Abstracts Philosophy, Religion, and Theology

The musical experience from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception

by Alex Fernando Camacho Santamaría

This paper proposes a philosophy of music, based on the philosophy of the author Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as presented in the book Phenomenology of Perception. The guide of our interest lies in the consideration of music as an ineffable art, due to the difficulty that arises when trying to explain with words what constitutes its experience. This condition of the musical craft has resulted in a wide range of cultural uses, in which the musical experience assumes the spiritual and practical values of each society. The philosophy of the French author is adequate to understand many of the objective misunderstandings arising from the aforementioned formal diversity of musical experience, for it is a philosophy that has its foundation in the idea of perception as being-of-the-world. This idea leads us to consider musical experience as irreducibly shaped by the pre-objective, or spatial, facet of perception and by the objective facet of perception -whose distinctions encompass sense, thought and spirit-. Under this perceptual synergy, the musical experience claims a peculiar bodily synesthesia and, therefore, the respective and mysterious quality with which it manifests itself in culture and history. This work, in synthesis, seeks to describe the musical experience from the philosophical objectivity of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological nature, trying to open ways for the understanding of complex phenomena such as music and art.