Here I would like to advance the admittedly speculative hypothesis that the peculiar quality of music lies in its ability to produce a highly specific form of relating to the world, one in which our relationship to the world as a whole becomes tangible and thus can be both modulated and modified. Music in a way negotiates the quality of relation itself, whereas languages and sign systems can only ever thematize one particular relationship to or segment of the world at a time… [Listening] to music has a different orientation than seeing, grasping, or feeling. The experience of music suspends the division between self and world, transforming it in a way into a pure relationship. Music is the rhythms, sounds, melodies, and tones between self and world, even if these of course have their source in the social world and the world of things. The universe of sound consists in its ability to express or generate all manner of different and differently nuanced relationships: strife, loneliness, desolation, resentment, alienation, and tension, as well as yearning, refuge, security, love, responsivity. This pure relational quality adheres to music in all of its manifestations, high culture as well as pop culture, and allows us to comprehend how it is that music and dance have always been so closely linked. …

[95] Only from this perspective can we understand how, on the one hand, music possesses the power to change the way we are situated in the world (our “attunement”), while, on the other hand, we crave different kinds of music depending on our relationship to the world at a certain moment. Even (and especially) music that expresses sadness, melancholy, hopelessness, or strife is capable of moving us, because we are able to experience it as resonating with our own sadness, melancholy, or strife, i.e. with our own relationships to the world. We experience being moved by such sounds as something positive (even and especially when we are brought to tears) and not at all as something that itself makes us depressed. To the contrary, it is when we are no longer touched, moved, or gripped by music that we experience alienation or, in extreme cases, depression, as it is then that we experience the world as mute, even as it is still so loud. …

If my contention is correct that music negotiates the quality of relation (to the world) itself, then we can begin to understand the eminently important function that it is capable of fulfilling in modern society. Music affirms and potentially corrects, moderates, and modifies our relation to the world, repeatedly re-establishing it as the “ur-relationship” from which subject and world origi-nate… Seen from this perspective, the “musicalization” of the world since the twentieth century seems to be an almost inevitable correlate (because complementary in its effects) to the growing reification of our two-sided bodily relationship to the world[.]

— Hartmut Rosa (tr. James C. Wagner), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (London: Polity, 2019), 94–95

[Our] work is not done simply by distinguishing between good resonance and bad alienation. Rather, it is here that our conceptual problems begin. First, it is possible to identify experiences that exhibit characteristics of “negative” resonance, either because they are directly harmful to subjects or because they have normatively undesirable or even disastrous “side-effects.” Second, the longing for total and lasting resonance with the world itself turns out to be a subjectively pathological and in political terms potentially totalitarian tendency. Third (and relat-edly), we shall see that forms and phases of alienation are not only unavoidable, but also required for the subsequent development of resonant relationships. It will, moreover, prove necessary to conceptually differentiate between brief, often intense moments of resonant experience and lasting resonant relationships, which are necessary to provide a stable and reliable basis for such repeatable experiences.

— Hartmut Rosa (tr. James C. Wagner), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, 39

Eighteenth-century man was the man who could no longer remain ignorant of the significance of the fact that Copernicus and Galileo were right, that this vast and rich earth of his, the theatre of his deeds was not the centre of the universe, but a grain of dust amid countless others in this universe, and who clearly saw the consequences of all this. What did this really apocalyptic revolution in his picture of the universe mean for man? An unprecedented and boundless humiliation of man? No, said the man of the eighteenth century, who was not the first to gain this knowledge, but certainly the first to realize it fully and completely; no, man is all the greater for this, man is in the centre of all things, in a quite different sense, too, for he was able to discover this revolutionary truth by his own resources and to think it abstractly, again to consider and penetrate a world which had expanded overnight into infinity—and without anything else having changed, without his having to pay for it in any [24] way: clearly now the world was even more and properly so his world! It is paradoxical and yet it is a fact that the answer to his humiliation was those philosophical systems of rationalism, empiricism and scepticism which made men even more self-confident. The geocentric picture of the universe was replaced as a matter of course by the anthropocentric.

— Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History, 23–24

A catena of quotations from Schweitzer’s elegant concluding chapter — whatever one makes of his own historical portrait of Jesus, which is the complementary strand in his thought to the below (indeed the number of ellipses etc. indicates that the two are twisted together in this chapter like a double helix), it is very hard to deny the force and incision of this polemic against the projection-as-historicization of Jesus:

Whatever the ultimate solution may be, the historical Jesus of whom the criticism of the future, taking as its starting-point the problems which have been recognized and admitted, will draw the portrait, can never render modern theology the services which it claimed from its own half-historical, half-modern, Jesus. He will be a Jesus, who was Messiah, and lived as such, either on the ground of a literary fiction of the earliest Evangelist, or on the ground of a purely eschatological Messianic conception. In either case, He will not be a Jesus Christ to whom the [397] religion of the present can ascribe, according to its long-cherished custom, its own thoughts and ideas, as it did with the Jesus of its own making. …

The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Saviour. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own. What surprised and dismayed the theology of the last forty years was that, despite all forced and arbitrary interpretations, it could not keep Him in our time, but had to let Him go. He returned to His own time, not owing to the application of any historical ingenuity, but by the same inevitable necessity by which the liberated pendulum returns to its original position. …

[398] We modern theologians are too proud of our historical method, too proud of our historical Jesus, too confident in our belief in the spiritual gains which our historical theology can bring to the world. The thought that we could build up by the increase of historical knowledge a new and vigorous Christianity and set free new spiritual forces, rules us like a fixed idea, and prevents us from seeing that the task which we have grappled with and in some measure discharged is only one of the intellectual preliminaries of the great religious task. We thought that it was for us to lead our time by a roundabout way through the historical Jesus, as we understood Him, in order to bring it to the Jesus who is a spiritual power in the present. This roundabout way has now been closed by genuine history.

There was a danger of our thrusting ourselves between men and the Gospels, and refusing to leave the individual man alone with the sayings of Jesus. There was a danger that we should offer them a Jesus who was too small, because we had forced Him into conformity with our human standards and human psychology. To see that, one need only read the Lives of Jesus written since the ‘sixties [1860s], and notice what they have made of the great imperious sayings of the Lord, how they have weakened down His imperative world-contemning [sic] demands upon individuals, that He might not come into conflict with our ethical ideals, and might tune His denial of the world to our acceptance of it. Many of the greatest sayings are found lying in a corner like explosive shells from which the charges have been removed. No small portion of elemental religious power needed to be drawn off from His sayings to prevent them from conflicting with our system of religious world-acceptance. We have made Jesus hold another language with our time from that which He really held.

In the process we ourselves have been enfeebled, and have robbed our own thoughts of their vigour in order to project them back into history and make them speak to us out of the past. It is nothing less than a misfortune for modern theology that it mixes history with everything and ends by being proud of the skill with which it finds its own thoughts—even to its beggarly pseudo-[399]metaphysic with which it has banished genuine speculative metaphysic from the sphere of religion—in Jesus, and represents Him as expressing them. …

[400] Because it is thus preoccupied with the general, the universal, modern theology is determined to find its world-accepting ethic in the teaching of Jesus. Therein lies its weakness. The world affirms itself automatically; the modern spirit cannot but affirm it. But why on that account abolish the conflict between modern life, with the world-affirming spirit which inspires it as a whole, and the world-negating spirit of Jesus? Why spare the spirit of the individual man its appointed task of fighting its way through the world-negation of Jesus, of contending with Him at every step over the value of material and intellectual goods—a conflict in which it may never rest? For the general, for the institutions of society, the rule is: affirmation of the world, in conscious opposition to the view of Jesus, on the ground that the world has affirmed itself! This general affirmation of the world, however, if it is to be Christian, must in the individual spirit be Christianised and transfigured by the personal rejection of the world which is preached in the sayings of Jesus. It is only by means of the tension thus set up that religious energy can be communicated to our time. There [401] was a danger that modern theology, for the sake of peace, would deny the world-negation in the sayings of Jesus, with which Protestantism was out of sympathy, and thus unstring the bow and make Protestantism a mere sociological instead of a religious force. There was perhaps also a danger of inward insincerity, in the fact that it refused to admit to itself and others that it maintained its affirmation of the world in opposition to the sayings of Jesus, simply because it could not do otherwise. For that reason it is a good thing that the true historical Jesus should overthrow the modern Jesus, should rise up against the modern spirit and send upon earth, not peace, but a sword.

