Mihály Szilágyi-Gál

TASTE AND COMMUNICATION

Médiafilozófiai jegyzet
Working Paper in the Philosophy of Media

INTRODUCTION

The disciplinary and the thematic division between moral-, and political philosophy, as well as aesthetics has clearly become the academically canonized way to study the questions of these fields of philosophy since the 18th century. However the adequate study of a particular matter may be more important than to follow an always more or less arbitrary disciplinary framing of enquiry. The job undertaken in the present analysis is to examine aesthetic phenomena as a matter relevant for aesthetic-, moral-, and political theory. The fact that the matter of the beautiful is recognized primarily as an aesthetic one does not exclude the possibility that the enquiry, which focuses on it, may not have certain aspects, which can equally be examined from the perspectives of moral and political philosophy. On the contrary the more puzzling a question is the less likely and the less necessary is to be viewed within the strict framework of a pre-arranged disciplinary categorization. Even within one single specialized field the interdisciplinary approaches can fall pray of ending up in something, which is “non-disciplinary” instead of being inter-disciplinary. This can emerge from the risk of the artificial comparisons among concepts and hypothesis borrowed from different fields. A further trap of interdisciplinary approaches is to claim the systematic resemblance, the common research potential of two distinct fields although in case of both there might be only one single particular set of problems which display shared research matters. This is the case for instance of the various, often blurred utilizations of some of the claims of Gestalt-psychology, or the fuzzy reliance upon the term “paradigm”, as well as upon the well-known “space-time” topos – terms and notions which often show up in non-adequate contexts and lead to equivocations. Contrary to such inconsistencies in certain cases a given matter or phenomena steps out from some particular disciplinary framework and appears as a self-originating subject of research. In such cases the relationship between the disciplinary framework and the disciplinary identity of the research matter in question is reversed and it is the discipline itself that turns out to be an artificial categorization; furthermore it is the concrete research matter that gains independent attention. In these cases the inter-disciplinary approach is the only legitimate one, because it is the most suitable research means to address the topic itself instead of enforcing it into some pre-set disciplinary categorization.

