hegel, philosophy, and music 129is the main thing, but its reality still appears as immediate existence
[e.g. in the objective form of the sculpture]. Now [in romantic art] it is
a question of presenting a subjectivity which dominates the [objective]
form (‘Gestalt’)’ (ibid.: 177 ). There is now a difference between ‘form
and meaning’ (ibid.: 176 ), but of a different kind from that present in
symbolic art, where spirit did not have full control of the natural mate-
rial. Romantic art has no essential relationship to the material world;
instead, it ‘has a musical foundation, a hovering and sounding above a
world which can only take up a reflection of this being in itself of the
soul’, because ‘inwardness has an opposition within it against external
existence’ (ibid.: 182 ). The move away from sensuous particularity is
seen as constitutive of the essential power of mind. This power consists
in mind’sawarenessof the finitude of all empirical things, which is man-
ifested in romantic art: ‘The traces of temporality, of the impoverish-
ment of nature, the externality of existence can for this reason be taken
up more for their own sake’ (ibid.: 185 )insuch art. The novel, which
forms itself from the transient material of a historical period, depends
on meanings established by the writer, rather than on the meanings of a
pre-existing unified community, of the kind that Hegel sees as the basis
of Greek art. There is, then, a falling apart of the subject’s inner sense
of its existence and the power of its thinking, and the external world,
which no longer appears as inherently meaningful.
In his account of the relationship between the arts Hegel locates
music in terms of the falling apart of the subjective and the objective
that is characteristic of modernity. The falling apart is exemplified in
proto-Weberian manner by the processes of abstraction in science and
law that destroy traditional ideas of immanent meaningfulness. Music is
therefore connected to the development of specific forms of thinking
which arise from the individualisation of the subject in modernity, and
to the loss of a community founded on shared religious beliefs. Because
its material, ‘although sensuous, progresses to even deeper subjectivity’
(ibid.: 42 ) than the spatial material of painting, music comes higher
in the hierarchy of the arts than painting. The basis of music’s status
as a new form of subjective expression is ‘feeling’, ‘Empfindung’, which
is essentially internal. The question for us is whether feeling is to be
regarded as a form of immediacy, of the kind that the critique of the
myth of the given convincingly rejects as a foundation for epistemol-
ogy, or whether it is to be understood in the sort of terms we consid-
ered in Nussbaum’s claim in chapter 1 that feelings are kinds of judge-
ment. Feelings, as we saw, cannot be wholly inward because they involve