From confession to self-knowledge. Singing as a connection between religious experiences, artistic activity, and self-knowledge

As the role of religiosity has altered profoundly throughout the last decades, the individual’s need and search for existential meaning has lost essential support. The societal and religious developments have led to a more isolated self, a self that may be described as disembedded or disconnected in relation to its environment. As a response to this disconnection, new ways of private religious practice seem to emerge. In light of these developments, the article explores how singing can enable both deeper self-knowledge and re-connection through the cultivation of the bodily, social and spiritual dimensions of experience that singing involves. Furthermore, this article argues that current philosophical perspectives on music are insufficient when it comes to giving a full account of this possibility, as they do not consider the potential of religiosity and self-knowledge through music. However, epistemological ideas found in Rudolf Steiner’s work are helpful when it comes to understanding the spiritual potential inherent in singing. These ideas, which essentially consist of the view that self-knowledge is a kind of communion with oneself in otherness, enables a reformulation of what religiosity may mean today, especially when taking the experience of the disembedded self as a starting point. Such a perspective is vital in order to fully grasp the opportunities of self-knowledge that singing offers,
and hence how the activity can serve as a vital part in the development of modern religiosity, seen as a way of enacting self-knowledge and communion with one’s environment.

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