Response to 11/16/11 Prompt

This is going to appear as an insane digression, but it is something that I saw in the reading that I felt was important to note. On page 169, Higgins cites Kierkegaard:
The ethical individual knows himself, but this knowledge is not a mere contemplation (for with that the individual is determined by his necessity), it is a reflection upon himself which itself is an action, and therefore I have deliberately preferred to use the expression "choose oneself" instead of know oneself... Only within him can the individual acquire information about himself.
What I believe this does, is brings into the equation a commonality between Jean-Paul Sartre and Friedrich Nietzsche (the former whom is famous for his stress on the collective over the latter's stress on the individual). Within this enormous and ongoing philosophical debate the political and social implications are the focus, but in the end, I believe music, through this argument of Kierkegaard's (who happens to be Sartre's main influence) and Kundera's subsequent argument, we can scold Nietzsche for ignoring political and social implications, but also frown upon Sartre's pessimism about achieving perfection as an individual and argue that both the individual and collective are equally important. Essentially, we can see the parallels of Kierkegaard and Sartre in the sense that in choosing our future, we choose how our past affects us (that is, different futures representing different vantage points); we can also see Nietzsche's argument through Kierkegaard that understanding the individual is a necessary foundation to understanding and restructuring a society.
Through Kundera, Higgins illustrates the importance of understanding life as a structure of aesthetic evaluations. "A sense that one's life has aesthetic value is fundamental to one's ability to affirm it. To find our lives significant, we must find them somehow coherent... Poetic images stimulate our determination of our life's structure..., establish hope and the conviction that the particular life chosen remains worth pursuing..., [and] overcomes panic" (Page 170) We can see how essential it is for us to come to terms with the individual before we can find commonalities between one another, choose a goal, and fight for our common ideals.
Because I developed a hypothesis about a philosopher (Sartre) we haven't read in this class, I felt it necessary to seek out something that at least expresses his thoughts on music. Paul E. Robinson's premise of "Sartre on Music" has three parts; "the composer as a human being ought to do what is morally and politically justifiable; what is morally and politically justifiable today is to take the side of the oppressed; music can express and evoke the feelings of a time and place" (Sartre on Music, Paul E. Robinson, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Vol. 31, No. 4 (Summer, 1973), pp. 451-457, http://www.jstor.org/stable/429317 ) This introduces the idea that music not only serves a purpose to how the individual feels, but that it serves a moral obligation as well, and I believe this is where Higgins may be going.