We all know the meme, we’ve seen it across Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest.

“Music is Life.” “Music can change the world because it can change people.” “Life is like music: It must be composed by fear, feeling and instinct.” et cetera.

While these are nice quotes for teenage girls to put on their bedroom walls, they don’t tell us much about music.

Despite being banal, trite, and often irritating, these cliché quotes do offer some insight into the nature of music. If anything, they point us to the important role music takes in our lives. If one were to take a survey, I’d bet 9 out of 10 people would say music exists for entertainment. We listen to it while driving, running, cooking, cleaning, working, studying; we dance to it, we tell others about it, we sing along with it.

I’d agree with any person who says that 99% of music on the radio serves one purpose: entertainment. I’m guilty of listening to it…we’re all guilty. We love being flattered by our modern day sophists, i.e. the musical “artist.” So is it the case that music is simply a mode of entertainment?

I hope not.

True music may be entertaining, but it is not simply entertainment. True music (i.e. music that is not just entertainment) does something unique to the person listening. E.T.A. Hoffmann, in his essay on Beethoven, speaks about this unique relationship between the nature of music and what it does to the listener.

Some readers may find Hoffmann’s essay too polemic; however, Hoffmann touches upon certain characteristics of music which open the door toward a genuine understanding of music’s impact on the human person.

In his introduction, Hoffmann states,

“Music discloses to man an unknown realm, a world that has nothing in common with the external sensual world that surrounds him, a world in which he leaves behind him all definite feelings to surrender himself to an inexpressible longing.”

This passage provides a summary of Hoffmann’s analysis.

He continues in his essay describing Beethoven to Mozart and Haydn. Although Mozart and Haydn begin to capture what lies at the heart of music, it is not until the arrival of Beethoven that man surrenders himself to an inexpressible longing. Thus, Hoffmann says,

“Beethoven’s instrumental music opens to us also the realm of the monstrous and the immeasurable. Burning flashes of light shoot through the deep night of this realm, and we become narrower and narrower confines until they destroy us – but not the pain of that endless longing in which each joy that has climbed aloft in jubilant song sinks back and is swallowed up, and it is only in this pain, which consumes love, hope, and happiness but does not destroy them, which seeks to burst our breasts with a many-voiced consonance of all the passions, that we live on, enchanted beholders of the supernatural!”

What a bold claim! Through instrumental music – music which Hoffmann claims is true music – the listener is moved out of this earthly realm and is “destroyed” by the Infinite. Yet, man’s longing for the Infinite remains.

In his essay, “Thoughts About Music,” Josef Pieper writes,

“Music prompts the philosopher’s continued interest because it is by its nature so close to the fundamentals of human existence….The one question particularly intriguing to the searching mind of the philosopher when he reflects on the phenomenon of music is this: What indeed do we perceive when we listen to music?”

Addressing the question, “What do we perceive when we listen to music?” Pieper discovers that there is no particular object as with other arts; that is, some represented objective reality. Even lyrical music does not provide man with an object in the proper sense of the term. One hears the words and can derive meaning from them but there is an additional meaning in the music itself, something absent in the words. Pieper asks again, “What is it we perceive in music?” He answers by quoting Schopenhauer, who states, “Music ‘does not speak of things but tells of weal and woe.”

Pieper clarifies,

“Weal and woe – these are concepts related to the will; they point to the bonum, the good, seen as the intrinsic moving force of the will. The will is always directed toward the good.”

Addressing any moralistic misconceptions, Pieper gives an existentialist definition of man. Man is a homo viator – a man on a journey.

“Man’s being is always dynamic (geschehendes Sein); man is never just ‘there’. Man ‘is’ insofar as he ‘becomes’ – not only in his physical reality….In his spiritual reality, too, man is constantly moving on….man is intrinsically a pilgrim, ‘not yet arrived.”

