94 music, philosophy, and modernity
August Wilhelm, he comments on the claim that ‘what one honoured
with the name song and dance before the discovery of an ordering mea-
sure of time was not essentially different from the leaps of joy and cries
of animals’ (ibid.: 142 ). The crucial difference of the human from the
animal is that ‘no animal limits the freedom of its passionate expres-
sions by rhythm’.^7 In this sense ‘freedom’ is merely indeterminate,
uninhibited activity which presses for expression, rather than being
the positive grounding metaphysical principle as which Fichte regards
it. Without rhythm ‘man would have eternally have had to remain in the
wild state’; rhythmic expression ‘soothes the feeling’ which gives rise
to the wild state (ibid.). August Wilhelm refers in this context to the
myth of Orpheus, who tames wild nature with music. In another text,
in which he considers the role of Greek Orphic cults in the genesis of
philosophy, Friedrich develops the underlying idea in a remarkable and
influential direction.^8
Schlegel sees philosophy as beginning with the development of
thought’s awareness of its capacity to transcend particularity. However,
he does not regard this in the kind of heroic terms encountered in
Fichte. Freedom as expanding activity can be just as much a threat and
a potential torment as it is the basis of new possibilities. Schlegel sur-
mises that the people of the Orphic period’s first ‘inkling of infinity...
fills the suddenly awoken mind not with joyous astonishment, but with
wild horror. Via a necessary illusion the mind transfers the product of
its freedom onto an alien power whose impulse [‘Anstoss’–which is the
word Fichte employs for the ‘check’ which drives back the infinite power
of the absolute I into itself] awoke it’ (Schlegel 1988 : 2 , 5 ). The wild and
often violent nature of the orgiastic religion associated with this awaken-
ing of what will lead to philosophy is a result of the fact that ‘the highest
passion likes to injure itself in order... to relieve itself of excess power’
(ibid.). Schlegel adopts from Fichte the model of thought as involving
a freedom which can expand towards infinity, which has to become lim-
ited for determinate thought to result at all. Fichte sees this in terms
of the absolute I; Schlegel, in contrast, offers an historical account
of the struggle this might involve for finite human individuals whose
essential being is based on feeling. The experience of the expansive
7 I shall not deal with the distinction between rhythm and metre here, as the latter can be
considered to be an elaboration of the former, deriving from the initial identity required
for a rhythm to be a pattern at all.
8 Both August Wilhelm and Friedrich draw on classical Greek writings about rhythm, but
Friedrich takes them in new directions because of his awareness of Kant.