FROM MELODY TO THEME: ATTEMPTED TESTIMONY

The cunning of Reason! First acquaintance with a Mendelssohn piano concerto at thirteen, as
with other music, goes to make me whatever I am today. "Today", what is that? Also a
moment, dialectical, the same as those "days", superseded for that very reason, except in the
memory merely. So I am not now, any of us must say, what I am eternally. I am not now, more
than phenomenally. I, says Hegel, am the Idea under the form of individuality, am liberty,
love, blessedness. For it is thinking (thought as act) which is both I and these other forms of
the Idea.1 We are unable to mean anything else when we say "I". The mood corresponds quite
well to the typically Thomist slogan, "Become what you are". Religion, or prophecy rather,
counters, "We know what we are but we know not what we shall be."2 This though is prior to
any questioning of empirical time, engendering the contradiction tolerated as paradox, "and
time shall be no more", a future that is not future, not time.
So how did the Mendelssohn form thinking? Of course it might have been Mozart, Haydn or
Bach, Gubaidulina (had she been composing already then) or anyone whatever, seen though
as a contrast or challenge to previous experience and its coincident interpretation. The relation
of one's musical taste to one's thinking is closer than many styling themselves thinkers admit.
What though is music? Melody? Rhythm? It is certainly perceived aurally, as sound. Yet it
bears the name of a general spiritual inspiration, as from a or any muse. Music. The same
though might be said, differently, of poetry, poesia (from a verb to make). Hegel, in the
Aesthetics, places poetry above music, due to its greater explicitness, to the substitution of
sign for symbol while still remaining art in its essential intellectuality. Yet he places music
above painting, sound above sight, as not "braking" or suspending dialectical flow, where
everything finite is a stage or moment, not standing still because not realisable in itself, but
only as itself superseded (aufgehoben) in the final and eternal result.
This in turn means, we should be clear, that we cannot begin to explain this flow itself by
saying "In reality". This is just what is denied, not partially, as in Kant, but of our whole
perceived and perceiving finite mind. The flow is peculiar to us, as the cunning of reason
hides from us that all is accomplished.3 Just as and only as phenomenally perceived, mind
remains intact with its inalienable claim to immediate perception, of flow or of anything else,
as is denied on this level in Kant, proposing a more immediate reality (subjective idealism).
Yet of course we might say that in reality things are not real. It is in part a matter of style, an
aesthetic even, though this would be not at all reductively meant.
As for this result, Thomas Aquinas correspondingly argued that the finis ultimus (of human
living) is present, as final cause of action as such, in all that we do. It is God, beatitude or,
according to him, bonum in communi4 (to be distinguished from the abstract ens commune,
even though bonum is in fact ens absolutely). As determinative of all action, hence too of all
thinking, this presence is total as totally operative, so that nothing is present except as in it. It
would be "absolute cunning" as intrinsically hidden, latent, since what is open to view is
passive to the onlooker. The Infinite cannot be thus limited or, as Hegel will so strongly
emphasise, external to anything. Otherness, that is, is not absolute but, taken as such, abstract,
a category in short.
Even Nature as a whole is thus to be understood as a moment in this circular dialectic of "the
whole", of nous rather. Whole, too, is abstract, a part of the trans-organic unity of whole and
parts. It is circular as going out and coming back. Exitus is reditus, as the circle or sphere,

