the work but of its referring aspect as such. The excellence of a
work of art lies in what we judge to be its powers to propose to
us its referent rather than its referent; what Kant might name its
soul, or animating impact.
Let us look again at the claims that Kant associates with
aesthetic experience. The relevant aesthetic pleasure is said to
concern our common sense and the contingency of its
presupposition. The evaluation's lack of a provable, physical
necessity is what makes the awareness pleasant in the first place.
As argued above, aesthetic experience supposedly concerns the
surprise involved in our awareness of the actual, and contingent,
co-operation of our cognitive faculties with regard to some part
of the world. Perhaps then we may conceive of aesthetic excellence
as providing an experience of the central metaphysical problem of
representation, of how our symbols hook onto the world. To provide
an experiential awareness of this problematic is a big task that
we assign to aesthetic experience in aesthetic discourse; it is
too big, it seems, for any concrete empirical experience to meet.
It may be too vague as well for any experience not to meet it, and
provide us with the wanted effect. This is why we think of it as
overcoming us, if we are lucky enough; and why we think that,
notwithstanding the trouble we go through in our perceptual
contemplation, we cannot simply wring it from such contemplative
activity. At some point, to miss a singular work's aesthetic
excellence may be due to a lack of concentration by the beholder;
however, to concentrate as strenuously as one possibly can does
not guarantee its recognition. Nevertheless we do readily refer to
and firmly believe in this notion of an aesthetic appreciative
experience and think it secures such a crucial aesthetic notion as
aesthetic excellence, but also artistic creativity, style, and
authenticity (which are also examples of aesthetic antinomies). We
talk along lines which ultimately point to some aesthetic
experience, and if we want to understand such referring, a better
strategy than denying such experience's empirical reality would
lie in ascribing mere ideality to it.
vii. A regulative principle of aesthetic discourse
In keeping with the distinction Kant proposes in the Preface to
the first edition of the Critique of Judgement, in the context of
the aesthetic problematic we should now ask whether our pleasant,
aesthetic, awareness of the contingency of a presupposed common
sense should be regarded as constitutive or regulative for our
notion of aesthetic excellence.40 In his analysis of the analogies
of experience in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant accounts for the
difference between 'constitutive' and 'regulative' with the help
of a distinction between mathematical and philosophical analogies:
a mathematical analogy enables us to know a fourth member if one
knows three already, whereas in a philosophical analogy only some
