Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) is an unreplaceable milestone in the history of Western civilization, whose dimension is so crystal clear that, no matter the weaving moment of political and moral fashion of the day, his music is executed everywhere in the world. The reason is simple. Those who had the fortune to encounter and understand his music will never stop to be baffled by it, by its unique capacity to embed human sentiments inside a strict iron rational logic.
Differently from Chopin, who is so emotional to be undigestible to some, differently from Bach, whose love for abstract structure makes him the embodiment of the XVII century mechanicism, Beethoven is the unique pinnacle of intellect, reason and sensibility, a rare Kantian union of different aspects of human cognition and experience. But what about the life behind the music? Is Beethoven a man unlike many others? The answer is ambivalent when reading a selection of biographical notes and other annotations left in his Conversation Books and here, I will only draw some remarks without entering in the specificities of Beethoven’s life, which is assumed sufficiently known to the reader.
What I want to report here are the common threads that Beethoven shared with many other great thinkers. Yes, thinkers, because Beethoven only by accident was a musician, as his music is a philosophical act as Kubrick’s movies. As argued elsewhere, philosophy is not the land of written language necessarily but of argumentation for the sake of truth reached through a merciless critique of language. As such, it is pointless to draw a rigid line between Beethoven and Kant or Spinoza, to mention two major thinkers whose life wasn’t as different from Beethoven’s – Gens una sumus.
