82 music, philosophy, and modernity
identification, which is a necessary part of what generates significance,
relate to music?
The central factor here is rhythm. John Dewey says inArt as Expe-
riencethat in the course of human development ‘Man no longer con-
formed his activities of necessity to the rhythmic changes of nature’s
cycles, but used those which necessity forced upon him to celebrate
his relations to nature as if she had conferred upon him the freedom
of her realm’ (Dewey 1980 : 148 ). The genesis of freedom out of the
awareness of necessity is the key idea here. One of the first people to
see why was Schelling, who connects rhythm directly to philosophy in
his 1802 – 3 Philosophy of Art.InSchelling’s terms rhythm need not be
only acoustically manifested, and can be part of any kind of meaningful
articulation. Music’s essence is rhythm, the ‘imprinting of unity into
multiplicity’ (Schelling 1856 – 61 :i/ 5 , 492 ), so even harmony can be
conceived of as ‘rhythmically’ based. The idea of the unification of a
multiplicity of elements is familiar in the aesthetics of classicism from
the end of the seventeenth century onwards (see, e.g., Baeumler 1967 ),
but Schelling points in a different direction. He talks of rhythm as ‘the
transformation of a succession which is in itself meaningless into a sig-
nificant one’ (ibid.: 493 ), and it is the idea of the initially meaningless
nature of the succession of phenomena that is decisive. Why does the
linking of different phenomena give rise to significance at all? The key
factors here are ( 1 ) the differentiated moments, and ( 2 ) that in relation
to which they are both different and unified, which must itself remain
the same between the different moments. This combination of identity
and difference involves both the idea that rhythm is itself meaningful,
because of the ways in which it can be related to other aspects of the
world, and the capacity to be aware of identity in multiplicity, that is, to
apprehend rhythm as rhythm and be able consciously to produce and
modify it. The latter, reflective awareness takes rhythm beyond what
is present in phenomena like repeated animal cries that may be per-
ceived as rhythmic, but which need involve no more than mere instinc-
tual repetition. In this sense awareness of rhythm is proto-conceptual
- and this will mean that it relates to what Kant calls schematism. The
key question will be whether schematism is required for rhythm, or
whether rhythm is required for schematism, or whether this is a false
alternative.
Questions concerning the relationship between identity and dif-
ference which appear in Schelling’s description of rhythm are
fundamental to Kant’s account of cognition, and thence to a whole