Following hard on the heels of “The ‘Tuning-In’ Relationship” was a second paper on the intertwining of human music-making, human social life, and moral development, this time with an evolutionary twist.
In particular, I pick up from and/or expand upon the last section of the previous paper, on practices. There were some loose threads I wanted to pick at and, well, things unraveled quickly!
Kirkman, R. (2024). “Practices and Practicing in Human Moral Development.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
Here is the first of six installments:
I. The Evolution of ‘Tuning In’
Suppose the aim of teaching and learning ethics is to foster in students the development of mature and adept moral practice: they should be better able to perceive the ethical contours of social situations they encounter, and to respond well to those situations.
This may well involve fostering students’ capacity to make judgments on the basis of principle, but judgment is only one of the cognitive requirements of mature practice, and it is the most recently arrived on the scene. There must be other, much older modes of sense-making that allow the mature moral practitioner to ‘tune in’ to a given circumstance as a social situation in which matters of value might be in play, as a precondition for principled reasoning and moral judgment (Narvaez, 2010). Before we can think about what we ought to do, we first have to have some grasp of where we are and what is going on.
The term, ‘tuning in’, is suggested by the work of Alfred Schutz (1951), who takes making music together as an example of “the mutual tuning-in relationship” which can “shed some light on the nonconceptual aspect involved in any kind of communication”. For Schutz, giving some attention to the conditions under which it is possible to make music together serves as an apt point of entry into pre-theoretical and even pre-linguistic modes of human sense-making, which may also reveal the conditions under which it is possible to be responsive and responsible to one another.
Schutz focuses mainly on the temporal dimension of musical interaction: musical experience unfolds in time, so a primary condition for shared musical meaning would be a synchronization of the inner time of one participant with the inner time of another, through external cues of various sorts. Synchronization is not, on its own, a sufficient condition for the tuning-in relationship, however. Or, rather, synchronization may account for the process whereby the meaning of music unfolds, but the possibility for tuning-in to shared meaning depends critically on something relatively stable and shared in the content and context of that unfolding experience, something the participants may take for granted.
Schutz himself offers a clue to what this something might be with the example of a pianist sitting down with the score of an unfamiliar sonata. The pianist, Schutz writes, will have “a well-founded knowledge of the type of musical form called ‘sonata within the meaning of nineteenth century piano music’, the types of themes and harmonies used in such compositions of that period, of the expressional contents he may expect to find in them – in sum, of the typical ‘style’ in which it is to be executed.” To tune in to the composer’s intended meaning, then, the pianist must already have entered into a particular practice of music-making, that of what is loosely called “classical” music. Bruce Ellis Benson (2003) also underlines this point: “music is always something that takes place within a community and this is inherently what we might term, ‘practice-,’ ‘discourse-,’ or ‘tradition-‘ related.”
Schutz’s example of the pianist plays across variations on the term ‘practice’ as it is used in English: if the aim of teaching practical ethics is to foster the development of mature moral practices, students must become more adept at tuning in to the shared practices of communities of which they are part, and they should be given the opportunity to practice – that is, to rehearse, though trial and error – perceiving and responding to the ethical aspects of social situations.
What follows, then, is a step toward understanding the tuning-in relationship in connection to practices and practicing, the outlines of an inquiry into human moral development, not just the development of the individual across a lifetime, but the emergence of modern human cognition across evolutionary time. The premise is that the roots of modern ethical practice, like those of modern musical practice, reach far back in hominin evolution, perhaps most notably to the mimetic culture of Homo erectus and other precursors of modern Homo sapiens.
References
Benson, B. E. (2003). The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music. Cambridge University Press.
Narvaez, D. (2010). Moral Complexity: The Fatal Attraction of Truthiness and the Importance of Mature Moral Functioning. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(2), 163–181.
Schutz, A. (1951). Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship. Social Research, 18(1), 76–97.
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