Was Hanslick a Closet Schopenhauerian?

Abstract

A common tendency throughout the history of thought concerning the nature of music has been to attribute to it a peculiar power to represent the dynamic of the universe. The tradition has perhaps its most developed expression in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. The strict formalism present in Eduard Hanslick’s treatise, On the Musically Beautiful, clearly stands in stark opposition to such ways of thinking. And yet the book’s final paragraph (in the first edition, at least) ends with a paragraph in which music is referred to as the ‘sounding image of the great motions of the universe’.The present paper examines the extent to which this apparently Schopenhaurian moment in Hanslick can be reconciled with the formalism promoted by the rest of the book. I argue, in opposition to differing claims to the contrary made by Mark Evan Bonds, and by Christopher Landerer and Nick Zangwill, that the original concluding paragraph is inconsistent with the rest of Hanslick’s argument. At the same time, the paragraph cannot simply be written off as a slip of the pen. Rather, it seems to reflect an anxiety on Hanslick’s part about musical formalism failing to provide any account of why the art of music is valuable.

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