 Fred Kersten discovers in Schutz’s musical writings important philosophical insights. For instance, music and inner time unfold polythetically and cannot be grasped monothetically; that is, one must live through the unfolding of a symphony or inner experience, and any conceptual summary of their contents inevitably fails to do justice to their meaning. However, since all conceptualization consists in a monothetical grasping of polythetic stages, Schutz is actually realizing that certain dimensions of consciousness elude conceptualization and thus demarcating the limits of rationalization, just as he had pointed out how certain provinces of meaning (e.g. dreams) evade theoretic comprehension or duration eludes memory. According to Kersten, Schutz has seen clearly that the passive associations of listening (e.g. recognizing the appearance of symphonic theme) differ from those of sight (e.g., apprehending an object like a house) and that listening does not identify numerically distinct items but produces an illusion of identification. Schutz’s conclusion that sameness in music involves not numerical unity but recurrent likeness challenges the fundamental Husserlian thesis that the synthesis of passive identification is universal, at the basis of the constitution of the world.