Dreaming and Philosophy

 

I have an empirical hypothesis: dreaming caused philosophy. That is, it was dreaming that tipped our ancestors off to philosophical questions, and it still does. Dreaming embodies so much of what stimulates philosophical thought; it’s the cradle of philosophy. Not all of it, to be sure, philosophy being a wide-ranging subject, but a good deal of what is most characteristic of philosophy. Dreaming triggers the philosophical mood or mindset, its inner thrust. Without dreaming we would not be the philosophers we are (though we might be a different kind of philosopher). The most obvious manifestation of this is skepticism: dreams irresistibly prompt skepticism about the external world (the primary kind of skepticism). The question “How do I know I am not dreaming?” is the quintessential philosophical question; and it can’t be asked if you are not a dreamer. You wake up in the morning, your dreams fresh in your mind, you recall that you were just now convinced of the reality of what you dreamt, and you wonder whether the same could be true of your present waking (you think) experience. You reflect that there was nothing internal to your dream experience that alerted you to its fantastic nature, so what justifies your belief that your present experience isn’t the same? This basic question brings with it a host of subsidiary questions concerning experience, the senses, justification, knowledge, truth, error, and the relation between mind and reality. Now you are off to the philosophical races. All these questions introduce concepts that need examination, though you normally take them for granted. You realize that you don’t really understand these concepts: what is experience, justification, knowledge, truth, etc.? You are forced to confront the basic questions of epistemology and metaphysics. Clearly experience of a world can take place in the absence of the world experienced, as dreams vividly show, so the question of the relation between experience and world becomes problematic—how can experience justify belief in a real world? But what is the “real world”—what belongs to it and what doesn’t? What is existence anyway? Reflection on dreams prompts these distinctively philosophical questions. And dreams are natural to us, a human universal, shared with other animals, a feature of normal childhood: so philosophy is also natural to us, being coeval with dreaming. The concept of a dream is itself a philosophical concept, especially when coupled with the word “mere”: for the concept of a dream brings with it the concept of the mind as something distinct from external reality, and that concept is the entry point into philosophy. Now we have the distinction between appearance and reality in play, a foundational philosophical distinction.

            Consider Plato’s cave, itself a foundational philosophical image. Isn’t it an apt metaphor for dreaming? The cave dwellers experience only shadows that they mistake for reality, as dreamers experience only phantasms of the mind, which they mistake for reality. To leave the cave and achieve real knowledge is like waking up and smelling the coffee—a transition from a state of deception to a state of truth. Now reality floods in, where before it was all fantasy and error. Did Plato think of the cave parable because he already knew about dreaming? Dreamers are like part-time cave dwellers: every night we enter a world of illusion that we take to be real, as the cave people might alternate between cave life and life outside the cave. They might start to wonder whether they ever really leave the cave: is what they call “the outside world” really just another kind of cave? They thus have their “cave skeptics”, those who insist that there is no justification for declaring one world real and the other unreal—perhaps, indeed, the cave world is the real one! Our dream life acts as a pointer towards radical doubts about common sense, reason, truth, and all the reassuring apparatus of waking life. That’s why I say it’s the prime impetus towards philosophy, because it raises these questions in a particularly pressing and vivid form. Without dreams we might just acquiesce in the natural standpoint (Husserl’s phrase) and not question the relation between mind and world: for nothing in waking experience, except the odd visual illusion, really forces the question of the relation between knowledge of reality and subjective experience. Philosophy arises when we start to think reflectively about the distinction between experience and reality, and dreams force this distinction upon us. It is true that animals and small children dream and yet don’t philosophize, so dreaming is not sufficient for philosophy; but all that is required is the ability to remember and think about our dreams—to conceptualize them. We could formulate, and fret over, the appearance-reality distinction without knowledge of dreams, by standing back from our normal waking experience; but that would be an intellectual feat not natural to ordinary people, unlike simple awareness of our dreams. I am not talking about what is logically possible here; I am talking about what is natural to human beings constituted as we are—about evolutionary anthropology. My empirical hypothesis is that dreams, and our awareness of them, and our talk about them, are the de facto root of philosophical thinking—how we actually came to be philosophers at some point in evolutionary history (perhaps around the time we made those famous cave (!) paintings).

