Tonalities of Being

If someone is incapable of hearing the difference between intervals of a fifth and a fourth, a musical career is not recommended. If a friend of yours cannot achieve a grasp of verb declensions, you will not take any lofty linguistic or philological ambitions seriously. Similarly, we must recognize that there exists a certain tonality of being which conditions perception of philosophical and religious facts. If this perception is lacking, better to pursue some entirely different field. [Henry Corbin in The Voyage and the Messenger, a collection of lectures and essays, North Atlantic Books, 1998, p. 5-6]

Around here we (read members of the family) were much taken with E.F. Schumacher’s book, A Guide for the Perplexed, years ago. In that he discusses the concept of adequacy, taken from the scholastic concept of adequatio rei et intellectus, thus the correspondence between the “thing” and the understanding of it. Sounds dry, but isn’t. I have the suspicion that St. Thomas and many others of that era meant something much more, using the word “intelligence,” than that word has come to mean in our times. The subtlety of that word, adequacy, becomes nicely visible in the quote from Henry Corbin; Corbin’s examples carry the wider meaning nicely. He means what people say when they have problems translating an understanding into concepts but say, instead, “I know it when I see it.” Hence Corbin’s nice word, tonalities. Music escapes the usual approach which must break things in order to parse them, and in the breaking something escapes the definition.

Adequacy has served us well. It makes one tolerant of those who simply cannot hear the music.