1
G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia 159 (1827 version, as in Wallace translation, OUP).
2
I John. 3.
3
Hegel, op. cit. 209.
4
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia-IIae, 10, 1.
rather, is the denial of finite figure, "the shape of the real absence of shape". 5 Thus the
contours of the Idea are perceived in Nature too, the partes extra partes, as in the unity of a
painting, but potentially merely. In nature the Idea is self-alienated, that is to say. Such is
materia, non ens, potentiality merely, while light, Hegel will say, is the first ideality,
dependent upon sight as heat is not. Nature is not a painting but needs always to be painted,
sung of, ascended from in praise of its creative Spirit. It needs to be understood by Spirit as in
its ultimate nothingness, ex nihilo, contained as a "moment" in the dialectical ascent to the one
Word or self-manifestation which Reason essentially is. Thus art is above, higher than, more
spiritual than nature. Art is the first form of the content of the Idea, the Concept, as returning
to itself from Nature in absolute Spirit. Art leads on to religion and religion to philosophy, on
Hegel’s view, but the content is the same.
At age thirteen then one's individual mind developed through music, naturally allied to the
sexual impulse. Impulse recalls pulse and there one can question the equation of music with
sound. Hegel speaks rather of a vibration, a trembling, as before the Lord, the numen. Is the
rhythmic pulse heard? Could not a deaf man sense it? The vibration is “in the blood”,
apprehended in that most generalised of the senses, touch, which includes sense of one’s
sensing, one’s “body”, as “tact” (touch, but also beat, rhythm) is presupposed to con-tact, an
identity with the other as two vibrating strings produce one new sound.
Sex might seem to found music as the dance embodies courtship. Yet one dances for the God,
like David before the ark, typically to an ecstatic death, in love, con-tact. Here is the root of
music in the whole, in penetration to the heart of things. But this is precisely the sexual
impulse, eros. So sex is more than sex. Alone, it is abstract, as is soul or body. But nothing
finite is thus alone. This is the ground of dialectical flow in music, or of music as the
prototype of dialectic, rather. Music is essentially a celebration of the all in each and the each
in all, as are the rites of religion (sumit unus sumunt mille6) or as is thought thinking itself.
Being might be said to precede thinking yet, more fundamentally, I am because I think and
not merely as a supposed condition for thinking. Forma dat esse.
Yet so much music is “incidental”, either to an occasion or even to a story one tells oneself in
one’s mind. Here one says one makes the story follow the music, but really one invents a
frame for the music to follow, that one can think of while one listens. Such programmed
music, or opera, is essentially incidental, as was not, incidentally, the case with Wagner.
This is also the problem of the Lied, where the music might seem be incidental to poetry.
Perhaps one is not disturbed by this, once poetry, like liturgical celebration, is reckoned
“higher” than music, equally transcending occasion in sign, symbol and metaphor. In poetry

sound, the only external matter which poetry retains, is in it no longer the
feeling of the sensuous itself, but is a sign, which by itself is void of import…
Yet this sensuous element, which in music was still immediately one with
inward feeling, is in poetry separated from the content of consciousness… all
types of art… poetry runs through them all… Poetry is the universal art of the
mind… ends by transcending itself… passes… into the prose of thought.7

Hegel refers here to the arbitrariness of linguistic signification, as condition for its intellectual
effectiveness. Music, all the same, like all the arts, has a right to be considered and enjoyed on
its own, as in the Mozartian Divertimento. The name suggests it be taken as representing the

5
Hegel, Philosophy of Nature 239 (Enc., version of 1817).
6
From a (liturgical) poem by Aquinas on reception of the eucharist which can be understood, context shows, as
where, or when, one receives all (a thousand) receive. Otherwise no insight at all would be expressed. "You are
all members one of another". He would be recalling this "apostolic" text.
7
Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics, 4c3.
"pure play" of the notion, more above than below the "time of the sign", looking to parousia
rather.
The "prose of thought" is clearly not the prosaic as negatively opposed to the poetical. Indeed
insofar as it is poetry that transcends itself towards thought we infer in reverse that thought is
often better caught in poetry, witness Parmenides or Eliot. Music too can be taken as attaining
to expression of what cannot be said, thus bypassing the whole "time of the sign", on earth as
it is in heaven, ignoring the stairs and taking the elevator, so to say. There is of course that
greater particularity peculiar to sense, but this is an instance of the "concrete universal", the
necessity of the infinite's infinite differentiation. This is further brought out by the
ineradicable differences between any two "performances", as in the need for a performance at
all. Speech acts of course provide analogies here, even at the level of the sign. Indeed the
atonal revolution introduces a doubt in regard to Hegel's simple exclusion of music from the
intellectuality of poetry. A Sartre can misread poetry as "the music of words"8, seeing music as
an abstractly sensuous entity, as Hegel does not. The question here though is whether making
music the natural language of the soul, in distinction from the artificiality of language, is the
only other option.
One may say that the Schönbergian tones stand even less for anything outside themselves,
except someone decree this. The impression remains though that music too is somehow
intellectual, poetic. The composer is a Tondichter. A given passage does not "symbolise" grief
or courage or humour. It says it, or rather says something related which is inseparable from
that very passage as heard. D.H. Lawrence insisted similarly that our actual emotions are
never fully caught by the names at our disposal. The anger in a room is an abstraction from
the moods of each man individually. Once, however, we expand language to individual names
for each individual thing then there is no longer language. And that is the case with music, at
least if viewed musically, I would say "muse-ally". The piercing beauty is always that it is just
this. This is why it is important to stress, possibly against Aristotle, that the Absolute must
have perfect knowledge of (and providence towards) every particular, whether sparrow or
Spaniard. When we speak of beauty, in fact, even the beauty of an intellectual construction,
we always refer to its individuality, e.g. as just this construction or theorem, just this flower.
Our grandparents' craze for sunsets was a (somewhat formalised) intuition of this.
All in all we may be a little bit sceptical of Hegel's limiting of music, which he after all calls
the art par excellence for the Romantic age. He is anxious to maintain, against certain
contemporaries, the superiority of thought over feeling. Yet his contemporary Wordsworth, in
his poem The Prelude, coined the phrase "feeling intellect". Or, what is a feeling that is not a
thought? Hegel himself stresses content of consciousness as a common denominator. Only
thus could he say that "everything is a syllogism".
Music depicts, stands for or is a sign of itself, born anew as such at the commencement of any
composition or improvisation, to die and fall again, since substance is superseded and the
dialectic is not "braked". In this sense it is the "food of love", of union with the Notion beyond
all abstractive particularisation but inclusive of all things, the "great Apocalypse" or finis
ultimus.
Thus "music is a greater revelation than the whole of religion and philosophy", said another
child of the year of grace 1770, for what it reveals, in epiphany, is the very principle of
revelation. Like God it can only reveal itself and not some other thing. In doing so though it
reveals all, reveals, that is, that it is not external to some other entity but is its own utterance,
and this one utterance is ever itself. Here there can be no other thing. Thought (nous) thinks
itself, beyond even ex-istence.
Yet an insufficiency, at least for us, asserts itself: o Freunde, nicht diese Töne. That, however,
is also sung as within music and its power. "Power is the morality of those who stand out
8
Cf. J.-P. Sartre, What is Literature?, 1947.
from the rest and it is mine" (Beethoven). It, music, allows nothing external, a type of love in
this, as of Hegelian freedom. Ama et fac quod vis, the watchword of God himself. "I will be
what I will be" and not be tied to some presumed Being anterior to me. Here the very mind of
God falls together with what Nietzsche will see as the denial of God. Yet what is denied for
sure is the phenomenal self, rather. "Let him deny himself". This has little to do with giving
up sweets for Lent.
This great "choral" movement or Satz, furthermore, comes to fullest ecstasy of expression in
the fugal and purely "tonal" or instrumental middle section. It then returns, as if in hesitant
regret, pausing, slowing down, to the vocal necessities of Schiller's poem, though in
resounding and emphatic acclaim. This acclaim, over which the fugal acceleration still
presides, yet itself slows down pretty quickly into the mystical, penultimate section where the
voices themselves, almost like "stationary blasts of waterfalls" one might wish to say, become
as instruments emitting heavenly sound, as supra-personal spirits, an "articulated group" of
them.9 Their song communicates more than its text concerning one who "lives above the
stars". They presage the wild valkyries of a later piece, at least in their trans-earthliness. They
are not, that is, "reduced" to mere instruments, but in putting the medium above the message,
if any, they make it no longer medium but the substance of what it reaches out to. The
trumpets, the "shawms" (Psalm 150, the final psalm), the many cymbals are themselves, as
essentially in actu, the praise which this final psalm calls for. It praises in the calling for
praise. "Everything that has breath", Spirit as such, shall join in.10

