160 music, philosophy, and modernity
is undoubted, but cannot be resolved into thoughts. This is the mystery
which undeniably lies in music’ (ibid.: 383 ).
Schleiermacher’s ensuing contentions about music might appear at
odds with many widely held conceptions in contemporary philosophy
because they would seem to take us back to all the problems of seeing
music in terms of subject–object relationships. The questions that lead
him to this position are, though, not based on the separation of sub-
jectivity from the world. This is very obvious when he asks: ‘How has
this direction towards free production in sound (‘To n’) been able to
expand itself to such an infinity above what is given in nature?’ (ibid.:
392 ), and contrasts the development of musical instruments as exten-
sions of the human voice with poetry’s lack of extensive development of
the material of language. Literary language, with a few exceptions, uses
the same words as are used in everyday intercourse. Even the musical
effects of poetic language are nowhere near as important as the contin-
ual extension of the possibilities of sound in music. The vital issue is the
connection between the ‘mobility of self-consciousness’ and ‘musical
productivity’ (ibid.: 393 ), which always already involves the material in
the objective world via which the mobility of self-consciousness becomes
communicable. Why otherwise would he lay so much emphasis on the
development of the objective means of expression in the history of
musical instruments?
The source of music’s importance is the same as for dance, ‘namely
the physiological basis of rhythm in the movements of life themselves.
The connection of artistic productivity with the movements of self-
consciousness which is so directly linked to the activity in the move-
ments of life is, accordingly, unmistakably the main factor in musi-
cal production’ (ibid.: 393 ).^7 Schleiermacher wants a conception in
which what is expressed in language, and what is expressed in mime,
dance, and music are related, but not reducible to each other: ‘just
as the infinity of combination of articulated sounds belongs to human
thought being able to appear in language, so the manifold of measured
(‘gemessen’) sounds represents the whole manifold of movements of self-
consciousness, to the extent that they are not ideas, but real states of
life’ (ibid.: 394 ). He also inserts a crucial qualification: ‘the direction
towards the infinite multiplicity of combinations of measured notes is
7 InAesthetic TheoryAdorno says: ‘The apparently purest forms, traditional musical ones,
date back, right into all idiomatic details, to contents like the dance’ (Adorno 1997 :
7 , 15 ).