Thread by @Helenreflects

I am teaching Xunzi's discourse on music next week for my philosophy of mind class (all less commonly taught philosophical traditions), and pairing that with psychology of music, notably Xunzi's adage that "music is joy" 1/

Xunzi was a Warring States philosopher approx living in the 3rd C BCE. He argued for the importance of human artifice (偽) in achieving goodness, things like ritual, music, and poetry. He said 其善者偽也 (what's good in people is their artifice) 2/

Xunzi held that human nature is bad, because our innate tendencies will cause us to conflict with others, these include
• fondness for profit -> struggle
• hate and dislike -> cruelty
• desires of eyes and ears -> lasciviousness and chaos 3/

The Mohists argued that music is wasteful. Xunzi objects to them: the sage-kings realized that we need to give expression to our emotions and so they created music, especially the canonical collection of the Odes (Shi 詩). 4/

Hence the Xunzi begins
“Music is joy, an unavoidable human disposition.”
It’s unavoidable that people feel joy (and certainly not bad!) but if it’s not properly expressed/channeled people will fall into chaos and disorder. So we need to channel it properly, through music 5/

Xunzi thinks the Sage Kings invented music with the express purpose of harmony
He examines situations where music is performed
• For political officials in the ancestral temple
• At home in the family
• in the village
• in military campaigns 6/

He observes that in all these situations, music creates proper harmony and in military rouses us to action. Now, how can music have this influence in politics, the family, the village, and the military? Xunzi says it is because music deeply transforms us 7/

Xunzi describes how music affects us "The phenomena of sounds and music are these: The drum is great
and magnificent. The bell is expansive and full. The stone chimes are restrained and orderly. The yu, sheng, xiao, he, guan, and yue are energetic and vibrant.... 8/

" The xun and chi are rolling and undulating. The
se is serene and relaxed. The qin is soft and gentle. Song is pure and penetrating." -- put in contemporary terms, music has what Rietveld calls "affective allure", it rouses and moves us irresistibly. 9/

(Paper by Rietveld here btw) academic.oup.com/mind/article-a… 10/

Just like donning certain garments can put you in a mood, music can do that too, so Xunzi: "Thus, the mourning garments and the sounds of weeping make people’s hearts sad. To strap on armor, don a helmet, and sing in the ranks makes people’s hearts emboldened." 11/

Interesting parallels between Xunzi and music and theories on the psychology of music, notably Joel Krueger's theory of musical affordance here (open access) frontiersin.org/articles/10.33… 12/

Joel Krueger observes (a well established phenomenon) that people listen to music to manage their mood, to animate behavior, cultivate and refine affective experiences (“musicking” in Krueger’s paper), but draws intriguing conclusions from this... 13/

Notably, music offers us affordances--things in our environment we can respond to in an embodied way. Much like a couch invites us to slouch in, and a chair to sit in upright, music can help us to modulate our mood in a certain way 14/

So music invites us to move (tapping your finger, bobbing your head), not just movement but synchronous movement, in tune w the music and others, and affective too, getting in the groove of the music 15/

Drawing on extended mind hypothesis (Clark and others) Krueger goes on to argue that music not only helps us to manage our moods, it can *create* complex emotions and expand our emotional and affective ways that would not be possible without it 16/

"Musical expressions of emotions can have, for instance, increased complexity, temporal range, subtlety, and force in contrast to their non-musical counterparts. These properties help to explain why, when listening attentively to a piece of music, we often feel as though ..."17/

"we have temporarily accessed a realm of feeling and expression that somehow goes beyond that of our everyday non-musical life; it also helps explain why musical expressions of emotion can seem simultaneously familiar and alien.” /18

Now this is super-interesting and ties in with Xunzi, who likewise thinks that human nature (our inborn dispositions) are relatively fixed BUT that we have artifice (wei, culture) with which we can expand and "beautify" ourselves, surmount or limitations 19/

Ritual, music and poetry are such ways to expand ourselves. They are external but they also reflect inward, expanding our range of emotional responses and refining them. This is why it is so important for Xunzi we listen to *the right* music /end