Alexander Jakobidze-Gitman’s essay for the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, published online in advance of the paper edition.
Alexander Jakobidze-Gitman – ‘Dionysian Spirit as “The Social Self”: Alfred Schutz’s Insightful (Mis)use of Nietzsche’ (Originally published online: 31 October 2019).
Abstract: Recent publications on Alfred Schutz suggest the importance of his musical thought for understanding his general viewpoint on intersubjectivity. Developing this proposition further, my article focuses on one aspect of Schutz’s writings on music: his attempts to amalgamate the aesthetic oppositions of the Dionysian/Apollonian by Friedrich Nietzsche and inner duration/spatialized time by Henri Bergson. Despite the seeming distortion of the initial meaning of the Dionysian impulse, I suggest that Schutz’s employment remains faithful to the aesthetic and cognitive theory of early Nietzsche. To substantiate this, I draw a link between Nietzsche’s early theory of aesthetic cognition and the neurophysiology of the mid-nineteenth century. Furthermore, the way Schutz applied the Dionysian/Apollonian opposition to the problem of musical communication made his musical thought prefigure some neuro-scientifically inspired discussions of the present-day, like the one on joint attention. Schutz tackled the key paradox: why the experience of music can be shared but not directly communicated.
Full article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2019.1682790
Alexander Jakobidze-Gitman, Faculty for Humanities and Arts, University of Witten/Herdecke, Witten, Germany
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