Per Caritatem

Socrates’ seemingly excessive strictures on music (particularly in the Republic) have engendered a number of interpretative rejoinders. One such response is the idea that music’s persuasive and cognitive powers cannot be sharply delimitated. This argument has been developed by Julias Elias and claims that music is essential for even the most rational among us (not just for emotively moving or controlling the masses)

“because of the fundamental limitations of propositional, logical, conceptual knowledge. As Elias has argued, music (or, more broadly, expression that is poetic rather than prosaic) has the capacity to convince precisely where reason alone would fail.”[1]

Interestingly, Plato himself seems to imply something along these lines when he employs myth, poetry, and invokes the muses as if to say that rational argumentation has its limits.

“All systems, Elias explains, rest upon foundational ‘givens’ that cannot be logically proven or scrutinized in terms of the system’s own framework. All thought and reason rest on indemonstrable presuppositions, assumptions which cannot be established propositionally because they themselves constitute the ground on which one stands in accepting or rejecting assertions within the system of rationality. Plato’s myths are not shortcuts to ends he might have achieved by logical, expository means. ‘[E]very system proposed,’ argues Elias, ‘must contain some terms which are primitive, indemonstrable, asserted on faith; and because no rules can be given for their invention a touch of the poet is necessarily found in every such system.’[2] Although Plato sought a purely rational knowledge, universal, self-sufficient, independent of a knower, and untainted by belief, his reliance upon poetry shows he did not find it. And this, urges Elias, is the strongest possible Platonic defense of things like poetry. Since all knowledge is supported at critical points by belief and commitment secured by this ‘poet’s touch,’ music plays an indispensable role in creating and sustaining cultural cohesion and stability.”[3]

Notes
[1] Wayne D. Bowman. Philosophical Perspectives on Music, p. 46.
[2] Julias A. Elias. Plato’s Defense of Poetry. (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1984), p. 233. [3] Wayne D. Bowman. Philosophical Perspectives on Music, pp. 46-47.