Month: November 2025

Mentors instead of machines: Why implicit (musical) knowledge cannot be algorithmized (guest post by Andreas Wildenhain)

My parents had a lot of records, including everything by the Beatles and Santana’s “Abraxas.” I was maybe six or seven years old and loved playing the albums on the record player, picking up a guitar and strumming along, realizing that some of the notes I was playing were the same as the ones I heard on the record. It was fascinating, and even more fascinating when I figured out the melody of “Moon River.” A little later, I realized that the few chords I found somewhere on a chart were also used by the Beatles. So I started to pick out Beatles songs. A new world opened up with melodies, sounds, rhythms. You just had to listen carefully.

But with some pieces, I was left behind: How did Eddie van Halen manage to play such cool solos … What were those rhythms in Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre de Printemps” and how could John Coltrane play those shimmering cascades of sound where I could no longer distinguish the individual notes? How did Kraftwerk produce those synthetic sounds? My parents and teachers told me I couldn’t just play around like that, I had to learn how to read music, then I would understand, and my guitar teacher gave me the sheet music for the song “Bald gras ich am Neckar” (Soon I’ll be grazing by the Neckar), which I was supposed to practice “diligently.” I was disappointed.

Why am I writing these personal memories from the perspective of an improvising jazz musician on the blog of a philosopher who, among other things, is intensively engaged with “reading as a social practice”? Isn’t music always a social practice? The answer is certainly yes, and I don’t want to sing the praises of the myth of the self-taught musician here, but rather ask myself whether it isn’t advantageous for the acquisition of musical knowledge and one’s own musical identity to first engage with the material oneself, without tutorials or AI, but perhaps with a mentor. The musical learning process has changed significantly in recent years due to the accessibility of modern media for all popular music styles. I think there are some parallels here with Martin Lenz’s observations on reading and the reception of demanding philosophical texts, which may be interesting because of their distance from philosophy.

People who grew up in the 1950s to 1970s and had a feel for blues, jazz, and rock didn’t have access to sophisticated teaching methods or educational guidance on how to play this music. There were records and our ears, but there were rarely any written forms of knowledge (sheet music/tabs). The challenge was to figure out how these musicians played their melodies, solos, chords, and rhythms.

Perhaps one could say that listening closely to a recording is comparable to Plato’s allegory of the cave. We hear things out in the world, but a truth about this music, apart from an aesthetic sensation, is not immediately accessible to us. So, as with a philosophical text that exudes fascination but also seems unwieldy and inaccessible, it is necessary to create one’s own context of meaning.

We cannot know what AC/DC, Björk, or Autechre were thinking, what ideas and feelings they had when they composed and recorded their pieces. However, the tremendous advantage of our generation is that for a long time there were no experts or gatekeepers, as everyone more or less had the same starting point. This meant that we were forced to make sense of what we heard in order to implement or reconstruct the ideas of the original.

And so questions arose, such as:

What was being played – composition vs. improvisation?
What rhythm – swing, Latin, odd metres?
What notes – scales, arpeggios?
What techniques – legato, staccato, bendings, palm mutes?
What harmonies – 3 to 5 notes, harmonic turns (cadences)?
Why do musicians suddenly play only one exotic scale (Miles Davis, *Kind of Blue*)?
How are these sounds created – Tangerine Dream, Metallica, Kaija Saariaho?

This activity took place without YouTube tutorials, guitar tabs, sheet music, or textbooks, and unfortunately, in the beginning, the results I heard were often wrong or only approximate to what the artists played. But doesn’t “playing wrong” also mean that I didn’t understand the composer’s intention? In rock/pop and jazz, it was usually never just about implementing a compositional idea, but about working with the material of the song, the idea of improvisation, and interpreting it. Musicians showed each other ideas during sessions (Real Book) or in the studio, or they learned by playing together in a band. People went to concerts by local or international artists to perhaps gain better access to musical ideas and to meet and exchange ideas with other musicians. In this sense, what was heard led to a social practice, and in my opinion, every understanding is already social because it took place within shared, pre-formed interpretive frameworks.

There was no ‘digital’ insight in the sense of true or false, but rather an approximation of truth (the artist’s original recording) that was shaped by one’s own ability to perceive things, ask questions, and draw conclusions. And this, in turn, meant that even if you didn’t play exactly like Kirk Hammett or Jaco Pastorius, you inevitably developed your own individual style. Good examples of this are musicians such as Volker Kriegel, the Krautrock musicians, Klaus Doldinger, and Kraftwerk, to name just a few German musicians. The “truth” does not lie in the exact reproduction of Charlie Parker or Van Halen licks, but in the successful communication of a musical idea in a context.

