rhythm and romanticism 93of philosophical thinking is the desire to attain something which can
never be present, but which yet demands to be attained. This desire is
suggested by the structure of feeling’s combination of limitation and
its opposite. If we now look at the relationship between longing, music,
and rhythm in the context of some aspects of early Romantic philosophy
the connections to the issues raised so far in this chapter will become
apparent.
The best place to begin to approach these issues is, perhaps rather
surprisingly, via Schlegel’s writing on Greek and Roman literature from
the second half of the 1790 s. The underlying issue is the tension we
encountered above, between the feeling of finitude and the sense of
the infinite, which Schlegel explores in a variety of forms. His core
assumption is that philosophy should not be concerned with what is
fixed and completed, but rather with the fact that the world continu-
ally changes and develops. Fichte’s conception of the I appeals to him
precisely because it makes activity, rather than objectivity, the key to
the philosophical picture of the world. At the same time, he is suspi-
cious of there being any single foundation for philosophy because it is
likely to restrict the possibilities of articulating the world in new ways.
Furthermore, he sees the need of thought to strive beyond finitude as
developing from an initial state of limitation, of the kind designated by
feeling.
The following account of the nature of Hellenic culture, which is
in some respects close to the questionable ideas of Herder, under-
lines Schlegel’s insistence on diversity of articulation as a major aim
of philosophy:
A truly human state does not consist of ideas or of endeavours alone,
but of the mixture of both. It overflows completely through all available
orifices, in all possible directions. It expresses itself in intentional and
natural signs, in speech, voice and gesture simultaneously. In the natural
formation of the arts, before the understanding mistakes its rights and
confuses the borders of nature by violent interference, destroying its
beautiful organisation, poetry, music and mime (which is also rhythmic)
are always inseparable sisters.
(Schlegel 1988 : 1 , 109 – 10 )When Schlegel explores the role of rhythm in the genesis of cultural
forms the links to what we have considered so far become evident, and
the argument becomes less based on the questionable ideas of his prede-
cessors. In a review inDie Horenof a text on poetic metre by his brother,