Music and Spirituality, Part II: The Difference Ontology Makes

My last post, which was about music and spirituality, sparked a number of thoughtful comments. As I started to respond to some of these, my response kept growing until I realized that it should be a post of its own. So...here is Part Two, in which I want to focus more deeply on what difference, if any, our ontology makes for assessing the significance and value of our aesthetic responses to music (and other aesthetic objects, human-made and otherwise).


Let me begin by sharing my affinity for Bernard’s comment, when he expresses “great wonder in being able to create worlds through words which are then reimagined into existence in brains on the other side of the globe. I delight in this from a purely materialist point of view.” Like Bernard, I think there is something amazing about the idea that activity in my brain could produce something in the physical world—a work of fiction, say—which would then stimulate the brains of people across the world to follow patterns similar to (but not identical with) many of those that motivated the author (and many of those experienced by other readers).

But if this is right, does that mean I should be able to dispense with any non-materialist beliefs without my aesthetic experience thereby losing any of its significance? Let me put it this way. When I contemplate a world in which artists produce physical artifacts that stimulate the brains of others, producing a kind of connection and harmony among far-flung human brains—well, I find this to be a kind of meta-level artistic creation. One of the wonders of a live musical performance is that this kind of shared experience can itself become an object of experience by musicians and listeners. One gazes across the auditorium and sees feet tapping to the same rhythm as one’s own, tension building and releasing in tandem across dozens of faces, etc.

The original work of art—the musical work or the piece of creative writing—becomes an instrument for producing another work of art at a higher level, one painted on a human canvas. And this work of art is beautiful.

But the same question that we confronted with respect to the beauty of the original work arises with respect to the beauty of this meta-level creation. In what does that beauty consist? Is the beauty of this neurological interplay among different human brains just another brain response? When I call this interplay beautiful, does that simply mean that when my brain receives this interplay as input, it is stimulated to generate a certain kind of pleasure response?

More profoundly, does it matter? Does it make a difference for the significance of the statement “X is beautiful” whether my subjective response to X is produced by its beauty (and is a fitting or appropriate response to its beauty) or whether the statement just means “X produces in me (and others) a certain kind of neurological response.”

One thing we can say about the latter alternative is this: If beauty just is a neurological response (or, more precisely, if something having the property of being beautiful just amounts to it have the propensity to produce a certain kind of neurological response in human observers), then it is a contingent fact that Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is a great aesthetic work whereas my dog’s farts are not (please excuse the crudeness--my dogs have been eating something recently that made this example leap to mind).

What this contingent fact is contingent upon is what our human neurological wiring happens be. Had human brains been wired differently, so as to generate the kinds of responses to canine farts that Beethoven’s 9th tends to produce and vice versa, then—by virtue of brain wiring—it would be true that canine farts are things of sublime beauty whereas Beethoven’s 9th is not.

And it would follow, furthermore, that there would be nothing deficient or defective about our brain responses in this hypothetical state of affairs. That is, we could not rightly say that brains wired in this way are less discerning than brains wired in the other way (in the way that we could, for example, say that brains which fail to distinguish between fresh milk and spoiled milk are deficient in their capacity to discern significant truths about the world).

Let me summarize my point in the following way. Consider this claim: “Beethoven’s 9th symphony is a sublime aesthetic achievement worthy of Beethoven’s labors, and if our brains were wired such that we found more of aesthetic value in sniffing dog farts, then our brains would be deficiently wired.” This statement is true only if there is more to beauty than a certain kind of neurological response. If “beautiful” just means “apt to produce X kind of neurological response,” then the claim is false (because in that case alternative neural wiring could never lead to deficiencies in aesthetic discernment, and certain kinds of alternative wiring would entail that Beethoven’s efforts become aesthetically fruitless—akin to the compositional efforts of my tone deaf friend from high school—without there being any change in the actual substance of what he produced).

Now I’m pretty sure that if reductive materialism is true, then we must accept all of these implications. But I’m also pretty sure that these implications are not trivial—that they do have an impact on the significance of what is going on between artists and their audiences. If these implications are right, and there were some drug that could mimic the neurological effects of exposure to a flawless performance of Beethoven’s 9th, then wouldn’t the act of administering the drug have a comparable aesthetic significance as the act of putting on a flawless performance of Beethoven’s 9th?

Perhaps there is a difference insofar as the performers undergo neurological events that aren’t repeated when the drug is administered on the would-be audience. But then suppose there’s another drug that could produce in the would-be musicians the relevant neurological outcomes.

One might point out that administering these drugs severs the neurological activities associated with our encounter with a flawless performance of Beethoven’s 9th from the actual human effort that ordinarily goes into such a performance—the hours of individual practice and collective rehearsal, not to mention the investment of energy and attention during performance. One might suppose (and I think this is true) that the aesthetic “payoff” is cheapened if cut off from that effort—that there is something valuable about these aesthetic payoffs being the result of the cultivation of human talents and the collective effort to channel those talents together into a great performance.

But when we say it is valuable that these things--artistic effort and aesthetic payoff--be linked, what do we mean? The value of connecting effort with a certain kind of outcome is not a physical property of that connection, measurable with scientific instruments, etc. And so materialism cannot treat that value as a property of the connection. It has to treat it as nothing more than a subjective response to that connection. And if subjective responses are nothing more than neurological responses, the value of this connection just is another neurological response.

