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Why do some think "music" (not gear, trading, etc.) is the ultimate end?

A recent thread spurred a debate about the word "audiophile." Again. It went round and round in the usual ways.

What I don't understand is why so many take for granted that loving music is superior to loving gear. Or that gear is always -- and must be -- a mere *means* to music, which is the (supposedly) true end.

But if you stop and think about it, why do we love music? It gives us enjoyment.
Isn't that why people love gear? The enjoyment?
Or even, to push the question, buying, selling, changing gear? That's for enjoyment, no?

So, it raises the difficult question: Why do some think that "music" as an "enjoyment" is better than "gear" or "shopping, buying, selling, trading"?

Not everyone believes this, but it is the most prevalent assumption in these discussions -- that "love of music" is the end-which-cannot-be-questioned. 

So, while music is the largest end I'm personally striving for, I do realize that it's because it brings me enjoyment. But the other facets of the hobby do, too. And I'm starting to realize that ranking them is an exercise but not a revelation of the "one" way everything should sort out. It's all pretty subjective and surely doesn't seem like a basis on which I could criticize someone else's enjoyment, right? 

What do you think? On what grounds do you see it argued that "music" is a *superior* or *ultimate* end? Whether you agree or not, what reasons do you think support that conclusion?
hilde45

Showing 6 responses by mahgister

mahgister's avatar
mahgister
13,304 posts
 
I am not aware of anyone ever having been brought to tears from staring at a silent pair of speakers.
I always weep  in front of my silent speakers....

But it is after listening to Scriabin or Chet Baker....

Never before.....
mahgister's avatar
mahgister
13,304 posts
 
Thanks and merry christmas edcyn....😌
mahgister's avatar
mahgister
13,304 posts
 
It remind me of my schoolyard teen years, when some objected about listening the words they dont understand or reacted to interest they dont like....My hate of crowd come from these years indeed....

Coming back to the OP matter, gear has no interest to me apart from their contribution to sound quality....
Music is a so deep subject that Stuart Hameroff says with Roger Penrose that the brain is more akin to an orchestra than to a computing device...

I know they are right because in the music the signification and the sound wave body make one complete unity.... This cenesthesy is already the perception of an encompassing reality.... In this sense the music is a multidimensional consciousness potential in the making.... A computation suppose that and his itself only the shadow of a more deep music.....It is not bad poetry when a great mathematician physicist, Michael Berry, call the prime distribution a musical event, not only a mere computational event....

Understanding music is akin to improve our conscious participation in the phenomenas flow in our own body and in the world that are always ONE anyway, and that are made one on another level for the conscious listening experience, and Pirsig outpassing the sterile subject /object customs and barrier is a walk in the right direction indeed....



:)
mahgister's avatar
mahgister
13,304 posts
 
Thanks hilde45...

Pirsig is an interesting writer and your recommendation is interesting...

Pirsig was pushing toward something like a more integrated view, a connective, dynamic way of seeing experience rather than pigeonholing ways of seeing.

You are right and it is the reason why i name few of my favorite to walk the same walk....

I only push the many writers i did recommend to go more on the same road, and Dewey was indeed one of the great american thinker with Peirce, and few others....

By the way the best friend of Goethe is a thinker in his own way and express very deep thinking about the polarities in his own way in a very simple and deep book : Schiller "on the aesthetic education of man" a pleasure to read...

Happy holiday to you and all....
mahgister's avatar
mahgister
13,304 posts
 
To go way deeper than with Pirsig in the same direction, try Jean Gebser, "the ever present origin" and reading Julian Jaynes and Ernst Cassirer will do the rest of the job....

Classical and romantic, or left brain and right brain are surface manifestation of polarities deeply seated in the dynamic genesis history of consciousness...

Gebser, Cassirer, and Jaynes are all complementary works but perhaps a bit hard to read then i suggest this small book, very astounding one indeed : Owen Barfield, "saving the appearence" and more easy read than the three i recommended already : Iain McGilchrist: "the master and his emissary" will complement Barfield.....After these 2 you are ready for Gebser/Jaynes/Cassirer....

In one small book by the physicist Henri Bortoft, disciple of David Bohm: an explanation of Goethe vision and perception: "taken appearence seriously"... Understanding Goethe the greatest thinker since Plato and easily the more underestimated and difficult to understand anyway, is very helpful even if you read none of the books i suggest....Goethe was a supremum artist and his science understanding had 2 centuries in advance then.....😊

The best Christmas to you and to all.....
mahgister's avatar
mahgister
13,304 posts
 
Listening music is a spiritual endeavour, like mathematics or poetry...

Listening music not only give enjoyment, like collecting cadavers when you are a good sniper, or female bodies if you are a pimp,or cars or gear or postal stamps; listening music can and must transform the soul coming from the spirit....

Then audiophile hobby is not essentially collecting gear, not even implementing the rightful controls of the 3 embeddings for any audio system, it is listening music first with the wish to listen to it with the optimal sound experience possible....


Music is more than only pastime enjoyment, it can be also therapeutical, and it can liberate our limited senses and by a cenestesic miracle propel our soul to the spirit world where all our senses merge in an interpenetrating one....



« At the end music is no more incoming waves of sound»- Groucho Marx thinking about the deaf Beethoven


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