Andrew Hicks
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- February 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190658205
- eISBN:
- 9780190658236
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190658205.003.0004
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western, Philosophy of Music
This chapter inaugurates the analysis of the Boethian tripartition of music, following the reordered twelfth-century presentation (as argued in the preceding chapter) and beginning with “human ...
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This chapter inaugurates the analysis of the Boethian tripartition of music, following the reordered twelfth-century presentation (as argued in the preceding chapter) and beginning with “human music,” the harmonies of the soul, body, and their conjunction. Ranging widely across the terrain of psychology (in Plato’s Phaedo), physiology (in the medieval reception of Galen), and cosmogony (the creation account in Plato’s Timaeus), the chapter argues that the “problem” of substance dualism was a “non-problem” for twelfth-century cosmologists precisely because of their harmonic conception of the body-soul union. The body is made suitable for ensoulment by dint of the proper proportioning of its parts, its “instrumental” harmony. The body as instrument (corpus organicum) is gladly received by the soul, through which it exercises its otherwise voiceless agency. The soul’s affect and the body’s agency together forestall the vulnerability of the fragile conjunction that is the life of the human organism.Less
This chapter inaugurates the analysis of the Boethian tripartition of music, following the reordered twelfth-century presentation (as argued in the preceding chapter) and beginning with “human music,” the harmonies of the soul, body, and their conjunction. Ranging widely across the terrain of psychology (in Plato’s Phaedo), physiology (in the medieval reception of Galen), and cosmogony (the creation account in Plato’s Timaeus), the chapter argues that the “problem” of substance dualism was a “non-problem” for twelfth-century cosmologists precisely because of their harmonic conception of the body-soul union. The body is made suitable for ensoulment by dint of the proper proportioning of its parts, its “instrumental” harmony. The body as instrument (corpus organicum) is gladly received by the soul, through which it exercises its otherwise voiceless agency. The soul’s affect and the body’s agency together forestall the vulnerability of the fragile conjunction that is the life of the human organism.