            There is another point about dreams that feeds into their philosophical fecundity: they are mysterious. Dreams confront the questing mind with a problem of a peculiarly recalcitrant kind. We can see how our senses might have led naturally to the existence of natural science, and these questions were by no means easy, but in the case of dreams we are faced with an enigma of another order. We don’t know why we dream, what function dreams serve, what they mean (if anything), what they tell us about human nature. We can imagine our ancestors puzzling over their dreams, concocting many a fanciful theory, admitting total bafflement, not getting anywhere; this could be their first experience of complete incomprehension and futility. And it isn’t as if we have now solved a problem that baffled them; we still don’t understand dreams. This is characteristic of philosophy: extreme recalcitrance, irresoluble disagreement, not knowing even where to begin, lack of a reliable method, bemused wonderment. Dreams presented our ancestors with a shocking demonstration of the limits of the human intellect, or (what is the same) the opaqueness of the objective world. So dreams created (we are hypothesizing) our early exposure to the joys of philosophical perplexity. The epistemic optimist in us is brought up short by the existence of dreams. We have now solved some of the major problems of science—the nature of the perceived heavens, the existence of animal species, the mechanism of inheritance—but we are still struggling with the problem of dreams. This problem prefigures, and produces, many of the problems of philosophy; and it exemplifies the normal state of the philosophical mind—which is a kind of tormented not knowing. Dreams are a conundrum in their own right as well as a source of further conundrums.

            Other subsidiary themes can be seen to flow from dreaming into philosophical thought: the concepts of existence, of possibility, of belief, of imagination, of fiction, of consciousness, of the self, even of morality. What is existence, given that dream objects don’t have it? What distinguishes the real from the unreal? What we dream seems generally to be possible in some sense, but what is this notion of possibility, this creation of alien worlds? Are we spinning possible worlds every night from within our own mind—or magically perceiving such worlds in our dreaming mind’s eye? Dreaming seems to revel in the merely possible, revealing our talent for modal consciousness. In dreams we seem to believe what we dream, just like in waking life, but what is this thing called belief? How does it differ from knowledge? Can dreams generate their own kind of knowledge? Or is it wrong to think that we believe what we dream—do we just dream that we believe? In waking life we exercise the faculty of imagination, which resembles the dreaming faculty in many ways, but is it really the same faculty in both cases? Is dream experience actually just imaginative experience? Or is it perhaps like sensory hallucination—or some third kind of experience specific to dreaming? How are dream stories related to waking fiction? Is dreaming the font of fiction too? Can dreams and fiction express their own kind of truth? Are we conscious when we dream? We are clearly unconscious in one sense, but aren’t we also conscious in another sense? What is this notion of consciousness that is common to sleeping and waking? Are we conscious in the same sense in both cases? Is the self that dreams identical to the self that exists in waking life? Or do we have a second dreaming self? What is this self that can exist in these two forms? The puzzles of personal identity crop up in considering dreaming. And am I morally responsible for what I dream? If I dream of violence and sex, am I to blame myself for indulging in such things? Do dreams reveal my secret moral nature (as Freud supposed)? Are dreams proper objects of shame? Thus a lot of philosophy gets condensed into the dream experience, and dreams frame these questions in a particularly sharp way.[1] One could devise an introduction to philosophy course by focusing on dreams and their philosophical progeny (Dreaming and Philosophy 101). That would anchor the subject firmly in facts about the daily experience of the students, as opposed to arid texts and abstract speculations. I suspect enrollment would go up.

