Form and Freedom: The Kantian Ethos of Musical Formalism

Musical formalism is often portrayed as the enemy of artistic freedom. Its main representative, Eduard Hanslick, is seen as a purist who, by emphasizing musical rules, aims at restricting music criticism and even musical practices themselves. It may also seem that formalism is depriving music of its ability to have moral significance, as the semantic connection to the extramusical is denied by the formalistic view. In my paper, I defend formalism by placing Hanslick’s argument in a Kantian framework. It is not hard to find Kantian elements in Hanslick’s work, such as his emphasis on the contemplative and disinterested nature of the aesthetic judgment, the nonconceptuality of music’s content, and his insistence that “beauty has no purpose.” I argue further that Hanslick’s formalism is in fact motivated by and manifests the Kantian conception of freedom as self-legislation. Thus understood, the kind of moral significance music may have rests upon its own autonomous rules

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Beauty and Rules : Kant and Wittgenstein on the Cognitive Relevance of Aesthetics

Non peer reviewe

Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Normativity and Grammar

Peer reviewe

Wittgenstein and Musical Formalism : A Case Revisited

This article defends a formalist interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later thought on music by comparing it with Eduard Hanslick’s musical formalism. In doing so, it returns to a disagreement I have had with Bela Szabados who, in his book Wittgenstein as a Philosophical Tone-Poet, claims that the attribution of formalism obscures the role that music played in the development of Wittgenstein’s thought. The paper scrutinizes the four arguments Szabados presents to defend his claim, pertaining to alleged differences between Wittgenstein and Hanslick on their accounts of theory, beauty, rules, and the broader significance of music. I will argue that in each case the similarities between Wittgenstein’s and Hanslick’s respective views outshine possible differences. Ultimately, I will argue that instead of rendering music a marginal phenomenon suited for mere entertainment, formalism –as presented by Hanslick and Wittgenstein, whom I read as influenced by Kant’s aesthetics– underscores music’s ability to show fundamental features of reality and our relation to it. Music does this precisely as a sensuous yet structured medium that is irreducible to any conceptually determined domain.Non peer reviewe

Editorial

Non peer reviewe

Wittgenstein and Levinas on the Transcendentality of Ethics

This article discusses Wittgenstein’s early ethics by comparing it with the ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas. By treating ethics as transcendental, both Wittgenstein and Levinas are responding to the tension they find between contingent facts of the world and the absolute demand of ethics. We argue that the origin of this tension may be traced back to Kant’s philosophy, specifically to Kant’s division between nature and morality. Instead of grounding the ethical in the world of facts or in a transcendent realm over and above the limits of the world, both Wittgenstein and Levinas resolve the tension by appealing to the idea of a perspective, distinct from the perspective of knowledge, that shows the world as meaningful or purposive in spite of its objective lack of meaning. By spelling out the relevant similarities and differences between Wittgenstein and Levinas, the paper addresses the nature and extent of the Kantianism in Wittgenstein’s early ethics.Peer reviewe

Wittgenstein in the 1930s: Between the Tractatus and the Investigations

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant distinguishes two viewpoints on the world. The first, “determining” perspective arises out of cognitive judgments that subsume particulars under conceptual rules. The second, “reflective” perspective sees the represented manifold as a purposive whole without having a concept under which to subsume it ready at hand. Kant’s paradigm example of the latter perspective is the judgment of beauty. This paper argues that Wittgenstein drew a similar distinction in the early 1930s. In an early discussion of rule-following, Wittgenstein distinguishes two perspectives on grammar. The first, “discursive” perspective treats grammar as a conceptually formulated system of rules. The second, “intuitive” perspective “overlooks”, or surveys a grammatical system as a whole. Wittgenstein’s description of the latter perspective resembles Kant’s account of the reflective perspective. In accordance with Kant, Wittgenstein also connects the “intuitive” perspective to aesthetics. In what is perhaps his most sustained discussion of aesthetics, Wittgenstein defends a conception of aesthetic judgment as normative yet partly founded on a subjective response arising from looking at an aesthetic system as a whole. Such a normative yet partly subjective judgment is also involved in our grasp of grammar. </p