rhythm and romanticism 89description ‘determinations of timea priori according to rules’ could
itself be a description of rhythm. Rhythm is not a natural phenomenon
that we apprehend empirically, because even the linking of moments
of a rhythmic pattern in nature depends upon the a priori capacity
for synthesis. Do we, then, need the category of unity to apprehend
rhythm, which raises the problem of just how the transcendental
subject relates to the empirical subject, or is the concrete experience
of rhythm that is made possible by schematism actually part of what
enables such abstract forms as the category of unity to develop at
all? It can be argued that we live in a world which is rhythmically
structured and that the ways in which we then use rhythm as part of
thinking derive from the immediate experience of rhythm as part of
what it is to be in a world. The contemporary pragmatist idea that it
is impossible to establish a clear demarcation between scheme and
content in cognition suggests that we have to see these factors as
always already connected to each other as part of being in a world.
If this is the case, the philosophical version of the issue proposed
by Kant can be questioned in terms of the role of the musical in
world-making.
The questions just suggested are clearly quite metaphorical if taken
within the context of the first Critique. However, if one asks why these
pre-conceptual forms of apprehension develop at all, the issue starts
to look like more than just a rather speculative analogy. What one
is looking at are Taylor’s forms of ‘preconceptual engagement’ with
the world. Dewey maintains that ‘What is not so generally perceived is
that every uniformity and regularity of change in nature is a rhythm.
The terms “natural law” and “natural rhythm” are synonymous’ (Dewey
1980 : 149 ). In Kant’s transcendental account we begin with what is
actual – knowledge in the sciences, and look for what makes it possible –
necessary forms of thought. This takes place in terms of operations of
the mind. The Idealist and Romantic thinkers who respond to Kant
seek, in the manner suggested by Taylor, to locate the mind in a world
from which is not topically separate by concentrating on the ways in
which we actively engage with the world. Why should the mind involve
what Kant tries to theorise in terms of the schema? As we saw, the
schema shares with the aesthetic idea the role of connecting the sensu-
ous and the intelligible, and both involve pre-conceptual ways in which
the world coheres.
Aesthetic ideas depend on the power of judgement, which links the
imagination and the understanding, and schematism is required for