Blog #7 - Higggins

Kathleen Higgins believes that music can inform our ethical experience. She defends the view that music has much to offer our ethical lives and reflection, expressing that music is a means of “exploring the wealth of our ethical world and can promote harmonious living.” She defends the connection between music and human character and behavior. Higgins affirms that "music’s capacity to engage our intellectual, emotional, and physical natures simultaneously, its suitability for promoting social cohesion, its reflection of practical and ideal modes of human social interaction, its ability to stimulate reflections regarding our basic values" are essential features of musical experience. 

This is in direct opposition to the current trend in musical aesthetics: the abstract analysis of music solely in terms of its form, also known as formalism. She affirms that the dominance of aesthetic formalism neglects the richness of aesthetic experience and explains how it has contributed to the abandonment of the idea that music has an ethical dimension. Higgins argues that when music is "defined as 'a musical score' and aesthetics becomes a technical enterprise," essential elements of the musical experience are screened out, contributing to a loss of proper aesthetic judgment. She specifically quotes in her book, “Philosophical adherence to a rigid definition of music in terms of musical works has led many philosophers to counterintuitive misunderstandings about the nature of music as a phenomenon in human experience.”