MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

(Tuis.) #1

Conclusion


Cheesecake, or metaphysics?

After Adorno’s sombre analyses of the place of music in moder-
nity, in which pleasure is often subordinated to truth, there might
seem to be something refreshing about the bluff hedonism of Steven
Pinker’s claims that music is ‘auditory cheesecake’ (Pinker 1997 :
534 ) and that ‘the direct effect of music is sheer, pointless pleasure’
(www.lse.ac.uk/collections/evolutionist/pinker.htm). The difference
between Pinker and Adorno is a somewhat drastic illustration of how
the split between metaphysics 1 and metaphysics 2 can manifest itself in
modernity. In a riposte to the comical reductionism of evolutionary psy-
chology’s treatment of cultural issues, Louis Menand suggests against
Pinker that:


Music appreciation, for instance, seems to be wired in at about the level
of ‘Hot Cross Buns.’ But people learn to enjoy Wagner. They even learn
to sing Wagner. One suspects that enjoying Wagner, singing Wagner,
anything to do with Wagner, is in gross excess of the requirements of
natural selection. To say that music is the product of a gene for ‘art-
making,’ naturally selected to impress potential mates – which is one
of the things Pinker believes – is to say absolutely nothing about what
makes any particular piece of music significant to human beings. No
doubt Wagner wished to impress potential mates; who does not? It is a
long way from there to ‘Parsifal’.
(www.newyorker.com/critics/books/? 021125 crbobooks. See also
Simon Blackburn: http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/∼swb 24 /reviews/Pinker.htm.)

Pinker is not worth taking seriously in this context (and in quite a few
others): he too often fails to separate how an aspect of culture may
have originated from how it subsequently becomes significant. The two


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