music and romanticism 163forms in which it is manifested did not function in some respects like
language and convey intersubjective content. This does not mean that
the same feeling is necessarily understood by all recipients of a piece
of music, but neither is it the case in language that the same assertion
necessarily conveys the same content to different people. Knowledge is
the product of reason, and art is the product of fantasy, but it is ‘Not
as if these are completely different powers; they are just the different
functions of the same capacity for discrimination, and they are only
relatively different’ (ibid.: 48 ).
One consequence of this approach is that it indicates how the cog-
nitive connects to other ways of being in the world, and so suggests why
music can make a contribution to our comprehension of the nature and
limits of purely cognitive activity. In hisEthicsSchleiermacher claims of
judgement: ‘Feeling and the principle of combination [i.e. judgement]
are One. For self-consciousness comes between each moment, because
otherwise the acts would be indistinguishable’ (ibid.: 71 ), and in an
added note he asserts ‘If one goes a step further then all action as com-
bination is grounded in feeling’ (ibid.: 73 ). The determinate elements
of judgement have to be separate if they are subsequently to be joined
in a judgement – H ̈olderlin surmised for this reason that the German
word ‘Urteil’ means ‘original separation’ (see Bowie 2003 a: ch. 3 )–
otherwise they merge into an undifferentiated identity. The different –
mediated – elements to be united also rely, though, on that which is the
same, which connects them, namely immediate self-consciousness.
This may seem to be just a logical point – identity and difference can-
not be made intelligible without each other – which offers no obvious
way of giving any content to the notion of immediate self-consciousness.
It is clear that the basis of judgement in our ability to connect – an ability
which, as we have seen, is linked to the question of rhythm – cannot itself
be characterised in the same terms as what it enables us to judge. Rorty
therefore objects to notions like this on the grounds that they involve
‘the pointless, because tautologous, claim that something we define as
being beyond our knowledge is, alas, beyond our knowledge’ (Rorty
1999 a: 58 ). However, this is precisely why Schleiermacher argues that
we articulate what is at issue here in other ways, which are not reducible
to the ways in which they can be known, but which are also not merely
indeterminate.
Schleiermacher maintains that it is not the immediacy of particular
moments of individual feeling that is essential for music, but rather
‘mood (‘Stimmung’), which arises from the cross-section of moments of