154 music, philosophy, and modernity
says of music: ‘If a theme, a phrase, suddenly means something to you,
you don’t have to be able to explain it. Justthisgesture has been made
accessible to you’ (Wittgenstein 1981 : 27 ). Schleiermacher’s concep-
tion of music has a lot to do with the idea of a gesture being made
accessible to someone in this way.
Hamann’s peculiar version of ‘empiricism’ may have helped to set
in train a key idea which Schleiermacher develops in his theology and
in hisAesthetics.Inhis work from the 1760 s onwards Hamann claims
against rationalist conceptions that our essential belief in the reality of
things is not inferential: ‘beliefhappens as little in terms of reasons as
tastingandsmelling’ (Hamann 1949 – 57 : 2 , 74 ). Despite his admiration
for Locke, what he has in mind is not a sense-data empiricism, but rather
the idea that the world is always already revealed to us as intelligible, in
the manner we have seen in relation to rhythm, before it can be theo-
retically grasped. Hamann sometimes sees this in erotic terms: our most
significant relationships are those which make us feel engaged with a
world which can motivate and inspire us, cognitive relationships being
secondary to this engagement. Hegel’s objection to such a conception
is cogent in its own terms: the increasing rational determination of the
world must transcend the inherent particularity of immediate expe-
riences and desires. There are, though, as we saw, hints that Hegel
regarded the possibility that religious ‘substance’, of the kind Hamann
sees in delight at the world’s ever-renewed forms of intelligibility, might
also be located in music. In Schleiermacher the idea of immediacy is
explored in relation to a conception of self-consciousness which does
not, despite frequent claims to the contrary, lack the social dimension
present in Hegel’s account of self-recognition in otherness. Schleier-
macher’s detailed attention to the role of language and other forms of
intersubjective articulation already suggests why this must be the case.
The real significance of his approach lies in his focus on the dimension
of feeling, as a private, individual, and as a public, collective, cultural
phenomenon.
The difference between theChristian Faith, Schleiermacher’s account
of Protestant doctrine, and most of the theology which precedes it is
apparent in its startling claim that ‘the absolute feeling of dependence’,
in which our self-consciousness, as a ‘general element of life...repre-
sents the finitude of all being in general’, is what ‘replaces for the doc-
trine of faith all so-called proofs of the existence of God’ (Schleierma-
cher 1960 : 175 ). Schleiermacher radically separates philosophy, which
seeks proofs, and religion, which demands faith based on ‘feeling’.