Jones - 2007 - Music and The Numinous

Music and
the Numinous
#ONSCIOUSNESS
&
,ITERTURE
THE!RTS

General Editor:
Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe
Editorial Board:
Anna Bonshek, Per Brask, John Danvers,
William S. Haney II, Amy Ione,
Michael Mangan, Arthur Versluis,
Christopher Webster, Ralph Yarrow
Music and
the Numinous
RICHARD ELFYN JONES
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007

Cover Design: Aart Jan Bergshoeﬀ
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-2289-8
ISSN: 1573-2193
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
Printed in the Netherlands
Contents
Preface 5
Introduction 11
Chapter 1: The Transcendental and Rational Discourse 21
Chapter 2: Music as Sublime Organism 43
Chapter 3: Process Philosophy 63
Chapter 4: Music and Process 73
Chapter 5: A Whiteheadian Aesthetic and a Musical Paradigm 85
Chapter 6: Music, the Other Arts and Process 95
Conclusion 107
Selected Bibliography 117
Index 119
Preface
The lines of thought that joined my interest in music and the arts
with my enquiries into metaphysics began to emerge some twelve
years ago. However, since childhood I have been aware that, as a
keyboard player, making music was for me essentially a form of
philosophising (carried out, I hope, spontaneously and instinctively
rather than in any over-ambitious manner). Early memories of
recorded performances by Schnabel, Solomon, Arrau and Brendel
served to instil a restless curiosity about what comprises the real
essence of the musical art. This book therefore aims to explore music,
and to a lesser degree the other arts, in a somewhat unusual way by
relating it directly to its ontological roots.
For many years I have been a proponent of Process philosophy.
Process philosophy is derived from and inspired by the writings, grand
in scope and bold in application, of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-
1947). In works like Religion in the Making, Adventures of Ideas,
Science and the Modern World and especially Process and Reality
he formulated a metaphysics applicable to all aspects of life. His
system is intrinsically interdisciplinary and interrelational. All
individual beings, from God to the most insignificant thing, are
explained through Whitehead’s set of metaphysical concepts. The
philosophy’s influence has been wide-ranging, especially in the USA.
From the middle of last century many American theologians embraced
Process as a tool for developing a new Christian natural theology
whereby ideas of God as an absolute predestinator, or as a “being-
itself”, was rejected in favour of a more world-affirming theism. The
concept of the numinous is obviously central to theology as well as to
other contemporary expressions of Christian faith. But this book has
little to say about theological perspectives. The numinous is defined
by me as pertaining to the numen or the supernatural. Although this
6 Preface
essentially Kantian idea of the numinous as a category for

understanding religion was developed forcefully and somewhat
mystically by the theologian Rudolf Otto, this book avoids
theological arguments. On the contrary it adheres to the basic tenets of
Whitehead’s metaphysics as expounded in Process and Reality. In
choosing not to examine any Biblical and confessional gloss on
Process that appeared after Whitehead’s time I accept the general
character of Whitehead’s teaching and apply that to a specific example
of reality which we value, namely music. Naturally, such is the
generality of Whiteheadian Process that other aspects of reality could
just as easily have been chosen. It is inevitable therefore that our
discussion should be as broad based as possible.
The reason Whitehead is not discussed until Chapter 3 and
afterwards is because the Introduction and the first Chapter provide a
historical preview recalling the pervasiveness of ideas of process in
Western thought since the time of the Greeks. In providing these two
introductory chapters we are also reminded that it was Whitehead
himself who proclaimed that famous judgement on Western
philosophy, namely, that it is all merely footnotes to Plato.
The Introduction presents an oblique approach to the subject
through links between art and mystical and esoteric theories. Joscelyn
Godwin’s Harmonies of Heaven and Earth is a rich compendium of
ancient beliefs about music’s magical powers and the connections
between its mathematical substructures and the architecture of the
universe. I am indebted to this source for many intriguing facts that
are discussed in this chapter. The Introduction provides a critical pot-
pourri of what Godwin terms “speculative music” preparatory to the
more important approaches which will be discussed later. In Chapter 1
“The Transcendental and Rational Discourse”, there is an inevitably
succinct review of Process’s indebtedness to Plato, Plotinus, St.
Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas and some later writers before
focussing on Schopenhauer’s important hypotheses on music’s
capacity to lead to a transcendental reality.
It was Mendelssohn who, in a famous letter, pointed out that, far
from being an abstract art music is the most particular. Our
examination of the materials of Western music must therefore be
technical, but without analysing pieces of music in a conventional
manner. Chapter 2, “Music as Sublime Organism”, provides a detailed
examination of theories by the Austrian musicologist Victor
Preface 7
Zuckerkandl (1896-1965) starting with his systematic derivation of

music’s implications from the harmonic series. Clearly this could not
be discussed without scrutinizing music’s raw materials, the pitches
and their ordering in space and time. Chapter 3, “Process Philosophy”,
is an introduction to Process thought. Here, the most important
Process terms are defined, but with particular reference to the idea of
God playing a role in the birth of every aspect of reality, whether that
be physical, biological, psychological, sociological, educational,
theological, aesthetic, or any other. What will become clear is the
value of Whitehead’s ideas as a cauldron from which others can draw
in a manner suitable for their own phenomenological enquiry. At this
point the book becomes technical in a philosophical rather than
musical way. Although Whitehead did not write extensively about
God it is clear that for him God offers a “subjective aim” to every
being in the universe. As we shall see, God in his primordial nature is
the ground of all possibilities, but, as both creator and component in
the universe, always persuasive never coercive. Fundamental to
Whitehead’s concept of God in the image of an ultimate philosophical
principle is the idea of divine creativity, indeed creativity is the
“ultimate inexplicable stuff” of the universe, and it is as crucial a
concept for the philosophy of Process as “being” is in Aristotelian or
Thomistic philosophy. Firstly God is viewed as primordial: “He is the
unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality.
In this aspect he is not before all creation, but with all creation.1 But in
this abstraction he is “deficiently actual”, and in two ways: “His
feelings are only conceptual and so lack the fullness of actuality.”2
Whitehead maintained that conceptual feelings, when existing apart
from complex integration with physical feelings, “are devoid of
consciousness in their subjective forms.”3 It follows therefore that
there must be a further aspect of God, for as well as being primordial
he is also consequent.
He is the presupposed actuality of conceptual operation, in unison of
becoming with every other creative act. Thus, by reason of the relativity of all
things, there is a reaction of the world in God. The completion of God’s
nature into a fullness of physical feeling is derived from the objectification of
the world in God. He shares with every new creation its actual world; and the
concrescent creature is objectified in God as a novel element in God’s
objectification of that actual world ... God’s conceptual nature is unchanged,
by reason of its final completeness. But his derivative nature is consequent
upon the creative advance of the world. 4
8 Preface
While endeavouring to assimilate the characteristics of God to those

of every other actual entity, perhaps the denial of God’s omnipotence
is an attempt to absolve him of responsibility for evil. Whatever was
the case, in Process and Reality Whitehead produced an elaborately
systematised philosophy in which the concept of God and other
philosophical conceptions are made to cohere with the reality of the
world. When referring to this consequent God, Whitehead often
maintained that when we speak of the world we are saying something
about God. It will soon become clear that throughout this book I
define God according to Whitehead’s concept of him.
Chapter 4 is devoted to “Music and Process”. In this Chapter the
universal nature of Whiteheadian concepts are extrapolated vis-à-vis
music. We explore critically where might the ontical (defined in a
special sense as representing the world and material things) end and
the ontological (again defined in a special sense meaning the sacred)
begin. This is done in the light of assertions by F. David Martin and
others. With reference to these two terms (in Chapter 4 and elsewhere)
I follow the distinctions of Heidegger, especially as modified after
Being and Time (1927), in calling the world of beings and things
“ontical” reality, and Being, defined as a primordial power which
reveals itself as a presence in our experience, “ontological” reality.
Chapter 5, “A Whiteheadian Aesthetic and a Musical Paradigm”
offers a case-study based on the first Prelude of Bach’s Well-
Tempered Clavier, used as a means of teasing out the numinous from
what is no more than a musical excerpt. Later in the chapter we
proceed at a more abstract metaphysical level to relate the aesthetic
and artistic implications of the analysis to ultimate considerations
involving God.
But music cannot be considered in isolation from the other arts, and
Chapter 6, “Music, the Other Arts and Process”, aims to compare
music with other arts in the context mainly of observations about
literature by George Steiner, J.A.W. Heffernan and others. Here, in
the references to literature I aim to understand the relationship
between rational discourse and the approach to the numinous.
It will by now be apparent that the book is wide-ranging. Such a
bold aim could not easily have been achieved without help and
encouragement from two very perceptive friends, the philosopher Dr.
Meredydd Evans, and the musicologist and aesthetician, Emeritus
Preface 9
Professor Peter Williams, both of whom read early and late drafts,
respectively, and gave valuable advice.
Notes
1. Process and Reality (1929). Revised edn., ed. Griffin and Sherburne (New
York1978), p. 343.
2. ibid.
3. ibid.
4. ibid, p.345.
Introduction
A friend persuaded me to go to Ely Cathedral to hear a performance of Bach’s
B Minor Mass. I had heard the work, indeed I knew Bach’s choral works
pretty well. I was sitting towards the back of the nave. The Cathedral seemed
to be very cold. The music thrilled me ... until we got to the great Sanctus. I
find this experience difficult to define. It was primarily a warning. I was
frightened. I was trembling from head to foot, and wanted to cry. Actually I
think I did. I heard no “voice” except the music; I saw nothing; but the
warning was very definite. I was not able to interpret this experience
satisfactorily until I read - some months later - Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige
Here I found it - the “Numinous”. I was before the Judgement Seat. I was
being “weighed in the balance and found wanting”. This is an experience I
have never forgotten.
This testimony to the numinous power of music comes from Sir

Alister Hardy’s book The Spiritual Nature of Man.1 In it is reflected
Hardy’s abiding curiosity for that reality which is concealed behind
the appearance of things. As a distinguished zoologist and founder of
the Religious Experience Research Unit at Manchester College,
Oxford, his approach was a scientific one insofar as this was
compatible with exploring the continuum between temporality and
eternity, between matter and spirit, between man and what Rudolf
Otto called the “wholly other.” The quotation raises a number of
issues, is psychologically redolent, and has very problematic
implications. Suppose that what music does is transport us to a world
of imagination in which we experience a range of feelings, depending
on the context. Then we might realise that the human imagination
carries us to another, perhaps transcendent, reality. But as I shall note
in my Conclusion, defining this reality is inevitably bound up with our
personal psychological state. Consequently, to sense the presence of
unearthly powers may be no more than a projection of personal
12 Introduction
desires. With this in mind, many readers will find the quotation
sentimental, but at least it will serve as a trigger for the large question
that is to be raised in this book, namely, to what extent art, and
specifically music, is underwritten by the religious and the
metaphysical. What statements can be made which can validate a re-
examination of the aesthetic and religious experiences in relation to
each other? To do so we must elevate aesthetics to a position it has not
enjoyed for centuries. At the same time, we need to capitalise on the
highly original work in metaphysics in the form of Process
philosophy, as exemplified by its founder, Alfred North Whitehead.
Also, there has been a combination of developments in science, in
psychology, and in philosophy in general which warrant a fresh
approach to the spiritual dimension. In a scientific-secular world this
is fraught with hazard. Scornful comments like Dickens’s about the
American Transcendentalists (“I was given to understand that
whatever was unintelligible would certainly be transcendental”) are
familiar to us. But even among the most rational scientists and
logicians there are plenty who will draw inspiration from Whitehead’s
rueful observation that when the topics of aesthetics have been
sufficiently explored it is doubtful whether there will be anything left
over for discussion.
There is surprisingly little reference to art or aesthetics in
Whitehead’s work, but he infuses his writings with statements
defining aesthetic order as derivative from the immanence of the
divine in the world. If we follow him in relating the aesthetic
consistency of the world to a non-temporal purpose, then we are of
course defining “aesthetic” in its very broadest sense. In so doing we
embark on a historical journey back to the very roots of philosophical
speculation. In the specific area of metaphysical aesthetics, and in
particular with reference to music as a divine art, (if “divine” is not
too loaded a term at this early juncture), we must remember that the
theological-metaphysical approach was the normal one up to at least
the baroque era. But afterwards, rational philosophy tended to deflate
any claim of music’s transcendental powers, and with the exception of
some romantics (most notably Schopenhauer) this has been the case
until the present. In Greek the very name of music, the art of the
muses, points to its divine origin. So the Greek thinkers will be
integral to our discussion not least in the contradictions between them.
We will not discuss in detail technical aspects of Greek music since
Introduction 13
their nature and significance cannot now be fully recaptured. We do

not know Greek music, we know only its theory and that imperfectly
and many of its complex speculative aspects are quite foreign to
modern thinking. But certain aspects need our attention. For instance,
we need to recall that although the Greek heritage dates as far back as
the fourth century B.C., we must go further back into the past than this
for the famous ancient quarrel of poetry and philosophy which Plato
refers to and which is relevant to us. It was the ancient myths which
fuelled philosophy with an outlook on life and an interpretation of the
nature of things - with poetry and art increasingly uneasy subjects for
the ensuing logical discourse of philosophy to feed upon. The quarrel
which followed between the aesthetic and the rational was one of the
most striking features of ancient thought. It was a quarrel which
existed before Plato’s time but was eloquently reasserted by Socrates
in the Republic (607b 5-6) where he argued for the banishment of the
“honeyed music” in lyric and epic from his ideal city in favour of
more rational values. In the present context, we too will have to
understand the relationship between rational discourse and other
forms of understanding.
As soon as one starts to speculate about the world of the psyche one
is inevitably drawn into something whose separateness from the real
world hinders coherent discussion. If we speculate about the
relationship of art and music to the transcendental then we know that,
despite the mechanics of its articulation, music is widely regarded as
being closer to the world of the psyche than to the external world.
Since its essence has no tangible reality, no body, no place, it might be
well described as a psychological process. (And this is despite the fact
that the organising and performance of it involves self-evidently
physical processes). If that which is of real interest in music has none
of the qualities of the external world we might indeed assume that
music is a totally psychic phenomenon. One view of music is that it
mediates between the external world and whatever other world there
might be in a manner which can have a profound emotional effect on
us. Our own personalities are affected by it, and few would dispute
Hegel’s description of it as echoing the motions of the inner self.
Similarly, Susanne Langer’s memorable encapsulation of music’s
essence as an “unconsummated symbol” and as a “myth of our inner
life”2 reflects the inherent mystery in music which we, in this book,
will attempt to address.
14 Introduction
But our experience of music often takes us beyond a personal

psychology. It often gives us signs of a deeper reality. Whether we in
the twentieth century are in a better position to validate this than our
forefathers may be questionable, living as we do in an age where the
overriding role of music is as a commodity whose commercial
exploitation blunts any awareness we may have of an elevated
function. Even a casual review of the extraordinary range of musics
available to us cannot but remind us yet again that this apparently
limitless wealth of expression emanates (usually) from only twelve
notes. This elementary fact should in itself prompt us to explore
deeper the metaphysics which underlies this extraordinary
manifestation of multum in parvo. Sadly, phenomenological enquiry
has restricted itself to analysis of techniques. Musical analysts have
never been so single-mindedly persistent; whether the procedure be
Schenker’s, La Rue’s, Forte’s or Lerdahl/Jackendoff’s the current
trend is to assiduously pursue an explanation for music in terms of the
music itself. This is usually beyond reproach and often of a dazzling
competence. On the other hand we may, as Wordsworth put it,
“murder to dissect”, for at times much of the intellectual energy
expended in brilliant analysis seems counter-productive. It was
Mahler who reminded us that the most important thing about music is
not in the notes - the thing that is really worth bothering about is the
ineffable. What technical analysis can do is to deepen our awareness
of musical processes and identify what unifying power underlies a
work’s individual expression, and, of course this must be done in a
technical way. It is a purely musical exercise, but it has very little to
do with the metaphysical import of art. In contrast, the other, more
literary approach to explaining music has perhaps not enjoyed much
credibility in academic circles in recent years. But metaphysical
aesthetics must hinge on this rather more discursive (albeit still
analytical) procedure allied with as logical a philosophical approach
as possible. Clearly, courage is required in discussing the
transcendental elements in those objects which clearly are
transcendental. And music is by common acceptance such an object.
Through it we can hope to transcend ourselves by knowing ourselves
to be transcended. And if the musical analysts have concerned
themselves with structure and expression, I with my metaphysical bias
would rather concern myself with exploration and discovery of a kind
which can be called “metaphysical aesthetics”.
Introduction 15
One starting point is the following simple fact, which will have a
striking confirmation when we come to discuss Whitehead later.
Unless we decide that man is unrelated to the cosmos in which he
lives, what happens to him (whether musical or otherwise) must bear
some relationship to what is happening to the whole of which he is a
part. One reason why this approach to the cosmic problem has been
studiously avoided by many philosophers lies in the notion of
philosophy itself as knowledge. Since knowledge must be true to exist
then philosophical problems are usually related to the truth of certain
propositions. (Truth, in Etienne Gilson’s difficult phrase, “is the
conformity of intellection with its object”.) If there is no object, there
is no truth. So in this respect philosophers behave like scientists. But
the intangible nature of the very act by which works of art are
produced have often reduced philosophers to silence because, for
them, what remains to be known is only to be found if homogeneous
with what they already know from nature. One of the great
misunderstandings of aesthetics is the belief that art conforms to
nature and life. Indeed, there may be more validity in the opposite
view, illustrated by Oscar Wilde’s shopworn epigram about life
imitating art. At least art tells us of the dramatic patterns of human
life, defines its sense, and it is clearly the experience of many that they
discover in life what the artist through his work tells us is there.
First, we look to the distant past, and even beyond the earliest Greek
philosophers to the mythical background against which much of
Greek thought must be viewed if we are to appreciate and understand
it properly. Here, music played a role that identified it as intermediary
between man and the gods. A reverence for antiquity inclines even the
most rational to give credence to the myths, which tended to magnify
the physical power of music to irrational extremes. To take a realistic
if not everyday occurrence, we are all aware of the capacity of a voice
to shatter glass, and we understand that this is the result of the normal
behaviour of matter under the influence of air waves and amplitude.
How this disproportionate result is brought about is easily explained
by gauging the accumulation of energy over a period of time. The
ancient myths, however, constantly involved a disparity between the
physical energy expended by singing or playing and the ensuing
physical result, so that nature is ultimately answerable not to common-
sense laws of cause and effect but to a transcendent principle,
dependent on a cosmic consciousness, and evidenced by musical or
16 Introduction
harmonic laws. The ancient synthesis which gave to music such a

crucial role is explicit in many stories, which are by no means
confined to antiquity and the Greek tradition. Awareness of the
existence of unheard music is not a philosophical matter, as the group
who investigated the Rollright Stone Circle in Oxfordshire was well
aware. In a BBC science programme dating from 1983 it was revealed
that these megalithic stones actually gave off ultrasonic vibrations of a
remarkable strength. These varied in their patterns from hour to hour,
and according to the phase of the moon and the season. Modern
scientists were able to trace this energy to the way the geometry of the
stones’ placement ingested a microwave energy from the sun. This
ultrasonic energy was so high that it damaged the scientific
instruments. These effects must have been known in ancient times and
they certainly formed the basis for stories that were widely known.
Later there were many attempts to find psychological or symbolic
explanations for apparently incredible feats, as we note from the
writings of Joscelyn Godwin and others who have explored those
mysterious mythological and historical bye-ways unfamiliar to most
musicians and aestheticians.
Fantastic myths have no credibility for the majority of us, yet the
fairly new science of cymatics reminds us that the physical world still
holds many secrets which even today would seem to repair its broken
relationship with the spiritual and the supra-sensible. For instance, the
Swiss physician and natural scientist Hans Jenny brought to cymatics
a rational approach enriched by his artistic and medical skills.3 He
photographed the effects that sound produced on substances like
smoke, fluids and lycopodium powder and revealed beautiful new
shapes with wonderfully mysterious symmetries bearing a close
relationship to the patterns found in nature, organic and inorganic.
His new science was dedicated to the study of vibrations at every level
of existence, from the molecule to the galaxy, and he discovered that
one of the most fascinating activating agents is sound. Jenny’s
research served as a rational link with the improbable phantasmagoria
of many an ancient myth. And while they might not lend plausibility
to theosophic self-indulgencies they do provide a proper scientific
basis for probing areas virtually ignored by scientists.
Similarly, a direct link between music and the vegetable kingdom
has been a recurring element since those mythical times when
Orpheus’s musical powers were said to move stones and trees and
Introduction 17
charm the beasts. In due course a semi-scientific correspondence was

found in such writers as the fifth century poet Martianus Capella,
whose description of Apollo’s Grove at Cirrha near Delphi described
the harmony of the wind coursing through the trees and producing the
octave, fifth, fourth, and whole-tone, according to how high the
branches were.4 This effect was accepted over a millennium later by
the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602-80), who said that the
height of pine trees and their relative proportions set up a similarly
relative harmonic proportion in whispering breezes. He went further
in observing the harmonious proportions of plants, which in
themselves were seen to have nodes spaced exactly as the division of
the monochord in the proportions 1.2.3.4,5 a fact which, in the light of
what we will discuss in Chapter 2, may be significant for us.
We are indebted to Joscelyn Godwin for cataloguing so much about
music’s connection with esotericism, occultism and myth. His book is
disarmingly open-minded, indeed to the point that it is sometimes hard
to discern what are his criteria of truth. Among the many fascinating
facts which he uncovers is that describing how the power of music
over nature extended to medicine. Certainly, music’s healing
properties have been well-documented and in various forms. Even the
materials from which the instruments are made have had a curative
role. Giovanni Battista Porta writing in 1588, for instance, advised the
use of instruments made from particular stalks or wood in the healing
of particular illnesses. Thus, lymphatics might be relieved by music
played on the stalk of the hellebore, and so on.6 Although we are not
particularly concerned with these medical implications the general
point here is that some explanation of the power of music by way of
sympathetic vibration of some intangible substance is typical of all
pre-modern accounts. Such is the significance of music generally in
antiquity that Marius Schneider, the Alsatian ethnologist, has written
in many places that in cultures where music was used as a magical
force, a total absorption in sound brings to being in man the
primordial condition of the universe. According to Godwin,
Schneider’s research confirmed universal beliefs that the universe was
musical and temporal in nature, not visual nor spatial, indeed, to the
extent that the “ego-bound consciousness is supplanted by the state of
music.”7
18 Introduction
Different theories about the essentially therapeutic effect of intervals

proliferated during the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century
the whole understanding of perception was re-examined but with very
little advance in either new theories or discoveries. Leibniz addressed
the question, how do notes get from the ear to the perceiving soul? His
position was put as follows:
Nature must always be explained mathematically and mechanically, provided

it be kept in mind that the principles of the laws of mechanics and of force do
not depend upon mathematical extension alone, but have certain metaphysical
causes.8
On the one side, the mechanical explanation carries one to the

mathematical basis of music; on the other, the revelatory spiritual
impact carries one to an intuition of the harmony of God’s universe, a
dipolar function happily synthesised in Leibniz’s famous definition of
music as “an occult numeration of the soul.” The well-being of the
soul through a sympathetic correspondence in music is the aim of all
music therapy, as can be seen today in the work of Paul Nordoff and
Clive Robbins, whose dramatically successful work with autistic,
psychotic and subnormal children, including deaf ones, has been one
of the musical and medical revelations of our time. Both Nordoff and
Robins were independently influenced by the anthroposophist Rudolf
Steiner who had previously shown what a potent force music could
be. Steiner’s work received an effective educational manifestation in
the Waldorf Schools, where music therapy was used to great effect
with mentally retarded and congenitally handicapped children.
The tale of the Trappist monks in an American abbey who,
following the prohibition of the Second Vatican Council (1962)
obediently discontinued the singing of their daily offices in Latin,
shows the deleterious effect this had on their mental well-being. No
longer able to survive with only four or five hours’ sleep a night,
sickness and psychological problems ensued. They tried all sorts of
remedies until they deduced that their ills were the direct result of
losing those hours previously devoted to singing the liturgy in
Gregorian Chant. Godwin interprets this story as evidence for the
deep-seated therapeutic effect of singing (particularly so in a silent
order). The lesson of this anecdote is that singing was instituted in the
contemplative orders not only for the glory of God but also as a
practical means of harmonising the personality, and the community, in
Introduction 19
a situation of great psychological stress. The use of the voice is a

human need no less compelling than sexual desire. The Trappists,
forswearing conversation, exercised their voices in song, and it was
the removal of this sublimation that brought disharmony to their
lives.9
The modernist trend since Vatican 2 would seem to throw into relief
the deep-seated psychological, even quasi-supernatural, powers of one
of the Church’s most ancient musical forms - Gregorian chant, which
in its impersonal monophony is above the assertive individuality of a
composer. As Olivier Messiaen put it, “Plainchant alone possesses all
at once the purity, the joy and the lightness necessary for the soul’s
flight towards Truth.”10 We shall discuss this issue later in the book.
In our present discussion we must venture beyond the therapeutic
and purely psychological response to inhabit rather more difficult
territories. In so doing we will have to use the term “supernatural.”
Unfortunately this is a word that has been justly disparaged on a
number of grounds. Biblical scholars have criticised it as failing to
convey the concreteness and historical character of the Israelite
religious experience; Christian theologians have attacked it as
potentially offending the world-affirming doctrine of the incarnation;
historians and cultural anthropologists have pointed out that the term
suggests a division of reality into a closed system of rationally
comprehensible “nature” and a mysterious world somewhere beyond
it. Nevertheless the term is in everyday usage denoting a fundamental
category of religion, the assertion of a belief in another reality that is
of ultimate significance for man and which transcends the reality
within which our everyday experience unfolds. Rudolf Otto, in The
Idea of the Holy, attempted what may still be regarded as a definitive
description of this “otherness” of religious experience. He emphasised
that the sacred (that is, the reality man believes he encounters in
religious experience) is “wholly other” than ordinary, human
phenomena, and in this “otherness” the sacred impresses man as an
overwhelming, awesome, and fascinating power. Most of this book
will be concerned with a wide-ranging discussion of the nature of that
psychical relation which is found in art between the so-called artistic
experience (of creator, performer or audience) and the “wholly other”.
20 Introduction
Notes
1. (Oxford 1979), p.85. The book relates several similar experiences by a wide
range of interviewees.
2. Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge USA 1942), pp.240 and 245 respectively.
3. See Hans Jenny, Kymatik (Basel 1967).
4. Martianus, The Marriage of Mercury with Philosophy, tr. W.H.Stahl and

R.Johnson with E.L.Burge, as Vol. 2 of Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal
Arts (New York 1977), sect.2., quoted in Joscelyn Godwin, Harmonies of Heaven
and Earth (Rochester, Vermont 1995), p.16.
5. Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis, facsimile of Rome 1650 edn. (Olms

1970), Vol.2 pp.411 ff., quoted in Godwin, op. cit. p.16.
6. See Godwin, p.17 ff. for a detailed historical survey of various bizarre practices.
7. ibid., p.94.
8. G.W. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, Correspondence with Arnauld, and

Monadology, tr. Montgomery (Chicago 1927), pp.135-6.
9. Godwin, op.cit., p.54.
10. Recherches et expériences spirituelle (Paris 1977), p.3.

