In Book X of The Republic, Socrates discusses the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, which echoes today in debates about the possibility of a rational, systematic knowledge of politics. More than a debate about genre or style, the quarrel that Socrates describes highlights the differences between truth and falsehood, reality and appearance, original and imitation, reason and emotion. In The Music of Reason: Rousseau, Nietzsche, Plato, Michael Davis shows through a series of interpretive essays that this continuing quarrel presents scholars with a false choice; the “dualities” it depicts are “duplicitous” because reason is musical, and vice versa (p. 193). In his “prelude,” Davis writes, “The Music of Reason has as its concern what grounds logos but for that reason cannot ever be taken up into logos. How are we to speak about what resists being spoken? Such a logos seems to us alogos—absurd. In the diminished sense of reason that we customarily employ, it seems a reason not altogether rational. But perhaps our unease is an indication not of a problem of reason but rather of the poverty and partiality of our understanding of reason” (pp. 10–11).

Davis argues that Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Plato knew this deeper reason and interrogated philosophical accounts, including their own, to reveal their ambiguities, ironies, and limits. He suggests that on some level we all sense the music (musike) that grounds reason (logos); for example, in the connections between music and math or the emergence of thoughts seemingly “out of the blue.” Davis’s argument is musically structured in three movements—exposition, development, and recapitulation—with a prelude and a coda. Each movement focuses on a lesser-known text by the philosopher it discusses: Rousseau’s Essay on the Origins of Languages: Where Something Is Said about Melody and Musical Imitation, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, and Plato’s Lesser Hippias. These essays offer complex readings that could stand alone, but they are also woven together in a rational-cum-musical composition.

Regarding Rousseau, Davis considers why his analysis of the origins of language and political life revolves around music. Davis argues that, for Rousseau, music expresses the relationship between universality and particularity, community and individuality. Musical melodies that unfold in time express the “voices” of individuals, but these “voices” can only be articulated within a shared mode of communication: a “language of voice.” “Every communication is a communication of; every articulation is an articulation to” (p. 22). By composing melody into chords, harmony mutes its individual and temporal aspects and embeds them in a structure. Rousseau thinks that melody supersedes harmony, because it expresses the “moral need” of subjects for recognition and constitutes them as objects of recognition. He presumes the existence of “an extralinguistic context,” which he considers to be the capacity of animals, including humans, to sense that they are—or can be—sensed (p. 41). Musical melodies represent this sensibility, the interior recesses of the soul that cannot be fully translated into words but that constitute the foundations of political life.

Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music highlights a related tension between the Apollinian and the Dionysian. Most simply, the Apollinian is that which gives form to the Dionysian chaos and represents it as art. Artistic creation is a temporal process; it forms detached objects, including subjects as objects, out of immediate experience (p. 75). This interpretive essay is Davis’s most complex, partly because it traces the autobiographical and self-critical aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy, stressing how it emerges over time in relation to other artists and philosophers, especially Socrates and Wagner. What seems crucial here is Davis’s discussion of tragedy as “dialogic,” as a “middle voice” expressed by the chorus that represents a process of simultaneously “looking at” and “being seen” (p. 99). This is the condition of ordinary existence; individuation is simultaneously active and passive, creative and destructive. It is also the role of the tragic hero in whom the Dionysian takes Apollinian form and who expresses the suffering born of individuation. Davis concludes that “tragedy is therefore no artificial composite of music and myth, of Dionysus and Apollo. As a necessarily inadequate expression that makes a display of its own necessary inadequacy, tragedy shows what cannot be shown and says what cannot be said. This is the highest achievement of art” (p. 135). Reason, Davis argues, is impossible without this musical ground.

Socrates with his defense of philosophical reason was Nietzsche’s greatest adversary. Plato’s Lesser Hippias is the focus of Davis’ third interpretive essay. Davis describes this Platonic dialogue as “a poetic account of poetry” (p. 163). It is also a defense of lying that shows how all speech is necessarily false. The distinction between articulation and communication resurfaces here, because a condition of language is that “telling the truth in logos is not possible without falsifying—taking things to be the same that are not” (p. 178). In this sense, we are all the spoken word artists of our life stories. However, there is a difference between lying consciously and unconsciously, and that difference turns on our awareness of our experience. As Davis describes it, “Socrates takes things from the basement level of his mind to examine but never makes the mistake of identifying himself in an unqualified way with this level. Yet, in general, he knows that this constant awareness of himself as other than himself is what he is” (p. 185). Put differently, by knowing what he does not know, Socrates reveals the depths of the human soul. Davis concludes, “In speaking of what speaks, musing about Muses who must lie to tell the truth, Plato communicates to us an articulation of logos as communication” (p. 190). It is such truths that constitute beauty.

In the coda, Davis reflects on how the quarrel Plato depicted persists, but now with a greater understanding of its significance. He writes, “That there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, signifies that reason wants to bring everything to the surface, into the light it ushers in the Enlightenment. Music, on the other hand, wants to remind us of what is latent, hidden; it depends for its effect on revealing the hidden as hidden…. Accordingly, to ask, in defiance of the ancient difference between philosophy and poetry, whether reason must be musical is to ask whether the true must show itself as the beautiful” (p. 191).

As I hope to have conveyed, Davis offers insightful readings of these philosophers’ views on the music of reason. Those readings expand our understandings of Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Plato by elucidating their less familiar writings. They also recast the role of reason in politics by revealing its deeper, elusive foundations in musical experience. However, some themes could be developed further by relating the more obscure works discussed here to better-known writings. For example, I wanted Davis to compare Rousseau’s Essay on the Origins of Languages to his remarks on language in The Origins of Inequality. Davis’s reading of Nietzsche called out for discussions of On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the latter of which focuses on the figure who was Nietzsche’s poet. With Plato, I was reminded of the Delphic Oracle’s teaching in the Apology and Socrates’s noble lies in the Republic. Davis asks his readers to make these connections and to listen (read) carefully in order to hear (see) the melody that unites the three movements of his book. Although that is a valuable exercise, I wanted Davis to reflect more on what it means to write about the music of reason. Should Davis, like Nietzsche, be singing rather than speaking (p. 95)? Such self-reflection would serve to remind scholars that we cite our souls as well as our sources. In our current challenging times, the music of reason may play a crucial role in highlighting these glimpses of the true as the beautiful.