Actually, I referred to “spiritual realities” and stand behind this.
I would never say I “believe” (or “do not believe”) because the very idea of “belief” as we understand it today is a 17th century Protestant(*) notion, though one arguably rooted in certain aspects of Platonism. The senses of “belief” and the “X” that is believed are already incompatible. “I believe in X” is nothing more than an amphibology, and likewise “I do not believe.”
(*) Ironically, it was an early 20th-century Protestant theologian, an apologetic no less (Rudolf Otto) who in his application of Husserlian phenomenology to religious experience, did much to rescue us from this idea, in his 1917 book Das Heilige (The Holy) – unfortunately mistranslated as “The Idea of the Holy”, where “idea” already indicates that an essential point has been missed.
I’d have a lot to say on this, but I’d refer both to @renegog 's story:
It’s like the story of the american anthropologist in the middle of last century, fascinated by the stories he’s heard of the backwards Irish and how they still to this day believe in fairies and the good folk. So he goes to ireland and travels out to the countryside and sees an old woman walking the long way around a fairy circle. He asks her, “do you really believe in fairies?” to which she responds, “of course I don’t believe in fairies that would be ridiculous. But just because I don’t believe in them doesn’t mean they’re not there.”
[that is: I am in my own way the “old woman” – like it or not…]
and then Nietzsche’s one-page essay “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable”: https://www.austincc.edu/adechene/Nietzsche%20true%20world.pdf – this gives more of a sense of the intellectual history behind such troublesome notions of ‘belief’.
Anyway – the point… I think more than anything the “instrumental” notion of thinking can be dangerous – the idea that “the spiritual” consists of a collection of concepts or theoretical constructs that are only subsequently applied to music.
For me it’s has always been a mode of being – music, writing, code etc. are all integral manifestations of a spiritual reality, not “domains of application” for “ideas” that would necessarily pre-exist them.
The notion “these are just concepts”, that after all “we’re not really into this stuff” – while a well-intentioned one, does not defend us from attack – it only internalizes it, much as Bentham’s panopticon leads to self-surveillance, much as neoliberal ideology (capitalism’s reproduction of the “relations of production”) becomes self-policing, and so on.
Indeed, the point at which we acknowledge any division between “theory” and “praxis” is the point at which thinking has stopped altogether. Perhaps the origins of the instrumentalization of reason as we receive it today – whether Platonist or Cartesian – the dialectical splitting of “myth” and “enlightenment” – are perhaps unimportant. What’s important is that we’ve uprooted the tree of existence in order to set it upon solid foundations – not noticing that it’s for the most part already dead.
And indeed, the oblivion of being may be experienced most fully in that it is not experienced at all – that no one notices that anything’s amiss. Yet – annihilation is all around, whether in the forms of global fascism, the technological singularity, or climate collapse. Is it perhaps that such annihilation has for the most part already taken place?
