The way that Aristotle conceives of ethics and the good life are closely related to the idea of harmony. Instead of just involving a string of unrelated occurrences, the good life carries with it an underlying unity or totality. Well-being involves having rational desires. That means your desires are in harmony with each other and also in harmony with your values. It also means that your actions are in harmony with your desires. What all of this amounts to is that you are happy when you are living in a state of psychic harmony. Basically having a good character boils down to keeping your soul in such a state, where everything in your soul is functioning the way it is meant to. Naturally we want to avoid being troubled with conflicting desires. That only leads to a state of continual dissatisfaction with life, which Aristotle associates with wicked persons. Such people “shun themselves,” because
they remember many a grievous deed, and anticipate others like them, when they are by themselves, but when they are with others they forget. And having nothing lovable in them, they have no feeling of love to themselves. Therefore also such men do not rejoice or grieve with themselves; for their soul is rent by faction, and one element in it by reason of its wickedness grieves when it abstains from certain acts, while the other part is pleased, and one draws them this way and the other that, as if they were pulling them in pieces.96
To most of us this is self-evident. According to Aristotle's perspective, declaring the lack of any right or wrong in ethics—as many who buy into today's pervasive moral relativism are inclined to do—is tantamount to claiming that happiness and unhappiness are indistinguishable, that living a satisfying existence is identical to living a wretched one. But such an assertion flies in the face of common sense.
Music, Culture, and Character
Philosophers throughout the ages have been intrigued by the question of the broader significance of music for human existence. According to Jamie James, to retrace the paths taken not only by Western music but also Western intellectual history reveals a concerted quest for the supreme orderliness of the cosmos.97 This idea of music manifesting a universal order is what Pythagoras claimed to be the music of the spheres: the apparent soundlessness across the firmament is eternally emitting a higher form of music that only the gods can hear. According to Liebniz, writing at the time of J. S. Bach, music represents a kind of unconscious calculation that produces, along with harmonic delight, an apprehension of the uppermost forms of truth. Schopenhauer believed music to herald an appearance of cosmic reality, which is suffused throughout our existence.
Yet music serves as more than a topic for meditation on its metaphysical features. The relationship between musical study and performance, on the one hand, and moral virtue and character, on the other, has been probed since the very origins of speculative thought.
As we saw in our discussion of Aristotle's concept of virtue, in classical teachings, the idea of “politics” is broad, and concerns not simply the activities of elected officials, but a wider range of activities that includes leadership of human associations. Accordingly, we turn to consider what insights that teaching offers for our understanding of virtuosity and the cultivation of excellence in business life and the broader culture of which it is a part.
Ancient thinkers, alluding to the elements of harmony, rhythm, and melody, deemed such features of music to carry moral and emotive force. Both Aristotle and Plato attach particular significance to rhythmic and harmonic phenomena due to the force they hold for impacting the attainment of the chief goal of the life of politics. To Aristotle that objective is to inculcate a particular sort of character in people, that is, to render them virtuous, able to accomplish noble acts. It is obvious, to Aristotle, that music contributes to virtue since we can see from numerous things that we take on a certain quality of character on account of its influence on us.
To the ancient mind, music is understood to be an “imitative” art in the sense that music portrays the range of emotions and forms of character that humans exhibit. In the words of Aristotle:
Since…music is a pleasure, and virtue consists in rejoicing and loving and hating aright, there is clearly nothing which we are so much concerned to acquire and to cultivate as the power of forming right judgments, and of taking delight in good dispositions and noble actions. Rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and of the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know from our own experience, for in listening to such strains our souls undergo a change.98
Not only do musical representations appear to the soul (psychê), but they leave an imprint on it. Such an imprimatur tends to have substantial delibility for highly impressionable souls, as with youth. Such a character-shaping tendency exists with respect to one's exposure to works of art in general: sculpture, painting, and poetry. Accordingly, Socrates voices his position in the Republic regarding youth that, from immersion in beautiful works of art, youth will stand equipped for goodness, “likeness and friendship and harmony with the principle of beauty.”
Yet for Socrates, of all the images of art, music remains the most influential. Thus he opines that “musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful.”99
Aristotle and Plato are especially intrigued by the notion that music can be conducive to one's capacity for self-restraint. Music can excite our passions, and it also has the power to calm them. Vladimir Horowitz believed that the virtuoso is able to contain inner passion, controlling its release during the performance.100 The composed state of the passions cultivated through suitable upbringing in music is good preparation for virtuous activity. That is due to the tendency, Aristotle says, for undue passion to interfere with a person's aptitude for moral reasoning and choice. Aristotle contends that the virtuous life demands the exercise of prudence, understood as the dual capability to recognize moral virtues—first principles of conduct—and to ascertain how to actualize such virtues through specific behaviors.
Aristotle observes in Politics that receiving correct training in music empowers a person not simply to make appraisals of noble melodies, but also to appraise noble things as such.101
Turning our gaze higher, the early philosophers advise that suitable upbringing in music grooms the soul for philosophical inquiry and reflection. Aristotle and Plato alike teach that immoderate passion blocks not only moral efforts but philosophical pursuits as well. Therefore, by quelling passions that divert the soul away from its quest for truth, temperance-creating music clears a path for philosophy. Music kindles in one's soul a magnetism for the truth that philosophy pursues. The exquisiteness in music reveals to the soul the realm of the beautiful and the intelligible. With its charm and the natural delight attending it, music nurtures an enduring predilection for ordered beauty. And this is precisely what the philosopher is yearning for. As Socrates states in the Republic, the philosopher associates with the divine and orderly in the universe.
Closely connected with this notion, the Pythagoreans located harmonic, arithmetic, and geometric means underpinning the musical scale. In addition, they identified ratios associated with musical consonance, that is, intervals of the octave (1:2), perfect fourth (3:4), and perfect fifth (2:3). According to the Pythagoreans, the just and well-ordered society is analogous to a well-tuned lyre. Whereas the separate notes preserve their individuality, they are proportionally connected to the larger group that comprises the musical scale. As such the notes are in a state of interdependence.102
What does this all mean for the life of business? Can we somehow appraise the health of economic life today through an examination of our musical culture? In addressing this matter, it is instructive to consider the type of diagnosis of contemporary culture (especially music) and politics (in the broad sense discussed earlier, which encompasses business), along with their impact on the soul, that follows from the perspectives of Plato and Aristotle.
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