Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World (Sound and Symbol Volume One [1]) (Bollingen Series XLIV)

Volume 1 of 2. vii, [3], 399, [3] pp. Translated into English from the original German by Willard R. Trask. 'In antiquity, music ranked with mathematics as a key to the understanding of the universe. But today, mathematics serves almost alone as a means of our endeavor to penetrate the unknown. And, even though, since the Renaissance, the rise of music has been as spectacular as that of mathematics, scarcely any attempts have been made to investigate this parallelism and interpret its meaning. The present study - now being published for the first time - attempts to reinstate music as an instrument of philosophical inquiry. It seeks not so much a philosophy of music as a philosophy through music. By working from the bare facts of musical experience to a recognition of its essential properties, the author arrives at a set of fundamental concepts which could serve as a framework for an understanding of the world and of ourselves: concepts that are in surprising accord with some of the basic ideas of modern science. Indeed, one of the characteristic elements of twentieth-century thought in general, as the author demonstrates, is an orientation toward music.'