Chapter One
The Transcendental and
Rational Discourse
As we formulate arguments which show music’s ontological status

we must use language, and do so inside a closed speech system, thus
laying ourselves open to the scorn of the logical positivists, who
would see our predications as no more than nonsense. For talk can
often neither be verified nor falsified; its essential axiom, as George
Steiner has suggested, is that the root of all talk is talk! In his book
Real Presences, Steiner reminds us that one of the messages in
Schoenberg’s great opera Moses und Aron is contained in Moses’s cry
of abstention, “O Word, thou Word, which I lack”. It is precisely
because the golden-tongued Aron can discourse so eloquently on God
and on man’s fate that the ensuing symbolic lie of the Golden Calf is
presented as a falsehood. To the inarticulate Moses, the stutterer, the
only true statement is the music. The meaning of words and the
meaning of music are set in opposition. For Steiner, to perform music
and respond to it are themselves metaphysical experiences.
Furthermore, to ask “what is music” may well be our way of asking
“what is man?” But using words and expounding on this is difficult.
The mass of critical verbiage about works of art in the form of
discursive interpretation (as well as formal analysis) reflects the
dominance of the “secondary” and the parasitic over the “primary”, as
Steiner has argued. No music criticism or musicology can tell us as
much about the meaning of a piece of music as the performance of it,
the great bulk of writings on music, in Steiner’s opinion, being
“benign illusions of significance.”1 The story about Schumann being
questioned as to what was the meaning of a piece he had just played is
a happy confirmation of this point - the composer said nothing and
simply played the piece again.
If we are to discourse with any confidence we should at least have
an overview of previous writings, so the remainder of this chapter will
seek to provide a historical survey of the vast literature of rational
discourse which should give us a selective frame for our own
22 The Transcendental and Rational Discourse
speculations later. In Harmonies of Heaven and Earth,2 Joscelyn

Godwin attempts to categorise the main levels of artistic endeavour.
He describes the highest level as the “avataric” level, which is like
that of a divine manifestation in the minds of those who respond to it.
The avataric creator is an inspiration for followers to re-interpret and
imitate according to the model. “For instance, the painting of Jesus
and his mother originally attributed to St. Luke became the model for
every subsequent ‘Virgin and Child.’ ”3 Among composers are those
central to various traditions, most notably for our purposes figures like
St. Gregory the Great, to whom all of Gregorian chant was at one time
attributed, or Pérotin of Notre Dame, often said to be the creator of the
first polyphony in four parts. Gregory’s contribution became iconic
for others, notably for those monks who composed “Gregorian”
chants to re-create after the revealed pattern. This is inspiration of the
“second level”. Godwin explains that in Antiquity and Eastern
cultures the task of the creative artist at this second level was to work
strictly within the traditional forms bequeathed by the avataric
masters, who often, as in the case of Orpheus or Sarasvati or the
Chinese emperor Fo-Hi were regarded as divine or semi-divine
revealers of wisdom. At this level the “maker of songs” was no
different from, say, the lute maker. “The arts and the crafts, in short,
are synonymous.”4 A third level of inspiration exists, but according to
Godwin this is the creativity proceeding from the creator’s own ego,
from his subconscious mind. It is regarded as inferior “because it no
longer has a connection with Memory” which, at the second level, the
copying of canonical works of art or craft supplied.5 Although our
artistic heritage during recent centuries is largely the history of this
third type of inspiration, we shall see below in the arguments put by F.
David Martin how the concept of an avataric master has been
perpetuated, not surprisingly, in sacred and other works by J.S.Bach.
Godwin continues his descent “through the creative hierarchy
without a break to the position of the artist’s audience”,6 who, ideally,
should aspire to achieve an awareness of the Intelligible Beauty that is
the source of the contemplated object, rather as Plato taught us in the
Symposium, (210 d-e). In the traditional crafts this is reached by
means of symbols, geometrical patterns, or, in fine art, animal
emblems. In the traditional arts, the symbols are also overt but their
meanings are often not understood except by the cognoscenti. Godwin
goes on:
The Transcendental and Rational Discourse 23
It is up to the beholder to follow the symbol as far as his capacity allows, but
his effort is sanctified by the fact that the object is true to its source. The only
such musical art in the West is plainchant.7
Clearly there is in plainchant an inner continuity with the religious

dimension, for its conventional signs over many centuries have come
to be widely accepted as avataric and expressing the religious. As an
icon its configuration or gestalt is immediately recognisable since it
contains an embodied reference to its source which creates feelings of
ultimate concern or reverence in the listener. Psychologically this
creates the conditions for a greater awareness of a numinous reality. In
our reaction to such music, as Rudolf Otto points out,
musical feeling is rather (like numinous feeling) something “wholly other”,
which, while it affords analogies, and here and there will run parallel to the
ordinary emotions of life, cannot be made to coincide with them by a detailed
point-to-point correspondence.8
All music that is art (and all other arts) reveal something about
higher presences, but certain genres must reveal these more directly
because this has been their historical role. This is the case with
plainchant or indeed with any religious music. In one sense at least,
Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is ontologically different from
Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, because Bach’s masterpiece sets words
which directly invoke religious feelings. Plainchant might be
compared with Bach’s oratorio in some respects, but has a more direct
connection with religious feeling or liturgical activity. In his book Art
and the Religious Experience: The Language of the Sacred9 F. David
Martin offers one interpretation the different degrees of ontological
meaning of widely differing pieces of music, religious and secular,
and points out that whatever all musics have in common there are
obviously some types of works which have a greater claim to
sublimity. Martin’s arguments are striking and idiosyncratic and will
be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4. He examines an early and
rather weak composition by Lennon and McCartney, All My Loving,
to show that while it may indeed evoke emotion it fails “to inform
about these emotions or anything else.” What is lacking here is what
Martin describes as “translucent iconicity.”10 In contrast, this is what
Gregorian chant and much other religious music has. The “region”
revealed by plainchant is symbolic of Being as a preserving agency
that enables the past to be immanent in the present, and Martin
attempts to show how the past is preserved in a particular way in the
present. The past is brought into ecstatic unity with the present and,
indeed, the future. Underlying this is our sense of history being
inextricably bound with our knowledge of time’s passing, which is so
central a feature of all metaphysical thought and which is a
fundamental structural feature of music. Both life and music are
transient, and our oneness in some mysterious sense with God is the
proper solution to the problem of the transitoriness of life. It is
relevant that by disclosing the main musical archetype of religious
feeling the symbolic power of plainchant makes possible the
immanence of any past in the present. If we allow all art to aspire
towards being an immanent representation of a divine of a force, some
would argue that there is a danger in “corrupting” the notion of
transcendence. They might argue that a value judgement on individual
examples should surely be made, as is already implied in Martin’s
reference to Lennon and McCartney. But a contrary argument could
also be levelled, namely that we cannot deny a transcendent character
to raw, familiar reality in art even if there is no suggestion of ultimate
concern or reverence. For, logically we might not be able to disqualify
even the most trivial pieces, since they also inevitably employ
structures which are common to all instances of that particular art
form and therefore are potentially as mysterious and transcendental as
more overtly “religious” examples. For an attempt at rationalizing this
we turn to Kant. The beauty we find in plainchant, for instance, and
the specific connection it has with man’s religious quest would tend to
classify it as one of Kant’s adherent beauties. For Kant, such objects
as houses, palaces, arsenals, churches, summer-houses, and anything
which is functional, in which appreciation of design (involving a pure
sense of form) mingles with awareness of the end to be served (the
practical), is called adherent.11 Then the two satisfactions, that of our
pure sense of form, and that which is practical, can coalesce in a
single experience. Kant warns that in this dipolarity there is loss in
purity, but with an attendant gain in richness, and he admits a greater
importance to those experiences where we are aware at once of the
form and the content, the form as a harmonious design, and the
content as an apt instrument for some recognised good. Plainchant
therefore ingresses into our daily existence as a thoroughly plausible
manifestation of an adherent beauty, its liturgical function providing
the strong practical function which is also overtly religious. But,
depending on your approach to what might be revelatory, the same

might be true of music very different from plainchant.
As we have noted, we need to go back further than the music of the
early church if we are to examine the philosophical sources of a
revelatory theory of art. Firstly, we need to consider Plato’s Doctrine
of Ideas to see if we can apply it to art. In it are contained the
distinctions made by Plato between reality and appearance, between
universals and particulars, knowledge and opinion. Plato thought that
the objects of sensory experience and of scientific knowledge are only
imperfectly and derivatively real in so far as they imperfectly
approximate to, or are “imitations” of, the “ideas” which are the
divine maker’s prototypical “forms” of real things - animals, plants,
earth, air, fire and so on. Though there are many beds there is only one
“idea” or “form” of a bed. Just as a reflection of a bed in a mirror is
only apparent and not real, so the various particular beds are unreal,
mere copies of the one real bed made by the divine imager. A
philosopher is a man who understands this, who knows of this vision
of truth, of the ideal, of the absolute and eternal and immutable. In
other words he has knowledge. Merely having a love of “beautiful
things” is not real wisdom since this is to do with the particulars, the
mere reflections of ideal entities. In any case they are full of
contradictions and always partake of opposite characters so that,
according to Plato, we cannot have knowledge (which is infallible)
about these, only opinions.
In the last book of the Republic there is a clear exposition of the
doctrine of ideas or forms, which precedes Plato’s condemnation of
painters,(for his doctrine of divine enthusiasm had room for poets and
musicians but not for artists). The following is a famous quotation
(from elsewhere in Plato, the dialogue Ion), where he accords a
special status to the poet as a vessel for divine musing:
That’s why the god relieves them of their reason, and uses them as his
ministers, just as he uses soothsayers and divine prophets – so that we who
listen to them may realize that it is not they who say such supremely valuable
things as they do ... but that it is the god himself who speaks, and addresses us
through them. 12
Similarly, human music is seen as an imitation of the divine melody

which can tune the soul to that eternal harmony which it is the
musician’s task to bring from heaven to earth. It is the function of
music to imprint upon the soul the hallmark of its divine origin. The
hypothesis here is that there is a cosmic source for music contained in
the concept of “the music of the spheres” from which human music is
derived. This divine music box is imitated by musicians. And this
evidence of an aesthetic element in the cosmos was further refined by
the Pythagoreans into a form of primitive psychology by the
introduction of the soul in the form of a harmony, or at least a musical
attunement based on numerical proportion and illustrated by sweet
concords on the strings of the lyre. As the lyre goes out of tune when
touched by an unskilled performer, so the harmonious disposition of
the soul will be sensitive to mishandling. The mechanics of all this
attains a high degree of speculation and may strike us as
unpromisingly theoretical in character. (This is cryptically summed up
by Iris Murdoch in The Fire and the Sun, where she refers ironically
to Plato’s high regard for music – “the fine art preferred by God is
music - but inaudible, of course!”13) Clearly for Plato there is an
inspired artistic activity which imitates the ultimate reality of the Ideas
themselves. The works of painters and sculptors did not belong to this
higher activity because they were reproductions, “imitations of
imitations”, and twice removed from reality, but those most intangible
of expressive phenomena, human song or chords (which at that time
were deemed sweetly plucked concords on the lyre), seemed to form a
bridge between the visible and the invisible. And ever since, man has
explained the mystical qualities of song by reference to this Platonic
justification.
This profound implication of the transcendental ulteriority of music
needs to be considered in relation to metaphysical concerns by Plato
which have been central to Western philosophy since his time. For
instance, one fundamental question which has been asked many times
over the centuries is whether the Form of the Good (to use a
Platonic/Aristotelian gloss on the Deity) is overwhelmingly the
universal object of desire, that which draws all souls towards itself.
For Plato, the chief good of man is the contemplation of this absolute
Good, and once one experiences this vision then one will not willingly
busy oneself with worldly matters, but will apply oneself to the study
of eternal verities. Music-lovers may not fathom how or why God as
self-sufficient and “wholly other” can be included in any metaphysical
discussion of music. The answer lies in the conception of God as
immanent. While the idea of a self-sufficient God is clearly
expounded by Plato we should also remember his presentation of the

opposite conception, one of God as manifestly of this world too, and
therefore inextricably bound to what we value in life and nature. Thus,
having formulated the doctrine of a transcendental God, Plato
develops a metaphysical notion of an immanent God, to the extent that
a logical ground for the existence of this world is deduced. Faced with
the nonsense of a world full of things which are supererogatory
additions to the Eternal, we can therefore accept that mundane
artefacts and utilities can indeed derive from the Idea of the Good.
God as transcendental or God as immanent? is the question posed.
Scholars have suggested that it seems to have caused confusion even
for a thinker of Aristotle’s stature. In the Endemian Ethics Aristotle
contradicts Plato by asserting that One who is self-sufficient can
surely have no need of the service of others, nor of their affection, nor
of social life, since He is capable of living alone and He cannot have
need of friends.
Plato had already struggled with the contradiction which arises from
the idea of an immanent God in Republic 509b, where even bad things
are derived logically from the eternal source. For our purposes the
main question which this raises is the nature of the relationship
between the transcendental and the immanent. Why does God as
Being manifest himself also as a God of Becoming, and what is the
nature of this process? A satisfactory answer to this question will
present us with an imaginative means of evaluating worldly things
including art. In particular, we are bound to become more aware of the
significance of works of art, and of music in particular, for it is
precisely in this area that the artist presses most persuasively his claim
to be “another god” (to use a Renaissance commonplace). The
question posed has been of perennial fascination ever since Plato’s
time, and we cannot overestimate its influence on Western thought.
Yet, in Timaeus 33d Plato argues that it is better for the world to be
self-sufficient. Thus we may logically ask why should mundane
entities exist, or have to exist at all? What possible purpose have they
for a God whose perfection is already realised and who surely cannot
be enhanced by anything else? But Plato assumes paradoxically that
the absolute Perfection cannot be fully perfect if it is in supreme
isolation. He asks, is it then less perfect if existing alone? Thus was
instituted the notion of a God immanent in the world, a fecundity who
brought temporal and material things into existence in a richly

pluralistic and variegated universe.
If the temporal and the material exist, and if time and multiplicity
are so fundamental to our existence, perhaps we can deduce that they
have to be attributes of a God even if he be separate from us, out of
time and wholly unitary. The answer may lie in the saying, Omne
bonum est diffusivum sui (everything should be as far as possible like
Himself). This is how the Middle Ages saw it, and this concept of two
Gods in one has underpinned a great deal of philosophical conflict
over the centuries. The notion of the immanent God had logically
spawned a divine craftsman, the demiurge who filled the world with
all kinds of creatures and things. For confirmation that a connection
exists between the Ideal world and ours it is logically necessary
therefore for all eternal essences to have temporal counterparts (see
Plato’s Timaeus 39e, 42e, 51a and 92c). Thus comes into existence
the principle of plenitude.
History has learned from Plato’s famous simile of the Cave in the
RepublicVII that the sensible world is seen as an idle flickering of
insubstantial shadow-shapes, at two removes from God. This allegory
of human enlightenment tells of those who are destitute of philosophy
likened to naïve prisoners in a cave, who have a fire behind them and
a wall in front. All that they see are shadows of themselves and of
objects behind them cast on the wall by the light of the fire. Inevitably
they regard these shadows as real, as the “whole truth”, for they have
no notion of the objects to which they are due. This story illustrates
the difference between the sensory faculties and the intellectual,
together with the corresponding difference between their proper
objects. If we can accept that not all the cognitions we have are of
sense-transmitted objects, this will allow us to suppose that some
things can never be seen and touched, yet may still exist. Thus, having
no real stability our thoughts are not the direct basis for any
knowledge of real things. Plato teaches us that at least they can be
subdivided into belief and conjecture. Conjecture is simply our
awareness of false visible things, mirror reflections and so on. No
doubt the objects and even the shadows do have some reality, but this
reality is incomplete and raises paradoxes. Here is where the intellect
must step in to make a distinction and give us the stability for which
we seek through the lower of its two subdivisions, namely hypothesis,
which is the reasoning from set assumptions. But this method also
falls short of the whole truth. Plato formulates an all-embracing truth

by tracing all hypotheses and beliefs and conjectures to a final unity, a
single idea in which all the partial existences and arbitrarily grounded
fragments of truth could take their places and thereby show all their
interrelations one with another. Words by Dante spring to mind, those
describing his own ultimate vision of God “wherein I saw the
scattered leaves of the universe in one volume composed.”
We must now ask what this has to do with the arts and music. In
searching for an answer we recall that it is the experience of many
persons that great art allows us a glimpse of our world without our
“selves” superimposed onto it. This is explored by Iris Murdoch in
The Sovereignty of Good where she discusses the power of art that is
not mediocre as directing the “attention ... outward, away from self.”14
As a result, what is truly beautiful is inaccessible and separate from
us, and from life and nature and the temporal process. As an aspect of
the Good, art is separate from say justice, morals and other virtues
because of its extra dimension and its ability to encapsulate (in
Murdoch’s disconcerting simile) an “absolute pointlessness”. But
according to Murdoch, the pointlessness of art is not the pointlessness
of a game; it is the pointlessness of human life itself, and form in art is
properly the simulation of the self-contained aimlessness of the
universe. Good art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too
timid to recognize, the minute and absolutely random detail of the
world, and reveals it together with a sense of unity and form.15 Dante’s
words consolidate the essential mystery of the “pointless” affirmation
in a tangible, earthly form of the higher Good. It is a metaphysical
paradigm which was widely held in the Greek world.
Following on from this we learn from Plotinus that the arts are not
to be slighted on the ground that they create by imitation of natural
objects. From Plotinus we recognise that the arts give us bare
reproduction of the things seen but go beyond to the Ideas from which
nature itself derives. They make good where nature is defective,
having the vision of beauty in themselves. So the cause of painters
and sculptors is happily retrieved. More importantly there is a
justification here of the thesis which forms the central concern of this
present book, which is the belief that the work of art, and here
specifically music, reveals something of which the natural world is an
imperfect image or symbol, and can reveal it more luminously if not
more truly than inartistic nature.
The writings of Plotinus reflect a more exclusive and wholehearted

mysticism than is to be found in Plato. In his fifty-four essays, or
Tractates, which were later arranged in six Enneads, Plotinus outlines
a sometimes very obscure and idiosyncratic philosophy. Behind the
visible world as its ultimate source and ground is what Plotinus calls
the One, which is ultimate reality in its “first hypostasis” and which is
beyond all conception and knowledge. This is variously described as
the Good, or the Infinite. Different functions of the One are known as
its second and third hypostasis, the second hypostasis being Intellect
or Mind, the Divine Knower (nous), the Platonic Forms (or ideas),
thus the archetypes and prototypical patterns of the visible world. The
third hypostasis is the All-Soul (psyche), or principle of creativity and
life. These three hypostases make up a single transcendent Being,
from which all reality proceeds by emanation. Plotinus tries to
overcome the Platonic dualism of Being and Becoming by connecting
what belongs respectively to greater and lesser reality. As Monroe C.
Beardsley points out in Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the
Present, Plotinus’s metaphors of Being overflow,
like a spring, and of a central source of light that grows dimmer with the
distance from it we may think of the various parts of reality, including nature
and the visible world, as participating in the light of Being and Becoming in
one sense overcome by this conception of all things as ordered in a continuous
degree of greater and lesser reality, but the contrast between the Visible and
the Intelligible World remains in the distinction between nature and the Forms
of the Second Hypostasis.16
For Plotinus the beauty of the visible world is its mirroring of the
invisible and art can reveal an “Authentic Beauty” or “Beyond
Beauty” (even though, paradoxically, to achieve “Absolute Beauty” is
not to see it!) His observations on music, although cryptic and
fantasy-laden, are fascinating in their assertion of important verities:
Any skill which, beginning with the observation of the symmetry of living
things, grows to the symmetry of all life, will be a portion of the Power There
which observes and meditates the symmetry reigning among all beings in the
Intellectual Cosmos. Thus all music - since its thought is upon melody and
rhythm - must be the earthly representation of the music there is in the rhythm
of the Ideal Realm.17
It is in the spontaneity of artistic expression that we see reflected the

important concept of emanation, a difficult idea (for our purposes
identical perhaps with “immanence”) in which Plato’s thoughts

became crystallised in the work of Plotinus and others. In Plato’s
Republic VI.508 the term aporroia was introduced and this came to
play a central role in the cosmology of Neoplatonism. It was applied
originally to the emission of light and heat by the sun. Later it was
adapted, in particular by Plotinus, to describe the derivation of the
many from the One. It found its way into Christian theology through
the work of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and his Western
translator and interpreter, John Scotus Eriugena, and a number of
other thinkers.
Dionysius the Areopagite, and much later John Scotus Eriugena,
appropriated the concern of Neoplatonism to make the existence of the
world intelligible by relating it to the being of the One from whom it
took its origin. They sought to revise the Christian understanding of
creation in the light of this. Aquinas pursued their endeavour with
greater circumspection but with clear acknowledgement of the source
of their inspiration. He introduces the topic of creation by referring to
“the procession” of the creatures from God.18 He writes of “a
prolongation, as it were, into the lives of men of the … processiones,
within the Blessed Trinity.” Furthermore, “the coming forth of a
divine Person comes before and is more perfect than that of the
creature, for a divine Person issues as the full likeness of its principle
whereas the creature is but a partial likeness.”19 As Keith Ward
explains:
If Thomas means to say that the same act by which God understands the
divine self, by which God is, is the act by which God wills the world, then this
world is in all its detail, part of God’s being what it is. If this world is
contingent, then God must be contingent in some respect.20
The most serious objection to the concept of emanation from the

viewpoint of Christian orthodoxy is that in its original usage it implies
a continuity of being, or nature, between the original source and that
which emanates from it, such as to obliterate or weaken the radical
distinction between the Creator and the creature, which is held to be
basic to Biblical faith. Emanation comes close to the concept of
generation; in fact, the original model of emanation, namely the
derivation of light from a luminary, was frequently used even in
Christological debates of the early church as an illustration of the
generation of the Son (meaning that it is the same “in being” as the
source), and it eventually found its way into the Nicene Creed in the
phrase “light from light”. But that was specifically in relation to the
Son. The point was that that which is derived from God by generation
is indistinguishable or inseparable from its source. In contrast, that
which is created is of another substance or being.
The process of emanation in the Neoplatonic world scheme does not
result in an identity of being between the emanant and its source, but
in a diminution, or dilution, which progresses as the emanent moves
further from its source, until it reaches the nadir of nothingness. One
who named the rungs of an ascending progressive ladder was
St.Augustine and he listed the hierarchic chain as follows: bodily
animation, sense, art, virtue, tranquillity, the entrance, observation.
Elsewhere this progression takes the form: “of the body, through the
body, about the body, toward the soul, in the soul, toward God, with
God.”21 The Christian doctrine of creation is often imbued with a
paradox which nicely balances the pantheistic absorption of things
into divinity by the recognition of God’s likeness everywhere, and the
theory of God’s sublime aloofness and distinction from finite things.
The transcendental and the immanent are played off ambiguously
against each other. Clearly, if things are like him then they must be
beautiful, but in a strictly limited degree. Hence while things may
aspire to becoming the One, they must resign themselves to becoming
mere “harmonies” of the One. Therefore, if God has communicated a
likeness of his own beauty then there may be degrees of likeness to
God resulting in a hierarchy of beauty. Working this out in a modern
context is demanding to say the least, and fraught with a hazard
previously mentioned, namely that of asserting as truth what has been
conditioned by one’s own (often unreliable) psychological motivation
and agenda.
St. Augustine also wrote about imitations of God’s beauty. In many
places in the De Ordine and Soliloquia St. Augustine addressed God
as he in, by, and through whom all good and beautiful things have
their qualities. We note this because, among the early fathers, St.
Augustine was the one most concerned with aesthetic matters,
although he seems to have had a divided mind about the importance of
beauty, for he clearly felt that earthly beauty may prove to be a trap. In
one place he deplores the satisfaction in musical harmony “for the
sake of vulgar pleasure.”22 (Knowing exactly what he means is of
course impossible for us in our ignorance of what sort of sounds he
refers to). He sees a danger in men being too enamoured of transitory

earthly satisfactions. In particular, physical beauty is regarded as the
lowest grade of beauty and not comparable to beauty of soul.
For a classical development of the Augustinian view we go to St.
Thomas Aquinas who, in a famous passage in the Summa Theologiae23
formulated the three conditions that are required in order to ascribe
beauty to anything: integrity or completeness (integritas sive
perfectio), right proportion or consonance (debita proportio sive
consonantia), and radiance (claritas). Aquinas’ formulation was
essentially a theological one since he associates beauty with the Son:
wholeness, because he truly possesses the nature of the perfect Father;
consonance, because he is the Word; and radiance, because he is the
Word, the radiant light of understanding. This applies to both natural
and artistic beauty and Aquinas generally insists that all three
conditions are required. But clearly there are many instances where
only one or two are applicable. A verdant meadow in spring may not
be fully beautiful. It may have radiance and perhaps a sense of
completeness but lack harmony (although that would not be needed
for us to perceive its beauty). In art criticism we may judiciously
accept Aquinas’ trio of conditions and, if so, this would serve to
justify an assertion from a much later period, namely Hegel’s claim
that the beauty of art is higher than that of nature. But here we come
up against essential differences between one art and another. Perhaps
Aquinas’ analysis may be more appropriate to the visual arts or to
things in which form is a fundamental consideration. This would
certainly reflect the general tone of much ancient and medieval
aesthetics.
In Aquinas’ opinion, although a creature or some aspect of nature or
a work of art may represent and resemble God to the extent that it has
some perfection, it clearly does not represent him as it might
something else in the same species or genus. Aquinas accepts the
impossibility of any straightforward comparison of earthly things with
God. Like some other theologians he claims that God’s nature is
simple, for he is not composed of matter and form, and his essence
and existence are the same. This leads him to predict that the
perfections which pre-exist in God in a unified and simple way are
represented differently in creatures and things and in a diverse and
manifold way.24 He was able thus to speak of creation’s likeness to
God without treating him as one being alongside others and without
losing sight of the religious requirement that the object of worship far
surpasses any other reality. If “beautiful” and “beauty” are attributed
to God and to things or creatures in different ways, then God gives
beauty to things or creatures according to their proper nature. In other
words, the process is analogical. Each kind of thing is good or
beautiful in its own way. Therefore, instead of looking for a nature or
form that, in its beauty, is common to diverse beings, we should rather
look at the context and admit that there is no single and unique
referent. To borrow an idea from Wittgenstein, things may have a
“family resemblance” and a network of similarities rather than a
common definition. Later Thomists coined the phrase Analogy of
Proper Proportionality to describe the word frames which can help to
clarify analogous resemblances. The analogy is founded on,
The ontological (transcendental) relation in which each being stands to every

