132 music, philosophy, and modernity
fulfilment that results ‘is of its nature external, spatial and thus always
distinguished from the inwardness of the I’ (ibid.: 263 ), because there
is a determinate external object which occasions the inner response. In
music this distinction is lost, so ‘the notes progress in my deepest inward-
ness’ (ibid.). The ‘power of notes’ comes about because what matters
is the internal response: the subject is stirred by the movement of the
notes in a manner which supposedly precludes an objective response.
However, this is already implausible, because the feelings experienced
in relation to music rely on awareness of connections between the notes,
and, in a differentiated response, on a great deal many other idealisa-
tions. Then, however, comes Hegel’s crucial contention: ‘People can
be all the more enthused (‘hingerissen’) the less they have determinacy
of content, the less ideas and thoughts they have’ (ibid.). In contrast to
Schlegel’s view of the significance of Orpheus, Hegel claims: ‘Orpheus,
they say, tamed mankind, gave it laws through music. Our laws are not
given musically. Music alone, which is without content for itself, does not
affect us’ (ibid.: 265 ). Whereas music with a text gives satisfaction, the
more music becomes independent, ‘the more it belongs to the under-
standing and is a mere piece of artifice, which is only for the expert and
is untrue to the purpose of art’ (ibid.: 270 ).
Two factors are in play here, which relate to Hegel’s view of music as
‘art of the deepest feeling’, and ‘of the strictest understanding’ (ibid.:
262 ). The first is a justifiable suspicion of a giving way to powerful
feelings that are not structured by thought (i.e. the sort of feelings
which will be involved in what Schlegel, Schelling, and Nietzsche see
as the ‘Dionysian’); the second is the idea that wordless music can only
appeal to those who have a technical understanding of it. The first fac-
tor makes music inferior to philosophy because its ‘content’ is ‘more
indeterminate and vague’ (Hegel 1965 : 2 , 299 ) than that of discur-
sive thought; the second makes it inferior because the content cannot
become objective to a community in the way that what is communicated
by language can. Even though music must involve material inference
if it is to be understood as music, it is therefore excluded from the
level of the inferential game in which knowing how becomes know-
ing that. Hegel’s apparently contingent historical judgement on word-
less music therefore has a specifically philosophical import. He insists
that ‘music stops at the expression of feeling, it makes this its purpose’
(Hegel 2003 : 266 ), and it can only transcend this limitation via the
text it accompanies. Like Kivy and others, he assumes that the meaning
of music with a text is just the meaning of the text which the music