rule of recognition is implied, and an ability to recognize the
next instance if it should occur, but not the possibility to infer
this next instance.41 In this sense, philosophical analogies are
not constitutive, but regulative.
Now we can think of a discursive domain as being constituted by a
unique a priori principle only if it is independent from other
domains. The alleged autonomy of our discourse on aesthetic
excellence, however, is relative, because it does not imply such
independence: the aesthetic domain is connected with our knowledge
claims as it is with our actions, however problematically so. The
pleasant awareness of common sense that forms the principle of
aesthetic discourse therefore cannot be constitutive, which we
could also have derived from the fact that we cannot prove a
thing's beauty on the ground of this awareness. So the principle
of aesthetic discourse must indeed be regulative: it rests upon
the identity of aesthetic experience. In short, for aesthetic
discourse aesthetic experience itself functions as the regulative
principle.
Again, the empirically indistinct character of aesthetic
experience can, in combination with its regulative functionality,
be accounted for by taking it as functioning within aesthetic
discourse as an 'asymptotic' ideality, rather than as an
identifiable and substantial empirical event. There are two
important aspects to this ideality. On the one hand the aesthetic
experience may be an actuality for some of us at some specific
time, but even then no determinate claims as to this actuality
will provide a knock-down argument, nor will they deepen the
relevant issue. We will not be convinced of a thing's beauty by a
statement such as: "Believe you me, I had this aesthetic
experience when contemplating this object, so it must be
beautiful." Moreover, no empirical identification of the aesthetic
experience is ever going to be operable, as the symptoms of
aesthetic experience reveal an obvious vagueness.42 All this is
not accidental, but rather proves its merely regulative nature. As
such the aesthetic experience is an ideality, and may just as
well, without loss of regulative functionality, be a figment of
the imagination. On the other hand this aesthetic experience is an
idealization in that we ascribe comprehensiveness, and coherence
to it, and take it to include many important realizations, such as
our feeling of being at home in the world, in life, and amongst
other people.
In sum, the strategy yielded by this article to account for
aesthetic experience's decisive role in discourse on aesthetic
excellence is twofold: first, we must understand such discourse as
antinomic, in that for cognitive considerations to be significant
they ought to be supplemented by an experiential reflection of
these. However, secondly, this aesthetic experience is merely a