***********************

At thirteen I had assumed that pure music, even without the singing of hymns or lyrics, had a
mood to convey (as does In the Mood or The Harry Lime Theme) or a story to tell, at least in
so far as they were events in it. The Grasshoppers' Dance conveys a mood but the descriptive
title seduces to more, even chains the imagination. I still look more benignly upon
grasshoppers because of it. But all these pieces I knew years previously still, looking back still
to Run Rabbit Run or In an Eighteenth Century Drawing Room (my unknown introduction to
Mozart), but also Strauss's Perpetuum Mobile, this suggesting movement beyond mood. Not
only Johnny Zero, ballad of a U.S. school-dunce fighting ace, but Poor Jenny or I Wonder
who's Kissing her now were clearly narrative, evoking infantile sympathy, as was, however,
the purely instrumental (on our 78) Jealousy, though moody enough and touching the same
sympathy. For myself? For another? I had heard my mother sing pathos-laden words to it.
I began to progress to more elaborate pieces, via a Debussy Prelude, the Scheherezade theme
(played by a popular pianist) or Grieg's Concerto and The Italian Caprice. The narratives they
evoked would reach, typically, a high dramatic point at the (literal) ushering in of a melody,
an "air", though apart from any general four-part harmony. Such a melody was as a princess
lointane, come near, so near in fact as to be unable to be seen. Thus it transcended hope,
herself contradicting her own nature, in thus tonally incarnating. "Look well! We are, we are
indeed, Beatrice." And I too heard in these her tones more and more the reflection of the
Absolute one in the following few years, as the Beatrician "figure" yielded to more powerful
impressions, summoning the fierce patience of philosophy to my life-long aid.
Then, however, was still the "time of hope", where one repeatedly "awoke on the pale hill-
side". The faerie-lands were indeed forlorn and not the last word. One heard them in Grieg,
Tchaikowsky, Rachmaninov, Sibelius, in the Liszt B minor sonata, again the melody. It was
9
If "there is an essential link… between logos and phone", yet this applies more literally, and hence tellingly, to
sound, albeit "intentional", than to the more specific "voice". Cp. J. Derrida reporting Husserl on the voice,
"Husserl Interpretation", Philosophy Today, Summer 1967, Vol. XI, 2/4, pp. 106-124 (115).
10
Anton Bruckner's uncharacteristically short version of this psalm is still far more than a mere "setting",
achieving, certainly intending, a beatitudo of instrumentation in the very naming of these Biblical instruments.
the dream that life had still to become. Yet many of these could write symphonies too, robust
affirmations of the Idea. One might ask, how does the flute solo in the Brahms E-minor
symphony differ, in intent, from that in the Grieg concerto? Is it really less heart-breaking
merely, a sour meringue? In Brahms' First Symphony, as in Beethoven's Ninth, its inspiration
probably in this respect at least, a melody is certainly ushered in. Yet the treatment of it, the
development given to it, shows it to have been rather a theme of the whole, with more or less
incidental melodiousness. One may apply this judgement to Schubert too as, now, a classicist,
or to the mock-classicist, in his first symphony, Prokoffiev, but equally to the latter's other
works, as closely interwoven as any. Development, that is, signifies unification in diversity.
Proponents of Tchaikowsky (who deserves higher praise) and the others would mock
captivation by Brahms. "If what you want is meringues then why eat them sour? It is pure
affectation." But at fourteen or fifteen I did not want meringues principally, as I maybe had at
thirteen or, more literally, at six. Even there, though, does one not rather seek the finis ultimus
among the meringues of which one has knowledge? What else drives the infant to its mother's
milk, or the stone to earth's centre? It is indeed a wish for home and thus testimony against
time and finitude, "this place appointed for my second race", as Plato was surely not the first
to understand, as if exerting a contingent influence upon us. Appetitus as such or finally is
pondus, pondus meum, the thrust of any possible subjectivity to the absolute and
unconditioned.
I noticed this freedom from the need for such an ushered in melody, then, already in the
lightweight Mendelssohn piece, played by Moira Lympany. My father bought it for himself on
two twelve-inch seventy-eights, at the same time as he bought for me, at my urgent pleading,
the "Italian Caprice".
In the latter everything seemed to occur for the sake of one (or two) "magic moments",
announced, incarnated in melody. Such a moment is an instance of the psychological "now"
distinguishable from the temporal instant often assumed as the "eternity of the present
moment". There is no reason why such a psychological "now" should not be found to extend,
for a given individual, over the whole series. We would then have the endless melody dreamt
of by Debussy or Wagner. But what kind of unity would be thus restored? This psychological
"now" is not "longer than" the present moment since it is in actuality an escape from the
illusion of abstract time and hence, like our thoughts, without length.
