​Music as Experiential Metaphysics

​Schopenhauer, Whitehead, and Mahler

Music does not express this or that individual or particular joy, this or that sorrow or pain or horror or exaltation or cheerfulness or peace of mind, but rather joy, sorrow, pain, horror, exaltation, cheerfulness and peace of mind as such in themselves, abstractly…

Arthur Schopenhauer (WWR I, 289)

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Schopenhauer believes the experience of music brings us epistemically closer to the essence of the world as will—it is as direct an experience of the will qua thing in itself as is possible for a human being to have.

Sandra Shapshay, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy


If you want to do metaphysics without reading books, listen to music. It is a direct experience of the subjective side of the universe. Music is panexperientialism in sonic form.
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Mahler Symphony #1
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​The opening movement of Mahler's First Symphony is often seen as a musical depiction of the Will's blind, striving nature. The movement is full of energy and drive, but it is also dark and foreboding, reflecting the suffering caused by the Will. However, the symphony ends on a note of hope and transcendence, suggesting that it is possible to escape from the suffering caused by the Will through music.

Schopenhauer: Music as Feeling 
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"No wonder that Schopenhauer was the darling of composers in the 19th and 20th centuries, for he argued that music has a truly exceptional status among the arts and uniquely reveals the essence of the “in itself” of the world. Music that affords such insight—the only music he deems worthy of the name—is Classical/Romantic, non-programmatic music without a text, or what was termed late in the 19th century, “absolute music.” Unlike all of the other arts, which express or copy the Ideas (the essential features of the phenomenal world), Schopenhauer affirmed that music expresses or copies the will qua thing in itself, bypassing the Ideas altogether. This puts music and the Ideas on a par in terms of the directness of their expression of the thing in itself (WWR I, 285). In order to understand Schopenhauer’s reasoning for this rather stunning view of the cognitive significance of music, one needs to pay attention to the role of feeling in Schopenhauer’s epistemology, and especially to the feeling of embodiment that a subject can experience by attending to ordinary acts of volition.

It is the feeling of embodiment—the intuitive, immediate knowledge that one wills when, for instance, one wills to raise one’s arm—that is monumentally significant for Schopenhauer in his identification of the Kantian thing in itself with will. First-personal knowledge that one wills is immediate, rather than inferred from observation, according to Schopenhauer, and is shorn of all of the forms of the PSR (including space, causality, and even being-an-object-for-a-subject) with one exception, the form of time.

​Similarly, Schopenhauer holds that the experience of “absolute” music (music that does not seek to imitate the phenomenal world and is unaccompanied by narrative or text), occurs in time, but does not involve any of the other cognitive conditions on experience. Thus, like the feeling of embodiment, Schopenhauer believes the experience of music brings us epistemically closer to the essence of the world as will—it is as direct an experience of the will qua thing in itself as is possible for a human being to have. Absolutely direct experience of the will is impossible, because it will always be mediated by time, but in first-personal experience of volition and the experience of music the thing in itself is no longer veiled by our other forms of cognitive conditioning. Thus, these experiences are epistemically distinctive and metaphysically significant."

- Sandra Shapshay, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

​Shapshay, Sandra, "Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/schopenhauer-aesthetics/>.

Music is What Feelings Sound Like

Often, when people ask how process thinkers understand music, I say that "music is what feelings sound like." I add that colors are what feelings look like, and odors are what feelings smell like. Sounds, colors, and order are sensory expressions of energy, and in Whitehead's philosophy, energy is a form of feeling. Even quantum events in the depths of atoms "feel" their past actual worlds, albeit probably in non-conscious ways, and we humans do the same. Wherever there is energy there is feeling, and energy is everywhere.

The idea that "music is what feelings sound like" is Whiteheadian in spirit, but it also resembles the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). He was a German philosopher known for his influential work on metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of human existence. He is often regarded as one of the most important figures in Western philosophy during the 19th century.

Schopenhauer is best known for his philosophical work titled "The World as Will and Representation" (published in German as "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung" in 1818). In this work, his central idea is that the fundamental essence of reality, which he calls the "Will," underlies and drives all phenomena in the world. This Will is a blind, irrational, and insatiable force that is responsible for the desires, needs, and actions of all living beings. It is similar to what Whitehead calls Creativity: a creative advance into novelty which is the underlying and inescapable essence of reality. 

