The Significance of Beauty: Kant on Feeling and the System of the Mind

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In the Critique of Judgment , Kant argues that feeling is part of the system of the mind. Judgements of taste based on feeling are a unique kind of judgement, and the feeling that is their foundation forms an independent third power of the mind. Feeling has a special role within this system in that it also provides a transition between the other two powers of the mind, cognition and desire. The author of this text argues that feeling, our experience of beauty, provides a transition because it orients humans in a sensible world. Judgments of taste help overcome the difficulties that arise when rational cognitive and moral ends must be pursued in a sensible world. She demonstrates how feeling, disassociated from rational activities in Kant’s earlier works, is now central in reaching rational ends and understanding humans as unified rational beings.