Syntactic composition amazes me.
The mind, in what feels like almost automatically produced movements, has a smoothness which while it can be seen as rigid (e.g., dogmatic), ultimately resists restriction.
Argumentative amelioration (i.e., a genuine concession within a debate that leads the party that conceded to rigorously reformulate their position without or with less prejudice).
The immanent relation the self holds with the world is unparalleled in its awe-inducing (some may even say sublime) brilliance.
In that truly free time I have, where I am burdened by, or almost burdened by absolutely nothing, I think about my syntax and different ways to compose sentences. My head becomes a workshop, standing on two feet.
What good music is can only be apprehended by the individual (and the individual’s mind). That you and I have different ideas of good music is even more certain than that which is self-evident. Taste, what a funny word. Ears are the oral conduit of the faculty of sensibility. We taste music, consuming it as it is immediately before us. Intuitions of music, intuitions in the Kantian sense, are that experience, that part of the manifold that, when impressed upon us and organized by the understanding through the criterion that the categories as a whole are as well as inner (time) and outer (space) sense, have the possibility to turn the manifold inward, which is to say, inside the mind, throwing all things out of the mind into the manifold. This is not to say that music induces the sleep of reason, but rather, music and reflection on it is always an internal operation, it may even be a logical operation (in the sense that logic is the understanding’s self-cognition). That music leads to internal reflection about our mind is something quite perplexing. This perplexingness is probably not only best captured by the fact that our linguistic conventions have to resort to another part of sensibility (oral sense [tasting]) to describe the intuition of music (music taste) but it is also best captured by the fact that the act by which the intuition of music is thrown at the mind (the act of speech) cannot even capture music, for it is only some music that truly “speaks to us” while other music is left in the dust, speaking nothing to us at all. Music, in fact, can induce our minds into thinking about the representation of the world and its relation to it differently. This is evident in the fact that some music “pumps us up” (raises consciousness to a higher degree?) or some music causes us to “lose ourselves in it” (we go into music, and leave the world?). But, let us not forget to restate and emphasize through this communicated repetition that music is not the sleep of reason, but rather the establishment of reason’s primacy:
The proposition of the identity of myself in everything manifold of which I am conscious is equally one lying in the concepts themselves, and hence an analytic proposition; but this identity of the subject, of which I can become conscious in every representation, does not concern the intuition of it, through which it is given as object, and thus cannot signify the identity of the person, by which would be understood the consciousness of the identity of its own substance as a thinking being in all changes of state; in order to prove that what would be demanded is not a mere analysis of the proposition “I think,” but rather various synthetic judgments grounded on the given intuition. (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B408–409)