If there was melody in the concerto then it too was rather the song of the whole thing, a
tapestry of various motifs, themes and their intertwined fragments. It was not so much magical
as it was a demonstration of human or divine power, of intellect, "feeling intellect" certainly,
but principally intellect. One might say this with still more confidence of one of the Mozart
concertos, say the A-major, K488, the magic of which is certainly more than momentary. One
does not wait for "moments" in these pieces. One moves at ease in a whole world of wonder,
this consisting though in the placing of our prior consciousness in a more ample perspective,
in some form or other. That the piece takes twenty minutes, or two hours, is immaterial. Such
a length, any question of length, is not within the world of the piece. Really it is not within
our own life either.
Magic, in fact, the power that is magic, finds here a more congruent setting, in what for me, as
it were moving backwards, was a new type of music. I began to dream of Beethoven, of
whom I had heard. Yet I still made up stories for the music to illustrate, though not blind to
their incongruity. That became the key enquiry for me: what is this music about? And as
Mendelssohn himself said, if one could say that then one wouldn't need the music. There can
be a message which communicates itself, a substance which is its own epiphany, or, in that
case, epiphany itself rather. Of what? Here we persist in asking just the question that we ruled
out the instant before. Epiphany itself is not of anything (else). Glory is the traditional name
here.
I was puzzled by the music's imperviousness to this narrative inventiveness. When I later, my
armour struck from me by the hammer-blows of spirit, declared that music spoke of God,
always and everywhere, I was first adumbrating the view sketched above, though a clumsy
theology only allowed me to see some of it. Such music overcomes time by means of time, as
erotic love overcomes the body by means of the body. It is heard "all at once" or not at all.
Rather, life here, finitude, is disclosed as in essence a system of signs. But such signs
necessarily reduce to signa formalia or pure signs. They are never perceived but something
else is perceived, the implicit11, and maybe only perceived in or through them. Hegel's sharp
and insightful distinction between (arbitrary) sign and (natural) symbol should not be made
absolute, that is to say. This might be seen as an aspect of a putative post-modern corrective.
This doctrine, of the signum formale, as developed for example in Renaissance
scholasticism12, was criticised by some as "overthrowing" the nature of a sign, a criticism
mirroring that of transubstantiation-theory as "overthrowing the nature of a sacrament" (as in
the Elizabethan Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England). If generalised, as we suggest
here, it leads on to a view where everything is text, but by no means necessarily written. We
can preserve the predominance Hegel gives to sound, "tone", as not braking or suspending the
dialectic.
That is, the progress from symbol to sign, the distinction Hegel makes, should itself be seen as
dialectical. The symbol is aufgehoben, except for particular finite contexts. This in fact is the
orthodox position regarding the mystical interpretation of scripture, as when Paul says of the
doings and sufferings of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, "Now these things happened in a figure",
as at least one translation has it. They happened, but "in a figure", and such is the Hegelian
conception of nature itself. I hardly need here to add a qualifying phrase, a mutatis mutandis.
As in Aristotle, the ultimate difference, sign, determines the whole. All is sign, the writing, or
rather speech, of the all-encompassing Absolute, "in whom we live and move and have our
being", i.e. we don't have it simpliciter. Thus in music we can disregard the instruments, the
record-player, the composer, the finitude of our own auditory sense, the situation itself of
"listening to music". I am that. At any and every moment we "hear", we apprehend the whole,
whether or not delivered to intellect by this perhaps fancied sense. What we seem to
remember we need no urging then to forget, to consign back to the dark pit. This pit, Hegel's
image of memory, here first takes on the qualities of John of the Cross's "dark night of the
memory". It is dark because memory as it were overcomes itself as in its perishing the whole
world perishes, because (and not merely as if) it never was. Such is the nuclear power of
music, the "food of love".
No doubt a good story too is seen in that way, as in it the outer world is annihilated in the
power of Spirit. This insight might shed further light on the rash of suicides provoked by
Werther. Without delight in the story there would not have been such strength of motive. The
wish to die on finishing a beautiful book, as if in hope of continuing within the book, is by no
means uncommon, as Greeks have been reported to kill themselves when overcome by the
beauty and grandeur of their country. The motive of repentance or self-abhorrence in the face
of another's spiritual or other beauty is not dissimilar. It is the theme, after all, of the hymn