other being in virtue of the very act of existence whereby all that is exists.
Beings are analogical in be-ing. That is to say every being exercises the act of
existence in proportion to its essence. The analogy of proper proportionality
alone accounts for the diversity of beings and their unity in being 25
The notion is similarly expressed by Maritain when he says:
Like the one, the true and the good, the beautiful is being itself considered
from a certain aspect; it is a property of being ... Thus everything is beautiful,
just as everything is good, at least in a certain relation. And as being is
everywhere present and everywhere varied the beautiful likewise is diffused
everywhere and is everywhere varied.26
That all three conditions in Aquinas’ trio need not be met is surely
feasible. For instance, doesn’t the integrity of many works of literature
and music, especially in the Romantic period, eschew formal beauty,
as is often suggested? Perhaps, or perhaps not. If chaos and
shapelessness are absent, and in art that is almost always the case, then
surely some formal coherence (beauty) is present. We are only too
aware of the overriding importance of meaning and feeling in a
Mahler symphony, and Aquinas’ trio of conditions may seem weak
and limited in this, as in many another, romantic context. Also, we
may not expect a modern work to have radiance; in fact, we are only
too aware that there is that phenomenon for which Yeats’s phrase
“terrible beauty” is well suited. But underlying this, of course is the
possibility that here too, paradoxically, there is a “radiance.” And this
is by no means a twentieth-century experience, for there is profundity

and emotion to be found in those great works of art to which the term
“beautiful” seems inappropriate. Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge,
Shakespeare’s King Lear, and Grünewald’s Crucifixion are all far
removed from our time, and clearly we need either to extend our
concept of beauty in our discussion of them or to bring in different
concepts which should have the same status as beauty. In so doing we
are essentially concerned with artistic truth, and a connection seems
essential with those other affective and moving qualities of art, with
art’s ability to stir our feelings and imagination and its capacity to
enlarge our emotional range. We may distinguish different media, too,
looking perhaps for imagination and moral insight in literature,
emotion in music, and so on. Some arts reflect the world of nature
whilst others look more to the inner world, corresponding perhaps to
the different realms of spiritual experience.
To leap many centuries we note that it was Leibniz (more than any
other modern philosopher) who echoed Aquinas in taking seriously
the idea of a creation with God as author and man profiting therefrom.
He wrote:
In God is found not only the source of existence, but also that of essences,
insofar as they are real. In other words, He is the ground of what is real in the
possible. For the Understanding of God is the region of the eternal truths and
of the ideas on which they depend; and without Him there would be nothing
real in the possibilities of things, and not only would there be nothing in
existence, but nothing would even be possible.27
Since God is omniscient Leibniz’s concept of the “substance” is not

in any way approximate but is complete in every detail and with
regard to every one of its properties. Every possible substance, not
only the ones proceeding to a finite form in this world, is represented
in the mind of God by what Leibniz calls its complete individual
notion. And every unfolding of a substance's “programme” has an
inexorable inevitability. In view of its specifications every substance
contains a law of the continuation of the series of its own operations,
but complete knowledge of a substance is known only to God, not to
us. One of the key ideas of Leibniz's ways of establishing the
existence of God is his assertion that possibles could not exist without
the existence of a Being who could produce the possible.28 This is no
novel idea, deriving as it does from Aquinas’s fifth proof for the
existence of God, whereby things are seen to achieve their end by

design rather than fortuitously. It follows that whatever lacks
knowledge cannot achieve its end without direction from some
intelligent Being, which we call God.
Nineteenth-century thinkers were well aware of the different modes
inhabited by the different art forms. For our purposes we shall
concentrate on one eminent nineteenth-century figure who draws
these strands together. In so doing we can move from a general view
of metaphysics to a more specific consideration of the ontological
power of music. Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, more than any
other’s, holds a strange fascination for musicians, in particular his
assertion that there are strict limits on the reach of the intellect and
that the abstraction of reason, even when useful, cannot possibly be
taken as an indication of the nature of reality. Schopenhauer published
his major work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as
Will and Representation) at the age of 30. It is a survey of the whole
of human activity and knowledge in the light of a philosophical
attitude that saw the universe, in all its variety and richness, as
something to be transcended. Unlike many philosophers, and in direct
opposition to those for whom philosophy is a purely verbal,
conceptual activity, Schopenhauer’s work is rooted both in the
burgeoning romanticism of his time and in his personal experiences.
This existential activity identified him more with creative artists than
with philosophers. Although immensely erudite, he was never an
academic in the professional sense, and this was summed up in his
student days when he became disillusioned with his teachers Fichte
(in particular) and Schleiermacher. He is often assumed to be a deeply
pessimistic writer. A perpetual conflict certainly existed in him
between feeling and reason, between the subjective and the objective,
inevitably perhaps because of his emphasis on the Will and
determinism.
The main elements of his philosophy were formulated by intuition
early in life. For Schopenhauer the universe is a cosmic illusion
brought about by what he called the Will (the fundamental reality
underlying all knowledge and reason).29 This manifestation, the
“thing-in-itself ”, inhabits one’s consciousness and expresses itself in
archetypal ideas. One can be released from bondage to the Will and its
productions only if it can be extinguished from consciousness. This
has been falsely interpreted by many as extinction in nothingness.
Furthermore, Schopenhauer’s universe is hierarchic ranging from the

pure Will down to its most unconscious productions. We all have the
potential to know its inner workings, and it is “art, the work of
genius”30 in particular, which gives the closest idea of what the Will
itself is like. Artistic endeavours have the Platonic Ideas as their
models, and these Ideas are the very essence of the world. This
aesthetic attitude infuses Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and, despite
Schopenhauer’s very limited knowledge of it, music is elevated above
all the arts. The other arts represent it at second or third hand - for they
only depict its “productions.” That so many of his closest
philosophical predecessors had failed to say much about art and its
relation to a higher existence troubled Schopenhauer, who could really
only look to Plato and Kant for any truly significant contribution, and
Plato’s work, in Schopenhauer’s view, was tainted by his hostility
towards art. (This came about, as we have seen, because of Plato’s
view that works of art are mere imitations of things and events in the
phenomenal world).
Schopenhauer formulated a doctrine which categorised the Will’s
self-objectification in the world of phenomena into four categories:
inorganic matter, plant life, animal life and human life, with a
progression in terms of value and significance from lower to higher.31
Schopenhauer saw the different arts connected to the appropriate
category. The medium most appropriate for the communication of a
perception of the beautiful differs according to the grade of the Will’s
objectification to which the object seen as being beautiful belongs.32
For instance, the art most appropriate for communicating insights in
inorganic matter or inanimate nature is architecture. When such things
as flowers and trees are seen as beautiful, this is usually conveyed by
painting and, indirectly, by verbal description. In animal life the
physical presence of animate objects, their solidity and mass, make
them more clearly expressed in the three dimensional form of
sculpture. In the highest category, that of humans, language comes
into its own. In particular, the power of drama is inexorable,
combining as it does the dramatic unfolding of events in time
simultaneously with the articulation of inner thoughts. The verbal arts
stand almost supreme in the artistic hierarchy corresponding to the
grades of the Will’s objectification.
But the highest of all the arts is music, which is regarded by
Schopenhauer as having a special quality. Presumably, for
Schopenhauer, this quality makes music essentially different in kind

from the other arts.33 Unlike the other arts it does not find its subject
matter in perceptions of anything in the world of phenomena. All
works of art that are not music, says Schopenhauer, either represent
objects or events in the phenomenal world or are decorative or have a
practical use. The very fact of music’s separation from the
phenomenal world has led some people to regard it as other-wordly, a
view endorsed by Schopenhauer. According to him,
all the arts except music communicate knowledge of something which is

intermediate between the noumenon [the “thing-in-itself”] and phenomena,
namely Platonic Ideas.34
Music by-passes the Platonic Ideas, and unlike the other arts speaks
of the noumenon directly. And since the noumenon is an indivisible
and undifferentiable whole then music is a direct articulation of it and
a manifestation of the whole of it. It is therefore an alternative to the
Ideas. So profound is this power that music provides a symbolic
alternative to the world. And not so symbolic either, for it succeeds
concretely in doing what philosophers do in abstraction. It is the most
direct representation of the Will, indeed it is the Will made audible, a
non-conceptual representation of an inner life. Philosophy itself is no
more than a translation into conceptual terms of what music expresses,
giving some rationale to what, in music, we sense purely intuitively.
For Schopenhauer music seems to be the romantic reincarnation of the
ancient notion of universal harmony. He describes it as,
in the highest degree a universal language, which is related indeed to the

universality of concepts, much as these are related to the particular things. Yet
its universality is by no means that empty universality of abstraction, but of a
quite different kind; it is united with thorough and unmistakable distinctness.
In this respect it is like geometrical figures and numbers, which are the
universal forms of all possible objects of experience and are a priori
applicable to them all, and yet are not abstract but perceptible and thoroughly
definite.35
He goes on:
We could just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will; this is
the reason why music makes every picture, indeed, every scene from real life
and from the world, at once appear in enhanced significance, and this, of
course, all the greater, the more analogous its melody is to the inner spirit of
the given phenomenon.36
Thus one can say that Schopenhauer’s view of music contains

within it a “revelation” theory of the meaning of music. Music’s
self-evident capacity to parallel, or speak for a transcendental reality
presupposes that the revelation is somehow not expressible, since
this lies outside or beyond rational discourse. Schopenhauer
acknowledged this as follows:
I recognise ... that it is essentially impossible to demonstrate this explanation,

for it assumes and establishes a relation of music as a representation to that
which of its essence can never be representation, and claims to regard music
as the copy of an original that can itself never be directly represented.37
Because he was unable to adequately support his assertion of

music’s special powers it is not surprising that Schopenhauer failed
to develop his arguments in the form of convincing ideas in a body
of propositions. It is true that he exhorts his readers “to listen often
to music with constant reflection on this [theory].”38 But no more. All
he does is tell us that music is a copy of the Will itself. Sadly, the
innumerable correspondences that he draws between music and the
phenomenal world lack conviction because of the gap that exists
between the world as a representation (as phenomenal) and as Will
(an impersonal and undifferentiated energy that is the direct
manifestation of the noumenal). He wants to have it both ways, it
seems. The dilemma he is in is that he wishes to assert that musical
revelation is ineffable and yet he wants to philosophise about it. But
the two disciplines are different: as we know, philosophy is
essentially conceptual, while art is both conceptual and perceptual.
Schopenhauer’s dilemma was understood, at least in part, much
later by more than one Process philosopher. For instance, Susanne
Langer, in Philosophy in a New Key, acknowledged that the
essentially abstract and ambivalent nature of music gives it a
capacity to express the life of feelings in general.39 Following from
her argument that “music can reveal the nature of feelings with a
detail and truth that language cannot approach”,40 she pulls back
from claims, such as those found in Schopenhauer, that feelings have
a further reference, namely to a noumenal reality. In so doing she
avoids stepping beyond what is consistent with her theory of art,
which, unlike Schopenhauer’s, eschews metaphysical assumptions in

favour of advocating no more than music’s presentational
symbolism as a paradigm of a function shared by all the arts.
As a pupil of Whitehead Langer would have been aware of the
importance of perception not least since there was an assumption
that Whitehead (at least partly following Leibniz, Schopenhauer,
Bergson and others) was a panpsychist. This is despite the fact that
he never seems to have employed the term “panpsychism” in
relation to himself. Although he regarded himself as a realist
Whitehead often seems to be in support of panpsychism and
accepted that in the quantum nature of energy there was at least an
elementary life consisting of creativity, aim and (to use his own
striking term) “enjoyment”, however rudimentary. Since Whitehead
regarded the fundamental units of existence as in some way
experiential then he can undoubtedly be described as an exponent of
panpsychism. But before we attempt to see whether Whitehead’s
teaching renders the world more comprehensible on the assumption
that every object is imbued with a soul or mind it will be fruitful to
view the matter from a different direction. In the next chapter we
shall appraise the work of Victor Zuckerkandl who in his Sound and
Symbol 41 attempted to reverse the traditional relationship between
music and philosophy, not by exploring music through recourse to
aesthetic theory (such as we may see in Schopenhauer and, more
obliquely in Whitehead or some other Process philosopher) but
rather through deriving an aesthetic, indeed an entire metaphysical
stance, from a detailed examination of music itself.
Notes
1. Real Presences (London 1989), p.23.
2. See pp.81ff.
3. ibid., p.86.
4. ibid.
5. ibid., p87.
6. ibid.
7. ibid.
8. The Idea of the Holy, tr. John W.Harvey (London 1928), p.50.
9. (Lewisburg 1972).
10. See Martin’s reference, ibid., p.134.
11. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, “Analytic of the
Beautiful”, ed. Paul Guyer, tr. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge
2000),pp.114-116.
12. Ion 534c-d. tr. Trevor J. Saunders Early Socratic Dialogues (London 1987), p.55.
13. Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (Oxford
1977), p.56
14. (London 1970), p.66.
15. ibid, p.86.
16. Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present (Alabama
1966), p.79.
17. Plotinus, The Enneads, tr.Stephen MacKenna, rev. by B.S.Page (London 1956),
V, ix,11; p.441.
18. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, tr. Thomas Gilby (London 1963),
Vol.1,1a.1,p.89.
19. ibid., Vol. V111,1a.45.6,p.51.
20. Keith Ward, Religion and Creation (Oxford 1996), p.232.
21. See the analysis by Katharine Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn, A History of Esthetics
(Bloomington 1954), p.146.
22. See Augustine The City of God, ed. and tr. R. W.Dyson (Cambridge1998)
Bk.XVII, Ch.XIV, p. 802.
23. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, tr. T.C.O’Brien (London 1976),
Vol.7,1a, 39, p.133.
24. ibid., Vol 3,1a, 13.2, p.55.
25. G.B.Phelan, St. Thomas and Analogy (Milwaukee 1943), p.39.
26. J.Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, tr. J.W.Evans (New York 1962), p.30.
27. See Nicholas Rescher’s translation in The Philosophy of Leibniz (New Jersey
1967),p.14.
28. See C.I.Gerhardts, Die philosophischen Schriften von G.W.Leibniz (Berlin 1875-
90), III, p.572 as cited by Rescher in The Philosophy of Leibniz.
29. Bryan Magee offers a lucid definition of the problematic term “Will” in his The
Philosophy of Schopenhauer, revised edn., (Oxford 1997), pp.124-5.
30. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation tr. E.F.J.Payne,
(New York 1969),Vol.1, p.184.
31. ibid., Chapters 23 and 24.
32. Magee, op.cit., p.176.
33. Schopenhauer, op.cit., Vol.1, p.256.
34. See Magee, op.cit., p.182.
35. Schopenhauer, op. cit., Vol 1, p.262.
36. ibid., p.262-3.
37. ibid., Vol. 1, p.257.
38. ibid.
39. (Cambridge USA 1957), pp.243 and 246-57.
40. ibid., p.235.
41. Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol (London 1956), pp.363-4.

Chapter Two
Music as Sublime Organism
Some of the issues raised so far are common to all the arts. Now we
should enquire as to what is music’s province and what makes it
unique. To start, there are some elementary facts. Among the various
sensory experiences we possess, musical experience is the only one
that belongs predominantly to our own lives. Light and colour, sound,
smell, taste, solids, fluids, gases, the heat and the cold, are all to be
found in nature outside ourselves. The whistle of the wind is also
found in nature and outside ourselves but could be described as a
musical experience only by some exaggeration. Generally speaking
music has a decisive border, its transcendence not being found
elsewhere in nature. Musical sound is set apart, and its traditional
connection with the soul and with feelings has divorced it from the
intellect, at least as far as its essence is concerned. Its outward,
technical manifestation absorbs the theorists, provided the ultimate
question is not posed - how is music possible? This is more profound
even than it looks, for in it is hidden a deeper question, namely what is
the nature of this world if it contains this extraordinary phenomenon
called “music”, which admittedly is a term open to various
definitions? Traditionally philosophy has not been enthusiastic to find
an answer, since its energies have been focused in different areas.
Truth, Virtue and Beauty, the three subjects of Logic /Epistemology,
Ethics and Aesthetics respectively will not suffice to explain the
essence of music, even when all three can be made to cohere in an
interdisciplinary way. By itself, the aesthetic response falls short
because it tends to confine itself to judgements of taste, aesthetic
value and theories of beauty. These are not the categories that concern
us here, except insofar as they relate to a metaphysical source (i.e as
outside sound per se).
We start with melody, or at least the individual notes that might
make up a melody. Here is our first mystery - what is it that
differentiates a nondescript musical phrase (albeit that is put together
44 Music as Sublime Organism
so as to have a logical structure) from a truly great melody such as we

might find in any mature work by Mozart or Schubert? Whatever may
be the answer, it is clearly not as intelligible as a similar one in, say,
language. If I change “the cat is on the mat” to “the mat is on the cat”,
the difference between the two statements is manifestly obvious. The
difference in sound is perceptible to anyone, while the difference in
meaning is perceptible only to someone who understands English.
Similarly, if the opening theme of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony
has one note changed in it, then this too is immediately noticed by all,
perhaps even by a tone-deaf person. But what is it that actually
changes in the melody when its notes are changed? In the comparable
case in language we can give a sensible explanation. In the case of
music we find ourselves unable to account for it, while appreciating
the grammatical change that has taken place. The analogy between
language and music is a fruitful one and will be explored later in some
detail. We may succeed in explaining Schubert's inspired choice of
notes by a technical discussion. This might clarify what is required to
achieve competence in melody writing. But whether Schubert's
melodic genius can be rationalised thus is doubtful. In any case we are
at present less concerned with melodic genius than with the
underlying forces at work in melodies good and bad. In all melody we
notice common forces at work, comparable to that exerted between
magnetic needle and magnetic pole. Every musical note belongs to a
field of musical gravity, is drawn in a particular direction, and
nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the Schubert piece referred
to.
A cogent discussion of this and other musical issues appears in the
writings of Victor Zuckerkandl.1 In Sound and Symbol the author
defines the proper musical quality of the notes as a “dynamic quality”
that permits notes to become conveyors of meaning. The notes by
themselves as vibrating strings or vibrations of air are objective
phenomena, essentially without dynamic quality, and therefore
phenomena of the external world easily measured by scientific means,
indeed translatable to the visual dimension by means of an
oscilloscope. Other properties, such as pitch, intensity, colour or
volume can also be measured. But these are only physical
manifestations. Clearly there is something in the notes of a melody to
which nothing in the context of the physical world corresponds. This
is the important feature, that which we recognise as having artistic
Music as Sublime Organism 45
value. But it is invisible, intangible, and does not fit into the general
context of the physical world. Here lies the dilemma - we hear
dynamic forces at play in a melody, their existence is beyond doubt,
but even though they are perceived via the physical world they are
not, according to Zuckerkandl, a part of the physical world.
In another important book, Psychological Studies,2 Theodor Lipps
made a connection between the dynamic qualities of notes and
physical processes, and his “theory of pulses” has been advocated by
Zuckerkandl and others as a rationale for deriving tonal dynamism
from the numerical ratios of the harmonic series. Any note, as
produced on any instrument, is accompanied almost imperceptibly by
a varying number of simultaneously sounding attendant notes called
harmonics, overtones or upper partials. Thus the note C may be
accompanied by the C next above, the G above that, the C above that,
the E above that, and so on, the intervals between the notes getting
smaller as the series ascends. The first seven harmonics of C give a
chord which in the harmonic system is the dominant seventh of the
key of F major, a sound therefore that historically demands resolution
to a new fundamental, F. There is a story told about the musicologist
Donald Tovey's inclination to hear strong unison Cs as self-evidently
“in” F major, because of the gravitating pull exerted by the almost
imperceptible overtone B flat, the seventh harmonic of C. In turn, the
ensuing F would hold its own seventh, E flat, as a subversive force
pulling it towards the key of B flat, and so on down a spiral of ever
lower fifths and increasing flats into a hellish realm of double flats.
This may account for the evil associations of the seventh as
expounded by writers like Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin (1743-1803).
He was essentially a theosophist who examined the duality inherent in
musical intervals by a fanciful analogy with macrocosmic entities,
where the perfection of God is represented by the pure octave, but the
disturbance effected by the seventh became the source of all evil.3 In
such areas of poetic speculation such as this it is not difficult to find
contradictory viewpoints, one of which aimed to deter Goethe from
rejecting the flat seventh because of its supposed failure to fit in with
the laws of harmony. Bettina Brentano Von Arnim (1785-1859) wrote
to him castigating him for his misunderstanding of the crucial role of
the seventh as a harmonic catalyst:
The flat seventh does not harmonize certainly, and is without sensible basis; it
is the divine leader, - the Mediator between sensual and heavenly Nature; it
has assumed flesh and bone, to free the spirit to tone, and if it were not, all
tones would remain in limbo ... the flat seventh by its resolution leads, which
pray to it for delivery, in a thousand different ways, to their source - divine
spirit.4
To return to plain facts, and providing that we have here a

tempered scale, we can go down in a cyclic pattern through all twelve
keys and then arrive back at the starting point. Thus the whole cycle
can be regarded as represented in potential by the sounding of one
note.
The scale system illustrates a different aspect, and the more obvious
one of the dynamic relations between notes. A note's stability as part
of a group is dependent on its relationship to the chosen tonic, at least
in classical music. In particular, the striving upwards of the leading
note B to C represents a powerful assertion of this dynamic principle.
In addition one can also describe musical notes in mathematical terms.
Taking the seven diatonic notes in a major scale we notice that, in
terms of intervals, purity of sound is related to the simplicity of the
ratios of the frequencies of the notes that constitute those intervals.
The interval of the fifth has the ratio 3:2, and its inversion, the fourth,
4:3; the major third 5:4, and its inversion, the minor sixth 5:3, and so
on. But nothing in the physical phenomenon of a note corresponds to
its musical quality, and therefore Lipps began an inquiry into the exact
mathematical order of the relation between notes. He sought to
discover whether such an analysis (involving that which occurs
between one note and the next) would enlighten us about the inherent
dynamic qualities over and above the purely vibrational differences of
individual notes. He recognised a psychological tendency for the
vibrations to set in motion a 1-2 rhythm, or a pulse whose oscillation
is fundamentally stable. If another note is added which vibrates twice
as fast as the first so that the two notes have the ratio 1:2, then there is
no fundamental contradiction - it still sounds like the same note, but at
a different place, namely the octave above. But if the frequencies of
the two notes have a different ratio, say that of 2:3 or 4:5, the pulse of
the second note will not fit the first, or at least it will sound a different
pitch. Lipps' theory was that in every such “disturbance” there was a
tendency to return to a position of equilibrium, so that when the
frequencies of two notes are in such a ratio that on one side we have 2
or a power of 2, i.e. 4, 8, 16, and on the other 3 or 5, or 3 x 3 or 3 x 5,
there exists a natural tendency on the part of the 3s, 5s, and so on, to
move towards the power of 2, to seek resolution there as a natural

centre of gravity.
Zuckerkandl’s arguments are helped by his careful scrutiny of
Lipps’ theories. In Sound and Symbol Zuckerkandl maintains that the
frequencies of the first two notes of the opening of Schubert's
Unfinished Symphony (B and C sharp) have the ratios 8:9, thus there
must be a tendency from the note C sharp to the note B, the former
seeking the latter as its home base. It seems that, according to Lipps,
the disturbances in the relationship of pulses and their subsequent
removal (certainly as far as classical music is concerned) accounts for
the play of forces which is found in melody. It is a theory that has
much to commend it, especially when the argument is extended to
embrace the functions of key in our Western tonal system. Here, a
different gravitational pull from the one Lipps describes can be seen.
Now we consider not the notes B and C sharp per se, but B as 1 and C
sharp as 2, the first and second degrees of the B minor scale; 2 points
beyond itself to 1, and this directional pointing is found in each note
of the scale. When we hear notes, we place them in the seven-note
system. In developing Lipps' hypothesis Victor Zuckerkandl noticed
that owing to their greater stability 3 and 5 serve their most unstable
adjacent notes, especially the higher, as the nearest points of support.
4 tends to resolve on 3, 6 to 5; 4 gravitates towards 1 across 3, 6
across 5 and so on. Since our Schubert example is in the minor we
should point out that the effect in the minor mode is different from the
major, (a complex topic in itself). The fifth note of Schubert's melody,
A, is a minor seventh and thus predisposed to fall to 6 rather than, say,
to rise to 8. As we explore the various gravitational forces at work in
an unaccompanied melody such as this one, we become ever more
aware of the elusive and complex character of these forces, for if we
compare similar situations like 4-3 with 6-5 we notice essential
differences such as to confirm the subtlety of our tonal system.
A difference exists between melody and harmony insofar as we
assume that any reasonably musically literate person can construct a
harmonic progression or a tonal scheme. This is the reason why
harmony and counterpoint are such eminently teachable subjects. But
knowing full well that it is perhaps a gift from the gods we rarely
attempt to teach melody. The intellectual basis which we find in
harmony and counterpoint is foreign to melodic invention. Heinrich
Schenker's analytical system surely obeys a correct intuition in
looking for quasi-melodic outlines behind classical pieces, but it never

