INGENERATUS
(They say that when we listen to Bach we can feel a nostalgia for paradise, while when we listen to Mozart we are in paradise itself.) Heidegger listened to a lot of music, and apparently Mozart was his favorite composer. Which confirms in a way his predilection for neoclassicism. He wrote to Hannah Arendt that when he heard Orff's Antigone live, he felt as if the gods were there with him. What gods? Certainly not those of onto-theology, the Christian god, the one of traditional metaphysics that he criticized and deconstructed, whose death and end Niezsche had already announced, its loss of vital meaning. What gods then? Of course, they were the same gods Holderlin spoke of (Orff was adapting Holderlin's famous and controversial translation of Antigone). And also the gods of the pre-Socratic Greeks, the Homeric gods, those who exalted themselves with all the arbitrariness that Plato criticized in them. The truth is that there is something about Mozart that makes him unique, and this has to do precisely with the feeling of the presence of the supernatural, yet at the same time very human and full of serenity, when we listen to him. Apparently, the same was true of Heidegger, which is why he devoted special consideration to Mozart in one of his lectures on the principle of sufficient reason --- this principle seems to be one of the fundamental pillars of the serenity that Leibniz's philosophy, often considered optimistic, draws upon. Serenity that is characteristic of classicism and is especially imbued with Mozart's music, in his own style of composition, with this gift that was given to him as a source of beautiful sonic emanations, as if genius were not his, as if he were a mere instrument of divinity.
Postscript
ResponderExcluirMusic is also the only art form that contributed to the extermination of the Jews organized by the Germans between 1933 and 1945. Based on testimonies such as those of Simon Laks and Primo Levi, we learn about the power of music, which they speak of as the "Dream Song, which allows one to attract and kill," and they link the extreme function of music to the concentration camps, to the receptivity to sounds in intrauterine life. Music, the only art form requested by the Konzentrationlager administration; the only one capable of interacting with the organization of the Nazi death camps, with hunger, misery, slave labor, pain, humiliation, and death.
Since World War II, we have been continually entering a world of exasperating melodic sequences, of a coercive and repugnant use of music, amplified infinitely by the invention of electricity and technological multiplication. Noise pollution has become incessant, assaulting and polluting night and day the streets of cities around the world, galleries, supermarkets, shopping malls, bookstores, bank tellers, swimming pools, beaches, hotels, restaurants, taxis, subways, airports, and even airplanes. This is how music can become hateful even to those who loved it so completely. Music attracts human bodies. It is the siren in Homer's tale: Ulysses tied to the mast of the ship, assaulted by the song of the soul's death. Music is a hook that captures souls and leads them to death. We must remember this: the naked bodies of Jews entered the gas chamber to the sound of music:
ResponderExcluirMusical rhythms fascinate bodily rhythms.
ResponderExcluirAs a power, music is associated with any other power: listening and obeying: a director, performers, obedient people: this is the structure its execution establishes. In his philosophical accounts, Plato never considered differentiating discipline and music, war and music, hierarchy and music.
It surprises me that some men are astonished that those who love the most refined and complex music are capable of weeping while listening to it and at the same time are capable of indescribable cruelty. Art is not the opposite of barbarism, reason is not contradictory to violence --- one cannot oppose the arbitrary to the State, peace to war, bloodshed to the flow of thought, because neither the arbitrary, nor violence, nor blood, nor thought are alien to a logic that remains logical even when it debases reason. These are the words of Tolstoy: “Wherever one wants to have slaves, one needs the greatest possible quantity of music.”