156 music, philosophy, and modernity
to an identity of thoughts with the objects of our thinking.^6 Schleier-
macher makes this idea the source of his claim that faith, not proof,
is the root of religion. Because we can never know what the ultimate
source of our ability to ask questions about our own activity is – such
knowledge would rely precisely on an objectification of the ground of
subjectivity – we are always inherently ‘dependent’. In consequence,
‘apart from in the sense that activity can only be originally attributed to
God the relationship of absolute dependence cannot be expressed at
all’ (Schleiermacher 1960 : 188 ), least of all in the terms of a philosoph-
ical argument. For those of us who cannot see the necessity of moving
from the idea that our activity is dependent on something which we do
not ourselves originate and which we cannot know in the way that we
can know things in the world, to faith in God, this claim might, though,
seem superfluous.
However, the decisive factor is how Schleiermacher’s core idea is
associated with something close to the conception of ‘feeling’ that we
encountered in the contrast between Novalis and Fichte in chapter 3.
The Romantic absolute is only accessible via the realisation of our intrin-
sic relativity: ‘if we are conscious of ourselves without further ado in our
finitude as absolutely dependent, then the same applies to everything
finite, and in this way we take up the whole world into the unity of our
self-consciousness’ (ibid.: 53 ). It is not that we thereforeknowabout
the totality of everything finite – we can only know finite particulars
in inferential terms – but we have a sense of the totality because of
our feeling that, although everything particular, including ourselves,
is finite and transient, the totality is not. Schleiermacher’s concern is,
then, with the ways in which we live in a world that is intelligible to
us, both as what we can know in scientific and practical terms, and
as what transcends knowledge but is essential to the possibility of that
knowledge. The latter kind of intelligibility is regarded in terms of our
individual ‘being in the world’ that is grounded in feeling. Because
this being cannot itself be objectified – each attempt to objectify it
requires a connection to other such attempts, which themselves cannot
be part of the objectification – we need means of coming to terms
with our being as subjects which are not reducible to what can be
asserted about those means. It is in this connection that music becomes
important.
6 Schleiermacher thinks the latter is a regulative idea, given the indefinite number of ways
in which we can speak of what there is.