14 - On morality

Summary

Clearly the new morality that instrumental music was elected to represent was a biological one – an internal, organic impulse that formed an Empfindungssprache of moral gestures. The soul during the course of the eighteenth century had obviously shifted its footing from a mechanical to an organic ethic; the extrinsic law that regenerates a depraved will is now replaced by an internal moral sense that no longer needs the sanctifying grace of God but the biological growth of its emotions instead. Ernst Cassirer traces the source of this inward morality to the Cambridge Platonists who already in the seventeenth century had drawn the distinction between the mechanical and the vital:

There are a sort of Mechanical Christians in the world, that not finding Religion acting like a living form within them, satisfie themselves only to make an Art of it … But true Religion is no Art, but an inward Nature that contains all the laws and measures of its motion within itself.

True religion is no art? The ironic twist at the end of the eighteenth century was that art had become nature and that nature had replaced God as the interpreter of the cosmos. Thus the aesthetic could make an art out of morality by aestheticising the soul as a kind of innate, natural religion consecrated by the body. And music, because it seemed to mime the body's internal motions, was given power over the moral nature as a living form within.