Music, Immortality, and the Soul

TL;DR

This paper explores the dual nature of music as both a temporal and atemporal art form, linking it to philosophical and mathematical concepts to explain its profound emotional impact and its connection to transcendent and immanent realms.

Contribution

It introduces a dual-aspect monism perspective, connecting music's dual nature with ontological debates in mathematics and physics, offering a novel philosophical framework.

Findings

Music functions as a conduit between transcendent and immanent realms.

The dual nature of music explains its unique emotional and spiritual impact.

Links between music, mathematics, and physics support dual-aspect monism.

Abstract

Music has been called the temporal art par excellence. Yet, as this paper explains, it is also the atemporal art par excellence. The contradiction is, however, only apparent, and a result of viewing music from two possible perspectives. That it has these two perspectives is the focus of this paper. In particular, the way in which these two aspects of music allow it to function as a kind of conduit between transcendent and immanent; immaterial and material. This can help explain the power of music to touch places deep in the soul (the part of us that transcends matter and time), that other forms of art struggle to reach. A somewhat similar debate occurs in looking at mathematics from an ontological point of view. In particular the treatment of the real numbers. There are curious properties of real numbers that seem to put them, like music, in the realm of the transcendent: in terms of the amount of information to specify them, one requires infinite computer time since there is no repeating pattern to their decimal expansions. One must simply evolve the sequence, working through it, despite the fact that it might have a perfectly situated home in Platonia. In other words, bringing them into this world demands a temporal element. We explore these and other links to a variety of issues in physics, ultimately arguing for dual-aspect monism.