Kant on aesthetics
Aesthetical judgment can be divided into pure judgment and empirical judgment; free beauty and dependent beauty. Only free beauty, representing nothing, is a pure judgment of taste (e.g. parrots, seashells). Dependent beauty relies on concepts, and so cannot be a pure judgment (e.g. human beauty, buildings).
Disinterested pleasure, the basis of the aesthetic judgment, is a result of harmony between imagination and understanding. To say that something is pleasant is judgment of sense and not taste : "The rose is pleasant." One should thus say "It is pleasant to me." One can only demand agreement for the judgment of beauty, not sense, for a judgment of beauty is based on a formal purposiveness.
"If all humans have these cognitive abilities (imagination and understanding), then all should be able to reach the same judgment." Kant
Kant insists that a set of
rules is necessary for cognitive judgment, that one must have a trained and
cultivated eye to judge objectively.