ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the criterion of beauty in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement interferes with a notion of 'the good'. Beauty was associated by him with an idea of freedom that cannot be shackled by overt purposefulness. Indeed, he described the beautiful as displaying 'purposiveness without purpose'. The chapter examines Kant's ambivalent treatment of architecture. His hesitations about the place of architecture as an art form pertinently draw the attention to issues that bear on contemporary debates about who produces, and indeed what constitutes, 'good' construction. Kant's term 'mercenary art' is probably an inadequate way to describe the creativity involved in construction, considered as an instance of 'craft'. Kant proposes that taste is a 'kind of sensus communis'. 'Common sense' is normally understood as a form of basic knowledge that is simply, or even banally, 'there', in this world, close to hand, within reach of everyone were they to put their minds to it.
