music and romanticism 147like the rest of objective nature, but, also like objective nature, language
is part of us in ways that resist objectification. Such objectification is
always secondary to a prior intelligibility without which objectification
makes no sense. This dual status precludes both a wholly naturalistic
account of language, and one which sees language as completely in the
power of the subject. It is language’s resistance to being regarded as
belonging either to the subject- or to the object-pole that opens up its
connection to music for the Romantics.
As we saw in chapter 3 ,rhythm is a necessary part of what enables us
to experience and act in an intelligible world. Novalis talks of rhythm’s
linking of natural and human phenomena: ‘Seasons (‘Jahreszeiten’),
times of the day (‘Tageszeiten’), lives, destinies are all, strangely enough,
thoroughlyrhythmical– metrical – follow a beat (‘tactm ̈aßig’)....Every-
thing we do with a certain skill – we do rhythmically without noticing it –
Rhythm is found everywhere – insinuates itself everywhere’ (Novalis
1978 : 401 ). The sense that rhythm is part of both the natural and
the human world is crucial in this context. The link between identity,
coherence, and pleasure which we explored in relation to Kant and
Schlegel, and which Hegel saw in the ‘return to self’, recurs here in a
manner that prefigures Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about
the precedence of our immediately meaningful active contacts with the
world before the ways in which they can be conceptualised.
In hisFragments from the Unpublished Works of a Young Physicist(pub-
lished 1810 ), much of which was written at the same time as Novalis’
texts, Novalis’ friend, the physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter, offers per-
haps the most hyperbolic version of such ideas about music. Even if his
main point cannot be defended, Ritter does show how the intelligibility
of languages is not something that languages themselves can explain:
The essence and work(ing) (‘Wirken’) of humankind is language. Music
is language as well,universallanguage; thefirstlanguage of humankind.
Existing languages are individualisations of music; not individualised
music, rather they relate to music as the individual organs relate to the
organic whole...Music disintegratedinto languages. For this reason every
language can still use music as its accompaniment...songis double lan-
guage, universal [i.e. music] and particular [i.e. verbal language] at the
same time. Here the particular word is raised to universal comprehensi-
bility.
(Ritter 1984 : 272 )The aspects common to music and verbal language implicit in Ritter’s
comments are the units of articulation (note and word), rhythm, and