"When I Survey the Wondrous Cross". The point is that music, to be music, starts off from
that vantage-point. Hence the restriction to melody, to programme, is a kind of falling away
from or failure to attain to it.
Surely it meant something, I yet continued to urge to myself, but what? A few months later,
back in 1953, my father started to bring home LPs, "long-playing records". Then too
11
I borrow Eugene Gendlin's favourite term, though for my own purposes.
12
From Peter de Fonseca, S.J., to John of St. Thomas, O.P., often referred to in the U.S., e.g. by John Deely (An
Introduction to Semiotic), as Jean Poinsot. In Fonseca the term stands for the image in the eye signifying (sic)
what we see without ever being seen itself, while for Poinsot it denotes the logical instruments, concept,
judgement, syllogism, signifying the realities intellect perceives. So the sign itself tends to reduce to a relation.
technology seemed to lead the way into new spiritual realms, as it does now, given the
requisite dispositions, or even willy-nilly. As Hegel puts it in the preliminaries to Philosophy
of Nature, even human evil-doing is superior, has more of spirit in it (malum est semper in
subjecto), than the movements of plants.
I listened to the Emperor Concerto eight or nine times, budding intellect with pious
confidence in the parental aesthetic, before grasping or being grasped by it as a totality, as
Beethoven's main orchestral works were to do one by one through the succeeding months.
The unknown field of "chamber music" still lay before me. This remains life's major drama
and determinant. It moved, namely, choices maybe greater than itself. All other music was in a
different category and remained so until versions of the two Brahms piano concertos entered
the house and a friend at school lent me Scherchen's rendering of his First Symphony of 1877,
to be followed by all the rest. Not meringues, but intellectual and spiritual pleasure, with an at
times emotional prostration transcending any possible satiety of all the senses combined. Just
that suggestion does not suit at all the sense of hearing, other-directed as it is. "All thy waves
and storms have gone over me" and I saw that this music was, as I then called it, in a poem,
"universal biography", though again, in a way fit to supersede biography, bios. Whenever one
writes one's life-story one annihilates it, as when one would paint the face of nature in a unity
foreign to its essentially alienated state.
So not any particular characteristic of the man Beethoven, phenomenal indeed also in the
literal, non-exclamatory sense, like all of us, was at issue. At issue was this sort of music as a
real possibility, as moment of the Notion, epiphany of the whole beyond whole that is, rather,
a perfect, super-organic unity. Here the whole is no longer a mere union of parts, but rather, as
"heard all at once" again, that final destruction of all compositeness and finitude needed for its
realisation, the famous ingratitude of Spirit.
Of course the other music we mentioned participates in, has elements of this, just as the
symphonists lapse into narrative mood at times. The Pastoral Symphony, all the same, merely
pretends to be a series of tone-paintings. In reality, as Tondichtung, it is absolute self-
manifestation, the "world as will and idea" indeed, thought thinking itself, with all the ecstasy,
terror and longing of parousia, when the heavens are "rolled up as a scroll" and "time shall be
no more". The same, of course, can be true of some tree outside the window. "A fool sees not
the same tree as a wise man sees." The Seventh Symphony, too, Wagner truly said, is the
apotheosis of the dance, i.e. it is not a dance, but power, though without further intention,
universal of universals, I. I am that. "I live, yet not I…" But we are going behind these
paradoxes, as philosophy should and must, to be itself.
Poetry, the superior art, yet belongs to "the time of the sign". Music has no such arbitrary
sign-system. But not because it should be seen as restricted to natural symbols. Where there is
no nature there are no such symbols. It is rather, again, parousia. In so far as it overcomes
time it is more than prophecy even, or reveals prophecy to itself. Precisely as Hegel's logic,
with which in its difference it is yet identical, it anticipates the result by cancelling or
destroying all that is partial or abstracted. In having nothing it has all things, as if by faith
overcoming the world, faith, the substance of things hoped for. To him that has shall be given,
for he has been given. And given what? Nothing less than gift, donum, itself, i.e. the Spirit.
"For it is in loving that we are loved." Here Francis destroys paradox by paradox, since
meaning what he says.
As Hegel, for his part, says, God does not reveal this or that. God is revelation, self-
manifestation. Only so can actus purus, to which countless syllogisms conclude, be
conceived. And so music too expresses nought but itself in being its own birth in actu. For
this any theme will do, any subject, since subjectivity is necessarily infinite. So "play on", for
I have told you, in absolute subjectivity, not contradicted by the contingent detail, how, to stay
with Twelfth Night a moment, one "became a hart". For one becomes only what one is and
each one is every one.

