role, some of its aspects other than its mere activity must be
what makes us decide that we are confronted with a beautiful
object.
Now Kant also states that the faculty of judgement in the
aesthetic mode of estimating functions ...
"... merely to perceiving the adequacy of the representation for
engaging both faculties of knowledge in their freedom in an
harmonious (subjectively-final) employment, i.e. to feeling with
pleasure the subjective bearings of the representation."25
Apparently he thinks that it is "The feeling of pleasure or
displeasure [which] denotes nothing in the object..." which makes
the notion of the free play of the cognitive faculties function
decisively.26 The pleasure regarding the subjective bearings of
the representation, regarding, i.e., the free play of the
cognitive faculties, must be taken as the awareness that settles
our aesthetic judgement. The same ambiguity may seem to threaten
here: this pleasure, however, is not so much an intentional
activity as a specific awareness of one, a specific way in which
we are affected by sensation, imagination and understanding. The
very same ambiguity reappears in Kant's notion of inner sense, and
it seems to derive from his distinction between transcendental
idealism and empirical realism. Evidently, I cannot go further
into these matters here, but propose instead a temporary way out
through Kant's definition of 'pleasure' (in par. 10).27 This
definition is of great interest here, since it is nominal and does
not describe an allegedly substantial experience:
"The consciousness of the causality of a representation in respect
of the state of the Subject as one tending to preserve a
continuance of that state, may here be said to denote in a general
way what is called pleasure."28
'Pleasure' then should instead be taken here as an adverbial
determination of the involved awareness of the free play of the
cognitive faculties. So it is not the perceptual and imaginative
activity concerning the object but rather the pleasant awareness
of such free activities that constitutes our judgement of taste.29
For a judgement of taste the subjective feeling of pleasure or
displeasure is the very manner in which our inner sense
'correctly' receives the aesthetic excellence of an object.30 We
recognize it because we want to carry on with the involved free
play.
More and more the question surfaces what exactly the free play of
the cognitive faculties amounts to. How better to understand what
is involved in it than by referring for a moment towards its
subject matter, beauty. Kant characterizes beauty as the