In the notes below, I bring Whitehead and Schopenhauer into dialogue, hoping some of the ideas might spur your own thinking.

Schopenhauer on Music

Music, according to Schopenhauer, is the most metaphysical of arts. It transcends the confines of specific circumstances, granting its listeners access to the realm of pure emotion, untethered from particularities. This realm of pure emotion is cathartic and transformative. It offers opportunities for understanding, healing, and growth. But it is also metaphysical. It reveals the very essence of a Will to live which is at the heart of the universe as well as human life. And it does it better than other arts. because music is not a representation of anything outside of itself; it is a direct manifestation of the Will's inner essence. When we listen to music, we are not simply hearing a series of notes; we are experiencing the Will itself.

Here is how Robert Wicks explains Schopenhauer in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

​"Separate from the other traditional arts, he maintains that music is the most metaphysical art and is on a subjective, feeling-centered parallel with the Platonic Ideas themselves. Just as the Platonic Ideas contain the patterns for the types of objects in the daily world, music formally duplicates the basic structure of the world...If one is to discern the truth of the world, it might be advantageous to apprehend the world, not exclusively in scientific, mechanical and causal terms, but rather in aesthetic, analogical, expressive and metaphorical terms that require a sense of taste for their discernment. If the form of the world is best reflected in the form of music, then the most philosophical sensibility will be a musical sensibility.
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With respect to the theme of achieving more peaceful and transcendent states of mind, Schopenhauer believes that music achieves this by embodying the abstract forms of feelings, or feelings abstracted from their particular everyday circumstances. This allows us to perceive the essences of emotional life – “sadness itself,” “joy itself,” etc. – without the contingent contents that would typically cause suffering. By expressing emotion in this detached way, music allows us to apprehend the nature of the world without the frustration involved in daily life, and hence, in a mode of aesthetic awareness akin to the tranquil philosophical contemplation of the world. Insofar as music provides an abstract and painless vision of the world and of inner life, however, it also fails to evoke the compassion that issues from identifying tangibly with another person’s suffering. This deficiency motivates a shift from musical, or aesthetic, awareness to moral awareness." [1].

Schopenhauer's Will as Whitehead's
Subjective Aim toward Satisfaction

As Wicks suggests, the Will for Schopenhauer is a blind, irrational force that drives all of reality, including human beings. It can be compared to the ultimate reality in Whitehead’s philosophy: that creative advance into novelty, of which all actual entities, including God, are exemplifications. This creative advance, as such, is neither good nor evil. Whitehead calls it creativity and suggests that even the source of order in the universe, even God, is in its grips, as are all other actual entities.

Actual entities are not objects in space; they are momentary events with a will to live of their own. Whitehead speaks of this will as an entity’s subjective aim toward satisfaction. Whitehead adds that this aiming is imbued with emotion or what he calls “subjective form.”  The Will of which Schopenhauer speaks, I suggest, can be understood as this emotion-filled aiming toward satisfaction which is everywhere throughout the universe as the essence of each actual entity.

Schopenhauer, then, believed that music is the only art form that can directly express the Will. When we listen to music, we are not simply hearing a series of notes; we are experiencing the Will itself in its subjective, feeling-informed way. We are experiencing the sadness, for example, or the joy of the Will, in a context that momentarily transcends the vicissitudes and struggles of daily life.

Music as Pure Emotions in Sonic Form:
Eternal Objects of the Subjective Species

Wicks compares what music reveals about the universe to Platonic Ideas, except dealing with feeling and emotion, not spatial and temporal relations. Interesting Whitehead's philosophy points to two kinds of pure and timeless potentialities what resemble such Platonic ideas, one of which is mathematical in nature and another of which is emotional. He speaks of them as "eternal objects" of the objective and subjective species. 

