150 music, philosophy, and modernity
connect to philosophical, social, and historical issues, as well as estab-
lishing new kinds of relationship to verbal texts. Beethoven’s symphonic
language, with its integration of ever greater diversity, can ‘excite in a
free, indeterminate manner’. It allows enjoyment of the ways in which
tension results in resolution via complex and intriguing routes that
both evoke and extend the narratives in which much of our affective
and other life consists. Novalis’ remarks are, of course, too fragmentary
for one to do more than construct a position from the relationships
they have to other aspects of his thought, but one can further develop
the ideas in relation to Schleiermacher. In order to see exactly how, we
need first briefly to look again at Schelling’s account of music, rhythm,
and self-consciousness.
Schelling: rhythm and self-consciousnessIn the 1802 – 3 Philosophy of Art, written just after he had been in contact
with Novalis in Jena, Schelling claims that art works communicate in
sensuous form what philosophy communicates in abstract form. The
book’s underlying idea is that ‘The secret of all life is the synthesis of
the absolute with limitation’ (Schelling 1856 – 61 : 1 / 5 , 393 ). Each par-
ticular thing is limited by its particularity, but that limitation is therefore
itself universal; the essential fact about ‘life’ is that particularity is con-
stantly overcome by each particular entering into new syntheses with
other particulars. He applies this idea to language, which is a ‘work of
art’, because it is manifest in ‘real’ matter, but possesses ‘ideal’ meaning
via the relationships between its elements. The connection to the ideas
we have been considering emerges when he says that ‘even language
is nothing but a continued schematisation’ (ibid.: 408 ), because the
general sign enables the particular intuition to be linked to other cases
of that intuition. Without schematisation there would be an indetermi-
nate infinity of particulars. Schelling maintained, as we saw, that rhythm
was ‘the transformation of a succession which is in itself meaningless
into a significant one’ (ibid.: 493 ) for the same reason: the particulars
gain an identity via their relations to a whole.
Schelling contends that ‘no discovery seems more directly inspired
in mankind by nature’ (ibid.: 492 )than rhythm. However, he does not
regard rhythm as a natural phenomenon. Instead, he sees it both as
generated by human activity, which has natural roots, and as linked
to self-consciousness: ‘In everything which is in itselfpure identityof
activity man seeks... driven by nature, to establish multiplicity and