MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

98 music, philosophy, and modernity

what one is seeking the origin of to describe its own origin, without it fail-

ing to communicate what is essential about what preceded itself? I shall

return to this issue again later. For the moment Schlegel’s story can at

least be seen as an intriguing way of responding to the fact that rhythm

is a fundamental human way of being in the world, and of arguing that

more abstract forms of coping with reality derive from such concrete

ways of being. In this sense, Schlegel sees things rather as Rorty does,

there being no moment when thought emerges as something wholly

other to what precedes it. Concern with understanding what precedes

rational thought will be more and more associated with music from this

time onwards.

Although Schlegel is a less fragmentary thinker than he is sometimes

presented as being, he does not offer fully worked-out positions on

these (or on many other) matters. This lack of completeness is actually

congruent with the way he sees philosophy anyway: his aim is often

not a final, fixed system, but rather an ever richer series of coherent

connections between elements of the world, of the kind which music

can also provide in its own particular ways. Let us, therefore, pursue

one further series of connections that he makes between music and

philosophy.^12

In notes from 1805 Schlegel suggests that ‘Philosophy is founded

onmusic,istherefore not completely independent’ (Schlegel 1971 :

50 ). We have already seen some reasons for such a claim in the links

between schematism and rhythm. Another, related, way of understand-

ing the claim can be seen via his remark that ‘Music is most of all

longing.’ The constellation of music, philosophy and longing recurs

throughout his work. Schlegel claims, for example, that ‘What [music]

alone can express is longing for the infinite and infinite melancholy

(‘Betr ̈ubnis’)’ (Schlegel 1988 : 6 , 12 ). In certain respects music and phi-

losophy seem therefore to be identical, and this is underlined by the

following description: philosophy’s ‘essence consists precisely in the

hovering change, in eternal seeking and not being able to find; our

thirst for knowledge is always given something, but much more always

seems to be left’ (Schlegel 1988 : 3 , 79 ).

In Romantic philosophy truth often appears as a regulative idea

which may even be just a necessary illusion generated by the combi-

nation of our feeling of finitude with the sense of infinity inherent in

12 Schlegel can at times be found inverting many of the priorities between music, the other
arts, and philosophy that he is seen as establishing here. It is also clear that he would
not have heard most of the music with which I associate his thinking, but this does not
mean that what he says cannot illuminate this music, and vice versa.