Music and beauty. Ethical-aesthetic synesthesia and source of the creative thought

The famous assertion taken from Dostoevsky’s "Idiot" ("Beauty will save the world") offers a key that, based on a literal interpretation of the Russian text, leads to invert the terms of the sentence: "The world will save beauty". To be possible, it is necessary that the world recovers the essence of beauty, that is gratuity, which is an indispensable point of reference in the concept of charis, meaning "grace". Grace is the open space where beauty and the world interact, making possible an experience that is both aesthetic and ethical. The immediate nature of grace can be found on the floor of the psychoanalytic concept of "insight" as intuitive, immediate knowledge. Thus, it extends the meanings of beauty and aesthetic experience, characterized by an "aesthesic-aesthetic knowledge" which consists mainly in the performance of a sensitivity capable of perceiving sensations through intuition. At the intersection between ethics and aesthetics is the musical experience which, in its substantive untranslatability, is a vehicle or "container of resonance" for the emotions: the musical symbol appears as empty signifier, which solves the horizon of the concepts defined while evokes the undefined of imagination and affections. Listening to music, therefore, turns an inner perception, a kind of aesthetic intuition at an unconscious level, by itself untranslatable (symmetrical thought), which can be unfolded through the asymmetrical relations of logical thought. It is in this key that the concept of "projective tension" can be interpreted. For it allows us to create what is not yet existing and to innovate what already is. Aesthetic experiences that emerge from the categories covered by this tension have a common factor in the discontinuity and the creation of "uncommon" that in music is found both in terms of composition and improvisation, and that also affects the field of knowledge and learning.

Keywords: Aesthetics, ethics, beauty, emotion, insight, music, referring tension, deviation

Maurizio Cogliani, Musica e bellezza. Sinestesia etico-estetica e origine del pensiero creativo in "EDUCAZIONE SENTIMENTALE" 16/2011, pp 105-123, DOI: 10.3280/EDS2011-016008