succeeds in defining why the melodic invention of works should be so
often seductive, for his system is essentially to do with formal
structure. Harmonies therefore are generally simple discoveries. But
melody often entails creation at the highest level of the imagination,
and the composer as creator need not feel that his own participation in
that creative process is less metaphysically significant because of the
personal gifts which he alone exercises. Where a composer's own
creations lose value and indeed credibility is when they are
mechanical inventions. This is the issue raised by all methodically
contrived music from early canons to motivic organisation of a 12
note series. Sadly, many modern scores have elevated the constructive
processes above the genuinely musical revelations of the inner ear, a
fault which, for example, Bach the great constructor never
succumbed to, even in his wildest forays into constructionism.
The organic process which is called melody symbolises certain
fundamental characteristics of the natural world, most obviously
biological structures (however improbable this might seem). The
biologist Jakob Von Uexküll in his Theoretische Biologie5 saw the
action of “melodic laws” in organisms as a “genetic melody”, (for
instance in the way fish develop.) This poetic analogy underlies a
serious scientific point about the genesis of organisms. The scientific
aspect of music we have been concerned with so far is that of physical
laws. But the creative aspect of music would seem to relate music just
as convincingly with a science fundamentally different from physics,
namely biology. Certainly, there is in biology as in physics and
chemistry a dependence on causality. But physical causality is not
apparent when, for instance, an egg is cut in two and two new whole
organisms are the result. The individual parts of the new organisms
have no correspondence with the individual parts of the egg, so there
is no causal chain here - it is a purely biological process. While
conceding that this apparently mysterious process can be scientifically
accounted for, there appears to be a miraculous place-transcending
order at work that is not dissimilar to that found in music. Uexküll
makes a further identification of musical process with biology on two
levels - firstly the level of nature, the way life is organised (whether
life as feeling and thought as in music or as an organic process as in
biology), secondly, the metaphysical level, where both music and
biology in rather similar fashions simulate a form of creativity that is
mysteriously endowed with an immaterial power that is both in this

world and beyond it. We can only imagine the scepticism such
fanciful notions would elicit from die-hard academic musical analysts!
We shall now turn to harmony. While always being aware that it
was essentially no more than a bit of fancy and fantasy we note how
venerable is the history of the triad's symbolism, particularly among
the German theorists of the Renaissance and afterwards. For Johannes
Lippius in 1612 the common chord symbolised the Holy Trinity, the
true and unitrisonic root of all the most perfect and most complete harmonies
that can exist in the world ... the image of that great mystery, the divine and
solely adorable Unitrinity.6
Andreas Werckmeister (1645-1706), a German provincial organist

and theorist, extended this to four octaves and made a correspondence
with the four successive periods of divine revelation. Octave I
(harmonics 1, 2) now symbolise God the Father as he was before
Creation; II (harmonics 2, 3, 4) the time of the Old Testament, when
the Trinity was concealed; III (harmonics 4, 5, 6, 8) the time of the
New Testament, in which the Trinity was revealed; IV (harmonics 8,
9, 10, 12, 15, 16) the melody of the Christian life, in earth and heaven.
His association of these ascending octaves with what he called the
“trumpet scale” (the trumpet's harmonics) gave it a resplendently
apocalyptic gloss, and it was significant here that the dissonant
harmonics 7, 11, 13, 14 were excluded as representing sin.7 Such an
approach is strange to us, yet the awesome mysteries of harmony still
prevail in modern analysis as we will now endeavour to show.
Clearly there is in harmony a prodigious and diverse sound-world
which phenomenally extends the range of our discussion. One
acoustic property of chords is that when the component notes merge
the resulting harmony becomes a single complex sensation. The
dynamic qualities we have noticed in individual notes are perpetuated
in harmony according to the position of the notes. CEG can be
described as 1.3.5., but the presence of a key means that the numerical
function can change according to what key you are in. Therefore CEG
is 5.7.2. when we are in F major, or 4.6.1 when in G major, and so on.
The sense of direction prevailing in the individual notes is more
complex than in melody alone. In general, the tonal pull in a chordal
context is more ambiguous than in melody because here the chord
itself possesses a tension of its own. Some chords exert a greater
gravitational pull than others. The tonic chord 1.3.5. is clearly the
home base for other chords, while the dominant chord as we have
noted, and especially the dominant seventh, 5.7.2.4., finds the pull
towards the tonic irresistible (at least in music later than the 16th
century). Until the end of the nineteenth century, in the majority of
cases, the dominant seventh chord was followed by the tonic, and final
cadences were often formed by this progression.
We have maintained that the dynamic force is a mysterious element
which lies in the notes as they progress in time from one note to the
next, or from one chord to the next. In contrapuntal music we still
have a strong chordal element in the vertical superposition of the
notes, but many would argue that here the horizontal sweep has, or at
least pretends to have, primacy over the harmonic event. Our
convention is to use the name of an interval (second, fifth, octave and
so on) to describe not only the distance between two notes but also
the connection between them, which may either be successively as in
melody, or simultaneously as in harmony. The movement from one
note to another or from one chord to another is far more than it is at
first glance in, say, the hymn-tune “St Anne”, where there is a
progression from the chord E flat to A flat to E flat to C minor to A
flat to B flat to E flat. Here there is an extra dimension in the very act
of moving away from the tonic chord to a related area before returning
to the tonic. This horizontal motion adds to the dynamism we have
already seen in individual notes, and where there is harmony there
must surely be an enhanced effect which opens up a vast new
dimension of tonal potential. A chord is not just the sum of its notes,
and a triad's depth of meaning cannot be explained by aggregating its
three components. In both melody and harmony we can deduce why
the language of diatonic music takes the form so familiar to us. By
extending our argument to more complicated areas it is possible to
come to similar, if more complex, conclusions about chromatic music.
With atonality the conscious rejection or contradiction of these
gravitational forces is an issue in itself. Indeed this analytical method
gives no explanation of chromaticism, which of course has been
present in Western music for longer than we realise. Bach was the
composer of chromatic music par excellence, and even in the
apparently still harmonic waters of the classical period the chromatic
subtleties of Haydn and Mozart and Schubert suggest that the “pulse
theory” of Lipps and its extension to harmony provides a rather

inadequate rationale.
We have noted the uniquely insubstantial quality of music. The
notion that there may be quantifiable, verifiable correlations between
rhythm, pitch, timbre, harmonic resolutions or dissonance, or the fact
that the number and mathematical progression of vibrations are
functional, does not conceal the essential unreality of music as a kind
of constant flickering of presence and absence together. Although we
hear forces, we can find no material phenomena to which music
correlates. In the external world body and force are dependent upon
each other, and we know of forces only through their material effects.
Even here the actual nature of the force may be imperceptible. Yet we
clearly deduce it from material traces. We have already noted that in
music too there are material forces, the wave-producing vibration of a
string or column of air. But these physical properties have nothing to
do with the dynamic properties of music as previously discussed. In
music it is precisely the fact that its forces are invisible, and have no
matter, which makes logical deduction ineffective.
Because of its derivation from the harmonic series, tonal music
would seem to have a superior claim to the divine than non-tonal
music. But we must note that the very expansive, adventurous
character of art, its continuously developing state and novel creations,
makes it logically impossible to ensure any set of defining properties,
especially in a world wide context. Indeed, for many music lovers
tonal music does not (only) indicate a music derived from diatonicism
but also modes, ragas etc. Similarly, the ontological distancing of
serialism from the harmonic series may at first sight tend to
undermine the metaphysical validity of it and other non-tonal systems.
But many would dispute this, for the very existence of 12-note
chromaticism and complex ragas make them also eternal objects
and, as such, with sufficient metaphysical validity as wellsprings for
human creativity (as our recognition of a number of masterpieces,
twelve-note and non-Western respectively, would seem to confirm).
While objects generally recognised as being of special aesthetic
interest have in common some distinguishing trait (what Mozart and
Stockhausen produced is the same in that it is music), such a trait
cannot be a defining characteristic.
How does all this fit our assertion of music as an immanent
expression of a divine creator? The truth is that there is a nonphysical
element in the external world which is neither to be understood by

examining technical phenomena nor to be seen as merely a projection
of our emotions. It has an autonomy of its own, which the great
Process philosopher Charles Hartshorne described as an “external
psychic”, a psychic force outside ourselves. If we listen to the opening
of the Schubert symphony we not only hear the notes B, C sharp, D,
B, A, F sharp and so on, but the characterisation of these notes into a
solemn and brooding phrase low in the cellos and double basses. And
this has an emotional effect. Many listeners would see this as the
whole experience. But in addition to this is that which is neither
physical nor emotional, namely the dynamic force, the relationship in
motion of 1 2 3 1 7 5 6 etc, the degrees of the scale explored by
Schubert's opening. As we have previously maintained, this dynamic
force is a separate and mysterious power, fundamental to musical
expression and yet to which many listeners are oblivious, for in no
way is it a creation of the listener. One could say also that it is not
consciously created by the composer, for he is often bound to use it
without understanding how it works. Nevertheless we must always
remember that the piece belongs to a specific culture and context. Its
phrase-length marks it as belonging to a Western canon; and since it
ends on the dominant it clearly belongs to the 18th century.
Leibniz's famous description of music is apposite: “music is a secret
arithmetic of the soul unknowing of the fact that it is counting”
(nescientia se numerare). This concealment may account for the
problems which face aestheticians when dealing with music, and
indeed the other arts, (as we shall see later in Chapter 6). For we can
doubtless see potent forces which are invisible dynamic agents for
equilibrium and tension not only in music but in the visual arts and
architecture or in literature. This extra dimension we have noted will
be elusive. We may, for instance, find it difficult to define in the
visual arts precisely because the eye, which has such a central role in
constructing the world of material things, may not easily penetrate the
nonmaterial in the guise of purely dynamic phenomena.
In asking what it is that lends enchantment to a melody by Schubert,
(and in his case we could cite almost any melody by this most gifted
of all melodists), Zuckerkandl maintained that the key to
understanding the process lies primarily not in the relation of the notes
to any feeling of ours but rather in the relation of the note B to C sharp
and so on. And this autonomy of the notes can be proven, for the
dynamic power is evident even when the context is not musical, in the
playing of a scale, for instance, (but always accepting that our scales
are also constructs i.e. conceptions belonging to our culture but having
evolved from physical laws). This has absorbed a number of
influential musical commentators in their various attempts at
rationalisation. Leonard Bernstein, for instance, in his televised
Harvard Lectures8 probes the deep structures inherent in music and
makes cogent analogies with Chomskyan linguistic theories. But the
crucial issue of music's immanent meaning is not satisfactorily
pursued by him beyond purely emotive descriptions. Yet the
comparison with language provides a fruitful area for Bernstein to
attempt a hermeneutics of music. In language as well as music, the
meaning is often inexpressible by other means, and at least this
mystery is shared by music and language. But as we shall note in
Chapter 4 a word and its meaning, in the sense of what it is saying, are
independent things, the word being a series of signs for a meaning that
is separate. There is no equivalence in music. A musical meaning
resides in the note; meaning and sign are indivisible and the musical
meaning cannot reside elsewhere. The flickering of presence and
absence is nowhere more tantalising than in this compounding of
abstract meaning with real sound. Whatever emotion we may feel as
listeners may not necessarily be an accurate reflection of the meaning
of the notes, whose import lies in the notes and not in us. Zuckerkandl
argues that while it is possible to translate from one language to
another it is not possible to translate from one music to another
because language has a finite world of things whereas musical notes
themselves are what they mean. He continues,
Hence too the number of words, of the smallest meaning units of language,
corresponds roughly to the number of things: languages are rich in words,
whereas twelve tones suffice to say everything that has ever been said.9
(Clearly Zuckerkandl is mistaken here, as will be apparent to us every

time we listen to, say, a richly expressive 19-note raga). As we shall
note later, if music generates its own meaning from inside itself, then
words lead away from themselves to a separate conceptual idea. In the
opinion of many, this is what brings the musical experience close to
the religious dimension.
Just as a religious symbol provides a direct apprehension of God, so
does a musical note provide a direct sense of experiencing another
world. Whether or not we can call this God is dependent on how all-
inclusive we are prepared to be in our speculations about religion, for
religious belief is such a personal matter. While the presence of God
may be self-evident to the believer, the unbeliever will perceive
nothing. At least in music we can be sure that there is an “invisible”
dynamic force of some significance to music lovers. This force is
clearly heard and exists in all music (including trivial pieces). In this
respect the numinous quality in a musical context is more directly
perceptible than in a religious one. Perhaps this is why music (and not
always of a certain rigorously disciplined kind, as we have already
noticed) has been central to worship. Of all the arts one might find
represented in heaven, music and the singing of angels would seem to
take pride of place.
We should also include rhythm in our discussion. It is possibly the
most fundamental element of all, as Roger Sessions implied when he
said, “Basically music is not so much sound as motion”. Rhythmic
motion in music is a subject that affects the present discussion because
it is to do with what happens so as to connect the notes. Rhythmic
movement is less concerned with the notes, which in themselves do
not move, than with the relationship between one note and the next.
Fundamentally, rhythm is to do with time, and if we are to seek to
provide an ontology of time in music we must deal with its principal
manifestation, which is rhythm. In combination with melody and
harmony, rhythm constitutes the trinity of basic elements that are
fused in music. But unlike melody and harmony, which are found only
in music, rhythm is a universal property, and found in the inanimate as
well as the animate, in the microscopic as well as in the macrocosmic.
In music two types of rhythmic force can be seen, rhythm as
commonly understood on the one hand, and, on the other, metre,
which is a process for demarcating beats. They both cohere, since
metre groups rhythms into (usually) equal portions. Zuckerkandl
makes a good analogy whereby a comparison is made between the
motion of a machine on the one hand and man on the other: the
machine runs metrically, man walks rhythmically.10 It is the interplay
of rhythm with metre which accounts for much of the driving intensity
of many pieces. The general organisation of works into formal
structures owes much to the polarising effect of metre, intensified as it
must always be by the constantly rejuvenating power of rhythm.
Symmetries are established and contradicted and there is diminution
and augmentation involving variants of pre-established motifs and

themes. Rhythmic dynamic forces have a life of their own, but these
combine with the previously described tonal dynamic forces to
produce a complex synthesis of musical argument which we recognise
as the “form” of a work. On the smallest as on the largest scale, all the
technical paraphernalia of music interact to make a synthesis, with
certain ground rules involving tonal and rhythmic dynamic forces.
It might seem that time itself is an innocent bystander in all this, a
mere servant for all this energy. Isn't it a somewhat neutral vessel
through which the music travels? Not necessarily. When a piece
comes to its end we feel that, in addition to us responding to the richly
argued musical discourse, the passing of time itself has been a
participating element. The rhythmic power is exerted not by the beats
but in what happens between the beats, from beat to beat, so that time
seems to actively participate, to intervene.
This is an unorthodox view of time. Even such an original thinker as
Schopenhauer avoided ascribing such significance to it. (In The World
as Will and Idea he describes time in itself as empty and without
properties, and in similar vein we have William James's observation,
that “empty time's own changes are not sufficient for the awareness of
change to be aroused.”) The performing musician will reject this
notion, for he is constantly relating his work to time as an active force.
This bears some relation to ourselves as beings who, from heartbeat to
heartbeat, live a rhythmic life, whether we are musicians or not. We
might ask whether the rhythmic forces we have been discussing are
not processes in our own bodies (rather than without) were it not for
the very particular data which informs even the simplest musical
piece, which proves rhythm’s autonomy and thus separates it from our
feelings and the movements of our own bodies.
If metre and rhythm follow on from the concept of time, then time
itself, as a concept, will not be beyond our comprehension. For if we
have understood musical rhythm then we can understand time, at least
insofar as rhythm is an integral factor in its passing. In Sound and
Symbol, Zuckerkandl, like many other writers on music, perceptively
compares two concepts of time, physical time and musical time, and
shows fundamental differences between them. On the one hand, while
physical time is “order, form of experience”, musical time is “content
of experience.” While physical time “measures events”, musical time
“produces events.” While physical time is “divisible into equal parts”,
musical time “knows no equality of parts.” While physical time “is

perpetual transience”, musical time “knows nothing of transience.”11
Therefore, through musical notes and their rhythms, time becomes a
concrete reality, and musical rhythm is the most effective way of
making time an experience in itself. The realisation of time belongs to
music for in music we perceive effects of time rather than in time.
Zuckerkandl's final analogy between physical time and musical time
raises the issue of the equality of parts. This needs explanation, for it
illustrates how unphysical is music's measure of time. One definition
of physical time equates it with the motion of a body taken as the
measure of the motion of another body, hence a comparison of two
bodies, of matter in space, not of times. Equality of time is crucial, of
course, in the musical sense of good rhythm meaning “keeping in
time.” But in ensuring that time units are kept equal we note that this
does not relate to space, and again we ask what is the nature of this
musical equality of time? Is it the equal succession of beats, or of bars,
or of phrases? Often there is arithmetically an equality, but every
musician knows that deviations from metrical equality do not disturb
us if the rhythmic (or time) variation makes musical sense. When
music imposes a rhythmic quality on equal lengths of time it often
rejects equal time (meaning man's measurement of time, and
involving spatial measurements).
Zuckerkandl deals with the poignant issue of the transience of time
as an indicator of man's mortality and suggests that musical time tends
to counter this transience (transience being one of the fundamental
features of physical time). He quotes a number of classic statements
about the passing of time, from Locke's cryptic “Time: a perpetual
perishing” to Schopenhauer's “Time is that by the power of which
everything at every instant turns to nothing in our hands”. He goes on
to ask the provocative question:
To us, temporality and transience are words for the same thing, and only the
timeless does not pass. It might be asked why, then, one aspect of this twofold
process imposes itself on us so much more than the other; for the same time
that turns the now into a no-longer has, after all, first made the not-yet a now.
Yet we never talk about anything but time passing; no one says, “Time
becomes.”12
As we shall discover later, the notion of time “becoming” is the crux

of so much that is fundamental to Process thought. Since music
disputes the hour-glass idea of time it thus questions the entire

conceptual notion of it. Music actively moves into the future in a
manner rather different from other phenomena. The need for a phrase
to be answered by a succeeding one is in itself a reaching out into the
future. Language behaves similarly, a sentence inexorably proceeding
so as to draw the future closer, making time “become”. But it is the
material concepts which language handles which does this. In music it
is the singularly immaterial flux of sound which provides compulsive
anticipation of what is to come in time. Of the many differences
between language and music none is more striking than the
continuously revelatory effect of musical surprises. In language, a
surprising statement is usually only a surprise the first time, while in
music we continue to be startled by surprise events after having heard
them many times before. It is this capacity, found only in music and in
the very finest pieces of literature, which helps to confirm the idea of
time itself being enhanced by its rhythmic manipulation in the hands
of Bach or Mozart, or indeed Shakespeare or Dante. Zuckerkandl
shows us that in such contexts time is more than a mere container for
events. Music is certainly an experience of the present, but it is a
present in which the past and the future are stored somehow
simultaneously, as one of the more difficult passages by Henri
Bergson attempts to suggest. In Zuckerkandl’s discussion on Bergson
he quotes the following passage from Durée et simultanéité :
A melody to which we listen with our eyes closed and think of nothing else, is
very close to coinciding with this time which is the very fluidity of our inner
life; but it still has too many qualities, too much definition, and we should first
have to obliterate the differences between the tones, then the distinctive
characteristics of tone itself, retain of it only the continuation of that which
precedes in that which follows, the uninterrupted transition, multiplicity
without divisibility, and succession without separation, in order at last to find
fundamental time. Such is duration immediately perceived, without which we
should have no idea of time. 13
Bergson claims that time is a process of the inner world and is to be

understood psychologically. But it is not in me, it is in the music. So
musical time does not reside in the psyche after all. Yet its connection
with us is real - it is co-rhythmic with physiological time, with the
durations of our body rhythms, with life itself. It is a living time,
which can “remember”. Here in Bergson too there is a rejection of
spatial measurement of time. (He sees “spatialised time” as concerned
with an “instant” as a “point” in time, and of duration as an interval

that extends between two points - thus measured by spatial
representation). The immateriality of notes make them compatible for
functioning in time, for notes are not qualities, they are a self-
sufficient inherence in time involving a direct perception of time. As
soon as the note is heard we are drawn directly into time. Hearing the
notes means hearing time. We can appreciate this by analogy with the
visual dimension - if I see a landscape the duration of my experience
is not an element of the sensation. It is not duration that I see, it is
landscape. But in listening to a note I hear in it duration per se, and
music not only possesses duration but contains temporal extension as
a fundamental defining quality
Before we leave this area of inquiry we need to discuss briefly
musical space and silence. The relationship of time to space in music
is a vexed one. Schopenhauer maintained that music is perceived
solely in and through time, to the complete exclusion of space.
Zuckerkandl contradicts this when he discusses harmony, whose
notes, although merging into a single chord, do not disappear in it;
each remains in existence as a separate component of the chord and, in
simple cases, can easily be heard in the chord even by untrained ears.
What keeps apart simultaneously sounding notes so that they can
jointly form a chord? Simultaneously appearing colours coalesce into
a mixed colour, unless, that is, they appear in different places, unless
space keeps them apart. It appears as if the fact of simultaneity of
different notes would in some way bring space as its indispensable
prerequisite into music.14
The same argument is presented with counterpoint, its texture
arising from the connection of several voices proceeding side by side.
In its most elementary form this correlation between time and space
(space, of course, being only a metaphor not an essence) is seen in a
unison passage sung by a mixed choir, for here the men sing exactly
the same part as the women but sound an octave lower. This is the
same music but spatially a different experience. For Zuckerkandl this
involves a very special experience of space, and this is supported by
our habit of describing music “spatially” in almost all our common
descriptions of it. If we experience the complex simultaneity of a
chord as a vertical event in a contrapuntal passage we still perceive a
single flow of music in time. Contrapuntal lines in Bach, even when
their separation is clarified by their being allotted to different tone
colours, still maintain a cogent unity - four melodies integrated into a

single texture. There are four separate meanings too, but these bow to
the overriding precedence of a unified expression. Such is the subtlety
of time's hold on this that we can still perceive and appreciate the four
separate elements of this essentially divisible whole.
A musical note's connection with space, as ordinarily conceived, is
seen in its manifestation as a performed event, perhaps in public, or at
least in a space. But the note immediately detaches itself from its
material source, and this divorce from spatiality is one of its physical
and metaphysical characteristics. Zuckerkandl makes a distinction
between notes and thought, and points out that, whereas there is no
within-without in thought, there is this distinction in a musical note.
Only thoughts are indifferent to space. But the creative imagination of
the composer or of a performer is similarly immaterial and this lack
of materiality in the creative act is the essence of all musical
composition. So, as we have already maintained, a piece of music
inhabits two worlds, the inner psychological world and the real world
of its performance, that of the twanging gut and measured breath on
the reed. Sound is imparted into the air, is localised in space, and
occupies and integrates space before we encounter it. But if the ear is
aware of space in music, then, to use Zuckerkandl's phrase, it is “a
space without place”. It entirely lacks the three-dimensionality of
optical space where there is occupancy by objects. But many might
argue that this is an over-simplification, after all isn’t it also music
when you sit in a chair and read it?
To turn now to silence, we notice that one of the peculiar
experiences in music is the eloquent effect of silence, when silence is
a structural element in the motion of a piece. In one passage in Bach's
motet Jesu meine Freude there are rests which are used functionally to
stop the music prior to an outpouring of motion in the form of a
vibrantly surging sweep of counterpoint. The context here is so
rhythmically unified that the rests contribute as much as the music to
the motion. In other words, musically the rests are not silent, they are
full of meaning, are pregnant pauses. This procedure is not confined to
music, for in speech also there can be eloquently structural rests, and
where great poetry has pauses the effect is similar to that in music.
This reinforces our claim that dynamic force is found not just here in
this note and there in the next note, but in the transition from one to
another. What takes place in between is processive, the lifeblood of
musical motion (and afterwards too, as in that special moment before

the applause).
We have naturally seen time as music's province and our discussion
of the other arts has been limited to a passing reference to literature.
Clearly, many of the points made above have validity in relation to
dance and we shall deal with this in later chapters. It is also
conceivable that those arts which seem not to be connected with time
as a process, which do not use time as music does, may have a
mysterious underlying connection with time as an active agent. For
instance, in his book A Whiteheadian Aesthetic , Donald W. Sherburne
makes a case for reconsidering the different functions of time in the
performer and non-performer arts respectively. He confirms much of
what has been discussed above when he writes:
In the performer arts an objectification is a discursive entity that requires the

passage of time for its performance and then fades from actuality into
objective immortality, while in architecture and the non-performer arts an
objectification, once secured, is an enduring object indifferent to time.15
He goes on to point out a peculiar tendency for the arts within each
category to “approximate to those within the other”. He notes a
tendency in viewing a painting, statue or cathedral to be in a certain
chronological sequence like the sequence in a musical performance.
From the opposite point of view, he cites the allegation (it is no more
than that and not authenticated) that Mozart could hear a symphony
complete in his head in the flash of an instant to prove that
the temporal arts demand a familiarity on the part of the contemplator which
permits him to gather the discursiveness of the performance into a unity of
presence parallel to that which predominates in the nontemporal arts.16
In suggesting that the discursiveness of the temporal arts must be

overcome before the objectified proposition “can be fully grasped”
Sherburne lends support to Schenkerian analysis, where an
instantaneously graphic explanation of a musical work is aimed for.
Conversely, he seeks to urge the sequential appreciation of
nontemporal arts if the subject is to have the right impact on the
viewer. Why this needs to take place is not explained, except in a
general statement to the effect that the basic aesthetic tension of unity
within contrast is exemplified by this approximation of arts within one
category to those within the other. “Music has contrast built into it,
hence the composer struggles for unity; architecture has unity built
into it, hence the architect struggles for contrasts.”17
In conclusion, therefore, the artistic universe as a whole has a

temporal dimension that is more than momentary, for it can be
perceived as a distinct structure. If one remains conscious of the
poignant reality of real time in which one is inexorably moving
towards death, one apprehends the joy of art's own time as being
profoundly meaningful. In stepping from one chronology to another it
is as if we step from time to eternity. The reality of our “living
towards death”, as Heidegger described our condition, is suspended.
This explains the liberation and peace that is found, a true catharsis,
even when the artistic subject prehended is apparently of a gloomy
nature.
Notes
1. Sound and Symbol (1956) and Man the Musician (1973).
2. (Baltimore 1926).
3. See Godwin’s discussion, op.cit., p.174.
4. Bettina Brentano von Arnim, Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child (London

