engages more normal cognitive considerations.17 This might account
for the appearance that some rule is involved in aesthetic
matters. Our awareness of the insufficiency of our everyday
cognitive considerations, and the relationality of our evaluations
with regard to our very own perspective and feelings might seem to
explain why this aesthetic rule is not a real one: we might come
to think that idiosyncrasies in our background knowledge explain
our uncertainty with regard to judgements of taste. In effect,
however, our judgements of taste do not describe an object's
natural properties, so our uncertainty about our evaluative
judgement cannot be reduced to this acknowledgement of our merely
cognitive shortcomings. Instead, this uncertainty relates to a
different theoretical point. I will go into this later, in section
vi, which deals with the regulative and ideal nature of aesthetic
experience.
iii. Beauty's dependence on determinate concepts
According to Kant the aesthetic evaluative predicate is pure if
it is not clouded by interests, emotions or concepts, although it
may be related to them. Put differently, purity here means that in
a judgement of taste no determinate concept may be found at the
predicate place. If in specifiable ways a judgement of taste
relates to a concept determining the object, then the judgement is
dependent. The aesthetic evaluative predicate itself does not
determine its object, but expresses instead the pleasure with
which the free play of the cognitive faculties manifests itself.
We can identify this pleasure as our awareness of this free play,
and we will express it with the predicate of 'beauty'. As a
consequence every judgement of beauty must be 'pure' in the
Kantian sense.18 That is, although our discussions will concern
natural properties of the object, it is our specific, pleasant
awareness of our mental activities which we actually express in
the judgement of taste. Now if we want to prevent this
subjectivism to lapse into sheer idiosyncratic sentimentality, we
must find a way to relate this pleasant awareness to more
determinate considerations regarding the object, to the concepts
with which we determine it, i.e.
Now Ted Cohen (1990) has argued that in the case of complex works
of art (in cinema, for example) every judgement of taste is
dependent. 19 He thinks that the notion of dependent beauty can
best be understood as explaining the role played by the concept at
the subject position within the relevant proposition stating the
judgement of taste, 'X is beautiful'.20 With respect to complex
works of art, such as those of the cinema, it surely makes a
difference if one appreciates a film's plot instead of its editing
or lighting qualities.21 Now we may all agree that agreement about
the concepts with which to describe the object will deepen any
critical argument, but why is this the case? Descriptive agreement
