Song and Soul

It is a truism that song touches the soul. Something about song and something about the soul naturally mesh: that is, song and the emotions are suited to one another. But why is this? What features suit song to the emotions and hence the soul? Song is clearly language set to music, but what is language and what is music? Language is the pairing of sound and meaning, or better the union of the two: sound expresses meaning and meaning suffuses sound. Music is the union of melody and rhythm: pitch variations conjoined with temporal intervals. So song is the union of these two unions: a song is the joining together of the sound-meaning pair (language) and the melody-rhythm pair (music). When you sing you are fusing your ability to conjoin sound and meaning with your ability to conjoin pitch variations and temporal intervals. A song is a synthesis of these four elements: sound, meaning, melody, and rhythm. In a song, language is converted into something temporally structured (bars, note lengths) and pitch variations are imposed on it (the standard musical scales). Language becomes music. So there is a metamorphosis into an aesthetic medium, no longer a mere vehicle of communicative speech. Language is called upon to operate in the realm of art. Meaning itself becomes an aesthetic object by being subjected to musical forms. The speech act of song is a distinctively aesthetic type of speech act. And music itself becomes imbued with the representational power of language: it acquires an extra layer of meaning, a new type of significance. Music becomes semantically complex, doubly expressive. Such are the powers of song to transform both language and music into new versions of themselves.

            But how do these constitutive features of song mirror the emotions? One would like to find parallel structures at work in the emotions. First, sound and meaning: what in the emotions parallels this duality? Surely this: emotions admit a distinction between their felt character and their representational content. It feels a certain way to be angry or in love and these emotions are about certain people and states of affairs—what philosophers call qualia and intentionality. Moreover, these features merge and meld: they are not independent dimensions like size and color. So emotions are structurally similar to language in joining the phenomenological and the referential—a coloration of consciousness and a semantic content. Second, melody and rhythm: how do emotions parallel thisdistinction? Certainly not by sounding like higher and lower notes, or by mimicking the sound of a drum; but at a more abstract level we can find similarities. Pitch intervals consist of variations along a continuum of sound, selections from acoustic space; and rhythm is the spacing of sounds over time. But don’t emotions also vary continuously in an analogous way, and don’t they also occur spread out in time as separate experiences? Your anger can reach a high affective pitch, waxing and waning, then give way to something less intense; and it can also develop over time according to a recognizable pattern. Your love can burn brightly or dim languidly, and it also throbs and pulses in predictable ways (as when you meet or part from the beloved). Emotions evolve in time and they can be more or less intense (sharp, deep, tormenting, exhilarating). They can also be repetitive and maddening (or soothing). They can reach a crescendo or peter out, scale new heights or plumb new depths. Emotions seem to possess a “music” of their own: staccato or smooth, vibrant or torpid. So emotions mirror the musical form of a song, as well as its linguistic form. As the song progresses, its melody and rhythm intersect with the phenomenology of the corresponding emotions, in such a way that a certain note seems to condense a whole world of emotion, capturing the emotion perfectly. The music of the song maps onto the “music” of the emotions, with its variations of pitch and temporal development. Thus a song can condense and encapsulate a familiar human emotional experience, say the breakup of a love affair. There is an underlying commonality of form. The fourfold union of song reflects the fourfold union of emotion: sound-meaning plus melody-rhythm mirrors feeling-meaning plus affective variation combined with temporal development. The song is targeting the emotional structures of the soul.  [1]

            And there is a further similarity, namely the close connection between the inner and the outer that characterizes both song and emotion. Emotion characteristically has a behavioral expression, both vocal and non-vocal, as when a person shouts and stamps his feet; but song too, like most music, is often accompanied by behavioral expression, as in swaying and dancing. Musical experience and emotion both tend to translate into bodily movement. So hearing a song is apt to lead to the same kinds of behavior that the corresponding emotions lead to—swooning, jumping up and down, lachrymation. The emotions have their bodily manifestations, and so does hearing a song. This affinity enables song to connect with emotion, just as if a song were an embodied emotion. Also, the connection between the inner and the outer in the two cases is not an external connection: the behavior is integral to the emotion (in a way notoriously hard to articulate). The inner and the outer are unified. So there is a third union to be added to the previous two: both song and emotion are the union of three unions. Song is thus the ideal vehicle for the expression of emotion: they both have the same abstract architecture. The soul sings.  [2] 

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  [1] Similar remarks may be made about poetry and emotion: the affinity is undeniable, and it is natural to find in emotion some of the structure of poetry—meter, assonance, dissonance, etc. Song, of course, is a form of poetry, as well as being a form of music. A song is poetry set to music, and this enables it to tap into the emotions via the formal analogies between the two.