Pop and rock have their origins in African-American musical tradition, which was characterized, among other things, by the oral transmission of knowledge. Interestingly, the goal of orally transmitted music of African-American origin is to make musicians an individually recognizable voice of the community (cf. LeRoi Jones, “Blues People,” 1963). In this sense, the “best” musicians are those who develop their own voice (instrumental or vocal) and are recognizable to their social community. Think of idiosyncratic musicians such as Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, Howlin’ Wolf, Eminem, and D’Angelo, who illustrate this very vividly. Without going into further detail, this also illustrates an aesthetic that could not be further removed from that of a classical orchestra or the ideal of pure opera singing.

What I like about the method of independent “listening out” described above is the component of reflective acquisition (“I work on a problem (concept), understand its logic, and critically examine it in practical applications”), which is then applied in playing the song or improvising and presented to the audience. And this is precisely the opposite of schematic memorization (“This definition is true because the professor says so”), since pure memorization allows me to take a step back from the object of knowledge. In other words, in this case, I would no longer be an authentic spokesperson for what I am reproducing, since I am not making what I have learned my own experience. In this process, I remain “digitally” verifiable (true or false), but unfortunately nothing more. The increasing spread and use of artificial knowledge systems such as LLMs will probably reinforce the trend of avoiding things that could be discovered in this world, generating quick answers that may be correct but remain almost superficial, empty of content, and unverified for the speaker. LLMs offer us statistically prevalent information from a training data set, which, because we attach meaning to it, takes on an apparent necessity. Despite the many advantages of information retrieval with current LLMs, the greatest danger is that we will treat the knowledge humanity has acquired and written down to date as the status quo. We humans will then orient ourselves toward a knowledge authority that, detached from our human experience and our lived reality, determines what we need to know and what we do not.

In my work with my instrumentalists, it is therefore important for me to learn about each individual’s personal approach to music (metal, singer-songwriter, creative music), because only by understanding their motivations can I support them in developing their music as independently as possible. Mick Goodrick (guitar teacher in Boston) always told us, “We should become thinking guitarists,” and his teaching style led us to a meta-reflection on our learning practices. 

And last but not least: those of us mentors who have already climbed a little way up the ladder can offer encouragement and motivation when it comes to questions about the path, motivation, and willingness to engage in a demanding and gruelling project for a longer period of time, and perhaps help to ensure that the insights gained do not lose touch with lived experience.

In this sense, I think that art, music, and literature, as well as all forms of social practice, remind us again and again in what sense we are human.

Books, music albums, and exhibitions are letters, messages, and images from friends that offer opportunities to engage with these messages.

Andreas Wildenhain

Why does hardly anyone in academic philosophy care about reading?

No, this is not about the decline of the occident, just a note about a curiosity in academic philosophy. Philosophy is a discipline in which reading is a key competence, not least in that philosophical exchange often focuses on the precise formulation of a premise or an argument. But while there are numerous guides on writing philosophy or on reconstructing arguments, there is next to nothing on reading. Given that different people reading philosophy often end up with contrary takes on texts (be they historical or contemporary) and given that much energy is spent on singling out proper takes, it is astonishing (to put it mildly) that there is so little reflection on reading. Or perhaps not? One of the first things I took in as a philosophy student is that philosophy is, by and large, an implicit culture where the rules of the game are not expressed but handed down by emulation. However, reading practices are not just about the rules of a specific game. Arguably, such practices make the often unreflected fabric of our intuitions and ways of life. So understanding our (current as opposed to some other) reading practice will not only yield an understanding of our particular ways but also of why we prefer certain texts and forms of reading over others in the first place. So why do we care so little? Preparing a larger project and a workshop on the issue of reading, I would like to share some encounters and musings.

Text production. – Having been educated as a historian of philosophy, first as a medievalist and, then, as an early-modernist, I have always been intrigued by the fact that texts have to be produced (before they can be consumed) by the historian. Becoming aware that the texts we read in books have come a long way (from picking and transcribing manuscripts into readable Latin, to a critical edition after choosing a leading manuscript, while referencing deviating manuscripts and sources, to a translation, a translation competing with other translations, being published), the material basis of reading and its availability, for whatever ideological or financial reasons, was already a thing to be pondered on. So, long before we can set eyes on a text, a number of decisions are made that include and exclude authors and whole traditions. When colleages say, they alter the canon by putting a new text on the reading list, I often want to ask why they think that the text is not already part of the canon, especially if it’s (fairly) readily available. But that’s by the by. The upshot is that reading presupposes the very availability of texts, and that’s a highly ideological matter already (or else tell me why everyone referencing medieval philosophy just references Thomas Aquinas).

