158 music, philosophy, and modernity
is distinguished from mere bodily behaviour by the measurement of
movement present in rhythm. The material of rhythm is present in
human nature in the form of heartbeats and breathing, but these must
be ordered by choices in the artistic employment of rhythm that lead to
accent and metre. Such employment happens without the instrumen-
tal use of the activity for a specific social goal: art ‘only begins with the
moment... which is no longer just the unconscious and will-less result of
the inner movement, but in which free spontaneity must first intervene’
(ibid.: 369 ).
The interpretation of the account of music in theAestheticsdepends
on how one interprets immediate self-consciousness. The notion’s
philosophical importance lies in its role in understanding non-
conceptual ways of being in the world. Clearly this involves the contra-
diction of seeking to mediate something which is, precisely, immediate.
However, Schleiermacher’s point is that the immediate nature of affec-
tive ways of being, for example, can be conveyed by mediated, but non-
conceptual, means in art. Fundamental to Schleiermacher’s conception
is the ontological uniqueness of all individuals, whose ‘life consists in the
variation (‘Wechsel’) of the moments of immediate self-consciousness’
(ibid.: 124 ). This individual life is communicated externally ‘in a bound
manner in the pathematic movements which are the artless precursor
of certain arts’ (ibid.). ‘Pathematic movements’ are things like bodily
movements in reaction to effects of the world on the subject, which
can become the material of articulated rhythms and gestures in dance
or music if they are brought into the realm of intentional actions. The
moments of such self-consciousness consist in contacts between the sub-
ject and its world – what he terms ‘the being-posited of humankind in
the world as a whole’ (ibid.: 127 )–and they are made external by ‘the
significant movements of the voice and the system of the limbs’ (ibid.:
126 ).
Music is an ‘accompanying art’ because our ability to understand
even textless instrumental music is connected to other ways in which
we understand, such as our understanding of verbal language. How-
ever, even though the states of ‘moved self-consciousness’ expressible
by music can be expressed in other ways – for example by gestures in
a dance or words in a poem – they ‘cannot do without this expression
because it is put in a necessary connection with this state by nature’
(ibid.: 367 ). Schleiermacher is referring to the continuities (and differ-
ences) between differing forms of human expression as responses to
a world. The historical development of wordless instrumental music is