            What else could have caused philosophy? It isn’t easy to say how philosophy arose in the human mind; it can look like an unprecedented leap in the dark, a remarkable saltation (to use a term from evolutionary biology). Did someone just suddenly start thinking about skepticism one day and talk to his neighbors about it? Other subjects have clear roots in everyday experience, but philosophy seems to have no clear basis in our ordinary concerns. What triggered the philosophical brain to spring into action? The advantage of the dream hypothesis is that it identifies a psychological trait of humans that could naturally morph into philosophical thought, perhaps conjoined with other traits such as language. Dreams are subjects of natural concern to their owners (some people can’t stop talking about them) and they readily give rise to the kinds of questions I have listed. So dreams are a likely candidate for acting as the cause of philosophy. It is an interesting empirical question whether there is a causal link between dreaming in children and a dawning awareness of philosophical issues: maybe there is a predictable developmental sequence leading from one to the other, possibly aided by outside stimuli. And if there are cases of dreaming pathology, we might investigate whether this has any impact on philosophical maturation.[2] Philosophy naturalized.

 

[1] I could also mention the problem of privacy and other minds: no one can tell what you are dreaming just by observing your body as you sleep. Dreams are private mental events par excellence. Of course we can also ask how dream experience relates to the brain, producing one version of the mind-body problem (behaviorism looks distinctly unappealing). 

[2] Are professional philosophers particularly prone to reflect on their dreams? Are there any dreamless philosophers? What kind of philosophy would they produce? I often dream about philosophy, as I suppose other philosophers also do: does this confirm the conjectured link between the two? In my late teens I became fascinated by dreams, which led me to Freud; was my later transition from psychology to philosophy unconsciously powered by the same interest? I do think dreams play a much more pervasive role in waking life than is generally recognized, so they may be close to the surface in conscious philosophizing. Doesn’t the rapt philosopher have a dreamy air about him? I nearly always think about philosophy as soon as I wake up, with my dreams still fresh in my mind. Descartes liked to work on philosophy in bed in the morning. Rodin’s Thinker looks like he might be asleep.  Etc.

 

Dualities

 

I wish to draw attention to a duality that runs through many areas of philosophy and elsewhere. It is a very abstract duality and it is not easy to find words to pin it down; yet it seems real and important. Here is a list in which the duality is apparent: volition and cognition, value and fact, desire and belief, energy and matter, cause and effect, potentiality and actuality, necessity and truth, premise and conclusion, meaning and use. Intuitively, the first item in each pair connotes something active, productive, generative, while the second connotes something passive, lacking in the ability to initiate things. The first item is connected to doing, the second to being. Thus mere cognition, fact and belief can’t affect motivation unless accompanied by passion, conation and the will; matter has no causal power without energy, the actual grows from the potential, necessity can force truth on a proposition, premises entail conclusions, meaning generates use. In each case one item is acting in a certain way while the other is going along for the ride. There is the bringer about and the brought about, or the essentially powerless. Belief may indeed guide desire in the production of action, but it isn’t an independent source of power. In some cases the concept of causation is implicit, but the notion to which I am drawing attention is not limited to causation, since it applies in cases like logical entailment (we don’t say the premises cause the conclusion, though we do say that they compel it).  The notion of production seems apt: a set of premises can produce a conclusion, meaning can produce use, necessity can produce truth, and values can produce actions. One thing gives rise to another. Reality contains two sorts of things: things that make and things that are made, the inherently active and the inherently passive. At any rate, we think this way in a variety of contexts; our concepts are colored by the distinction in question. The idea of such a duality is present in our conceptual scheme. I have no neat name for the duality in question, though I think it has clear application; just for convenience we could call it the “active-passive distinction”, though a nice Latin name would dignify the distinction. We are familiar with the is-ought distinction; this is the is-does distinction.

