146 music, philosophy, and modernity
terms, rather than primarily as a means of representation. As he puts it
in a famous passage fromMonologue:
whoever has a fine feeling for [language’s] application, for its rhythm,
for its musical spirit, who hears in himself the gentle effect of its inner
nature and moves his tongue or hand accordingly, will be a prophet; on
the other hand, whoever knows this well enough but does not have the
ears and the feeling for language will write truths like these but will be
made fun of by language and will be mocked by people, like Cassandra by
the Trojans. If I believe that I have thereby indicated the essence and role
(‘Amt’) of literature [‘Poesie’, in the wider sense of creative art derived
from ‘poiesis’] in the clearest possible fashion then I yet know that no
one can understand it and that I have said something completely stupid,
because I wanted to say it, and in this way no literature can come into
being.
(Novalis 1978 : 438 )Language is linked to music because it is not completely in the power of
the subject and yet offers resources to the subject which transcend the
subject’s intentions. This leads Novalis elsewhere to the following pre-
scient view of the non-representational future of modern art: ‘Poems,
just pleasant sounding and full of beautiful words, but also without any
meaning or context... like fragments of the most diverse things. True
poetry can at the most have an allegorical meaning as a whole and an
indirect effect, like music etc.’ (ibid.: 769 ). By trying to speak the truth
about the truth one fails to achieve what is possible when one relies
on the musical and literary possibilities of language. These open up
new dimensions of the world in ways which cannot be reduced to an
explanation that would circumscribe the truth.
A related notion of the limits of the sayable occurred in Wittgen-
stein’s ideas about music and ‘logical form’. Wittgenstein maintained
that ‘The proposition can represent the whole of reality, but it cannot
represent what it must have in common with reality in order to repre-
sent it’, and so sought ‘a means of expression with which I can talkabout
language’. The idea in Novalis is that, just as the self is not transparent
to itself and so has to embark on a constant attempt at self-articulation
by means of ‘external’ language, language involves kinds of intelligibil-
ity which are not reducible to what can be explained within language
itself.^2 Weencounter language as part of the contingent, external world,
2 Reference here to ‘the self’ is just intended to indicate that propositional self-
knowledge – from objective facts about my name, height and so on, to subjective facts
about my feelings – cannot capture aspects of self-conscious existence that may be artic-
ulated in music and gesture.