And so, once again, what if there were a drug that could produce that response? Of course, there isn’t. But the point is that if there were, the reductive materialist could offer no reason to favor a world in which musicians cultivate their talents and put on a great performance over a world in which the right drug cocktail is administered instead. The materialist cannot offer any such reasons because the offering of such reasons requires that there be objective values—aesthetic and other kinds of values that aren’t just “in our heads.” (I think this line of thought has bearing on issues of free will as well, but I won’t pursue that here).

Of course, the reductive materialist can still point out that, as a matter of contingent fact, we don’t have the hypothesized drugs. And so, in the real world, the desired neurological effects will be achieved only if actual musicians take up their instruments, work hard, and put on a performance before an appreciative audience. Since the desired effects really are highly desired and appreciated by many, this means that the work of musicians and other artists has real significance in the actual world, even if materialism is true. But my point is that, given reductive materialism, there is nothing about a great performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony that makes it true of that performance that it is has aesthetic merit. The aesthetic merit is purely a brain event, which can hypothetically exist even in the absence of the work of art.

Now, obviously, none of this is an argument for the existence of God. At most, it is an argument in support of looking for some coherent alternative to the reductive materialist account of aesthetic value. But whether it is even that much is open to dispute. What I have most directly aimed to do here is point out that the reductive materialist account has implications for our understanding of aesthetics that I (and others) find both counterintuitive and personally troubling. These troubling implications can be avoided only if we assume that aesthetic judgments have an objective truth value—that is, only if they are true or false apart from what is going on in our heads. And it is hard to see how they can have such a truth value if we accept a materialist ontology.

While this helps to explain why I am drawn to alternative ontologies—why I might “root for them,” so to speak—can it have any bearing on what it is reasonable for me to believe?

As has been pointed out before, one cannot conclude that an ontology is false just because one finds it to be troubling or counterintuitive. That is, true statements are often personally troubling, and our intuitions can deceive us. But, as has also been pointed out before, there is a big difference between a holistic interpretation of experience and a specific hypothesis about the world of experience for which specifiable standards of evidence are clearly applicable. Among other things, one’s holistic interpretation of experience plays a crucial role in determining which of our experiences are to be treated as having the veridicality necessary for counting as evidence. As such, when we go about deciding on a holistic interpretation of experience, any attempt to do so by first settling on specific criteria of evidence will beg the question (because we will thereby implicitly embrace a holistic interpretation of experience in advance).

So how do we approach the task of deciding among such holistic interpretations, if any standard of evidence we invoke for doing so is necessarily going to beg the question? As I have alluded to before, Hegel offers an approach that I think is quite brilliant (even if his own application of that approach was, in my judgment, fatally infected by arrogance)—an approach which proposes that we tentatively “put on” or try out a holistic framework with its standards of evidence and see where it takes us. His presumption is that an inadequate framework will encounter deep problems of various kinds (which he collectively calls “contradictions”). We should then revise the framework to overcome these problems and try out the new and improved framework to expose its problems. And so on.

I will develop these ideas more fully in a later series on Hegel. For now, I just want to note that in this methodological approach, our intuitions as well as an awareness of where we cry out in protest against a framework’s implications can and do play a role.

One last point deserves mention. An important reason why many insist that aesthetics is ultimately all in our heads is because they believe that treating aesthetic claims as objective makes no sense. And the reason why they think this is because they implicitly or explicitly accept the core thesis of logical positivism, which holds the following:

“In order for a proposition to be a meaningful statement (that is, a statement with a truth value), it must either be an empirically testable claim (a claim such that the world would be different in empirically discernible ways were the claim true than it would be were the claim false) or an analytic one (one that asserts a logical relationship among concepts).”

I will hereafter refer to this as the "Logical Positivist Thesis." If this Logical Positivist Thesis is embraced, then aesthetic judgments will be meaningful only if they are understood to be saying something about what is going on in our heads. Why? First of all, because aesthetic judgments are not analytic, and so (given the Logical Postivist Thesis) in order to be meaningful they need to be empirically testable. But, to put it loosely, no scientific instrument could measure how many turps of beauty are contained in Beethoven’s 9th. If beauty is a property of the symphony, it’s not an empirical one. Since Logical Positivism has no room for the meaningful attribution of non-empirical properties, it must either dismiss aesthetic judgments as meaningless or identify them with something that is empirical. Neurological activity is empirical, and it does correlate with judgments of beauty (that is, those who experience what they take to be beautiful have something going on in their heads that is empirically different from what is going on in the heads of those who are smelling dog farts). And so the identification is made.

The big problem with this entire line of thought—one I’ve pointed out before—is that the Logical Positivist Thesis is self-referentially incoherent: it’s neither empirically testable nor analytic. And so, if we accept it, we must reject it. It is one of those principles which absolutely cannot be true. And this means that there must exist meaningful (true and false) statements that are neither empirically testable nor analytic.

In short, it is necessarily true that there exists a class of meaningful propositions (propositions which have a truth value) which are not reducible to empirical or analytic propositions. There must be true propositions that are not just matters of how ideas are related to each other, and are not empirically testable statements about the material world.

Perhaps aesthetic propositions fall into this class.