Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language

SOMETHING HAPPENED. Whether or not one allows for discontinuities in the history of ideas, one could agree that something took place, something that would have to wait for posterity before its significance could begin to be sorted out, discussed, and assessed, and then only after it had been granted a form. The marvelous publication story of Diderot’s Neveu is pertinent: the author’s stubborn suppression, Goethe’s translation from a subsequently lost manuscript, the retrotranslation of the German for the first French edition in 1821, and so forth, until finally in 1890, more than a century after the author’s death, the discovery of the text, in Diderot’s own hand, by one Georges Monval, librarian of the Comédie Française, who purchased the manuscript from a bookstall along the Seine, long after the work’s effects had been felt.¹

To speak of the initial reception of Le neveu de Rameau is to speak of an echo, of a text removed from its origin and recorded across the Rhine by no less an engineer than Goethe, whose yielding prose enchanted generations of German readers and writers from Hegel to Freud.

In 1805 Diderot’s text came before the public as a work whose place in the burgeoning German literary canon had already been prepared. More a welcome expatriate than a humble migrant worker, Rameaus Neffe arrived in brilliant local dress. The fact that the original French was nowhere to be found simply added to the effect. For Foucault, regardless of the unusual publication history, it was only now, at the height of German romanticism, that Diderot’s dialogue and the event it registers could address a competent audience. Thus, posthumously disseminated from a nonlocalizable source, the text’s illustrious career began. “The eighteenth century was unable to understand [entendre] the full meaning of Le neveu de Rameau. And yet something happened, at the very time when the text was written, promising a decisive change.”² In Foucault’s view, the book could only work after the fact—nachträglich.

What, then, did happen, and why the essential untimeliness? Why did this event have to wait for the future to become manifest in a comprehensible form? Foucault’s reasoning seems clear. His History of Madness, which attempts to trace a broad reevaluation of insanity, makes a historical argument first by proposing an epoch of “the grand confinement,” where madness as unreason (déraison) had to be forcefully sequestered from rational society, and subsequently by announcing the “birth of the asylum,” where the mentally ill were reintroduced into society, albeit under the moral watch of the psychiatric doctor. The shift from a discourse of isolation to one of medical treatment—both of which are viewed by Foucault as mechanisms of oppression and subjugation—is marked by two crucial signposts: 1656, which witnessed the establishment of the first hôpital général to house about 1 percent of Paris’s population, and 1793, when Philippe Pinel, the mythic “liberator of the insane,” assumed the directorship of Bicêtre. What happened with Le neveu de Rameau, therefore, is that “for the first time since the Grand Confinement,” decades before the Revolution, that is, decades before unreason could reenter society as mental illness, “a madman once again became a social personage.”³ And yet, as Foucault asserts, the eighteenth century failed to understand or hear—entendre. Ears were not yet ripe. Instead a “great fear” of contagion was sparked, which threatened to attack the moral and cognitive security of the bourgeoisie. An adequate hearing would have to wait for another day, when madness would no longer be perceived as fatal but rather as a vital component of human experience, say in the fantastic visions of the German romantics or in the supple dialectic of German idealism.

Despite Foucault’s cautious disavowals, the teleology implicit in his History is evident. It is not fortuitous that one of the first and most influential appropriations of Le neveu is found in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807), which assigns the mad musician an absolutely central role in the analysis of Enlightenment culture. Moi’s incomprehension and uncertainty (“I didn’t know whether to stay or run away” [NR 76/96]) is replaced by the idealist’s recognition of Spirit’s manifestation in the form of a “higher consciousness” (PG 389/319). The Foucauldian threshold has been crossed. The dialogue cedes to the dialectic, in Jena rather than Paris, in the nineteenth rather than the eighteenth century.

Before looking further at the way Hegel responded to Diderot, it is prudent to pause a moment and reflect on the general nature of such philosophical appropriation. The tradition of rendering madness discursive—intelligent, informative—is long and prestigious. At least since Plato, the evanescent voice of madness has been made to yield to philosophy’s sustained eloquence. In the Phaedrus, the voice falls to Socrates, specifically in his second speech, his “palinode,” which he spouts forth “madly” (manikôs [265a]), sparked by the fulguration of his daimonion (242c). The myth of the charioteer therefore motivates the remainder of the dialogue. What is proclaimed in mad inspiration requires interrogation and careful unfolding: the birth of philosophy. Similarly, the four species of divine madness (theia mania) that Socrates lists in his enthusiasm are all defined by and confined to a teleology. Each is revealed to have a purpose (telos) that constitutes its realization: prophetic madness results in benefits for the state; ritual madness cures disease; poetic madness glorifies; and erotic madness leads directly to the philosophical project itself (244c–245b). Upon “listening” (êkousamen) to the divinely inspired words, Socrates sets out on the philosophical pursuit of truth (278c). This subsequent appraisal of the mad moment therefore cannot itself be mad. Accordingly, in reference to the role of madness in the Phaedrus, Silke-Maria Weineck writes: “The accountable nature of madly engendered meaning generates the necessity of a critical paraphrase that must not be mad itself…. The very privilege of mad speech disinherits the mad speaker of his product. The speaker can never claim mad speech as his own while he is mad.”⁴

In many respects, this structural motif rehearses the oracular practices at Delphi, where the entranced Pythia Melissa spewed forth in obscure glossolalia what was subsequently deciphered by the officiating priests in relatively lucid hexametric form. But Socrates had his doubts about the poetic industry. As for Foucault, he repeatedly suggests that a process of integration takes place in the case of Rameau’s nephew, whose “existence” indicated rationalism’s “reversal, which could only be understood or heard [entendu] in the age of Hölderlin and Hegel.”⁵ The implication is that to give Diderot’s mad musician a hearing, one must deal with the great echo chamber of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, whose pages resound with nephew’s voice.

A survey of French literature from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries seems to corroborate Foucault’s assertion on the eventlike quality of Le neveu de Rameau. It demonstrates that Diderot’s portrayal of a musically gifted madman is quite unique for the period. Foucault, who does not entertain the possible links between the nephew’s insanity and his musicality, would have done well, then, to secure a place for music as well within his “grand confinement.” Although music certainly did not suffer from the same kind of societal isolation, and although theoreticians and philosophers of the time regularly treated musical topics, there is nonetheless remarkably little representation of musicians or musical experience in works of literature. It is as if literary artists had plugged their ears to music. The preponderance of Orphic themes in the poetry of the Pléiade failed to find resonance in the later period. In fact, one can now detect a decided antagonism on the part of literature against the musical arts. Writers of the Golden Age and beyond regularly protested against their treatment by composers. Boileau, whose libretto had been insultingly rejected by Lully, famously retorted: “Music does not know how to tell a story” (“La musique ne saurait narrer”).⁶ Voltaire, who equally suffered from the impossible demands of Jean-Philippe Rameau, complained to Charles Hénault that the renowned composer was simply “mad” (fou).⁷

The anger heard in these assessments is connected to the conventional belief espoused by men of letters, namely, that music should be subservient to words, for words alone could make tragédie lyrique meaningful. In the opinion of the rationally minded, music should remain the handmaiden of poetry. As a consequence, purely instrumental music troubled writers all the more for its apparently complete abandonment of sense. In his Spectacle de la Nature (1746), the abbé Pluche regards music without words as merely pleasurable. In a judgment that recalls Athena’s suspicions concerning the aulos, Pluche finds that instrumental music “amuses the ear without presenting any thought to the mind.” Its sounds are entirely “devoid of meaning” (“destitués de sens”) and thereby neglect to fulfill art’s primary function, which is to convey moral principles in an intellectually comprehensible fashion.⁸ To introduce this potentially meaningless, idle, immoral art in a work of literature and moreover to treat it somewhat positively with a protagonist no less insane, no less unproductive or immoral, would be for the majority of eighteenth-century authors unthinkable in every sense of the word.

Diderot’s figure of the mad musician does appear to address this unthought, providing a place for this banished, doubly fearful topos. And certainly the later age to which Foucault refers was in a far more favorable position to entertain the nephew’s madness as something worthy of thought, if not wholly commendatory.

The ground for Hegel’s reception of the text was prepared not only by Goethe’s translation but also by the earlier flourishing of Empfindsamkeit, the Sturm und Drang and early romanticism in German literature. Here madmen thrive, for example, in Christian Spiess’s Biographien der Wahnsinnigen (1795–96), Tieck’s Der blonde Eckbert (1797), or Jean Paul’s Titan (1803). Nor is there a lack of musically inclined outsiders. In Adolf Knigge’s Die Reise nach Braunschweig (1792), we meet an itinerant flute virtuoso, a Vertumnal type who travels under various pseudonyms and in diverse dress. Like Diderot’s nephew, his nearly demonic power poses a serious threat to moral society, enchanting music lovers and seducing man-crazed (manntollen) women, whom he proceeds to rob and abandon.⁹ Concerned less with the moral sphere and more with the dark recesses of melancholy, the Nachtwachten des Bonaventura, published anonymously in 1803, features a horn-wielding, mildly deranged protagonist, who begins his rounds when the world of reason goes to sleep. The watchman is obsessed with music, which he sees explicitly as an antidote to poetic aspirations: an “antipoeticum.” He consigns the night to troubled souls and mad auditory hallucinations, for example, the mysterious song that only those about to die can hear: “the first sweet sound from the distant beyond.”¹⁰

Literature of course was not the only home for mental disturbances. The year 1805—the very year in which Goethe’s Neveu translation appeared—saw the opening of the Psychische Heilanstalt für Geisteskranke in Bayreuth, the first asylum to be established in the German states—a liberal-minded institution, clearly designed according to the standards set by Pinel. Outside the medical profession, philosophy, too, now appeared ready to converse with insanity. Kant had already recognized the necessity of including an analysis of mental derangement in order to fill out his study of mankind: “Anthropology requires at least an attempt at a general outline of this most profound degradation of humanity which seems to originate from Nature.”¹¹ Madness (“amentia”), insanity (“dementia”), and delirium (“insania”) may substitute common standards of meaning—a “sensus communis” for a “sensus privatus”—but this peculiarity was nevertheless still meaningful; it still made sense.¹² Kant, however, still agreed with earlier opinions that deemed madness incurable. For him, any cure would require the use of subjective understanding, which is precisely what the madman lacks. By Hegel’s day, this estimation was beginning to be reevaluated. Most significantly, madness came to be perceived as something emphatically curable.¹³ The popularity of visiting the mentally ill—the fashionable Irrenhausbesuch—signaled the general willingness within society to accept the once-banished other back into its domain.¹⁴ Again, this freshly welcome neighbor often betrayed a musical disposition. “Der Besuch im Irrenhause” (1804), by Friedrich Rochlitz, editor of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, not only reflects the trend of clinic visits but also codes mad experience as a distinctly musical phenomenon.¹⁵

How did madness emerge from invisibility? And why the decided preponderance in German culture? In his 1963 study on the “eccentric” (Sonderling), Herman Meyer attributed the sudden surfacing of such figures in late-eighteenth-century German literature to a new emphasis on human subjectivity that pitted the individual against objective reality and society at large.¹⁶ Theodore Ziolkowski develops this thesis to include a general disenchantment with Enlightenment ideals and rationalism’s promises. The fascination with the mad should be associated not only with a new focus on the inner life of human subjectivity but also with the program of transcendent idealism, which sought to resolve the conflicts inherited from the century before between empirical and rationalist methods. What is particularly German about this phenomenon, Ziolkowski argues, is the German states’ failure to be established on the world-political scene.¹⁷ To be sure, however, the German enthrallment with interiority and with irrational themes goes even further back, well before the Napoleonic invasions and Fichte’s positing of the absolute I. Although the immediate political, philosophical, and institutional changes undoubtedly had a crucial impact on influencing new attitudes toward psychological states, much of the groundwork had already been laid in the century preceding. On this point, what I would like to suggest is that the predisposition around 1800 described by Ziolkowski was in fact anticipated by shifting notions on the nature of musical composition and appreciation.

The allure of subjective interiority and a concomitant interest in nonrational experience run parallel to the cultivation of new conceptions of music, particularly among German composers and theorists, as an art of “sentimentality” (Empfindsamkeit). Throughout the eighteenth century, ideas of sentiment were formulated either in complementary relation or in emphatic opposition to conventions of rationality. Whereas neoclassicism generally insisted on the subordination of heart to head, later developments began to contend sensibility’s superiority to sense and thereby entailed a reassessment of verbal language. In the burgeoning field of aesthetics as well as in the emergent genre of the novel, the claims of cognitive understanding began to be challenged. The new emphasis on feeling invariably limited the capacity of language to address the fullness of human experience. Against the transparent and therefore reductive properties of words, theorists pointed to the opacity of individual sentiment, whose communication relied on something beyond semantics and syntax, on something more mysterious, like the dark processes of intersubjective sympathy.

As early as 1715, in his Traité du beau, Jean-Pierre Crousaz claimed: “One’s ideas are easily expressed, but it is very difficult to describe one’s sentiments; it is impossible, even, through language, to give an exact understanding of them to those who have not had similar experiences.”¹⁸ The antiverbalism of Crousaz’s statement, which was subsequently rehearsed in the work of Charles Batteux and the abbé Dubos, would be exploited later in the century by German theoreticians claiming the preeminence of music for expressing the subtle distinctions of human feeling. British empiricism also made significant contributions. In Das forschende Orchestre (1721), Johann Mattheson anticipated the full blossoming of Empfindsamkeit by elaborating on the work of John Locke and others, basing his musicology on the dictum that “sentiment [Empfindung] is the source of all ideas.”¹⁹ By the middle of the century, the prominent Berlin journals of Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg—Der critische Musicus an der Spree (1749–50) and the Historisch-kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik (1754–78)—worked further to transmit French aesthetic and British empiricist thought to German intellectuals concerned specifically with musical topics. For example, an associate of Marpurg, Johann Adam Hiller, in his weekly Nachricthen (1770), persistently argued against neoclassical concerns over music’s presumed cognitive muddle: “Without being restricted by words, [the composer] can choose feelings [Empfindungen] which could be classified under one or the other passions, or even which seem to belong to more than one. And even assuming that one did not know how to classify this or that feeling of a composer, these feelings nevertheless originate in the human soul and its feelings…. Often many things can be expressed, which we do not know how to label with names.”²⁰

Descartes’s fear that the excessive onslaught of conflicting passions can “eradicate or pervert the use of reason” had been transformed into something desirable and commendable.²¹ The shift, it should be noted, was far from a clean break. Most aestheticians regarded Empfindsamkeit as a moderating force that balanced the excesses of rationality and brute sensuality. Thus Johann Georg Sulzer advocates sentimentality’s place in the arts, while warning against its immoderate use, which would make feeling something “shameful … effeminate, weak, and unmanly.”²² At any rate, Diderot’s nephew, who demands “exclamations, interjections, suspensions, interruptions, affirmations, [and] negations” (NR 87/105), could now find a response not only in German aesthetic theory but also in the sentimental, impassioned style of C. P. E. Bach’s volatile fantasias.

Empfindsamkeit was based on a reworked understanding of the body that had far-reaching epistemological implications. In the earlier paradigm, the res cogitans of Cartesianism had been essentially incorporeal, a being transcendent to the body, which itself was relegated to the objective (that is, nonsubjective) sphere of res extensae. Now, by rendering the body biological or organic, as opposed to a lifeless, soulless thing in extension, the vital materialists of the eighteenth century, Diderot among them, collapsed the rationalist dualism that grounded meaning in the mind over and against the physical and the physiological. They thereby introduced a way to conceive of music not in deficient terms—say, as an art that could not think for itself or that needed the guiding intelligence of words—but rather in terms of corporeal, physical expression.²³ As a language of feeling, dependent more on sympathetic resonance than on cognitive understanding, music had already bypassed the confining dictates of reason.

The theoretical statements of Johann Gottfried Herder concerning music, however brief, played a pivotal role in the development of musical Empfindsamkeit. In one sense, he rehearsed the general ideas inherited from the French and English traditions, while, in another, he pointed toward a conception of musical experience that moved beyond the by-now-popular notion of music as a language of feeling.²⁴ In Kalligone (1800), his “metacritique” of Kant’s critical philosophy, he takes issue with Kant’s judgment that music is but a “beautiful play” (“schönes Spiel”) of feelings and instead posits its source in “our inmost being.” Musical experience has little to do with rational agency; rather, our very nerve fibers constitute a clavichord of sorts, which vibrate in “involuntary reaction,” allowing the body itself to express itself spontaneously, automatically, without recourse to the dualistic structures of rationalism.²⁵ Diderot had already suggested as much in the letter to Mademoiselle de la Chaux that he appended to the Lettre sur les sourds: “In music, the pleasure of the senses depends on its particular effect [disposition], not only on the ear, but on the entire nervous system. If there are heads that resound [“têtes sonnantes”], there are also bodies, which I would like to call harmonic.”²⁶

Similarly, for Herder, all musical sound is the result of striking the exterior of bodies, which makes their interior perceivable. Music is simply a reverberation, a resounding from within, an echo responding to impulses from without.²⁷ As the next chapter discusses, Herder argues strongly against Kant, who had asserted that musical pleasure lies merely in the enjoyment of mathematical proportions. Instead, Herder’s empiricism ascribes musical pleasure to basic corporeal responses, which are essentially involuntary and noncognitive. Music is therefore meaningless in the strict sense, eluding human understanding, yet still significant inasmuch as it affects mankind’s relation to the world. What is expressed here belongs to the German fascination with nonrational dimensions of human experience, of which madness was but an extreme case. Notably, this enthrallment was greatly nourished by the nonrational workings of musical production.

Goethe’s early work—so marked by Herder’s influence—provides many signs of changing attitudes to irrationality. Moreover, it reflects an appreciation for new theoretical views of music’s meaning and effects. Already in his first novella, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), there are even hints of madness’s proximity to musical experience, especially in the protagonist’s fervid, if not delirious passion for folk song and Ossianic abandon. In the novella’s first part, in the description of the famous dance scene, music is explicitly said to have “opened” the guests’ “senses to feelings,” to have made them “more susceptible to impressions.”²⁸ It is this particularly vulnerable, musically induced state that will continue to mark the sentimental hero’s mad, impossible love, which eventually drives him to take his own life.

The novella, however, also links music to madness as a possible cure. Exactly one month after the dance, the sentimental Werther describes the salutary effects that music has on his soul:

[Lotte] is sacred to me. All passion [Begier] is silenced in her presence. I never know how I feel when I am near her; it is as if my soul turns about in every nerve.—She has a melody that she plays on the piano with the force of an angel, so simple and so spiritual [geistvoll]! It is her favorite song; she only has to strike the first note and all pain, confusion and caprice [“Pein, Verwirrung und Grillen”] are cast from me. I believe every word about the ancient magical power [“der alten Zauberkraft”] of music. How her simple song affects me! And she knows how to apply it, often when I would like to shoot a bullet to my head! Then, the confusion and gloominess [“Irrung und Finsternis”] of my soul disperses, and I breathe freely again.²⁹

The scene is reminiscent of the legendary powers of David’s harp, which alone could rid King Saul of the evil spirit of melancholy that tormented him (1 Samuel 16:14–22). Goethe would continue to employ the motif of the curative force of music throughout his career, from the “Heavenly tones” of Faust’s “Night” to the late Novelle (1828), where it is the child’s flute playing and song that calm the ferocious lion.³⁰ For the author who studied piano and then cello as a young man and whose mother and father both excelled on musical instruments, the beneficial properties of music were always colored by a certain nostalgia, by a longing for a simpler, more natural existence.³¹ It is precisely music’s blissfulness, however, that can render the contrast with the present world all the harsher. In Werther, toward the year’s end, Lotte’s piano playing brings the doomed young man to uncontrollable tears and inconsolable despair. He shouts for her to stop and is asked to leave (December 4). A possible cure for madness, music can always become its possible cause.

I do not consider it fortuitous, therefore, that the principal representatives of mental disturbance and irrationality in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96)—the harpist and the child Mignon—both display a peculiarly strong relation to music, be it a source of natural, excessive feeling, a remedy for psychic torment, or an expression of a solitary, incomprehensible life. The “mournful strains” of the harpist, sung directly after the disastrous fire in book 5, strike Wilhelm as “the consolations of someone who feels he is near to madness [“der sich dem Wahnsinne ganz nahe fühlt”].” The final stanza, the only one that Wilhelm is able to recall, is paradigmatic of a new consideration of derangement:

An die Türen will ich schleichen,

Still und sittsam will ich stehn,

Fromme Hand wird Nahrung reichen,

Und ich werde weiter gehn.

Jeder wird sich glücklich scheinen,

Wenn mein Bild vor ihm erscheint,

Eine Träne wird er weinen,

Und ich weiß nicht was er weint.

(Let me linger by the gate

Unobtrusive, silently,

Pious hand will give me food,

I move on to other doors.

Every one will show delight

Just to see my face out there,

Down their cheeks a tear will fall,

Why they weep, I do not know.)³²

The verses exhibit the solitude, sympathy, and self-opacity haunting romantic perceptions of madness straight through the later tradition, which would be powerfully drawn to these lines, from Schubert and Schumann to Hugo Wolf.³³ It is important to note that the first edition of Wilhelm Meister included printed melodies for the lyrics, prepared by the Kapellmeister Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Goethe’s close friend. This composer would play host to a new generation of poets and philosophers at Giebichenstein, his luxuriant estate outside Halle. Here Goethe and Schiller, the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Tieck, Jean Paul, and others were treated to musical soirées featuring Reichardt’s latest Vertonungen of the most recent poetry.³⁴

Among the ranks of frequent visitors was the celebrated Johann Christian Reil, who since 1789 worked as Halle’s chief physician (and had the opportunity to treat Goethe himself on more than one occasion). Reil specialized in a field that would eventually be called “Psychiatrie,” a term he himself coined in 1808.³⁵ Reil’s Rhapsodieen über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrüttungen (Rhapsodies on the application of psychiatric cure methods for the mentally disturbed, 1803) exerted an immediate influence not only in the medical community but also in literary circles, thanks both to its richly evocative, metaphorical style and to Reil’s association with Reichardt’s romantic haven at Giebichenstein. Aside from the blatant aspirations to high poetic style, Reil’s book is noteworthy in pleading for the humane treatment of the insane. A man of feeling in every sense, Reil did more to eradicate the demonization of the mad than any other before him. With Rousseau, but without his vehemence, he faulted the progress of civilization for the increasing numbers filling the asylums.³⁶ Indeed, Reil reformulated most species of insanity as symptoms of societal alienation. Above all, it was the pronounced musicality of this rhapsodic psychiatrist that directed, throughout romanticism, a synthesis of philosophy and poetry, a blending of physiology and aesthetics, that strove to reveal the continuum between normalcy and mental abnormality.

The new receptiveness to psychological disturbances, instigated by notions of sentimentality and corroborated by institutional, philosophical, and scientific reforms, prepared Hegel to recognize in Rameaus Neffe that the “derangement [Verrücktheit] of the musician” is a sign of modern man’s necessary self-alienation (PG 387/317). In the Phenomenology of the Spirit, the nephew provides the best illustration that culture (Bildung) is a realm of self-estrangement. For Hegel, Diderot’s fool is a figure that stands both within and outside the Enlightenment, someone who exhibits its inherent contradictions while being able to recognize them as such. The problems that the nephew’s characterization therefore exposes become crucial moments in the Phenomenology’s grand narrative, devoted to Spirit’s relentless striving toward self-consciousness.

From a broader perspective, one might surmise that Diderot’s text merely constitutes but another literary instance of a philosophical analysis, just as Sophocles’ Antigone belongs to “The Ethical Life” (Sittlichkeit) of Antiquity and the narration of the “Beautiful Soul” in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre to the world of “Morality” in the sections preceding and following. Diderot’s Neveu, however, should not be regarded simply as one of a series of literary exempla. Presented as an embodiment of “tornness” (Zerrissenheit), Diderot’s persona inæqualis serves a more fundamental function, representing the deep divisions that foretell every move to higher forms of consciousness.

In the second section of Phenomenology’s sixth chapter, Hegel leaves the harmonious, natural realm of ancient Greek civilization and moves to the modern world of culture, where consciousness is regarded as essentially disharmonious. The happy balance that the polis enjoyed—between divine and human law, the family and the state, the feminine and the masculine—is now disrupted by a Spirit (Geist) that tears apart and breaks down everything that is stable in society. This Spirit of Culture is the “tornness” itself, the Zerrissenheit, that reveals the life of culture as one of perversion and inversion. The basic cause for this general breakdown is the contradiction between what could be called a natural state and an actual one, between the naturally given and its nonnatural actualization. Hence the word for culture—“Bildung”—seems to lose all connotations of natural development, common among most romantic writers. Instead, it functions in stark opposition to everything that may be taken as nature. Culture is the realm wherein nature—be it brute sensory data or the immediate feelings (Empfindungen) ascribed to a personal subject—is worked on and altered. The implication is that the natural is always deficient and requires a cultural transformation. In brief, understood specifically as an actualization, Bildung enacts a double articulation, converting the evanescence of the natural and offering it to the universality and constancy of the actual.

Above all, it is the subjective self that undergoes the greatest metamorphosis. Hegel writes: “It is … through culture that the individual acquires standing and actuality [Wirklichkeit]. His true original nature and substance is the alienation [Entfremdung] of himself as Spirit from his natural being. This externalization is, therefore, both the purpose and the existence of the individual” (PG 364/298; emphasis in original). The “actuality,” or Wirklichkeit, that marks this process of alienation shows the “work” (Werk) involved. The operation of Bildung is therefore a process of self-formation: “is individuality forms itself [bildet sich] into what it intrinsically is, and only by so doing is it an intrinsic being [an sich] that has an actual existence [wirkliches Dasein]” (ibid.; emphasis in original). Just as the happy world of the Greek polis had to yield to the dissonant unhappiness of modernity, so the self in some natural state must cede to the cultural processes by which it becomes actual. Hence Hegel’s decisive conclusion: “Although here the self knows itself as this self, yet its actuality consists solely in the setting-aside of its natural self” (ibid.; emphasis in original). Culture, then, is the realm of Zerrissenheit, insofar as it hosts a shape of consciousness that is what it is only by way of self-alienation. In the world of Bildung, “nothing has a spirit that is grounded within itself and indwells it, but each has its being in something outside of and alien to it” (PG 361/295). Modern consciousness is what it actually is by not being what it naturally is. Consequently, where the realm of nature was happy, the world of culture is basically one of despair.

But what precisely was this happiness, and why the need for discontent? Already in the introduction to the Phenomenology, in a light allusion to Plato’s allegory of the cave, Hegel warned that the path of philosophy is an arduous one: “Whatever is confined within the limits of a natural life [“Was auf ein natürliches Leben beschränkt ist”] cannot by its own efforts go beyond its immediate existence; but is driven beyond it by something else, and this uprooting [Hinausgerissenwerden] entails its death. Consciousness, however, is explicitly the Notion [Begriff] itself. Hence it is immediately something that goes beyond limits [“das Hinausgehen über das Beschränkte”], and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself…. Thus consciousness suffers the violence [Gewalt] at its own hands” (PG 74/51). In Hegel’s grand dialectical scheme, the violent power, or Gewalt, of consciousness is the force that will allow Spirit to break from its prereflective state in nature. It loosens the bonds to contingent and evanescent existence and lets Spirit continue on its path toward the Idea, which relinquishes particularity for universality. In this sense, the second part of the Phenomenology rehearses the opening of the first, which refutes empiricist claims that posit what is perceptually given as the proper basis for knowledge. The brief experiments that Hegel conducts in his chapter “Sense-Certainty” serve as grounding examples for this argument. The realm of Bildung is the hard, historical lesson that permits philosophy to ground truth truthfully. For this reason, Hegel describes the world of culture by employing a historical narrative that passes from the European absolutist state, through the Enlightenment, to the French Revolution. Rather than retrace the complicated steps and reversals that make up Hegel’s account of culture, it is sufficient to recognize that, throughout, the epoch is defined as a period where the self’s “actuality” (Wirklichkeit) is achieved at the expense of its “natural self.” The opacity of the soul’s particularity—like every phenomenon of the “Now”—is due to its evanescence: its immediacy “immediately passes away” into a phenomenon for others. It is transformed into something knowable, which by definition stands opposed to that which is already gone. In other words, the self’s reality can only be had through the externalization that establishes subjectivity as split. Diderot’s nephew emerges as a philosophical hero insofar as his musical madness—“the derangement of the musician”—announces this fundamental split, which the narrating man of Enlightenment (Moi) failed to grasp and which the idealist of Jena could now enlist in Spirit’s service.

Hegel characterizes the nephew and the philosophe as representatives of an “ignoble” and a “noble” consciousness, respectively. In the simplest terms, the noble consciousness regards its individual will as congruent with the will of the state, while the ignoble considers state power as an oppressive, antagonistic force. Where the ignoble consciousness is always on “the point of revolt,” the honest man of the Enlightenment remains complacent. Ultimately, however, this noble consciousness is compelled to realize that the state power that he had thought to be “good” is in fact “bad,” especially as the monarch devolves into a self-serving despot. One by one, all the fixed values that stabilized the life of the noble consciousness fall apart in contradiction. The “good” becomes the “bad,” the “bad” becomes the “good”—every evaluation suffers an inversion. “It is this absolute and universal inversion [Verkehrung] and alienation of the actual world [Wirklichkeit] and of thought: it is pure culture [reine Bildung]. What is learnt in this world is that neither the actuality of power and wealth [“die wirklichen Wesen der Macht und des Reichtums”], nor their specific Notions, ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ or the consciousness of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (the noble and ignoble consciousness), possess truth; on the contrary, all these moments become inverted, one changing into the other, and each is the opposite of itself” (PG 385/315; emphasis in original). The universal inversion is of course a necessary consequence in the world of culture, where, as I have already mentioned, the self is itself only by being what it is not. Of the two types of consciousness, however, it is the “disrupted” mind of the ignoble and mad musician that is able to cope with culture’s inherent contradictions. As for the noble consciousness, it finds it more and more difficult to deal with the perpetual breakdown of its rigid distinctions between the “good” and the “bad.” In the end, the philosophe has nothing left to say. For this reason, Hegel grants victory to the nephew, because he (Lui) recognizes the truth that Moi ignores.

The Zerrissenheit that the base consciousness reveals not only portrays everything in culture as a source of unhappiness but also frustrates the simplicity of writing in the first person:

The “I” is this particular “I”—but equally the universal “I”; its manifesting [Erscheinen] is also at once the externalization and vanishing of this particular “I”, and as a result the “I” remains in its universality. The “I” that utters itself is heard or perceived [vernommen]; it is an infection [Ansteckung] in which it has immediately passed into unity with those for whom it is a real existence, and is a universal self-consciousness. That it is perceived or heard means that its real existence dies away [verhallt]; that its otherness has been taken back into itself; and its real existence is just this: that as a self-conscious Now, as a real existence, it is not a real existence, and through this vanishing it is a real existence. This vanishing is thus itself at once its abiding; it is its own knowing of itself, and its knowing itself as a self that has passed over into another self that has been perceived and is universal.

(PG 376/308–9; EMPHASIS IN ORIGINAL)

Even though they are ignorant of the fact, Diderot’s narrator (Moi), no less than the monarchy (“L’état c’est moi”), enjoys “real existence” only insofar as his “real existence” has vanished. His externalization through language—his textualization—permits existence to be realized, but only as something “perceived” or “heard” [vernommen], that is, as something whose ground is “outside of it.”³⁷ In writing “I,” I must suffer a self-disavowal. The autobiographical gesture, writing the word “I,” is a move into self-exile or even self-extinction. The pure feeling self cannot be represented, cannot be perceived or heard without losing itself. Under different circumstances and facing different revolutions, Rimbaud will formulate the same notion by unworking grammar itself: “JE est un autre” (“I is an other”).

In a larger sense, the Vertumnal nephew embodies the dialectic itself, a figuration of the awareness of the mutual implication and contamination of all opposing pairs. The perverting force of the madman’s behavior overrides and blurs all rational distinctions. Therefore, for Hegel, the nephew “has the last laugh” on the narrating Moi, whose “noble,” “honest consciousness” consists precisely in establishing strict but fragile borders between opposites, for example, between the good and the bad, the self and the nonself. The nephew’s concreteness corrects the abstractness of the moral perspective; his maddening aesthetic dismantles the clear but lifeless distinctions posited by the moralist.³⁸ These distinctions are unworked by the idle nephew, whose remarkably vigorous désœuvrement exposes the vacuity of everything, both abstract representations and singular expressions. The “Sense-Certainty” chapter already demonstrated that language—which is “self-consciousness existing for others”—is more truthful than subjective intention: “In language, we ourselves directly refute what we mean to say” (PG 91/60). Private “meaning” (meinen) is to be distinguished from public “saying” (sagen). The “work [Werk] of thought,” reveals that personal intention (meine Absicht) or opinion (Meinung) fails to rise to the universality of truth, to the Allgemeine. Faced with the truth of Lui, the meaning of Moi’s words truly has nothing to say. This is the crucial point. Hegel’s nephew is not the spontaneous, frenzied, “subjectless” voice of immediacy but rather the very incarnation of mediation and tornness that is culture. In the Phenomenology he is not a Marsyas awaiting inversion and vivisection but rather the inverter himself, somewhat akin to Socrates, who always drove the noble Alcibiades mad.

Hegel’s overall program may indeed find its primary illustration in Diderot’s Neveu, but not without some degree of interpretive violence. Altogether, the Phenomenology’s sixth chapter features three separate quotations from the dialogue. Each is highly decontextualized, given without attribution and tightly rewoven into the fabric of Hegel’s argument.

The first citation is summoned to clarify the deficiency of “natural individuality,” defined as a merely “assumed existence” (“ein gemeintes Dasein”), which must be posited back to an origin that literally never took place (PG 364/298). “Natural being” is a “kind of existence” (emphasis in original), an “espèce,” whose confirmation rests on false pretenses. To explain, Hegel utilizes the nephew’s own definition of the term “espèce” as “the most horrid of nicknames; for it denotes mediocrity and expresses the highest degree of contempt” (ibid.). Here Hegel betrays his strong, eminently philosophical method of reading. In returning to the context of the remark in Diderot’s text, we find that the nephew is not discussing “natural being” as an “espèce.” On the contrary, he applies the term to what Hegel would call mediated, “actual existence.” The nephew is explaining the futility of trying to educate his son. How can one form a child into something that contradicts his innate tendencies? “Education being continually at cross purposes with the natural bent of the molecule, he would be torn between two opposing forces and walk all crooked down life’s road like a lot of them who are equally inept at good or evil and whom we call ‘types’ [espèces], the most frightening of all epithets because it indicates mediocrity and the last stages of the contemptible” (NR 90/108). In this passage, the nephew portrays the feeling soul not as an “assumed existence” but rather as an original nature that must be defended from the pull into Hegel’s substantial self. The nephew is arguing that any attempt to correct one’s natural disposition is useless at best and breeds dullness at worst.

In direct contradiction to the nephew’s exegesis, then, Hegel claims that education or Bildung does not produce a mediocre “kind of existence” but rather allows the individual to become substantial or actual or real. For the philosopher, it is the “assumed existence” of something called “natural individuality” that is the mediocre type, a “kind of existence” to be disparaged. Although the nephew clearly calls the acculturated person a “type,” Hegel’s own philosophical program compels him to understand the nephew’s words as describing the natural, that is, uncultured sort. That is because for Hegel the nephew represents a higher consciousness, which must recognize the natural self as something inferior. This first citation is programmatic, insofar as it reveals the strategy that the philosopher will use throughout, employing Diderot’s words in a way that transcends, and even may contradict, the character’s intention.³⁹

The second quotation is more readily attributed to Diderot’s text, even though the author’s name is nowhere cited. This is where Hegel explains that the Spirit of Culture, manifested in the ignoble consciousness, is alone capable of recognizing the inversions and perversions of every notion maintained by the noble or simple consciousness of the Enlightenment. For the latter, the garrulity of the former is simply “the derangement of the musician.” In a direct quotation from Goethe’s translation, Hegel presents the unequal rambler as the one “who heaped up and mixed together thirty arias, Italian, French, tragic, comic, of every sort; now with a deep bass he descended into hell, then, contracting his throat, he rent the vaults of heaven with a falsetto tone, frantic and soothed, imperious and mocking, by turns” (PG 387/318; cf. NR 83/102). This is Moi’s description of Lui’s most memorable performance, whose ecstatic quality appears to illustrate the nephew’s argument that music should be based on natural expression as opposed to academically procured rules (NR 82–83/101–2). Again Hegel ignores the context. Specifically, he neglects to point out the nephew’s naturalism and instead utilizes the description to present a mode of human expression that eludes the “noble consciousness.” Hegel’s deployment further violates Diderot’s narrative by claiming that Moi finds Lui’s mad performance entirely strange and incomprehensible, when actually the narrator notes his own “admiration” and “pity.” In any case, at this point Hegel interjects a comment, before continuing with a further citation:

To the tranquil [i.e., noble] consciousness which, in its honest way, takes the melody of the Good and the True to consist in the evenness of the notes, i.e., in unison, this talk appears as a … “rigmarole [Faselei] of wisdom and folly, as a medley of as much skill as baseness, of as many correct as false ideas, a mixture compounded of a complete perversion of sentiment [“völligen Verkehrtheit der Empfindung”], of perfect shamefulness, and of complete frankness and truth…. It will be unable to refrain from entering into all these tones and running up and down the entire scale of feelings from the profoundest contempt and dejection to the highest pitch of admiration and emotion; but blended with the latter will be a tinge of ridicule which spoils them.”

(PG 387/318)

Hegel’s brief explanation appears to interrupt a continuous citation; however, the second quote is taken from an entirely different section of Diderot’s text, from Lui’s earlier imitation of a “pimp” (proxénète) attempting to seduce a young girl (NR 24/51). Then, without any punctuation, Hegel grafts yet a third passage, which is presented as a direct quotation but is in fact a paraphrase of Moi’s description of the same performance reported in Hegel’s first quote (NR 83–84/103).

Hegel’s citational practice betrays the same kind of “perversion” attributed to the nephew qua Spirit of Culture. Like an echo, he cuts and splices snatches of text, which thereby transcend and rework the original. In this regard, Hegel’s strategy reflects his philosophical project. As noted, “intention” (Meinen) is the untruth that can only arrive at truth by becoming what it is not. The truth of “saying” (Sagen) belongs to the side of philosophy, which can articulate what Diderot’s text said, in contradistinction to what it meant. Furthermore, this montage, or cento, in addition to revealing the dialogue’s truth, also illustrates how an individual’s truth—for example, the truth of the Phenomenology of the Spirit—can only emerge in the dialectical confrontation of more than one particular text. Hegel’s philosophy forms (bildet) Diderot’s satire in the same way that latter molds the former.⁴⁰ Through intertextual violence (Gewalt), Hegel listens to the “derangement of the musician” and finds in his “all-powerful [allgewaltigen] note” the reconciliation that will “restore Spirit to itself” (PG 387/318). In this way, the idealist philosopher hopes to correct the insufficiencies of a purely rationalist standpoint. He reveals that the first-person narrator (Moi) or even “the self” (le moi), grounded in the “self-identical” (“das sich Gleiche”), is but a moment toward the truth: “what is self-identical is only an abstraction, but in its actuality [Wirklichkeit] is in its own self a perversion” (ibid.). Philosophy therefore works.

