Music, Metaphor, and Emotion

Abstract

We describe music in terms of emotion. How should we understand this? Some say that descriptions should be understood literally. Let us call those views literalist. By contrast nonliteralists deny this and say that such descriptions are typically metaphorical.' This issue about the linguistic description of music is connected with a central issue about the nature of music. That issue is whether there is any essential connection between music and emotion. According to what we can call emotion theories, it is essential to music to be somehow related to real emotion. Prominent examples of such theories are these: it is the main function of all or most music to express emotions, to arouse emotions, or to represent emotions.2 In my view, such theories have little plausibility, and they face a battery of powerful objections. In particular, these theories are objectionable on the grounds that essential features of preclude such essential relations between music and emotion.3 Yet to argue against various specific theories of music, of which there is a large variety, does not address the reasons that draw people to theories. I think that there are two main reasons. The first is that the most obvious explanation of why we describe music in terms is that emotions, or relations to emotions, are part of what music is. The second reason is introspective, or phenomenological-that much music moves us when we listen to it, so it seems that music generates emotions in us, which we project onto the music when we describe it in terms. In this article, my negative purpose is to dissolve these two reasons. My positive purpose is to argue for a particular nonliteralist view of linguistic descriptions of music in terms of emotion, a view according to which descriptions are metaphorical descriptions of aesthetic properties. I call this the aesthetic metaphor thesis. This view is naturally conjoined with a view of the nature of music according to which music has the function of sustaining aesthetic properties. On this view, music itself has nothing essential to do with emotion. If descriptions are not literal, then that removes the first reason that people have for turning to theories. I shall also show how we can nevertheless allow a sense in which music may move us, even though it does not generate emotions. That undermines the second reason. Furthermore, we will see that in many respects, the precise role that descriptions play supports the aesthetic metaphor thesis over its rivals.