Freedom and Necessity. And MusicProf. Terry Pinkard (Georgetown University)
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Freedom and Necessity. And Music
In his lectures on art in 1823, Hegel claimed that the elemental force of great music has to do with the way we hear in it the struggle between freedom and necessity. It’s a nice turn of phrase, but what would it mean in Hegel’s terms and in general for us to “hear” such a thing? To get a grip on Hegel’s turn on phrase requires us to understand how Hegel thinks that art is not a fully conceptual grasp of what it is to be a ‘minded” (geistig) creature, but it is also nonetheless not a non-conceptual grasp of mindedness, and part of that has to do with Hegel’s assertion that thought is “embodied” in a work of art. To understand that assertion, we need to understand another of Hegel’s assertions in the lectures on music that the “being of the subject is in time.” Thus, to understand what Hegel was claiming in his lectures on music, we need to have some appraisal of how he thought the struggle between freedom and necessity was to be resolved within his own philosophy, why that had something non-trivially to do with the temporality of human agency, and what any of that has to do with music. To make that argument, I will look at the one piece of music Hegel discusses at length – Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni – to work out what his own argument for the relation between freedom and necessity has to be.
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