ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critical and reconstructive reading of Kant's "Orientation" essay of 1786 for the wider philosophical purpose of arguing that the ability to orient oneself in the world requires knowledge claims about sense objects that cannot be made without an irreducible aesthetic or felt discrimination. It shows that orientation represents a class of judgment that is aesthetic insofar as it draws on an ineliminable affective and thus subjective state but is cognitive in the sense that it gets purchase on and discloses features of the objective world. The chapter suggests that when Kant leads us to consider whether an affective state can enable a particular sense object to function as a symbol for the layout of the world as a whole. It argues that Kant's account of worldly orientation requires a judgmental capacity that is aesthetic insofar as it draws on an ineliminable affective.