— Albert Schweitzer (tr. William Montgomery), The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1910), 396–401.

[While] the Enlightenment — heterogeneous, contradictory, and complex as its ideas may have been — did gradually come to establish the concept of the self-determined way of life as an effective cultural benchmark in the realms of politics and pedagogy, religion and aesthetics, the economy and everyday practice, it generally tended to supplement this concept with the idea that reason, nature, and the (political) common good would come to provide a “natural” limit to the spaces opened up by the ideal of self-determination and thus a more or less generalizable, socially acceptable way of life and concept of happiness. Over the course of the nineteenth and especially the twentieth century, the demand for self-determination expanded into ever more spheres of life, while the idea that this demand could be substantially or essentially limited by reason, nature, and community became increasingly less plausible and lost much of its binding force. At the same time, social institutions were gradually reshaped to become dependent on anonymous actors. From education to the professions [19], from the supermarket to party democracy, from the religious constitution to the art market to the use of media, subjects capable of acting and making decisions in accordance with individual preferences have become a functional requirement of modern institutions.

— Hartmut Rosa (tr. James C. Wagner), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (London: Polity, 2019), 18–19

Polanyi has the rationalists’ number, a decade before Foucault et al:

I do not suggest, of course, that those who advocate philosophic doubt as a general solvent of error and a cure for all fanaticism would desire to bring up children without any rational guidance or contemplate any other scheme of universal hebetation. I am only saying that this would be what their principles demand. What they actually want is not expressed but concealed by their declared principles. They want their own beliefs to be taught to children and accepted by everybody, for they are convinced that this would save the world from error and strife. In his Conway Lecture of 1922, republished in 1941, Bertrand Russell revealed this in a single sentence. After condemning both Bolshevism and clericalism as two opposite dogmatic teachings, which should both be combated by philosophic doubt, he sums up by saying: ‘Thus rational doubt alone, if it could be generated, would suffice to introduce the Millennium.’ The author’s intention is clear: he intends to spread certain doubts which he believes to be justified. He does not want us to believe the doctrines of the Catholic Church, which he denies and dislikes, and he also wants us to resist Lenin’s teaching of unbridled revolutionary violence. These disbeliefs are recommended as ‘rational doubts’. Philosophic doubt is thus kept on the leash and prevented from calling in question anything that the [sceptic] believes in, or from approving of any doubt that he does not share. … Since the sceptic does not consider it rational to doubt what he himself believes, the advocacy of ‘rational doubt’ is merely the sceptic’s way of advocating his own beliefs.

— Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy, 297

Three incredibly important paragraphs from Polanyi:

Every acceptance of authority is qualified by some measure of reaction to it or even against it. Submission to a consensus is always accompanied to some extent by the imposition of one’s views on the consensus to which we submit. Every time we use a word in speaking and writing we both comply with usage and at the same time somewhat modify the existing usage; every time I select a programme on the radio I modify a little the balance of current cultural valuations; even when I make my purchase at current prices I slightly modify the whole price system. Indeed, whenever I submit to a current consensus, I inevitably modify its teaching; for I submit to what I myself think it teaches and by joining the consensus on these terms I affect its content. On the other hand, even the sharpest dissent still operates by partial submission to an existing consensus: for the revolutionary must speak in terms that people can understand. Moreover, every dissenter is a teacher. The figures of Antigone and of the Socrates of the Apology are monuments of the dissenter as law-giver. So are also the prophets of the Old Testament—and so is a Luther, or a Calvin. All modern revolutionaries since the Jacobins demonstrate likewise that dissent does not seek to abolish public authority, but to claim it for itself.

Admittedly, submission to authority is in general less deliberately assertive than is an act of dissent. But not always. St. Augustine’s struggle for belief in revelation was much more dynamic and original than is the rejection of revelation by a religiously brought up young man today. In any case, at every step of the process by which we are brought up and continue to participate in an established consensus, we exercise some measure of choice between different degrees of conformity and dissent, and either of these choices may mean a more passive or a more assertive reaction.

