Feature
A Melodious Life
How Polyphony & the Cantus Firmus Can Illuminate Integrity by Lauris C. Kaldjian
Over the course of my life, three areas of interest have occupied the largest portions of my study and practice: music, medicine, and ethics. As I entered upon each of these pursuits, I did not think about the transcendental properties of being they exemplify, but in retrospect I realize that, together, this trio of interests represents ways of pursuing the beautiful, the good, and the true. The theme of a conference at Notre Dame University ("You Are Beauty") encouraged me to reflect more deliberately on the interrelationships within this trio, and specifically on how beauty relates to truth and goodness in my own particular context. Regarding this context, let me note that I come to my topic not as a music theorist or historian, but as a physician and ethicist who began playing violin concertos by Bach many years before I started reading EKGs or books by Alasdair MacIntyre.
Music, especially sacred music, has been a steady consolation at times when the presence of suffering has brought dark clouds over the beautiful things of this world and I have struggled to make sense of the good and the true. Dietrich Bonhoeffer articulated this consolation in a letter (from prison) to his infant godson, saying that in the years to come music "will help to dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibility, and in times of care and sorrow will keep a ground-bass of joy alive in you." For many of us, the consoling and clarifying power of musical beauty is broadly relevant to our lives, and it prompts me, as a medical ethicist, to consider how the beauty of music can illuminate one of the more perplexing problems in ethics: the problem of having to make a decision between two or more good options.
Tension in the Moral Life
Let me give a clinical example. Imagine a 75-year-old woman with end-stage leukemia. Although her disease is beyond human remedy, she continues to ask for blood and platelet transfusions so that she will not bleed to death. Her request pushes against her doctor's gentle but clear insistence that she is dying and transfusions will not change that fact. How should a doctor choose between the obligation of beneficence (the good of this woman's continued life, even if only for a few days) and the claims of justice or utility (the good for others who would receive greater benefit from these scarce resources)? How do we reconcile such contrasting and mutually exclusive goods? How do we prioritize one option over another, and thereby bring order to the moral field of possibilities?
These kinds of choices don't just involve patients, of course. They occur whenever we are forced to choose how to distribute our limited time, effort, and money between the interests of one person and those of another, or between one goal and another.
When faced squarely, the problem of deciding between competing goods may threaten our expectation of moral order and give the impression that the moral landscape in which we make choices is fragmented, not unified. This is the conclusion reached by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who points out, in an essay titled "The Fragmentation of Value," that moral value is plural, but moral decisions are singular. He believes that moral plurality comprises six basic types of value (obligations, rights, utility, perfectionist ends, private commitments, and self-interest) that cannot be prioritized because each value is irreducibly distinct. As a result, there is an intrinsic tension in the moral life that defies resolution. (If we were to describe Nagel's position in musical terms, we might say these different moral values create a cacophony of competing melodies.)
The root of the problem, argues Nagel, is anthropological, because humans "can view the world from many perspectives . . . and each perspective presents a different set of claims." In the end, he deals with the problem of competing moral values by dismissing it, claiming that it's a mistake to look for "a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do" for the same reason that it's a mistake to look for "a single theory of how to decide what to believe" (italics mine). But for those of us who believe such metaphysical explorations are not mistaken, the problem of tension in the moral life stokes our desire for a deep practical wisdom that gives our moral choices a certain order, coherence, harmony, and, especially, integrity.
Cosmic Order in Music
Integrity is a concept that carries important meaning in both ethics and aesthetics, so it is particularly helpful to keep it in mind when discussing how musical beauty can illuminate morality. Integrity is a component of traditional definitions of beauty, along with proportion, consonance of parts, resplendence, and the experience of pleasure. In musical beauty, integrity involves an ordered relatedness of notes and parts that creates coherence, coordination, movement, and balance; these ordered relationships between sounds of different pitch, pattern, volume, and duration give music its phenomenal ability to combine a multiplicity of contrasting sounds into a meaningful and often complex whole.
In his book Resounding Truth, the theologian-musician Jeremy Begbie describes how order and integrity explain not only the fascinating workings of music, but also a tradition of thinking about music that sees in it a reflection of the order of creation. This tradition was formed by a Christian-Greek synthesis that ran from Pythagoras and Plato through Augustine and Boethius into the medieval period. It maintained that musical sound and order, especially harmony, give expression to a universal, God-given cosmic order because music is part of that order.
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