164 music, philosophy, and modernity
being-affected’ (Schleiermacher 1931 : 52 ). Mood – the German word is
connected to musical modes and to the idea of ‘attunement’ – is there-
fore a kind of synthesis which does not rely on what is being connected
being articulable in words. However, mood does require a sense of how
separate moments of feeling can coalesce into what can be articulated
in non-verbal form. This process involves both receptive openness to
the effects of the world and the kind of active synthesis required for
judgement. The synthesis here takes the form of differentiated artic-
ulations, such as music, that have more than individual significance,
even if their source is individual being in the world. This might seem
to be a conception which is really only appropriate to an individualis-
tic, ‘Romantic’ conception of the subject’s ‘self-expression’ in music.
However, Schleiermacher makes it clear that the degree to which ‘feel-
ing’ is individualised in music has to do with the historically available
forms of communication and expression in a culture, and these vary
in their ability to be adequate to individual existence. The point of the
conception is precisely to get away from fixed divisions between the
subjective and the objective: ‘Production is always something individ-
ual’, because there will always be differences, even in artistic activities
which involve the following of strict rules, but ‘The individual is...in
truth never separate from the universal’ (ibid.: 75 ), because the forms
which the individual employs are socially transmitted and are part of
an intersubjective world.
Schleiermacher’s conception is echoed in Martha Nussbaum’s that
music has to do with ‘our urgent need for and attachment to things out-
side ourselves that we do not control, in a tremendous variety of forms’
(Nussbaum 2001 : 272 ). The notion of immediate self-consciousness
seeks to convey how we are open to a world which necessarily affects
us at every moment but which does so in ways that are not all best
responded to in cognitive terms. This openness is never merely recep-
tive. Musical production requires a reflective distance from the immedi-
acy of being affected, and this enables a degree of freedom in response
to effects of the world which may otherwise elude articulation. Unlike
many philosophers who seek to give an account of music, Schleierma-
cher is able both to suggest how music achieves things which verbal
language cannot, and to characterise music’s relationship to language
in a manner which avoids a radical split between the two.
Schleiermacher’s approach is important for philosophical under-
standing of language because it points to dimensions required for the
functioning of language which are often ignored in the wake of the