  [2] Less poetically, the emotions are analyzable using much the same conceptual apparatus that we can use to analyze the nature of song. The two are isomorphic, formal twins. That is why a song feels like an aural emotion.

An Objectivist View of the Universe

I will describe a metaphysical view aptly labeled objectivist. My aim is expository rather than argumentative, though I am inclined to accept the view. Objectivism says that the universe (reality, being) is fundamentally objective not subjective, with the emphasis on “fundamentally”. It isn’t that the universe has no subjective features; it is just that these features always have an objective basis. By “objective” I mean “not mind-involving”—having nothing intrinsically to do with consciousness (or unconsciousness). The view contains two sub-theses: all properties have an objective basis or correlate, and all concepts have an objective counterpart concept. For example, the property of being red, though subjective, has a basis in objective properties of objects and nervous systems; and the concept of being red has a counterpart concept in concepts of such properties. The color is mind involving, but the correlated objective properties of objects and nervous systems are not mind involving; and the concept of the color is graspable only by someone who experiences the color, but concepts of external objects and nervous systems are not so graspable.  That is, subjective facts always have objective facts behind them—but not vice versa. I won’t harp on the property-concept distinction in what follows, since the same point applies to both: I shall simply say that the subjective is always backed by the objective. What “backed” means will vary with the topic: it could mean straightforward identity, or it could mean something like supervenience or grounding or realization. For example, pain always has an objective correlate of some sort, though views may vary about how strong this correlation relation is. Strong objectivism might insist on reductionism via identity; weak objectivism might claim only a supervenience relation. The general idea is that the subjective is always embedded in the objective, while the objective need not be embedded in the subjective (and typically is not). Thus reality is fundamentally objective. We could put this by saying that the subjective is always emergent on the objective, but the objective is never emergent on the subjective. Mind-independence is the basic form of reality.

            Notice that I have not used the word “physical”: the objectivist view is not that everything has a physicalbasis. There are three reasons for this. First, the concept of the physical is not well defined (for reasons I won’t go into here). Second, we want to leave open the possibility that fundamental reality is not what the physical sciences (currently) describe. Third, it may be that physics harbors subjective elements: our concepts of geometry, causality, and motion are arguably anthropocentrically constituted (at least in part). It could be that a genuinely objective physics has to move beyond these human concepts in order to achieve the kind of absoluteness demanded by the “absolute conception”.    [1] So the objective world I am talking about might not coincide with the world as described by physics; at any rate, we are dealing with different doctrines. Objectivism is committed to the idea that everything has non-subjective nature (or correlate)—something that is captured in a “view from nowhere”—not that everything has a physical nature (whatever that may mean). The thought behind it is that minds are just part of reality; they don’t condition the whole nature of reality. And where they do exist they always rely on non-subjective features. Thus objectivism stands opposed to subjectivism—the doctrine that reality is inherently subjective. Idealism is the obvious form of such subjectivism, but other versions of subjectivism are conceivable. The point of objectivism is to insist that reality is not subject to the mind—and even the mind depends on non-mental factors. Even if we cannot achieve a perfectly objective conception of things, reality itself demands such a conception. Maybe a completely objective conception is impossible for any conscious thinking being—in which case reality is necessarily inconceivable as it is in itself—but still its nature is such as to be quite independent of any subjective intrusion. Objectivism regards reality as perspective-neutral, perspective- transcendent. This view goes beyond what is commonly called realism: it isn’t just the doctrine that reality is independent of our thoughts; it expels anything subjective from reality (except for the manifestly subjective). It takes reality in general to be radically removed from anything mental. Even when objects have subjective properties, such as color, they have underlying properties that have nothing to do with the mind. And even if some properties are irreducibly subjective (e.g. color experiences), they must exist against a background of objective being. There is no such thing as the kind of free-floating subjectivity that idealism contemplates. Metaphysical objectivism affirms that reality exists on a bedrock of entirely mind-free facts, whatever exactly those facts may be. The basic reason for this is that reality pre-dates minds and would exist even if minds did not. Objectivism is the abstract position that reality is constituted quite separately from mind: it is not committed to any particular view of what the underlying reality is. In that sense it is ontologically neutral.

