music and romanticism 155What he means by the absolute feeling of dependence is notoriously
contentious. The core notion of ‘dependence’ in its absolute form is
the basis of religious ‘piety’. Dependence derives from the realisation,
both that we are not the ground and origin of our own activity, and
that the objective world is inherently transient, and so cannot offer
a firm foundation of cognitive or other certainty. Self-consciousness
is always located between dependence and freedom, never absolutely
being either: ‘our self-consciousness as consciousness of our being in
the world or of our being together with the world is a succession of
separate feelings of freedom and feelings of dependence’ (ibid.: 26 ).^4
Self-consciousness therefore combines moments in which our relation-
ships to things in the world and to ourselves are, in differing measures,
always partially receptive and partially spontaneous. Think, for instance,
of how the understanding of Wittgenstein’s musical theme or phrase is
both particular to the individual in question and yet is occasioned by
something in the external world.
The fact that we can move between degrees of receptivity and spon-
taneity must be grounded in something which is both beyond the differ-
ence between them and which must accompany all such moves. Oth-
erwise it is unclear how experience is intelligible at all, rather than
disintegrating into unrelated moments of receptivity and spontane-
ity. This ground of connection Schleiermacher terms ‘immediate self-
consciousness’, or ‘feeling’,^5 in order to differentiate it from the medi-
ated states of relative activity and passivity in which empirical conscious-
ness consists. Novalis argued that ‘feeling cannot feel itself’, because it
is not inferential: immediate self-consciousness is therefore not trans-
parent to itself. It is, though, the source of the realisation, both of our
essential connectedness to being, and of the transcendence of being in
general and of our own being in particular, over what we can know: ‘The
transcendent basis must now indeed be the same basis of the being which affects
us as of the being which is our own activity’(Schleiermacher 1942 : 275 ). We
‘carry the identity of thought and being in ourselves; we ourselves are
being and thinking, thinking being and existing thinking’ (ibid.: 270 ).
This means that there cannot be an external, cognitive perspective on
the relationship between the two. The ‘identity’ in question refers to
the inseparability of thought and being, not, as is sometimes claimed,
4 Heidegger read Schleiermacher when he studied theology, so it seems possible that he
derived the idea of ‘being in the world’ from Schleiermacher.
5 He sometimes does not use the terms synonymously, but for our purposes we need not
make a distinction between them.