The Art of Sounding Behavior. Helmuth Plessner's Contribution to the Aesthetics and Anthropology of Music

The renowned connection between Plessner and philosophical anthropology has obscured both the fact that his writings on music are actually unrelated to his major anthropological theory and the importance of his conception of musical sound and music signification for the aesthetics of music. Plessner bases his theory of music signification on a radically anti-sensualistic phenomenological approach to musical sound. According to this approach, musical sound is a voluminous, constitutively temporal and phenomenally positioned quale. These qualities endow musical sound and sound formations with the property of inherent directedness. According to Plessner and Buytendijk's phenomenological theory of behavior, in which music plays an exemplary role, directedness is the fundamental property of all signification. This fact enables Plessner to approach music in terms of meaningful Gestalt, namely in terms of behavior. Taking further into consideration that, according to the same theory, the precise meaning of all behavior is situationally determined, we inquire the conditions under which the non-semantic, open, pre-symbolic meaning of music becomes semantically significant. All this makes part of a philosophical theory of music signification transcending and thus mediating the extremes of formalistic autonomy and semantic heteronomy. While Plessner does hint at certain issues of anthropological importance, like the conformity of sound to human corporality or the boundlessness of human acoustic perception and production in contrast to animals, he never raises the critical question of what makes such peculiar anthropological phenomena possible. In the last part of our paper we refer to Plessner's theory of ex-centric positionality in order to programmatically outline a philosophical anthropology of music which differs from both evolutionary/biological and cultural anthropological approaches to music. Some fundamental issues of this proposed branch of philosophical inquiry concern the anthropological possibility conditions of both music and music signification, the sources of musical historicity and value, and the nature of the social meaning of music.