Gabriel, Hegel e Nietzsche sul ruolo della musica nelle nostre vite: una scatola degli attrezzi per comprendere le nostre emozioni

Peter Gabriel.

"One musician who stands out in the cultural landscape for his profound engagement with the theory as well as practice of music is Peter Gabriel – and what seems especially striking are his repeated pronouncements that music should, to quote his distinctive formulation, provide us with “an emotional toolbox” to which we can turn at different moments of our lives, locating songs to recover, guide and sublimate our feelings".

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

"The philosopher Hegel argued that music is so necessary because it rehearses in the language of the body concepts and truths we are in danger of losing touch with when they reach us only through our rational faculties".

Friedrich Nietzsche.

"In his book The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), Nietzsche described two opposing forces at work in our lives.

The first is the pull of the Apollonian ideal, named after Apollo, the god of the sun, order, light, and knowledge. The other, opposing force he termed the Dionysian, after the Greek god of wine, chaos, irrationality and freedom, Dionysus. 

Nietzsche believed that both forces were highly necessary in individual and collective life: we need to be thoughtful and sober, yet open to the instinctive and the irrational – and it is by combining these two ideals that we stumble towards maturity".

"The ‘shiver down the spine’ we feel at points in music are encounters with our suppressed longings for forgiveness, reconciliation and harmony – returning to us with an alienated majesty".


The book of life, capitolo 5.

Una valida ragione per non iscriversi ai social networks: ci possono sprofondare in un senso di inadeguatezza

"Litost (Czech): the humiliated despair we feel when someone accidentally reminds us, through their accomplishment, of everything that has gone wrong in our lives.

They casually allude to a luxurious house they are renting for the holidays. They mention the glamorous friends they have had for dinner. We feel searing self-pity at the scale of our inadequacies".

The book of life, capitolo 4.

Le vite degli altri: perche' non giudichiamo noi stessi con i parametri che usiamo per le persone attorno a noi

"Many of our errors, the researchers found, stem from a basic mismatch between how we analyze ourselves and how we analyze others. When it comes to ourselves, we employ a fine-grained, highly contextualized level of detail.

When we think about others, however, we operate at a much higher, more generalized and abstract level. For instance, when answering the same question about ourselves or others — how attractive are you? — we use very different cues. 

For our own appearance, we think about how our hair is looking that morning, whether we got enough sleep, how well that shirt matches our complexion. For that of others, we form a surface judgment based on overall gist. 

So, there are two mismatches: we aren’t quite sure how others are seeing us, and we are incorrectly judging how they see themselves".


Maria Konnikova, The confidence game.