Will Humanity Survive Religion?. W. Royce Clark
the uniqueness of each performance and even hearing of recorded music. Third, it has been argued scientifically that music is more inherent in or natural to the human brain than language, that many more sections of the brain are required for this “hard-wiring” than even for language, and that its connection to the cerebellum or “reptilian brain” reveals its connection to dopamine, to pleasure, therefore to pleasant memories, which acts as stimulus for remembering and even survival of the species. See note 32 below. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music.
30. But I make no claims of being an expert on semiotics, and so must rely on others, including the brilliant and fantastic writer, Umberto Eco. See his Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1997).
31. In chapter 7, we will see how these relations between part and whole enable one to construct a “history” as Wilhelm Dilthey described it.
32. The precedence of a capacity for music in the human brain involves more than anything else what Levitin calls “schemas,” in which the brain is able to form a coherent whole of various parts, and “multiple-trace memory models” by which the brain can extract invariant properties of a piece of music even when one hears it in radically different variations precisely because the brain preserves some context for these memories that enables them to be revived because of unique cues attached to them. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music, 228–34; and chapter 5, esp. 158–63. This same ability of the brain to fill in blanks, to correct spelling, to make connections that are not explicitly given, are at the root of Pinker’s understanding of how the mind works, using visual images, phonological representation, grammatical representation, and what he calls “mentalese.” Pinker, How the Mind Works, pp. 85–86, 89–90, 104.
33. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Gramercy Books, 1994), see esp. pp. 73–105 regarding the “for-itself” as it faces its consciousness, nothingness, and possibility of realizing its totality as its own project, so he uses “project” as both a verb and noun.
34. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 354–457. He insists that while speculative reason or pure reason helps one to sense the unity necessary in understanding, which requires not simply the categories of judgment but experience, in itself “speculative reason” is only “regulative” rather than “constitutive.”
35. I use musical illustrations here for several reasons. First, I am very personally acquainted with its power and meaning, and agree with many people who have seen it as the most transcendent expressions of humans, not in being “absolute,” but in its apparent ability to help one transcend one’s situation momentarily in imagination, to feel being a part of a greater whole. Second, it differs from many other art forms in its transient nature, in its living presence, its irreversibility of movement, and in the uniqueness of each performance and even hearing of recorded music. Third, it has been argued scientifically that music is more inherent in or natural to the human brain even more than language, that many more sections of the brain are required for this “hard-wiring” than even for language, and that its connection to the cerebellum or “reptilian brain” reveals its connection to dopamine, to pleasure, therefore to pleasant memories, which therefore acts as stimulus for remembering and even survival of the species. On this last point, see Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music. William James, whose Varieties of Religious Experience suggested that mysticism was the primary relation involved within religion, also equated music with mysticism. Among the scholars we put primary focus on in this book, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Tillich, Altizer, Panikkar, Rubenstein, and Scharlemann—all saw music and/or mysticism’s profound connection to human consciousness, so to religious consciousness.
36. I am not suggesting that the tones have to be audible to human ears to have their “temporal actualization.” We are quite aware that most composers could “hear” the tones, chords, even complex sequencing and development completely in their minds. But meaning still required a “temporal actualization” even if only within the mind. Here it is likely that more general symbols interacted with each other in the composer’s mind rather than simply every single tone. This would fit more Pinker’s understanding of the impossibility of models in the mind being overly specific and therefore too innumerable for the mind to store or find useful. How the Mind Works.
37. This was Nietzsche’s point when he insisted that one cannot pick and choose from past history; one must will it all since it is a whole. That means whatever tragedies I see in the past, though I deplore them, I cannot will even to have eliminated the autonomy of those who perhaps selected wrong alternatives or acted inhumanely. If one loves life, one would will it to repeat itself all over again, exactly as it was, with all the joys but also all the heartache, illness, and alienation from others. That would be the only real “redemption.” See note #43 below.
38. Lee Yearly noted that as necessary as genuine discourse is in our pursuit of the “flourishing life,” there can come a point when the conflict becomes too extrinsic or inhumane or threatening of unworthy goals that one will tend to discontinue trying to dissuade the other or may even turn one’s attention to try to protect others from the opposition’s influence. Lee Yearly, “Conflict Among Ideals of Human Flourishing,” in Prospects for a Common Morality, ed. Gene Outka and John P. Reeder, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 233–52, esp. p. 238.
39. Panikkar speaks in similar terms: “The meaning of your life does not rest only in its final achievement, just as the sense of a symphony is not merely in the finale.” Raimundo Panikkar, Invisible Harmony: Essays on Contemplation and Responsibility (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), p. 8. Rather than use the old idea (or even a new idea) of a monad, or some negative theology, which reduces the dialogical importance of the differences, he suggests the concept of “concord,” and then compares it to music again; “Concord” “defies quantification. Neither multiplicity as such nor sheer unity brings about, or even allows, harmony. Harmony implies a constitutive polarity, which cannot be superseded dialectically. It would be destroyed. Concord is neither oneness nor plurality. It is the dynamism of the Many toward the One without ceasing to be different and without losing uniqeness, and without reaching a higher synthesis. There is no harmonical accord if there is no plurality of sounds, or if those sounds coalesce in one single note. Neither many nor one, but concord, harmony” p. 178.
40. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, chapter 7 on Proust and Nietzsche. Rorty lists Nietzsche with Hegel and Heidegger in the sense that he seemed to want to have the final word and encompass the whole. Yet Nietzsche considered change or contingency as much or more than Heidegger, and Rorty notes that the late Heidegger at least changed his vocabulary considerably to place himself within the relativity of history. In any case, Hegel was an “irony theorist.”
41. Steven Pinker, in his How the Mind Works, uses the sentence “The baby ate the slug” to illustrate the compositional aspect of speech (and of the mind). “The whole is not the sum of the parts; when the words are rearranged into The slug ate the baby, a different idea is conveyed.” So everything depends upon the relation or position of the various parts to the whole or the sentence or composition. He says that the mind, “equipped with the concepts of babies, slugs, and eating, and with an ability to arrange symbols for them on a mental bulletin board according to a scheme that can be registered by the demons that read it, enables a person to” think the thought for the first time in your life.” (p. 118)
42. In Barzun’s description of the early twentieth century as it discovered the “absurd,” this stimulated his potent analysis of “relativism” as people make a caricature of it, thinking they have to have an “absolute,” in which he illustrated that human judgments always must involve a certain relativism, and that does not imply sheer chaos or the demise of all moral standards as some like to suggest. Ultimately, he suggests a better word than “relativism” would be “relationism,” which is precisely what I am suggesting throughout this book; “relation” as basic as “space” and “time” in Kant’s schema, though Kant failed to place it there. See Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, pp. 760–63.
43. It is for this reason that Nietzsche insists that if there is any “redemption,” it would have to be redemption of the whole. Nothing else makes any sense. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp.