Total Eclipse

Have you ever felt something best expressed in music? That words are like shadow-things, falling just off your true mean, but music, as in, like a metaphor, somehow manages to “show” what you mean?

A kind of close approximation sense, but still more real than any words could ever refer to.

I’m working on a project for my Psychology Research Methods class, and it may involve testing, under controlled conditions, the ABC (Affect, Behaviour, and Cognition) effects of music . Particularly the way nonverbal music can, in some way “colour” our perspective or world view. There is no “sad” music or “happy” music, but our minds make it so.

I still need to arrange my thoughts a bit on the subject, but it’s interesting to consider this; Though I accept the rejection of Private Language, for Wittgenstienian considerations, is it possible that there are still some sort of special thoughts or ideas which are, in essence, by virtue unexpressable?
Wittgenstein seems to have thought that Ethic and Aesthetic judgments lie in this realm. Though these sentences are nonsense, and say nothing at all about the world, they still somehow show us something. That which is miraculous and magical, the sense of wonderment at the existence of the world, or the feeling of absolute safety. These are true experiences, though our language lacks the capacity to express them.

It’s interesting to think that perhaps the artistic impulse, and music in particular, is somehow our novel way of trying to show what we can never say.

“The test of the integrity of a poem, or any work of art, may be, simply:
does it lead, in the end, to freedom, or does it merely expand the arena
of confinement? A voice from the outside, truly, is what we need to hear.
Even a single word. Even something that is not a word, but suggests such a
word.”

- Jesse Bernstein, 1987

Tagged as expression, Ludwig Wittgenstein, music, nonsense, Psychology, quote, Steven Jesse Bernstein + Categorized as Art/Culture, Philosophy