rhythm and romanticism 103Music is often seen as both conveying the feeling which engenders such
philosophy, and yet enabling us to accept this situation and temporarily
to transcend it.
A conception like this makes apparent the reasons for questioning
the dominance of metaphysics 1 in modernity. Because what modern
science seeks has no foreseeable end, what we can learn via the infor-
mation which it provides is never enough to give us a sustained feeling of
meaningful coherence. The Romantics’ version of metaphysics 2 does
not, though, offer a positive way beyond the sense of inherent lack
that results when knowledge-acquisition is related to the desire and
the need to make the world cohere. Indeed, in certain respects it actu-
ally underlines the fragmentary nature of our place within things, and
it is vital for my argument that metaphysics 2 should not be regarded
as seeking to conceal the contradictory nature of modern experience
in the name of an illusory harmony. The point is that the Romantics
explore one of the main ways in which cultures seek to come to terms
with a modernity that lets us know more and more while often feeling
less at home in the world which that knowledge engenders. There is
a further confirmation of the fertility of the Romantic approach. The
kind of music which evokes what the Romantics begin to explore, the
music of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, Bruck-
ner, and Mahler – music which confronts, rather than evades, some of
the most challenging affective and other issues in modernity – devel-
ops after the ideas of the Romantics have already begun to fall into
obscurity.
However, lurking in this discussion is the question of whether music,
as a merely symbolic medium, or a form of ‘aesthetic appearance’, is not
being asked to carry too heavy a burden in relation to the real advances
in scientific knowledge and ethics which are more obviously essential to
the ‘philosophical discourse of modernity’. In one sense this clearly is
the case, but there are dimensions of modern philosophy which involve
an important deficit with regard to music that can be revealed in rela-
tion to Romantic ideas of the kind explored above. The key issue here
is that, although the Romantics seek to create systematic coherence
in their thinking, they do so on the basis of the feeling that ultimate
coherence will elude them. Novalis talks in this respect of philosophy as
‘systemlessness brought into a system’ (Novalis 1978 : 200 ). This para-
doxical characterisation of philosophy leads to the question of what can
give meaning to the resulting sense of inherent incompleteness, and