The present analysis reflects upon The Critique of Judgment by Immanuel Kant. I consider that the feature which links the beautiful as an aesthetic category to the fields of moral- and political philosophy is its public character as described by Kant. The process of seeking for aspects which are shared by the aesthetic, the moral and the political phenomena has to develop from the simultaneous examination of these areas, otherwise one risks to run into forced interpretations and possibly infinite regressions thus compelled to endlessly explaining one field of enquiry from the other one.
	In Kant's aesthetics the experience of the beautiful consists of the free play between understanding and imagination. By free play (das freie Spiel der Einbildungskraft und Verstand) he means the conceptually un-determined interplay between these two mental faculties in aesthetic experience. Beyond his strict terminology the essence of what Kant claims is that judgments of taste equally belong to the conceptual and the sensual realm. By clarifying that judgments of taste reflect upon the subjective experience of the interplay between understanding and imagination, Kant implicitly describes taste as a space for freedom. It is this inherent freedom of aesthetic experience Friedrich Schiller joins in his own way, by defining the beautiful in the Kallias Letters and undertaking it further in the Aesthetic Education of Mankind in a Series of Letters as freedom in the appearance (Freiheit in der Erscheinung).
	The present enquiry argues that in the Kantian context, the freedom inherent in taste consists of the requirement of disinterestedness which Kant specifies in judgments of taste. Furthermore it is the concept of disinterestedness that links Kant’s aesthetic theory to his moral theory, and it is this concept upon which both Hannah Arendt and Friedrich Schiller attempted to reconstruct a political theory from Kant’s aesthetics. The present analysis is designed to reconstruct the implicit statements their considerations, on the relationship between beautiful and good have for moral and political theory. Kant’s claims on the aesthetic phenomena, as well as Schiller’s and Arendt’s interpretation of those claims as relevant for moral and political philosophy display also Schiller’s and Arendt’s own assumptions of the relationship between the aesthetic- the moral- and the political phenomena.
The similarity between aesthetics and morality is specified by Kant in different ways and as a relation of different degrees. There are several terms and concepts, which appear both in the description of aesthetics and morality: disinterestedness, purpose without purpose, form and autonomy. The list can be continued with other concepts, like plurality, judging, communicability and common sense as the most evident ones. The notion shared between his aesthetic and practical thought is disinterestedness. And the matter this notion bridges in practical and aesthetic thought is freedom.
Given that the reflective judgment which is the basis of judgments of taste is described by Kant as heautonomus rather than autonomus, a simple analogy between moral and aesthetic freedom would be misleading. It can be demonstrated however that seen from a higher level of generality Kant’s conception of freedom embraces both moral and aesthetic judgments. The shared matter is not the restricted meaning of autonomy but a broader conception of freedom. The key to the all-embracing sense of freedom which covers both moral and aesthetic theory - the transcendental foundation of what Kant means by freedom at all - is disinterestedness. This can be discerned from the role the pair of concept interest – dis-interest plays in Kant’s moral theory, as well as from the role disinterestedness plays in his aesthetic theory. The overlap addresses a more fundamental common essence than the difference which lies between autonomy and heautonomy. In case of his moral philosophy, through his famous distinction between autonomy and heteronomy Kant directly links the presence or abscence of interest to the presence of either moral evil or good – and he only rescues interest for morally good action on the higher level of the interest of reason for the actual working of the categorical imperative. It is in this respect that disinterestedness can be seen as a genuine aspect of freedom shared by aesthetics and pratical thought.
Kant’s idea behind disinterestedness is that interests motivate acting in a direction, which is opposite to free acting. This is what he calls heteronomy in his moral theory. In his aesthetic theory he clarifies that we call beautiful what pleases without interest, hence the formulation disinterested delight. Both in case, of aesthetic and moral judgments it is made explicit that the involvement of interests in the act of judging causes impurity of the act of judging itself. This impurity undermines their being either judgments of taste, or moral judgments. Accordingly being free from interests means, that the act of judgment is autonomous.
It worth observing that the concept of disinterestedness is immediately related to the idea of freedom. In case of judgments of taste the requirement of disinterestedness demands the independence of judgments from motivations in the act of judgments which are related to the existence of the judged object rather then to disinterested delight. In case of moral judgments the distinction between autonomy and heteronomy denotes a similar requirement of being freed from interests in the occurance of an act which is only supposed to harmonize with the categorical imperative – which is commitment to the general interest, the interest for the realization of the realm of ends. Accordingly heteronomy is described as the presence of particular interests in the maxim of the act.
It is purpose without purpose that joins disinterestedness in the description of the role of freedom in judgments of taste. This notion refers to the inherent law-likeness of aesthetic phenomena. Form is a further concept that appears both in case of moral and aesthetic freedom and it is immediately related to the inherent law-likeness of moral and aesthetic phenomena. Therefore one can trace the lines of an argument that links disinterestedness, purpose without purpose and form into one single picture, that embraces both moral and aesthetic phenomena, and of which essence lies in its being free from interests. To be free from interests is the common normativity of moral and aesthetic phenomena, and the „common world” they all belong to is the realm of ends, in which the freedom of the self-imposition of law reigns and in which any particular interest works as heteronomy, causing impurity in moral acts as well as in artistic creations and leading to „ugliness” – both in the aesthetic and moral sense of the word. Indeed in this inference ugliness and evil do come very close to each other, as well as their counterparts, beautiful and good, both referring to the impurity of being infected by interests.
The difficulty is however to set out any systematic way in which Kant relates aesthetics to morality. The least one can assert on this relationship is that aesthetic experience (and the judgments based upon that) is in certain cases suitable to represent moral ideas. The reason why Kant does not offer any systematic description of the relationship of similarity should not be necessarily seen as a weakness of his elaboration. But rather as the outcome of his recognition of the fact that the degree of this similarity is not constant - it varies from case to case. This means that there is no a priori rule for some constant analogy between aesthetics and morality. What we learn from paragraph 59 is that aesthetic phenomena can be adequate to represent moral ideas. But due to the partly subjective character of judgments of taste Kant obviously cannot specify any a priori constancy of such representations. Products of art can be used for representing moral ideas but this will always occur in some particularly different way and in inevitably various degrees. Contrary to this teleological judgments are never suitable to represent moral ideas. The reason for this difference is that whereas teleological judgments refer to a conceptually specified teleology of a thing (for instance to the usefulness of a machine), judgments of taste refer to the conceptually non-specified free play between imagination and understanding in the act of judging.

