music and romanticism 145a function that compensates for deficits in social life, at the risk of
reconciling people to unjust circumstances (and worse), and fulfill-
ing a critical function, at the risk of being a merely symbolic protest
against social conditions which does not significantly influence most
people’s thinking and action. Hegel’s possible ambivalence concerning
how the substance of a modern community might be constituted with
regard to music is therefore an indication of a structural tension facing
modern music. However, music sustains itself through the crises associ-
ated with the idea of loss of substance in ways which cannot be under-
stood solely in terms of an opposition between compensation and
critique. Adorno fails to see how the relationship between compen-
sation and critique has different significances in differing historical
and cultural circumstances (see Bowie 2004 a and chapter 9 below).
It is therefore important to find resources which allow for these differ-
ences to be part of the understanding of music and modern philosophy.
Elements of such resources can be found in aspects of Romantic phi-
losophy, some of which we already considered in chapter 3.
Romanticism and musical consciousnessThe unifying theme in Romantic philosophy is probably the attempt
to grasp new kinds of connection between human consciousness and
nature. Such connections can, if the aim is to anchor them in a re-
theologising of nature, be ‘dogmatic’ in Kant’s sense, but they need not
be. Despite the considerable diversity in what early German Romantic
philosophers – I shall look at Novalis, Schelling, and Schleiermacher –
say about music, they tend to share a sense that music has to do with ways
in which we are part of the world that are not accessible to conceptual
articulation, but which can also affect conceptual thinking. They do so
because they regard music, not as something ‘natural’, but as something
inextricably linked to self-consciousness.
Novalis’ comments on music are scattered throughout his work, and
are neither very numerous nor very consistent. We saw in chapter 3
how his disagreement with Fichte led him to a new conception of phi-
losophy’s relationship to temporality. By rejecting the idea of a system
grounded in the spontaneity of the I, he is led to see philosophy’s task
as coming to terms with the transience and lack of self-transparency of
the I. This means that art can be as much a resource for philosophical
understanding as discursive argument, and that music is essential to phi-
losophy. Novalis consequently regards language in ‘poetic’, expressive