Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

However, there is general agreement that Romantic music exhibits,
a preference for the original rather than the normative, a pursuit of unique
effects and extremes of expressiveness, the mobilization to that end of an
enriched harmonic vocabulary, striking new figurations, textures, and tone colors.
(Plantinga, 1984, p. 21)
The list of composers who were musical Romanticism’s greatest practitioners begins
with Beethoven, and includes Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz,
Liszt, Wagner, and Brahms.
Romantic music can be used to further develop the analogy between classical
music and cognitive science. In particular, there are several parallels that exist
between musical Romanticism and connectionist cognitive science. The most general
similarity between the two is that both are reactions against the Cartesian view
of the mind that dominated the Enlightenment.
Romantic composers wished to replace the calculated, rational form of music
such as Bach’s contrapuntal fugues (Gaines, 2005; Hofstadter, 1979) with a music
that expressed intensity of feeling, which communicated the sublime. “It was
a retrogression to the primitive relationship that man had had to music—to the
mysterious, the exciting, the magical” (Einstein, 1947, p. 8). As a result, musical
Romanticism championed purely instrumental music; music that was not paired
with words. The instrumental music of the Romantics “became the choicest means
of saying what could not be said, of expressing something deeper than the word had
been able to express” (p. 32). In a famous 1813 passage, music critic E. T. A. Hoffman
proclaimed instrumental music to be “the most romantic of all the arts—one might
almost say, the only genuinely romantic one—for its sole subject is the infinite”
(Strunk, 1950, p. 775).
Connectionist cognitive science too is a reaction against the rationalism and
logicism of Cartesian philosophy. And one form of this reaction parallels Romantic
music’s move away from the word: many connectionists interpreted the ability of networks
to accomplish classical tasks as evidence that cognitive science need not appeal
to explicit rules or symbols (Bechtel & Abrahamsen, 1991; Horgan & Tienson, 1996;
Ramsey, Stich, & Rumelhart, 1991; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986a).
A second aspect of musical Romanticism’s reaction against reason was its
emphasis on the imaginary and the sublime. In general, the Romantic arts provided
escape by longingly looking back at “unspoiled,” preindustrial existences
and by using settings that were wild and fanciful. Nature was a common inspiration.
The untamed mountains and chasms of the Alps stood in opposition to the
Enlightenment’s view that the world was ordered and structured.
For example, in the novel Frankenstein (Shelley, 1985), after the death of
Justine, Victor Frankenstein seeks solace in a mountain journey. The beauty of a
valley through which he travelled “was augmented and rendered sublime by the
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