148 music, philosophy, and modernity
affect. Ritter relies on a mythical idea of ‘music’ as the origin and ground
of all languages (if we think in terms of Schlegel’s and Schelling’s ideas
about rhythm the idea is less problematic), but the idea that music
is more universally accessible than verbal languages points to some-
thing more plausible. Natural languages are inter-translatable and can
potentially be learned by any language-user. The ability to learn them
also depends on acoustic and rhythmic forms of repetition. Phenomena
like gaining command of a foreign language, when the shapes of new
sentences which one has never spoken before form of their own accord
as one speaks, or when one’s musical improvisations involve melodic
and rhythmic shapes that one has never played before, seem to derive
from this kind of ‘comprehensibility’, which itself derives from ways of
coping with the world that transcend particular languages.
Novalis claims that ‘All method is rhythm. If one has grasped the
rhythm of the world, one has grasped the world...Fichte did nothing
but discover the rhythm of philosophy and express it verbal-acoustically’
(Novalis 1978 : 544 ). The ‘rhythm’ Fichte discovers is the relation-
ship between the I and the not-I. In this the infinite expansion of
the I is inhibited and takes on the finite forms of the not-I; at the
same time each resulting limitation is transcended by the activity that
takes the I beyond it. The idea is echoed in Hegel’s conception of the
‘return to self’ in music. Fichte says, for example, that ‘I andactivity
which returns into itselfare completely identical concepts’ (Fichte 1971 ,
1 , 462 ). Rhythm only becomes rhythm via a ‘return to self’, as well as by
the transcending movement to the next moment of articulation within
a larger pattern. Novalis even associates the ubiquity of rhythm with the
‘rhythm of individual health’ (Novalis 1978 : 544 ), as a way of trying to
extend the analogies he seeks throughout his work between subjective
phenomena, such as associations of ideas, and objective processes, such
as chemical syntheses, or the irritation of muscles. Much of this is, to
say the least, speculative. However, the continuities between forms of
intelligibility that Novalis and Ritter propose do offer ways of beginning
to understand the power which music has to connect us to the world in
many differing ways.
One of the worries about Romantic philosophy’s attachment to music
is, however, that it can be seen as entailing the celebration of indetermi-
nacy. This is why both Hegel and the later Nietzsche are so suspicious of
it (see Bowie 2003 a). Novalis maintains, for example, that ‘Every uni-
versal indeterminatepropositionhas something musical. It arouses philo-
sophicalfantasies– without expressing any determinate philosophical