152 music, philosophy, and modernity
multiplicity...From this the close relationship of hearing in general,
and of music and speech in particular, to self-consciousness can be
understood’ (ibid.). Music requires the material form of vibration that
combines the temporally different moments into one sound. The sound
is apprehended as a unity by hearing, and, as such, is connected to the
being of the I, which combines different moments in itself and thus
renders the world – including music’s succession of sounds – intelligi-
ble. The idea is close to Hegel’s conception of the ‘return to self’ that
takes place in music, but we now encounter an important divergence,
which still has resonances today.
The aim of Hegel’s version of Idealism is to show how the self con-
stitutes itself via its relationships to the objective world and to other
subjects. The lack of self-transparency which is essential to Novalis and
Schleiermacher is to be overcome by philosophy’s articulation of the
subject’s relationships to the world. For Hegel music comes lower in
the hierarchy of articulations than some other forms of art because of
its transience and relationship to feeling. Schelling puts music low in
the systematic hierarchy of the arts for similar reasons: like Hegel, he
adheres to aspects of a Platonist conception of philosophy’s relation-
ship to time. However, music becomes more significant in the terms
Schelling proposes if it is also considered in the light of Romantic phi-
losophy, for which the ineluctability of transience is constitutive of all
particular existence, as opposed to being what is to be overcome by phi-
losophy. The principal question here is the understanding of the subject
in relation to music. Does music do more than offer ‘indeterminate feel-
ing which has not yet been able to progress to solid being-determined
in itself’ (Hegel 2003 : 43 )? Even Hegel says things which might cast
some doubt on this view, but on what basis might an alternative view be
convincingly advanced?
Music and self-consciousness: SchleiermacherHegel was famously rude about Schleiermacher’s conception of reli-
gion as founded on the ‘feeling of absolute dependence’. The lack of
determinacy of this feeling meant, Hegel claimed, that a dog would be
the best Christian. I am not concerned here with the religious dimen-
sion of Schleiermacher’s work. Much of what he says about feeling
and self-consciousness is said in secular contexts, and he often makes
it clear how important it is not to involve religion where it does not
belong. What is most significant is that Schleiermacher connects ideas