            Given the existence of the distinction, we can envisage various philosophical approaches to it. Some may regard one term of each pair as more basic than the other, some may seek to collapse the two, and some may contest the very meaningfulness of the distinction. In these alternatives we can recognize an array of familiar philosophical positions, ranging from the denial of all notions of power and influence to a stout affirmation of the reality of (possibly noumenal) active things (as in Schopenhauer’s generalized notion of Will). Then again, we can envisage an acceptance of a kind of deep metaphysical dualism—a kind of double ontology. One thing that stands out is that the active seems less empirically accessible than the passive: we don’t see the active agents, still less their mode of activity—as in Hume’s view of causation and in the cases of necessity, entailment, and meaning. There always seems to be a whiff of the mystical about productive things that offends the empiricist in us all. Even in the case of desire its productive power is hidden (as Hume observed). The idea of potential seems positively otherworldly. Entailment is puzzling and unobservable. Meaning is perplexing in relation to actual use (Wittgenstein). Values are regarded as problematic compared to facts. We have trouble understanding the realm of the productive. Skepticism about this realm is therefore predictable. But it also seems true that reality can’t be completely passive, a mere assemblage of constant conjunctions, accidental correlations, pure contingency, and unconnected atoms. For example, it can’t be that the premises and conclusion of a valid argument just happen to be true together; the premises must force the conclusion in some way (as meaning must force use in some way). The world can’t be a totality of unconnected facts; the facts need some sort of cement—causal, logical, or normative. There has to be some oomph somewhere. Reality must contain powers of several sorts, from the powers of the material world to the powers of morality (“I had to do it”). Plato thought that the Good created the entire world; that may be going a bit far, but the active nature of the Good is a sound insight on his part. The organism may need beliefs to guide its actions, but it is stuck without motivating desire (notice the phrase “vital spirit”). Some sort of metaphysical vitalism seems indicated (“pan-vitalism”). Even logic is animated in virtue of its deductive powers (inference is a type of action). Arithmetic has its “operations” (addition, subtraction, etc.). Morality has its imperatives. In addition to this activity we have non-vital stuff—stuff that just hangs there (as Berkeley thought of everything except the will, human or divine). At any rate, much philosophical controversy revolves around these ideas, and it is worth trying to make them more explicit and appreciating their pervasiveness. Just as people speak generally and abstractly of “realism” and “anti-realism”, without reference to specific areas of interest (e.g. Dummett), so we can speak generally and abstractly of “activism” and “anti-activism”. In discussing one area in which this distinction comes up we can acknowledge that it comes up in other forms in other areas, seemingly distinct. For example, similar issues come up in the philosophy of causation and in the philosophy of logic (the nature of necessitation), or in moral philosophy and the philosophy of language (virtues and meanings in relation to action). One might be a global activist or a local activist, or a global anti-activist or a local anti-activist (e.g. you believe in logical necessitation but not causal necessitation). One might even opt for total global activism, holding that all of reality consists solely of active powers or dispositions (Shoemaker comes close to this view in his theory of properties).  The extreme global anti-activist, on the other hand, holds that reality is nothing but a mosaic of unconnected atomic facts with not even logical entailment to hold things together (I can’t cite an historical example, but some positivists come close to this, e.g. Mach). This is the “one damn thing after another” school of thought (approvingly so described by A.J. Ayer): there is no “pushing” in the world, just co-existing. Everything is essentially powerless.

            This subject is very undeveloped, though it forms an undercurrent in many discussions (e.g. Wittgenstein on rule-following and the philosophy of physics). It is hard to know even how to approach it; ordinary language offers few clues. What exactly is this abstract notion of production or making or pushing (it isn’t supervenience)? Can it be given a formal treatment? Can it be made to unite apparently disparate areas of philosophy? How useful is it?[1]

 

[1] Dummett used to characterize realism in terms of logic: realism is the belief in bivalence, while anti-realism is the rejection of bivalence. In this vein we could characterize activism in logical terms: it is the belief that reality needs to be described by a modal logic, while anti-activism is the rejection of such a logic (so Quine would come out as an anti-activist metaphysically). The metaphysical activist holds that reality consists at least partly of modally described powers, while the metaphysical anti-activist resists that thesis, his ontology consisting of discrete impotent objects. 