We should realize at the same time how inevitable, and how unceasing and comprehensive are such accreditive decisions. I cannot speak of a scientific fact, of a word, of a poem or a boxing champion; of last week’s murder or the Queen of England; of money or music or the fashion in hats, of what is just or unjust, trivial, amusing, boring or scandalous, without implying a reference to a consensus by which these matters are acknowledged—or denied to be—what I declare them to be. I must continually endorse the existing consensus or dissent from it to some degree, and in either case I express what I believe the consensus ought to be in respect to whatever I speak of. The present text, in which I have described in my own way the interaction of every utterance with the public consensus, is no exception to what I have said in the text about utterances of this kind. Throughout this book I am affirming my own beliefs, and more particularly so when I insist, as I do here, that such personal affirmations and choices are inescapable, and, when I argue, as I shall do, that this is all that can be required of me.

— Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, 208–09

“This was one of the central problems confronting all the foreign policy executives [in 1914] (and those who try to understand them today): the ‘national interest’ was not an objective imperative pressing in on government from the world outside, but the projection of particular interests within the political elite itself.”

— Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, 190

Two notes, with no pretense to originality, from my most recent reread of The Lord of the Rings (probably the 15th lifetime or something like that):

1. One of the many things that elevates Tolkien’s trilogy to true greatness is how deep and subtle an exploration it offers of political philosophy/theology. What is the ideal king like? What is the good, if any, of political violence? How is power to be used? What is true peace? What does a flourishing society look like? What responsibilities do we have to the past — and the future? What is true greatness, and what responsibility do the great have to the humble? Tolkien addresses all these questions, and more: sometimes by way of explicit statement (usually in the mouth of Gandalf, Aragorn, Elrond, or Faramir); sometimes less directly but still explicitly spelled out in the course of events (the tragedy of Boromir, or the Scouring of the Shire); sometimes more by the narrator’s showing than telling (the spiritual dimension of the conflict, or the changes in narrative voice and register). One wonderful narrative example: the transformation of Merry and Pippin through their great deeds and their sufferings (and the Ent-draughts), and the great authority and “lordliness” they possess on returning to the Shire — yet without losing their deep love for and connection to the Shire and its people, who do not really understand what they have survived and done.

2. The conflict in The Lord of the Rings is more spiritual than it is material. Of course there is much heroic violence and the clashing of great armies and many glorious deeds and so forth; but Tolkien perceives, and shows, that his heroes and armies depend more on their hope and the strength of their spirit than on their bodies and their arms, and that before and after any physical blow is struck the chief weapon of the Dark Lord and his servants is fear and despair. The powerful weapons and tokens that appear in the story — Aragorn’s sword Andúril, Galadriel’s star-glass — all work by possessing and exerting a spiritual influence to bring hope and courage in dark places. Most of all, the One Ring is no mere MacGuffin, but it is a malevolent agent in the plot: drawing the allies of Mordor to harass and hunt down the Ring-bearer, while tempting the Ring-bearer and his companions with delusions of grandeur and unearned power — yet ultimately the Ring’s malicious hold over the wills of both Frodo and Gollum is its own and its true master’s undoing. The strength of will and spirit of any character is always his or her most important and relevant feature to the plot, before the ability to perform any particular deed. So the great ones — Gandalf, Aragorn, Galadriel, and Faramir — all pass the test by refusing to take the One Ring from its humble yet rightful bearer, so enabling the only bearers who could creep undetected into Mordor to take the Ring to the Mountain of Fire. Aragorn has the strength of will to wrestle with Sauron in the palantír of Orthanc, so inducing him to strike Gondor before he is fully ready. Sam fights off the Ring’s temptation on the fences of Mordor by love for his master and the characteristically hobbitish practical humility (a small garden at home is quite enough for him to manage!). The spiritual dimension of the conflict is more important to its progression than the material. A lesson for us all.

‘Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.’

— Gandalf the White, in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King: being the Third Part of the Lord of the Rings, 1150