Music reminds us that the mind is more than a calculator. We are resonant bodies as much as representing machines

Ella Fitzgerald performing at Mister Kelly’s nightclub in Chicago in 1958. Photo by Yale Joel

Jenny Judge

is a philosopher, musician and writer-at-large whose work has appeared in The Guardian, ThePhilosopher’s Magazine and Medium’s subscription programme. She holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Cambridge, and is currently working on a second PhD in philosophy at NYU. Her research interests include the philosophy of mind, cognitive science and aesthetics.

The 55 Bar in Greenwich Village, with its bulging ceiling tiles and strings of fairy lights taped haphazardly to the walls, looks more like the clubhouse of a rural Irish sports team than a New York City jazz venue. Yet some of the musical experiences I’ve had in that dingy basement have bordered on the otherworldly. When I’m pinned to the back of my seat by the mind-warping rhythms of a drummer, or the harmonic ingenuity of an improvising guitarist, I often have the feeling that my body ‘gets’ things in a way my brain can’t. I find myself physically responding to nuances in the musical texture that have been and gone before I have time to formulate thoughts about them. I can speculate to some extent about what I’ve heard after the fact – that snare hit was perhaps a shade early; that cadence resolved just a fraction too late ­– but in the moment, I can’t quite articulate what it is that I’m reacting to. My grasp on what I’m hearing doesn’t seem cognitive. It seems visceral.

But talk of ‘visceral, non-cognitive grasping’ sounds hopelessly vague from a philosophical standpoint. In philosophy, it’s common to describe the mind as a kind of machine that operates on a set of representations, which serve as proxies for worldly states of affairs, and get recombined ‘offline’ in a manner that’s not dictated by what’s happening in the immediate environment. So if you can’t consciously represent the finer details of a guitar solo, the way is surely barred to having any grasp of its nuances. Claiming that you have a ‘merely visceral’ grasp of music really amounts to saying that you don’t understand it at all. Right?

Humans do, of course, represent features of the world, and perform mental operations on that information. We owe many of our most striking successes as a species to doing just that: it’s how we built aqueducts, and steam engines, and computers. But just as often, we allow ourselves to be borne along by the currents of what’s swirling around us without abstracting away from it. Getting swept up in a musical performance is just one among a whole host of familiar activities that seem less about computing information, and more about feeling our way as we go: selecting an outfit that’s chic without being fussy, avoiding collisions with other pedestrians on the pavement, or adding just a pinch of salt to the casserole. If we sometimes live in the world in a thoughtful and considered way, we go with the flow a lot, too.

I think it’s a mistake to dismiss these sorts of experiences as ‘mindless’, or the notion of a merely visceral grasp of something as oxymoronic.[…]

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