 

Persistence Through Time

 

In virtue of what do material objects persist through time? This is not a difficult question to answer: the particles composing the object must persist through time (enough of them anyway) and they must stay spatially related to each other in the same way over time (to a sufficient degree). If you destroy all the particles, or disperse them to the wind, then the object ceases to exist. Normally objects cease to exist because of the latter circumstance not the former, since particles are pretty much indestructible: the object disintegrates and its erstwhile particles scatter abroad. This answer is not the same as the following answer: the successive stages of the object are similar and there is a causal connection between these stages. That answer says nothing about particles and their spatial relations. And it is vulnerable to counterexamples that don’t affect the first answer: what if all the particles are destroyed and a new set put in their stead—isn’t that a numerically distinct object that is just like the previous object? It doesn’t matter if the former state of the object causes the latter—we still have a numerically distinct (but qualitatively identical) object. There would be an appearance of identity over time, but the facts would belie the appearance. God (or an evil demon) could be doing this all the time, thus producing an illusion of persistence. Nor is similarity a necessary condition, since objects change a lot. You might say that the positions of the particles also change a lot over time, but we need not insist on exact preservation of position, so long as the particles don’t separate entirely and head off in different directions.[1] The basic point is that the particles need to maintain a certain spatial cohesion. That, at any rate, is the rough idea of what the persistence of material objects consists in: particles sticking together. This is how we think of the persistence of such objects over time.

            But when it comes to persons or selves or subjects or egos or souls this paradigm breaks down. For we cannot identify the particles that compose selves and we have no idea of their spatial relations. We can do this for the bodies of selves, so we know what we are talking about with respect to these entities; but the self isn’t the body, so we can’t just borrow its persistence conditions. The brain too persists in virtue of particle cohesion, but we have no idea what this could mean for the self: what are its particles and what kind of cohesion? The self isn’t a congeries of material particles (or immaterial ones). Its relation to the body and brain is unclear, so we can’t transfer an explanation of persistence from one to the other. The mind-body problem thus affects the problem of personal identity over time. Lacking this resource, people are apt to settle for the kind of theory I just rejected: personal persistence consists in qualitative similarity with (or without) causal connection. But this is intuitively too weak, and arguably also too strong. More important, it is the wrong kind of theory. It leads to notoriously problematic cases such as teletransportation: is the person who appears from nowhere on a distant planet really the person who entered the transportation booth or just someone very similar? If we could say that the particles of the person (not the body!) had all been destroyed or dispersed, then we could assert that the original person no longer exists (though a twin has appeared far away from where he or she was last seen); but that is precisely what we are not allowed to say, because we have no notion of what such particles (small parts) might be, or how they must be related over time. The paradigm of material object persistence doesn’t carry over and we have nothing to put in its place, so we are left fumbling in the dark. The mystery of the self (closely connected to the mystery of consciousness) prevents us from answering the persistence question in the standard way, and no other way suggests itself. In brief: personal persistence is a mystery. This is why we find ourselves so puzzled about whether we do persist over time, as we don’t find ourselves similarly puzzled for the case of material objects. It is the same table over time, because the parcel of particles has persisted, but am I the same person as yesterday? Am I perhaps just a duplicate self that appeared this morning when I woke up? There seems nothing to ground my identity over time. Maybe something does ground it, objectively speaking, but I am ignorant about what it is. The persistence of the conscious self is as mysterious as the consciousness that defines it, not surprisingly. Not that there is nothingmysterious about material object persistence, but personal persistence introduces another layer of mystery—it doesn’t conform to the relatively easy case of rocks and tables. Some sort of personal atomism would restore the parallel, but that seems like a remote dream in our current state of knowledge.[2]

 

[1] We should allow for the case of organic entities that replace their particles every few years, but here we still have particle composition and particle position. It’s not like simply annihilating the particles and replacing them with a new particle configuration in the same place at some later time. Also, it is not at all clear that organic entities are really material objects given that their identity conditions are independent of the material objects that compose them (they are not aggregates of particles). They are closer to form than matter.

