music and romanticism 153to do with self-consciousness, which are important for his very particu-
lar conception of religion, to music. Schleiermacher says some of the
most insightful things about music to be found in modern philosophy
(see Scholtz 1997 for a detailed historical and philosophical account),
but he has often been regarded as merely offering some rather con-
fused remarks (see, e.g., Moos 1922 : 172 , who gives lots of space to
other theorists whose ideas are now merely of historical interest). This
perception of Schleiermacher is part of a general failure to grasp the
significance of his philosophical project, which is now proving to be
remarkably prescient with regard to contemporary philosophy (see my
introduction to Schleiermacher 1998 , and Bowie 1997 , 2003 a, 2005 ).
Schleiermacher’s conception of religion is based on the idea that we
are connected to a world which is intelligible to us in more ways than
can be expressed verbally. In his remarkably influential early rhapsodic
text,On Religion( 1799 ), Schleiermacher asserts:
the universe is uninterruptedly active and reveals itself to us at every
moment. Every form which it produces, every being to which it gives
a separate life in accordance with the fullness of life, every occurrence
which it pours out of its rich, ever-fruitful womb, is an action of the
universe on us; and in this way, to accept everything individual as a part of
the whole, everything limited as a presentation of the infinite, is religion.
(Schleiermachern.d.: 57 )The individual’s ability to respond to the universe in cognition and
action, which Fichte’s Idealism made the very ground of being’s intelli-
gibility, depends upon the prior ‘activity’ of the universe itself. Schleier-
macher is influenced by Schelling’s Spinoza-influenced idea of nature
as a ‘productivity’ which comes to ‘intuit’ itself both in its transient,
differentiated ‘products’ – specific natural objects and organisms – and
in our thinking about those products as objects of knowledge.
The kind of connection to the world with which Schleiermacher
begins is immediate, and this is the reason for Hegel’s objection to it.
Hegel is justified in opposing immediacy as the basis of cognition: what
we can claim to know depends on inferential relations between asser-
tions which can be publicly validated, there being no direct sensuous
guarantors of epistemic reliability. However, the Romantic concern with
immediacy, which makes Tugendhat so suspicious of the conception of
truth as linked to art, has to do with responses to our affective and
other relationships to the world which are not reducible to a theoret-
ical attempt to determine the nature of those responses. Wittgenstein