“Why bother? – I just read.” – Still at Groningen University, I once asked colleagues whether we shouldn’t compose a reading guide detailaing how they approach their respective readings. The standard response was: “Why? I just read. There’s nothing much to say.” Asking further, they would often detail ways of reconstructing and formalizing arguments that were at once highly technical and subject to change. So, if you’re one of these poor souls thinking that there is one good way of reconstructing an argument in a text, just forget about it! It’s hard and ongoing work – no matter whether the text is by Plato or Ted Sider. The bottom line is that, no matter whether you’re a historian or a staunch analytic philosopher, any reading is highly contestable. Shouldn’t this fact give rise to a discussion of how readings are or should be constrained? You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But there is literally nowt (which is why I thought it timely to run a conference on the why and how of doing history of philosophy).

Texts versus arguments. – In my first year as a student of philosophy, I was asked to reconstruct an argument by Leibniz. We were supposed to use decimal numbers. My instructor (for those who care it was Lothar Kreimendahl) was not happy: Rather than presenting a list of numbered propositions, I gave what is nowadays called a narrative. I proudly rejected being graded for my supposed failure. But what this taught me was that the distance between the the text and its reconstruction can be very long and varied. I got out ok, but I still worry about the poor souls who think there is one true reconstruction or reading of a text. The upshot is that there is no clear way of getting from the text to a reconstruction of an argument. In fact, the text has to be seen in a certain context as speaking to a certain issue in the first place. But how is that known or established? Well, first of all it needs to be established, be it by your instructor, interlocutor or the stuff you’re reading about it. So there is no argument to be read off a text. The way of dealing with texts (as e.g. containers of arguments) has to be established already.

Who cares? –  Of course, scholars dealing with different periods in the history of philosophy or reading cultures have to care. Doina-Cristina Rusu and Dana Jalobeanu, for instance, taught me that recipes and descriptions of experiments form a specific reading culture that needs to be studied in its own right in order to understand how things were understood and transmitted. The same goes for current philosophy, or so I think, but the implicit culture suggests otherwise. Yet, as long as this culture or cultures remain implicit, I think we’re not even doing proper philosophy (if doing philosophy includes studying the preconditions of one’s thought). So my guess is that we’re mostly doing what Kuhn took to be normal science. We unthinkingly emulate our teachers. But while doing so, we encounter the uncanny: students who don’t care about reading and even produce their writings with the help of LLMs. But funnily enough, in this very situation we insist on a proper distinction between the text reflected on and the text written. My hunch is that it’s our implicit reading culture that leaves us with very few responses to such misgivings. The bottom line is: We need an idea of how texts relate to thoughts etc. in order to handle the situation. But for that, we need to understand the preconditions of reading.

Not even didactics of philosophy? – While practitioners in different philologies and related disciplines seem to care greatly about reading practices, in philosophy the situation is so bad that not even didactics of philosophy have much to offer. Really? Obviously, or so I thought, philosophy teacher education would go into reading, no? Talking to some highly accomplished and experienced scholars in didactics like Vanessa Albus or Laura Martena, I learned that reading is not only thought of as problematic but often even actively pushed to the fringes in teaching philosophy. But why? Well, part of the reason is that philosophy is already taught in primary school, a level at which you won’t rely on texts. For later stages, a common resource is provided, amongst other things, by so-called sets of post-texts (Nach-Texte) which present summaries of a philosopher’s opinion (as one among other opinions). This way, a text by Kant might be reduced to the opinion of a talkshow guest in class. Not quite as drastic, but perhaps similar in spirit is Jonathan Bennett’s famous initiative of providing translations of classic texts from the early modern period from English into English, “prepared with a view to making them easier to read while leaving intact the main arguments, doctrines, and lines of thought.” This way you get, for instance, a simplified version of Locke’s Essay. (More than 15 years ago, I was involved in a translation project in which someone mistook these translations for proper texts and handed in a translation of a classic text from the simplified English into German. Luckily, we caught this in time.) The upshot is that (again, with notable exceptions) even didactics makes do with the miraculous move from the textual surface to the supposed argument or position – without much thought about interference by different possible reading strategies. At the same time, didactics is, strangely enough, a fairly young discipline that was still pushed to the sidelines during my student days.

Do philosophers still take pride in claiming not to have read that much? – Perhaps, then, the often rehearsed assumption that “thinking for yourself”, our supposed originality, doesn’t require or might even be hindered by too much reading still has great currency. Remembering school days, texts were often taken, not as a place of thought, but almost as a mere occasion for thinking. At the end of the day, I can only begin to suggest (in the time to come) why thinking about reading matters greatly and why it might still have been sidelined nonetheless, at least as a philosophical topic. But while my recent survey across philosophical disciplines on this issue was somewhat disconcerting (except for a few classics mainly from the French and some practicioners in the larger phenomenological tradition), I have high hopes when it comes to neighbouring disciplines.