music and romanticism 157The notion of immediate self-consciousness is the basis of Schleier-
macher’s attempt to address issues concerning the limits of the sayable
and the role of other expressive means that humankind employs to
respond to those limits. Manfred Frank has argued that Schleierma-
cher belongs to a tradition in which ‘feeling, as the epistemic organ
for a non-objective familiarity with oneself, is also the epistemic organ
for the comprehension of being in its radical pre-conceptuality, includ-
ing, of course, one’s own being’ (Frank 2002 : 10 ). Immediate self-
consciousness plays a central role in Schleiermacher’sAesthetics, partic-
ularly in relation to music. The significance of what Schleiermacher
explores can be suggested by Samuel Wheeler’s remarks concerning
the role of metaphor in the relationship between the cognitive and the
non-cognitive in learning: ‘Worthwhile “learning” is not just the inges-
tion of propositions but rather a whole complex of states that cannot be
divided into the cognitive and “other”... This inseparable mix of the
“cognitive” with the “other” is characteristic of learning generally, not
just of the kind of learning we derive from poetry’ (Wheeler 2000 : 110 ).
One example of what Wheeler is referring to is the use of rhythm in
learning which we considered in chapter 3 ; another would be learning
‘how a piece goes’ that is, for example, demonstrated by the gestures
of an orchestral conductor, or by its being played in a pedagogically
effective manner by another person.
Schleiermacher’sAestheticsbegins with the interplay between spon-
taneity and receptivity in the production and reception of art. Art
always involves degrees of each. When listening ‘passively’ to a piece
of music, for example, hearing it as music also involves the freedom
actively to make connections and associations in response to what one
hears. Schleiermacher’s underlying assumption is that living being is
always active or ‘productive’. Such productivity can, though, just con-
sist in natural processes: much of our unreflective thinking is just a
‘production’ of representations in which our will plays no role (the
same would be true of dreams). Only when this productivity is chan-
nelled by reflective thinking can it become art: ‘what makes art into
art is nothing but the eminent direction towards free productivity in
that form of activity which otherwise emerged as bound productivity,
be it as spontaneity or receptivity’ (Schleiermacher 1842 : 301 ). Mime,
for example, employs the movements of people reacting unreflectively
to what affects them in life (these reactions are part of ‘feeling’ on
the individual level), but it makes those movements into intersubjec-
tively accessible gestures which are no longer just reactions. Dance