************************************************

And yet… The dream of love? Such is the romantic melody. Not a mere dream about love but
the dream made real precisely as dream, that is love, born of "the strength to dream" which
alone can encounter the gift. Life has itself then become a dream.

When you're in love

The whole world sings a melody.

In so far as that is ever so the case made above against melody falls away or has, at least, to be
situated. Dialectic and negation remain at work upon what, just insofar as it is expressed in
composite, judgmental form, remains finite and thus far contradictory, eliciting deferment to
some future Aufhebung. Any judgement says of the subject that it is what it is not. The finite
evokes contradiction as life elicits death.
In melody rather, in that case, as in love itself, the particular focused upon comes to embody
the universal thesis we have put forward concerning all particulars, viz. that each has the unity
of all within or intrinsic to it. Love's transfiguring action dispenses, for a season, with the
formality, and ipso facto with the time, of the sign. It is the whole melody, apprehended as
one, which enchants the whole which "sings" it. Only when in love, argues McTaggart, do we
see the person as he or she truly or eternally is. McTaggart though has no guarantee against
the Platonic view that what we love are forms rather than persons, seen now as "composite"
human beings. In reality though humans are not composites if "the body" is no more than sign
of "the soul".
So with melody the Romantics broke loose from classical symphonism, destroying it in a
fresh affirmation of haecceitas, thisness. "It had to be you." There is no other name under
heaven (whereby we can be saved). The roots of such romanticism, that is, extend back into
scripture, there above all. Hegel, thus, is the philosopher of scripture. He does not support
himself upon it, he "accomplishes" it, in different key.
Tristan generalised the particularity principle, which then more and more particularised itself
in story after story, melody after melody. Nothing is new, however. In the seventeenth century
"my Julia" had already triumphed, if only through "the liquefaction of her clothes". Such
(particular) subjectivity is absolute subjectivity, there being no other kind.

It is not possible that the unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call
your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment
not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal
and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings.
But not in this sense - that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an
aspect or modification of it, as in Spinoza's pantheism. For we should have the
same baffling question: which part, which aspect, are you? What, objectively,
differentiates it from the others? No, but inconceivable as it seems to ordinary
reason, you - and all other conscious beings as such - are all in all. Hence this
life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence,
but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it
can be surveyed in one single glance.13
13
Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World, transl. Cecily Hastings, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
1964, pp. 21-22.
Each has his key to a particular lock giving different access to the common secret. Each
reaches it through the one, an other one, to whom he gives a cup of water, to whom he listens,
to whom, as a brother, he offers love. Of course the other may also be self and here the natural
self-reflexivity of consciousness, the soul's love for itself, itself opens out on to the possibility
of a dissolution, an overcoming rather of our empirical notion of self. There is no access
otherwise, from the seen to the not seen. I take example from outside the Romantic "period"
to show it "thematised" a constant of, let us say, experience, looking both backwards and
forwards to our own condition.
Everything then is constant in inconstancy, self-destroying in self-transcendence, while

Love hath pitched his tent

In the place of excrement.

