There is undoubtedly a rhythm of thought. A cadence, a timeliness but also a delay, a syncopation, an upbeat and downbeat, a harmonic tension. Doing philosophy does not simply coincide with harmony but, in fact, with the complex framework of a classical score with all its components. This is not merely a metaphor or a poetic juxtaposition; "thinking" as such necessarily determines a movement that questions and traces signs both within the aesthetic dimension and within the logical-argumentative one. The category of expression is properly philosophical insofar as it binds, blends and implicates language in its multiplicity. We would say, strictly speaking, that the language of philosophy gives an account of the manifold. To intercept this dynamic means to modify radically the very methodology of communication and, in paradigmatic terms, the use of aphoristic writing has sanctioned the concretization of this power. There is an undeniable bridge, a scenic commonality, between vitalism, the aphorism and music. The common ground is thought, it is philosophy, whose declension stands out in the conjoining capacity of these three interpretive-affirmative forms; as regards interpretation, the aphorism rends, pierces and leaves significant semiotic traces, just as music does where a phrasing or an aria seem to carve reality. Everything relates affirmatively to a pulsation that brings thought to reckon with the sterility of a merely logical dimension (decisive though it is, for its part) since the grasping of the plural web of which the real is composed can only impose itself as vitality. The manifold as thought is life in its tangle, along its lines, and music alongside aphoristic writing possess a privileged modus of entry into it. The turn from traditional treatment (fertile in any case) to the more "untimely" essayistic writing found in Friedrich Nietzsche its magnetic pole of reference. This study, however, undertakes to decipher stylistic-cognitive analogies with two other authors of different affiliation: Stendhal on the plane of the novel and Gioacchino Rossini in the musical domain.
Nietzsche already grasps a substratum of thought defined as the "spirit of music"[1] and, beyond the querelle with Wagner, it persists across the entire arc of his work. The link with philosophy immediately emerges, together with the possibility of penetrating the world starting from a difference in tonality[2] for which, already grammatically, Nietzsche decrees a provenance, an impersonal agent that, if we look at the entire nexus of his works, goes well beyond the relation to tragedy and to the conceptual knots concerning the Apollonian and Dionysian forms. An artistic-musical gesture that serves as an invitation to a reflection that from life wants to reach life itself, in a circularity to which Nietzsche will give theoretical dignity through the doctrine of the eternal return of the same. Thought is sound. "To think" is to traverse phonetic territories at various expressive levels, the irregular ticking on the table of the thrown die (Mallarmé in Deleuze's reading). And thinking comes from an Outside[3] that requires a darkening of the all-pervasive and voracious I which, like God and the dogma-values, blurs the rhythm, turning it into a hypocritical liturgical monody. Tragedy is a rhythmic condition that summons the individual in the gesture of his heaviest expression, that of thought, that particular status which questions and seeks to affirm once no salvation can any longer be attributed, by a truth that has supervened, at the horizon of events. The Nietzschean mode of writing weighs this condition but does not hide behind an alienated, toneless passivity; it grows in creativity, in potentia cognoscendi, it divides and shares life with life, grasping being as an instance of the pure becoming of multiplicity.
A thought set to music marks a difference. It situates itself in the intermezzos as a heuristic choice, it explores the λόγοι against the λόγος, it fertilizes writing and the creation of ever new refrains though eternally within the return. Now, the sound-thought, once its rhythmic in fieri determination is grasped, according to Nietzsche brings to elucidation the mode that concerns the vitality felt within, as life manifesting itself to life: "The 'inner experience' enters our consciousness only after it has found a language that is understood by the individual; this means the translation of a state into states more familiar to him"[4]. Two elements arise: on the one hand the labor of the search that attains an expressivity, seized and physically internalized ("the understood language"), while on the other the disclosure of the plural, the monodic state transformed into that polyphonic "more familiar". A scriptural and conceptual polyphony that alternates cuts with melodic continuities, counterpoints with linear sequences. Musicological terms which, within metaphor, I hold can be communicative and expressive instruments for narrating life and the vitality produced within it. Pierre Boulez, in the construction of his works, held firmly to this perspective, showing its life-plurality axis: "[…] we must invent our own rhythmic vocabulary following our own norms, and, in this sense, already in my first works there is what might be called a contrast – I always maintain it, moreover, it is one of my main ideas – between free forms (there are, here and there, very free rhythms, practically improvised and written according to invention) and, at the opposite, very rigorous sections"[5]. What does improvisation do when it affects thought? Every wellspring of reflection is the fruit of a throw of dice and of a refrain that rebound from reality onto the one who will think that event; the encounter with any entity whatever, from one's fellows to the landscape, to animals as to inanimate objects, characterizes thought, at least at the outset, as an improvised occurrence, an unforeseen musical line that intercepts us and to which, after mere reception, it falls to us to grant and to give the qualification of thing thought. Neither the cogito nor the personalist vision of the transcendental can conceive such a productive relation between externality and creativity, between line of flight and its enlargement. Thought must never take scandal before improvisations, for if it is life it cannot necessarily withdraw. Granting the bewilderment, the taking charge, the setting off again with a resumed rhythm, means binding life to the sonority of its force, dignity without handholds, power to exist.
