On the Petite Phrase of Proust and the Experience of Empathy: Exploring the Rhythmical Structure of Music

How does music (as Proust tells us) have the power to speak to us as if it were a living being, endowed with subjectivity? Do we empathize with music? Ordinarily we consider our perception of subjects as subjects, through empathy, to pertain to flesh-and-blood persons; this article asks how it is possible for us to empathize with the ordered movement of aural sensations in time. Drawing upon Edith Stein’s On the Problem of Empathy together with Edmund Husserl’s work on Querintentionalität and Längsintentionalität in Husserliana X, I show, first of all, how the temporal structure of inner time-consciousness pertains to the ordered structure of musical expression; secondly, I investigate how the other as other is given with respect to retention and protention. My claim is that musical expression, insofar as it partakes of the potentiality of protention in particular, is creative and opens the possibility for that which is other-than-myself.