ABSTRACT
There is a tendency to regard the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement as lacking in unity, not just in comparison with the first two Critiques but by much less rigorous standards. If the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement has an overall unity, we must be able to give a firm content to Immanuel Kant’s remark that ‘Beauty may in general be termed the expression of Aesthetic Ideas’. The reference of the judgement of taste to the noumenal substrate modifies Kant’s aesthetic theory as radically as the reference of choice to Freedom modifies his ethical theory. Kant thought that in assuming the finality of Nature Judgement refers indirectly to God, and that every experience of beauty gives a hint of the existence of God and therefore of the possibility of the Summum Bonum and the authenticity of the categorical imperative. Aesthetic experience is as central to Kant’s Aesthetics as the feeling of obligation is to his Ethics.
