Improvisation as Original Ethics: Exploring the Ethical in Heidegger and Gadamer from a Musical Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Martin Heidegger famously claimed that ethics needed to become “original” again, but offered no detailed insight into what an “original ethics” might be. Several commentators, however, find evidence of such an original ethics in the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. In this paper I argue that an original ethics, as alluded to by Heidegger and taken up by Gadamer, depends upon a certain improvisational comportment, such that acting ethically involves spontaneously attending and responding to that which one encounters in factical existence. To substantiate this claim, I draw upon improvised musical performance as an exemplar, highlighting how the responsiveness at issue in musical improvisation is equally present in an original ethics, which is itself demonstrative of a practical, performative, and spontaneous engagement with the world. This account not only elucidates the improvisational character of ethics, it equally illuminates the nature of the ethical at issue in improvised musical performance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.078 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".