1839), Vol.1, p.282. Discussed in Godwin, op.cit., p.175-6.
5. Discussed in Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, p.263-4.
6. Andreas Werckmeister, Musicae mathematicae hodegus curiosus (Frankfurt and

Leipzig 1687, reprinted Olms 1972). Discussed in Godwin, op.cit., p.185.
7. ibid.
8. The Unanswered Question (Harvard 1976).
9. Zuckerkandl, op.cit., p.68.
10. ibid., p.170.
11. ibid., p, 202.
12. ibid., p.224.
13. See Durée et simultanéité (Paris 1922), quoted in Zuckerkandl, op. cit., p.244.
14. op.cit., p.268.
15. A Whiteheadian Aesthetic (Tennessee 1970), p.131.
16. ibid.
17. ibid.
Chapter Three
Process Philosophy
Before discussing music any further we shall explore some general
philosophical arguments arising out of Process and scrutinize briefly
the ideas of the first and greatest Process philosopher, Alfred North
Whitehead. But for Whitehead to be cited in any discussion on
aesthetics needs some explanation, for there is very little reference to
art or aesthetics in his work. Since he was one of a small group of
thinkers whose influence is felt far beyond the confines of their own
specialisms his philosophical writings provide an inexhaustible mine
of suggestion, despite their difficulty and stylistic elusiveness.
(Whitehead himself maintained that he was the only person ever to
have read the chapter on “Abstraction” in his Science and the Modern
World, and Dorothy Emmett in an obituary notice said, “There are
some who have done so. But they must be very few!”)
When he was elected to the Professorship of Philosophy at Harvard
in 1924, at the late age of 63 and following a phenomenally
distinguished career as a scientist, he embarked upon a fruitful period
of activity both as an original philosophical thinker and as the teacher
of such illustrious figures as Susanne Langer, Paul Weiss, F.C.S.
Northrop and Charles Hartshorne. What soon became apparent in
Whitehead the philosopher was how relevant his scientific discoveries
were to his philosophical thought, as is apparent in his idea of forces
at work (process) as fundamental to reality.
In his famous book Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology
(1929)1 we have an exposition of what he described as his
“Philosophy of Organism”. Here he asserts that ultimate components
of reality are “events” in time, not static situations or particles of
matter. An event is never instantaneous, for it always lasts over a
certain duration, (although perhaps an infinitesimally short period of
time, as when a molecule in this paper reacts to another). This is an
event and a process in time. An instant of time and a point in space
have no place in his scheme. Thus, with events we do not talk of how
things are (what they are made of) but of how things become. The
process of events, their “becoming” is fundamental. Those events of
which the world is made are called “actual entities”. In older
philosophies substance plays a fundamental role, but unlike substance
64 Process Philosophy
(which endures), an actual entity has no permanence. And as if to

emphasise this point he, in typical neologistic fashion, describes an
actual entity not as a subject but as a superject, thus suggesting its
emergence from antecedent entities to itself. The provenance of this
concept in classical antiquity is immediately apparent when we recall
Heraclitus’ famous assertion that no man could step twice in the same
river. Here is encapsulated the hypothesis that the only absolute which
exists is change and only process and change can be counted on to be
the basis of reality.
The actual entity “becomes” as it absorbs influences from other
entities in its environment, including God. God also can become. This
absorption or takeover is termed “prehension”, literally meaning
“grasping”. So prehension is a ferment of “qualitative valuation”
which need not necessarily be conscious. The table on which I am
writing prehends its surroundings, since its molecules react to others.
Whether one can romanticise this and see in it the workings of a mind
or rudimentary consciousness evidenced by the simple transfer of
energy is not a matter for the present discussion.
The entity prehends objects from its environment. Those objects are
said to exert “causal efficacy” on the subject. But this is not some
simple, easily understood effect, for to begin with it need not be
conscious. In “seeing”, for instance, the eye’s enjoyment of a reddish
feeling is intensified and transmuted and interpreted by complex
occasions of the brain into definite colours and other instances of
qualitative “eternal object.” The original physical feeling of causal
efficacy is submerged but not eliminated by an inrush of conceptual
feelings. Furthermore, conceptual prehensions allow the objective
scale of values given by the primordial nature of God to enter the
decision, and it is then that we have a display of qualities presented to
us. Whitehead calls this experience “perception in the mode of
“presentational immediacy,”
The becoming of an actual entity is called a “concrescence”. This is
an integration as a result of prehending other things or as a result of
experiencing the causal efficacy of other things on it. Actual entities,
sometimes termed “actual occasions”, (which, because of the
implication of temporality might be a more appropriate term) are the
final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going
behind actual entities/occasions to find anything more real. “God is an
actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off
empty space.”2 There may be gradations of importance, or diversities
of function, but in principle all are on the same level.
Process Philosophy 65
When the concrescence is complete, an actual entity’s or actual

occasion’s private life, during which it has been prehending, comes to
an end. In perishing it embarks on a public career and the cycle starts
again. This novel occasion now becomes the object for another subject
to prehend, and, if consciously, with aspirations of a kind of
immortality. While ordinary objects may be physically prehended,
eternal objects are conceptually prehended.
As a foundation for this we have eternal objects. Whitehead sees
eternal objects as ingredients in an experience and rather similar to
Plato's ideal forms. They are patterns and qualities like squareness,
blueness, hope or love. Whitehead's definition of eternal objects has
its source in early Greek theory, for to him “eternal objects of the
objective species are the mathematical Platonic forms.”3 But here he is
referring to the objective forms of numerical relationships and
geometrical shapes. What was noted in Chapter 2 concerning the
physical coherence of music naturally fits in with this. But eternal
objects of the subjective species function in a more complicated
manner. They are the qualitative clothing to the raw quantitative data
of the objective species. Such a subjective species is “an emotion, or
an intensity, or an adversion, or an aversion, or a pleasure, or a pain,”4
and so on. So-called secondary qualities are eternal objects of the
subjective species, as are (per se) pains, likes, dislikes, etc. These
eternal objects of the subjective species appear at the private end of
prehension, but they may be transmitted into a characteristic of the
datum objectified. A complex illustration from music will show how
subtle this can be. The bare essentials of harmony may be reduced to
one particular scale system which is an eternal object of the objective
species, but it is made meaningful in a series of harmonies or in the
coherence of a complete piece so that the eternal object achieves a
subjective status. Any succeeding rationalisation of this provides a
further objectification of the whole structure, both its quantitative data
and its qualitative clothing. Musical analysts may not be aware of it
but this rationalisation is the function of musical analysis. Naturally,
the more probing the analysis then the more it will provide a
fundamental explanation of a piece.
When an actual entity undergoes the developing process
(concrescence) it acquires a definite character to the exclusion of other
possible characters by selecting some eternal objects (rather than
others) to conceptually prehend. So if I say that this pencil is green,
then this is a proposition where the subject is a society (nexus, or
group) of molecular actual entities and the predicate is the eternal
object “green”. The fusion of the two is the combining of something

real with something ideal. An eternal object refers only to the purely
general among undetermined actual entities. In itself an eternal object
evades any selection among actualities.5 On the other hand, the datum
of a physical feeling is either one actual entity or, if the feeling be
complex, a determinate nexus of actual entities. This datum is unique
and specific, a “this” as opposed to “any.”
In this synthesis [of eternal object and actual entity within a proposition] the
eternal object has suffered the elimination of its absolute generality of
reference.6
According to Whitehead both the eternal object and the actual entity
find their reasons for being in God. For Whitehead, God is the
“aboriginal condition” upon which all actual occasions are dependent.
Without God the forms of definiteness (artistic and otherwise) would
be “indistinguishable from nonentity”. In a limited sense of the word
“create”, God can be said to “create” all actual entities and Whitehead
insists that God has a crucial role in the birth of each one. In playing
this role, God does in a very real sense participate, though Whitehead
warns us not to be misled by the suggestion that the diverse creativity
of the universe is to be attributed to God's volition.7 For Whitehead
what is real is the actual entities/occasions. But we must remember
that groupings of occasions (nexus) are abstractions. We must beware
of attributing reality to nexus lest we commit the “Fallacy of
Misplaced Concreteness.”8 It may be hard-core common sense to
believe that what I am writing on is this desk. But the desk categorises
other substances, including the microscopic. Whitehead argues that
the desk does not pertain to my experience in the most concrete way,
but rather to abstractions from the categories of substances contained
in it, hence the Fallacy. If we can free ourselves from too much
reliance on the common abstractions underlying our perception of
substances then we can perceive aspects of life and reality which we
have hitherto ignored, like those molecules within this desk that I
write on, that have as much reality as the desk. Thus, the sequence
from microcosmic actual entities/occasions through various stages
towards macrocosmic entities is a sequence from reality to
appearance.
God’s persuasive (rather than coercive) wisdom imbues the initial
aim of every concrescence. This occurs at the start of each occasion’s
reaction to the influence from the past. The initial aim “determines the
initial gradations of relevance of eternal objects for conceptual

feelings with its initial conceptual valuations, and with its physical
purposes”,9 and God’s all-embracing conceptual valuation is harnessed
to the particular possibilities available for the initial feeling.
Whitehead wrote:
there is constituted the concrescent subject in its primary phase with

its dipolar constitution, physical and mental, indissoluble.10
As we have said, from this point onwards the concrescence

determines its own definiteness and this is the general law. Whitehead
always asserted the freedom of non-divine subjects, whether that be
me gardening or Bach, with awesome awareness, penning a fugue as
one of more than a thousand works indicative of a profound
understanding of what can be produced from the overtone series.
The three concepts referred to by Whitehead as the formative
elements are creativity, eternal objects, and God. God is the third
formative element and one of Whitehead's most impressive
achievements is to show how God binds actual occasions and eternal
objects into one coherent system, with God in His role of “the
outcome of creativity, as the foundation of order, and as the goad
towards novelty.”11 Since artistic creation has frequently been linked
to the notion of a divine madness or inspiration it is useful to find in
Whitehead a rational account of the nature and function of God so that
we can specify in a more precise way the relationship between God
and artistic creation. His concept of God emerges from a metaphysical
demand for a unique actual entity which links actuality and
potentiality. In other words it supplies a First Principle to relate the
eternal models to the actual definite forms. This provides an
explanation for why things need to exist. In artistic terms significant
creations seem to have importance, yet since they form no part of a
useful commercial function we may not be able to argue for their
relevance. But, as Whitehead notes,
nothing, within any limited type of experience, can give intelligence to shape
our ideas of any entity at the base of all actual things, unless the general
character of things requires that there be such an entity.12 (My italics).
This means that the general character of things requires that there be
a God. But God does not interfere, he is not a deus ex machina, for
this would not conform with a logical metaphysical system such as
Whitehead envisages. Yet Whitehead's God is central to his
metaphysical system and not at all arbitrary: God is not to be treated

as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their
collapse, he is their chief exemplification. Whitehead's doctrine of the
primordial nature of God strengthens the claim that God's conceptual
valuation is identical with the web of relationships constituted by the
relationships forged by eternal objects:
The things which are temporal arise by their participation in the things which
are eternal. The two sets are mediated by a thing which combines the actuality
of what is temporal with the timelessness of what is potential. This final entity
[God] is the divine element in the world, by which the barren inefficient
disjunction of abstract potentialities obtains primordially the efficient
conjunction of ideal realization ... By reason of the actuality of this primordial
valuation of pure potentials, each eternal object has definite, effective
relevance to each concrescent process. Apart from such orderings, there
would be a complete disjunction of eternal objects realized in the temporal
world. Novelty would be meaningless, and inconceivable. 13
The conclusion emerges that the three formative elements are

interwoven into a mutual interdependence. This implies that without
eternal objects God's primordial existence is impossible, for eternal
objects are the primordial “definiteness” apart from which no
existence or creativity, even in the primordial instance of God, is
possible. Actuality presupposes definiteness, and God must also be
definite. In his A Whiteheadian Aesthetic, Donald Sherburne makes a
common-sense analogy, as follows:
It takes pistons, a sparking device, and some fuel to result in an operating,

pulsing, dynamic engine. If any of these three be lacking, there is no dynamic
system. Remove the sparking device or the fuel and you still have pistons, but
pistons resting in their casings are lifeless and pointless when compared to the
vibrating, thrusting pistons of a dynamic system. Likewise, eternal objects in
the “isolation indistinguishable from nonentity” are inert, lifeless, and
ungraded in relevance when compared to eternal objects linked by the web of
relational essences which is God's primordial vision.14
God's relationship to actual occasions couples them with the abstract

model which is an eternal object. This coupling is called a proposition,
and gives to God a “common quality”. But it is only God who can
conjure up conceptual feelings that do not depend upon prior physical
feelings:
unfettered conceptual valuation, “infinite” in Spinoza's sense of that term, is

only possible once in the universe.15
Conversely, the artist does not create ex nihilo; his vision is not
unfettered or infinite as is that of God. But his creativity presupposes
God and therefore the artist is a discoverer (a view which, by the way,
was sharply contradicted by Croce when he maintained that artistic
creation implied absolute novelty and a bringing into being ex nihilo).
Whitehead's theory, therefore, is that an artist discovers a proposition.
How rich a process and how subtle it is can be shown by all the
attendant features of the process, for example, by the contextual
influence of what Whitehead calls “conceptual reversion”. Conceptual
reversions are feelings partially identical with and partially diverse
from the eternal objects constituting the data which one is confronted
with. This profoundly subtle concept is crucial in artistic creation
since it is the element which implies that the artist has freedom of
choice. A conceputal reversion was defined simply by Hume in his
well-known discussion of the missing shade of blue: even though one
has never seen a particular shade of blue, one can, given other shades
of blue, conceptually supply the missing shade. Thus, creativity
thrives “on a positive prehension of relevant alternatives.”16
Many artists surely cannot “conceptually supply”, but if we accept
the notion as feasible then this forms an intriguing element in
creativity. The final artistic product is the artist’s, and in a particular
form that can be called novel. The eternal object acts only as a
wellspring. What we mean by describing artistic creation as discovery
is that when the artist, the innovator, dives down into the inner flux to
draw up a crystallised shape which he endeavours to fix, this becomes
a discovery when he has expressed it because we recognise it as
having a universal truth. So the divine inspiration is not something
appealed to ad hoc in Whitehead's system, it is rather an underlying
metaphysical requirement linking the creative surge of actuality in all
its gradations from God to “the most trivial puff of existence in far-off
empty space”!
An important characteristic of creativity in Whitehead's system was
the necessity to recognise the “ultimate” without denying actuality to
the individualisations of the ultimate. In his doctrine the “ultimate” is
the basic activity of self-creation generic to all individual actual
entities. That is to say, it is the generic activity conceived in
abstraction from the individual instances of that activity. This
“ultimate”, this generic activity, Whitehead terms “creativity.”
Creativity must transcend each individual actual creature even though
it is not itself “actual”. Thus is secured the conception of a connected
“universe.” And thus is secured the character of the universe as a
process, for its ultimate character is that of a self-creating activity.

The individual actual entities are the creatures of this universal
creativity in the sense that the ultimate, creativity, individualises itself
in the individual creatures. So creativity is neither a thing nor an
entity, it is a selective principle which expresses the relationship
between “one” and “many.” It expresses the relationship whereby “the
term ‘many’ presupposes the term ‘one’, and the term ‘one’
presupposes the term ‘many.’ ”17 For Whitehead, creativity
is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe
disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe
conjunctively.18
Whitehead also describes this principle more simply: “It lies in the
nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.”19 It would
seem, therefore, that the universe abhors a many; it is just an ultimate
fact that the universe cannot tolerate a disjunctive diversity, as many
thinkers (such as Lovelock recently with his Gaia theory) have sought
to prove.
Since creativity brings together the actual creations of man and the
divine principle from which those creations derive there is here both a
concrete togetherness and novelty. According to Whitehead both
things must happen simultaneously, for to produce togetherness is to
produce novelty and vice versa. As we have noted,
The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to

conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in
disjunction.20
And this is fundamental to Whitehead's doctrine of process. For it is

because creativity links in the same set of relationships the production
of togetherness and the production of novelty that an on-going process
is built into the philosophy of organism. Of course, the eternal objects
are essentially aloof from change in that it is of their essence to be
eternal. But they are involved in change in the sense that the very
process of becoming, which is any given actual occasion, depends on
the control of the selected eternal object. There cannot be anything
“novel”, (that is, different from what is already “actual”) unless there
be a “potential” for it. Something “novel” cannot come into existence
out of nowhere; it must be a “given” as an “unrealized potentiality.”
Whitehead shows us that this unrealized potentiality must be
constituted by entities; the word “unrealized” simply underlines the
contrast of potentiality with actuality. Thus the notion of novelty can

have no meaning unless there be entities which are pure potentials,
and which are the eternal objects.
To conclude, in Whitehead’s universe God affects the world by
providing each emerging actual entity with its subjective aim. Divine
activity is imparted to mundane actual entities through God’s
consequent nature weaving itself across his primordial nature. For
Whitehead, God is dipolar, both transcendent and immanent, and in
the second capacity, dynamic rather than statically immutable. The
immanent God returns a dynamism back into the world through the
shaping of subjective aims. As Whitehead puts it:
The consequent nature of God, composed of a multiplicity of elements with

individual self-realization ... passes back into the temporal world and qualifies
this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of
relevant experience ... What is done in the world is transformed into a reality
in heaven and ... passes back into the world ... In this sense, God is the great
companion - the fellow-sufferer who understands.21
Primordial envisagement of eternal objects is necessary to make our

inferior envisagement of them possible.
We have noted that the three formative elements are creativity,
eternal objects, and God. In the next two chapters we shall consider
the relationship between them and how the binding of actuality with
potentiality can work in music. And as we explore how Whitehead’s
logical methodology can be supplemented by aesthetic intuition we
recall Whitehead's own warning against letting scientific domination
and analysis eviscerate the “aesthetic needs of civilised society.”
Whitehead always maintained that the vivid but transient values of art
are permanent and that it is scarcely possible to overvalue their
importance in an age which threatens to go down in its materialism
and lack of awareness of ultimate issues.
Notes
1. In this book all the references are to the edition revised by Griffin and Sherburne
(New York 1978).
2. ibid., p.18.
3. ibid., p.291.
4. ibid.
5. ibid., p.256.
6. ibid., p.258.
7. ibid., p.225
8. See, for instance, A.F.Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

(Cambridge UK 1927), p.64.
9. Process and Reality, p.244.
10. ibid.
11. ibid , p.88.
12. Science and the Modern World, p.207-8.
14. A Whiteheadian Aesthetic, p.40.
16. This is discussed in Process and Reality, p.249.
17. ibid., p.21.
18. ibid.
19. ibid.
20. ibid.
21. ibid., p.350-1.

Chapter Four
Music and Process

The value of Whitehead's system as a cauldron from which others
can draw ideas in order to apply them to their own respective areas of
enquiry is undisputed. The general or universal nature of his concepts
ensure their relevance in all areas of reality. Strangely, as we have
noted, it is in only one area, that of Process theology or philosophy,
that his speculations have been influential. Process theology is largely
the result of the way Whitehead, along with Charles Hartshorne,
succeeded in influencing members of the School of Divinity at
Chicago during the 1930s and later. It is only recently, and in a very
limited way, that Process has featured in writings about art. Among
the most significant contributions is F. David Martin's book Art and
the Religious Experience: The Language of the Sacred, which we
have previously mentioned in Chapter 1. This work is redolent of the
Whiteheadian approach. For example, in attempting to explain the
fundamental essence of the different arts Martin concludes that a fine
balance and interchangeability of “causal efficacy”and “presentational
immediacy” can be perceived in different art forms. He echoes
Donald W. Sherburne (see above, p.60) when he writes:
Music more than any other art is perceived mainly in the mode of causal
efficacy. Abstract painting more than any other art is perceived mainly in the
mode of presentational immediacy. Thus music appears in part elsewhere,
whereas abstractions appear to be all here. In listening to music, we
experience presentational immediacy because we hear the presently sounding
tones. But there can be no “holding” and we are swept up in the flow of
process. In seeing an abstract painting we experience causal efficacy because
74 Music and Process
we follow the reference of the embodied meaning and this involves a sense of
process.1
This extract gives an idea of the modus operandi in adapting

Whitehead's theories to a chosen area of analysis. In the context of the
present discussion we need to focus on the fundamental point of
Martin's argument, that this is a religious quest. His procedure is to
carry ultimate questions into the actual context of specific works of
art. And if we are to follow him successfully we must be aware of
certain elementary facts about sense and perceive them in a
Whiteheadian manner and without committing the fallacy of
misplaced concreteness. For example, if we consider sounds and
ponder on their nature we might argue that when I hear a door
shutting, the sensation is not primarily (in the commonsense
judgement) an abstract acoustic one. I know what a door is, have
heard one bang before, and recognise the common factor. In
Whiteheadian terms I, the subject, have already prehended the object
and by means of the “mental pole” interpreted it. Consequently, if we
are to be useful transcendentalists we may have to be aware of the
prehensions and try to listen away from things, listen through things,
perceive the inner core of an aural (and indeed visual and other) sensa,
to the depth dimension of whatever it is, the referent. Some will see
this as somewhat comparable with Heidegger's notion of “Being” as
the depth dimension of all “beings”, Being giving enduring value and
ultimate significance to beings. George Steiner has written of
Heidegger’s doctrine of existence as one of “radical astonishment”, in
the way that,
“Being” and “being” are the pivot, the core of “lit darkness” to which every
path leads, whatever its starting point. 2
Following on from this, and very much in his own terminology,

Whitehead tells us that although the ontical (the secular) and the
ontological (or religious) are distinguishable, they are not separable.
For we must remember that God is an actual entity. So can we ever be
sure where the ontical ends and the ontological begins? We may at
least tentatively attempt to answer this by scrutinising the materials of
our chosen art of music, and look at common experiences of music.
To avoid a confusion about “meanings” we will consider pure music
only (not programme music). We also need to bear in mind the
Music and Process 75
traditional rift between the Referentialists and the Non-referentialists

among musicologists and aestheticians, and remember that most
aestheticians tend to belong to the second category, being either
Formalists (like Hanslick or Gurney) or Absolute Expressionists (like
Leonard Meyer). For the Formalists, tonal structures have meanings
which are strictly musical. The Absolute Expressionists take a softer
line. They affirm the evocation of emotion by the musical meanings,
but this emotion is strictly musical, so musical meaning is intra-
musical for them too. The Referential Expressionists on the other hand
claim that musical meanings legitimately refer to the extra-musical
world, whether that be ontical or ontological. This theory owes its
unpopularity presumably to the implication that somehow one
shouldn't listen to music as such at all, rather daydream of swirling
torrents and great vistas of the natural world - anything extra-musical
in fact (a common perception among non-musical people). We may
not favour the theory, but in the present context we may choose to
review it and give at least some credence to it, albeit in a rather
unorthodox way. This is because the whole point of our discussion is
art referring to something else.
F. David Martin's bold compression of Whitehead's thought is often
useful, and one example recalls our conclusions about time and
temporality in Chapter 2:
Music more than any other art forces us to feel causal efficacy, the
compulsion of process, the dominating control of the physically given over
possibilities throughout the concrescence of an experience. The form of music
binds the past and future and present so tightly that as we listen we are thrust
out of the ordinary modes of experience, in which time rather than temporality
dominates. Ecstatic temporality, the rhythmic unity of past-present-future, is
the most essential manifestation of the Being of human beings.3
With its similarities to the assertions by Zuckerkandl, the

implication here is that music can make us feel process directly
because musical notes are presented successively. But successive
unfolding is found in other arts too. As we noted in Chapter 2, music's
special claim over other art forms surely lies in its abstract nature. As
we have stressed, the notes convey internal or embodied meanings, at
least in pure music where there are no designative allusions. It appears
that only music has both characteristics, namely a successive
unfolding and abstraction. But before elaborating on this special claim
which is made for music, Leonard B. Meyer's differentiation between

designative and embodied meaning should be explained.4 In language,
when a word refers to an object this is a designative meaning.
Embodied meaning occurs when the stimulus and the referent are the
same. A note, a phrase, or a section of music has embodied meaning
because it points to and makes us expect another musical (not extra-
musical) event. Embodied meanings are the internal relationships of
an art form, and in pure music and abstract painting it is the very lack
of a designative meaning that distinguishes them respectively from
programme music and representational painting. But, admittedly,
designative meanings can be attached by us to them.
Designative meaning is strong in literature, film and dance (in
dance, the bodies themselves have a designative meaning). Whether
having a designative meaning weakens our sense of the fundamental
compulsion of process is a vexed question - it might form a distraction
inimical to the experiencing of process, at least in the form we
associate with music. Martin succeeds in conveying this peculiar
engagement or participation in process via music by recalling a
striking passage from Sartre's The Psychology of Imagination where
the author succinctly observes that music neither dates nor locates.
I am listening to the Seventh Symphony. For me that 'Seventh Symphony'

does not exist in time, I do not grasp it as a dated event, as an artistic
manifestation which is unrolling itself in Châtelet auditorium on the 17th of
November, 1938. If I hear Furtwaengler tomorrow or eight days later conduct
another orchestra performing the same symphony, I am in the presence of the
same symphony once more. Only it is being played either better or worse … I
do not think of the event as an actuality and dated, and on condition that I
listen to the succession of themes as an absolute succession and not as a real
succession which is unfolding itself, for instance, on the occasion when Peter
pays a visit to this or that friend. In the degree to which I hear the symphony it
is not here, between these walls, at the tip of the violin bows. Nor is it “in the
past” as if I thought: this is the work that matured in the mind of Beethoven
on such a date. It has its own time, that is, it possesses an inner time [process],
which runs from the first tone of the allegro to the last tone of the finale, but
this time is not a succession of a preceding time which it continues and which
happened “before” the beginning of the allegro; nor is it followed by a time
which will come “after” the finale. The Seventh Symphony is in no way in
time.5
In Problems of Art6 Susanne Langer makes a distinction between

musical time and clock time, with musical time possessing a
“complexity” and “variability” which is more similar to body time,

with its passage of vital functions and the tensions of “lived events”.
We have already noted that music certainly seems to give meaning to
time, and through it we experience the present in a special way,
directed as we are towards the future anticipated by our expectations.
Thus if the ontical categories of time and place, and all the habits of
everyday existence are not designated, then (to revert to quasi-poetic
Heideggerian terminology) we may then be open to Being.
When discussing music in more detail F. David Martin's treatment
of standard works is sometimes disconcerting. For instance, in
clarifying the ontological implications contained in music he
compares Bach's “48” Preludes and Fugues (i.e. all of them as a single
group) with the Art of Fugue and with the St. Matthew Passion, all
three works being reduced by Martin to single, rigidly uniform types.
We may agree with him that technically the Passion is a form of
programme music for liturgical use, its designative meaning referring
specifically to religious events and doctrines. But he goes on rather
provocatively to say:
Yet music can have a religious programme and even be put to liturgical use
and still not be religious, except in the sense that all works of art are religious
insofar as they reveal something of the mystery of Being in their seeming
inexhaustibility ... There must be a more essential or further inner continuity
[my italics] between the music and the religious dimension.7
Unfortunately he is not clear about the “how” of this inner

continuity. He points out that the Art of Fugue and the “48” lack
religious programmes. But, curiously, he seems to perceive some
transcendental element in the Art of Fugue that is missing in the “48”
Preludes and Fugues. For he asks, isn’t it possible that the Art of
Fugue possesses an inner continuity with the religious dimension that
the “48” lack? This is a very problematic assertion, and again we need
to ask what exactly is the nature of this inner continuity.
With this question poised in suspended animation we could perhaps
digress for a moment in order to refer to another area of art where
Martin's arguments prove more convincing and certainly more logical.
This might help us answer the present question. In discussing
painting, Martin recalls the ground-rules set by Tillich, namely
Tillich's distinction between “signs” and “symbols”, where “sign”
designates ontical (secular) reality and “symbol” designates
ontological (religious) reality. There is a further distinction too, that

between “conventional” signs and “iconic” signs. We also have
“conventional” symbols and “iconic” symbols. The meaning of a
conventional sign is arbitrarily attached to it, perhaps by social
convention, like x and y in mathematics. The sign's value is its
transparency, since one sees through it to the message conveyed as
when using a non-onomatopeic word. An iconic sign on the other
hand incorporates characteristics significantly similar to the referent,
like a stickman. In language the onomatopeic word “rattle”, because it
resembles the sound of a rattle, is an iconic sign. There is a
designative meaning here too and thus this sign is also transparent.
Martin then moves to the world of symbols with an analogy between
signs and symbols as follows. He cites another human image very far
removed from our stickman, namely Christ in Grünewald's
Crucifixion. He says of it: “our sight is ensnared, we attend carefully
to the embodied meanings.” The designative meaning is very
obvious, while the embodied meaning is the divinity and suffering in
the lines.
Whereas the stickman is a “transparent icon”, Grünewald's Christ is a