Kant’s influence on Schiller's work on the aesthetic education of man is obvious. Schiller confesses the direct Kantian inspiration already in the First Letter on the aesthetic education of mankind. The Second Letter further confirms that within the Kantian inspiration the relationship between freedom and the beautiful is recognized by the author as a significant aspect of his own Kant-reception. There are several commentaries, which do not only underline this influence but also highlight the fact that it was exactly the problem of freedom, which linked Schiller's aesthetic, moral and political reasoning into one single system of reply to Kant's moral philosophy and aesthetics.
	Kant's third Critique and Schiller's Aesthetic Letters are fundamentally different both in philosophical- and literary style. The stylistic differences between the two texts are also relevant for their philosophical differences and overlaps. The two authors take different positions on how to express philosophical theses and this difference in style also reflects the difference in philosophical content. As a poet Schiller was inclined to recur to modes of expression and argumentation which were allusive rather than systematically clarifying. This makes his text difficult to comprehend. Schiller was aware of the quasi-theoretical character of his style when he confesses in his correspondence with Goethe that for poet, he is a philosopher and for a philosopher, he is a poet. This fact can be equally seen as a weakness and a strength of his artistic and analytic capabilities. Although in his style as a thinker Kant can really be seen as Schiller's opposite, it is precisely The Critique of Judgment, which displays the lowest degree of his usual conceptual rigor. This is Kant’s most controversial book. Contrary to his usual analytical accuracy, in this book, he even relies sometimes on metaphorical expressions and hints, especially regarding the relationship between morality and judgment of taste. There is a peculiar feature of the topic of both texts, which may even offer some clues to understand, why these two authors, so different in intellectual habit had to a certain extent fallen pray of obscure arguing. In their analyses they both arrived to the idea that the aesthetic realm is both of conceptual and non-conceptual nature. Consequently they had faced the difficulty of conceptually talking about something of which conceptual grasping is only partly possible. The hybrid nature they identify as characteristic to aesthetic phenomena, could help us to understand the sometimes hybrid style of their elaboration of what the aesthetic phenomena are.
	There are good reasons to accept Eva Schaper's argument that although Schiller's Aesthetic Letters are remarkable as a distinct conception of the aesthetic phenomena, they constitute a misunderstanding of Kant's own conception of the topic. I consider however that one does not have to accept Schiller's entire thesis in order to examine the validity of just some of his considerations in light of Kant's own conception. Moreover Schiller's mistakes in his attempt to properly understand Kant might come to light much better if one engages into the reconstruction of both theories.
	Arendt’s thoughts on the possibility of creating a political philosophy from Kant’s aesthetic theory can be seen as the description of the limits of modernity and of modern politics as such, in its being un-sensitive for particularity, for its being unable to consider individuality. Hence her affinity for judgment as the faculty which can break any usual chain of causation and which can give another direction to occurences: judging is the exercise of freedom. The exercise of erweiterte Denkungsart (enlarged mind) – one of the features of reflective judging as defined by Kant - is an epistemic, a moral and an aesthetic exercise in the meantime. Arendt's underlying idea is that the faculty to think (and to judge) is both the cognitive chance and the moral burden for being able to discern good from evil. There is a closer relationship between judgments of taste and a broader meaning of judging, which is of essentially social nature and which opens up the final relationship between aesthetic, moral and political judging. What links this broader meaning of judging to taste is sensus communis. The aesthetic spectator and the political „Weltbetrachter” emerge from the same ideal of world-community as Kant’s idea (and ideal) of the final development of history which is meant to be the realization of the state of Mündigkeit. This is what appears in Kant’s hopes for the historical realization of the ethical world community – the final end of nature. The idea of the final end of nature is in turn part of the aesthetics which is implicit in the teleology of the world. Enlarged mind is the ontological precondition of a public space without which neither taste nor politics as joint human action could be possible, and in which none of these two could exist without the other one. Arendt attempts to reconstruct Kant’s political philosophy as a hidden part of his aesthetics. Although she is criticized for disregarding Kant’s specific writings of political philosophy, given that the notion of autonomy had remained for Kant a fundamental notion in all of his writings in practical philosophy, including his later works on political theory, Arendt’s attempt to reconstruct the seeds of a political theory in Kant’s aesthetics along the idea of the autonomy of judging in matters of taste is a worth undertaking.

