title: Kant’s situated approach to musicking and joking
Creators: name: Jakobidze-Gitman, Alexander
Publisher: name: Universität Graz
Year: 2020

description: Background in the history of musical aesthetics. Kant’s denigration of music to the lowest
form of art (alongside the art of telling jokes) was due to a transitory phase that musical aesthetics
experienced around 1790: both philosophers and musicians recognized that there are no
correspondences between types of musical passages and the emotions elicited by the listener (as
the previously dominant doctrine of affects claimed). Rather, music brings about “an unspeakable
wealth of thought” that had not yet been acknowledged as a proof of its superiority over other
arts, as Romantic philosophers proclaimed soon after Kant’s time.
Background in cognitive neuropsychology. No explicitly comparative research into humour
and music appreciation exists (as opposed to humour in music). However, a juxtaposition of the
findings of separate studies of those two domains reveal that the pleasure both humour and music
cause is based on violations and confirmations of participants’ expectations. It has been shown
that dopaminergic release during humour and music appreciation has to do with the intrinsic
reward of learning. In these studies, the mind is described as deeply embedded in the
environment.
Aims. The aim of my study is to juxtapose Kant’s controversial thoughts on the affinity between
music and humour with the findings of recent studies in the same areas by cognitive
neuroscientists.
Main contribution. The claim of my article is that the views on music and humour as set out by
Kant and present-day researchers are mutually illuminating. For one thing, Kant’s explicit
association of musicking and joking prompts a comparison of recent studies in these disparate
domains. Secondly, the juxtaposition stimulates a rethinking of the relations between the
hedonistic and information-processing aspects in the appreciation of both music and humour.
Kant believed that the feeling of refreshment and sensual pleasure brought about through music
was related to the oscillation of inner organs, distinct from any mechanism of cognition. In the
light of the current research findings, however, it has become clear that the degree to which
individuals experience such visceral reaction is largely dependent on the mind’s engagement in
the task, in terms of predicting imminent and future outcomes. Present-day researchers hold that
pleasure derived from both music and humour arises not only from prediction confirmations, but
also from errors since these also contribute to the understanding of environment. This insight
diverges from Kant’s account, but at the same time helps resolve the discrepancy between his
two incompatible viewpoints: “music as culture” (the appreciation of aesthetic forms) as opposed
to “music as the free play of sensations” (sensual pleasure).
Implications. My study challenges the common view that the computational theory of mind and
the 4E-framework (cognition as embodied, embedded, extended and enacted) are two
comprehensive paradigms in music cognition that strictly oppose each other. In both Kant’s
account and current empirical research findings, seemingly disembodied mental representations
and intra-cranial processes cause sensorimotor and visceral reactions.
Keywords: Kant’s aesthetics of music, ecological approach to music cognition, French
sensualism, incongruity theory of humour.