            It should not be taken for granted that subjective facts necessarily have objective counterparts or correlates—after all, many philosophers have denied this. It tells us something about the nature of the mental: it needs the non-mental. It can’t exist without it. No matter how irreducibly subjective a mental state may be, it must bring with it something quite different from itself—something objective. The objective, on the other hand, obeys no such requirement: it can happily exist without the company of the subjective. The subjective, however, is dependent on the objective in order to have any being at all, despite the opacity of the connection. Thus some sort of objectivist reduction would appear indicated—yet no such thing seems on the cards. This is really quite puzzling. The subjective is irresistibly drawn towards the objective, entirely parasitic on it, yet quite different from it. It is true that the subjective is enmeshed in the objective, notably via causality, but still the nature of the necessary connection is far from clear (thus allowing dualism to gain a foothold). So the objectivist position is not free of perplexity: it is true without being intelligibly true. The objectivist therefore carries a heavy explanatory burden, which he fails to discharge (I don’t regard this as an objection). The position is certainly interesting and distinct from other more familiar positions. It should be debated on its own terms.

    [1] Objectivity can come in degrees (as can subjectivity): one conception can be more objective than another. Thus physics may be very objective compared to common sense. But there also must be a form of objectivity that is absolute—where the objectivity is complete. For reality itself does not share gradations of objective understanding: facts have absolute objectivity when they have it at all. The world itself is absolutely objective (not counting the mental world). 

On Not Denoting

The literature on descriptions tends to operate with a limited class of examples, mainly descriptions of people and places (“the queen of England”, “the capital of France”). This can bias us in favor of certain theories of their semantics. We can think of descriptions as referring to people and places (Frege and Strawson), or we can think of descriptions as quantifying over people and places (Russell). But there are many other types of descriptions that lend themselves far less readily to such theories: “the end of the line”, “the impossible dream”, “the shortest way home”, “the day after tomorrow”, “the big home sale”, “the height of absurdity”, “the reason why”, “the truth about Mary”, “the logic of existence”, “the problem of consciousness”, “the Greek gods”, “the mystery of life”, etc. etc. Here we are not dealing with concrete particulars unabashed reference to which can be assumed unproblematic; some ontological hesitancy might be presumed. Are we really to believe that the use of such descriptions necessarily commits the speaker to a robust ontology of corresponding entities? The speaker might turn around and say that of course she has no belief that such things really exist: if a theory of descriptions commits her to such existence, she might demur from the theory.  [1] When a speaker says, “the golden mountain must be worth a lot of money” are we to assume that she believes that the golden mountain exists to be referred to and quantified over? It is noteworthy that these descriptions don’t have names or demonstratives associated with them, unlike descriptions of people and places: there isn’t an antecedent assumption of existence-committed reference of the kind suggested by names and demonstratives. We are not already referring to such things in other ways; the description is the only way we have to speak of them. So a referential or quantificational treatment of them is not intuitively natural: their meaning is not naturally taken to involve the kind of ontological commitment we associate with other referential devices. Their “logical grammar” is not that of a straightforward assertion (or presupposition) of existence, whether by singular term (name or demonstrative) or by existential quantifier.

