The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Agreeable. An Interpretation and Reconstruction of Kant's Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment

Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment aims to reconcile the theoretical and practical parts of philosophy by means of the reflecting power of judgment and its principle of the purposiveness of nature. In ascribing morality to nature’s purposiveness, however, Kant eventually appeals to a kind of practical necessity rather than the power of judgment itself, such that his reconciliation remains incomplete and only partially successful. Based on an interpretation and reconstruction of Kant’s writings, I argue that the beautiful, the mathematical sublime, and the overwhelmingly (dis)agreeable are three special symbols of the morally good, for they together signify the aesthetic unification of the domains of nature and freedom. In judging these phenomena, we feel that which we consider to be the necessary aesthetic effects of another being’s presentations of the ideas of a continuous series of particulars, of the entire world, and of an intelligible causality in nature, such that we regard the latter as given from a merely aesthetic point of view (namely, not in the intuition). The three ideas collectively describe all natural objects to be intelligibly determined with thorough unity. On the other hand, according to Kant, the fundamental moral law writes ‘So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universal law’, which implies ‘all actions ought to be intelligibly determined with thorough unity’. And so, the three aesthetic experiences, while undeterminable by concepts, together instantiate the idea of nature’s specifically moral creation through actual feelings of pleasure and displeasure. This aesthetic actuality mediates between theoretical possibility and practical necessity: it is essentially less than theoretical actuality, which requires an object’s intuition, but significantly more than mere theoretical possibility, which contains no grounds whatsoever for a moral postulation.