著者

源河 亨

出版者

美学会

雑誌

美学 (ISSN:05200962)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.68, no.2, pp.97, 2017 (Released:2019-01-02)

---

Peter Kivy claims, from his early works, that music cannot arouse “garden-variety emotion” such as joy, anger, fear, sadness. According to him, the emotion aroused by music is a special “musical emotion”; the object of this emotion is always music. This claim seems to be counterintuitive and thus elicits many objections from philosophers, musicologists, psychologists, neuroscientists, and artists. However, I will argue that Kivy’s position is most plausible given the philosophy of emotion. Especially, I will show that there is no emotion deserving to be called “sadness” that is aroused by music. By appealing to philosophical considerations on emotion, I will support the following two points that Kivy emphasizes. The first is the lack of an object. There are no sad things (no loss) while we listen to music. If sadness does not occur, the lack of an object makes no matter. The second point is the paradox of negative emotion. Sadness has a negative value and we prefer to avoid it. If we can accept this, why then, are we willing to listen to music that make us sad? Again, if sadness does not occur, there arises no paradox.