What is Music? - Ernst Jünger

This is from a journal entry but also serves as a nice book review or short essay. I also find it helpful in regards to Zeno’s Paradoxes.

Wilflingen, 20. October 1965

Reading: Erich v. Kahler, “What is Music?”. Obituary of Victor Zuckerkandl († 24. 4. 1965), who seems to have been one of the rare musicians interested in sound as metaphysics. At any rate, their number cannot be compared to that of the poets who reflect on the word, or painters who reflect on line and colour beyond technique and quality. My judgement is subjective, however, it is based on my own reading; there are surely sources that have remained inaccessible to me. I have read the best on the subject in The World as Will and Representation. In general, highly musical philosophers seem better in this regard than musicians.

According to Kahler, Zuckerkandl goes far beyond the phenomenon of music. “He shows, on the basis of the specifically musical, that there is a supermaterial reality.” Tones are immediate being, perceived as movement. It is not the tone that moves, but the movement that leads from one tone to another. “Different pitches are not different properties of the thing ‘tone’. If one subtracts the different pitches of two tonalities, what remains is not ‘tone’, but nothing.” Kahler adds: “Musical movement is therefore fundamentally different from all other movement; it is pure movement, that is, movement free from the thing.”

We are confronted with this “nothingness” again and again. It is also felt by the listener; during a pause, the full violence pours in.