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Kant's Critique of Judgement

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Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition Kant, Immanuel and Bernard, J. H. (John Henry)
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This Deduction is thus easy, because it has no need to justify the objective reality of any concept, for Beauty is not a concept of the Object and the judgement of taste is not cognitive. It only maintains that we are justified in presupposing universally in every man those subjective conditions of the Judgement which we find in ourselves; and further, that we have rightly subsumed the given Object under these conditions. The latter has indeed unavoidable difficulties which do not beset the logical Judgement. There we subsume under concepts, but in the aesthetical Judgement under a merely sensible relation between the Imagination and Understanding mutually harmonising in the representation of the form of the Object,—in which case the subsumption may easily be fallacious. Yet the legitimacy of the claim of the Judgement in counting upon universal assent is not thus annulled; it reduces itself merely to the correctness of the principle of judging validly for every one from subjective grounds. For as to the difficulty or doubt concerning the correctness of the subsumption under that principle, it makes the legitimacy of the claim of an aesthetical judgement in general to such validity and the principle of the same, as little doubtful, as the like faulty (though neither so commonly nor readily faulty) subsumption of the logical Judgement under its principle can make the latter, an objective principle, doubtful.
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But if the question were to be, how is it possible to assume nature a priori to be a complex of objects of taste? this problem has reference to Teleology, because it must be regarded as a purpose of nature essentially belonging to its concept to exhibit forms that are purposive for our Judgement. But the correctness of this latter assumption is very doubtful, whereas the efficacy of natural beauties is patent to experience.

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Kant's Critique of Judgement, Project Gutenberg eBook #48433

§ 38. Deduction of judgements of Taste § 39. Of the communicability of a Sensation