So I just watched Black Snake moan while drinking an odd mixture called Tilt, and it got me thinking about music. I was looking through my high school transcripts earlier, and I did better in music theory than pretty much anything else. Music theory ties together intuition, passion, and logic, in a way that nothing other than philosophy really can, and perhaps more than is possible even for philosophy. On paper it's all applied mathematics, though it's meaningless unless you can hear it and feel it. Of course, the passion and feeling were there long before the math historically, though biologists, neurologists, and physiologists will strive to tell you more with each new experiment how the passion and feeling come about. If "spirit" means anything to me, it is what is nourished by music, and yet music connects the objective to the subjective in a way that is hard to understand but impossible to forget. This might make it one of the best reasons to believe that there is no fundamental division between soul and body, nothing that really separates us from the world that we are undeniably a part of.
I hope I get to be one of those rare philosopher/scientist/mathematicians who prefer blues, folk, and rock to Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. For me, it's all part of being a good animal- and being a good animal is part of being a good person.
But more on that later!
I'm no philosopher but I enjoy blues and rock much more than classical music. Sure classical is great (especially Chopin), but to me the blues in particular have much more soul. Maybe it's because it's so in your face. I've had plenty of music friends tell me that there is just as much soul in the classics.
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