Critique of Judgement (Bernard Translation)

Batteux was a well-regarded French writer who had attempted to organize the Arts into two groups: those that exist in space and those that exist in time. This method of classification would naturally appeal to Kant. He does not seem, however, to have read the ancient foundational text on the subject, Aristotle's Poetics, the principles of which the critic Lessing declared were as certain as the laws of geometry established by Euclid.

Following the guiding thread of the categories, Kant declares that an aesthetic judgment about Beauty is, in terms of its quality, "disinterested" This means the observer takes pleasure in the beauty of the object itself, without wanting to possess it or use it for any specific purpose.; a point which had been established by writers as different as Francis Hutcheson and Moses Mendelssohn. Regarding quantity, a judgment about beauty provides universal satisfaction, although it is not based on any definite concept. This universality is only subjective It relates to human feeling rather than an objective fact about the item.; but it is still present. The maxim "To each his own pleasure" original: Trahit sua quemque voluptas does not apply to the pleasure provided by a pure judgment about beauty. As for relation, the characteristic of an object called beautiful is that it shows a "purposiveness without a definite purpose" The object looks as if it were designed for a reason, even if we cannot identify a specific practical use for it.. The pleasure is inherent original: a priori, independent on the one hand of the charms of the senses or the emotions of mere feeling, as the art historian Winckelmann had already declared; and on the other hand, it is a pleasure quite distinct from that which we feel when viewing perfection, with which the philosophers Wolff and Baumgarten had identified it. By his distinction between free and dependent beauty, which we also find in the pages of Hutcheson, Kant further develops his doctrine of the