Bios mousikos

Mousikē is of the same genos as human phusis, says Aristotle. In Plato's Philebus, at 62c, Socrates asks Protarchos whether mousikē is necessary for the adequate mixture essential to a desirable life; to which he replies that he certainly considers mousikē to be necessary, ‘if our life [bios] is really to be a life of some [proper] kind’ (ἀναγκαῖον ϕαίνϵται ἔμοιγϵ, ϵἴπϵρ γϵ ἡμῶν ὁ βίος ἔσται καὶ ὁπωσοῦν ποτϵ βίος). Furthermore, in the Phaedo, at 61a, Socrates while in prison will be told in a recurring dream that ὡς ϕιλοσοϕίας μὲν οὔσης μϵγίστης μουσικῆς (‘philosophy is the highest mousikē’). In what sense is this meant, he wonders? Is it in the sense, perhaps, of shaping a way of life, an ēthos, as a continuous becoming of a philosophical search/initiation (muēsιs = mousikē)? Socrates disputes this initial understanding and suggests to himself that what he was, in fact, told to do is to practise mousikē in the ordinary sense. But, of course, the answer to the question cannot be understood as if it were a contemporary dilemma, or as falling into the late supposedly neat modern scission between abstract philosophy and ordinariness. Socrates is well aware that the practice of mousikē and philosophical understanding are united before the experience of the happening of sound and ‘language’. These two events are so intimately linked that philosophy must undertake to study them and protect them from erosion. The two coeval anthropogenic events of the occurrence of the phōnē (or ‘voice, sound’) and of the ‘word’ (logos), at a time when these are not yet separated, are the inspiration and measure of the ‘highest philosophy’ (= mousikē).

Rather than consider Socrates to be in conversation with his ‘bad conscience’, as Friedrich Nietzsche would perhaps have it, it is of interest to imagine the way in which mousikē was experienced; that is, the experience that actually enables such a Socratic expression in the first place.