(Email, University of North Carolina, Chapell Hill)
Hearing the Ineffable: Deciphering Novalis’ “Hieroglyphics” through Schopenhauer’s “Musical Metaphysics”
Although first coined in the second half of the 19th century by Richard Wagner, the idea of “absolute music” – a pure, instrumental music emancipated from language, which finally allowed one “[das] Unsagbare[] dennoch zu sagen” – began to develop some fifty years earlier with German Romantic writers such as Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, and Wilhelm Wackenroder. Each of these writers faced a type of linguistic crisis, in that they felt language was no longer capable of expressing the inner or “true” nature of reality, and turned instead to contemplating music as a possible solution to their general dilemma. However, in their somewhat counter-intuitive attempts to write about music, authors such as Novalis found themselves making a number of extremely enigmatic claims about the relationship between language, music, and reality, which scholars have been attempting to make sense of ever since.
This trend of turning to “absolute music” as a means of expressing the ineffable continued and found its next main proponent in the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer. This philosopher’s use of musical analogies to explain the way in which he believed the world is divided into “Will” and “Representation” echoes early German Romantic endeavors to find some sort of transcendental meaning to life by reflecting on music. Unfortunately, though, the few scholars who have explored the relationship between Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy and German Romanticism have simply postulated that the two are exceedingly different. For instance, Bryan Magee points out that “[t]he two central notions of Romanticism – the idealization of Nature, and the glorification of self-expression in life and art – are both of them diametrically opposite to Schopenhauer’s views.” I, on the other hand, would like to propose that a comparison between the use of musical analogies in both Novalis and Schopenhauer will show that, despite initial appearances, Schopenhauer and his “contemporaries” have much more in common than originally believed. In fact, I will argue that reading Novalis through the Schopenhauer’s pessimistic voice helps one decipher some of the more cryptic claims that the young Romantic made in his numerous fragments and short stories regarding language, nature, and the quest for absolute truth.
