rhythm and romanticism 95power of freedom is therefore as much a problem as it is the ground of
new possibilities.
Schlegel sees the initial state of human awareness as involving mere
unarticulated feelings, of the kind which also occur in animals. Because
of the particular nature of the human experience of feeling as limita-
tion described above, it expands into a sense of infinity which takes
the form of ecstatic states that have to be controlled by developing cul-
tural forms.^9 Schlegel’s approach leads to an account of the origins of
philosophy which is in some respects historically and anthropologically
more plausible than an account which talks about the emergence of
philosophical abstraction in Thales’ ontology of water. He suggests, in
a manner which will be echoed by Nietzsche, that those who produced
the culture of this period, from dance, to poetry and philosophy, were
full of the living idea of an incomprehensible infinity. If this idea is the
beginning and end of all philosophy; and if the first inkling of it expresses
itself in Bacchic dances and songs, in inspirational customs and festivals,
in allegorical images and poems; then orgies and mysteries were the first
beginnings of Hellenic philosophy; and it was not a happy idea to begin
philosophy’s history with Thales, and to make it suddenly appear as if out
of nothing.
(ibid.: 10 )The development of a culture which can channel the sense of the infi-
nite into meaningful forms therefore involves an overcoming of the
initial horror generated by the feeling of limitlessness inherent in the
link between freedom and philosophical thinking.
The essential ingredient in this overcoming is, precisely, rhythm.
Progress beyond the ‘helpless state’ in which people are just open to
the endless, ecstatic generation of feelings by the unlimited nature
of what underlies thought involves the ‘drive to hold fast a feeling
(‘Empfindung’) for oneself and to repeat it’ (ibid.: 13 ). This drive already
makes possible the beginning of the ‘poetic capacity of humankind’:
‘for only by sensuous limitation and sensuous distribution of the mate-
rial of communication, by rhythm, which in the case of the wild man
therefore does not belong to excess but to need, can feeling...be
expanded into a lasting and more universal effectiveness’ (ibid.). He
sums up the decisive point as follows: ‘rhythm in this childhood of
9 There is no explanation ofwhythis sense of infinity develops at all, because that would
place it in a causal nexus, when the point is precisely that it is not caused by something
else.