nietzsche's answer to the question mark left by music jonathan bitz I was once asked a seemingly simple question, "why do we enjoy music so much"? As with many people, I couldn't help myself, and immediately I launched into the multitude of possibilities. I locked-in on the first, and most obvious word that came (and comes to most, who are queried): rhythm. And after a couple tries at it, I even drew up the idea that our hearts beat - so, of course we should like music. We have heard rhythm all our lives, in our head, and in our bodies. Even in the womb. All told, we both came up with good stuff, that day - but none of our impressive theories answered the question, exactly. And to this day, five years later - I have yet to fully answer this question. I have always known that there was a correlation, somewhere, that worked. Sure, rhythm, heartbeat. Movement, fluidity, dance. Something. But, what is it, really that makes music so interesting, so moving and so godlike? Well, as this question has turned into a mild quest of sorts - I have come, once again, across another answer. Another stab at the grand question. And maybe an end, at that. The great German thinker and writer Friedrich Nietzsche was enveloped with music his entire life. From age fourteen, when he first wrote about its power - until he died. It was nearly an obsession. Relationships in his life, namely with the great composer Richard Wagner, attest to this fact. Nietzsche's famous quote about music, "without music life would be an error," is known world-wide, and repeated frequently. However, he stated some more powerful and wondrous things about music. Relative to our initial inquiry, of why we enjoy music so much, he said: "Our true experiences are not garrulous (meaning, given to chatter). They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words. We have already grown beyond whatever words we have. In all talking, there lies a grain of contempt." Nietzsche furthered this by saying that, "In comparison to music all communication through words is shameless. The word diminishes and makes stupid; the word depersonalizes: the word makes what is uncommon common." He said, simply, "music say(s) certain things that words are incapable of expressing." At the end of the day, Nietzsche believed that language could not elevate itself beyond merely expressing the smallest part of existence - "the most superficial and worst" part, is what he said. Faced with his views on the importance of music, it is curious that Nietzsche ended-up spending his life immersed in words. Writing them, and using them. As an academic, and a professor, he was an erudite in philology (in the broadest sense: the study of language). But this does not mean he did not try his hand at composing. He did. To the unfortunate end of which he was forced to admit that he hadn't the faculties to express all that he heard in his head. So, he was relegated to writing. But, he wasn't a hack. Far from it. As was noted by some of his contemporaries, Nietzsche struggled endlessly to find the perfect words and phrases. He aimed at making sentences ring with as perfect of melody and rhythm as they could. And most scholars agree that he accomplished exactly that: It is said that the only other German that wrote as precise and beautiful phrases and compositions was the great poet, Goethe. And in extending this impact that music had on Nietzsche's life, when he wrote he was terribly fond of employing the unorthodox "dash". He used it nearly unabashedly. For him, it did not disrupt the continuity of a sentence, but rather, it served as the only grammatical tool which is able to create that kind of a space that only music is capable of creating. That kind of space, devoid of morphemes, where words have no power to make what is uncommon, common. As Nietzsche wrote to his sister, "For me, (in my writing) it always begins only after the dashes." So it is, that alas, I have a theory that can answer my initial question, with more explanatory power. The correlation that I have been searching for, about music and its impact, I believe, is between words and music. It may not be the final word, but undoubtedly, nearly anyone would agree that music expresses something beyond words. And to this end, it is curious that, to explain that-which-is-beyond-words, there is a word: ineffable -