The present analysis does not attempt to either defend or criticize Schiller's and Arendt’s interpretation of Kant. What I hope to demonstrate is that by reflecting upon Kant's conception of the aesthetic phenomena as an implicit conception of the political phenomena Schiller and Arendt isolate an implicit thesis in the third Critique concerning the relationship between the concept of the beautiful and of the public which turns an aesthetic enquiry also into one of moral- and political theory. Further the present analysis is not an attempt to continue or to "find out" how Arendt's interpretation of Kant – sadly left un-complete - would have, looked like, or should had been ended up. I don't try to reconstruct Arendt's unfinished book written about Kant's alleged political philosophy. Such attempts would be futile. What I would like to understand in Arendt's interpretation of Kant is, what it means to consider, that a theory of the aesthetic phenomena - of what is beautiful and ugly - is at the same time an underlying theory on good and evil morally and politically understood.
The puzzle shared by Kant's, Arendt's and Schiller's approach is the matter of publicly shared judging. And the shared outcome of Schiller’s and Arendt’s enquiry on the topic is that they discover the normative resources of Kant’s aesthetics for moral and political thought in Kant’s conception of freedom in both his aesthetic and moral theory: freedom as autonomy.
The matter of common judging consists of a set of questions targeting the epistemological, moral, aesthetic and political aspects of how to come to publicly shared judgments despite the inevitable individuality of any concrete act of judging. This is the primary question that turns the relationship between the specifically political- and aesthetic enquiry into a separate area of research that links both. I consider however, that neither the aesthetic, nor the moral and the political dimensions of their approach appear directly, but that all these considerations derive from an underlying ontological thesis the three authors share. According to this, we do not only have a moral and a cognitive relationship to the world as it appears to us, but we also have an aesthetic relationship to it. The aesthetic relationship to the world follows from the genuine situation of the one, who judges, in always occupying a particular perspective from where the judgment is made. The space where the relation of each one who is occupying his own position, to everyone else actually takes place is the public space. This fits Arendt’s central idea of her works on Kant. One could claim in this respect, that the inevitable perspective of the one, who judges is not a simple standpoint, but a genuine position, which makes any particular standpoint possible at all (überhaupt). The genuine ontological perspective of always being "somewhere" in the world, to be in a position from the outset from which we relate ourselves to anything and anyone else in the world, raises the problem of morality in the sense, that we are never alone – we are always related to the others and we have to be aware of this fact: according to Arendt this fact is, that “plurality is the law of the earth”. Already the “stop and think” situation of the thinking individual, experiences the genuine fact of being always in plural, even in the lonely act of thinking – hence Arendt’s referring to Socrates, who explains to one his disciples, that he lives together with a neighbor, who is always objecting him: this neighbor is his own consciousness. This constant process of facing oneself in the process of thinking – its genuine plural nature – immediately establishes its moral dimension: that of self-reflection, which is a hypothetical external view. Thus the moral- and the political dimension of judgments of taste rely on the fact that they are genuinely related to the other people, and this permanent plurality starts with the very act of thinking, which – according to Arendt – is a dialogue with oneself: thinking is a morally accountable act. The moral and the political dimension of judgments of taste appear in the pre-moral and pre-political context of the genuine relatedness to each other – and to myself in the first hand.
The analysis of Kant’s aesthetics from the point of view of its potential for moral political thought is only accurate if one also takes into account Kant's explicit moral- and political considerations, especially those elements, which Kant intentionally relates to his own aesthetic theory. But the present approach only relies on particular propositions of moral- and political theory, insofar as these are also Kant's own underlying statements, and avoids to also deal in the course of interpretation with external conceptions of moral- and political theory. The leading matter which inevitably links aesthetic, moral and political aspects to each other remains freedom.