“translucent icon." The referent of a translucent icon, unlike that of a
transparent icon, cannot be understood independently of careful attention to
the icon.8
This is where a work of art attains ontological significance, and

there is no doubt that works of art possess this translucent iconicity.
While Grünewald's Christ has conventional symbols it also has iconic
symbols. Martin asserts that without the addition of conventional
symbols it will be very difficult for an iconic symbol to function as a
religious one. For how can one prove that certain brush strokes in a
painting have iconic symbolism? Martin's answer is that if the primary
subject matter is ontological, then, and only then can the work be
appropriately described as religious. But how does one determine
whether a work is ontologically oriented? The answer has usually
been – “if conventional symbols are present.” But what if it is not a
painting of Christ, or the Cross, or anything like that? Let us say
Picasso's Guernica (to cite an example of Martin's). There are no
conventional symbols in it which might specifically indicate the
religious dimension. We must ask therefore whether it has iconic
symbolism, even if only implicitly. Does it not point to a further
reality in its devastating representation of what the ontical is like when

it becomes man's supreme value, which, admittedly, is a point Martin
makes? One can assert that Guernica does suggest something other
than the secular values of Franco's fascism, a something other than the
awful image of a bull signifying totalitarianism. But this “other”
image is not explicitly indicated, despite the fact that one is helped in
a possible interpretation by the presence of recognisable figures. This
raises the issue of how to extend this ontological enquiry to paintings
which are completely abstract, or indeed to abstract or pure music.
Tillich himself was moved to see in Guernica an ontological
dimension, and, as Martin reminds us, it was Tillich who argued that
there was more religion in Cézanne's apple than in Hofman's Jesus!9
Similarly, we recall that it was George Bernard Shaw who argued that
the “Choral” Symphony was more relevant to the devout believer than
Brahms’s Requiem.
To return to the question which remains unanswered, seen now in
relation to our discussion of paintings, we note Martin's conclusion
which greatly complicates the premise whereby the St. Matthew
Passion and, say, a secular work like the Art of Fugue are coupled
together in an ontological category and regarded as translucently
iconic whereas the “48” is categorised as ontical. For he maintains
that not only is there a difference between the Passion and the Art of
Fugue, (because of the religious programme of the Passion) there is
also a distinction to be made between the Art of Fugue and the “48”,
with the former at least implicitly seen to possess “an inner continuity
with the religious dimension”. He amplifies this as follows:
In most of the work - Contrapuncti 1-11, 14, 17-18 and above all 19 (the
unfinished quadruple fugue) there is in the structure of the embodied
meanings an unearthly inevitability about the resolution of the tensions that is
iconic with the sense of reverence and peace that accompanies coercive
experiences of Being. For example, in the opening 16 measures of
Contrapunctus 11 the 3 note phrases that form the subject sound in isolation
somewhat baseless and suspended. Despite their majestic pace, there is
unfulfilled tension, anxiety in each one. Yet this theme of 4 measures is
centred around the tonic pitch, and when it arrives at the D there is a sense of
quiet release, although there is no final release until the last chord of the
fugue. The Well Tempered Clavier [i.e. the “48” Preludes and Fugues] on the
other hand, despite its perhaps equally powerful icons of inexhaustibility and
temporality generally lacks icons of religious feeling . . .10
Later, he admits – “often no doubt we will differ about such

judgements”!
Clearly, Martin’s highly programmatic arguments do not convince
and are compromised by a too vivid and easily led imagination. The
conclusions one can make from them suggest the need for a more
careful scrutiny of the musical materials than is found in the analysis.
First, if music is an iconic symbol and translucent, showing us a world
beyond, then very careful attention must be paid to the actual
harmonic and rhythmic characteristics. After all, if God is somehow to
be evoked and perhaps even experienced through the icon then the
icon itself must be carefully assessed. When one does this it soon
becomes apparent that what is really under scrutiny is the language of
music as a whole, not just one “secular” piece and the way it differs
from another secular one. Some will argue quite convincingly against
this by exaggeratedly stressing that a metaphysical distinction is
apparent between the Art of Fugue and some example other than the
“48”, for instance some banal pop music. We may indeed concur and
plausibly dismiss the pop music as failing, through its embodied
meanings, to inform us or make us aware of ecstatic temporality
because of an alleged triteness of meanings and their failure either to
make significant demands upon our imagination or to conjure up a
translucent iconicity. But such general statements may be so weighed
down with cultural and religious preconceptions and prejudice as to be
rather suspect and one reason for this may be the lack of a detailed
assessment of the actual music. What if we found that a piece of pop
had the same chord structure as a beautiful (transcendentally
beautiful) piece by Mozart? What criteria apply then, even when there
is meticulous regard for musical materials? So, comparing pieces has
its pitfalls, and the comparison between the Art of Fugue and the “48”
is no exception. Perhaps therefore we should look at music as a whole
(rather than draw conclusions from individual pieces in relation to
other pieces) and do so in the light of a modification of an observation
by Susanne Langer when she said:
The tonal structures we call “music” bear a close logical similarity to the
forms of human feeling - forms of growth and of attenuation, flowing and
stowing, conflict and resolution, speed, arrest, terrific excitement, calm or
subtle activation and dreamy lapses - not joy and sorrow perhaps, but the
poignancy of either and both . . . Music is a tonal analogue of emotive life.11
Unlike Langer I would claim that the iconic designations of music

as a whole are not necessarily restricted to the structure of feelings. By
means of powerful internal connections which seem inexhaustible the
very structure of music (so much that is possible out of so few notes)
suggests that music as an analogue of feeling is too restricted a
definition.12 To begin with, the fundamental technical basis is an
eternal object found in nature and bequeathed by God to us, and as we
have previously noted at length, that is the harmonic series. Our
approach might be to ponder what the world must be like if between
us and the world the phenomenon of music can occur. How must I
consider the world, how must I consider myself, if I am to understand
the reality of music? This may not have much to do with conventional
analysis of a particular piece of music, so concerned are we with
certain fundamentals common to all music. And it is fascinating how
musical notes, although derived from something very material like the
harmonic series, do not correlate with any material phenomena when
they are in horizontal motion or vertical grouping. As we have noted
in Chapter 2, acoustical phenomena and one's auditory apparatus are
indeed material but they have nothing to do with the “meaning” of the
sounds in our particular area of enquiry. We might impose a private
meaning on the sounds, of course, and we might be helped to
appreciate the music by the designative meanings or conventional
symbols in it. But one should be cautious in the present context of this
personal interpretation, for claims have been made, somewhat
provocatively, by Charles Hartshorne and other Process philosophers
that the element of feeling is more closely bound up with the “outer
world” component than might at first be assumed. As Hartshorne has
pointed out in discussing colour (and the comparable point remains
true of music) “the ‘gaiety’ of yellow ... is the yellowness of the
yellow.”13
As we have already seen, Whitehead emphasises God's immanence
in the world. This occurs in three ways, and these provide
cornerstones for new avenues of enquiry. First, God supplies every
entity with its basic conceptual aim. Second, he is present with the
entity throughout its concrescence in its world. Third, as the entity
prehends God, so is he an influence on it, and his own consequent
nature is duly affected. As Zuckerkandl has suggested at the very end
of his book, our epilogue becomes the prologue to a new study. In this
context no passage could be more appropriate to close our journey
from Greek thought to Whiteheadian metaphysics than the following

from Johannes Kepler which Karl Popper quotes as a hymn of praise
to the music created by man, to the polyphonic music that was in
Kepler's time still a fairly recent discovery. In taking as his starting
point his theory of the movement of heavenly bodies and the divine
music which results therefrom we find a poetic celebration of the great
issue which concerns us. Kepler writes:
Thus the heavenly motions are nothing but a kind of perennial concert,
rational rather than audible or vocal. They move through the tension of
dissonances which are like syncopations or suspensions with their resolutions
(by which men imitate the corresponding dissonances of nature), reaching
secure and predetermined closures ... And by these marks they distinguish and
articulate the immensity of time. Thus there is no marvel greater or more
sublime than the rules of singing in harmony together in several parts,
unknown to the ancients but at last discovered by man, the ape of his Creator;
so that, through the skilful symphony of many voices, he should actually
conjure up in a short part of an hour the vision of the world's total perpetuity
in time; and that, in the sweetest sense of bliss enjoyed through Music, the
echo of God, he should almost reach the contentment which God the Maker
has in his Own works.14
In the next chapter we shall focus on a fragment of music by

J.S.Bach. By examining it in a metaphysical context our method will
differ from that of conventional analysis. By appraising it specifically
with an affective awareness of its ontological implications according
to Whiteheadian precepts, we may thus be able to discern whether it is
rational to perceive within it God’s “persuasive” role.
Notes
1. p.147.
2. George Steiner, Heidegger (London 1978), p.31.
3. Martin, op.cit., pp.94-5.
4. See his Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago 1956), pp.2 ff.
5. See Martin, op.cit., p.104 and Sartre, The Psychology of the Imagination (New
York 1948), pp.279 ff.
6. (New York 1957), p.37.

7. Martin, op.cit., p.113.
8. ibid., pp.116-7.
9. loc. cit., p.160.
10. ibid., p.124.
11. Feeling and Form (New York 1953), p.27.
12. This is also Martin’s view, op.cit., p.122.
13. Charles Hartshorne, The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation (Chicago 1934),
p.7.
14. Quoted in The Times Higher Educational Supplement (July 24, 1992), pp.15 and
19.
Chapter Five
A Whiteheadian Aesthetic and a
Musical Paradigm
In considering a musical case-study to illustrate how the procedures
of Process Philosophy can be applied we recall Whitehead’s advice to
take some part of our personal experience to provide clues as to how
the real and the conceptual can be merged. To do this we need to
clarify the concept of prehension. As we have noted there are two
aspects to prehension. Prehensions of other actual occasions are
physical prehensions and prehensions of eternal objects are mental or
conceptual prehensions. Both aspects appropriate elements of the
universe which in themselves are other than the subject, and in so
doing synthesise these elements. Physical prehensions are always the
data of the past, called by Whitehead “stubborn facts”, about the
world as it was. These facts process inexorably into the new actual
occasion. But high grade organisms enjoy another kind of takeover
from the past, namely what man does when prehending concepts. This
emotional response has been touched upon in our discussion of
Martin’s views, and it makes up the mental pole of prehension. In
order to make the leap from inorganic to living societies Whitehead
makes a sharp distinction between the physical and mental pole of
each actual occasion.1 The physical pole is responsible for the
automatic evolution of material reality, and is more or less devoid of
“novelty.” The mental pole on the other hand has an element of
subjectivity, is most striking in imaginative thought and is the source
of all creative advance in the universe.
In prehending concepts we sense an objective scale of values in the
form of eternal objects. As we have noted, eternal objects are
efficacious in all types of prehension, ranging from sub-atomic
phenomena to advanced societies, including human activities. The
omniscient God includes all possibilities available for the
concrescence of an actual occasion. These possibilities encompass the
86 A Whiteheadian Aesthetic and a Musical Paradigm
range of eternal objects that are relevant to the concrescence.

According to Whitehead, it is through God’s “appetition” that a
selection of the relevant eternal objects is allowed to ingress into its
concrescence, so that, “the things which are temporal arise by their
participation in the things which are eternal.”2 In his chapter on
“Abstraction” in Science and the Modern World (1925), previously
referred to at the start of Chapter 3, Whitehead comprehends an
eternal object in two ways: on the one hand, vis-à-vis its particular
individuality in its own unique and peculiar form, and on the other, in
its general relationships to other eternal objects “as apt for realisation
in actual occasions.”3 The general relationship to other eternal objects
implies that the eternal object varies from one occasion to another in
respect to the differences of its mode of ingression,
for every actual occasion is defined as to its character by how these

possibilities are actualised for the occasion.4
Thus actualisation is a selection among possibilities. More accurately,

it is a selection issuing in a gradation of possibilities in respect to their
realisation in that occasion. Whitehead calls this principle of selective
limitation the relational essence. Furthermore, for eternal objects to be
relevant to process there is required a togetherness of eternal objects.
According to Whitehead, this togetherness must be an aspect of God.
To explain how this organic process works, we shall turn to one
aspect of reality, to art, and to some abstract music by J. S. Bach, a
famous piece with no programmatic reference which might
complicate our interpretation of its meaning.5 We chose this non-
programmatic piece because abstract music represents process in an
unambiguous way. Naturally, in order to illustrate Whitehead’s
speculations, such is the universality of his philosophy that we could
have chosen any aspect of reality. But our aim is specifically to
explore a medium whose power possesses a dimension that, in the
final analysis, lies beyond the world of concepts. The discussion later
on God’s persuasive role may help to relate the aesthetic and the
religious aspects, bearing in mind that our exploration of the
continuum between temporality and eternity, between matter and
spirit, between man and the “wholly other” will always respond to the
numinous power concealed in real things, like, for example, pieces of
music. For Whitehead’s advice was to start from some section of our
experience in the belief that the knower, the percipient event, provides
A Whiteheadian Aesthetic and a Musical Paradigm 87
the clue to nature in general. Thus, in art the potentiality for becoming
is no mere abstract concept. All actual occasions are dipolar, and the
physical and conceptual must work hand in hand with an outcome that
is real, and that produces a real experience. In art, creative advance
into novelty is underpinned by the individual choices of the artist and
his jealous involvement with inclusion and exclusion.
J.S. Bach, Prelude 1, The Well-Tempered Clavier.
In relation to dipolar reality we can regard the opening note of

Bach’s Prelude 1 in C major from the Well-Tempered Clavier as an
individual essence, as middle C, 256 cycles per second. But as the root
of the C major triad this C has a determinate i.e. a relational essence to
other features of the tonality of C. Here, C is the tonic and there is a
fundamental axis of C (tonic) and G (dominant), both notes being
eternal objects in mutual relation. A congruence exists between these
predisposed tonal forces present in nature, and the creative
manipulation of the creative artist (drawing in other notes and chords)
so as to make a coherent pattern of 35 bars ending conclusively, as it
began, on a C major harmony. As the composition develops, the
relational essence is extended, at least with regard to the choice of
notes and the tonal progress. As in some other Preludes, the rhythmic
progress is very regular and repetitive, and even minimalist until 3
bars from the end, the result of constructing the piece throughout on a
simple broken chord formula. We can follow the relational aspect in
great detail, from the initial departure in bar 2 from C to a D seventh
chord in third inversion whose relation to C is as a pseudo-dominant
(it is not a major chord) to C’s own dominant, G major. The
fundamental ploy of presenting chords 1, 5 and 2 (C major, G major
and D minor) in relation to each other is characterised and enhanced
by Bach’s decision in bar 2 to hold the C root so that it becomes the
seventh of the D chord, thus exerting a compulsive tension demanding

resolution down to B in bar 3.
The eternal object C (note), while remaining in the same place, has
now changed its function, (a common procedure in tonal music,
whose importance was discussed in Chapter 2). This is indicative of
what happens generally in music, where tonal progressions similar to
what is found here facilitate subtle interrelationships between different
notes whose functions change constantly, and which also bestow on
an unchanging note (like the C here) a change in tonal, and therefore
expressive, function. To describe this in Whiteheadian terms, we can
say that while these chords are built on the determinate relationships
of the overtone series (approximate tunings only), the specific
instances of these harmonies are actual entities that have ingressed
from the eternal object C major or, indeed, from the note C, which has
a “patience” for the ingression. This is complicated by the fact that,
according to Whitehead’s hypothesis, every eternal object is
systematically related to every other eternal object. A relationship
between eternal objects is a fact which concerns every relata, and
cannot be isolated as involving only one of the relata. Accordingly
there is a general fact of systematic mutual relatedness inherent in the
“character of possibility.” The realm of eternal objects is properly
described as a “realm”, because each eternal object has its status in the
general systematic complex of mutual relatedness. In referring to the
relationship of eternal objects to actual occasions, Whitehead wrote:
The general principle which expresses A’s ingression in the particular actual
occasion a is the indeterminateness which stands in the essence of A as to its
ingression into a, and is the determinateness which stands in the essence of a
as to the ingression of A into a. Thus the synthetic prehension, which is a, is
the solution of the indeterminateness of A into the determinateness of a.
Accordingly the relationship between A and a is external as regards A and is
internal as regards a. 6
In a powerful paper in Review of Metaphysics Charles Hartshorne

expressed this perhaps in a more congenial form as follows:
But, though the all-inclusive cannot, in its inclusiveness, be absolute, yet since
it includes all things, it can perfectly well include something absolute. For to
be included is, we have argued, an external relation, a relation of which the
included is a term, but not subject. Therefore, the absolute can exist in the
supremely relative, in serene independence, serene exemption from relativity.
For it is not the absolute which has the relation ‘in’ the actual relative, but
rather and only the relative which as the relation, “containing” the absolute;
just as it is the particular subject which has the cognitive relation to the object,
while the latter is only nominally “in” this relation. And, indeed, since an
abstraction cannot actually know, it can only, when we speak of it, be
something known, an object. Thus the absolute is a divine object in the divine
subject and for the divine subject. It is an essence not an existence.
Nevertheless, it may yet be that God’s existence follows from his essence, if
by “his existence” we mean only that there is some existence embodying the
divine essence. 7
Thus the eternal objects are ingressed by selection, and prehending

them involves the grading of possibilities. At all microcosmic levels
this is highly complex, and with regard to our musical example there
will be a multitude of graded possibilities as each harmony progresses
to the next. On a wider canvas, this grading of possibilities is quite
striking in the overall form of Prelude 1.
Since its evolution as a piece has been documented, it is possible to
study some revisions and expansions that suggest an ongoing grading
of possibilities by Bach, effected with the cooperation of his eldest
son W.F. Bach, for whom the piece was originally intended. This
takes us into the world of musicology. From an initial version of 24
bars the piece was expanded to 27 bars before assuming its final
definitive form of 35 bars. An examination of the various different
versions shows the final masterpiece emerging as an extension of the
possibilities suggested by the simple basic material. The insight this
gives into Bach’s uniquely powerful control over tonal possibilities,
not to mention the lyrical inspiration of it all, is a revelation that needs
no further comment here.8 Implicit are the hidden possibilities, other
valid choices available for Bach, and not just those seen in the two
less accomplished versions of this Prelude. (Whitehead’s term for an
unrealised possibility was “conceptual reversion” and Bach’s two
sketches suggest the nature of such possibilities. But of course these
are more than just conceptual, for they actually exist in manuscript).
Bach did not exhaust all the possibilities conceptually; he was
concerned with one only, which is the final and perfect version. We
may assume that excellent possibilities remain unrealised, despite the
feeling we might have that this Prelude is unique and exists finally in
a very satisfactory form. But in noting the different versions we
naturally see that, between any form and another, there is inevitably a
continuum of possible intermediate forms. There are alternative
suggestions, “untrue propositions”9 which lie undisclosed. To
comment further on these undisclosed possibilities seems fruitless, as

Whitehead’s pupil Charles Hartshorne implied when he said,
“counting to infinity is an incomplete process,” (meaning,
presumably, “incompletable.”) Like Whitehead himself, we must
accept that reality is found in actual occasions, and only in them.
As was said in the previous chapter, since creativity brings together
the actual creations of man and the divine principles from which those
creations derive, there is both a concrete togetherness and novelty to
it. According to Whitehead, both things must happen simultaneously,
for to produce togetherness is to produce novelty and vice versa, and
with some imagination we can reach out to what this means by
scrutinizing worthwhile examples of actual occasions like Bach’s
Prelude.
The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to
conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in
disjunction.10
This is fundamental to Whitehead’s doctrine of process. To

recapitulate, we can say that the eternal objects of course are not
subject to change, in that it is of their essence to be eternal. But they
are involved in change insofar as the very process of becoming, which
is any given actual occasion, depends on the control of the selected
eternal object or objects. There cannot be anything novel (that is,
different from what is already actual) unless there is a potential for it.
While bestowing the infinite possibilities of the eternal objects
according to various principles of value, God reins them all into a
coherent harmony so that all actuality is harmoniously graded. God
therefore functions as the principle of limitation, imposing order on
the infinite possibilities of the eternal objects. In Science and the
Modern World Whitehead asserted that God is an explanation: “God
is not concrete, but he is the ground for concrete actuality.”11 As noted
in Chapter 3, some years later, in Process and Reality, there is a
remarkable and unexplained shift to the assertion, consistently made
thereafter, of God as an actual entity: “God is an actual entity and so is
the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space.”12 Whitehead
clearly regarded his original idea of the inscrutable and lonely God as
a fundamental inconsistency, and incompatible with one of the aims in
Process and Reality, namely to rid philosophical discourse of what
hitherto had been “enmeshed in the fallacy of misplaced
concreteness.” In the three notions - actual entity, prehension, nexus [a

collection of entities] - an endeavour was made to consistently base
philosophical thought upon the most concrete elements in our
experience.13
If God is himself conceived as an actual entity who works as an
agent for maximising and harmonising values, then in this form he is
enduring, and, as an enduring subject, he relates temporally and in a
temporal world; for God’s mode of relationship with other subjects is
through his actions having an effect upon the world and its agents, and
modifying the world in accordance with his intentions. This logically
entails a self-imposed limitation upon his absoluteness; for if he acts
in the temporal world then he makes himself available to receive, in
the very same field, the acts of non-divine agents. This also implies
both a reaching out by God and his dependence on others. If the world
needs God, then God needs the world. If God is no exception to
metaphysical principles, and if his authority is seen to be restricted
and curtailed by this self-imposed consequential nature then one
rational argument for it is the assertion that a creator God must have a
social bond which he has created, notably with higher organisms such
as ourselves. In other words, why not follow the dynamics of creative
involvement in which creator and created affect each other
selectively? As some writers have put it, to be fully God He needs the
universe. If, after creating the universe, the divine reality was exempt
from the multifarious diversity of his creation, then what is the point
of the creation and what is the universe’s purpose? Since God is
actual, he must include in himself a synthesis of the total universe.
Therefore, God is immanent in the world and is an ordering entity
whose purpose is the attainment of value in the temporal world. The
ordering entity is a necessary element in the metaphysical situation
presented by the actual world.
We have noted previously that Whitehead emphasises the
togetherness of eternal objects on which creative order depends. This
precise monism, in which all reality is unified, was at the core of
Hartshorne’s panentheism (literally pan-en-theism), which validated
God’s transcendence by maintaining that everything exists in God.
God contains all. On the other hand such is the freedom allowed to the
concrescing entity that, while the initial aim is infused by God
directly, the actual occasion’s subjective aim refers to the active
appropriation by the concrescing entity of what it decides freely to
take as its own personal goal guiding it towards its characteristic

action. God then becomes the source of the systematic introduction of
novelty into the world process and for the co-ordination of all the
varied activities of a harmoniously evolving world order. Whitehead
asserts that, apart from the intervention of God, there could be nothing
new in the world and no order in the world. The course of creation
would be a dead level of ineffectiveness with all balance and intensity
progressively excluded by the cross-currents of incompatibility. If this
is correct, truth in art is possible only if it conforms to the patterns at
the microcosmic level. Art is not a realm apart from the fundamental
structures of God’s universe. It is indissolubly linked to reality, and
hence to the world. So we can be sure that a work of art is loaded with
ulteriority. Whitehead seems to admit that he cannot provide a
rational, verbal conclusion to the argument when he tells us:
The relata in Reality must lie below the stale presuppositions of verbal
thought. The Truth of supreme Beauty lies beyond the dictionary meanings of
words.14
Perhaps it is through scrutinizing masterpieces such as our simple

example from the Well-Tempered Clavier that we are able so often to
come to terms with powerful undercurrents of ulteriority that are so
pervasive in the different realms of human and indeed natural activity.
But what of the other arts, and what is their ontological status in
relation to what seems to be a special position accorded to music? In
considering the relationship between the different arts we recall
Walter Pater’s pithy assertion, “All art aspires towards the condition
of music.” Since Pater’s time this has been somewhat wilfully
deployed as an apologia for a unique power, sometimes felt as
numinous, which music possesses. In this context we shall, in the next
chapter, explore what possible claims can be made for arts other than
music.
Notes
1. See Process and Reality, p.108 and many other places where the mental pole is
discussed.
2. Process and Reality, p. 40.
3. p.197.
4. ibid., pp.198.
5. But many years after Bach’s time this piece, the first Prelude from the Well-
Tempered Clavier, assumed a programmatic religious meaning when Gounod
borrowed it to make an instrumental accompaniment to his Ave Maria.
6. Science and the Modern World, p.199.
7. “God as Absolute Yet Related to All,” Review of Metaphysics (New Haven

1947), Vol.1 No.1, p.46.
8. Similarly, the idea of Michelangelo “releasing” a figure from the rock is a

familiar one to a number of artists, working in all forms, who might regard
themselves as artistic vessels or conduits.
9. See Science and the Modern World, p.196.
11. p.222.
13. ibid.
14. A.N.Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (Cambridge UK 1933) p.343.