In literary territory an expressive contribution of remarkable fecundity emerges from the style and work of Stendhal[6]. Of significant centrality is the vitalist posture of Stendhal's novels and studies, where the analytical meticulousness of Enlightenment stamp (as with the anatomy of amorous discourse in L'amore, 1822) is accompanied by the energetic and disruptive potentiality of Il Rosso e il Nero (1831), a Romantic manifesto of the writer's political engagement. What is affirmed in a "vital" perspective takes on, in Stendhal, the characters of self-analysis, that is, of the attempt to grasp the composite and mobile fresco that engraves existence in all its dispersions; the existential "experienced" coincides with scripturality, nothing remains outside even though it is the dimension of the Outside that spurs the infinite solicitations, exalting or annihilating, that distribute themselves across the page. It is no accident that Nietzsche particularly loved Stendhal's prose, since it embodied a form of true, authentic genius, supported by two cornerstones: on the one hand the production of singularities (from Julien Sorel to Fabrizio del Dongo) that admit no transcendences and, within the field of pure immanence, live the burden of their own passion in the union of life and creation; on the other, the clear and evident relation between Stendhal's style and classical music (the novelist himself devoted a biographical writing to Rossini[7]). Continuous variation, the incessant excess in political and aesthetic terms, brings to emergence the perception of becoming as a necessary presence to be confronted. Yet it is not only a matter of producing constructive lines but also of rendering intelligible the peculiarities of psychologies and conducts of life that are, to use the Nietzschean formulation, reactive. Hypocrisy, guilt, the mystification of the France of the 1830s, universalized into philosophical motifs and also debatable on the terrain of rhythm, style and scriptural musicality. As an "untimely" figure ante litteram, Stendhal does not shirk realism and makes of it a founding receptive datum in order to avoid equivocation and ambiguity, but at the same time his characters seek to stand out in a transvaluation of values of their own, with collective, social, political repercussions (from Sorel, critic of the moral and civil corruption of the Restoration, to the idealist Lucien[8]). In sum, realism is the rational note of the world's apprehension and Stendhal does not flee it (he accepts the nonsense of the "true world", become "true" after having been "fable"), but within this immanence he creates, grows impassioned, vitalizes existence with a creative power (he makes himself legislator, makes himself overman, like Sisyphus he gives himself even if there is no salvation) and Nietzsche makes of him the finest French psychologist.
A heroism without eschatology that is reflected also in the style, fractioned and broad, segmented and smiling, committed and indifferent, which Stendhal wields at will, arriving at counterpoints of the novelistic, an anticipator of a literary twentieth century to come. An approach to writing that is greatly affected by music and, in particular, by the works of Rossini. Why Rossini? There is a bridge, a fundamental ligature between Nietzsche, Stendhal and Rossini insofar as each of them accepts multiplicity, declines its chaos and creates within it. A Nietzschean aphorism, a Stendhalian narrative passage, a Rossinian ouverture: three expressions as so many creations and so many acknowledgments. In the Rossinian gait, beyond the well-known "crescendo", are enclosed the "plurals" of living, never marked solely by a fixed homology, indeed at times abruptly interrupted and, in other cases, dispensed in the broad gesture of continuity. Regularity is a moment, it is an index (recall Deleuze) made of precariousness and at the same time of power, since Rossini keeps no constant register but frantically leaps from one point to another, alights melancholically and sets off again with a roar. Emblematic are the orchestrations of L'italiana in Algeri and Il barbiere di Siviglia, but the harmonic chiselings must not be forgotten, almost a style within the style, a fractal constitution, of La Cenerentola and La gazza ladra. Invention moves within multiplicity and the narrative fact becomes an accessory, as for so many other musicians who raise disputes with their librettists; cascades of notes like a chaosmos[9] where one must reckon with chaos and with the absence of finalism that is not exhausted in itself but changes into expressive opening, a radical prehensile gaze upon lived experience.
The eighteenth-century staticity is called into question by Rossini, who imposes a new musicological heuristic of the harmonic gesture into the very folds of maturity and of certain choices capable of opening sudden fissures in the fabric of the opera (the use of a few cavatinas in La donna del lago and in Semiramide). A full voice that nails the audience to confront the musical situation and take it upon itself, like Nietzsche's shepherd who must bite off the head of the black serpent to free himself from lies and then, with a reversal we might call Rossinian, "laughs, haloed in light". In Rossini's opera there is "[…] great inconclusive din, clamorous music, words that add nothing to the action, since everything has already been said […] a sonorous architecture, of an applause-wringing finale, psychologically exciting, vexatious for the audience with its irrepressible rhythms, with its breathtaking crescendos and unbearable clangors, until the concluding liberation"[10] . A freedom woven on the ridge of life and its potential. From vortical dynamism to sudden arrest: such is drama, such is theater, such is existence. Rossini created a "[…] great concertato of astonishment"[11] that takes upon itself the weight of the scene and its liberated overflowing.
With this excursus the attempt has been to trace a transversal hermeneutic mapping and to provide an interpretive key that shows how far philosophy and the "thinking" attitude in itself can stand out in their intermingling with disparate, plural materials and categories, and how, by means of this new attitude, certainly polemical toward the aphasia and sterility of a specialism made of emptiness, a concrete and active interdisciplinary horizon can be defined. Nietzsche, Stendhal and Rossini brought together through the sharp and decisive movements of the reception of the world in its multiplicity and of the creative perspectives in fieri that can be produced within it; music, philosophy and life (as, for that matter, painting and the other art forms) as the hinges of questioning and of constructing answers that loyally implicate themselves with existence, thus properly performing that operation called philosophy.

