form, feeling, metaphysics, and music 37‘Language never begins to form itself through science, but via gen-
eral communication/exchange (‘Verkehr’); science comes to this only
later, and only brings an expansion, not a new creation, in language’
(Schleiermacher 1942 : 511 ). The expansion of language in modern
science does increasingly colonise areas which formerly appeared inac-
cessible to science, including aspects of language and emotion them-
selves, and the scientistic assumption is that this process will eventually
result in the disappearance of scientific no-go areas. Schleiermacher’s
point, however, is that the prior, irreducibly normative dimension of
human existence is constituted in terms of the ability to understand
forms of exchange and communication without which the activity of
science itself could not even get underway. There can be no science of
this understanding which would not already invalidly rely upon what it
sought to establish. The normativity of everyday life therefore cannot be
subordinated to scientistic demands for objectivity. This is why societies
can justifiably oppose the incursion of science into areas where scien-
tific legitimacy would depend on an ability to explain understanding
and communication in scientific terms. I am thinking, for example, of
the incursion of managerial and other forms of technological control
into many aspects of education which rely on kinds of interaction and
communication that are damaged by such forms.
Acrucial element in the practice of real-world communication is
the affective dimension of interpersonal relations, which cannot be
rendered fully objective and which therefore relies on the assump-
tion of a potential community of feeling between participants. Without
this assumption the very existence of many kinds of music as a shared
social practice becomes hard to comprehend. The familiar difficulties
concerning objective understanding of emotions derive from the fact
that there is no public symbolic manifestation that can guarantee the
identity of emotions in different subjects. The development of hugely
diverse resources for attempting to overcome this lack is fundamen-
tal to human culture. One of the sources of the development of the
imaginative capacity required to bridge the gap between self and other
in this respect is aesthetic activity. This can convey affective expres-
sion in normatively assessable, concrete forms, which do not involve
the objectivity of rule-bound cognition. Aesthetic activity is, moreover,
largely immune to incorporation into scientific explanation. Even if
music were, for example, to be adequately proven to have emerged
from the desire to attract sexual partners – or whatever – this explains
little or nothing about what motivates the development of autonomous