Love indeed is the motor of the constant dialectical contradiction, its not-yet, in that of its
nature reason seeks that absolute reconciliation which it is,14 is good will, therefore, as Dante
noted in his Vita nuova.
Thus the structure of love, as identity-relation, is incarnated in or, rather, built upon (it is
finally the same) the sexual difference. That there are just two sexes, not one and not several,
is the very sign of contradiction as it is, again, the impulse to reconciliation.15
Our natures even, as noted, themselves embody or are, in their very functions and powers,
contradiction. We are male or female but not both, as Jungian remedies for this serve to
emphasise. We may unite, to a finite degree, evoking that marital dialectic sketched by Sartre,
with just one of our "opposite number". Yet each seeks and will have a unity of all with all,
wistfully sought after in promiscuity, longingly represented in sacramental celebration where
all are "members of one another" and so not mere members at all.
Man and woman contradict one another in literal incomprehension, often enough, while love
contradicts itself. Wisdom lies in expecting this, as written on the face of all "natural" things,
just because they are not and cannot be "things", substances. The substance that appeared to
be Aristotle has been revealed as a moment identical with the whole, with all, in self-
supersession. "Everything finite is false," is not.
This is what lies behind the "times" of Ecclesiastes, the Preacher, a time to live and a time to
die, a time to embrace and a time to shun the embrace. "If I go not away the Spirit cannot
come unto you." One goes away in order to come back, constantly (I go to look at the kitchen
clock just to see if I may continue typing a while), in a rhythm of love. The so-called rhythm
"method" of birth-limitation no doubt aspired to, was in-spired by, this.
The madonna-whore dilemma is thus much more than a merely male syndrome or complex.
Love, which is itself absolute, ungratefully destroys or deconstructs all its finite embodiments,
as of necessity. The worshipper must thus delight, as mutual worshippers delight mutually, in
coming down to earth, letting the hair down, the better to resume awed adoration. It is just
14
Cf. Richard E. Aquila saying "a thing or substance is what it is only in the process of becoming what it is."
Aquila, "Predication and Hegel's Metaphysics" in Hegel, ed. Michael Inwood, Oxford Readings in Philosophy,
O.U.P., Oxford 1985, pp.67-84 (68). It is worth noting that Hegel operates with a pre-Fregean conception of
predication in the Logic. Indeed there is good reason there to conclude that, like Leibniz, he retains an
understanding of the Aristotelian logica docens tradition otherwise getting obscured in his post-Kantian time.
The whole philosophy of identity essential to his system might seem to depend upon this, that S is P, although it
patently is not. The Fregean f(x) quite bypasses this.
15
Of course there is "already" a sexual difference, mutatis mutandis, between any two men or any two women
and even, in view of previous suggestions re the indeterminacy of himself, between a man or woman and him- or
herself. So far, however, no one has felt a need, in order, say, to upgrade celibate status, to propose registered
marriage with him- or herself. But one might maybe try to interpret the registered religious vow, at least of
celibacy, as having been historically in that direction.
these who must expose, alternately revel in and be irritated by, one another's finitude in
eventual mutual recrimination and loving acceptance. Each is grateful to be "put up with" and
forgiven. From this point of view, as it were abstractly, an alternation between lovers, without
jealousy, is a variant upon the alternations within the finite relation.16 This would relate to the
indeterminacy of self as touched on earlier.
Thus we are offered as ideal to be imitated, as "saviour", one who died totally and entirely for
each one severally and forgot and forgets nobody. The sexual propensity cannot but be
affected by this general dimension, which is not a mere readiness or praeparatio animae.
Uncertain ambiguity of mind and dialectical alternations are themselves dialectical opposites,
while the choice of such a parable as that of the "unjust steward" betrays the presence of
dialectical inclination, the wish thus to explain the general situation to the uncomprehending.
That love "covers a multitude of sins" is a way of saying it embraces every contradiction as
solutio omnis quaestionis. Where all questions are loosed or solved judgements and language
cease and there is "only one word", that manifestation of self, of manifestation itself which is
best called glory, epiphany. Love, glory and wisdom are inseparable, in the parousial presence
of philo-sophia. This term, therefore, need not be, ought not to be restricted to the erotic
striving after what is not yet or even cannot be attained. Eros itself is rather fulfilled, in
mutual and universal agapetic identification, which we are cunningly deceived into seeing as
"not yet" or even as not our concern. Yet one thing and only this is necessary and (desirable)
"for itself" and hence "for us".

16
This without prejudice to long-lasting relations but allowing for overflow and above all no compulsión to this
long-lastingness, which no doubt people will frequently and as it were naturally wish to promise. This in turn
necessitates reexamination of the notion of unfaithfulness. Is a second love always and everywhere unfaithful to
the first? Certainly not in all circumstances, and resisting the temptation to speak of different and exclusive
species of love. Love is love and an exclusive concentration upon its manifestations should also have its limits.
The situation is otherwise similar to that of celibacy today. People are realising it should not be enforced if it is
to keep any beauty it may have.