Can Songs Philosophically Convince or Illuminate?
You tell me!
For those of us who love philosophy, philosophical songs—e.g. from the 21st Century Monads or Hannah Hoffman—can be a lot of fun. Since I’m not in a position to compose such works myself, one of my favorite uses of Suno is to play around with having it add musical backing to philosophical lyrics, with results like my Idealism Theme Song (Return to Eden) and The Curse of Deontology.1 While I find these fun, I can’t really imagine them being philosophically persuasive; they’re more just serving as superficial “pointers” to more in-depth arguments that one might consider later looking into.
That said, it seems to me that it should be possible for a song to be (at least somewhat) philosophically compelling. Music, as a medium, seems especially well-suited to eliciting emotional responses. And I think it’s actually quite common for people to reject philosophical views or arguments for ultimately emotional reasons—the ideas just fail to resonate with them in the right way. This suggests to me that the best chance for philosophically valuable or illuminating songs will be via emotional narratives that help us to see things in a new light, or from a new perspective.
My best attempt at this to date can be found in The Repugnant Conclusion (inspired by Daniel Rubio’s recent post, especially the idea of choosing between lotteries from behind a population-ethical “veil of ignorance”, in which one can choose between either guaranteed existence in Z or a proportionately tiny chance at securing a spot in the small utopian world A). I hope the song manages to convey a more vivid sense of the perspective of the Z-dwellers, and how outraged they could reasonably be at our suggestion that all their lives are so easily outweighed by a few people in A. It’s not the gamble they would choose, so maybe we shouldn’t be so confident that A is the better world overall (let alone that it must be “repugnant” to prioritize the Z-lives):
(Another, perhaps less compelling, attempt at musical illumination is ‘Hell Looks Fine to Demons’, channeling a perspective of horrified alienation from apparent natural beauty in light of the underlying “red in tooth and claw” reality.)
I’d be curious to hear people’s thoughts on the prospects for philosophically illuminating music—especially any candidate examples you’ve come across elsewhere (or created yourself). Since there aren’t many real philosopher-songwriters around, I’d encourage more plain old philosophers to play around with AI tools like Suno to do the musical work for them. I don’t imagine that I’m especially good at this, so I’d be excited to see what better-skilled prompters come up with. It seems like under-explored territory.2
Sometimes people rush to attribute somewhat delusional-sounding attitudes to people who enjoy using AI art tools, so let me just add for the record that I like Andy Masley’s take: “I’m excited that I found [these image outputs] in the same way I’d be excited about finding a neat rock. I don’t think much of my own creativity went into this, and I know it’s different from creating art myself.” There can be a little bit more to it than this, given the role of the human “creative director” in setting the high-level themes, and possibly directing some low-level tweaks at the end. (Or maybe I just don’t know enough about the human choices that can go into finding neat rocks.) But I think it’s the right attitude to take towards the work the AI does. And it can be genuinely delightful when your prompting uncovers a response that you really like!
I don’t even think the music needs to be especially good qua music in order to serve the philosophical role I have in mind. (I still find it incredible that we have these capabilities at all.) Though I’d be curious to hear if others disagree, and feel like overly formulaic or otherwise aesthetically dissatisfying music blocks the philosophical narrative from having an effect.
I think there's a lot of great philosophical argumentation, convincing, and illumination in fiction, partly because fiction gives you a much deeper understanding of a situation than a simplified thought experiment. And some fiction is well-illuminated by music, particularly music that helps bring out structural features in the fiction that aren't necessarily apparent on first look. (This is an aspect of the use of music that I think AI-generated music is so far extremely bad at.)
I'm a big fan of Wagner's Ring cycle (and wrote a 100 word thing about it here: https://aestheticsforbirds.com/2021/02/23/kenny-easwaran-on-richard-wagner/ ). The core theme of the series of operas is that a certain kind of power involves giving up on love - but there are different ways that the magic power of the ring, and the moral power of following the law (symbolized by Wotan's spear), and the power of safety from constructing Walhalla, each involve giving up on a different loved one. Wagner's famous use of leitmotifs throughout his music helps demonstrate this - in the last opera, all these powers are destroyed as Brunnhilde restores love, and you hear this in the music, as the leitmotifs for the ring, for Walhalla, and for Wotan's spear are each successively destroyed. But Brunnhilde herself exists only as Wotan's creation, intended to bring him the Ring, but she has free agency, and she ends up deciding that the best thing for Wotan is to destroy the Ring and defy Wotan's commands, and this too shows up through the music.
In a very different way, the musical Rent is all about the idea that when our time in life is limited (whether due to HIV or just due to mortality) we have to remember to enjoy the moments we do have and not spend all those moments worrying about the future moments that we won't have. This theme is brought out in the stories of many of the individual characters, and it too is conveyed by certain melodic elements being recycled throughout the show. (And I also enjoy that the character who most explicitly tells this theme to everyone else, and embodies it in his life, is the lecturer in "computer age philosophy" at NYU.)
The Curse of Deontology song made me think of how many interesting story ideas there could be for a character who's explicitly a quiet deontologist and consistently acts on his beliefs. It could be a tragic story where his moral constraints prevent him from saving the day, or it could be a more lighthearted story where he teams up with a utilitarian to do the dirty work for him. I imagine there could be lots of fun banter between the two, e.g., "I knew I could trust you to do the wrong thing," but the quiet deontologist would always make sure not to convince his utilitarian friend that he's actually right.