Music and Philosophy
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loginMusic played a central role in the thought of existential-ist philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973). One of the most tantalizing claims he made in a set of conversations with Paul Ricoeur. Employing a geographic metaphor, he claimed that philosophy was the continent of his work while his plays formed the off-shore islands; but what was deepest was music as the water that conjoins the two.1 One who wishes to understand how he thought of music will find that his philosophical writings contain only a few, quasi-aphoristic, though significantly penetrating things about the nature of music and its relation to his thought. Disappointingly, neither his short “An Essay in Autobiography” of 19472 nor his larger autobiography of 1971, Awakenings,3 adds much to that beyond a few remarks. But the latter work makes reference to an article, “La musique dans mon vie et mon oeuvre,” a lecture he delivered in Vienna in 1959, that turned out to be a significantly richer source.4 And if one turns to his bibliography, one discovers that, as a music critic, Marcel published over 100 items on music—including “Musique dans mon vie”!5 None of them are available in English. Those of greater length and philosophical interest were gathered together, along with several shorter representative pieces, in the work entitled L’esthétiquemusicale de Gabriel Marcel that appeared in the Presence de Gabriel Marcel series .
