Abstract

Listening Music Listening to an art of music’s work! Something important happens to us. Why? Because our soul is touched and moved at its deepest levels. In contact with music, a spiritual tumult invades our entire being; and we are revealed to ourselves in a new and previously unknown way. Face to face with the harmonious sounds – giving music the status of an artistic “text” – we find opportunities – maybe the best possible – to unfold our unique capacity to participate in, understand and even interpret life’s expanse. We put ourselves in the state of better self-knowledge and comprehension, by that hermeneutic polarity of “proximity and detachment” – according to Paul Ricoeur 2 . When we listen to music, each of us gives ourselves the chance to live the “absolute moment” – meaning, “at the same time, self-denial and self-mediation”. Everything that tears one away from anything restores the whole of totality of ‘being’, the subject installs himself in the profundity of “meaning’s continuity” 3 . In listening to music, the human being experiences universal communication, reaching the root of the major ethical truth of life – some of the “Logos of Life”, the center-concept in Phenomenology of Life elaborated by AnnaTeresa Tymieniecka 4 . “Two plans”: the “first” and the “second” – using Nicolai Hartmann’s aesthetical terms – are working together, in the accomplishment of musical art within the intuition and comprehension process to create a unitary view of this complex phenomenon. Through contact with an audio-sensitive matter, the listener deciphers a spiritual content molded into an artistic form. This content, its sense, and the force by which a musical work preserves and increases its identity over time are revealed through examination of the “relation between these plans”, through analysis of the whole musical experience in their “pure inner, autonomous connection” 5 . So we can speak about the relation between the material elements of the structure of musical language and what is “unreal” behind the spiritual elements of the plan. Hence, a question comes into profile: What is the reason for music’s life? What is its genesis, development, strength; actually, its undoubted value throughout its evolution over the millennia? We maintain that the ethos constitutes its great existence; the ethos – “rather than the eidos”, speaking in terms of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka , which assures even the “ontic-ontological” differentiation . In discussion is the intimate relation between manifestation, external phenomenally, and intelligibility, internal foundation, essence. Beyond the empirical domain, that of the organized sounds in melody, harmony, and rhythm, let us examine the substratum of interiority within which a plenitude of ethical values makes their home. Consequently, we set up a new concept: the meloethics 7 - a complex philosophical construct, a structural-dynamical unity of the components : ‘mélos’ / ‘ ’ = song, melody; by extension: music; and ‘èthiké’ / ‘ ’ = moral, which belongs to ethics; herein, the system of moral values