Chapter Six
Music, the Other Arts and Process
In making the necessary comparison between different art forms we
note a number of reasons why Pater's dictum poses grave difficulties,
at least in literature. Pater asserted that the ideal condition of art is for
the matter to be inseparable from the form, so that the more
effectively the material is fused in form the more splendid the work of
art. In literature this is difficult and perhaps impossible to achieve. In
the novel, poetry and drama the very fact of their reliance on specific
references to life, i.e. their fundamental concern with life values, is
what gives them coherence. Unlike music, literature strives with
difficulty to attain a purely structural and formal coherence without
necessarily drawing in the extrinsic, from life. The flow of words
would have little value were they to be appreciated for their sounds
alone, as is most often the case with music, at least instrumental
music. In Chapter 4 we learnt that the sense of music is inherent, its
meaning wholly intrinsic (embodied) while words and sentences are
designative and cannot achieve coherence independently of their
referents, images, facts and meanings from life. In his writings
I.A.Richards expounded at length on how the auditory arrangement of
vowels, consonants, phonemes and words have a design which needs
to be more than simply sound content. A poem is not really a perfect
fusion of content (meaning) and poetic technique (form). The poetic
line is self-evidently independent of the poetic rhythm despite the
wonderful examples that exist where one feels that a perfect unity has
been achieved. In his Practical Criticism1 Richards, in a rather droll
fashion, compares two trivial lines and points out the immense
difference between: “Deep into a gloomy grot” and “Peep into a
roomy cot.” He explains that the difference is not lessened by the
96 Music, the Other Arts and Process
comparatively slight contrast between the sounds of each line. A

student's contradiction of this (along the lines, “I should never bother
about the sense, the sound is enough for me”) provoked Richards to
drive home the point by composing a poem made up of nonsense
syllables as a “double” or “dummy” to Milton's On the Morning of
Christ's Nativity, xv, starting: “J.Drootlan-Sussling Benn/Mill-down
Leduren N./Telamba-taras oderainto weiring/Awersey zet bidreen.”2
Changing Milton's content to what is clearly non-representational
illustrates the chasm which exists between poetry and music. While
the coherence of the sound is the sine qua non of the meaning of a
piece of music, in literature the sound of words and sentences cannot
achieve coherence independently of their referents.
There is a similar case to be made with relation to painting, at least
concerning representational works. In the same way that Mozart's
Symphony no.40 is not “about” anything as Paradise Lost is, it is also
not “of” anything as the Mona Lisa is. We might not be so confident
of this assertion if we chose Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique or
Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, with their representational
implications (conveyed, incidentally, and unlike Beethoven's Ninth,
without specific recourse to words).
In his book Real Presences: Is There Anything In What We Say?
George Steiner, with characteristically rhetorical verbal pyrotechnics,
aims to grapple with the distinctions which exist between the
theoretical functions when directed to surface forms and content, and
those same functions when directed towards the depth content.
Towards the end of his book his central concern with music comes to
the fore. Pater is revisited (“In music form is content, content form.”3)
But he goes further than Pater. The “depth content” of music for
Steiner is a power or meaning which is spiritual, and with a depth of
being such as to prompt the question “can there be art in the absence
of ‘the rival Maker?’”4 For Steiner God is the premise for all
worthwhile aesthetic activity. He makes a “wager” on meaning and
understanding in the arts which he describes as “a wager on
transcendence.”5 This is done in faith, i.e with an awareness that while
proof is not possible, the arguments may be convincing enough to
Music, the Other Arts and Process 97
persuade Steiner’s readers of the involvement of a transcendental

participant. In this scenario it would be plausible to see the artist
himself as a god: “God is in reality nothing but another artist ...
declared Picasso, whose own appetite for invention, for self-recreation
was, indeed, that of a demiurge.”6 Matisse was even more direct
(“Yes, but I am God.”) And James Joyce's simile in A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man conjures up a mysterious disaffection:
The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or
above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, pairing
his fingernails.7
The aura is of an otherness, an awe-fullness whose source is felt as

the Maker. And it is a transcendental source not just in music but in
other arts too, although they seem to be less adequately underwritten
by the sacred. For Steiner, rationality dictates that this is no more than
presupposition: it is clearly a wager - the postulate cannot be proven.
Steiner intimates that we must respond to the world as if to the “real
presence” of the transcendental. He continuously admits that his
opinions are just speculative and, to use the language of linguistic
philosophy, “verification transcendent”. But seeing an art as
transcendental, on the one hand, and, on the other, seeing God directly
at work in the art form are two rather different things. We can be
drawn through the mediating power of a poem or a painting or a piece
of music to a higher plane than we might expect from the rational-
logical apparatus of the art in question; the work in question might
leap out of nothingness . . . [so that] its enunciatory shape so new, so singular,
to its begetter, literally [ leaves] the previous world behind.8
This does not necessarily mean that God's hand can be seen. But this
is exactly what Steiner surmises; for him this transcendentalism is
divine. The “quantum leap between the character as letter and the
character as presence” 9 is not of an aesthetic order (or only of an
aesthetic order), it is specifically metaphysical, divine. He is unfazed
by the fact that God has absented Himself so that, as Simone Weil
said, “truth is secret.” And since his absence is essentially

indescribable - being ineffable - then the question is raised whether
anything at all can be said about such an intractable matter.
Steiner perseveres over 200 pages and more, in impressionistic
fashion, encouraged by the fact that by charting the known in this
world one may be able to fathom the mystery of the unknowable. If
the intimations lie too deep for words, at least an attempt at specificity
and careful attention to the “semantic markers” of different art forms
may provide ontological clarification. Steiner sees the pigments or
incisions which externalize Grünewald's Issenheim triptych or
Brancusi's Bird, or the notes, tempo markings etc. which “actualize”
Schubert's posthumous Quintet as a
re-enactment, reincarnation via spiritual and technical means of that which

human questioning, solitude, inventiveness, apprehension of time and of death
can intuit of the fiat of creation, out of which, inexplicably, have come the self
and the world into which we are cast. 10
He continues by acknowledging the specific role of music as a

paradox which unites the palpable with the inexpressible.
When reviewing the book in The Times Literary Supplement, Roger
Scruton reacted to Steiner's extolling of the supremacy of musical
expression as follows: “Small hope, then, for the tone-deaf in Steiner's
Church.”11 This is not altogether fair, since, as we have noted, Steiner
sees a “carrying over” of the inexplicable in the more discursive or
representational arts, especially where religion is specifically welded
to myth. He cites different (very different) aspects of the one question
that is ineradicable in man: is there or is there not God? as posed by
Victor Hugo's late epics on God and on Satan, Faulkner's Light in
August, Melville's Moby Dick and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers
Karamazov (in the parable of the Grand Inquisitor.)12 But whether the
ineffability is apparent specifically in the semantic markers of
literature, as they are in music, must surely be open to question. If the
ineffable is directly sensed in arts other than music then shouldn't they
contain the ineffable intrinsically, like music, in their semantic
markers? In painting, perhaps this can be seen both in representational
and modern abstract works. Or can it? Steiner asks a question, rather
similar to ours concerning poetry, about representational painting's
ability (or shortcomings) in this respect. He asks,
In what possible regard ... can we attach transcendent dimensions to a still-

life, to the portrait, to the numberless depictions of the natural and domestic
settings in which we lead our non-metaphysical lives?13
We can attempt to answer this question by judging the capacity for

transcendence in representational and non-representational art
respectively. To take representational art first, we can take no more
trivial artifacts as a subject for painting, but in this case redolent with
meaning, than a worn-out pair of shoes. Van Gogh painted them and
Heidegger meditated on them14 in a manner which brought out the
integral reality beyond scientific analysis, (and also in a manner which
anticipates the influential role Heidegger was to have on
postmodernism). To use Heideggerian terminology the shoes have an
inherent “thereness” or meaning which cannot be externalized because
the meaning is “within-it.” In them can be sensed the life and purpose
of the peasant who wore them day in day out over many years. We
read into the picture what it is for a man to live in a particular way.
The shoes must be understood on the basis of what is at work in Van
Gogh's painting and not in just the “thingly” character of the pair of
shoes. The pair is a thing plus. The question is posed: what is man and
what is humanity if these shoes are according to Heidegger's
explanation? In attempting to disclose the “truth of beings” Heidegger
expresses a deep-seated need often present in the work of aestheticians
and art critics to disclose meaning that is hidden in spite of the
specificity of the image! Heidegger argues that such a simple
revelation is inherent in every work of art. In Van Gogh's painting
there is a formal self-sufficiency on the side of the object, of the pair
of shoes. It is shoes that are depicted; but they are enhanced
immeasurably by the artist revealing the creative dynamic by means of
light and colour. It is because of the experience of van Gogh (and
many another secular artist) that we should not be drawn so easily to
accord a special status to explicitly religious works. For Heidegger
“world” and “earth” clearly presuppose a metaphysical challenge.

Because of this, being representational has more value because it is
grounded in man's experience and therefore is redolent of life values.
Paradoxically, according to this belief, the closer the art is to life, via
its representational nature, the more authentic value it seems to have,
and by implication the more transcendental it is. Similarly, the
absorption of the object into its affective world is explored also (and,
again, impressionistically) by Mikel Dufrenne when he describes
the soft delicate tranquillity which is expressed by the interiors of Vermeer ...
not contained between the walls which the painting encloses. It radiates upon
an infinity of absent objects and constitutes the visage of a world of which it is
the potentiality.15
With reference to representational art Paul Tillich resolutely

disputes Heidegger's contention. While accepting that art indicates the
character of a spiritual situation, and that its symbols have something
of a revelatory character not found in scientific conceptualisation,
which “must suppress the symbolical in favour of objective
adequacy,”16 he maintains that the forms of the “naturalistic and
impressionistic tendency” in art are “the perfect forms of self-
sufficient finitude, in naturalism on the side of the object, [but] in
impressionism on the side of the subject”, albeit with great creative
power and with the force of symbolism. But nowhere does one break
through to the eternal, to the unconditioned content of reality which
lies beyond the antithesis of subject and object.17 In contrast, when we
turn to abstract art we find that planes, lines and colours do not just
express what he describes as “life values”, but represent both “world
values” and “life values.” For shapes and mathematical forms are
inherent in life and earth and have been artistically interpreted in
works of seemingly mystical transparency. Therefore, for Tillich,
when the dissolution of the natural forms of objects took on a
geometric character:
planes, lines and cubes ... received an almost mystical transparency. In this
case, as in expressionism in general, the self-sufficient form of existence was
broken through. A transcendent world is not depicted as in the arts of the

ancients but the transcendental reference in things to that which lies beyond
them is expressed.18
Clearly, a transcendent world is not depicted here in the same way

as in romantic or impressionistic art, but the transcendental reference
to that which lies beyond is unmistakable. The inherent quality of a
work, its capacity to evoke the Other is found in what is intrinsic
rather than extrinsic. The semantic meaning therefore achieves an
autonomy and becomes full of meaning because the other-worldly
reality is embodied in it. In the same way that, according to
Heidegger, Van Gogh liberates experience from the drag of social and
biological purposiveness, so for Tillich does Mondrian liberate
intelligence from the constraints of mathematical proofs and scientific
verification.
To return to literature, and to admit that the semantic incompatibility
we have noticed in representational and non-representational painting
is no hindrance to our argument that Steiner's wager may be justified,
we can test the nature of our assertion by considering “presence” in
one small corner of the work of a notable pantheist, William
Wordsworth. In his book, Wordsworth's Theory of Poetry, J.A.W
Heffernan maintains that,
For the rest of his life [Wordsworth] firmly believed that when a poet
transforms visible universe by the power of his imagination he imitates the
creative action of nature herself.19
The poet's connection with nature, furthermore, is seen as a quasi-

divine manifestation. Wordsworth's imagination works by analogy. In
a well-known passage in Book X111 of The Prelude, “Wordsworth's
ascent of Snowdon”, the poet describes what he saw from the peak,
and it is a great moment in poetry. The certainty of its declaration that
there is an imagination in nature analogous to that in man is awe-
inspiring. In its consideration of nature's capacity to transform “as if
with an imaginative power” we see traced the analogy between the
mind of man and nature. Heffernan seizes on the “as if” line (actually
found only in a fragmentary draft) and uses it to provide
a clue to one of the most vexing questions raised by that passage: just what is
the “mighty Mind” of the early version, or the lower-case “mind” of the later
one? The answer, I think, can be best approached by means of an algebraic
proportion. What Wordsworth witnessed at Snowdon was the transforming
effect of mist and moonlight upon distant hills. This effect struck him as very
similar to the transforming effect that he, as a poet, often had upon the images
he used in his poetry. In poetry, he believed, such an effect was produced by
the imagination. But what produced it in nature? We have three givens and
one unknown - all the requisites for a standard algebraic proportion:
human imagination = X
__________________ _____________
transformation of ages transformation
in poetry of natural objects in
actual experience
In ordinary English, the human imagination is to the transformation of images

in poetry as X is to the transformation of natural objects in actual experience.
With a formula something like this, not articulated but certainly felt,
Wordsworth groped his way toward a definition of X, the unknown factor.
What he concluded, I think, was this: the transformation of natural objects
before his very eyes was “presumptive evidence” - a favourite phrase of
Wordsworth's - that something like the human imagination was at work upon
them. It was a mighty mind, archetype of the human imagination; it exercised
itself on natural objects “as if” with imaginative power. What Wordsworth
saw at Snowdon was an image, emblem, or shadow of that mind, a
demonstration of its power for the human senses. But only in the visible
demonstration - only in the emblem - could he perceive the mighty mind. In
the Platonic language of the later Prelude, therefore, he ascended from “sense
...to ideal form.”(XIV,76) ... Can we give the “mind” a specific name? It is
extremely tempting to call it God ... But in fairness to Wordsworth we must
resist ... In the early version of the Prelude Wordsworth tells us that the
mighty Mind is exalted by “the sense of God”(XIII,72), which surely implies
that it is not identical with God. Further, even though Wordsworth seems to
separate the human imagination from the “Power” of nature, which is its
“Counterpart/ And Brother'”(X111, 89-90), he does not clearly separate it
from the “mighty Mind.”20
The poem, with its specific statements conjuring up the divine (and
obviously done conceptually), is of a different order from what can be
found (nonconceptually) in music or in non-representational painting.
And in the same way that Tillich doubts the noumenal capacity of
naturalistic painting so does poetry, it would seem, in its specificity,
also lack a capacity that is transcendental to the degree that music can
be. Speech lacks the direct contact with the ineffable.
To return to Steiner’s book, there, as we have seen, God is very much
part of the equation. But in his rhetorical manner Steiner never succeeds
in clarifying the exact nature of God's participation. One reason for this
is that his process is emotional rather than rational. His mode of address
fails to explain certain logical aspects that would have thrown some
light on the problem. Instead, his book inhabits a dim penumbral region
full of vague, inarticulate feelings imbued with an alienating piety.
Clearly a more logically coherent structure for imbuing works of art
with transcendental values is called for.
One convincing way of doing this must surely be via Process
philosophy. Steiner's thesis would have benefitted from an injection of
rationalism into its colourfully empirical observations. Such a rational
approach is provided by Process whereby feeling and rationality are
carefully balanced. For Whitehead observed somewhere that no one has
ever been a pure empiricist and, likewise, no one has ever been a pure
rationalist. Finding the proper balance appropriate to the circumstances
(Aristotle's mean) is the challenge, and we will now consider briefly
how Process’s approach to the arts is framed within a universal, centred
vision of reality, of all actual entities in the world.
In adapting these universal truths to art we should note that
Whitehead's axiology is remarkable in giving aesthetic value a
primacy over moral value. He claimed that the most fundamental order
of reality is aesthetic and that “The real world is good when it is
beautiful.”21 In turning to a literary gloss on this aesthetic position - and
to note, say, Wordsworth's (and many others') cloaking of philosophy in
art while responding to the imaginative world which they create, we
perceive a basic insight that man is wholly “in nature.” He is thus to be
perceived in a cosmological perspective in which, according to

Whitehead, all philosophical problems are to be raised and resolved. In
Whiteheadian language, when we read The Prelude we may be drawn
towards seeing through it towards a theory of “propositions”
(Whitehead's term) involving the transcendental. Its text can be
regarded as a configuration of linguistic symbols which tend to elicit
a hybrid physical feeling of God, in respect to God's conceptual feeling which
is immediately relevant to the universe "given" for that concrescence.22
Its nature is “a derived conceptual feeling which reproduces for the

subject the data and valuation of God's conceptual feeling.”23 Few
would doubt that Wordsworth’s way of expressing this has a more
agreeable tone than Whitehead’s, but the latter’s precision of thought
and expression has immense value in the way God is portrayed as
himself experiencing reality in a sentient manner, so that he (as
superjective) becomes a sense-datum for other actual entities.
So authoritative and influential was Whitehead's teaching that, at
least among his acolytes in the USA, Process philosophy has assumed a
significance comparable to many of the most important philosophical
movements of the last three or four hundred years. Since, today,
postmodernist deconstruction would seem to be the unavoidable
framework of all discourse, it is logical at this point to have a coda to
our chapter and enquire how postmodernism might respond, in its
avowedly sceptical and anti-authoritarianism manner, to a movement
such as Process, that offers universal explanation of important
phenomena. To start, Process's bold reconstruction of the idea of God
would surely upset irreligious deconstructors, who, anxious to see the
horizon wiped clean of all traces of divinity, might espouse a creativity
untrammelled by the “normative” factors of Process's “grand narrative.”
Contrary to expectations, however, there are at least three leading
proponents of Process, David Ray Griffin, Charles Birch and John B.
Cobb, who have aimed to show Process's strong postmodern quality.
Whitehead's comments in the 1930s and 40s in relation to inexactitude
of language prompted Cobb and others to make a connection with the
postmodernist idea of instability of language, and Whitehead's
observations in Science and the Modern World strongly suggest a break

with modernity. Incidentally his critiques generally are somewhat
comparable, if expressed very differently, to Heidegger's, who has been
acknowledged as a key precursor of French deconstruction.
In his paper “The ‘End of the Grand Metanarratives of Progress’?”
Raymond Younis argues that
Whiteheads' affirmation of “inexactness” seems to anticipate the

indeterminacy of meaning affirmed by the likes of Lyotard and Derrida.
These are not identical positions to be sure, since Derrida seems to be
interested in pointing out cases of indeterminacy in arguments and
assertions in which systematic coherence or rigour are rendered problematic,
and since Lyotard seems to be interested in affirming the failures or the
insufficiency of “grand metanarratives” which are employed to legitimise
certain restrictive Western methodologies and which, as he would have it,
are inextricable from metaphysics and its speculative content.24
While Cobb sees the deconstructive model as rather like peeling the
onion, Process postmodernism has a different model for renewal,
deriving from Whitehead's detailed account of creativity - the many
becoming the one and increased by one - in a pluralism implying an
unmasking, a deconstruction that positively reacts to the many,
generously aiming to relate all aspects without attacking established
norm. This is less of the “peeling the onion” type, more of “seeking
insights into the inexhaustible reality of the plenum of events, wherever
those insights can be found.”25
Notes
1. I.A.Richards, Practical Criticism (London 1964), p. 231.
2. ibid., p.232. Of course, we could cite Edward Lear to exemplify that value can be
found in nonsense, but this is not really the point here.
3. Real Presences, p. 217.
4. See the dust-jacket of Real Presences.
5. ibid., p.214.
6. ibid., p.209.
7. ibid.
8. ibid., p.202.
9. ibid., p. 211.
10. ibid., p.215.
11. The Times Literary Supplement, May 19, 1989, p.534.
12. See Steiner, op.cit., p.220.
13. ibid., p. 224.
14. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936), tr. Hofstadter Poetry,
Language, Thought (New York 1971), pp.17-87. Previously Steiner had
acknowledged the potency of Van Gogh's “almost raging insistence that the
placing of the piquant, of ‘the yellow that is somehow inside the shadow of the
blue’, is, in the severest observance of the term, a metaphysical act, an encounter
with the opaque and precedent authority of essence.” Real Presences, p.211.
15. Mike Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, tr.E.S.Casey et

al.(Evanston 1972), p.181.
16. Paul Tillich, The Religious Situation, tr. H.R.Niebuhr (Cleveland 1956), p.85.
17. ibid., pp.86-7.
18. ibid., p.88.
19. J.A.W.Heffernan, Wordsworth's Theory of Poetry: The Transforming Imagination

(Ithaca 1969), p.105.
20. ibid., pp. 102-4.
21. Adventures of Ideas, p.345.
23. ibid.
24. Raymond Younis, “The ‘End of the Grand Metanarratives of Progress’?”A paper
given at the Australasian Association for Process Thought Inaugural Conference,
Sydney, May 1997.
25. John B. Cobb, “Two Types of Postmodernism: Deconstruction and Process”,

Theology Today, Vol 47, No.2 (July 1990), p.149.
Conclusion
Readers may be anticipating an examination of a rather obvious
issue, namely the interaction between music and theology, or at least
the more recent developments in this field. They will probably
conclude that my reticence about this comes from the general
preference shown in this book for the phenomenalistic over the
theological. However, one eminently logical theologian, Paul Tillich,
has made a ground-breaking contribution in setting an agenda for the
role of the arts in theological work; and, similarly, because F. David
Martin is a Process theologian (and a Tillichian), his work naturally
has been critically reviewed in Chapters 1 and 4. As is apparent in the
Introduction and Chapter 1 several theologians in previous centuries
have treated music and the arts with theological seriousness, but most
of their modern successors have either neglected the topic or tended to
confine their deliberations on aesthetics to ethical matters. They have
generally restricted themselves (as Tillich himself did in Systematic
Theology) to the role of the arts in the life of the institutional church.
At this point we must remind ourselves that theological aesthetics are
to do with the full panoply of aesthetic considerations in a religious
tradition, thought, worship and practice. Consideration of the arts is
just one aspect of this wide-ranging category within theology.
It is surely right to strike a cautionary note on the work of
theologians during the last half century. When religious thinkers write
about art we sense a method of approach from within a religion, and
often their work seems to dissolve into history and sociology. They
have tended to avoid philosophical enterprise, perhaps because the
logical criteria of philosophy are thought to be somewhat irrelevant to
them. Since theology is neither a science nor a branch of formal logic,
as A.J.Ayer contended in Language, Truth and Logic, it could be
abandoned to a limbo outside the scope of positive knowledge and
significant inquiry.1 In contrast, the more phenomenalistic attitude in
the present book is an examination “from without” the bounds of
established religion.
110 Conclusion
In an examination from without you aim to use your reason

creatively, in the sense that you bring forth ideas which are not simply
re-arrangements of data arrived at through sense perception.
Furthermore, some of us will have noted that our experiences of music
and art, via an empirical process, have a mysterious quality, an
ulteriority which goes beyond a mere desire for enjoyment. In
listening creatively to music we do not just enjoy it, or merely project
something into the object of our admiration by imagination, rather we
feel within it something peculiarly profound. In this respect we are not
reacting very differently from the theological aesthetician, but we do
not carry his institutional baggage. Sometimes a work of art will have
such a striking emotional effect as to directly bring us face to face
with higher realities like our mortality, or, as the passage quoted from
Alister Hardy at the beginning of the book exemplifies, with God. But
even when the conviction is so strong that the experience is of
profound importance we can never be absolutely sure that all is not
imagination because there is here, in the absence of scientific
verification, a fear that what has been achieved may after all be a
nonsense because of the perceived irrationality.
Many would agree that advancement towards a rational, scientific
knowledge of God is impossible because of the incompatibility
between two ways God can be known, through the senses on the one
hand, as a system of concepts on the other, the age-old tussle between
faith and reason, theology and philosophy. There is a great difference
between the kind of assent that is required by a philosopher and the
kind of assent that is invited by the theologian. Since faith embodies
wisdom of a tradition or authority or revelation, then it is perceived as
not demonstrable by reason. Consequently, much of the content of
theological aesthetics, indeed of theology per se, is prompted
extrinsically through infallibly inspired scriptures. Coupled with the
weight of institutional teaching are certain mysteries which soar above
human reason, so as to question the nature of their coherence and,
especially, verifiability. Concerning coherence we may recall
Heidegger’s summing up of the problem when he acknowledged that
whereas theology gives thought to faith, thought full of faith is not
faithful to thinking. It rather blindly answers to God. In Heidegger’s
words, “faith and thinking cannot be made to coincide.” 2
Conclusion 111
During the last half century theologians, and Process theologians in

particular, have been coming to terms with and possibly discomfited
by all this. They have endeavoured to answer the question whether
God is an object that enters into our immediate awareness through a
possible experience or is He rather only an object of speculation,
purely a system of concepts known through the logical consistency of
propositions. If He is purely a system of concepts can He also be an
object of sensuous experience? Or are they incompatible? Although
Process has tended to concentrate on the second possibility, that of
rationalising the divine presence, it is not necessarily the case that the
polemical thrust of Process philosophy has neglected the claims of
belief “in” rather than “about” God
Following on from this one can elaborate on the psychological
ramifications, based on fear, which are implicit in beliefs not being
provable. The powerful Latin proverb timor fecit deos (fear created
gods) is redolent of man’s existential anxiety and encapsulates the
Freudian analysis about religion being largely projection. For Freud
religious faith was seen as no more than a wish-fulfilling illusion.3 He
claimed that a large portion of the mythical conception of the world
which is central to most religions is nothing but a psychological
projection onto the outer world. The unclear inner perception of man's
own psychic apparatus incites him to illusionary thoughts about
immortality and the hereafter, and these become projections of a
psychic interior which carries with it a vast luggage of
psychomythology. Thus God is largely a creation of man, who
projected into God his own human characteristics. Psychologically
speaking the belief in a personal God is ultimately nothing but the
belief in an elevated father image.4 This desire for a father, according
to Freud, leads naturally to religion. Freud’s theory that religion is a
projection of man’s desires resembles ideas previously voiced by
D.F.Strauss and Feuerbach. For them too religion was the dream of
human and not of divine development. Consequently, man thereby can
transcend himself, and religion is a comforting means for objectifying
man’s own essence in ideal terms. Therefore, the Christian idea of the
incarnation is nothing but the reflection of the dream of man to
become god. But as a counterargument to this, as Anthony Storr
points out in discussing Freud, this general approach to the issues
arose from a very narrow position and a psychological shortcoming
which “as he [Freud] himself admits, is incapable of understanding
112 Conclusion
ecstatic and mystical experiences which for many people are the
origin of ‘religious’ feelings.” 5
So much for the cautionary note. If we are to counter the accusation
that our reaching out to the spiritual dimension is mere projection we
need to establish our defence along a broad front, and include facts
that are provable and scientific if this is at all possible. But to give
scientific credence to what lies in the metaphysical domain may tend
to reduce the essential mystery of our exercise, as might be the case
when we read Zuckerkandl for instance. The predicament is that if
knowledge of the ontological becomes possible then its
inexhaustibility would surely be reduced to the exhaustible.
Nevertheless it seems important to define God in terms of concrete
experience, as is certainly the case in any Whiteheadian reference to
God. Achieving plausibility is clearly problematic. Inevitably,
accusations of self delusion and irrationality have been levelled
against many cogent writers for neglecting to supply “irrefutable
proofs,” among them even the “irrational” trio of Bergson, William
James and Dewey (Whitehead’s colleagues in radical empiricism).
But they were defended resolutely by none other than the arch
rationalist Whitehead when he remarked (in connection with all three)
that “one of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of
thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or
wrongly has been associated with it.”6 It is to be hoped therefore that
the process whereby art goes beyond the rational structures of logic is
available to us. There is often a defence of this by Whitehead and his
followers, including his pupil Susanne Langer, who wrote:
One can sometimes prove the consistency of concepts, and inconsistency can
always he logically demonstrated; but one cannot prove the excellence of a
concept, even if it be logically impeccable, except pragmatically, by operating
with it successfully.7
Operating successfully may often involve “felt beliefs.” As such these

are essentially beliefs “in” rather than beliefs “that” or beliefs “about.”
We must therefore proceed to ask what is the nature of beliefs “in.”
The general submission to a process of scientific verification that is
normally required by society is usually via some form of repeatability.
Ensuring repeatability causes systems other than scientific ones to
have a serious verification problem. Some writers have sought to deal
with this dilemma by producing, somewhat paradoxically, logical
Conclusion 113
arguments in support of “felt truths”, and none more persuasively than

