Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Response to Randall Allsup, “Species Counterpoint: Darwin and the Evolution of Forms”Lauri VäkeväI was thrilled to be asked to respond to Randall Allsup's paper as his standpoint appears to be close to my own.1 I take it that his interest in Darwinian metaphors [End Page 220] reflects at least moderate interest in naturalism—an approach that should be taken seriously in our field. However, there are many varieties of naturalism. In the following, I will deliberately interpret Allsup's ideas from the standpoint of the so-called 'soft' or 'cultural' naturalism favored by later Dewey and his followers.2As I see it, the most powerful precept of naturalism is its attack on essentialism—paradoxically the doctrine which focuses most deliberately on the nature of things. The essentialist, however, thinks of nature as something inherent in how things are, making them ultimately what they are. This kind of ultimate nature is something that a contemporary naturalist can never touch, for she only relies on empirical inquiry that departs from and returns to the contingent realm of lived experience. It is the latter that we attempt to make sense of as to try to live our life as fully as possible. At its best, philosophy can help us in this undertaking.To a naturalist, then, the essentialist's use of the term 'nature' is an anachronism, a remnant of an age when philosophers searched for the "really real," certain, absolute, and immutable. Were we to follow philosophical naturalism today, we should rather be looking at how things become empirically realized for cultural agents in their various life-practices. Culture is not seen as distinct from nature but as continuous with it: both can be understood through same means. This also covers the realm of value, which naturalism does not conceive as transcendental in any metaphysically binding sense, but rather as something that is realized in daily life and that thus has an empirical stand.Applied to the philosophy of music, naturalism states that it is futile to look for the essence of this art (or for that matter any art) through philosophical introspection or through logical analysis for the simple reason that we are always in the process of formulating it in our lives. The nature of music depends on the interpretative horizons of cultural agents living in a situation. 'Situation' (understood here in the sense that Dewey used the term) is the existential point of departure of our understanding and as situations vary, so do types of inquiry; therefore, we do not have to take as inclusive any particular claims about music, as they are merely particular answers to certain types of problems. Any path of musical inquiry may be worth taking, not because they all lead to the same destination, but because they can guide us through the rich thicket of possible experience that gives music its significance. This implies an open attitude towards all things musical, a theme which I find strong in Allsup's paper.One can also read another important naturalist point in his essay: "music—like life—evolves." Evolution is indeed a recurring theme in contemporary philosophical naturalism: what was previously considered as static or as perennial in nature and in culture can be now seen as being under continuous change. [End Page 221] Even mountains (and this is one of Dewey's favorite similes3 ) can be considered as events in the long run and even the most persistent of culture's beliefs may crumble someday.This awareness of all-encompassing change may not be very comforting: it might be mentally healthier to cling to rationalizations of how things that appear to change in fact do not. It may be more comforting to think that there must be a stable principle, a system of universally set rules, governing the randomness. For centuries, philosophy has been driven by this belief. In the philosophy of music, this is reflected in the problem of how the most ephemeral of the arts can be explained as having everlasting value. Mutatis mutandis, when music educators have argued over the pedagogical significance of music, one of the most pervasive ideas has been that music...