[2] I am thinking of Derek Parfit’s work here, but others have had similar ideas. What I say here also applies to survival without identity—we don’t know what it is for the self to survive. It can’t be the aggregate of particles that forms part of the brain because the self can’t be analyzed that way. At most this is a correlate of personal survival.

 

 

Music and Language

 

The analogies and connections between music and language are striking. This is most apparent in the case of song, but it applies quite generally. Music is made up of notes, phrases, bars, tunes, riffs, verses, movements, symphonies, operas, albums, etc. It has compositional structure. It proceeds from a finite base and generates a potential infinity of combinations. There are introductions and conclusions. Speech has melodic properties, pitch variation, pauses and crescendos. Music comprises rhythm as well as melody, some of it predominantly rhythmic. Poetry forms an intermediate link between the two. We use the vocal apparatus for both. We hear tunes in our head as well as words. Arrangements of words can suggest melodies to us, carrying a kind of latent melodic structure. Children learn music and language at roughly the same time, and have an innate aptitude for both. Both involve the internalization of rules and patterns (scales and grammar). There is a sensitive period for language learning and probably also for musical learning. We tend to be wedded to the forms of our own language and also to the musical forms to which we were early exposed. Language and music are universal to the human species and contain universal properties, though culture clothes each differently. They both have a social dimension and are used communicatively. No other species possesses both aptitudes, though there may be glimmers of them in other species. Both require a process of segmentation to divide up the incoming auditory stimulus into discrete units of sound. They clearly interact all the time, song being the obvious point of intersection. It would be wrong to identify them or claim some kind of priority of one over the other, but they coexist in mutually supportive ways. Songwriters make a profession of fusing them, and the brains of listeners respond to the fusion. Each has production and reception aspects: we make music and listen to it, as we produce utterances and comprehend them. Each admits of a competence-performance distinction. There is an abstract underlying structure to both as well as a sensorimotor expression: we hum and whistle tunes while tacitly cognizing and computing musical forms, and we utter words while unconsciously processing syntax. There are hidden dimensions as well as conscious manifestations. The major scale is not English grammar, but the two function similarly. Notes are discrete entities arranged into rule-governed patterns, as words are discrete entities arranged into grammatical sentences. Both can be said to express emotions and to be about something.

