We are working lately with three Heideggerian concepts: “tenderness” (Zärtlichkeit), “intimacy” (Innigkeit), and “care” (Sorge), which we find important to rethink dwelling in capitalist ruins.
Moreover, we take dwelling to be the only possible alternative to today’s fulfilled nihilism; and, more generally, to nihilism in any of its possible forms: those that want to accelerate modernity even more, those willing to persuade us that life is merely contingent or malignantly useless, and those that cling to the Nietzschean will to power as an anarchic experiential intensifier.
In this sense, we take dwelling as an educational need, as well; or as a Bildungsideal (“educational ideal”), to use an old German word. By the way, what has happened with the notion of Bildung and with its Ancient-Greek sibling, παιδεία (paideia)? Where has “education” as self-cultivation under the guidance of what was once called the spirit (or the combination of freedom, intelligence, and sentiment) gone? It seems as though it has been pushed offside by the dialectic confrontation of the two major figures that overdetermine the movements of the modern soul: utility and revolt.
In both cases, dwelling is bypassed. And to rethink it and re-practice it we are in need of the interplay of “tenderness,” “intimacy,” and “care.” Tenderness to approach things gently, after realising their fragility. Intimacy to make room for them in us. And care so as to not let them perish while acknowledging their finitude. The opposite of tenderness is roughness. That of intimacy, foreignness. And that of care, indifference.
We are willing to call them the main motifs and counter-motifs of the Bildungsideal needed to escape modernity and to re-imagine a livable world.
Some might find this too mild and eventually “feminine.” We gladly assume both things in lieu of the “masculine” readiness to enhance the will to power in terms of achieving a more-effective dominion of the real or in terms of sensing it all the more intensely, of which we have had too much already. But we shall return to this another day.
For today we would like to do something very simple. We would like to suggest a musical analogy for each of the aforementioned motifs. The examples are taken from the repertoire of French Baroque music, which we find distinctly meditative. More precisely, from the repertoire for three beautiful string instruments: the archlute or theorbo, the viol, and the virginal, which disappeared from the musical panorama with the transition to classicism and the latter’s preference for simple melodic lines and instruments better suited for them.
I. Intimacy – Robert de Visée, Chaconne en la mineur, Pièces de théorbe et de luth, 1716 (performed by Sebastian Strauchler):
II. Care – Marin Marais, “Les Voix humaines,” Prélude-caprice en re majeur, Pièces de viole, Livre II, 1701 (performed by Philippe Pierlot):
III. Tenderness – François Couperin, “Les Bergeries,” Rondo en si bémol majeur, Pièces de clavecin, Livre II, c. 1716 (performed by Yoann Moulin):