130 music, philosophy, and modernity
intentional relations to the objective world, and are themselves in part
dependent upon forms of articulation, including music, acquired from
that world. The issue for Hegel lies in the extent to which feelings can
be regarded as determinate.
Hegel analyses the musical note in terms of the idea of the animation
of objective material. Whereas the space in painting is still an ‘indiffer-
ent separation’, music ‘idealises it into the One of the point, but a
concrete one’ (ibid.: 42 – 3 ). This is because the point, i.e. the note,
‘exists as the beginning ideality of spatiality in movement, the trem-
bling of the material within itself’ (ibid.: 43 ). The process of animation
is moved into the dimension of time, where the vibration of the body
producing the note corresponds to ‘this negative sensuousness which,
as it is, is not, and in its not-being already produces its being again’;
‘the restless self-negation’ of the vibration is the ‘emergence’ of what
is negated (ibid.). The movement of the vibrating body involves a pat-
tern of presence and absence (hence ‘self-negation’) which have to be
grasped as a unity if the phenomenon is to exist as such at all. The
note can only be a note because each vibration is negated by the next,
but each vibration must, like the moments of time, be connected to
the preceding ones. The note is a sensuous, temporalised instantiation
of ‘material incompatibility’: each oscillation excludes the others, but
thereby becomes intelligible as part of a structured whole. This intel-
ligibility is constituted, though, at the level of feeling: ‘This material
of abstract inwardness is the immediate medium of equally indetermi-
nate feeling which has not yet been able to progress to solid being-
determined in itself. Music only expresses sounding and fading away
(‘Klingen und Verklingen’) and forms the middle-point of subjective art,
the point of transition of abstract sensuousness to abstract mindedness’
(ibid.). The idea of music as a transition between the natural and the
cultural, or the non-semantic and the semantic, that we encountered
in chapter 2 ,isechoed here.
The link of this conception to the issue of nihilism starts to emerge
when Hegel argues that the transition from nature to culture begins
with the ‘liberation of the sensuous element in the note’ (ibid.), but
culminates when the sensuous is ‘completely spiritualised, and the note
is no longer the sounding of feeling itself, but is degraded to a mere
sign which is contentless for itself’ (ibid.). The note is therefore just a
form of immediacy, and music is limited by the nature of its material.
At the stage beyond music the sign is not one of ‘indeterminate feel-
ing, but of an idea (‘Vorstellung’) which has become concrete in itself’