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20. As opposed to soma for the non-living body. 21. McEwen, Socrates' Ancestor, 43–44. 22. McEwen, Socrates' Ancestor, 45. 23. McEwen, Socrates' Ancestor, 53. 24. McEwen, Socrates' Ancestor, 54. 25. McEwen, Socrates' Ancestor, 51. 26. Speaking of waves (which are ephemeral), McEwen suggests that the "deathless" (and therefore divine) nature of daidala, or well-made things, derived partly from the notion that they could always be remade. If they were put together or assembled (as the primary meaning of such techne-related terms as daidalon, areros, and harmonia connotes), they could always be put back together. "Like the gods, " McEwen writes, "and unlike mortals, [the well-made thing ] never entirely disappeared. It was because it was itself a deathless appearing that the well-made, cunningly crafted thing was able to reveal an unseen divine presence"(56). This suggests another way of thinking about the essentially temporal or ephemeral quality of music. Because it is never simply there, or statically present as an object, it is never simply absent in the way that an object might be experienced as being. In that way its ephemerality is a reflection of its deathlessness and an intimation of immortality (it makes immortality as such visible, or audible, as well as teaching us something about what immortality might mean). 27. Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology, " in The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 9. 28. See McEwen, Socrates' Ancestor, 72. 29. See Heidegger's remarks on ergon in "Science and Reflection, " 160. 30. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a30. One could say that playing musically is what the making of music truly involves, and that there is a real (and important) difference between playing correctly (producing the right notes) and playing musically. 31. Aristotle himself seems unwilling to make this point about craft. Cf. Metaphysics, I. 1. 32. See Monoson, Plato's Democratic Entanglements, 220. Here Monoson notes that in his famous allegory of the cave "Plato does not use the theatrical [or theoria-related] vocabulary to describe the prisoners viewing the shadows. They are watching a series of images, but they are not depicted as 'spectating' ... Rather, they only see." It is the philosopher's seeing that is active and participatory. The prisoners are looking passively at something that is a mere image, not a true spectacle. |
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