SRJC Philosophy Professor Joel Rudinow combines the seriousness of academia with the self-expression embodied in the traditions of American pop culture. In a guest lecture Feb. 23, Rudinow presented his new book, “Soul Music: From Plato to Motown,” which explores the relationship between the tradition of African-American music in the early- to mid-20th century and its effect on the human soul and the collective soul of the nation.

Rudinow took a semester-long sabbatical in 2007 to travel through the Mississippi delta, the birthplace of the Blues, and to start writing his book. He traveled to Memphis at the top of the delta through various Blues shrines and landmarks to Vicksburg at the bottom of the delta and finished in New Orleans. The manuscript took a year to complete, but the initial premise existed long before the sabbatical allowed him the time to write.

“The book had been gestating for a long time,” Rudinow said.

Music and philosophy had always fascinated Rudinow. He’s had a working title for the book since the 1990s. But until the turn of the millennium, the study of music and philosophy together was unpopular in either philosophy or music studies, Rudinow said.

“I tried to get going on this when I was in grad school, but it was too far outside of what the discourse was involved in those days,” Rudinow said.

Historically, soul music appeared in the 1950s and flourished through the 1960s and included musicians like Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder and Sam Cooke. Soul music was a combination of gospel and Blues styles, which are often considered “spiritually incompatible,” Rudinow said. The Blues drew from the hard-drinking, morally questionable lifestyle of dancehall musicians, while gospel music embodied the strong faith and morals of the African American religious community.

Rudinow’s discussion was full of rich music history, tracking the roots of soul music from African-American spirituals through the legend of Bluesman Robert Johnson, which first connected the Blues with Faustian deals, and on to the roots of gospel. He also discussed the social impact during the Reconstruction era after the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement.

“It was the soundtrack to the Civil Rights struggle and I’m going to say that it’s not just a soundtrack, but an integral part of that movement and actually had the effect of assisting in the healing of deep spiritual wounds of the country,” Rudinow said. “The national soul was healed by this music.”

For Rudinow, the role of soul music in the popular culture begs certain questions. How does music affect the soul? Can music heal? Can music harm? What exactly is a soul, anyway? Rudinow side-stepped the problem of competing belief systems by giving what he called a “minimalist definition of the soul.”

“Without professing any firm convictions about what kind of thing the soul might be…I’m in the habit of referring to both my conscious awareness and my agency by the same name: ‘I,'” Rudinow said. “When I refer to my soul I’m just talking about myself as a conscious agent, talking about the locus of my awareness and the agent of whatever voluntary actions I engage in. My soul is whatever animates my body with awareness and action.”

Rudinow then suggested that groups can have the same combination of awareness and agency to form a “collective soul.”

Rudinow moved on to discuss Plato and how the Greek author explains the essence of good character, or justice, in terms of the effect on the soul: “Plato’s theory of justice is that it’s a matter of inner intonation and harmony; it’s a matter of tuning and harmonizing the several distinct energies within one’s soul. So Plato’s [definition] is essentially a musical moral psychology.”

The lecture ended with a discussion of the emerging study of music as medicine. The current conceptual framework treats music as a kind of drug and studies how music affects the body as if it were a chemical reaction.

Rudinow believes that such a basis for research stands in the way of advancing the science.

“Music enters the body not as a substance to be metabolized; music enters the body as organized sound energy,” Rudinow said. “So I want to argue that the clinical research should focus more directly on the physical effects on the body of organized sound energy, from the level of organs and organ systems down to the cellular and sub-cellular level.”

He looks at music more in terms of its direct affect on the energy of the body and likens musical therapy to the way that massage draws from energy reserves within the body, instead of chemically changing it.

The problem with the lecture was that Rudinow tried to say too much. “It was way too big of a topic to cover in one hour, which is unfortunate,” said audience member Doug Stevenson. “It was really fascinating.”

Rudinow never reached a solid answer to many of the questions he posed, but as with most philosophical topics, answers are hardly the point. The lecture posed the questions, the book ponders them in depth and ultimately it’s left up to us to come up with our own individual answers. As Rudinow sometimes tells his students, being puzzled is a fertile state for the mind to inhabit.