            The idea that descriptions are name-like or demonstrative-like has never seemed particularly attractive—they seem semantically sui generis—and this has fueled the ascendancy of Russell’s quantificational theory. But that theory too has some untoward consequences, notably the consequence that a freestanding description is really a whole sentence: if I utter the sentence fragment “the queen of England”, I have really uttered the whole sentence “there exists a unique queen of England”. The film title The French Connection is equivalent to There Exists a Unique Connection that is French or some such. Maybe descriptions imply or presuppose existence and uniqueness (or maybe not: see above), but it is hard to accept that they state existence and uniqueness (this was Strawson’s point). If they did, it would be possible to negate them; but we can’t say “It’s not the case that the queen of England”. So neither of the two standard theories looks very attractive, despite their hegemony: the suspicion grows that they have been accepted mainly because of a lack of any better alternative. The appearances suggest that descriptions are not referring devices like names and demonstratives (which don’t contain the particle “the”) and they are not like quantified expressions either: they are what they are and not some other thing. The meaning of “the” is unique—which is why we have the word. But then, what kind of semantics do they have? Their meaning appears not to be referential (in any clear sense of that elastic term), either in acts of singular reference or in acts of quantification; but if not, what kind of meaning do they have? Are we to say that they have non-referential meaning? That would not be unprecedented, since words like “not”, “and”, and “if” are also used non-referentially; but descriptions are at least nouns, unlike these words, so the idea of reference clings to them more tightly. This is really a problem: descriptions fit none of our referential paradigms, but they also don’t fit non-referential paradigms. They occupy a curious semantic no-man’s land. We might say that they serve to “introduce a topic” or “identify a subject”, but these phrases don’t really help to pin down how they specifically function. Indeed, they seem to challenge the whole referential framework: the concept of reference (or lack of reference) is unable to cope with them. They don’t denote, but they don’t not denote either. Russell could have written a paper called “On Not Denoting” and proceeded to discuss the semantic peculiarities of “the”. He was right that descriptions don’t denote like names and demonstratives, but he was wrong to suppose that they denote in the way quantifiers do, i.e. with variables ranging over existent entities. There is no denoting at all going on with descriptions as such, as opposed to certain instances of them, but what is going on remains obscure.  [2]

            A radical solution may be proposed: the whole framework of referential semantics deriving from Frege and developed by others needs to be abandoned. It is hard to remember that in the old days meaning and reference were not closely associated: meaning was held to consist in ideas of the mind; it was not a matter of word-world relations. Today we would say that meaning is a matter of concepts, which are psychological entities: they have a role in the mind but any supposed relation to things outside the mind is purely incidental. This is non-referential semantics (meaning is completely “in the head”). According to a view like that descriptions have meaning in virtue of internal psychological factors, so that the idea of reference never comes into the picture. In the extreme, this internalist semantics says the same thing about all expressions, including names and demonstratives, but we could restrict it to the case of descriptions: they express concepts but they don’t refer to anything or quantify over anything (i.e. refer by means of variables). The case of descriptions, then, provides support for such a non-referential semantics—though it is certainly a contrarian point of view (compared to orthodoxy). Short of that, we have an unsolved semantic problem on our hands, despite the enormous amount of attention paid to the word “the”: we still don’t know what this word means. We know what “that” means and we know what “there is” means, but “the” leaves us baffled. Russell was right to fret mightily over this little word, and Strawson was right to question his theory, but in fact it remains as puzzling now as it was over a hundred years ago.  [3]

  [1] I am not saying that the descriptions listed clearly fail to refer to existent entities; I am saying that a theory that says they definitely do is going out on a limb that no semantics should venture. We don’t want to end up saying that a speaker’s sentences commit him to the existence of things he expressly repudiates: a nominalist, say, should be able to use these descriptions with a clean conscience.

  [2] The semantics of descriptions should not be dependent on their type of subject matter: it should be the same whether we are speaking of entities acknowledged to exist or things to which we are reluctant to ascribe existence. Indeed, it should be neutral with respect to whether anything exists. Building assertions of existence into the very meaning of descriptions burdens them with far too much ontological responsibility. Questions of existence are far too controversial to be presupposed by semantics. 

  [3] Note to experts: I am well aware of the complexities of this subject, and the myriad ways of wriggling out of objections, and the passions aroused by the meaning “the”: but I am trying to cut through all that to expose a basic weakness in our thinking about descriptions since Russell wrote “On Denoting”.

