The essay shows the common ground between music and philosophy from the origin of Western philosophy to the crisis of metaphysical thinking, in particular with Nietzsche and Benjamin. At the beginning, the relationship between philosophy and music is marked by the hegemony of the word on the sound. This is the nature of the Platonic idea of music. With Nietzsche and Benjamin this hegemony is denied and a new vision of the relationship becomes possible. The sound is the origin both (...) of language and of music. In thinking about this origin, philosophy shows that “thinking about music” is “thinking in music”, and that this thinking is the origin of philosophy itself. (shrink)

This essay reconstructs Schelling's philosophical development during the years 1794-1800. It emphasizes the role of Kant's heritage within Schelling's early philosophy, and the strong relationship between Schelling and Hölderlin during their Tübingen years. The central question it explores is how the Absolute relates to Finiteness - a relation that constitutes the basis of transcendental idealism as well as the essence of a transcendental philosophy, here radically understood as a philosophy of finitude and as a critical aesthetics. The essay shows the (...) young Schelling as he presents a rich and novel field of inquiry, which provides a credible and engaging alternative to Hegelian thinking and anticipates themes from twentieth-century philosophy (Phenomenology, Existentialism, Critical Thinking). The volume thus provides both a historical and a contemporary look at Schelling's early philosophy, and at its original and speculative approach. (shrink)

The essay shows the common ground between music and philosophy from the origin of Western philosophy to the crisis of metaphysical thinking, in particular with Nietzsche and Benjamin. At the beginning, the relationship between philosophy and music is marked by the hegemony of the word on the sound. This is the nature of the Platonic idea of music. With Nietzsche and Benjamin this hegemony is denied and a new vision of the relationship becomes possible. The sound is the origin both (...) of language and of music. In thinking about this origin, philosophy shows that “thinking about music” is “thinking in music”, and that this thinking is the origin of philosophy itself. (shrink)

The Wittgenstein’s notion of plain and patent nonsense is fertile because it shows the discovery of the ambiguity of the sense, in particular of the nonsense of contingency at the end of complete clarification. All the reflection of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is a question on the possibility of crossing, from the inside, language as it is to move from the hidden nonsense of the contingency of the language and of the reality to the patent nonsense of the philosophy. But since the (...) clarity of the patent nonsense shows the paradoxical situation of our condition, the limits of the language, the patent nonsense is also the real discovery of the Philosophy that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to. This is the aesthetical dimension of the sense, in which the patent nonsense makes a transition to the hidden and enigmatic nonsense. It is on the level of this hidden nonsense that we can find the notion of Satzklang: sound of proposition. When we grasp in a flash, when we hear and we pronounce a word or a proposition, we catch the sound of the word that has directly to do with its meaning or its application, and it brings us back to that preliminary dimension in which we belong to a language that guarantees the possibility of the meaning of what we say, a possibility that reveals itself only in a dimension of non-sense: the echo of the original sounds of the language as it stands as enigmatically senseless because it poses itself as a condition for any language, in a primitive and primeval dimension of language. The paradigmatic aesthetical experiences called understanding a musical theme and understanding a poem, the question about the meaning of the sounds and the meaning of a theme in music show are described from the transiction from patent nonsense to something which is hidden nonsense. The analysis of the sound of proposition shows the sense of nonsense moving toward the inaccessible original place of the language: the place of having the taking-place of language itself. (shrink)

In Paris, metropolis of xix century, Benjamin traces the new paradigm of modernity: the modern theatrical dimension corresponds to the artistic innovations and to the reproduction of aesthetical requests. Entfremdung and Neutralisierung are the main characters of the Ästhetisierung and they are one with the distraction as principle of reception and the conformism as principle of valuation. This is the context of the aura’s decline. The Adorno’s critical essay on the radio (1963) analyses the transformation of works of art in (...) cultural gifts and, in particular, the loss of autonomy of the musical work of art in the radio listening. The Adorno’s remarks recognize the historical character of aura and a new possibility that it can re-emerge in a new historical dimension of the music. (shrink)