            Given these points of analogy and overlap, it might be useful to apply them to two well-known theories of language—those of Chomsky and Wittgenstein. Can Chomsky’s theoretical apparatus be applied to music, and can Wittgenstein’s characteristic ideas be similarly applied? I will be brief about both questions. I have already mentioned innateness, universality, sensitive periods, and competence and performance with respect to music; and the application of these notions to musical ability is obviously plausible, if not platitudinous. Less obvious is the question of cognitive architecture: what comparisons can be made at this level? I would emphasize the distinction between underlying competence and sensorimotor vehicle: linguistic competence is generally expressed in vocal speech, but this is not essential, as witness sign language.[1] Is something similar true of musical ability? Isn’t it always tied to the auditory and vocal? Yes, but this does not appear to be a necessary truth: we can imagine beings that possess our musical competence but lack our auditory faculties. That is, the abstract mathematics of music, involving pitch variation and rhythm, might be grasped by them but expressed via a different sense, say vision. They might see musical forms—melodies in the shape of patterns of light. No doubt their aesthetic experience would be very different from ours, but their brains could be performing the same abstract computations as ours as they process the visual input. For them musical form would be expressed in the way dance expresses musical form for us. If dance is music made visual, then their light shows would also be music made visual. They might even enjoy visual muzak. The point is that deep cognitive competence is separate from sensorimotor expression in both cases. Some aspects of what we call music derive from the abstract structure and some from the contingent sensorimotor system—just as Chomsky suggests that the same is true for language and vocal speech. Second, music is hierarchical: it consists of strings of notes that break down according to hierarchical principles. One musical phrase may be composed of other phrases that together form a structured whole. There are recurrent elements and backward-looking resolutions. There are “meaningless” combinations of notes just arbitrarily strung together. Chomsky talks about the Merge operation that generates new wholes recursively: the operation joins one linguistic unit with another, which can then combine with other units, and so on up.[2] And the same thing is true of musical forms: one note gets Merged with another, thus forming a new unit that can be Merged with another. Musical compositions are formed by a process of something like recursive combination. The mind has to grasp this structure in order to comprehend the musical piece. For example, we must keep track of the root note in order to appreciate a “return to the root”, and the “blue” note is defined by its place in a series of notes. We can break a symphony down into movements, themes, phrases, and individual notes—and similarly for a song composed of verses and chorus. So musical and linguistic comprehension involve a similar (but not identical) set of cognitive capacities, in particular an appreciation of hierarchical structure. Tree diagrams capture this structure in both cases, as they do for other hierarchical systems.

We can thus envisage a cognitive science of music similar to a cognitive science of language. Many of the same basic ideas will apply; the Chomskian apparatus will be applicable to both. There is an innate competence genetically represented, a natural and predetermined learning period, an outer expression and an inner architecture, an abstract structure capable of multiple sensorimotor externalizations, a computational procedure that generates infinitely many combinations from a finite base of primitive units, and a sharp competence-performance distinction. If we imagine an alternative intellectual history in which these ideas first gained a foothold in the study of music, then we can picture a theorist urging a similar approach in the study of language as against entrenched empiricist-behaviorist assumptions. As it is, we have Chomsky’s basic approach developed for the case of language first and then extended in the direction of music (or so I am suggesting). In my alternative history Chomsky’s counterpart writes books called Musical Structures, Music and Mind, and Aspects of the Theory of Music. He revolutionizes the field of musicology, construed as the study of musical psychology. It’s not all Markov processes, conditioned responses, blank slates, and Verbal Behavior (Chomsky’s counterpart writes a review of a book entitled Musical Behavior by the well-known Harvard psychologist B.F. Skynner).

            In the case of Wittgenstein we can imagine a similar possible world in which his counterpart, call him Wettgenstein, recapitulates the actual man’s history but in the field of music. In this imaginary world the philosophy of music is regarded as the central area of philosophy (they have a very musical culture) not the philosophy of language. Wettgenstein’s first work Tractatus Mathematico-Musicus is concerned with this subject and advances a highly abstract theory of the nature of music. It begins with the resounding words, “The world of music is a totality of tunes, not of notes”. He goes on to assert that tunes are complexes of simple notes. Auditory sequences mirror these complexes construed as objective features of the universe (“the music of the spheres”). A note is not a readily perceptible sound but a metaphysical posit. An auditory experience of music pictures these Platonic-Pythagorean entities by means of lines of projection. This is the hidden essence of musical form as we experience it. The mathematical properties of music are stressed. Heard music is held not to be capable of expressing the pictorial relation between itself and musical reality—this can only be shown by music. Music is really an abstract calculus tenuously related to what we actually hear. There is such a thing as an ideal musical notation capturing the form of the musical facts. Music is something sublime and otherworldly. So said Wettgenstein’s Tractatus, albeit obscurely. But in his later period he revised this theory of music: in his posthumous work Musical Investigations he rejected his earlier theory and replaced it with a new set of ideas (he was wary of calling this a theory). Here he spoke of musical games, musical practices and customs, music as use, of our musical form of life, of the rules of music, of the music of other tribes, of the concept of music as a family resemblance concept, and allied ideas. He repudiated his earlier static pictorial theory and replaced it with a dynamic behavior-centered theory. He compared his new theory with an already existing theory of language that mobilized the same set of ideas: for it was accepted by everyone that language functioned in the way Wettgenstein now claimed that music does. For instance, everyone believed that the concept of language is a family resemblance concept, so Wettgenstein could call on this acceptance to motivate his new theory of music–that there is no one thing in common to everything we call music just a series of overlaps and surface similarities in the heterogeneous musical family. There is nothing hidden to music—no deep structure—just a human social practice. It has a purpose, a role in our lives, but it isn’t any kind of sublime supernatural abstract structure. True, music can sometimes bewitch us as to its nature, but if we study it in its context of use we can see that there is nothing “queer” going on. Music is like language: a motley collection of old and new games with no underlying essence. It is a mistake to criticize one sort of music for not resembling another sort. Music is like a city composed of old and new buildings—just like language. There is nothing sacrosanct about the major scale! Other cultures use other musical scales and are none the worse off for it. Music is part of our natural history, like eating, drinking, etc. So the later Wettgenstein contended (still obscurely however).