Philosophy works insofar as it brings about “actuality” (Wirklichkeit) by giving form to the natural, which is otherwise something insubstantial, a mere assumption, “ein gemeintes Dasein.” Hegel’s appropriation or misappropriation of Diderot’s text strives to reveal what the nephew says as opposed to what he meant, just as the nephew’s performance can bring Hegel’s own words out of the sphere of mere opinion (Meinung) and into the realm of truth. He cites the nephew’s naturalism to argue against naturalism and to actualize his own idealism. In other words, Hegel turns the nephew’s perversion and derangement against both him and himself. This dialectical work could be said to temper the nephew’s nature in a way that recalls the tempering of the naturally given overtone series.

This analogy is especially pertinent when we think of Rousseau’s arguments against the uncle Rameau, against a mathematization that destroys the naturally endowed voice. In the introductory notes to his translation, Goethe already advised that any understanding of Rameaus Neffe must take into account the historical querelle between French and Italian music, between Rousseau’s beloved Mediterranean melodists and Rameau’s harmonic system, which was “mannered in a way that is … divorced from all authentic artistic truth and simplicity.”⁴¹ Hegel assumes the role of Rameau, who worked to reconcile the inconsistencies of naturally produced tones by way of a system based on temperament.

This musical historical process, like Hegel’s own dialectic, is rich in theological implications. It begins with Andreas Werckmeister (sic!), whose Musicalische Paradoxal-Discourse (1707) provided one of the first theoretical justifications for temperament. For Werckmeister, the so-called Pythagorean komma should be regarded as a felix culpa: a symptom of mankind’s fall that rendered the natural overtones of our mundane reality imperfect or impure and therefore in need of salvation.⁴² What Rameau (and later Hegel) would view as a response to God’s command to perfect the given, Rousseau would simply see as a sad removal from our origins in nature.

Hence Hegel’s implicitly anti-Rousseauist position, with which he concludes the passage dealing with Rameau’s Nephew: Reason should not give up “the spiritually developed consciousness it has acquired, [it] should not submerge the widespread wealth of its moments again in the simplicity of the natural heart, and relapse into the wilderness of the nearly animal consciousness, which is also called Nature or innocence” (PG 389/318).⁴³ Rousseau’s nostalgic dream of a natural, musical language is thereby dispelled.

For Rousseau, music was the art most capable of expressing human feelings (sentiments) irreducible to words. A momentous episode in his late Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1776–78) provides a key description of the state that Rousseau longed for and Hegel disparaged. It is found in the Fifth Promenade, where the author relates “the happiest days of his life,” spent on the small island of St. Pierre in the middle of the Lac de Bienne. It is a place of refuge and solitude, a site unspoiled by cultivation, seldom visited, and therefore an asylum from all of society’s ills. Centeredness and containment are emphasized throughout, so the sketch of the island at the lake’s “center,” “naturally circumscribed and separated from the rest of the world” (ROC 1.1048), may be regarded as mirroring the text of the Fifth Promenade, situated at the very midpoint of the collection’s ten “walks.”⁴⁴ Here, moreover, the writer can “circumscribe himself” (“se circonscrire” [1040]), untroubled by desires and passions, devoting himself to “idleness” (oisiveté), if not “worklessness” (“far niente” [1042]).

It should come as no surprise that his time on the island is “cradled” by natural sounds, by the original music of Nature: “the cry of eagles, the songs [ramage] of some birds, and the pulsing rushing of the torrent that falls from the mountain” (1040). This natural music overwhelms the articulations of a subjective position over and against the objective. In auditory experience, the perceiver cannot distinguish himself from the perceived. Subjectivity, reflection, and thinking are replaced by a simple “feeling of existence,” entirely turned in on itself, self-sufficient (like the island of St. Pierre), with nothing external to it: “Le sentiment de l’existence depouillé de toute autre affection” (1047)—“stripped” (depouillé) of all other sensations and passions, indeed of all otherness, which grounds the possibility of reflection. Thus, at night, the continuous noise of the tide ceaselessly strikes his ears, “making him feel his existence with pleasure, without taking the effort to think” (1045; my emphasis). At times Jean Jacques sets off on a little boat, all alone, letting the water take him where it will, lost for hours in reverie, with no determined objective or goal. Again, subjectivity is displaced; the “je” appears only to be negated: “There the sound of the waves and the agitation of the water, fixing my senses, chasing all other agitation from my mind, would plunge it into a delightful reverie in which night often came upon me without my having noticed it [“sans que je m’en fusse apperceu”] (1045; my emphasis).

For Hegel, this simple, nonreflective feeling is but a nonconscious emptiness, awaiting the alienation that would allow the reflective turn back to oneself, which alone is the birth of self-consciousness. Rousseau calls for no externalization. Prereflective and in the immediacy of the moment, one may still enjoy the pleasure of feeling “one’s own existence” (“sa propre existence”), “which suffers no emptiness in the soul that would need to be filled” (1046–47). Reflection would introduce an inequality, a difference out of which would emerge the distinction between subject and object. This manifestation of the “I” would disrupt the gentle pulsation of nature’s music and put an end to the song of equality: “If the movement is uneven [inégal] or too strong it awakens; in reminding us of the objects around us, it destroys the charm of the reverie” (1047). The “charm,” from the Latin word for “song” (carmen), would succumb to a rude disenchantment.

Hegel’s dialectic could have no patience for this existential feeling “stripped” (depouillé) of all exteriority. He would not allow the possibility of self-consciousness without reflection. For him, such a state is altogether unconscious and such a subject is necessarily a “corpse” (depouille). Whereas Rousseau asserts this immediate feeling of self and in fact takes it as an achievement, Hegel understands it solely as a prelude to philosophy, which alone may articulate what this “sentiment” actually says. For Hegel, Rousseau’s musical loss of subjectivity—his musical madness—is wrong in believing it can express something philosophy cannot. In Hegel’s hands, the madness of the musician ceases to be a source of fascination, admiration, desire, or fear but rather becomes a fundamental moment in the process of actualization. For this reason, the nephew, according to Hegel, is not really mad at all: “fully aware of its confused state” (“dieser sich selbst klaren Verwirrung” [PG 387/318]), the torn consciousness exhibits a higher stage of development over the simple mind. In unworking the language of simple abstractions and the natural standpoint, the nephew’s Zerrissenheit permits language to perform its true work of introducing the concrete universals that ground self-consciousness.

