music and romanticism 151variety through rhythm. We cannot tolerate uniformity for very long in
everything that is in itself without meaning, for example in counting,
we make periods’ (ibid.: 493 ).^3 Manual workers do something similar,
counting rhythmically in an unconscious manner to make their repeti-
tive work more tolerable. Schelling terms rhythm ‘the music in music’
(ibid.: 494 ), because the structure of identity in difference in schema-
tism’s relationship to language is repeated both in melody’s horizontal
unification of pitches into intelligible forms and in the vertical unifi-
cation in harmony of different pitches, from the overtones in a single
note to the notes in a chord. Schelling’s other speculative attempts to
integrate his conception of music into his conception of nature as a
continuum between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’ are now of mainly histori-
cal interest. However, his remarks on rhythm can still be philosophically
productive.
When Schelling talks of sound, ‘Klang’, as occurring via ‘a movement
communicated to a body whereby it is shifted out of indifference with
itself’ (ibid.: 508 ), so that it vibrates and animates its surroundings, he
suggests a metaphor for a crucial way of thinking in German Idealism
and Romanticism. It is in this context that his remark that ‘music is
nothing but the archetypal (‘urbildlich’) rhythm of nature and of the
universe itself’ (ibid.: 369 ) can make sense. Like the vibrating body, the
material universe can also be regarded as an ‘indifferent’ oneness which
is moved out of this indifference when it becomes the differentiated,
changing universe. Why the universe becomes anything determinate
at all is both a question of how the One becomes many things that
relate to each other, and of how this move from One to many becomes
intelligible via the differentiation and synthesis constitutive of thought.
Central to this process is time, which comes into being when the One
divides, but which is also whatunifiesthe elements which are divided.
Schelling claims in theNaturphilosophiethat ‘time is itself nothing but
thetotality appearing in opposition to the particular life of things’ (Schelling
1856 – 61 :i/ 6 , 220 ). Without time there would be no music, because
music’s form is ‘succession’ (ibid.:i/ 5 , 491 ), in which the particular
moment onlyisa particular moment because of its being in a connected
sequence of particular moments. He then argues, echoing Kant, that
‘the principle of time in the subject is self-consciousness, which is pre-
cisely the institution (‘Einbildung’) of the unity of consciousness into
3 Hegel was aware of Schelling’s account of music when producing theAesthetics. Both draw
on Johann Georg Sulzer’sAllgemeine Theorie der sch ̈onen Kunste ̈ of 1792.