            The actual Wittgenstein, despite being highly musical himself, says little about music in his Philosophical Investigations, preferring to draw his analogies from games; but we can envisage him invoking music in order to make his points about language. For music does appear to fit many of his suggestions: there are a great many types of music, music is woven into our daily lives, it is an activity that occurs over time, it is rule-governed, and it doesn’t lend itself to abstract theory. A theory (“description”) of music is really an anthropological exercise not a mathematical one—as Wittgenstein claimed for language. I am not saying Wittgenstein is right to see things this way, only that it would be natural for him to include music in his thinking; it could be used to support many of his contentions about language. In fact at one point he does bring in music to explain a point about meaning: in section 184 of the Investigations he discusses remembering a tune and asks, “What was it like to suddenly know it?” He says it can’t be that the tune occurred to the person “in its entirety at that moment!” Yet it must have been present in some sense—but in what sense, he asks. This is a version of a general problem he discusses particularly in relation to meaning: how I can know at a particular moment the meaning of a word if the meaning is the temporally extended use. He is raising a question in the philosophical psychology of music to illuminate a question about language and meaning. My point is that he could have invoked music in other contexts to advance his contentions—e.g. to explain his idea that language is a family resemblance concept, or to explore the concept of rule following. In fact it has been cogently argued that game is not a family resemblance concept, since it can be precisely defined; but no such thing has ever been done for the concept music.[3] On the face of it, Wittgenstein’s general theoretical apparatus applies quite naturally to music, so it would have been a good model to use to develop such a view of language. No one would think that a Tractatus-like view of music was correct (pace early Wettgenstein)!

            Music is not central to philosophy and psychology as they are currently practiced (it is consigned to aesthetics), but it has some promise of providing a useful area of comparison to other cases (as well as being interesting in its own right). It fits well with the perspectives developed by both Chomsky and Wittgenstein (different as they are). This is why it is helpful to consider what intellectual history would look like if music not language were the central focus of inquiry in both fields. As things stand we can only note the parallels and wonder how the subject would look if pushed further. I don’t see much prospect of a fundamental unification, but heuristically the comparison has its virtues.[4]                      

 

[1] See Berwick and Chomsky, Why Only Us (2016), p.74f.

[2] See Chomsky, What Kind of Creatures Are We? (2016), chapter 1.

[3] See Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper (1978), for a definition of games.

[4] We can imagine a book written by a Kripke counterpart about Wettgenstein’s Musical Investigations that claims to find a skeptical paradox at the heart of it about musical rule following. How do we know that a musician is following the major scale, say, given that his behavior so far is compatible with using some deviant scale in the future?