Finally with regard to the way in which the Kant-reception of the two authors is actually developed, in both cases the reception partly derives from their own approaches regarding the very same matters they reconstruct in Kant. In this respect both of them appear in the process of reception as original thinkers who’s claims are implicit receptions of some of Kant’s ideas. But within this process of implicit reception Arendt is more explicit: she elaborates her Kantianism more like a historian of philosophy than Schiller does. What is at stake in the present work is to discern what is common and what remains different in the works under scrutiny. The outcome is inevitably a reading of readings, an interpretation of interpretations, which might of course, not be void of its own assumptions. Not having the perfect ability to consider my own approach from any external view, the goal set in the following analysis is the attempt to constantly reflect upon my own reconstruction and to achieve in this way the borderline between a particular text and its interpretation.

I. KANT’S THEORY OF JUDGMENTS OF TASTE

Given the structure of the critical philosophy, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason and The Critique of Judgment it seems to be evident that the a priori of judgments of taste differs from both the a priori of theoretical and practical knowledge. The aesthetic a priori is neither knowledge, nor praxis. Still judgments of taste do have their well-defined place within the structure of the three volumes: they are supposed to serve as a bridge between the intellectual and sensual realm.

1. Kant’s Use of the Word Aesthetics
According to Kant aesthetics is not the science of the beautiful, but of the principles of the senses in general. There are several passages in the first Critique, which both establish the epistemological meaning of the word "aesthetic", and introduce its relevance for aesthetic theory. The most important one is paragraph 13, in the "Transcendental Aesthetic", which introduces the fundamental assumption transcendental deduction is based upon. Accordingly there are two a priori forms of intuition: space and time. These two basic forms are constantly present in every experience. Space is the outer form of the object of sensation which appears to the consciousness in the flux of time, which in turn is the inner sensation. Therefore it is ethimologically important to highlight that the word "aesthetic" has a specific meaning in the Kantian vocabulary. Although this specific meaning does not directly refer to Kant's actual aesthetic theory but its primary function is epistemological, it is indirectly related to what we call Kant's aesthetic theory. An obvious link between the notion aesthetic in its primary Kantian meaning and aesthetic theory is sensation. However in its primary meaning the role of sensation in the concept of the aesthetic refers to the more genuine transcendental level of the structure of sensations as such.
	Another link between the concept of aesthetic and what one calls Kant's aesthetic theory is the concept of judgment. From the perspective of the first Critique, the founding aspect of Kant's aesthetics lies in the idea that the very act of experience already entails a moment which Kant calls judgment. This is the moment of subsumption of the pure sense data in the intuition (Anschauung) under a concept, which synthetically forms, what we genuinely experience - as experience. The act of judging is for Kant an absolutely genuine moment in the process of the birth of experiences. Seen in this light to "judge" something as beautiful is in fact, a specific way to experience. As we learn from paragraph 9 of the third Critique the pure judging of the form of an object which actually refers to its aesthetic value (beauty or ugliness) is not identical to the act of judging the object itself. Further clarifications of the nature of judgments of taste define these acts as reflections of the subject upon his own state of mind while experiencing the free play between the conceptual and the sensual elements. This is the type of experience, which leads to judgments of taste. Given that Kant did not come up with any particular doctrine of the beautiful, he would obviously call his aesthetic theory a critique of judgment that is to say, the critique of the way, in which we arrive to judgments referring to aesthetic phenomena.
	The two parts of The Critique of Judgment treat the teleology of nature and the aesthetic teleology of taste as distinct branches of one single teleological system. The idea to place teleology and aesthetic theory into one single inquiry appears first in Kant’s correspondence with Carl Leonard Reinhold from 1787. Here the critique of taste is also mentioned as teleology.