Of the objective species he says: "An eternal object of the objective species can only obtain ingression in the first mode, and never in the second mode. It is always, in its unrestricted realization, an element in the definiteness of an actual entity, or a nexus, which is the datum of a feeling belonging to the subject in question. Thus, a member of this species can only function relationally: by a necessity of its nature it is introducing one actual entity, or nexus, into the real internal constitution of another actual entity. Its sole avocation is to be an agent in objectification. It can never be an element in the definiteness of a subjective form...Eternal objects of the objective species are the mathematical Platonic forms. They concern the world as a medium."

Of the subjective species he says, "A member of the subjective species is, in its primary character, an element in the definiteness of the subjective form of a feeling. It is a determinate way in which a feeling can feel. It is an emotion, or an intensity, or an adversion, or an aversion, or a pleasure, or a pain. It defines the subjective form of feeling of one actual entity." 

Whitehead adds that member of the subjective species, revelatory of emotion, can be ingressed in the data of sensory experience, such that, when we experience a sensum, we are experiencing the emotion in the sensum. It would follow, then, that when we experience the sounds of music, we are experiencing emotions in sensory form. The sounds of music are eternal objects of the subjective species in sonic form. We don't see the potentialities or entertain them as abstract ideas; we hear them. Additionally, we are typically experiencing those emotions in ways that are temporally patterned, as in rhythm, such that the other kinds of eternal objects, those of the mathematical kind, are also felt. Thus, music is an experience of patterned emotion, often in tremendously complex ways.

Schopenhauer is particularly interested in how music can evoke occasions for serenity and tranquility in a tumultuous world. A Whiteheadian approach will add that the emotions communicated through music can be evocative, troubling, confusing, and unsettling. Music does not need to be pretty, sublime, or beautiful to be music. Whether accompanied or unaccompanied by pleasant states of mind, it is metaphysical in its revelation of the affective and emotional side of life.

Music and Morality

And yet Schopenhauer rightly notes that it is not enough for a good life. There is a side of life which is moral: that is, which tends toward the good, and which beckons us to live with respect and care for others. We can be musical and not know this side of life. For process thinkers this side responsive to a beckoning that is part of the creative advance into novelty, but not the whole of it. There is in the universe, thinks Whitehead, a principle of order and novelty which is itself loving. This is, for him, God. Music can sometimes reveal this side of life, too. It offers a metaphysics, to be sure, and also, in some instances, a theology. It is at this point that music becomes sacred music. The music need not be religious. So called "secular" music can carry the beckoning no less than formally religious music.

In Whitehead's philosophy even God is in the grip of Creativity. The creative advance into novelty continues ceaselessly, and God is part of it. God, too, is an expression of Will. The beckoning of God comes from God's ordering of eternal objects of the objective and subjective species in ways that can be fruitful for life. This ordering is not once and for all; it adapts to each new situation.  And yet it comes from a place within the universe - Whitehead calls it the primordial nature of God - that contains all the potentialities, even if not actualized. It is God as cosmic mind. It follows that all the potentialities for feeling are in this mind, which means that when musicians create new music, they are exploring the mind of God as are mathematicians when they explore and discover new patterns. Music is what feelings sound like, yes. And music is what God sounds like, too.

- Jay McDaniel

Schopenhauer's Philosophy:
A Scholarly Discussion
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​Melvyn Bragg and guests AC Grayling, Beatrice Han-Pile and Christopher Janaway discuss the dark, pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.As a radical young thinker in Germany in the early 19th century, Schopenhauer railed against the dominant ideas of the day. He dismissed the pre-eminent German philosopher Georg Hegel as a pompous charlatan, and turned instead to the Enlightenment thinking of Immanuel Kant for inspiration. Schopenhauer's central idea was that everything in the world was driven by the Will - broadly, the ceaseless desire to live. But this, he argued, left us swinging pointlessly between suffering and boredom. The only escape from the tyranny of the Will was to be found in art, and particularly in music. Schopenhauer was influenced by Eastern philosophy, and in turn his own work had an impact well beyond the philosophical tradition in the West, helping to shape the work of artists and writers from Richard Wagner to Marcel Proust, and Albert Camus to Sigmund Freud.AC Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London; Beatrice Han-Pile is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex; Christopher Janaway is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton