Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci.

39 (2008) 483–494

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Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci.

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The psychology of Kant’s aesthetics

Paul Guyer
Department of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania, 433 Claudia Cohen Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Keywords: Contrary to both his own intentions and the views of both older and more recent commentators, I argue
Alexander Gerard that Kant’s aesthetics remains within the confines of eighteenth-century aesthetics as a branch of empir-
Henry Home, Lord Kames ical psychology, as it was then practiced. Kant established a plausible connection between aesthetic expe-
Immanuel Kant rience and judgment on the one hand and cognition in general on the other, through his explanatory
Beauty
concept of the free play of our cognitive powers. However, there is nothing distinctly ‘a priori’ or ‘tran-
Taste
Free play of the cognitive powers
scendental’ in his claim that this state of mind is what causes our pleasure in beauty or other aesthetic
properties. Nor did Kant establish a genuinely a priori or transcendental principle that all human beings
have the same disposition to experience a free play of their cognitive powers, let alone in response to the
same objects. This failure, however, in no way limits the continuing significance of Kant’s aesthetic
theory.
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1. The psychology of Kant’s aesthetics: transcendental or we endorse the transcendental perspective of the third Critique.
empirical? For its specificity lays in a transcendental a priori principle, not
in a metaphysical or a psychological difference between ani-
Should Kant’s theory of beauty, sublimity, and taste be consid- mals, human beings, and pure spirits. (Nuzzo, 2006, p. 590)
ered a continuation of the eighteenth-century and especially Brit-
But are they right?
ish exploration of these topics as part of empirical psychology—
There can be no doubt that the claim that Kant’s aesthetics is a
the approach that David Hume, for example, had in mind when
genuine part of his transcendental psychology and not mere
he wrote that ‘criticism’, along with logic, morals, and politics, is
empirical psychology has Kant’s own authority behind it. Kant’s
part of the ‘science of man’, the ‘only solid foundation’ for which
own transition from the position that aesthetics is part of merely
‘itself must be laid on experience and observation’ (Hume, 2000,
empirical psychology to the position that it has a priori principles
p. 4)—or does it employ a different approach that can only be
that entitle it to transcendental status is evident in a series of com-
understood as part of a genuinely ‘transcendental’ psychology?
ments from the first edition of the Critique of pure reason to the sec-
Distinguished commentators have believed the latter; for example,
ond edition of the Critique of the power of judgment. In a footnote to
half a century ago Ernst Cassirer praised Kant for accomplishing a
the ‘Transcendental aesthetic’ in the 1781 first edition of the first
‘transition from the psychological to the transcendental approach’
Critique, Kant wrote that Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s coinage
in aesthetics, in spite of that fact that ‘In no other field’ was this
of the term ‘aesthetics’ represented a ‘failed hope . . . of bringing
transition ‘so hard to realize and burdened with so many system-
the critical estimation of the beautiful under principles of reason,
atic difficulties as in that of the fundamental problems of aesthet-
and elevating its rules to a science’. Such an effort is doomed, Kant
ics’ (Cassirer, 1951, p. 298), while most recently Angelica Nuzzo
explained,
has written that
For the putative rules or criteria are merely empirical as far as
Kant’s fundamental claim is that taste can indeed be seen as rep-
their sources are concerned, and can therefore never serve as
resenting an independent sphere of experience . . . if, and only if,
a priori rules according to which our judgment of taste must

E-mail address: pguyer@phil.upenn.edu

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doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2008.09.010
484 P. Guyer / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 483–494
be directed, rather the latter constitutes the genuine touchstone
for the correctness of the former. (Kant, 1998, p. 156; A 21)1
For the 1787 second edition, however, Kant modified this clear
relegation of judgments of taste and their rules to the empirical
domain with the less commital statement that
the putative rules or criteria [for judgments of taste] are merely
empirical as far as their <most prominent> sources are con-
cerned, and can therefore never serve as <determinate> a priori
rules according to which our judgment of taste must be direc-
ted. (Kant, 1998, p. 173; B 35)
It is not clear what Kant’s first modification is supposed to mean,
but the second certainly leaves room for the view that although aes-
thetics can never furnish determinate rules for the judgment of par-
ticular objects—a position that Kant would never abandon—it does
yield some sort of indeterminate rules for the judgment of objects
that are in some way a priori and therefore cannot be grounded in
any merely empirical ‘experience and observation’ of human psy-
chology, but must have some sort of transcendental foundation.
And then by the time he published the Critique of the power of judg-
ment in 1790, Kant was clearly committed to the view that aesthet-
ics does have a priori principles that cannot be grounded in any sort
of empirical psychology. In the opening paragraphs of the work,
Kant states that
those judgings that are called aesthetic, which concern the
beautiful and the sublime in nature or in art . . . although by
themselves they contribute nothing at all to the cognition of
things, still . . . belong to the faculty of cognition alone, and
demonstrate [beweisen] an immediate relation of this faculty
to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure in accordance with
some a priori principle. (Kant, 2000, p. 57; CPJ, Preface, 5:169)
In a later section that defends the thesis that ‘No objective principle
of taste is possible’, Kant maintains that although Hume was correct
to claim that as far as particular judgments of taste are concerned,
‘although critics . . . can reason more plausibly than cooks, they still
suffer the same fate as them’,2 namely that they ‘cannot expect a
determining ground for their judgments from proofs’, nevertheless
Hume was wrong to conclude that aesthetics (‘criticism’) can only
be part of an empirical science of man. Rather, Kant argues, although
‘Criticism, as an art, merely seeks to apply the physiological (here
psychological) and hence empirical rules, according to which taste
actually proceeds to the judging of its objects (without reflecting
on its possibility)’, his own account of the very possibility of judg-
ments of taste that are universally valid even though they can nei-
ther depend upon nor yield determinate rules about conditions
under which particular objects are always beautiful or sublime, is
a ‘science’ that ‘derives the possibility of such a judging from the
nature of this faculty [that is, taste] as a faculty of cognition in gen-
eral’, a ‘transcendental critique’ that ‘should develop and justify the
subjective principle of taste as an a priori principle of the power of
judgment’ (Kant, 2000, p. 166; CPJ, §34, 5:285–286). And on the sub-
ject of the sublime, Kant states that his ‘transcendental exposition of
aesthetic judgments . . . can be compared with the physiological
exposition’—indeed, in the first edition of the third Critique he wrote
‘psychological exposition’—‘as it has been elaborated by a Burke and
many acute men among us, in order to see where a merely empirical
exposition of the sublime and the beautiful would lead’. Where
1
Citations from the Critique of pure reason are from the translation by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Kant, 1998), and use the pagination of the first (‘A’) and/or second (‘B’)
edition. Translations from the Critique of the power of judgment are from the translation by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Kant, 2000) and use Kant’s section numbers and the
pagination from the Academy edition (Kant 1900–), Volume 5, with the abbreviation CPJ. Quotations from the Critique of practical reason (CPracR) and the Metaphysics of morals
(MM) are from Kant (1996). Quotations from Kant’s Reflexionen (R) are from Kant (2005). Kant’s emphasis is rendered with boldface type, corresponding to his use of Fettdruck; his
use of Roman type for what he regarded as Lehnwörter is rendered with italics. Other uses of italics are for my own emphasis.
2
Kant refers to a remark in Hume’s essay ‘The sceptic’, in Hume (1987), p. 163.
such an approach would lead, Kant continues, is to ‘psychological
remarks’ that are ‘extremely fine, and provide rich materials for
the favorite researches of empirical psychology’, but not to genu-
ine judgments of taste that can ‘command’ the assent of others, for
these ‘must be grounded in some sort of a priori principle (whether
objective or subjective), which one can never arrive at by scouting
about among empirical laws of the alteration of the mind’ (Kant,
2000, pp. 158–159; CPJ, General Remark following §29, 5:277–
278). And these are just a sample of Kant’s claims on behalf of his
own approach.
So there can be no question that Kant himself thought that he
had discovered an a priori and transcendental method for aesthetics
that is different from the method of empirical psychology employed
by Hume, Burke, and many others among his ‘acute’ contemporar-
ies. My question is rather whether Kant was right to think that he
had succeeded in grounding aesthetics in some sort of transcenden-
tal rather than empirical psychology. My answer is that he was not
right to think so, and that, at least so far as they are plausible, the
central concepts and claims of Kant’s aesthetics remain within the
confines of eighteenth-century aesthetics as a branch of empirical
psychology. I will argue that Kant established a plausible connec-
tion between aesthetic experience and judgment on the one hand,
and cognition in general on the other, by tracing our pleasure in aes-
thetic experiences to a free play between the cognitive faculties of
imagination and understanding in the case of the beautiful, or
imagination and reason in the case of the sublime. I will also argue
that he showed that such experiences could include play with
concepts, notably moral concepts, that are on Kant’s own account
a priori, without sacrificing what makes them uniquely aesthetic.
In addition, however, I will argue that there is nothing distinctively
a priori or transcendental in Kant’s claim that the free play of these
powers is what causes our pleasure in the beautiful or the sublime. I
thus suggest that this thesis itself can only be understood as a piece
of empirical psychology, and that Kant does not succeed in estab-
lishing as a genuine a priori or transcendental principle the under-
lying assumption of judgments of taste that all human beings have
the same disposition to experience a free play of their cognitive
powers, let alone in regard to particular objects. Kant translates
concepts of eighteenth-century aesthetics into his own distinctive
language and refines them, but does not transform eighteenth-cen-
tury aesthetics from empirical into transcendental psychology.
I argue for this conclusion in three steps. First, I consider some
examples of eighteenth-century conceptions of aesthetic experi-
ence that are clearly similar to Kant’s, but equally clearly make
no pretensions to being anything but empirical, and then I argue
that Kant’s pre-critical theory of aesthetic response, while intro-
ducing the key concepts of his mature view, does not differ in
method from these other eighteenth-century theories (Sections 2
and 3). Second, I examine Kant’s mature accounts of our experi-
ences of beauty in nature and art and of sublimity chiefly in nature,
showing that while they involve faculties that in other contexts
Kant held to employ a priori concepts and principles, there is no
fundamental difference between Kant’s accounts of these aesthetic
experiences and accounts by others, including that of his earlier
self—and thus that there is nothing essentially a priori and tran-
scendental about Kant’s model (Section 4). Finally, I argue that
Kant is not entitled to his claim that there is an underlying princi-
ple for judgments of taste that is essentially a priori and thus be-
longs to transcendental rather than empirical psychology
 P. Guyer / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 483–494
(Section 5). I conclude by briefly suggesting that the enduring
interest of Kant’s aesthetics is in no way diminished by the rejec-
tion of its putatively transcendental status (Section 6).
2. Empirical theories of aesthetic experience
In this section I present a few examples of eighteenth-century
analyses of our experiences of the beautiful and the sublime that
made no pretense to being anything but empirical.
Let us consider the case of the beautiful first. The heart of Kant’s
mature theory of the judgment of the beautiful is that the mental
state that grounds such a judgment is an activity of the free play
of the imagination with the forms intuited in the reception or cre-
ation of an object which is in some way harmonious with the
understanding’s demand for unity in experience in general. The
pleasure in our experience of a beautiful object
can express nothing but its suitability to the cognitive faculties
that are in play in the reflecting power of judgment, insofar as
they are in play . . . For that apprehension of forms in the imag-
ination can never take place without the reflecting power of
judgment, even if unintentionally, at least comparing them to
its faculty for relating intuitions to concepts. (Kant, 2000, p.
76; CPJ, Introduction, §VII, 5: 189–190)
The idea of aesthetic experience as an activity of the mind playing
with represented forms of objects was hardly original to Kant, but
was common among the British aestheticians who clearly intended
their theories of beauty and taste to be part of their empirical sci-
ence of man, and entered Germany through their influence.
Two British theorists whose works Kant knew well and men-
tioned often in his lectures on anthropology, a major source for
the development of his aesthetics, are the Scots Alexander Gerard
and Henry Home, Lord Kames. Gerard’s Essay on taste won the prize
of the Edinburgh Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Sciences,
Manufactures, and Agriculture in 1757, was published in 1759 with
translations of essays on taste by Voltaire, D’Alembert and Monte-
squieu appended, and translated into German in 1766 (Gerard,
1759, 1766). Kames’s Elements of criticism was first published in
1762, and by 1763 had enjoyed both a second edition (the first of
many further editions) as well as the first volume of a German trans-
lation, the latter completed in 1766, the same year as the publication
of the translated Gerard.3 Gerard ‘resolves’ taste into the ‘simple prin-
ciples’ of the sense or taste of novelty, sublimity, beauty, imitation,
harmony, oddity and ridicule, and virtue (Gerard, 1759, p. iii). He be-
gins his discussion of the sense of novelty with the claim that ‘We have
a pleasant sensation, whenever the mind is in a lively and elevated
temper’, and ascribes such a ‘temper’ to the activity of the mind when
it overcomes some sort of difficulty or other: the mind
attains this temper, when it is forced to exert its activity, and
put forth its strength, in order to surmount any difficulty: and
if is efforts prove successful, consciousness of the success
inspires new joy. Hence moderate difficulty, such as exercises
the mind, without fatiguing it, is pleasant, and renders the
object by which it is produced agreeable. (Gerard, 1759, Pt. I,
§I, pp. 3–4)
The pleasure of novelty arises when we make new discoveries in
‘study and investigation of every kind’, even when that may require
considerable effort (ibid., p. 5). The sense of beauty is more com-
plex. ‘Beautiful objects’, Gerard writes, ‘are of different kinds, and
produce pleasure by means of different principles of human nature’
3
Kames (1762); I cite the recent edition of Kames’s sixth edition (Kames, 2005 [1785]). The first edition of the German translation was by J. H. N. Meinhard, in three volumes
(Kames, 1763–1766), with a revised edition in 1772.
485
(ibid., §III, p. 31). As his division of taste into several simple princi-
ples has already shown, Gerard sees no need to reduce all aesthetic
experiences to any single phenomenon. For our purposes, we will
not need to consider all the kinds of beauty he recognizes, but
can focus on the ‘first species’ of beauty, belonging ‘to objects pos-
sessed of uniformity, variety, and proportion’, each of which qualities
by itself ‘pleases in some degree’ while ‘all of them united give
exquisite satisfaction’. What is relevant for us is that each of these
varieties and subvarieties of experience of beauty is explained by
an appeal to a kind of free yet harmonious mental activity. Thus,
our pleasure in uniformity and simplicity is due to ‘Facility in the
conception of an object’, in which
the mind thinks well of itself, when it is able to form it’s concep-
tion without pain or labour . . . Objects endued with these qual-
ities enter easily into the mind: they do not distract our
attention, or hurry us too fast from one scene to another: the
view of a part suggests the whole, and, impelling the mind to
imagine the rest, produces a grateful exertion of its energy.
(Ibid., pp. 31–32)
The words are not exactly the same as Kant’s, to be sure, but several
elements of Kant’s conception of the free and harmonious play of
imagination and understanding are already suggested here: the
easy entrance of qualities into the mind, like Kant’s unintentional
comparison; the imagination of a whole that is intimated rather
than directly given; and the pleasing exertion of the mind. Similarly,
when Gerard describes the beauty of variety that complements the
beauty of uniformity, which, ‘when perfect and unmixed, is apt to
pall upon the sense, to grow languid, and to sink the mind into an
uneasy state of indolence’ (could this be the source for Kant’s
description of what happens when beauty is too regular, as in Mars-
den’s Sumatran pepper garden? (See Kant, 2000, p. 126; CPJ, General
Remark following §22, 5:243), what he says is that ‘as our ideas vary
in passing from the contemplation of one part to that of another[,
t]his transition puts the mind in action, and gives it employment,
the consciousness of which is agreeable’ (Gerard, 1759, pp. 33–
34). Here Gerard describes the mind’s sense of its own activity in
passing freely from the contemplation of one part of an object to an-
other as a source of our pleasure in its beauty.
Gerard does not explicitly describe his own methodology as
that of empirical psychology, but in the train of Hume’s ‘science
of man’ did not need to. Kames, who was instrumental in setting
the essay question for the Edinburgh Society and awarding Gerard
the prize, does not use this terminology either, but his empiricist
methodology is evident in the language of tracing natural connec-
tions in which he describes his project:
The design of the present undertaking, which aspires not to
morality, is, to examine the sensitive branch of human nature,
to trace the objects that are naturally agreeable, as well as those
that are naturally disagreeable; and by these means to discover,
if we can, what are the genuine principles of the fine arts.
(Kames, 2005 [1775], Original Introduction, Vol. I, p. 14)
Within this framework, Kames describes the paradigmatic aesthetic
‘pleasures of the eye and the ear’ as mediating or effecting a har-
mony between our lower and higher cognitive powers. These
pleasures,
being . . . elevated above those of the other external senses,
acquire so much dignity as to become a laudable entertainment.
They are not, however, set on a level with the purely intellec-
tual; being no less inferior in dignity to intellectual pleasures,
486 P. Guyer / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 483–494

than superior to the organic or corporeal . . . Their mixt nature
and middle place between organic and intellectual plesures,
qualify them to associate with both: beauty heightens all the
organic feelings, as well as the intellectual: harmony, though
it aspires to enflame devotion, disdains not to improve the rel-
ish of a banquet. (Ibid., p. 12)
The conception of the experience of beauty as harmonizing different
cognitive capacities is certainly present within empiricist
aesthetics.
The foundation of Kames’s aesthetic theory is the idea that a
person is always conscious of a ‘continued train of perceptions
and ideas passing in his mind’ (ibid., Ch. I, Vol. I, p. 21); that this
train of ideas is often stimulated and directed by objects without
any activity on the part of the person who experiences it, but that
the train of ideas can also be directed in various ways by that per-
son; that pleasure arises when the train is orderly and connected;
and that works of art in particular—art rather than nature is the
primary focus of Kames’s ‘criticism’—please when the train of ideas
they stimulate is conformable to the mind’s own tendency to or-
derly trains of ideas. Kames describes the mind as active in follow-
ing our orderly trains of ideas and in finding order in pleasing
works of art. First, Kames describes the pleasure that we take in ac-
tively tracing or following natural connections:
The principle of order is conspicuous with respect to natural
operations; for it always directs our ideas in the order of nature;
thinking upon a body in motion, we follow its natural course; the
mind falls with a heavy body, descends with a river, and ascends
with flame and smoke; in tracing out a family, we incline to
begin at the founder, and to descend gradually to his latest pos-
terity . . . (Ibid., p. 25; my emphasis)
This is a clearly description of unintentional but orderly mental
activity, finding connection and harmony among ideas and objects
without consciously subjecting them to any rule. Kames then lo-
cates beauty in art in its satisfaction of this disposition toward unin-
tentional yet orderly mental activity:
Every work of art that is conformable to the natural course of
our ideas, is so far agreeable; and every work of art that reverses
that course, is so far disagreeable. Hence it is required in every
such work, that, like an organic system, its parts be orderly
arranged and mutually connected, bearing each of them a rela-
tion to the whole, some more intimate, some less, according to
their destination: when due regard is had to these particulars,
we have a sense of just composition, and so far are pleased with
the performance. (Ibid., p. 27)
Kames describes beautiful nature as that with the sight or sound of
which our minds can play freely yet harmoniously, and beautiful art
as that which stimulates the mind to the same kind of pleasing
activity as beautiful nature does.
We can also find descriptions of the experience of the sublime
in Gerard and Kames that anticipate aspects of Kant’s account
while remaining firmly within the domain of empirical psychology.
Gerard describes the experience of sublimity thus:
We always contemplate objects and ideas with a disposition
similar to their nature. When a large object is presented, the
mind expands itself to the extent of that object, and is filled
with one grand sensation, which totally possessing it, composes
it into a solemn sedateness, and strikes it with a deep silent
wonder and admiration: it finds such a difficulty in spreading
itself to the dimensions of its object, as enlivens and invigorates
its frame: and having overcome the opposition which this occa-
sions, it . . . feels a noble pride, and entertains a lofty conception
of its own capacity. (Gerard, 1759, Pt. I, §II, p. 14)
In this paragraph, Gerard describes the mind as active in the expe-
rience of the sublime, as overcoming in some way the difficulty of
grasping the vast dimensions of the object of its experience, and
as feeling a pride in its own capacity to do this. He also describes
the tone of the mind’s feeling in all of this as one of solemn admi-
ration rather than grateful pleasure, the sorts of terms that Gerard
used in his account of the experience of beauty. Gerard’s account
parallels Kant’s in both its description of the mind as overcoming
an initial obstacle in an effort at comprehending or grasping an ob-
ject and its claim that the satisfaction in the sublime is qualitatively
different from the more straightforward or simpler pleasure in the
beautiful. But in spite of these similarities, there can be no question
that Gerard’s account is meant to be strictly empirical.
Kames’s account of ‘Grandeur and sublimity’ could well have
been a source for Kant’s account, since he uses the same examples
that Kant was subsequently to use: ‘Thus St. Peter’s church at
Rome, the great pyramid of Egypt, the Alps towering above the
clouds, a great arm of the sea, and above all a clear and serene
sky, are grand’ (Kames, 2005 [1775], Ch. IV, Vol. I, p. 151).4 How-
ever, although many authors before Kames had used the terms
‘grand’ and ‘sublime’ interchangeably, Kames uses them to mark a
distinction that neither his predecessors nor Kant made: for Kames,
sublimity refers to the sheer magnitude of objects, while an object ‘is
not termed grand . . . unless, together with its size, it be possessed of
other qualities that contribute to beauty, such a regularity, propor-
tion, order, or colour’, and in fact St. Peter’s and the pyramids are
called grand because they have such properties in addition to their
magnitude, unlike ‘a huge mass of rubbish, the ruins perhaps of
some extensive building’, an ‘overgrown whale’, and so on, which
may be sublime but not grand (ibid., pp. 151–152). But the main
point here is that Kames, like Gerard before and Kant after him, char-
acterizes the experience of grandeur, which includes the element of
sublimity although some experiences of sublimity are not experi-
ences of grandeur, as a form of mental activity that results in a kind
of satisfaction that is qualititatively or tonally distinct from pleasure
in beauty.
The qualities of grandeur and beauty are not more distinct, than
the emotions are which these qualities produce in a spectator
. . . all the various emotions of beauty have one common charac-
ter, that of sweetness and gaiety. The emotion of grandeur has a
different character: a large object that is agreeable, occupies the
whole attention, and swells the heart into a vivid emotion,
which, tho’ extremely pleasant, is rather serious than gay. (Ibid.,
p. 152)
Both the point that the sublime occupies the mind fully and the
point that our emotion toward it is serious rather than gay are rep-
resented, naturally in his own language, in Kant’s account; our
question for Kant’s account will be whether there is anything in

4
Kant uses the examples of St. Peter’s and the pyramids (Kant, 2000, pp. 135–136; CPJ, §26, 5:252). Since Kant never travelled to Italy or Egypt, he must have gotten these
examples from some literary source or sources. He does refer to the Lettres sur l’Egypte, où l’on offre le parallèle des moeurs anciennes et moderns de ses habitants of Claude-Etienne
Savary (1787) for the point that one must be at the right distance from the pyramids for them to have their proper impact, and likewise for sublime vistas in nature. But there is no
mention of St. Peter’s in Savary, so Kant may have been adding this point to these examples that he had taken from Kames years before he read Savary. Kant had also mentioned
both St. Peter’s and the pyramids in his early Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime (1764), referring his comments on the pyramids there (2:210) to a work by
Frederik Hasselquist, Reise nach Palästina in den Jahren 1749–62 (Rostock, 1762). Given the subject of that work, presumably the reference to St. Peter’s came from elsewhere. Since
the first volumes of the German translation of Kames came out in 1763, Kant could have been reading them shortly before writing the Observations. But perhaps St. Peter’s and the
pyramids were such stock examples of the grand or sublime that both Kames and Kant obtained them from earlier sources.
 P. Guyer / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 483–494
it that transforms it from empirical into transcendental
psychology.
Before turning to Kant, we might note another aspect of
Kames’s account of the sublime that is not paralleled in either
Gerard’s or Kant’s accounts. This is Kames’s observation of the
bodily as well as mental aspect of the experience of the sublime:
A great object makes the spectator endeavour to enlarge his
bulk; which is remarkable in plain people who give way to nat-
ure without reserve; in describing a great object, they naturally
expand themselves by drawing in the air with all their force. An
elevated object . . . makes the spectator stretch upward, and
stand a-tiptoe. (Ibid., p. 151)
This emphasis on the bodily effect of aesthetic experience and the
bodily expression of that effect might not be recognized again until
the aesthetics of R. G. Collingwood, John Dewey, and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty—but that would be a story for another day.
3. Kant’s early account of aesthetic experience
We can turn now to Kant’s accounts of the experiences of the
beautiful and sublime, and ask whether they differ from their pre-
decessors in a way that would entitle them to be considered part
of transcendental rather than empirical psychology. We may be-
gin, however, by observing that Kant already had accounts of aes-
thetic experience that were substantially similar to the core of his
mature account at a time when he himself, to judge from the note
in the ‘Transcendental aesthetic’, still firmly held that aesthetics
belonged to empirical rather than transcendental psychology.
The sources for Kant’s early views about aesthetics are primarily
his Reflexionen on anthropology and logic, that is, his notes, chiefly
in his interleaved textbooks, for his lectures on those subjects, as
well as the student transcriptions of his lectures on anthropology
beginning in 1772–1773.5 This fact in itself is of great significance,
because the text for Kant’s lectures on anthropology was the
section on empirical psychology in Baumgarten’s Metaphysics; so
unless there were explicit evidence to the contrary, it must be as-
sumed that Kant intended his theories in these lectures to be con-
sidered as part of empirical psychology. Further, the influence of
the British aestheticians on Kant is evident throughout these
materials.
None of these sources contain any extensive discussion of the
sublime, but they all contain extensive discussions of the beautiful.
In fact, the very first note on aesthetics that we find in Kant’s
Reflexionen on anthropology, which concerns neither the beautiful
nor the sublime in nature but rather the art of poetry, immediately
introduces the concept of an active play of the mind:
Poetic art is an artificial play of thoughts. We play with
thoughts if we do not labor with them, that is, are [not] neces-
sitated by an end. One merely seeks to entertain oneself with
thoughts. For this it is necessary that all the powers of the
mind are set into an harmonious play. Thus they must not
be a hindrance to themselves and to reason, although they
must also not promote it. The play of images, of ideas, of
affects, finally of mere impressions in the division of time, of
rhythm (versification) and unison (rhymes) . . . The sensible
play of thoughts consists in the play of speech (versification)
and of words (rhyme). It goes well with music. It awakens
the mind. (Kant, 2005, pp. 481–482; R 618, 15:266, dated
1764–1769)
5
In spite of its title, the Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime offers only the most conventional and brief accounts of the beautiful and sublime themselves
(Sect. I) before proceeding to the description of differences in preferences for the beautiful or sublime in different genders, nations, races, and so on, a topic that became a staple in
his anthropology lectures under the rubric of ‘Anthropological Characteristic’ and must have been a sure-fire crowd-pleaser. Kant’s lectures on anthropology were only published
in the Academy edition (Vol. 25) in 1997, and thus have only recently entered into the usable Kantian corpus.
487
The essence of both the creation and the reception of poetry is a free
play of thought that is stimulated by the themes of the poem and
facilitated by the formal features of the verse such as rhythm and
rhyme; here we have Kant’s later theory of ‘aesthetic ideas’ in a nut-
shell, and a contrast between poetry as play and other forms of dis-
course as labor that he would always preserve (ibid., p. 198; CPJ,
§51, 5:321). In the discussion of poetry in the Friedländer lectures
in anthropology of several years later (1775–1776), Kant’s com-
ments on aesthetics similarly begin with this account of the experi-
ence of poetry:
The play of thoughts and sensations is the correspondence [or
harmony: Übereinstimmung] of subjective [or subjectivistic:
subjektivischen] laws; if the thoughts correspond with my sub-
ject then that is a play of them. Secondly, it is to be observed
about these thoughts that they stand in relation to the object,
and then the thoughts must be true, and that the course of
the thoughts corresponds with the nature of the mental powers,
thus with the subject, and therefore the succession of thoughts
corresponds with the powers of the mind. This harmonious play
of thoughts and sensations is the poem. (25:525–526)
This passage suggests a number of points. First, Kant describes the
experience of the poem as a harmonious play between thoughts
and sensations, or we might say between intellectual and sensible as-
pects of our experience; this prefigures his later conception of a free
play between imagination, which includes sensibility, and under-
standing. Second, Kant describes this experience as in harmony with
the ‘subjective’ laws of the mind, but there is no suggestion that there
is anything a priori about these laws; on the contrary, at least at this
stage of Kant’s development, the term ‘subjective’ implies that even if
these laws are common to many human minds, they (and that fact
about them) can be known only empirically, as Kant makes clear in
a note from the same period as the Friedländer lectures:
What agrees with the universal subjective laws of cognition . . .
of human beings pleases in reflection, merely because it is in
harmony with the conditions of reflection . . . (The subjective
laws cannot, to be sure, be cognized a priori, but we can have
insight into their universality from our self-consideration. . .).
(Kant, 2005, p. 511; R 878, 15:385, dated 1776–1778)
Third, Kant suggests that in the experience of a successful poem the
thoughts are in harmony not only with each other and with the
laws of the mind but also with their object as well; this can hardly
fail to remind us of Kames’s view that the connections among the
train of our ideas in an experience of art are ‘natural’ both with re-
gard to the mind and to the object of the work. Thus, Kant’s concep-
tion of the experience of poetry, while clearly prefiguring his later
account of aesthetic experience, is entirely consistent with the
empiricist approach to this subject.
The Friedländer lectures are also significant because they gener-
alize Kant’s early account of the experience of poetry to other art
forms as well, although not to the case of natural beauty, in spite
of the fact that Kant’s later account will begin with the experience
of natural beauty and only later turn to the case of the fine arts. In
the anthropology lectures, Kant’s initial discussion of poetry al-
ways comes in the section on the Dichtungsvermögen (creative fac-
ulty) in the first part, on the cognitive faculties, and then he returns
to aesthetic matters in the second section, on the ‘feeling of plea-
sure and displeasure’. In the latter section of the Friedländer lec-
tures, Kant says that
488 P. Guyer / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 483–494
The senses are the receptivity of impressions, which promote
our sensible enjoyment, but we cannot bring our mental powers
into agitation through objects just insofar as they make an
impression on us, but rather insofar as we think them, and that
is the ideal enjoyments, which are, to be sure, sensible, but not
enjoyments of sense. A poem, a novel, a comedy are capable of
affording us ideal enjoyments, they arise from the way in which
the mind makes cognitions for itself out of all sorts of represen-
tations of the senses. Now if the mind is sensitive of a free play
of its powers, that which creates this free play is an ideal enjoy-
ment. (25:560)
Here Kant again uses the idea of free play while pointing toward his
later distinction between merely agreeable pleasures that involve
the senses alone and the pleasure in beauty that involves a harmony
between imagination and understanding as higher cognitive pow-
ers: Kant’s claim that the pleasure of our experiences of works in
the various media he has mentioned are not ‘enjoyments of sense’
but are both ‘sensible’ and ‘ideal’ is a move in this direction. But
all of this remains within the framework of aesthetics as part of
empirical psychology.
Kant’s early remarks on aesthetics are also vital to understand-
ing his mature theory because they make explicit the basis for his
association of aesthetic pleasure with the free play of our cognitive
powers in a way that the Critique of the power of judgment never
really does, namely his view that we enjoy such free play because
it is a form of activity and activity is our most fundamental source
of pleasure. This is evident in another early note, this one from
1769–1770. Here Kant is discussing our enjoyment of fireworks,
which is not as complex an aesthetic experience as our experience
of poetry because it involves only a ‘play of shapes and sensations’
but not a play between these and more intellectual ideas. But what
is crucial is his explanation of our enjoyment of such play, which is
entirely general:
One is sensitive either to one’s state in action or in passiv-
ity, insofar as one feels oneself to be dependent or to be a
ground of one’s state. Hence sensation is either active or pas-
sive. The sensation is active in the case of the form of appear-
ances on account of the comparison that one makes. The
active sensation is in itself always agreeable as well as all pas-
sive ones that promote the active one . . . but the sensation of
oneself as an object of other forces is passive; and the more it
is merely passive, the more disagreeble it is. (Kant, 2005, p.
490; R 655, 15:289)
Activity as such is intrinsically pleasing, and play is a form of activ-
ity, indeed a particularly pleasing one precisely because it is not
constrained as labor is. Of course, to be maximally enjoyable,
any form of activity including play must be harmonious or coher-
ent, that is, not undercut or diminished by internal conflicts as
well as by external constraints. These premises are the basis for
Kant’s early conception of a moral theory based on our pleasure
in freedom of choice and action as well as for his aesthetic theory
of the pleasure of the free play of our cognitive powers.6 Kant also
expresses this theory by characterizing life itself as activity, and
the feeling that arises from free yet harmonious activity as the ‘feel-
ing of life’. For example, from the Friedländer lectures on
anthropology,
The feeling of the promotion of life is gratification or pleasure.
Life is the consciousness of a free and regular play of all the
powers and faculties of human beings. The feeling of the pro-
motion of life is that which constitutes pleasure and the feeling
of the hindrance of life is displeasure. (25:559).
6
See my discussion of this in ‘Kant on the theory and practice of autonomy’, in Guyer (2005a), as well as in Guyer (2007), Ch. 2.
Or, from a note from the same period,
The feeling of the life of spirit pertains to understanding and
freedom, where one has the grounds of cognition and choice
in oneself . . . Everything that pleases us in such a way that we
are dependent on it is to that extent not in our power and
proves to be a hindrance to the supreme life, namely to the
strength of the power of choice to have its state and itself under
its own freedom . . . All taste consists in finding that which is
satisfying, the source of the sensuously touching, in our actions,
comparisons, imaginings, etc.; thereby it is one’s own . . . The
feeling of life is greater in sensation, but I feel a greater life in
voluntary animation, and I feel the greatest principium of life
in morality. (Kant, 2005, p. 507; R 824, 15:368)
There is some confusion in this passage, due either to Kant himself
or to the difficulty of the editor (Erich Adickes) in deciphering his
handwriting, but the idea seems to be that activity qua life is pleas-
ing, and that there is a scale of activity from simpler sensation to the
free play of the cognitive powers in aesthetic experience to the free-
dom of choice and action in morality. Of course for Kant the last
feeling of life or pleasure is the greatest, but no eighteenth-century
theorist held that the pleasures of taste are greater or more signif-
icant than the feelings connected with morality. What is important
for us is that while the younger Kant actually generalizes the ac-
count of aesthetic pleasures in such writers as Gerard and Kames
into a theory of value that comprises morality as well as aesthetics,
he does all of that within the framework of empirical psychology or
what he calls anthropology.
So now our question is whether Kant’s mature account of the
experiences of the beautiful and the sublime adds anything to this
early account that will transform it from empirical to transcenden-
tal psychology.
4. Kant’s mature theory of aesthetic experience
The core of Kant’s aesthetic theory throughout his career was an
analysis of the aesthetic judgments (properly, the aesthetic judg-
ment of reflection or judgment of taste) as the claim that the plea-
sure one has oneself felt in the experience of an object should be
experienced by all human subjects encountering that object under
ideal conditions, coupled with the theory that such claims can be
justified if the pleasure is explained as due to the free play of the
cognitive powers that are common to all human beings. Prior to
the Critique of the power of judgment, as we have seen, Kant in-
cluded this theory as part of ‘anthropology’, or empirical psychol-
ogy. In the third Critique, he suddenly claimed that this theory
rests on a priori principles and is part of transcendental philosophy
rather than empirical psychology. Our question now must be
whether Kant’s mature theory of the free play of the cognitive
powers as the basis of aesthetic experience and of its universal
validity as the justification of judgments of taste really does rest
on any a priori principles that would entitle it to this new status.
My argument in this section is that, while there may be an advance
in the logical analysis of the claims of judgments of taste in Kant’s
mature presentation of his theory, there is nothing in Kant’s ma-
ture concept of the harmony of the faculties as the ground for judg-
ment of taste that differs from his earlier theory in a way that
would transform it from a piece of empirical psychology into a
piece of transcendental psychology or philosophy.
Kant introduces the concept of the free play of the cognitive
powers at key moments in the exposition of his overall theory in
both versions of the introduction to the third Critique and in the
‘Analytic of the beautiful’ and the ‘Deduction of pure aesthetic
 P. Guyer / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 483–494
judgments’ in the body of the work.7 In the first introduction, Kant
distinguishes judgments of taste as ‘aesthetic judgments of reflec-
tion’ from ‘aesthetic judgments of sense’, or first-person reports of
our pleasure or displeasure in response to purely sensory stimuli,
for which we claim no intersubjective validity (Kant, 2000, p. 26;
FI, §VIII, 20:224), and then characterizes the experience that causes
our pleasure in an object of taste and grounds the claim to intersub-
jective validity as a relationship between the cognitive powers of
imagination and understanding that is harmonious but, unlike ordin-
ary cases of cognition, does not involve—that is, neither depends
upon nor leads to—the predication of a determinate concept of the
object triggering this experience. He describes this relation in a num-
ber of ways:
If the form of a given object in empirical intuition is so consti-
tuted that the apprehension of its manifold in the imagination
agrees with the presentation of a concept of the understanding
(though which concept be undetermined), then in the mere
reflection understanding and imagination mutually agree for
the advancement of their business, and the object will be per-
ceived as purposive merely for the power of judgment, hence
the purposiveness itself will be considered as merely subjec-
tive; for which, further, no determinate concept of the object
at all is required nor is one thereby generated . . . (Ibid., p. 23;
FI, §VII, 20:220–221)
. . . in the power of judgment understanding and imagination
are considered in relation to each other, and this can, to be sure,
first be considered objectively, as belonging to cognition. . .; but
one can also consider this relation of two faculties of cognition
merely subjectively, insofar as one helps or hinders the other in
the very same relation . . . (Ibid., p. 25; FI, §VIII, 20:223)
A merely reflecting judgment about a given individual object
. . . can be aesthetic if (before its comparison with others
is seen), the power of judgment, which has no concept ready
for the given intuition, holds the imagination (merely in the
apprehension of object) together with the understanding (in
the presentation of a concept in general) and perceives a rela-
tion of the two faculties of cognition which constitutes the sub-
jective, merely sensitive condition of the objective use of the
power of judgment in general (namely the agreement of those
two faculties with each other). (Ibid., p. 26; FI, §VIII, 20:223–
224)
Kant’s key claims here are that in the experience that grounds a
judgment of taste, the relation between imagination and under-
standing does not depend upon nor lead to the predication of a
determinate concept of its object, but nevertheless seems to satisfy
the subjective condition of the use of these faculties and is felt to
be purposive, and thus pleasurable, because of that. Apart from the
metaphors of ‘advancing their mutual business’ and ‘helping or
hindering’ each other, Kant gives us very little information about
what this relation between imagination and understanding might
actually be. I have suggested that what he means by the satisfac-
tion of the subjective condition of the use of the power of judg-
ment in general, in a way that neither depends upon nor leads
to the application or ‘presentation’ of a determinate concept, is
the feeling rather than conceptual recognition of unity and coher-
ence in the manifold of intuitions presented by an object, but that,
since it is part of both common sense and Kant’s own epistemol-
ogy that no object can be recognized or referred to without being
7
Kant wrote a first draft of the introduction in early 1789, now referred to as the ‘First Introduction’ (FI), and then wrote the new version that was actually published in the
finished book in early 1790, when the rest of the manuscript was already at the printer. Ernst Cassirer was the first to publish the whole first introduction for what it was, in 1914
(see Kant, 2000, p. xliii). By the ‘body of the work’, I mean the first half of the Critique of the power of judgment, the ‘Critique of the aesthetic power of judgment’; the second half of
the work, the ‘Critique of the teleological power of judgment’, is not addressed in this paper.
8
For my most recent and, I hope, most refined argument for this approach, see Guyer (2005b).
489
brought under some determinate concept, this felt unity must be
understood more precisely as a degree or kind of unity that goes
beyond anything that can be connected with the determinate con-
cept or concepts that do obviously apply to the object and are used
to recognize and refer to it in the first place. Thus, a beautiful ob-
ject differs from an ordinary one that falls under the same con-
cepts by leading us to experience it as possessing some greater
or different kind of unity than the degree or kind of unity it must
share with the latter.8
These explications of Kant’s central concept from the First Intro-
duction do not actually use the idea of play that we saw to be cen-
tral to Kant’s earlier accounts. However, Kant employs this concept
in his first explication of the concept in the published Introduction
to the third Critique, and also explicitly connects play with
pleasure:
If pleasure is connected with the mere apprehension . . . of the
form of an object of intuition without a relation of this to a
concept for a determinate cognition, then the representation
is thereby related not to the object, but solely to the subject,
and the pleasure can express nothing but its suitability to
the cognitive faculties that are in play in the reflecting power
of judgment, insofar as they are in play . . . For that apprehen-
sion of forms in the imagination can never take place without
the reflecting power of judgment, even if unintentionally, at
least comparing them to its faculty for relating intuitions to
concepts. Now if in this comparison the imagination . . . is
unintentionally brought into accord with the understanding
. . . through a given representation and a feeling of pleasure
is thereby aroused, then the object must be regarded as purpo-
sive for the reflecting power of judgment. Such a judgment is
an aesthetic judgment on the purposiveness of the object,
which is not grounded on any available concept of the object
and does not furnish one . . . this pleasure is also judged to
be necessarily combined [with the representation of such an
object], consequently not merely for the subject who appre-
hends this form but for everyone who judges at all. The object
is then called beautiful. (Ibid., p. 76; CPJ, Introduction, §VII,
5:189–190)
Here Kant says that the apprehension of forms in the imagination is
compared with the faculty for relating intuitions to concepts, which
we can take to mean that the play of forms in the imagination stim-
ulated by the experience of an object is experienced as satisfying
the general condition for subsuming a manifold of intuitions under
a concept, namely its unity, without that feeling of unity within the
play being grounded in any available concept nor leading to one.
Note especially that Kant says that the feeling of unity is not
grounded in any available (vorhandenen, literally ‘ready to hand’)
concept—thus Kant is not denying that the beautiful object falls un-
der one or many determinate concepts, but is maintaining only that
such concepts are not available to explain the distinctive unity of a
beautiful object.
Kant also uses the concept of play in his first introduction of
the concept of the harmony of the faculties into the argument
of the ‘Analytic of the beautiful’, in the section that he says is
the ‘key to the critique of taste’ (ibid., p. 102; CPJ, §9, 5:216),
and here he also explicitly says that the play is active rather than
passive; that is, something we initiate rather than merely some-
thing an object triggers in us. He describes the experience of
beauty, the ‘sensations whose universal communicability is
490 P. Guyer / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 483–494
postulated by the judgment of taste’, as ‘the animation of both
faculties (the imagination and the understanding) to an activity
that is indeterminate but yet, through the stimulus of the given
representation, in unison, namely that which belongs to a cogni-
tion in general’; our universally communicable pleasure in a
beautiful object is thus the ‘sensation of the effect that consists
in the facilitated play of both powers of the mind (imagination
and understanding), enlivened through mutual agreement’ (ibid.,
p. 102; 5:219). Here Kant’s suggestion is that the lively activity
of both imagination and understanding in the experience of a
beautiful object possesses the kind of unity that is the condition
of cognition in general, in contrast, of course, to the unity of a
determinate cognition. In his summary of the ‘Analytic of the
beautiful’, Kant varies his account slightly by suggesting not that
both the imagination and understanding are actively at play, but
rather that the play of the imagination with its representations of
the forms of objects is in harmony with the understanding’s gen-
eral requirement of lawfulness. ‘Everything flows from the con-
cept of taste as a faculty for judging an object in relation to the
free lawfulness of the imagination’. A beautiful object can pro-
vide the imagination
with a form that contains precisely such a composition of the
manifold as the imagination would design in harmony with
the lawfulness of the understanding in general if it were left
free by itself . . . Thus only a lawfulness without law and a sub-
jective correspondence of the imagination to the understanding
without an objective one—where the representation is related
to a determinate concept of an object—are consistent with the
free lawfulness of the understanding . . . and with the peculiar-
ity of a judgment of taste. (Ibid., pp. 124–125; CPJ, General
Remark following §22, 5:240–241)
Finally, Kant varies his explication one more time in his restatement
of his entire theory of the judgment of taste, that is, both its analysis
and its justificatory explanation, in the ‘Deduction of pure aesthetic
judgments’ (CPJ, §§30–40). Here Kant says that since the ‘judgment
of taste differes from logical judgment in that the latter subumes a
representation under concepts of the object, but the former does
not subsume under a concept at all’, such a judgment must instead
depend upon the ‘subsumption of the imagination itself . . . under
the condition that the understanding in general advance to from
intuitions to concepts’. Kant does not explain here or elsewhere
what it means to subsume one faculty under another rather than
an object under a concept, but his explication of this puzzling re-
mark makes it clear that he has in mind the same relation between
imagination and understanding by which he summed up the argu-
ment of the ‘Analytic’:
I.e., since the freedom of the imagination consists precisely in
the fact that it schematizes without a concept, the judgment
of taste must rest on a mere sensation of the reciprocally ani-
mating imagination in its freedom and the understanding with
its lawfulness, thus on a feeling . . . for the promotion of the fac-
ulty of cognition in its free play . . . (Ibid., p. 167; CPJ, §35,
5:286–287)
So now we have before us all of Kant’s mature explications of his
core idea of the harmony or free play of the cognitive powers in
aesthetic experience, or more precisely of imagination and under-
standing in the first case of aesthetic experience that he considers,
that of beauty—and even more precisely of free beauty (see CPJ,
§16). We are now ready to ask whether this account differs from
his earlier account in any way that would entitle its promotion
from empirical to transcendental psychology. Where in this ac-
count is there an a priori principle that could earn it this promo-
tion? Since Kant has insisted throughout that the faculties of
ordinary cognition are involved in this experience but not any
of their determinate concepts, it cannot be his claim that aesthetic
experience is grounded upon the a priori concepts of the under-
standing, the categories. Of course, if it is true that we do sub-
sume any object of aesthetic experience under some empirical
concept or other, that will entail that we also subsume it under
the categories, since the categories are nothing but the pure forms
of empirical concepts (the category of causation is the pure form
of empirical concepts of this or that particular kind of causation,
and so on). But Kant has made it clear that the experience of uni-
son or free lawfulness in the free play of the cognitive powers has
nothing to do with the subsumption of the object under any
determinate concepts, so a fortiori it can have nothing to do with
the subsumption of the object under the a priori categories. The
apriority of the categories is simply not part of the explanation
of our pleasure in beauty.
The same argument can be made with regard to the a priori
forms of intuition, that is, the pure forms of space and time. In
the passage from the published Introduction in which Kant speaks
of the unintentional accord of the imagination and understanding,
he does parenthetically describe the imagination ‘as the faculty of a
priori intuition’ (ibid., p. 76; CPJ, Introduction, §VII, 5:190; I previ-
ously elided this remark). But of course every object that is repre-
sented in space and/or time, whether beautiful, ugly, or
aesthetically indifferent, conforms to the a priori forms of intuition,
that is, the necessary structure of space and time themselves. So
the a priori forms of intuition themselves do not contribute to
beauty; as in the case of concepts, beauty must lie in some partic-
ular way in which the forms of beautiful objects give us a sense of
some form of harmony or unity that goes beyond what is required
for the mere possibility of representing them as spatial and/or tem-
poral at all. The beauty of an object may lie in its particular spatial
and/or temporal form, but that is only constrained, not determined
by the a priori forms of sensibility.
It follows from these arguments that even should Kant be
wrong about the apriority of the basic forms of sensibility and
understanding, his explanation of aesthetic response would not
be affected: at least as far as anything considered thus far is
concerned, should the categories and forms of intuition turn
out to be some sort of no doubt deep-seated empirical represen-
tations, beauty would still lie in the way in which certain objects
give us a sense of harmony beyond anything that can be
attributed to those sources. Thus far, at least, Kant’s conception
of the harmony of the faculties seems neither to depend upon
the genuine apriority of the forms of sensibility and understand-
ing nor to add anything genuinely transcendental to Kant’s
psychology.
Is there another way in which Kant’s account of aesthetic
experience might be genuinely transcendental? Kant’s idea that
the harmony of the faculties constitutes a subjective satisfaction
of the general conditions of cognition or judgment, or a state in
which it seems to us that our desire for unity is satisfied indepen-
dently of the predication of any determinate concept of the object,
is pleasurable or subjectively purposive, seems to rest on the
premise that the satisfaction of a goal is always pleasurable, but
particularly so when that satisfaction seems unexpected or con-
tingent. Kant suggests this premise in Section VI of the Introduc-
tion to the third Critique, when he writes that ‘The attainment of
every aim is combined with the feeling of pleasure’, but that it is
particularly in the case of an ‘accord . . . with our faculty of cogni-
tion, which we regard as merely contingent, [that] pleasure will
be felt’ (ibid., pp. 73–74; CPJ, Introduction, §VI, 5:187–188). But
is there anything a priori about the claim that pleasure is always
connected with the attainment of a goal, and particularly notice-
able pleasure with what strikes us as being the contingent satis-
faction of a goal? Sometimes Kant writes as if it is the definition
of happiness that it consists in the satisfaction of one’s desires
 P. Guyer / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 483–494
or the attainment of the ends that desires suggest.9 But if this
definition is accepted, then, first, that would make the connection
between the attainment of a goal and happiness a priori but ana-
lytic, not synthetic a priori, and, second, it would not follow from
this definition alone that there is any phenomenologically distinct
feeling, namely the feeling of pleasure, that is connected to the
attainment of a goal. Thus the claim that happiness always results
from the attainment of a goal may be a priori but is merely analytic,
while the claim that a feeling of pleasure results from the
attainment may be synthetic but seems a posteriori, an empirical
discovery of psychology—to be sure, the most elementary folk-psy-
chology, apparent to us all very early in our development. The
underlying premise of Kant’s explanatory concept of the harmony
of the faculties thus does not seem to be transcendental.
Here we should also note that Kant himself insists that there is
one case in which a feeling is connected a priori to a certain state of
the mental powers, but he does not make this claim about the con-
nection of the feeling of pleasure to the harmonious relation of
imagination and understanding; he makes it about the connection
of the feeling of respect to the determination of the will to make the
moral law the supreme limiting condition of all its maxims and ac-
tions. In the Critique of practical reason, Kant says that ‘we can see a
priori that the moral law, as the determining ground of the will,
must by thwarting all our inclinations produce a feeling that can
be called pain’, but then also, ‘since this law is still something in it-
self positive . . ., it is an object of the greatest respect and so too the
ground a positive feeling that is not of empirical origin and is cog-
nized a priori’. But Kant also says that ‘here we have the first and
perhaps the only case in which we can determine a priori from con-
cepts the relation of a cognition (here the cognition of a pure prac-
tical reason) to a feeling of pleasure or displeasure’ (Kant, 1996, p.
199; CPracR, 5:73). It might be objected that Kant left a loophole
with his ‘perhaps’ and that three years later he he allowed a second
a priori connection between a feeling of pleasure and a state of our
cognitive powers, namely that between their free play in our expe-
rience of beauty and our pleasure in it, to get through this loophole.
But he gives no indication that he has changed his mind about the
uniqueness of the moral feeling of respect even after the third Cri-
tique; thus, when he says about moral feelings in the ‘Doctrine of
virtue’ of the 1797 Metaphysics of morals that ‘Consciousness of
them is not of empirical origin; it can, instead, only follow from
consciousness of a moral law, as the effect this has on the mind’
(Ibid., p. 528; MM, 6:399), he still seems to be treating moral
feelings as unique in their apriority. But in any case, our question
is not what Kant thought, but what his conception of aesthetic
experience really entails. Kant’s emphasis on the unique apriori-
ty of moral feeling only adds support to the argument already
made that his explanation of aesthetic response as a free play of
the cognitive powers does not require any distinctively transcen-
dental psychology consisting of synthetic a priori propositions.
The observant reader, however, will immediately notice that
once again I have quoted Kant incompletely; more fully, the first
part of my last quote from Kant is
The attainment of every aim is combined with the feeling of
pleasure; and, if the condition of the former is an a priori repre-
sentation, as in this case a principle for the reflecting power of
judgment in general, then the feeling of pleasure is also deter-
mined through a ground that is a priori and valid for everyone.
(Kant, 2000, p. 73; CPJ, Introduction, §VI, 5:187)
This suggests that even if the principle that the attainment of every
end produces pleasure is not itself a priori, still the feeling of plea-
sure in the special case of aesthetic response ‘is determined through
9
For example, in the Critique of practical reason, Kant says that ‘happiness’ is ‘only the general name’ for what would result from realizing the object of ‘subjective determining
grounds’: Kant (1996), p. 159; CPracR, 5:25.
491
a ground that is a priori’ and that the universal validity of judgments
of taste depends upon that a priori ground. Is there some way in
which the harmony of the faculties is a priori and part of a genuinely
transcendental psychology that my argument thus far has failed to
notice and exclude? I take it that what Kant has in mind as a priori
here is the principle that every normal human mind will, under
ideal or optimal conditions, respond with a free play of its imagina-
tion and understanding to any object to which any normal human
mind under ideal conditions so responds, which would entitle any-
one who has truly experienced such a state in response to a partic-
ular object to judge that under ideal conditions everyone should,
that is, to make a judgment of taste. That is the principle that Kant
attempts to establish in his ‘Deduction of pure aesthetic judgments’.
So in order to complete my argument that Kant’s theory of taste is
not genuinely transcendental, obviously I must turn to this. Before I
do so, however, I want to consider briefly several of Kant’s explica-
tions of aesthetic response beyond his basic account of beauty that
patently appear to contain a priori elements, and to argue that these
still do not make his aesthetics transcendental.
I refer to Kant’s accounts of the sublime and of fine art. I will
take them in reverse order, since Kant explicates our experience
of fine art as a special case of beauty but treats the experience of
the sublime as a distinct form of aesthetic experience. For Kant,
works of fine art and our experience of them are distinctive be-
cause they involve an ‘aesthetic idea’, that is, ‘a representation of
the imagination that occasions much thinking without it being
possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate
to it’. ‘One can call such representations of the imagination ideas’,
he continues, ‘because they at least strive toward something lying
beyond the bounds of experience, and thus seek to approximate a
presentation of concept of reason (intellectual ideas)’, in fact ideas
connected with morality. At the same time, the imagination ‘aes-
thetically enlarges the concept itself in an unbounded way’, thus
‘is creative, and sets the faculty of intellectual ideas (reason) into
motion, that is, at the instigation of a representation it gives more
to think about than can be grasped and made distinct in it’ (ibid.,
pp. 192–193; CPJ, §49, 5:314–315). Genius or the ‘talent for art’
thus consists in ‘the exposition or expression of aesthetic ideas’
through ‘material, i.e., of the intuition, for the presentation of this
concept’, yet in such a way that ‘the free correspondence of the
imagination to the lawfulness of the understanding presupposes
a proportion and disposition of this faculty that cannot be pro-
duced by any following of the rules’ (ibid., p. 195; CPJ, §49,
5:317–318). I interpret all this to mean that in the mental activity
of the creative artist on the one hand, and in the response of the
audience for the artist’s work on the other, the imagination plays
not merely with form but with both form and intellectual content
in a way that freely satisfies the understanding’s general interest in
lawfulness. In other words, the experience of art is an experience of
beauty, but beauty lying in an harmonious relation between form
and content and not just within form alone (see Guyer, 1994, rep-
rinted in Guyer, 1997, pp. 351–366). Having introduced this theory
of art, Kant actually goes on to argue that all ‘Beauty (whether it be
beauty of nature or art) can in general be called the expression of
aesthetic ideas’ (Kant, 2000, p. 197; CPJ, §51, 5:320), but let us
ignore that claim. Our question is whether the fact that an aes-
thetic experience, of fine art only or more generally, can express
an aesthetic idea suffices to remove Kant’s account from the realm
of empirical to that of transcendental theory. Let us stipulate that
the ideas that furnish the content of works of fine art are, as Kant
supposes, typically moral ideas, and let us further allow Kant’s sup-
position that such ideas are ‘intellectual’ and a priori, originating in
pure practical reason rather than, as many of his contemporaries
492 P. Guyer / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 483–494

supposed, in sentiment, experience, custom, and so on. Would
accepting these stipulations make the fact that we can freely play
with such ideas in our creation and experience of art something
that we can know to be true a priori, and thus part of a transcen-
dental psychology? It is hard to see why it would; it would seem
to be a contingent fact about us and thus something we know
through empirical psychology—although, again, the most rudimen-
tary folk-psychology—that our imaginations can generate a free
and enjoyable play between form and content, even when the con-
tent itself is intellectual or a priori.
Perhaps a better case can be made for the aesthetics of the sub-
lime being part of a genuinely transcendental psychology, because
here the claim that certain of our faculties produce a priori ideas or
principles seems even more central and indispensable to Kant’s ac-
count of the experience than it is to his account of fine art. Put
briefly, Kant’s explication of the experience of the sublime is that
in its attempt to grasp something vast (in the case of the mathe-
matical sublime) or mighty (in the case of the dynamical sublime)
in a single image or apprehension, the imagination is frustrated,
and we are initially pained. Then, however, we are pleased when
we realize, at some level, that the very attempt of the imagination
to accomplish this impossible task was itself imposed upon it by
our own reason, theoretical reason with its transcendent idea of
the infinite in the case of the mathematical sublime and practical
reason with its transcendent idea of a capacity of our will for inde-
pendence from and superiority over nature in the case of the
dynamical sublime (see ibid., pp. 134–148; CPJ, §§26–28). In this
account, that we have a faculty of pure reason that has a priori
ideas of infinitude and moral purity seems essential. Even so, the
claim that the failed efforts of the imagination to apprehend cer-
tain natural phenomena—vast seas and mighty waterfalls, and all
of the usual eighteenth-century examples of the sublime—are both
triggered by the faculty of reason and in some way make us aware
of that faculty and its ideas and ambitions seems empirical; it does
not seem to be a condition of the very possibility of our experience
that imagination and reason be connected in this way, but a con-
tingent fact about us that we know to be true (if we do)10 by expe-
rience. As in the case of fine art, a priori ideas may enter into our
experience through imagination, but the fact that they do so does
not itself seem to be necessarily true of us or something that we
could know a priori. The account of our experience of the sublime
also seems to be part of empirical psychology.
5. The deduction of pure aesthetic judgments
We may now turn to the last hope for an interpretation of Kant’s
aesthetics as genuinely transcendental rather than empirical,
namely Kant’s claim that the universal validity of judgments of
taste must rest on an a priori ground. I have dealt with Kant’s
deduction of judgments of taste at length elsewhere, and here I
confine myself to two points.11 First, it must be clear that what Kant
characterizes as the general transcendental principle for the power
of reflecting judgment cannot be the a priori principle for aesthetic
judgment. Kant says that ‘The principle of reflection on given objects
is that for all things in nature empirically determinate concepts can
be found’, or at greater length that
This principle can be none other than that of the suitability for
the capacity of the power of judgment itself for finding in the
immeasurable multiplicity of things in accordance with possi-
ble empirical laws sufficient kinship among them to enable
them to be brought under empirical concepts (classes) and
these in turn under more general laws (higher genera) and thus
for an empirical system of nature to be reached. (Kant, 2000, pp.
15, 19; FI, §V, 5:211, 215).
In the published Introduction, Kant explicitly labels this principle
‘transcendental’ in the official sense that it ‘is one through which
the universal a priori conditions under which alone things can be-
come objects of our cognition at all is represented’ (ibid., p. 68;
CPJ, Introduction, §V, 5:181), even though he is also going to argue
that it is regulative of our inquiry into nature rather than constitu-
tive of nature itself. The key point for us now, however, is that this
cannot be the a priori principle, whether regulative or constitutive,
of aesthetic judgments of taste, because such judgments, by Kant’s
own lights, are independent of concepts except insofar, as in the
case of aesthetic ideas, concepts or more properly ideas of reason
enter into their content. Judgments of taste neither depend upon
nor lead to determinate concepts of objects, so the principle that
for all objects determinate concepts, indeed systematically ordered
determinate concepts, can be found is irrelevant to the process of
aesthetic response and making aesthetic judgments. As we have
seen, beauty, whether natural or artistic, and as it turns out sublim-
ity as well, always lie in a region of our response to objects that is
not determined by any of the determinate concepts that do apply
to the objects, and so a principle that postulates that determinate
concepts apply to every object has nothing to do with aesthetics.
And in the ‘Analytic of the beautiful’ and the ‘Deduction of pure
judgments of taste’, appropriately enough, Kant entirely ignores
this supposedly general a priori and transcendental principle of
reflecting judgment. Instead, he introduces a different principle
that is clearly intended to be the a priori and transcendental prin-
ciple of judgments of taste. Let us consider just the ‘Deduction’
properly so called. In Section 37, Kant asks ‘What is really asserted
a priori of an object in a judgment of taste?’ He then argues that the
fact that I can only know empirically that I do experience any par-
ticular object with pleasure, so that my report merely that I do so
experience an object, would ‘yield a merely empirical judgment’.
Thus, he concludes, ‘it is not the pleasure but the universal valid-
ity of this pleasure perceived in the mind as connected with the
mere judging of an object that is represented in a judgment of taste
as a universal rule . . . valid for everyone’; so ‘It is an empirical judg-
ment that I perceive and judge an object with pleasure. But it is an
a priori judgment that I find it beautiful, i.e., that I may require that
satisfaction of everyone’ (ibid., p. 170; CPJ, §37, 5:289). It is there-
fore strictly my claim that the object I have found pleasurable
should also be found pleasurable by everyone else that needs an
a priori principle as its foundation. Kant’s argument in Section 38,
the heart of the deduction, is then that since in the case of a gen-
uine aesthetic response ‘the power of judgment . . . can be directed
only to the subjective conditions of the use of the power of jud-
ment in general’, it is therefore directed ‘to that subjective element
that one can presuppose in all human beings (as requisite for pos-
sible cognitions in general)’, and thus that ‘the correspondence of a
representation with these conditions of the power of judgment’ in
one person who experiences the harmony of the cognitive powers
in response to an object ‘must be able to be assumed valid for
everyone a priori’ (ibid.; CPJ, §38, 5:290). Kant’s argument assumes
that we can know a priori that everyone else has the same sort of
cognitive powers that we do and that they work in the same

10
Malcolm Budd has argued that Kant’s interpretation of the experience of the sublime is excessively moralized and misrepresents the character of the experience; Budd (2002),
Ch. III. But what kind of argument can this be? It can only be an argument that Budd, or Budd speaking for many of us at the start of the twenty-first century, does not find Kant’s
interpretation of the sublime a convincing explication of his own experience before the kinds of objects that Kant refers to as sublime; that leaves it open that Kant or Kant and
many of his contemporaries at the end of the eighteenth century did find his explication convincing. This only goes to show that Kant’s theory is in fact empirical rather than
transcendental.
11
For my detailed treatment of the deduction, see Guyer (1997), Chs. 7–9. For critical responses, see Ameriks (2003) and Allison (2001).
 P. Guyer / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 483–494
way, including responding with a free play to the same objects that
produce that response in ourselves. But it is not clear that we can
really know any of these things a priori. Whether we know that
others have minds and that their minds work in the same general
way as our own is certainly debatable: Donald Davidson’s principle
of charity, for example, might be an a priori assumption that this is
so, but it is far from clear that this amounts to a priori knowledge
(Davidson, 1973). But even if we were to suppose that we really
do know a priori that all human minds work in the same general
way, we certainly do not know a priori that all human minds work
in the same particular ways; on the contrary, we know empirically
that different human individuals and groups carve up their experi-
ence with different empirical concepts. Nor does it seem obvious
that all human beings are equally capable of responding to objects
with a free play of their cognitive powers, let alone all capable of so
responding to the same objects. We certainly know empirically
that human beings have very different degrees of potential for
artistic creativity, some Mozarts and Dickenses being able to in-
vent melodies and characters with extraordinary facility, and the
rest of us only with more difficulty or, alas, not at all. Why should
it be different on the side of response—why should not some minds
that have the general power to apply concepts to objects also be
able to respond with a free play of their imagination and under-
standing to some objects, while others who have the first power
alas lack the second? Just as some people are tone-deaf or color-
blind, the latter of which at least we trace to a specific deficiency
of their sense organs, why should not some otherwise normal peo-
ple be more generally deaf to the harmony of the faculties, capable
of a concept-guided use of their cognitive powers but incapable of
free play with them? At the very least, that this is not the case
would seem to be something that has to be established empiri-
cally—unless we just stipulate that normal people are capable of
the free play of the cognitive powers, and all normal people capa-
ble of that in response to the same objects, in which case the prin-
ciple that all normal people will have the same aesthetic response
will be analytically true, and not a synthetic a priori and transcen-
dental principle at all.
6. Conclusion
Kant’s aesthetic theory consists of an analytic part, the analysis
of what is asserted in a judgment of taste, and a synthetic part, the
account of aesthetic experience that is supposed to make it reason-
able for us to assert judgments of taste under appropriate condi-
tions. Leaving Quinean worries aside, the former part of Kant’s
theory is certainly a priori. I have found no reason to regard the
synthetic part as a priori, however, and thus no reason to regard
Kant’s theory as transcendental rather than empirical psychology.
The harmony of imagination and understanding in the simple case
of pure or free beauty does not depend upon any of the a priori
forms, concepts, or principles of sensibility or understanding, and
even where a priori concepts, such as the ideas of reason, enter into
the play of imagination, as content in the case of fine art or as ulti-
mate significance in the experience of the sublime, there seems to
be no synthetic a priori principle that they must do so, or that we
must be capable of aesthetic play with them. The principle that
the attainment of any end, even under unusual and apparently
contingent circumstances, will be accompanied with a feeling of
pleasure does not seem to be synthetic a priori. And the assump-
tion that all human minds will respond to particular objects with
the same free play of the cognitive powers does not seem to be
synthetic a priori.
Does the failure of Kant’s aesthetics to transform empirical into
transcendental psychology mean that is a complete failure? By no
means. Kant clearly refined both the analysis of the claims of judg-
493
ments of taste and the psychological accounts of aesthetic experi-
ence that he adopted from his predecessors. In particular, he
transformed the somewhat crude distinctions between absolute
and relative beauty and the beauty of form (species) and of appear-
ance that he found in Hutcheson and Hume (Hutcheson, 1738,
Treatise I, §§II, IV; Hume, 2000, Book III, Pt. iii, §6) into a complex
account of the similarities and differences between free and depen-
dent beauty and natural and artistic beauty. Kant’s transformation
of Alexander Baumgarten’s idea of the analogon rationis (Baumgar-
ten, 2007 [1750], Vol. I, §1) into the idea of the free and indetermi-
nate play of the cognitive powers, rather than their ordinary,
determinate, concept-guided use, provides a foundation for more
recent accounts of aesthetic or critical discourse, according to
which we can only use ordinary concepts to try to get people to
see or hear in a work of art or other aesthetic object what we do,
but cannot prove to them that they must. Kant’s recognition of
the multiple dimensions for significance and pleasure in the expe-
rience of art (CPJ, §51), which we have not discussed, avoids many
of the pitfalls of more reductive concepts of art from Hegel through
the present. But our appreciation and use of these contributions do
not depend upon taking at face value the claim of Kant and some of
his admirers that he transformed aesthetics from empirical to tran-
scendental psychology.
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