190 Chapter 12
unity , Ritter and Ø rsted understood electricity to underlie the senses, no less than the senses
provide evidence of electricity: Ritter felt he was hearing electricity, no less than Ø rsted
was seeing it move the powder on his vibrating plates. For these Romantics, hearing and
music enabled the deepest and most inward knowledge. Ø rsted wrote a dialogue about
music. Ritter ’ s Fragments from the Posthumous Writings of a Young Physicist (1810),
which Walter Benjamin considered the “ most significant confessional prose of German
Romanticism, ” ends with a visionary interweaving of Chladni ’ s and Ø rsted ’ s sound figures,
electricity, light, and music. For Ritter, “ there must absolutely be no human relation, no
human history, which could not be expressed through music. ... All life is music, and all
music as life itself — at least its image. ”^17 Ritter ’ s provocative thoughts on music made deep
impressions on Novalis, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Robert Schumann.^18 Calling light “ the
bond that binds together all and every thing, ” Ritter nonetheless considers that “ every tone
is the life of the sounding body and in it, as long as it holds, as tone is extinguished with
it. Every tone is a whole organism of oscillation and figure, shape, as is also every organic
living thing. It expresses its existence [ Er spricht sein Daseyn aus ]. ”^19 He often connects
music with the deepest sources of language, just as he treats electricity as a kind of “ fire-
writing [ Feuerschrift ] ” that inscribes its primordial glyphs in Lichtenberg figures.^20 Ritter
considers these expressive shapes to be the originals for written language itself, taken as
visibly recording the emergent shocks of consciousness: “ Music is also language, general
language, the first of mankind. ... Music decomposes into languages, ” rather like the
decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen Ritter was one of the first to achieve.
“ Thus every one of our spoken words is a secret song, for music from within continuously
accompanies it. ”^21
In closely harmonizing ways, Ritter and Ø rsted sought the inner music of electricity.
During 1802 – 1803, Ø rsted visited Paris to represent their very different approach in the
capital of mechanistic science whose champion was Pierre-Simon Laplace.^22 Ø rsted kept
returning to his electric version of Chladni ’ s experiment, for instance in his essay “ On the
Harmony Between Electrical Figures and Organic Forms ” (1805), an extended meditation
on the striking differences he noted between the polarities of the electrical figures: the
positive charge patterns ’ “ striking resemblance to vegetation ” (such as figure 12.1b ) versus
“ the internal form of the plant ” seen in the negatively charged patterns ( figure 12.1c ), with
their womb- or egg-shaped contours. Ø rsted connected these contrasting forms with
chemical phenomena and with repulsive and attractive forces in general, ending with the
behavior of light. Though he notes that “ the first fundamental law of light is that its effect
spreads along straight lines, or that it is in the form of the first dimension, ” when light
strikes a partly opaque body “ another force must act against it, as its opposite. ” Thus, a
straight ray of light passing through a prism give rise to a new effect, the spectrum, and
“ the direction of this effect is precisely perpendicular to that first straight line. ” Ø rsted
further speculates a third dimension, a “ penetration or chemical process ” like the effect
Ritter discovered from “ chemical rays ” acting beyond the violet end of the spectrum.^23