W.E.B. Du Bois, Jean-Luc Nancy, and the Aesthetic Education offered by Music

Abstract

This paper will explore the aesthetic experience that can occur with music, and the potentially transformative
existential education that can unfold from that experience. First and foremost, the paper explores the ways W.E.B
Du Bois engages with music in The Souls of Black Folk. Drawing on the African-American tradition of the
spirituals, but also European symphonic music, Du Bois shows the different ways music can captivate a listener.
But Du Bois also complicates what is meant by “listening” to music. This can happen when music is used as a
literary device, symbolically as a way of setting the mood for the reader, but also when it is “heard” as arriving
from the future. Secondly, this paper turns to Jean-Luc Nancy, whose writing on listening, music and philosophy
has captured the attention of musicologists, literary theorists, educators, and, of course, philosophers. For Nancy,
listening includes both the embodied experience of hearing and processing sound, as well as the hermeneutics of
listening to the sound of ideas. Thinking is musical, music is philosophical, and the distinction between the two is
not always entirely clear. Together, Du Bois and Nancy help us to gain a deeper appreciation and understanding
for the diverse ways that “music” and “listening” can be experienced.