Zmysł nieskończoności. Friedrich Schleiermacher i idea muzyki absolutnej
The Sense of the Infinite. Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Idea of Absolute Music

Summary/Abstract: This essay presents analogies between the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, formulated in: On Religion (1799), and Romantic aesthetics of music represented mainly by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann. The common denominator of those ideas is the conceit of infinity understood not speculatively but existentially. Hence the pressure placed both in theology and aesthetics on experience and intuition: hence also the acceptance of theological historiosophic schemes supplying arguments against conservative normative traditions. In this light the theology of the early Schleiermacher appears as a transition stage between Church religiosity and post-Enlightenment individual spirituality – a symptom of Taylor’s “expressivist turn”. Furthermore, upon the basis of the example of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus the author attempted to outline the fate of the religion of the infinite in the course of the twentieth century. In accordance with a diagnosis contained in the presented book, the sense of infinity, although still vital, underwent in the twentieth century a basic mutation associated with a negative valorisation of exposing man to the endless and incomprehensible universe. This transformation manifests itself in the form of neo-gnostic intuitions.

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