The Ideal of the Embodiment of Truth
Temporary Knowledge of Truth
Personal Experience of the Goals of Knowledge in Music
The Origin of Philosophical Multiplicity
Loss of the Philosophical Cognition of Unity
Philosophical Aspiration and Philosophical Ability
The Poetical Means for the Cognition of Truth
The Dynamic Power of the Sound of Words
Scientifically Systematizing Multiplicity
The Differentiated Path of Musical Communication of Truth
The Integrated Path of Musical Communication of Truth
The Path of Knowledge
and the Goal of Truth
If true classical music is presented by creative performers, then, as opposed to the scientific system of philosophy, it is able to turn man into an embodiment of truth, into a truly wise man, into a free man.
Music
vividly demonstrates to the seeker of truth the potential of knowing truth,
and places him through the knowl-edge of truth into the state of embodiment
of truth – for a short time at first, and then for longer and longer
periods.
Thus, it guides him by virtue of the musical logic into the world of experience
of the wise who lives truth.
Like
that, music conveys the experience of all the advantages which result from
knowing truth, and the classical art of sound brings about, among others,
the experience of perfect innermost joy of life, the experience of unrestricted
acceptance of life, and the total musical experience of comprehensive insight
into the true functioning of nature.
Beyond that, music even conveys the experience of the almighty creative power.
In the last millenia, owing to its nature, its categorical treatment of meanings, the conventional scientific system of philosophizing by word and by letter was able to vaguely describe to man only the cognitive path of the intellect, a fact from which consequently arose the multitude of ideological, philosophical, religious, and political systems, and from which ever new multitudes appear.
However,
the natural unity underlying such diversity cannot be comprehended by means
of either conventional writing or by words as they are used today.
For neither the spoken nor the printed word are able to stimulate and awaken
the feeling in completeness.
Yet all the great philosophers aspire unity in their conception of the world and absurdly, so long as they operated on the meaning of words to circumscribe their thought, they chose the intellectual discussion in word and in writing – the medium least suited for the cognition of unity.
Proceeding from the meaning of the word, the great poets take into account the sound of the word much more than do the philosophers who operate on the meaning alone, and by this they come much closer to the emotional gaining knowledge than the philosophers.
For the sound, the rhythmical structure and the melodious development of the word are suited by nature to appeal to the feeling – in the flow of time, i.e. as a dynamic process.
Unfortunately, the meaning of a word is not able to directly stimulate the feeling in contemporary man, and certainly not in man of the last millenia because, simply physically, it lacks the dynamic power.
So, in its process of gaining knowledge, the conventional system of scientific philosophy rests almost exclusively on the intellectual ability of discrimination of the understanding, and therefore, as a system, it leads essentially towards diversity but never towards unity. Here, music simultaneously takes a twofold path:
Like the conventional scientific system of philosophy, music describes in its various musical force-fields the differentiation of the forms and phenomena of nature – the objective ones in the musical sound-space, the subjective ones in the motif-space, the social ones in the sequence-space – and the integrated wholeness of all differentiated phenomena in the infinite space of the harmony.
Simultaneously, however, with its differentiated way of describing the facts, music presents a consistent, dynamic process in which those facts are created, changed, re-formed again and again, and finally brought to decay – on all levels of the musical description.
© AAR EDITION INTERNATIONAL 1982