Abstract

In what follows I examine the role of music in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment through a close textual reading that also takes into account the historical context in which Kant himself understood and experienced music. I ask why Kant attaches so little aesthetic value to the experience of music at precisely the moment his contemporaries begin to celebrate it. I argue that, in order to answer this question, we must recover a particular moment in the history of music and music aesthetics, in which musical experience was unthinkable without a concept of community. This moment is represented by a particular nexus of late eighteenth-century thinkers, all of whom were connected in some way to Kant: the north German Pietists, who defined the religious and intellectual climate in which Kant was educated, and Johann Friedrich Reichardt and Johann Gottfried Herder, who were Kant's contemporaries and students. In Chapters 2 and 5, I examine how community must, for these thinkers, be at the foundation of any attempt to theorize aesthetic experience, especially that of music; for it is via the community that an individual's non-conceptual experience becomes conceptual and enters into language. According to Reichardt and Herder, musical experience attains meaning as the experience of a community rather than of a single individual. In Chapters 3 and 4, I argue that, in its treatment of art, Kant's Critique of Judgment is also preoccupied with the issue of community. I suggest that Kant's problem with music is that he cannot tolerate the kind of community that it fosters; for that community is based on feeling rather than on the exchange of ideas and concepts. Through this largely historical consideration of community and aesthetic experience, I attempt to lay the theoretical foundation for an aesthetics of musical experience that can, via the community, bring feeling into the academic discourse on music