Rousseau wants auditory experience to give access to a feeling of self-existence that is immediate, preconceptual, and prereflexive. Hegel’s dialectical project, however, demonstrates that any sense of self, any self-consciousness, is necessarily dependent on a self-objectification, on a self-expression mediated by language. Self-consciousness is “being for others”; it is only by being reflected in the other that I can become myself. But Hegel need not have the “last laugh.” The Naturphilosophie of Friedrich Schelling, Hegel’s other Tübingen schoolmate, may be understood as continuing a more Rousseauist strain and developing it along the lines of a transcendental idealism far different from Hegel’s. Concerning Hegel’s requirement for alienation and subsequent reflection, Schelling reverts to Rousseau’s lexicon: “In Hegel’s philosophy the beginning relates to what follows as a simple nothing, as a lack, an emptiness, which is filled and is admittedly felt as emptiness, but there is in this as little to overcome as there is in filling an empty vessel.”⁴⁵ Where Hegel sees only an “assumed existence” (“ein gemeintes Dasein”), Schelling sees Nature.

Rousseau touches precisely on this feeling—prereflective yet still belonging to oneself—in his Fifth Promenade, tellingly by way of natural sounds and rhythms, in bird songs and rushing water. This moment—of greatest significance for Hölderlin and his generation—would seem at last to remedy Rousseau’s fears of self-loss and expropriation. For the nature of auditory experience, as adumbrated here, discloses dimensions of human life irreducible to reflective understanding. This track will be pursued by the German romantics, from Wackenroder on, who all owe a great debt to Rousseau. Hegel, however, remained skeptical. He seemed to accept as true the rumors and allegations that the Genevan philosopher was insane. To be sure, Hegel valued music much higher and more respectfully than did someone like Kant. Consequently, his thoughts on musical composition and reception, with particular emphasis on the art’s temporality, had an enormous influence on later aesthetic theories. For Kant, who generally ignored music’s temporal nature, the art of sound was merely a pleasurable play of sensations, offering nothing to the understanding and therefore hardly an art at all. For Hegel, however, as the later lectures in Aesthetics reveal, music held a privileged position in his philosophical system. Nonetheless, his discussion of music seems to be haunted by a Rousseauist naturalism, which he consistently fought to denigrate. The way Hegel enlists music to perform dialectically appears like an attempt to rescue the art form from Rousseau’s mad program, just as the Phenomenology strove to put the derangement of Diderot’s musician to work. Work is the only cure for madness, Hegel asserts in the Philosophy of Mind, but what if music were stronger than Hegel’s philosophical will? What if it were able to unwork the system? What if music was inherently, incurably mad?

Dispersed across the writings and lecture notes outside of the Phenomenology, Hegel provides separate definitions of music and madness, which appear strikingly correlative. In his Lectures on Aesthetics, music is consistently regarded as an art of “pure interiority,” which may be taken as analogous to his brief but important statements in the “Anthropology” of his Philosophy of Mind, where insanity is primarily understood as a reversion or withdrawal to interiority, as a “sinking into inwardness” with no relation to external reality.⁴⁶ Parallel passages can be readily accumulated. These separate definitions seem to reveal not only music’s affinity to madness but also the “moment” music and madness share with the “natural self” discussed above. Hegel understands all species of madness as a regression to an archaic state of simple feeling (das Gefühlsleben).⁴⁷ The madman withdraws into his interiority, cuts himself off from the outside world, indeed “circumscribes himself” in a manner reminiscent of Rousseau on the island of St. Pierre.⁴⁸ To be sure, music for Hegel, is an art form—a “sensible manifestation of Spirit”—and therefore qualitatively different from a psychological disorder. Nonetheless, the fact that Hegel defines music as “the obliteration … of the whole of space” and a “complete withdrawal” signals at least some points of contact between the aesthetic experience and the mental state.⁴⁹

The connection becomes particularly clear in Hegel’s discussion of the “violent power of music”—“die Gewalt der Musik”—which bears striking similarities to Rousseau’s account from the Fifth Promenade. To begin, he defines music in terms of inwardness, that is, as a nonrelation to space and spatial figures that, together with the “purely evanescent” quality of sound, permits it to “penetrate the arcanum of all the movements of the soul” and therefore to cause consciousness to be carried away “by the ever-flowing stream of sounds.”⁵⁰ Concerned exclusively with interiority, music annuls the representational distance that distinguishes the observer from the observed. Since subjectivity is grounded in its relation to the outside (its existence for others), music’s obliteration of external space, its iconoclastic removal of anything that may be represented “out there,” potentially leads to a loss of subjectivity altogether. Musical performance offers no concrete, externalized object for the listener and therefore fails to maintain the distance between the subjective and objective poles of aesthetic experience. It consists of “purely abstract sound in a temporal movement,” which allows it to be a vehicle for purely interior content (Aesthetics, 157/908). For Hegel, it is this capability, and not something inherent in music itself, that has caused tradition to speak about music’s violence, its “all-powerfulness” (Allgewalt). Music is not mad in essence, but potentially maddening.

For this reason, music must be put to work: “Music is spirit, or the soul which resounds directly on its own account and feels satisfaction in its perception of itself. But as a fine art it at once acquires, from the spirit’s point of view, a summons to bridle the emotions themselves as well as their expression, so that there is no being carried away into a bacchanalian rage or whirling tumult of passions, or a resting in the distraction of despair, but on the contrary an abiding peace and freedom in the outpouring of emotion whether in jubilant delight or the deepest grief” (Aesthetics, 197–98/939). From the point of view of Spirit, music may be said to work like a concept, resolving the dissonance of particularity into the concord of the universal. Its maddening potential must be bridled so as to keep Spirit on its true path. The simplicity of life feeling (Gefühlsleben) must be brought face to face with difference, so as to generate a dialectically charged, concrete sense of individuality, self-consciousness in relation to the world. Analogously, lunatics, according to Hegel, should be made “to think about other things … to occupy themselves mentally and especially physically; by working, they are forced out of their diseased subjectivity and impelled towards the real world.”⁵¹ As early as the Phenomenology, Hegel had implemented his technique, latching on to the “derangement of the musician” only to reveal its task for philosophy. The nephew’s bacchanalian rage was bridled, violence was averted, and the persona inaequalis could expose how difference may be held together in sameness, just like a concept. Something happened. The age had become ready to hear the madman and assign him his task. And yet the madness—especially in its musical form—would continue to defy the workhouse. Its violence had hardly been exhausted.