Music and Philosophical Counseling
The goal of this research project is to examine ways of extending and deepening the boundaries of conceptualization in the philosophical counseling process, through the use of music.
The motivation for the project stems from the repeatedly felt need for a pre-verbal component in the philosophical counseling process.
The philosophical counseling process is basically a verbal process (involving reading, writing, and speaking skills). In the course of counseling, both counselor and counselee focus on the counselee's cognitive-spiritual world. Since the sphere of activity is verbal, the process of conceptualization and extraction of the counselee's worldview sometimes reveals a gap between the conceptual discourse, and the emotions that animate the counselee's view of himself and his world. The conceptual complex that is revealed in such cases constitutes a "tip-of-the-iceberg" with regard to the counselee's meaningful worldview.
Why Music? The power of an emotive experience in uncovering a rich and complete worldview
A wide-ranging corpus of literature spanning thousands of years indicates the great power of music in shaping man's world. In the pre-Christian Western world, as in non-Western cultures, music was considered to possess metaphysical healing properties. In the modern Western world, the past sixty years have seen a flowering of the use of music as a therapeutic instrument for populations with special needs. In recent years, music therapy has also gained ground in the treatment of normative populations.
This is the point of departure, bringing together the philosophy of music, the various uses of music, and the process of philosophical counseling. The emotive, non-verbal power of music can serve as a profound emotive and experiential basis for a broader process of conceptualization.
How can music, in principle a non-verbal medium, contribute to a worldview that is fundamentally verbal?
It can easily be shown that what the counselee says about his or her musical experience is unrelated to the "inherent" meaning of the music. Indeed, the very existence of such a meaning is not at all obvious. Yet the process of conceptualization engaged in by the counselee – with the gentle and cautious assistance of the counselor – provides a significant foundation for collaborative and meaningful work, both in uncovering and in enhancing the counselee's worldview.
The discussion of the meaning of music – whether based in a musicological, a philosophical, a cultural, or a clinical discourse – reveals the profound connection between the music itself, and the conceptual context in which it is embedded. Plato and Pythagoras discuss the place of music in the context of various Greek philosophies; Piciano or Carlino do so in the context of Renaissance thought; Descartes and Kepler consider music in the context of 17th-century science and philosophy; Nietzsche and Schopenhauer discuss its place in their 19th-century world, just as Max Weber and Theodor Adorno consider its significance in the 20th century. Similarly, the discussions of music's meaning in Bolivian or African culture, of music in India or in the Arab world, reveals the underlying context of the worldview involved in the author's interpretation. The various thinkers and philosophers who have written on music have taught us, through music, lessons about culture, human thought processes, human nature, or the essence of existence. In this way, they have exposed the ways of thinking and the conceptual frameworks that emerge from their musical experiences, relating these ways of thinking to their wider (non-musical) worldviews.
The goals of the project
On the theoretical level, the study will indicate the relation between the place of music in human life and the ways in which musical experiences are infused with meaning and are transformed into conceptualizations.
On the practical level, the study will aid the development of methods for extracting "thicker," more substantial conceptualizations and deeper, more significant worldviews, consistent with the different sides of the philosophical counselee and his or her world.
Research Team
The project is interdisciplinary by nature, touching on the following fields: music therapy, musicology, ethnomusicology, psychotherapy, philosophical counseling, and the philosophy of music. I have therefore put together a team of four research assistants specializing in the various fields.
Research Team
