Ethics, Music, and Beauty

Yesterday, when I got up in the morning, the question came to me of whether there is an ethic expressed in music. 

It’s a difficult concept to come to. After all, music is a language without any words; it is the language of the feeling. In this sense, there’s a high standard in music; music, at its heart, ought to be beautiful. While the interpretations of beauty are often subjective — even Leonardo da Vinci himself pointed out that extraordinary ugliness represents a special kind of beauty — human beings, whether secular or religious, have little doubt that beauty is real. Beauty emerges from comparative: it is excellent, it stands out from the rest as being more pleasing. It has an aesthetic quality. I think you’ll agree it’s hard to imagine a person who’s repelled by everything; just about every living creature has attractions of some kind, and some of them are aesthetic.

In fact, we might say that all attractions are ultimately aesthetic. The word aesthetic derives from the Greek aisthesthai, meaning that which is perceived. 

Beauty is, in other words, that which is both perceived and considered through evaluation to be better than other things that are perceived. It emerges from an action of discrimination. That discrimination takes place in perception, in observation.

In our essential nature as vessels into which the world flows, all creatures which are alive take place in perception of one kind or another. This is in the nature of life; as I explained yesterday, a tablet of soft material into which impressions are engraved. In the case of human beings — and probably, one might presume, other creatures as well — the act of perception includes a reciprocal action of discrimination, in which things are evaluated and ranked in an order. This is where the idea of ethic enters, because ethic is derived from another Greek word, ethos, which means nature or disposition, but extends itself to the concept of customs, of morality, a moral order.

Thus it is nearly impossible to separate the idea of ethics from the idea of order; and beauty is a consequence of the ordering or ranking of things. All of these are tied together in a single action that takes place in a human being when they see something that appears to be beautiful.

By the time we appreciate beauty, and think to ourselves, “that’s beautiful,” the evaluation has already been made. It takes place in a subtle place that cannot be picked apart by psychology or physiology. It is an action of the spirit. It would be impossible to teach any algorithm this action, because algorithms are creatures of mathematics and not of the soul. We may know, for example, that an algorithm is beautiful in the way it expresses a mathematical truth; but the algorithm can never know that of itself. It would have to be told. Yet in man, and in other creatures, the appreciation and perception of beauty is part of our nature. When a bird chooses their mate, a significant part of the decision is made by how beautiful the mate is. This is true of many animals. A selection by preference takes place. We focus on that in regard to sexual reproduction, but selection by preference is the predominant action of agency in its relationship with the outside world; in other words, the soul is drawn towards what it loves the better. Swedenborg made much of this in his evaluation of how human beings operate from within.

Yet this selection by preference, this evolution of beauty and its accompanying aesthetic and ethic ( right or natural ordering), does not belong to mankind. It is a thing much greater than we are; and one need only appreciate the extraordinary aesthetic of nature and the creatures and objects it produces — take a look at a gem beryl crystal, for example, or praying mantis that is indistinguishable from a leaf —to understand that beauty and its accompanying satellite natures are inherent. They arise with or without man. The same beauty that man perceives today was present 70 million years ago during the age of the dinosaurs. It is certain that dinosaurs, during that era, had their own appreciations of beauty — the extraordinary crests that some of them developed, as well as the now confirmed fact that they bore coats of striking feathers identical to those of birds today —and none of that beauty was there for man. It existed unto itself.

In this way, we know that beauty exists unto itself, and is not just for us. We also know that it bespeaks an order related to this selection by preference, which is the universe in search of its own beauty.

Music, in its own right, speaks of this ethic. It is not the ethic of man, however, which seeks to impose one set of values on another persons in order to regulate their behavior. It’s an ethic free of such constraints, free of the intellectual prisons we build for ourselves. Feeling, left entirely to its own action — which is in a certain sense what music does — creates an extraordinary world of its own that centers around this idea of beauty, which is instinctive within human beings. It is also a shared language; the inflections of minor keys, for example, are understood by all humans to represent a certain kind of sadness. You can feel this; one doesn’t need words to explain it. Certain vibrations affect the human nervous system in that way, because this is how feeling works. It doesn’t need thought to regulate it. Rather, it regulates thought; or, at least, it ought to.

Getting back to Leonardo’s observation that ugliness is also beautiful, we see that beauty is in the “I” of the beholder. Not the physical eye; this is just a machine, although one in and of itself of great beauty. It is in the personage that perceives that beauty resides; it arises from relationship with what is perceived. There is a deep mystery behind perception and love; certain objects have greater beauty than others in any discriminating hierarchy of aesthetics, and among aesthetes— those who appreciate beauty as a primary interest — there is often broad agreement about what beauty consists of. Some of this is formed by culture; but a deeper part of it belongs to the collective unconscious of mankind, and beyond that and even deeper part belongs to the spiritual being of mankind, that is, it resides in the soul itself.

All things, in their essence, are beautiful, even things that seem horrible to us, because all things in creation emanate from the spiritual entirety of God. All things are created through love, exist within love, and emanate love. Love, furthermore, contains its own opposite within it in a fundamentally loving way, which is another mystery of the spiritual life that can only be penetrated through great suffering and acts of perception too deep for the ordinary mind to encounter or explain. I can’t explain myself except to tell you here that it is quite true and worthy of contemplation.

The point I am working towards here is that both the hierarchy of aesthetic order and complete indifference to it are necessary. Beauty inhabits its own octave, in which each note of the octave represents a different level. Every one of them is necessary in order to construct the octave. It is a whole thing that cannot be dissected with the rational mind;but, like the musical octave, songs and symphonies can be created with it. Some of them will be dissonant; it is in the nature of any octave to have the capacity for producing an extraordinary range of relationships, each one of which is a valid expression within the movement of the notes.

This may seem like a rather wide-ranging material relative to the question of whether there is an ethic in music or not. Yet I think that all of these things need to be considered in the question. Any ethic presumes the existence of the good; and I defy anyone to conceive of a world where the existence of the good can be denied. Even a bad person ( as measured by others) believes their own badness to be the good. Within the context of material creation, goodness is relative; and this is where we discover hierarchies, comparisons, and rankings. Yet there is a metaphysical goodness, a goodness of the spirit and the soul, that represents a higher truth; and music can come to that objectively, because it doesn’t belong to the rational mind. Feeling, which is what music touches, has a more sensitive and nuanced ability to understand. The very fact that that understanding isn’t in words is what makes it strong and gives it depth. It stands alongside sensation in this regard. Both of them are representatives of the good.

What that means can only be explored spiritually, and not deductively, by deconstruction, rationalization, and so on. It may, however, with enough examination, provide an interesting new center of gravity from which to consider music.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.