This essay contemplates the potential of meaning in music. Most of us would agree that something significant happens in the meeting between music and listener, a phenomenon that can be said to be rooted deeper than human culture and language. With reference to philosophers like Nietzsche, Heidegger and Rudolf Otto, I aim to establish an investigative horizon (Fragehorizont) connected to the...
In the scientific secularisation of the modern worldview, music has lost its transcendent point of reference, taken for granted in pre-modern times. However, Protestant theology has contributed to this secularisation by a strict separation between (platonic) eros and (Christian) agape, and rejection of any kind of metaphysics. Consequently, and contrary to Martin Luther, music is from a...
In this article, I reflect on how music and religion meet in aesthetic experience, and how thinking responds to this encounter. The way of thinking takes the form of an interpretation of key elements in Augustine’s description of his musical experiences in Confessions (Confessiones). This article is not a philological-historical interpretation of Augustine, but an attempt to think with...