the response in question is taken to be the right one. I tend to
ascribe more depth, and more relevance for our lives' integrity to
aesthetic experience than that. In what follows we shall see where
this substantiality ends up. Secondly then, I argue that Kant can
only account for the decisive role of aesthetic experiences within
aesthetic discourse if he takes them on the one hand not as actual
empirical experiences but as ideal ones, and on the other, as
functioning regulatively for the aesthetic application of the
faculty of judgement.
Part I. Why we can argue in matters of taste
i. Common sense
According to Kant, the most crucial problem for aesthetics is the
antinomy of taste: we argue a lot about aesthetic matters, and
rightly so, but at the same time we are convinced that no
mechanical test enables us to prove a judgement of taste. Kant
argues that, if a principle of taste exists, it certainly will not
be an empirical enumeration of prevalent judgements, nor will it
be a logical principle that would enable us to prove a thing's
beauty from its properties.7 Kant's account of this antinomy of
taste starts off with an analysis of the claims that we make in
aesthetic discourse. He distinguishes pure from dependent
judgements of taste, describes the involved subjectivity in terms
of the cognitive faculties playing freely, and accounts for the
alleged universal validity of these judgements in terms of a
common sense.
Kant paradoxically takes the principle of taste to be a subjective
principle, which must be viewed as this common sense,8 which
according to Kant "... is a mere ideal norm."9 He associates this
common sense with a reasonable, and non-specific demand for
consent; it is the condition of 'communicability as such'; that
which makes us demand that other people respond to a certain
object as we did.10 At one point Kant takes the judgement of taste
to be an exemplary instance of this consent, a typical
illustration of common sense's obligatory working.11 However, he
also states that the elements of the faculty of taste laid out in
the Analytic of Beauty, such as 'disinterestedness', 'universal
though conceptless pleasure', 'purposeless finality', and
'necessity', will be united in it, and that our presupposition of
a common sense is merely an effect of the free play of the
cognitive faculties.12 So Kant on the one hand takes taste as
being a typical instance of common sense and on the other as
entailing recognition of our presupposing its existence, thus
leaving open the question of how exactly common sense relates to
the judgement of taste.
ii. Beauty's 'rule'
