Critique de la faculte de juger de la musique

Abstract

Kant's Critique of Judgement on Music. It is well known that Kant, in his Critique of Judgement, utters an explicit and repeated negative judgement on music. There is no doubt that such a condemnation is Kant's basic attitude, and that most difficulties of his position actually concern the range of such a negative statement, as well as the way to justify it. Much less attention, however, has been given to hesitations and nuances so thoroughly that this argumentation seem to put several basic categories of Kantian theory to the test, in which lies the great importance of Kantian text for musical aesthetics. In fact, Kant seems to accomplish a sort of an eulogy of music which wouldn't pronounce itself, hidden as it is under axiological hierarchies and moral suspicions, as in a negative picture. Taking account of this complexity should allow a subtler approach of that decisive historical break between AufklA¤rung's generation and German thought of the XIXth century, either in its romantic, Hegelian, or Schopenhauerian trends. Moreover, one could say that the Critique of Judgement introduces several themes that since then have always been at the center of musical theory's concern.