Tillich and Whitehead. Tillich cautioned us8 against making the
experimental and repeatable, scientific method of verification the
exclusive pattern of all verification. In more than one place he boldly
asserted that verification of the experiential type, as opposed to the
experimental, has the advantage that it need not halt and disrupt the
totality of a life process in order to distil calculable elements out of it
(which, apparently, experimental verification must always do). From
this we can deduce that the verifying experiences of a non-
experimental character can be truer to life, though presumably less
exact and definite. The question posed by such a belief is whether
introducing the experiential into metaphysics allays our inhibitions
about the intelligibility of such an argument as Steiner's, previously
discussed, which was presented, as noted above, in rather a shadow
cast by his admission of its “verification transcendence.” Process
philosophers generally would have the necessary confidence that
others lack in this context. They would assert their belief “in” the very
notion of non-conceptual thinking as plausible and bound up with our
nature and the nature of our universe.
We might not expect non-conceptual thinking in the non-theologian
Whitehead, but he as well as Tillich occasionally deplored the
tendency of logicians to ignore all but the narrow class of propositions
which interest them directly. In Process and Reality he made this very
striking suggestion:
The fact that propositions were first considered in connection with logic, and
the moralistic preference for true propositions, have obscured the role of
propositions in the actual world. Logicians only discuss the judgement of
propositions. Indeed some philosophers fail to distinguish propositions from
judgements; … But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be
interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to
interest.9
This ambiguous and paradoxical statement raises a question as to

whether Whitehead believed that an “ultimate” mode of reasoning (in
all fields of inquiry) has a somewhat different norm of deduction and
induction than is normally acceptable. Indeed, are there modes which
are neither deductive nor inductive? Also, more radically, are not
deductive and inductive reasoning themselves dependent on modes of
reasoning which are neither deductive nor inductive? If so, this will
114 Conclusion
produce a defence of modern theology with its perceived distrust of

reason. And if we go back to the passage quoted from Alister Hardy
we sense that a comment made on revelation and faith by John Hick
goes some way towards strengthening the validity of perceptual,
experiential knowledge. In his Philosophy of Religion Hick argues
that just as our knowledge of the physical world is ultimately based
upon sense perception, so any religious knowledge must ultimately be
based upon aspects of human experience as the source of the basic
religious data. He writes:
Thus, reason can never replace experience as the source of the basic religious
data ...[Reason] must seek to understand the implications of what is known by
faith: in a famous phrase of Anselm this is “faith seeking understanding” ...
Once certain “facts of faith” are acknowledged or confessed by a religious
community the task of the theologians is to draw out their implications,
relating them both to one another and to human knowledge in other fields.10
Standing in the tradition of Anselm, Karl Barth supported this point

by contending that theology needs to reconsider faith: “testing and
rethinking it in the light of its enduring foundation, object and content
…What distinguishes theology from blind assent is just its special
character as ‘faith seeking understanding.’”11 Similarly, revelation can
be consonant with reason because, as has been shown, the world bears
some revelatory marks of the world’s dependence on God for its
existence and order. Over the centuries Christianity has developed
many different conceptions of the difference between reason and
revelation, but has never deviated from the belief that vision of
ultimate reality, which for Platonists is knowledge in its purest sense
(noesis), is not achievable by use of intellect alone.
To carry this point to a different area, where the demands of logic
and reason would seem to be paramount, we note that Whitehead also
asserted that perceptual knowledge is just as much a factor in
mathematical insight or scientific discovery, (but obviously not in its
final fashioning). It is understandable that mathematicians have
frequently seen their activities as akin to artistic creation. This may be
because mathematical discovery (so mathematicians would tell us) is
not completely a matter of logic. Apparently it can often result from
mysterious powers in which the unconscious recognition of other,
hidden connections plays a part. Thus, a truly creative scientist will
choose one pattern for beauty's sake out of innumerable possibilities.12
Conclusion 115
It may be strange to see an aesthetic beauty at the core of certain

scientific discoveries, but a definition of beauty is neither limited to
art nor, conversely, is it the whole of an aesthetic theory. In seeking to
understand art we must concern ourselves with many different aspects
of it spread out on a vast canvas, including, among other things,
understanding aesthetic experience, artistic creation, and its
ontological status and function. Furthermore, our tendency to view
music and the arts against the widest possible canvas is justified by
Whitehead's example in applying his metaphysics so broadly. He once
argued
that one of the motives of a complete cosmology was to construct a system of
ideas which brings the aesthetic, moral, and religious interests into relation
with those concepts of the world which have their origin in natural science.13
Above all there was an instinctive aim to centre reality in the aesthetic
experience. When he wrote the following passage in Religion in the
Making Whitehead clearly had a concept of the aesthetic which is
really metaphysical. Whether this is no more than a pious assertion
will be a matter of opinion:
The metaphysical doctrine, here expounded, finds the foundations of the

world in the aesthetic experience, rather than – as with Kant – in the cognitive
and conceptive experience. All order is therefore aesthetic order, and the
moral order is merely certain aspects of aesthetic order. The actual world is
the outcome of the aesthetic order, and the aesthetic order is derived from the
immanence of God.14
In contrast to demonstrated truths, another problem faced when

communicating felt truths is that this is done via symbolism and
metaphor. Even the arch-rationalist Whitehead conceded the
inevitability of this. The transparency of felt truths to the ontological
cannot be expressed other than poetically, for in discussing them there
is no literal explanation, only another kind of symbol or metaphor. As
we have noted in Tillich, the strength of felt truths as distinct from
demonstrated truths lies in their conformity to the lived experience.
The dismembered rationality of analysis which characterises
techniques of abstract thinking has its value, but in the final analysis
one senses that to measure and count is not to see. It follows that once
Whitehead has exhausted nearly every logical abstraction in Process
and Reality he eventually defines God’s presence in rather different
116 Conclusion
language, which is metaphorical and essentially in aesthetic terms.

Even in Process and Reality there is a palpable change in his
expression to a more poetic style as he digresses fancifully on
the four symbolic figures in the Medici chapel in Florence, - Michelangelo’s

masterpieces of statuary … exhibit the everlasting elements in the passage of
fact … forever showing the essences in the nature of things.15
He goes on: “It implants timelessness on what is passing”, it becomes

“the moving image of eternity.”16 This is Whitehead relaxing into an
impressionistic mode, and, as a result, the comment is not particularly
instructive. We ask, in what way does the scene implant timelessness,
and how?
At this point (to use Whitehead’s own words from another source
which compounds the direct with the oblique), “The basis of
experience is emotional. Stated more generally, the basic fact is the
rise of an affective tone originating from things whose relevance is a
given.”17 In this vein we are not any more dealing with a cut-and-dried
metaphysic. On the contrary, Whitehead strives to integrate various
applications and displays an open-ness to approaches drawn from
other visions of reality. Intuition obviously is not dismissed. For
Whitehead, intuition was very important and, following Bergson, was
analysed by him as “the feeling derived from the synthesis of the
conceptual prehension with the physical prehension from which it has
been derived.”18 Intuition operates in various realms. As we have
previously noted, it may be directed towards the type of awareness
which is more “mathematical”, or to such aspects as the moral sense
of the rightness of things or to the artist's empathetic awareness, or to
the religious perception. What is important here is the balance
between rational generalisation and more emotional empirical
investigation. For Whitehead showed that to concentrate entirely on
any one field of interest would be to impoverish one's grasp of the
totality of things. This is how he accounted for speaking about deity in
abstraction from the world while at the same time thinking of God
always in terms derived from and relative to his creative activity in the
world. When Whitehead refers to Michelangelo or to Wordsworth in
Process and Reality he is articulating many another’s testimony to the
numinous power of art to convey a reality which is concealed behind
the appearance of things. Elsewhere he speaks of great art
Conclusion 117
transforming “the soul into the permanent realisation of values

extending beyond its former self.”19
From the coercive power of such a participative experience as this
flows more specific religious beliefs or feelings of ultimate concern.
We detect this in very many sources and very engagingly in Karl
Barth’s effusive acknowledgement of the role Mozart had in his life.
In 1956 Barth published a short book of writings about Mozart where
he stated that if he ever went to heaven he would first of all seek out
Mozart, and only then enquire about Augustine, Aquinas, Luther,
Calvin and Schleiermacher. His reason for according a special place to
a figure who was neither a pillar of the church nor particularly devout
had previously been voiced by him in his Church Dogmatics. In a
fulsome eulogy to Mozart he asked:
Why is it possible to hold that Mozart has a place in theology, especially in

the doctrine of creation and also eschatology, although he was not a father of
the Church, does not seem to have been a particularly active Christian, and
was a Roman Catholic, apparently leading what might appear to us a rather
frivolous existence when not occupied in his work? It is possible to give him
this position because he knew something about creation in its total goodness
that neither the real fathers of the Church nor our Reformers, neither the
orthodox nor Liberals, neither the exponents of natural theology nor those
heavily armed with the “Word of God”, and certainly not the Existentialists,
nor indeed any other great musicians before and after him, either know or can
express and maintain as he did.20
Barth’s claim that Mozart “saw the whole context of providence”

was certainly in response to a creativity that was mysterious and
inexplicable. Perhaps we instinctively sense that it emanates from
“outside” Mozart. In any case, and in the final analysis, and however
much we may revere him, we may suspect that what is fundamental in
Mozart’s music can be regarded as if totally independent of a
composer called Mozart. This, of course, is in “the final analysis,” and
in the final analysis, as a result of what we have learnt from
Whitehead and others, whether they be Process philosophers or not,
we can postulate that this fundamental quality is God.
Notes
1. See Chapter 6 of A.J.Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (London 1971).
2. Martin Heidegger, The Piety of Thinking, tr. James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo
(Bloomington 1976), p.67.
118 Conclusion
3. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. and ed. James Strachey
(London 1961), Vol.XXI, p.85.
4. Ibid., Vol.XIII, p.147ff. and elsewhere.
5. Anthony Storr, Freud (Oxford 1989), p.9.
6. Process and Reality, p.xii.
7. Reflections on Art (Baltimore 1958), p.xii.
8. See Systematic Theology (London 1953), I, p.114.
10. John Hick, Philosophy of Religion (Englewood Cliffs 1963), pp. 76-7.
11. Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology (New York 1964), p.36.
12. For instance, the playing with “beautiful” possibilities was an element in Watson
and Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA as related in Watson's book The
Double Helix.
13. Process and Reality, p.xii.
14. p.91-2.
15. Process and Reality, p338.
16. ibid.
17. Adventures of Ideas, p.226.
19. Science and the Modern World, p.252.
20. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, tr. G.W.Bromiley and R.J.Ehrlich (Edinburgh
1961), Vol.III, Part III, pp.297-8.
Selected Bibliography
Aquinas, St. Thomas. 1964. Summa Theologiae. (vol.1, tr. Thomas Gilby). London:
Blackfriars.
— 1970. Summa Theologiae. (vol.7, tr. T.C.O’Brien). London: Blackfriars.
Augustine.1998. The City of God. (ed. and tr. R. W.Dyson).Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ayer, A.J. 1946. Language, Truth and Logic. London: Gollancz.
Barth, Karl. 1961.Church Dogmatics. (tr. G.W.Bromiley and R.J.Ehrlich). Edinburgh:
T&T Clark.
Barth, Karl. 1964. Evangelical Theology:An Introduction. New York: Rinehart &
Winston.
Beardsley, Monroe C. 1966. Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present.
Alabama: University of Alabama Press.
Bernstein, Leonard. 1976. The Unanswered Question. Cambridge USA: Harvard
University Press.
Cobb, John B. 1990. “Two Types of Postmodernism: Deconstruction and Process” in
Theology Today, Vol 47, No.2. Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary.
Dufrenne, Mikel. 1972. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. (tr. E.S.Casey et
al.). Evanston Ill: Northwestern University Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 1961. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. (tr. and
ed. James Strachey). London: Hogarth Press.
Gilbert, Katharine and Kuhn, Helmut. 1954. A History of Esthetics. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Godwin, Joscelyn. 1995. Harmonies of Heaven and Earth. (RochesterVT: Inner
Traditions International.
Hardy, Alister. 1979. The Spiritual Nature of Man. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hartshorne, Charles. 1934. The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
J.A.W.Heffernan, J.1969. Wordsworth's Theory of Poetry: The Transforming
Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1936. “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Poetry, Language,
Thought. (tr. Hofstadter). NewYork: Harper & Row.
—The Piety of Thinking.1976. (tr. James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo).
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hick, John. 1963. Philosophy of Religion.Englewood Cliffs: NJ Prentice-Hall.
Jenny, Hans. 1967. Kymatik. Basel: Basilius Presse.
Kant, Immanuel. 2000. “Analytic of the Beautiful” in Critique of the Power of
Judgement. (ed.Paul Guyer, tr. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Langer, Susanne. 1942. Philosophy in a New Key. Cambridge USA: Harvard
University Press.
— Feeling and Form. 1953. New York: Charles Scribner’s & Sons.
Leibniz, G.W. 1927. Discourse on Metaphysics, Correspondence with Arnauld, and
Monadology. (tr. Montgomery). Chicago: Open Court Publishing.
Lipps, Theodor. 1926. Psychological Studies. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins.
120 Selected Bibliography
Magee, Bryan. 1997. The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Maritain, J. 1962. Art and Scholasticism. (tr. J.W.Evans). New York: Charles
Scribner’s & Sons.
Martin, F. David. 1972. Art and the Religious Experience: The Language of the
Sacred. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
Messiaen, Olivier. 1977. Recherches et expériences spirituelle. Paris: Leduc.
Meyer, Leonard B. 1956. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Murdoch, Iris. 1970. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
—The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists. 1977. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Otto, Rudolf. 1924. The Idea of the Holy. (tr. John W.Harvey). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Phelan, G.B. 1943. St. Thomas and Analogy . Milwaukee: Marquette University
Press.
Plato. 1953. Republic, Symposium and Timaeus in The Dialogues of Plato (vols.1, 2
&3 respectively, tr. B. Jowett). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
—1987. Ion in Early Socratic Dialogues. (tr. Trevor. J. Saunders). London:
Harmondsworth-Penguin.
Plotinus. 1956. The Enneads. (tr. Stephen MacKenna, rev. by B.S.Page). London:
Faber& Faber.
Rescher, Nicholas. 1967. The Philosophy of Leibniz. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-
Hall.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1948. The Psychology of the Imagination. New York: Philosophical
Library.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1969. The World as Will and Representation. (tr. E.F.J.Payne).
New York: Dover.
Sherburne, Donald W. 1961. A Whiteheadian Aesthetic. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Steiner, George. 1978. Heidegger. London: Collins.
—1989. Real Presences. London: Faber & Faber.
Storr, Anthony. 1989. Freud. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tillich, Paul. 1953. Systematic Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
— The Religious Situation. 1956. (tr. H.R.Niebuhr). Cleveland: H. Holt.
Ward, Keith. 1996. Religion and Creation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1929. Process and Reality (rev.edn., eds Griffin and
Sherburne, 1978). New York: Macmillan.
—1927. Religion in the Making. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—1927. Science and the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—1933. Adventures of Ideas. New York: New American.
Younis, Raymond. “The ‘End of the Grand Metanarratives of Progress’?” presented at
the Australasian Association for Process Thought Inaugural Conference (Sydney,
May 1997).
Zuckerkandl, Victor. 1956. Sound and Symbol. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
—1973. Man the Musician. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Index of Names
Apollo, 17 Gounod, Charles 93n.
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 6, 7, 31, 33-5, Gregory, St. 18, 22-3
117 Griffin, David Ray 104
Aristotle, 7, 27, 103 Grünewald, Matthias 35, 80, 98
Aron, 21 Gurney, Edmund 75
Arrau, Claudio 5 Hanslick, Eduard 75
Augustine, St. 6, 32-3, 117 Hardy, Alister 11, 110, 114
Ayer, A. J 109 Hartshorne, Charles 52, 63, 76, 88-90
Bach, J.S. 8, 11, 22, 23, 57ff., 67, Haydn, Joseph 50
77ff., 80, 86-90, 92 Heffernan, J.A.W. 8, 101-2
Bach, W.F. 89 Hegel, G.W.F. 33
Barth, Karl 114, 117 Heidegger, Martin 8, 74, 77, 99-101
Beardsley, Monroe C. 30 Heraclitus 64
Beethoven, Ludwig van 35, 96 Hick, John 114
Bergson, Henri 40, 57, 112, 116 Hofman, Wlastimil 79
Berlioz, Hector 96 Hugo, Victor 98
Bernstein, Leonard 53 Hume, David 69
Birch, Charles 104 Jackendoff, Ray 14
Brahms, Johannes 77 James, William 55, 112
Brancusi, Constantin 98 Jenny, Hans 16
Brendel, Alfred 5 Joyce, James 97
Brentano von Arnim, Bettina 45 Kant, Emmanuel 6, 24, 37, 115
Calvin, John 117 Kepler, Johannes 82
Cézanne, Paul 79 Kircher, Athanasius 17
Chomsky, Noam 53 La Rue, Jan 14
Christ, Jesus 22, 78 Langer, Susanne 13, 39-40, 63, 76,
Cobb, John B. 104-5 80-1, 112
Croce, Benedetto 69 Lear, Edward 105n.
Dante, Alighieri 29, 57 Leibniz, Gottfried 18, 35, 40, 52
Derrida, Jacques 105 Lennon, John 23-4
Dewey, John 112 Lerdahl, Fred 14
Dickens, Charles 12 Lippius, Johannes 49
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 98 Lipps, Theodor 45-7, 50
Dufrenne, Mikel 100 Locke, John 56
Emmett, Dorothy 63 Lovelock, James 70
Eriugena, John Scotus 31 Luke, St. 22
Faulkner, William 98 Luther, Martin 117
Feuerbach, Ludwig 111 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 105
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 36 Mahler, Gustav 14, 34
Fo-Hi 22 Maritain, Jacques 34
Forte, Allen 14 Martianus, Capella 17
Freud, Sigmund 111 Martin, F. David 8, 22-24, 73-80, 109
Furtwaengler, Wilhelm 76 Matisse, Henri 97
Gilson, Etienne 15 McCartney, Paul 23-4
God, passim Melville, Herman 98
Godwin, Joscelyn 6, 16-7, 22 Mendelssohn, Felix 6
122 Index
Messiaen, Olivier 19 Schubert, Franz 44, 47, 50, 52, 98

Meyer, Leonard B. 75 Scruton, Roger 98
Michelangelo Buonarroti 93n., 116 Sessions, Roger 54
Milton, John 96 Shakespeare, William 35, 57
Mondrian, Piet 101 Shaw, G. Bernard 79
Moses 21 Sherburne, David 60, 68
Mozart, W.A. 44, 50-1, 57, 60, 96, Socrates 13
117 Solomon 5
Murdoch, Iris 26, 29 Spinoza, B. 68
Nordoff, Paul 18 Steiner, George 8, 21, 74, 96-103,
Northrop, F.C.S. 63 113
Orpheus 22 Steiner, Rudolf 18
Otto, Rudolf 6, 11, 23 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 51
Pater, Walter 92, 95-6 Storr, Anthony 111
Pérotin 22 Strauss, D.F. 111
Picasso, Pablo 78 Tillich, Paul 79, 79, 100-1, 103, 109,
Plato 6, 13, 22, 25, 25-32, 37-8, 65, 113, 115
102, 114 Tovey, Donald 45
Plotinus 6, 29-31 Uexküll, J. von 48
Popper, Karl 82 Van Gogh, Vincent 99, 101
Porta, G.B. 17 Vermeer, Johannes 100
Pseudo-Dionysius, 31 Ward, Keith 31
Pythagoras 26 Weil, Simone 97-98
Richards, I.A. 95 Weiss, Paul 63
Robbins, Clive 18 Werckmeister, Andreas 49
Saint-Martin, L-C. de 45 Whitehead, Alfred North 5, 7-8, 12,
Sarasvati 22 15, 40, 63ff., 81, 85ff., 103-5, 112ff.
Sartre, Jean-Paul 76 Wilde, Oscar 15
Schenker, Heinrich 14, 47, 60 Wordsworth, William 14, 99-101,
Schleiermacher, F.D.E. 36, 117 114
Schnabel, Artur 5 Yeats, W.B. 34
Schneider, Marius 18 Younis, Raymond 105
Schoenberg, Arnold 21 Zuckerkandl, Victor 40, 44, 47, 52-9,
Schopenhauer, Arthur 6, 12, 36-40, 81, 112
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Music and

RICHARD ELFYN JONES

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007

Chapter 1: The Transcendental and Rational Discourse 21

Chapter 2: Music as Sublime Organism 43

Chapter 3: Process Philosophy 63

Chapter 4: Music and Process 73

Chapter 5: A Whiteheadian Aesthetic and a Musical Paradigm 85

Chapter 6: Music, the Other Arts and Process 95

Selected Bibliography 117

essentially Kantian idea of the numinous as a category for

Zuckerkandl (1896-1965) starting with his systematic derivation of

While endeavouring to assimilate the characteristics of God to those

This testimony to the numinous power of music comes from Sir

their nature and significance cannot now be fully recaptured. We do

But our experience of music often takes us beyond a personal

harmonic laws. The ancient synthesis which gave to music such a

charm the beasts. In due course a semi-scientific correspondence was

Different theories about the essentially therapeutic effect of intervals

Nature must always be explained mathematically and mechanically, provided

On the one side, the mechanical explanation carries one to the

a situation of great psychological stress. The use of the voice is a

3. See Hans Jenny, Kymatik (Basel 1967).

4. Martianus, The Marriage of Mercury with Philosophy, tr. W.H.Stahl and

5. Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis, facsimile of Rome 1650 edn. (Olms

8. G.W. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, Correspondence with Arnauld, and

9. Godwin, op.cit., p.54.

10. Recherches et expériences spirituelle (Paris 1977), p.3.

As we formulate arguments which show music’s ontological status

speculations later. In Harmonies of Heaven and Earth,2 Joscelyn

Clearly there is in plainchant an inner continuity with the religious

depending on your approach to what might be revelatory, the same

Similarly, human music is seen as an imitation of the divine melody

expounded by Plato we should also remember his presentation of the

brought temporal and material things into existence in a richly

falls short of the whole truth. Plato formulates an all-embracing truth

The writings of Plotinus reflect a more exclusive and wholehearted

It is in the spontaneity of artistic expression that we see reflected the

identical perhaps with “immanence”) in which Plato’s thoughts

The most serious objection to the concept of emanation from the

refers to). He sees a danger in men being too enamoured of transitory

The ontological (transcendental) relation in which each being stands to every

The notion is similarly expressed by Maritain when he says:

is by no means a twentieth-century experience, for there is profundity

Since God is omniscient Leibniz’s concept of the “substance” is not

existence of God, whereby things are seen to achieve their end by

Furthermore, Schopenhauer’s universe is hierarchic ranging from the

Schopenhauer, this quality makes music essentially different in kind

all the arts except music communicate knowledge of something which is

in the highest degree a universal language, which is related indeed to the

Thus one can say that Schopenhauer’s view of music contains

I recognise ... that it is essentially impossible to demonstrate this explanation,

Because he was unable to adequately support his assertion of

which, unlike Schopenhauer’s, eschews metaphysical assumptions in

10. See Martin’s reference, ibid., p.134.

14. (London 1970), p.66.

15. ibid, p.86.

19. ibid., Vol. V111,1a.45.6,p.51.

20. Keith Ward, Religion and Creation (Oxford 1996), p.232.

24. ibid., Vol 3,1a, 13.2, p.55.

25. G.B.Phelan, St. Thomas and Analogy (Milwaukee 1943), p.39.

31. ibid., Chapters 23 and 24.

32. Magee, op.cit., p.176.