Just That Way

In another, earlier blog I mentioned listening to a Beethoven symphony in a park in New York, and I said, “I felt that what it was like to be Beethoven was somehow contained in the music.....” The idea was that the music embodied the decisions, the choices that Beethoven made throughout the process of composing the piece. I’d like to pick up on that idea and give some of its background.

In 1974 Thomas Nagel wrote an essay titled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”---an essay and question still discussed today by philosophers and others. Its main point is that the question of the title clarifies what we mean when we say that a bat---or a person, whatever---is conscious, has consciousness. As for ourselves, we know there is something that it is like being us---for instance, while reading these words, or driving a car, or hearing the phone ring. What is it like to be ourselves in deep dreamless sleep? Nothing, we’re not conscious. What is it like to be a rock? Again nothing, as far as we know.

Nagel argues that a bat has such a different nervous system---whose main sensory apparatus features highly sophisticated echolocation, for instance---that we can never know the subjectivity, the consciousness, of the bat, what it’s actually like to be a bat. We might try to imagine being a bat, but that would only suggest what it would be like for us to be a bat, but not what it’s actually like for the bat being a bat. Some would say that the same situation exists with regard to other human beings---we can imagine, we can empathize, but the actual living conscious experience of another person is forever beyond us. That particular question aside, my point is that to think of the consciousness of others (or ourselves) as what-it’s-like-to-be that person simplifies the whole question of subjective experience.

"Death is the great mystery. We don’t know what it is. We don’t know what happens when we die. A monk asked a Zen master, 'What happens when you die?' The Zen master replied, 'I don’t know.' The monk said, 'What do you mean. Aren’t you a Zen master?' And the Zen Master replied, 'Yes, but I’m not a dead one.'” (Zenki Blanche Hartman: http://www.intrex.net/chzg/hartman5.htm)

Choosing an item from a restaurant menu expresses one’s preference for something over something else, and we know that what it was like to be at that moment included that particular state of preferring. But unlike choosing from a menu, in the creation of a work of art, the choices that express one’s preferences come from a field of limitless possibilities (within whatever constraints the artist also has chosen, such as genre, medium, subject, etc.). Everything about the finished work is chosen, since everything is subject to veto. A passage in a Beethoven symphony, or the whole symphony, exists as it is precisely because Beethoven preferred it to be just that way over all other possibilities. In that sense, I think, one hears in the music the embodiment in time of what it was like to be the master that he was, as he practiced his art. In a deeper sense, perhaps, his choices are the music.