Theory Of Music In Ancient Chinese Philosophy — страница 10

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that identical emotions can be expressed in various sounds is a consequence of the proposition that sound by itself contains no form. Identical sounds can express various different emotions, and there is no essential relation between sound and emotion. The sorrow and joy of a sound is determined by sorrow and joy of a person’s heart, not by the sound itself. Jikang sees that sound has a materialistic nature and so is distinguished from the subjective emotions of human beings. In his third debate, the assertion that “eating acrid things brings on hysterical laughter; smoke in your eyes causes grief-struck sobbing” is a case in point. In both cases, “tears are produced. But even if you have a Yi Ya taste them, he definitely will not say that the happy tears are sweet and

the sad tears bitter” Jikang compares the materialistic nature of sound to wine. And a question arises this way ;“The tissues secrete water and it beads up in the flesh; when pressure is applied it comes out. It is not controlled by grief or joy. It is just like the process of straining wine through a cloth sack. Although the device used to press it through may differ, the flavor of the wine is unchanged. Musical sounds are all produced by one and the same source. Why must they alone contain the principles of grief and joy?” How can we explain the situation where emotion is roused simply by listening to music? The answer lies not in the proposal that a chord contains any symbolic content, but rather in the idea that human subjective emotion causes the production of

feelings. The following passage condenses this point and elucidates this line of thought. When it encounters harmonious sounds, only then is it released. Harmonious sounds have no sign, but the grieved heart has its essence. If you make the grieved heart that has an essence depend on the harmonious sounds that have no sign, then you understand sounds and listen to them. The heart is moved by harmonious sounds, the feelings touched by anguished is the grief. How could you know? Those who labor sing of their woes; those who are happy dance about their achievements. If one’s heart is pained and grieved inside, then words bitter and sad are aroused. Words in sequence become poetry; sounds in sequence become music. We blend the words and chant them, put together the words. The

grieved heart is stored inside. When it encounters harmonious urther, does it blow differently through the ten thousand things but causes each to be itself? In this above passage, Jikang explains that sound has no content in orgin, but when sound arouses heart, people insert their own emotion into it. Due to this, people’s emotions are differently affected by hearing the same music. Historically it had been thought that not few people understood this Jikang’s refutation of the idea that specific sounds inspire specific emotions. Most, in fact, took his viewpoint for a misunderstanding. But we would do better to read Jikang’s view as follows: there is no constancy between emotion and sound and thus identical sounds produces varying emotions. Further, a subject’s emotional

state plays an important role in appreciation of art and the aesthetic, asthetic feelings are taken to be spontaneous and different from person to person. All of this is reduced to Jikang’s view about a certain kind of “uncertainty” in musical expression, an uncertainty which is in fact a defining characteristic of art. If music is partial and is determined to be fixed, simple and devoid of changes, then even if it can express certain special feelings, it cannot express various feelings and multiple thoughts. II-D. Separation thesis: heart and sound are distinct So far I have delineated the main characteristics of Jikang’s critique of the claim that sound has a fixed form. Next we will examine the proposition that heart and sound are different objects. This proposition is

a necessary implication of the contention that “sound has in it neither sorrow nor joy.” Because sound is already unrelated to sorrow or joy, and because sorrow and joy are just what our hearts are meant to feel, it follows that heart (xin) and sound are two different objects. Hypothetically speaking, if heart and sound is correlated to each other, namely sorrow and joy of heart are expressed in their corresponding counterpart in sound, it does not follow that Jikang’s claim of nonemotinal nature of sound proves to be a success. Hence, to shore up the claim that sound has in it neither sorrow nor joy, he should draw the logical conclusion that heart and sound are two different things. Following Jikang’s assertion, it is fair to say that the sound of music will move a