88 music, philosophy, and modernity
something more in nature between full spontaneity and mere mecha-
nism’ (ibid.: 111 ). It should not be difficult, on the basis of the non-
conceptualised meaningfulness of the world we inhabit, to connect the
cognitive aspect of judgement to the ways in which music is understood
as possessing meaning because it affects both one’s relationship to life
and the conduct and understanding of life. Rhythm need not involve
full spontaneous conceptual awareness, relates to natural processes,
and yet is not merely mechanical. How, then, does rhythm relate to
cognition?
Kant’s account of the schemata for the pure concepts of the under-
standing might seem to be able to be connected to music only with great
difficulty, given that the realm of application of the schemata is physics.
However, some of the schemata are actually also necessary – but not
sufficient – to be able to hear music as music. If we then consider the
question of how it is that there are schemata at all, we will be led into
some of the most interesting Romantic ideas about music and philoso-
phy. The important question here is one which Kant thought he did not
need to answer because it belonged to psychology, rather than to epis-
temology, namely how do the forms of thought of the transcendental
subject come into existence?
Kant’s account of the schemata includes the following
characterisations: the schema of cause ‘consists in the succession
of the manifold to the extent to which it is subordinated to a rule’, of
reciprocity is ‘the simultaneity of the determinations of one substance
with those of the other according to a general rule’, of reality is
‘existence of a thing at a certain time’, of necessity is ‘the existence
of an object at all times’ (Kant 1968 a:b 184 ,a 145 ). Schemata
are ‘therefore nothing butdeterminations of timea priori according
to rules’ (ibid.). All these descriptions can be related to music and
rhythm. Although ‘the succession of the manifold etc.’ refers to the
fact that everything real (which for Kant is everything that is given in
perception) is followed of necessity by something else, the same idea
can apply to the linking of beats that form patterns whose rules we
can establish. Reciprocity is meant to refer to Newton’s laws, but at a
more metaphorical level, its schema could be applied to harmony, in
which one pitch interacts with related simultaneous pitches according
to rules. The schemata of reality and necessity both involve ways in
which objects are intelligible in relation to time, and many musical
phenomena depend on differentiations between things that pertain
at one time and those that pertain at all times. Most obviously, the