3 Rhythm and Romanticism
What Kant said about music, and what he could have saidIn Kant’s transcendental philosophy the realm of objectivity is consti-
tuted by necessary forms of thought which organise data received from
the world into judgements. In some still disputed sense this means
that the thinking subject is the source of the world’s intelligibility. J. G.
Hamann’s objection to Kant was that all forms of thought depend on
natural languages acquired from the external world. His objection shifts
the issue of the world’s intelligibility towards the kind of questions we
considered in thelast chapter, not least towards the question of the
origin of language. Language, rather than the mind, is seen as the con-
stitutive factor in ‘world-making’, but it is not clear how it is that lan-
guage itself comes to exist in the first place, unless, as Hamann does,
one argues for a divine origin. The problem of the origin of language
is, as we have seen, one of the sources of music being regarded as the
transition between the non-semantic and the semantic. How, then, does
music relate both to Kant’s idea of necessary forms of thought and to
the linguistic critique of Kant? Responses to this question offer ways
of understanding the particular role of music in German Romantic
philosophy, as well as having resonances for contemporary philosophy.
The major factor here is the ‘in-between’ nature of both language
and music that was touched on by Herder in his remarks on hearing as
the mediator between feeling and vision. Because of its connection to
feeling, music relates to the inner nature of the subject; it also, though,
exists as a socially produced object with perceptible, physical properties.
In turn, the physical object, qua intentional object possessing meaning,
affects the inner nature of the subject. The two sides must be connected
if any sense is to be made of music at all. This connection also affects the
79