102 music, philosophy, and modernity
He connects this view of music and feeling to his notion of ‘Poesie’
[‘literature’, which has the Greek sense of ‘poiesis’, creative production],
the form of verbal language, which, like music, cannot be represented
or adequately translated into something else: ‘The higher language as
well should be music; here literature is the link which connects music
and language’ (ibid.: 58 ). We have seen why feeling can be seen as
the ‘root of all consciousness’ in the contrast of the Romantics with
Fichte, and in Schlegel’s account of the genesis of philosophy. The
further important step here is the idea of music as ‘philosophical lan-
guage’. The rationalist idea of a ‘general philosophical language’, in
which language is regarded as a means of representation and commu-
nication, had been the subject of Hamann’s influential critique in the
1770 s and 1780 s. He criticised it on the grounds that many dimen-
sions of what is conveyed by a particular natural language are based
on the history of the sensuous and affective contact with the world of
the people whose language it is, and can only be adequately under-
stood if we remain open to the affective and sensuous dimensions of
communication.
Schn ̈adelbach’s comment, cited in chapter 1 , that ‘negative meta-
physics’ offers a ‘reminder that discourse does not have complete con-
trol of the true and the good: that there is something here which cannot
be anticipated by a method, but which must show itself and be expe-
rienced’ (Schn ̈adelbach 1987 : 171 – 2 ) applies in this context to the
limits of a general philosophical account, both of particular natural
languages, and of music. On the one hand, Schlegel is just making
the questionable claim that music is a ‘universal language’ – the abil-
ity to understand music from cultures with which one is unfamiliar
can in fact require the learning of new ways of understanding, so the
music is not immediately and universally accessible. On the other hand,
the ubiquity of music in all cultures, and the ways in which unfamiliar
kinds of music can cross cultural boundaries do seem to involve shared
forms of intelligibility and ways of relating to the world of the kind
that we saw in the links between rhythm and schematism. Such links
are further evident in the widespread concern with the musicality of
verse which connects language and music in the manner suggested by
Herder. The essential aspect shared by music and philosophy as con-
ceived by Schlegel is suggested by ‘longing’, namely simultaneous ‘eter-
nal seeking and not being able to find’. Philosophy has, therefore, to
come to terms with its own temporality and lack of ultimate fulfilment.