Abstract

What I take to be the consummation of rhythmic music, which music parlance describes as "being in the groove", is here regarded as an experience that symbolically manifests a "highest good" which is a perennial theme in western metaphysics. This Good is a contemporaneity between terms of fundamental oppositions that constitute the human condition. From Kant's critical project, this ideal is traced from its origins in Socratic dialectic, through Schelling's principle of "Identity", and into Kierkegaard's notion of "resting transparently." Musical performance is successful, I argue, to the degree to which it manages to play this "both-at-once."