142 music, philosophy, and modernity
self-descriptions characteristic of contemporary genetics and artifi-
cial intelligence, have to co-exist with the search for forms of self-
understanding and self-expression, such as music, which can integrate
the subject into a disenchanted world. Hegel emphasises the need to
come to terms with the former, disenchanted kind of self-description,
but some of his remarks on how music relates to the individual subject
point to another side of his thinking.
Hegel observes that music requires the division of time because ‘time
stands in the closest relationship with the simple self which hears and
should hear its inner-self in the notes’ (Hegel 1965 : 2 , 283 ). Time,
though, can just be ‘empty progression’ (ibid.: 284 ), and the self must
contradict this mere accumulation of successive moments because its
essential nature is ‘return to self’ (ibid.: 283 ). By returning to itself it
‘interrupts the determination-less sequence of temporal points, makes
incisions in the abstract continuity’, so that the I ‘remembers itself and
finds itself again’ (ibid.: 284 )inthe experience of music. The tempo-
ral order of music is not given in nature, and the satisfaction it gives
belongs ‘neither to time nor to the notes as such, but is something that
only belongs to the I’ (ibid.: 285 ). This satisfaction enables the I to
establish a sense of its own meaning, its ‘feeling of self’ (ibid.: 283 ), via
the engagement with objective sounds. Hegel is concerned, then, with
Kant’s ‘transcendental unity of apperception’, the ‘I think that must be
able to accompany all my representations’, and thus also with the issues
discussed in chapter 3 in relation to rhythm. Like Schlegel, he connects
the way the self finds itself to rhythm, thus to what we saw in terms of
schematism and of Taylor’s idea of ‘preconceptual engagement’ with
the world. How, though, does what he asserts relate to his claims about
philosophy’s ability to integrate the spheres of modernity? Dahlhaus
offers an interesting speculation here which is, he acknowledges, not
philologically verifiable. The idea is that Hegel may have come to see
how his approach to music involves a more complex tension between
metaphysics 1 and metaphysics 2 than is apparent in the ideas we looked
at in thelast chapter. The ‘feeling of self’ can be just arbitrarily inward
and subjective, but it is also linked to important social considerations,
as the fact that it emerges via engagement with music as part of the
objective social world indicates.
Dahlhaus begins his speculation with a striking contradiction in
E. T. A. Hoffmann’s texts on music, texts which, given Hoffmann’s
place in the cultural life of Berlin, Hegel very likely knew. Writing about
Beethoven’s Opus 70 piano trios in 1813 , Hoffmann suggests, in the