2. The Meaning of the Concept of Judgments of Taste
Kant claims that the a priori rigor of judgments of taste can only be of subjective necessity. I contend that this claim leads to the notion of freedom in so far as, the presence of freedom emerges from the fact that the possible identity of individual- and public taste cannot be warranted a priori: judgments of taste are both individual and open for public assent. However the fact of the individual and public element in the validation of judgments of taste can at least lead to controversies, if not to contradictions. In the following I examine the possibility of this contradiction.
Kant defines judgments of taste those judgments which refer to the free play between imagination and understanding (das freie Spiel der Einbildungskraft und Verstand): „The cognitive powers brought into play by this representation are here engaged in a free play, since no definite concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition. Hence the mental state in this representation must be one of a feeling of the free play of the powers of representation in a given representation for a cognition in general. Now a representation, whereby an object is given, involves, in order that it may become a source of cognition at all, imagination for bringing together the manifold of intuition, and understanding for the unity of the concept uniting the representations.” We further learn that we label an object "beautiful", if we talk about an experience in which the sensual and the conceptual elements are spontaneously ordered according to an inner principle that governs this very experience. The free play occurs in this spontaneous organization of the sensual material into an intellectual form. This is the form of the subjective purposefulness we discover in the free play of our own mental faculties while perceiving the object to be aesthetically judged. The inner principle of this organization offers to the experience a closed teleology. This is what Kant calls as purpose without purpose (zwecklose Zweckmäßigkeit).
Kant claims, that it is the purposefulness as a heuristic principle of nature that we necessarily postulate in order to subsume the manifold we perceive under the laws of understanding, which in turn link our concept of nature to our concept of freedom, as the final purpose in nature. As we already learn from Kant’s moral philosophy, the idea of freedom is transcendental and can only manifest in the sensible realm of nature. With these considerations appears the need for aesthetics -  for the sake of completion of the critical construction. Aesthetics or more precisely the aesthetic phenomena is the bridge between nature and freedom. As a matter of fact the experience of the beautiful is the experience of the unique way, in which the experienced object displays the presence of such a purpose without purpose. For instance the unique way of how a painting reveals the tragic or satisfied or defeated etc, character of a human face is the realization of the inner purposefulness of all the details of that painting, for the purpose of expressing that particular human state of mind as showed on that face. Contrary to this by simply making a copy of a face is not an instance for artistic beauty, because it does not display the unique purposefulness of its details, meant to target the character of that face, but it just mechanically duplicates an already existing representation of it. Clearly it is the mechanical purposefulness of the act of simple copying, that turns such acts to be artificial, rather than inherently purposeful, spontaneous expressions of any possible theme of aesthetic representation. Hence the good piece of art is distinguished by the uniqueness of its way to „tell the same story” as what nature tells in a particular landscape for instance: the naive reproduction falls short to display the reflective reproduction, which is the essence of the aesthetic performance. The reflective reproduction shows nature as it is, not as it looks like. (Schiller’s distinction between naive and sentimental poetry adheres to a similar understanding of this difference.) Kant clarifies this difference between the artificial and the non-artificial ways of representation by claiming, that the good piece of art is the one that looks as if it would be a product of nature. (The most explicit expression of this idea can be found in paragraphs 43 and 48.)
According to Kant although judgments of taste are individual, they always anticipate the possible judgments which other observers would also make about the aesthetic quality of a given object. This anticipation is meant to be a necessary outcome of the a priori structure of the mind in arriving to judgments of taste as such. Hence anticipation is not to be understood sociologically, as a kind of self-adaptation to how others would judge, but it is to be understood transcendentally. More precisely Kant claims that the reason why it can be anticipated that particular aesthetic judgments are going to be socially shared is due to the fact, that the main structure of these judgments namely, the free play of the sensual and the conceptual elements is anthropologically general (a priori). This means that in judgments of taste each individual inevitably relies only on the a priori nature of this free play of the sensual and of the conceptual. It is this a priori uniformity, which serves as the transcendental ground for the social validity and communicability (Mitteilbarkeit) of the judgments of taste.