 Sexuality and the Transsexual

Consider a person, Alec, who believes he was born into the wrong kind of body. He believes himself to be essentially female, despite his anatomy. Accordingly, he chooses to become the woman he inwardly perceives himself to be: he dresses in women’s clothes, wears make-up, and acts the part of a woman (but no surgery or hormone treatment). He feels his authentic female self in his new role. He now calls himself (or she calls herself) Alice and feels the better for it. After a while, Alice comes to the realization that she is a lesbian—a female homosexual. She decides to change her appearance into a more masculine image: she cuts her hair short, wears manly clothes, and acts like a man (in so far as she can). In this guise Alice frequents places where lesbians mingle and successfully hooks up with likeminded others, most of whom are regular women. Sexually, Alice performs in the standard male manner, this being what her anatomy demands. To all appearances Alice looks and behaves just like the old Alec. Question: is Alice homosexual or heterosexual? She seems heterosexual when you consider her anatomy and sexual behavior, but from the inside she feels herself to be a woman making love to another woman, and thus homosexual. A male body is interacting with a female body in the usual heterosexual fashion, and yet psychologically the person is a woman interacting with a woman. Is this same-sex sexual behavior or different-sex sexual behavior?

            Neither alternative seems to capture the facts. If we dwell on the external appearances, we find heterosexuality; while if we look inside, we see homosexuality. Objectively, the erstwhile Alec is a straight male; subjectively, the new Alice is a committed lesbian. Which is it to be? It seems to me that the only answer can be “Both”. A single person is biologically heterosexual and psychologically homosexual. Generally these two attributes go together–your psychological sexuality tracks your biological sexuality—but in the case described the two come apart. In other words, we can’t deduce psychological sexuality from biological sexuality: Alice is a counterexample. She has it both ways: she is a heterosexual homosexual. She is partly heterosexual and partly homosexual. Not bisexual, mind you: she only has sex with women; the duality lies in her not in her partners. On the one hand, Alice is a biological male copulating only with females (both biologically and psychologically); on the other, she is a psychological female copulating with other females. She lives a dual existence: gay and straight, queer and ordinary. Some may say she has the best of both worlds; at any rate, she is familiar with both. Of course, the same is true if we switch genders: Joan may wish she were male and enacts her wishes, becoming John. In this new identity she discovers herself to be gay, i.e. John identifies as homosexual. But John has a female body and uses it accordingly. So John uses his female body to sleep with men: it may look like typical heterosexual sex, but from the inside the erstwhile Joan is a man sleeping with another man. John is both homosexual and heterosexual, and quite happy with the combination. He is attracted to people of the same sex as him considered psychologically, but his biological identity implies heterosexual sexual behavior. He feels himself to be a gay man, but his way of expressing this is to use his female body in the biologically indicated manner.  [1]

            Here is an even more challenging case: Percy has a very special psychological identity—he feels himself to be a woman who identifies as a man. At present he is simply a man with an unusual yearning, but he wishes to transform himself into something closer to his subjective identity. Accordingly, he transitions to a female persona by changing his clothes, manner, etc. Now Percy is a woman who wishes she were a man: call this person Pearl. Pearl would like to become a man, or so she says. Percy has achieved his wish, but Pearl has wishes of her own—she wants to become a man. Maybe she does, by adopting male accouterments: but then we are back where we started—a man who wishes he were a woman wanting to be a man. If Pearl decides she is a lesbian, is she a heterosexual or a homosexual? She is a woman sleeping with other women using a male body, but she also identifies as male: she is homosexual psychologically, heterosexual biologically, and also heterosexual psychologically (since she identifies as male while being psychologically female). It sounds like a very difficult psychological state to be in, and perhaps one that can never actually occur. But it shows what can happen when biological sexuality and psychological sexuality diverge in logically possible ways. We may need to reckon with far more complex forms of sexuality than the few forms currently recognized. Possible worlds may be sexually much richer than we can easily imagine.            

  [1] If you were to transfer the brain of a homosexual man into a woman’s body, you would get something like John: the brain would want men, while the female body would have to suffice for sexual relations.