"language is bounded by music on all sides" p 69
Even when K is blithering he comes up with such valuable things. (Why, why are we discussing language vs music at all? No clue so far.)
"Music always expresses the immediate in its immediacy. This is also the reason that in relation to language music appears first and last, but this also shows that it is a mistake to say that music is closer to perfection as a medium. Reflection is implicit in language, and therefore language cannot express the immediate." p 70
I have no idea, none at all, what K means by "spirit."
But, as often, I must have patience. This entire book, I suspect, is a sustained definition of "spirit," and looking for a simple definition is looking to skip the book. It's like asking 'what does Plato mean by "the good"?' Socrates said that "the good" was what life was for, but he also said he didn't really know what it was. He wasn't being coy, he was being honest. All Plato wrote were partial, fragmentary attempts to shadow forth "the good," especially in the person of Socrates: to ask for a simple definition of it is to totally misunderstand Plato's project. And so here. K's project is to shadow forth "spirit," and I'm just going to have to move in and out the tide of his thought and hope that the movement stirs something in me.
p 76 - 78: we're fairly embarked in actual discussion of Mozart's operas, here, and it may well be that reading the rest of this essay -- when I know nothing of Mozart, or of opera, or of music -- will be ridiculous and a waste of time. Certainly there's no point in reading this a second time without having at least some background. I'll persevere for now, but between having not the slightest notion of opera, and no idea what a phrase such as "desire is absolutely qualified as desire" may mean -- if anything -- I'm really not gleaning much here. Hopefully I'll do better with the upcoming essay on ancient tragedy.
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