In paragraph 5 of the third Critique, we learn that “taste is the faculty for estimating an object or manner of representation through a delight or displeasure without any interest. In paragraph 40, taste is defined as follows: “eine Art von sensus communis”. In paragraph 60 we learn that “taste is at bottom a faculty for estimating the sensible rendering of moral ideas (…) so it becomes clear that the true propedeutic for the foundation of taste is the development of moral ideas and the culture of moral feeling, since only when these are brought into connection with sensibility can genuine taste assume a determinate, inalterable form.” Paragraph 34 clarifies the disciplinary categorization of the examination of taste. Accordingly given that the beautiful in the representation of an object lies in its being the form of the subjective purposefulness we discover in the free play of our own mental faculties while perceiving the object, the critique of taste is defined as follows. It is the art or science (as Kant formulates) of subsuming and defining under rules the mutual relationship between understanding and imagination as it occurs in a concrete representation. Kant adds that this mutual relationship between the two faculties is the harmony or disharmony in the representation. The critique of taste is art, if it only demonstrates in examples. It is science, if it deduces the possibility of judgment of taste from the nature of the faculties in general. If it is art, it only seeks to explore empirical rules in judging the objects of taste. Contrary to this, if it is science, its object of exploration is the faculty to judge those objects of taste. Kant claims that what he undertakes is the last one as transcendental critique, which is meant to describe and justify the subjective principle of taste as the a priori principle of the faculty of judgment.
In the "Deduction of pure aesthetic judgments" paragraph 31 describes judgments of taste. We learn that these judgments are neither theoretical which are based upon the general concept of nature as supplied by understanding, nor purely practical which are based upon the idea of freedom as a priori supplied by reason. Hence judgments of taste neither inform, on what the thing is, nor do they tell what should be carried out for the thing to exist. Therefore it has to be explained how, can it be possible for the individual judgment, which expresses the subjective purposefulness of the experience of the object, to be of general validity for the judgment as such. This would clarify how is it possible, that something pleases merely in the act of judging, without sense perception and without a concept, being able at the same time as an individual judgment to rely on a rule of pleasure of general validity. This general validity cannot be based upon the exploration of how the other people judge, but it can only be based upon the autonomy of the subject who judges his own happiness he feels in the representation. Further these judgments are not supposed to be deduced from concepts and they have a logically dual character. Therefore judgments of this kind have the following characteristics: 1. a priori general validity, which however is not a logical generality based on concepts, but the generality of the individual judgment – its suitability to be generalized; 2. necessity, which although is a priori, it does not depend on a priori grounds upon which the pleasure in judgments of taste presupposed in everyone could be coercively claimed from everyone; 3. disinterestedness, the requirement which specifies the basic condition of the purity of such judgments – their independence of aspects which do not refer to the sole pleasure they occasion in our experience but bring into play extra-aesthetic motivations like interest in the mere existence of the experienced object, its usefulness for some particular purpose; 4. communicability, which is again, similarly to general validity it is not an empirical requirement, but one that refers to the suitability of judgments of taste to be communicable. This requirement is related to the distinction Kant makes between reports regarding our sensual state, which as opposed to judgments of taste are entirely personal. The reason why we can share (mit-teilen) our preferences in matters of taste with others is due to their partial relatedness to understanding – to the realm of conceptuality.
The closing chapter of the introduction to the third Critique entitled "Joinder of the Legislations of Understanding and Reason by Means of Judgment" offers a map of the systematic unity of the higher intellectual faculties as follows:

