rhythm and romanticism 87the same kind of operations as those involved in conceptual thought,
as well as relying on a shared feeling in different subjects. How, then, is
this link between the musical and the cognitive to be established?
In a phrase which we shall consider in more detail in chapter 9
Adorno characterises music as ‘the logic of judgementless synthesis’ (Adorno
1993 : 32 ). Music is judgementless because its synthesis of elements does
not require ‘predication, subordination, subsumption’ (ibid.) in the
way that cognitive judgements do. Patterns of identity and difference
constitute music’s ‘logic’, but these do not result in classifying assertions.
The question is how, in the light of the reversal we have adopted from
Schlegel, this intelligibility is talked about in philosophy. One of Kant’s
greatest difficulties in his account of the understanding’s generation
of classifying assertions lies in explaining how pure concepts of the
understanding can be applied to empirical intuitions, given that they
are of a different order from each other. How do the two harmonise so
that we can think it appropriate to apply structuring notions deriving
from the identifying activity of thought to the contingent effects of
nature on our perceptual apparatus? His much criticised answer is that
the ‘schema’ bridges the two sources of cognition. There would seem
therefore to be a connection between the schema and the aesthetic
idea: both connect the sensuous and the intelligible, and both involve
non-conceptual intelligibility.
David Bell maintains with regard to schematism’s role in Kant’s con-
ception of judgement ‘That our thought conform to the rules, prin-
ciples, concepts and criteria constitutive of objectivity, but that it also
be grounded in a spontaneous, blind subjective awareness of intrinsic
but inarticulable meaning – these are not conflicting requirements’
(Bell 1987 : 241 ). The interesting question, as Heidegger realises, is
how objectivity, the realm of metaphysics 1 , relates to non-conceptual
meaning, which is part of metaphysics 2 :isitdependent on it? If it
is, the scientistic vision of a law-bound explanation of cognition dis-
solves, because it cannot account for how it is that what we know
is intelligible in the first place. Schematism is intended by Kant to
account for the fact that we do not encounter an empiricist world of
unconceptualised sense-data that are then built into coherent ideas,
but rather encounter a world which is pre-conceptually intelligible.
Charles Taylor describes what is at issue here as follows: ‘We are able
to form conceptual beliefs guided by our surroundings, because we
live in a pre-conceptual engagement with these that involves under-
standing’ (Smith 2002 : 114 ). This ability indicates that ‘There is