The Phenomenology of a Simple Song: Expression, Creativity, and the Recovery of Aesthetics

Abstract

Abstract By placing aesthetics as art back within the phenomena of experience, this work seeks to recover philosophical aesthetics from the marginal position into which it has been relegated. Merleau-Ponty’s thought and the perception of music lay a groundwork for ontology and epistemology less conditioned by Cartesian biases. Musical thinking highlights the rich content of thought, the dimensionality of meaning, and the need to place language back within the phenomena of expression. A phenomenology of expression by way of songwriting reveals a complex creative process, a good portion of which is not transparent (neither rooted in reflective thought nor consciously determined). There emerges a notion of subjectivity and intentionality that transcends and subtends the “I” with which we ordinarily identify. The lyre of Orpheus opens the doors of the unreflective life, the aesthetic dimension, the intimacy of the world that transcends us, and the generosity of the subjectivity that subtends us.