MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

96 music, philosophy, and modernity

the human race is the only means of fixing thoughts and dissemi-

nating them’ (ibid.: 16 ). Dewey suggests the scope of this idea when

he maintains that ‘a common interest in rhythm is still the tie which

holds science and art in kinship’ (Dewey 1980 : 150 ). At one level

the argument would seem to be about the genesis of thoughts in

general, but the specific aspect which gives rise to philosophy is that

rhythm involvesboththe ‘incomprehensible infinity’ which can merely

result in an endless chaos of feelings,andthat which is able to fix a

world which has stable elements. It is the combination of expansive

energy and forms of limitation which makes rhythm essential to what

becomes philosophy, and to the more general change in the percep-

tion of the relationship between music and philosophy in Schlegel’s

time.

What sort of claim is involved in this account of the origin of philoso-

phy and Orphism in ancient Greece? Is it merely a piece of speculative

anthropology? In some senses it clearly is, but the point in relation to

the issues we considered in Kant’s idea of schematism should be clear.

It is the intelligibility of the repetitions which rhythmically structure

feeling that enables determinate, communicable thoughts to develop.

In this respect it makes sense to say that the musical can be construed

as at least a source of cognition.^10 Rhythm entails what Bell termed

‘a spontaneous, blind subjective awareness of intrinsic but inarticula-

ble meaning’. It can also be seen as linked to mathematics, and this is

the probable source of Schlegel’s claim that ‘One has tried for so long

to apply mathematics to music and painting; now try it the other way

round’ (Schlegel 1988 : 5 , 41 ) that I used to initiate the idea of inverting

the music/philosophy relationship.

Music as ‘philosophical language’

Part of Kant’s enterprise was to explain what made the synthetic a pri-

ori propositions of mathematics possible. If mathematics is based on

the ability to differentiate and identify, the question of how this ability

itself came about also demands an answer. In Kant’s terms the answer

has to do with the categories, which are assumed to be functions of the

spontaneity of the transcendental subject. The categories rely on the

10 Schlegel makes it very clear, incidentally, that music in the developed aesthetic sense,
which culminates in the rise of the idea of absolute music and in the Viennese classical
tradition, takes a great deal longer to emerge than what he means in the passages cited.