ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how "tone", "modulation", and "sensation" relate to each other and how they fit alongside the other elements of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment. The very notion of modus aestheticus, an "aesthetic mode" of presenting an object, literally conjoins the final two terms of the trilogy tone-modulation-sensation. The first sentence that begins the dense passage draws on the relationship between tone and modulation. The notion of a "tone" derives from the Greek tonos, literally a chord that was "stretched" to produce a given pitch and timbre. One philosophical question raised by Kant's notion of tone is how to address a kind of perceptual form that, unlike spatio-temporal intuition, is obviously defeasible and contingent and thus open to criticism and reconsideration. A clue to a distinctively Kantian answer comes when he pairs "tone" with "modulation". The term "mode" for Kant has a specific meaning, which is detailed on several occasions in the "Lectures on Logic".
