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In this Thesis, I explore the metaphysical significance of music with respect to the mind and cosmos, and finally the soul. After explaining the advantages of music relative to what Hegel deems to be the other romantic arts, painting and poetry, and in the process shedding light on its explanatory power for thought and the planetary movements, I weigh alternative formulations on what might constitute a great musical composition, drawing on metaphysical ideas conceived by both Hegel and Schelling. The centrality of negation and contradiction in how unities are formed in thought and Being according to Hegel mirror Kepler’s laws of planetary motion which are driven by inverse relationships between centrifugal and centripetal forces, bolstering Plato’s view that the cosmos and mind are in harmony with each other, and also helping to specify what are the principles of the ultimate form of music. I draw on these and other insights from Hegel and Kepler to argue that Beethoven’s dialectical sonatas are surpassed by Bach’s polyphonic fugues with their interwoven layers and seamless continuities, which intimately express the most profound truths of the mind and universe. Some aspects of musical semantics, namely, parallelism, vague meanings, and undecidability, suggest that there is a musicality to the quantum world, and I elaborate on how by focusing on the subtle interdependence and undulations characterizing David Bohm’s Holomovement theory, and the multivariate interplay featured in Roger Penrose’s Orchestrated Objective Reduction model of consciousness. Concluding that there is in fact a strong musical element to the driving forces of the human mind, we are forced to reconcile the determinate nature of Hegel’s concepts with the overdeterminacy that defines music in general, but in particular its quintessential manifestations in both the classical genre and black soul music. Ultimately, I argue that the meaning of music is defined by a merging of William Desmond’s idea of a porous spiritual substance serving as a conduit for a never-ending flow of soul, with the rational determinations of a dynamic mind, defined by contradiction and orchestration, a vision undoubtedly in concert with the advancements and insights generated by Plato, Kepler, and Hegel.

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In this dissertation, I explore the truth revealing function of art in Heidegger’s philosophy of art. The kind of truth Heidegger seeks here is the ontological truth of Being. I will argue that Heidegger is not able to fulfill his promise of bringing out truth of Being through the origin of art. I engage with Desmond’s critique of Heidegger to show that this is mainly because Heidegger’s so-called origin of (and as) art is not a true origin and creation is likewise not creation in the proper sense. This is mainly revealed through the problematic role of the artist and lacking a sense of goodness of Being. Only a more distant origin as otherness could resolve these problems. In this sense, Heidegger cannot not to grant what he rejects in the very beginning. Moreover, due to further unresolvable tensions in Heidegger, such as the ambiguous relation between artist and the rest of Daseins, ontological truth of Being is still unattainable in Heidegger.