86 music, philosophy, and modernity
which ‘negate the negation’ which is unidirectional sequential time –
that is, time where each moment ‘destroys’ what precedes it – by recall-
ing past events and anticipating future events. Only by hearing the
repetition of a beat as part of a rhythmic whole of some kind, which
requires this kind of negation of sequential time, can music be heard
as music at all. Diminishing music’s importance because of its temporal
nature is characteristic of many philosophical positions. It is the early
German Romantics who first begin to see the relationship between phi-
losophy and temporality in new ways, which are influenced by music and
which in turn influence music (see Hoecker 2002 ). One consequence
of the Romantics’ new evaluation of temporality via music will be that
it puts in question an exclusive concern with timeless philosophical
truths.
Elsewhere in his work Kant offers ways of thinking about these issues
that illuminate the issue of music, but does not himself make the con-
nection to music.^4 In the first Critique the capacity of the understanding
to produce cognitions depends on its negating, by schematism, the time
that separates two intuitions. More obviously, elsewhere in the third Cri-
tique, Kant explicitly uses vocabulary derived from music to explain
how it is that different individuals can communicate cognitions to
each other. He talks of a ‘common sense’, of the kind ‘required for
the universal communicability of a feeling’, as ‘the necessary condition
of the universal communicability of our cognition’ (Kant 1968 b:b66).
This communicability relies on the ‘tuning/attunement’ (‘Stimmung’)
of the cognitive powers, which is differently ‘proportioned’, depending
on the object in question, and which ‘can only be determined by feel-
ing (not by concepts)’ (ibid.). The echoes here of his remarks on the
musical idea of a coherent whole are unmistakable, but his strictures
on music mean that the two passages do not result in an account of the
philosophical status of the musical. The radical – Romantic – version
of what I want to consider here will be that Kant’s remarks in this and
some other locations can be construed as making the ‘musical’ into the
ground of cognition. The most obvious historical example of the kind
of attunement of feeling that would make sense of Kant’s remarks is that
occasioned by the organisation of pitched sounds in a musical system.
Such sounds are non-conceptual, but they rely for their intelligibility on
4 One of the few people to explore the links of Kant to music in this respect is Gilles Deleuze
in lectures on Kant to be found at http://www.webdeleuze.com. My thanks to Christine Battersby
for pointing this out to me.