rhythm and romanticism 85applied to particular aspects of nature by the understanding. This idea
leads to a sense of how the universe forms a coherently constituted
totality that ultimately includes the moral law, even though we cannot
know this to be the case. The aesthetic idea is, then, seen as enliven-
ing our ability to think, as pointing to an organic coherence in things
which is not cognitively accessible, as relating to thesensus communis
which is both the condition of possibility of consensual judgements of
taste and of a moral order based on shared principles, and as offering
an image of a coherent whole of the kind which philosophy cannot
claim to describe without regressing into dogmatism (see Dahlhaus
1988 : 54 ).
Kant famously asserts that music ‘is admittedly more enjoyment than
culture’ because it ‘speaks purely through feelings (‘Empfindungen’)
without concepts’ (Kant 1968 b:b 218,a 216). It therefore lacks the
connection to the moral and intelligible realms which literature pos-
sesses by virtue of its use of words to enliven the conceptual capacity.
Language conveys ‘determinate thoughts’ in a way that music does not.
Kant follows the still dominant doctrine of the time, for which music rep-
resents affects. Musical notes relate to affects in the same way as ‘every
expression in language has a tone which is appropriate to the sense of
the expression’, such that ‘this tone more or less designates an affect
of the speaker’ (ibid.:b 220,a 217). Perhaps somewhat surprisingly,
though, Kant thinks that music does convey aesthetic ideas. In music
the ‘form of the composition of... feelings (harmony and melody)...
serves by means of a proportioned attunement of the same... to express
the aesthetic idea of a coherent whole of an unnameable multiplicity
of thoughts’ (ibid.). This form has mathematics as its necessary, but not
sufficient, condition – musical proportions are mathematically express-
ible, but their effects on feelings are not.
Music may give the most pleasure of all the arts, because it ‘just plays
with feelings’ (ibid.:b 221,a 218), but it lacks cognitive content. As
Dahlhaus points out, this supposed lack of content derives for Kant
from his attachment to the doctrine of affects, but ‘other contents to
which music should relate as “themes” in order to arouse aesthetic
ideas and so to appear as unity are thinkable than affects’ (Dahlhaus
1988 : 54 ). Because Kant regards music as just disappearing once it
has appeared in time, he does not see how apprehending any musical
‘coherent whole’ depends precisely on the capacity to apprehend iden-
tity in difference which is the basis of his epistemology. This capacity is
common to the many ways in which we make a world from connections