MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

90 music, philosophy, and modernity

judgements to generate cognitions. Judgements of taste, in contrast,
depend on a ‘feeling which judges the object according to the purpose-
fulness of the idea (whereby an object is given) for the encouragement
of the cognitive capacity in its free play’ (Kant 1968 b:b 146,a144).
Aesthetic judgement is grounded in the difference between the object
of a judgement generating a pleasant feeling and it generating an
unpleasant one, and is therefore grounded in the subject’s nature as
a feeling being. This suggests a link between feeling and cognition,
based on the pleasure of the harmonisation of differing aspects of the
inner and outer world common both to the experience of beauty and
to cognition. Even though, Kant claims, we no longer feel any ‘notice-
able pleasure’ in the forms of order that we come to know in nature,
‘in its time there must have been some, and only because the most
common experience would not be possible without it did it gradually
mix with simple cognition and was no longer particularly noticed any
more’ (ibid.:b40,a38). Kant here wants to combine metaphysics 1
and metaphysics 2 in order to restore the kind of position we saw in the
rationalist representationalist view in thelast chapter, where there was
no separation between the two. However, he steps back from making
the connection substantial because that would extend the legislation
of the subject beyond what he thinks can be justified. The passage just
cited is one of the few where Kant addresses the idea that cognition
has a history, and that this history is linked to ‘feeling’. If it is accepted,
then, that pre-conceptual feeling is a fundamental factor in the genesis
of human forms of articulation, there are reasons for suggesting that
music, in a sense linked to Schelling’s remarks on rhythm cited above,
is inseparable from other forms of intelligibility. It is in German Ide-
alist and Romantic philosophy that the ramifications of this idea are
developed.

Feeling, music, and the origin of philosophy

Until recently early Romantic philosophy was generally assumed to be
part of the reaction to Kant inaugurated by Fichte’s version of ideal-
ism.^5 One way of understanding why there is in fact a significant divi-
sion between the Romantics and Fichte has been suggested by Manfred
Frank (Frank 1997 , 2002 ; see also Bowie 1997 , 2003 a), precisely in

5 Walter Benjamin already rejected this view in 1919 (see Bowie 1997 : ch. 8 ). For the
definitive refutation of the view, see Frank 1997.