We can ask, “What is it that man moves towards?” – Pieper answers, the good. This movement towards the good always has happiness as its objective. Pieper notes,

“Neither this object (Glückseligkeit) nor this process (becoming) can ever be adequately described in words….St. Augustine declares: ‘The Good – you hear this word and you take a deep breath; you hear it and you utter a sigh….We cannot say, and yet cannot be silent either….What are we to do, employing neither speech nor silence? We ought to rejoice! Jubilate! Shout out your heart’s delight in wordless jubilation!’ Such ‘wordless jubilation’ is known as music!”

Here we begin to see the insight Hoffmann provides in his essay. The longing for the Infinite is something real. Man’s fundamental disposition as a homo viator is to find bliss in the Infinite. Through his music, Beethoven allows the music to swallow up the happiness of jubilant song. In doing so, “[It] does not destroy them,” as Hoffmann states, “[But] seeks to burst our breast with a many-voiced consonance of all the passions, that we live on, enchanted beholders of the supernatural!” Through Pieper we see how Hoffmann expresses ideas concerning the nature of instrumental music and man. Yet we can ask, “What is it in music that allows man to yearn for the Infinite?”

To answer, let us turn to Dietrich von Hildebrand’s writing on aesthetics.

Since the majority of von Hildebrand’s aesthetical writings have not been translated, I’ll actually draw from John F. Crosby’s entry in The Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics. As with the majority of his other works, von Hildebrand embeds his value theory within his aesthetics.

Crosby states,

“By ‘value’ von Hildebrand means the intrinsic worthiness or excellence or nobility or dignity of a being. And according to him values are not scattered and random phenomena, but are gathered into an ordered whole.”

Unlike a bonum, values are not something relational to the person, that is, beneficial for them. Their dignity and worthiness is something values contain in themselves. From this von Hildebrand determines that all values in have an “aesthetic value,” namely something admirable or beautiful about them. Although they all contain this “aesthetic value,” their aesthetic appeal is secondary to their primary “metaphysical beauty.” Thus, there are two categories, values which have “metaphysical beauty” and those which are “aesthetic values” in and of themselves, e.g. music. Although all values have an aesthetical dimension to them, one (e.g. Hume) could make the claim for aesthetical subjectivity among pure aesthetic values. Von Hildebrand argues against this claim, emphasizing the objectivity of aesthetic value.

Crosby continues,

“By objectivity he of course means, to begin with, that aesthetic value is not given to us as a component of our experiencing (as if it were a part of our conscious experiencing, or Erleben), but is given over and against us, as an intentional object in or on some being. But he also means more than this: he means that beings having aesthetic value really do have it, so that they show themselves for what they really are when we experience them as beautiful, which means that people who fail to experience them as beautiful also fail to experience what is really there.”

This insight into the objectivity of aesthetic values allows for what Crosby claims as

“His greatest single contribution to aesthetics….Take the beauty of the streaked colors appearing in the clear sky at dawn; von Hildebrand is struck by the depth and sublimity that can be found in this beauty, and also struck by the fact that the beauty does not seem to be proper to, or proportioned to, the light and colors and spatial expanse from which it arises.”

From what we have gathered, Hoffmann opens the door to a genuine analysis of music. In Beethoven’s instrumental music, we are taken up in rapture toward the Infinite – in a sense, destroying oneself. Yet this destruction is a destruction of the finitude of this existence, replaced with the yearning for the supernatural. Pieper affirms this claim in his essay on music. Music is a wordless expression of man’s journey towards bliss. With von Hildebrand, we see how music as an aesthetic value contains within itself an objective dimension, whereby the human person is drawn out of himself into a transcendental relationship. The sublimity of Beethoven’s music – emphasized by Hoffmann – does not depend on man’s Erleben, but in a sense, pours itself out upon human experience.

The result of this overflow of beauty is that man loses himself in this world and is taken up into the world of the supernatural. It is this sublime reality to which Hoffmann emphatically returns. With these two authors, we can see the “destruction” Hoffmann explains is actually a positive destruction. We experience the beauty of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as it really is – namely, an expression of man’s longing for bliss, for the Infinite. Music, as an expression of the relationship between Infinity and the finite, is something real. True music is more than entertainment, it is something lived in man’s experience.