Notes

[1] Cf. F. Nietzsche, La nascita della tragedia, ed. P. Chiarini, Laterza, Rome-Bari 2006.

[2] In the Corso di linguistica generale, Ferdinand De Saussure had intuited that behind the langue (a fixed syntactic-semantic schematization) there is a differential power, the parole, which is a perennial becoming, a chaos that renders multiplicity present. Cf. F. De Saussure, Corso di linguistica generale, It. trans. by T. De Mauro, Laterza, Rome-Bari 2010. More specifically, I take the liberty of referring to: A. Simonetti, Il concetto di genesi epistemologica nella linguistica di De Saussure, in Schegge di filosofia moderna VIII, deComporre, Gaeta 2014, pp. 19-36.

[3] Cf. M. Foucault, Il pensiero del di fuori, in Scritti letterari, It. trans. by C. Milanese, Feltrinelli, Milan 2004, pp. 111-134.

[4] F. Nietzsche, La volontà di potenza, ed. M. Ferraris and P. Kobau, Bompiani, Milan 2008, p. 270.

[5] P. Boulez, Per volontà e per caso, It. trans. by P. Gallarati, Einaudi, Turin 1977, pp. 6-7.

[6] In sum, cf.: Stendhal, L'amore, It. trans. by M. Bontempelli, Mondadori, Milan 1973; Id., Il Rosso e il Nero, It. trans. by U. Dettore, Rizzoli, Milan 2003; Id., La Certosa di Parma, It. trans. by M. Ortiz, Rizzoli, Milan 2004.

[7] Cf. Stendhal, Vita di Rossini, It. trans. by B. Revel, Passigli, Florence 2018.

[8] Cf. Stendhal, Lucien Leuwen, It. trans. by L. Binni, Garzanti, Milan 2008.

[9] A conceptual category of Félix Guattari, a synthesis of the nexus between chaos and cosmos, between the plane of pure immanence and creative freedom within it. Cf. F. Guattari, Caosmosi, It. trans. by M. Guareschi, Costa & Nolan, Genoa 1996.

[10] M. Beghelli, Morfologia dell'opera italiana da Rossini a Puccini, in Enciclopedia della Musica, vol. II, Einaudi, Turin 2006, p. 903.

[11] Ibid.

Alberto Simonetti, PhD in Philosophy and Human Sciences, trained at the Universities of Perugia, Florence and Urbino; after thesis work on Adorno and on the relationship between philosophy and politics within the antipsychiatric horizon, he has engaged with several figures of contemporary thought such as Deleuze, Saussure, Foucault. Among his publications: Follia e politica. Itinerari di antipsichiatria (Gaeta 2014); L'insavio. Smarginature dell'esistenza tra Kant e Deleuze (Perugia 2016); La filosofia di Proust. Dalla parte di Deleuze (Milan 2018) and Il penultimo del pensiero. Gilles Deleuze storico della filosofia (Milan 2018).