Schopenhauer's flute and Descartes's lute

What can musical practice tell us about philosophy?

Which philosophers could play a musical instrument, or were known as talented singers? It's easy to come up with contemporary examples (e.g., The 21st century Monads), but I found it hard to come up with historical examples.

Still, there are some. Arthur Schopenhauer was said to play the flute each day after dinner. He especially loved (by his own account) Gioachino Rossini (1792 –1868). You can hear it below. Now imagine Schopenhauer playing it.

Nietzsche pokes fun of Schopenhauer's musical passion as follows:

Schopenhauer, pessimism notwithstanding, actually played the flute … every day, after dinner. You can read it in his biography. And just out of curiosity: a pessimist who negates both God and world but stops before morality, – who affirms morality and plays his flute, affirms laede neminem morality: excuse me? is this really – a pessimist? (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Ch 5, trans. Judith Norman).

In Nietzsche's view, there's a contradiction between lusty flute playing and professing a philosophy of avoiding attachments or getting on the hedonic treadmill. It just goes to show that Schopenhauer lived in “a world whose essence is will to power.”

Schopenhauer talks about music and his beloved composer Rossini in The World as Will and Representation. He outlines a formalist idea about music. Music is not meant to be modeled on language or to describe events, but rather,

For music everywhere expresses only the quintessence of life and of the events taking place in it, never these themselves, and so distinctions within these do not always influence it. Precisely this universality, exclusive as it is to music, together with the most exact precision gives music its high value as the panacea for all our suffering. Thus if music ties itself too closely to words or tries to model itself on events, it is trying to speak a language that is not its own. Nobody has avoided this error as completely as Rossini: which is why his music speaks its own language so clearly and purely that it has no need of words at all and retains its full effect when performed on instruments alone (World as Will and Representation, p. 309)

This is so intriguing!

As some of my favorite philosophy comes from the early modern period, I was hoping that Descartes could play the lute. I feel the instrument fits him and it's exactly the right period, the golden age of French baroque lute music (as you can see below in this beautiful piece by Ennemond Gaultier, a contemporary of Descartes).

Moreover, Descartes mentions the lute and the vibrations of lute strings in several writings, including letters to Mersenne and in his Compendium of Music, his earliest work (written when he was only twenty-three, though only published posthumously, in 1650), which he gave to his then dear friend Isaac Beeckman in 1619 as a New Year's gift.

There were several philosopher-lutenists, especially those with a physicist/mathematical bent, such as Galileo and Huygens. (In both cases, their fathers were accomplished lutenists).

Sadly I could not find any evidence that Descartes did anything other than plucking lute strings and checking their vibrations, not in a musical way, but prompted by an interest in math and physics.

Still, there is a very interesting passage on lute playing and muscle memory in a letter from Descartes to his friend Marin Mersenne (who also was very interested in music, as I detail here):

Now there is only this gland [pineal gland] to which the soul can be so joined; for there is nothing else in the whole head which is not double. But I think that it is the other parts of the brain, especially the interior parts, which most serve memory. I think that all the nerves and muscles can serve it, too, so that a lute player, for instance, has a part of his memory in his hands: for the ease of bending and disposing his fingers in various ways, which he has acquired by practice, helps him to remember the passages which need these dispositions when they are played.—1 April 1640, Letter by René Descartes to Marin Mersenne

This excerpt begins with Descartes’s obsession with the pineal gland where he believed the soul interacted with the body. But then it goes on to give an intriguing embodied account of memory, and the practice of a lute player. Maybe Descartes thought of this example watching a lutenist playing. People played in their homes for friends, and even in taverns in those days, cf this book by lutenist Mary Burwell ca 1670 who says it's not lady-like to play your lute in a tavern, thereby implying that there were plenty of people who played lutes in taverns.

Or, perhaps Descartes got this example from Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). Descartes was well versed in the scholastics, and Aquinas talks about a guitarist [citharaedo], referencing Ibn Sina (980–1037) the great Muslim philosopher and polymath.

But in natural agents the actions are determined, hence it is not necessary to choose those things which are for the end. Avicenna gives the following example. A harpist does not have to deliberate about the notes in any particular chord, since these are already determined for him; otherwise there would be a delay between the notes which would cause discord.—Aquinas, De Principiis Naturae, ch 19.

If we look up the original passage that Aquinas references from Ibn Sina Book on the Healing, Ibn Sina mentions an ‘oud player (the ‘oud is a precursor to the lute). This is in a similar context to Aquinas, where both scholars reflect on whether it's possible to have apparent design without conscious agency. Ibn Sina says no. You don't need a conscious goal, or conscious agency, to do something that looks deliberate. In fact, being too deliberate can get in the way of playing music (Maybe Ibn Sina could play the ‘oud??)

Once it [playing music] becomes a habit, however, doing it no longer requires deliberation, and it even becomes such that when deliberation is present, it is nigh on impossible to do, and even the one well versed in its performance becomes befuddled in its execution. An example would be a writer or lute player, for when they deliberate about the choice of one letter after another or one note after another and intentionally become preoccupied with their instruments, then they become befuddled and perform haltingly. They continue to do what they do uniformly only by not deliberating about each of the successive things they continue to do, even if that action and its intention initially occurred only through deliberation.—Ibn Sina, On the Healing, part 1, chapter 14, Jon McGinnis translation

So, if we circle back to Schopenhauer, what can Descartes's reflections on muscle memory and Ibn Sina's ‘oud player tell us about the pessimistic flute-player?

When we play music, we offload our deliberate intentions onto the world, and into our muscle memory. We no longer need conscious deliberation, or even a reason for why this finger goes that way, we just do it because we practiced it, and practice moves our body to go just in that way. We don't need a reason. We don't need to reflect on our picture of the world when we pick up the flute after dinner.

Even the most gloomy pessimist (and there are good reasons not to read Schopenhauer this way) can delight in music and lose herself in the intricacy and beauty of the music. Habit, as Erik Rietveld, has argued, can thus give us a unique unreflective freedom.