In this paper, I examine Hegel's thoughts on sound, which are scattered none too systematically throughout his Aesthetics and Philosophy of Nature. Unsurprisingly, sound turns out to have a dialectical mode of being: it is both material and ideal, both an entity and a concept. I postulate that Hegel's ontology of sound grounds his philosophy of music. Even though musicologists tend to assume that Hegel's aesthetic of music is pure idealism, since it is based in his partly materialistic ontology of sound, it is as much materialistic as idealistic. I then identify other dialectical conceptions of sound, and thus unwitting echoes of Hegelianism, in Eliane Radigue's notion of sound as simultaneously material and ideal, and in Pierre Schaeffer's sound object, likewise an ideal and material entity.
A version of this paper was presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics.
Read it here.