List of Mental Faculties                                                                   Cognitive Faculties
-	Cognitive faculties                                                                         - Understanding
-	Feeling of pleasure and displeasure                                                     - Judgment
-	Faculty of desire                                                                                     - Reason

A priori Principles                                                                                      Application
-	Conformity to law                                                                                       - Nature
-	Finality                                                                                                             - Art
-	Final End                                                                                                  - Freedom

	This table is a useful guide in the retrospective view one wishes to obtain not only about the introduction to the third Critique, but primarily about the place Kant assigns to judgment between understanding and reason. Kant's description implicitly casts light upon the problem of freedom in the relationship between the three Critiques. In this respect it can be immediately observed that whereas the application of finality is art, the application of final end is freedom. This clarifies an important aspect of the role of purposefulness in Kant's entire theory of taste. Namely that if one observes the symmetry between the principles of finality and final end on the one hand, and their applications on the other, one can observe that the principle of finality although final, is on a lower degree in the hierarchy of principles than the principle of final end. Art as the application of finality is “almost” freedom. In paragraph 59 we learn that art can serve the sensual representation of the ideas of reason – hence the sense in which art can be seen as “almost” freedom: it can sensually indicate what is supra-sensual.
Kant claims that the purposefulness of nature postulated by judgment cannot be a priori established either by understanding, or by reason. It is a regulative principle and it only serves the need (Bedürfnis) of judgment to be able to systematize the dispersed sensually perceived manifold, into empirical laws for construing experience. In offering transcendental law to nature understanding abstracts from the manifold of empirical laws. It only considers the general conditions of experience according to its form. Therefore judgment does not only have to subsume the manifold under the empirical laws, but it also has to find the general level under which this subsumption is to be carried out.
3. The Place of Judgments of Taste in Kant’s Critical Philosophy

A. Teleology as the Broader Framework of Nature and Freedom
The common root of the relationship between good and beautiful, ethics and aesthetics in Kant’s critical philosophy leads to the broader meaning of his practical thinking. However this common ground is only meaningful, if it is placed within the general context of the world-view which fuels the entire critical construction. The first step should be to understand Kant’s conception of teleology. Without considering his entire conception of teleology neither his practical nor his aesthetic thought can become meaningful.
	First of all one has to grasp the place morality occupies within the general world-order humans (and reasonable beings generally) organically belong to. The Critique of Judgment consists of two parts, from which it is the second part which addresses the final framework of what anything like purpose is supposed to mean at all. This final framework is Kant’s full conception of teleology. The two end points of this teleological world-order can be seen as the physical phenomena as it appears in space and time, and as the culture-creating man, as the final end in nature. Kant claims that it is only man who through his reason can have a concept about purpose. Man is able to turn the manifoldness of purposeful things of nature into a whole system of purposes. As a heuristic (regulative) principle created by man who also belongs to the nature about which he creates this principle itself purposefulness is the bridge between nature and morality, temporality and freedom. The special feature of man consists in his ability to reflect upon the world-order of purposes he also belongs to. This is man’s heautonomy. Purposefulness is an idea which belongs to the heautonomy of reflective judgment. As the final purpose of nature man still belongs to nature. However according to the distinction Kant makes between „final end” and „ultimate end” the morality of man exceeds the world-order of „physicoteleology” and steps into „ethicoteleology”. „Ethicoteleology” is the inherent teleology of man as moral beeing. The two kinds of teleologies and the related two kinds of finalities (ultimate and final purpose) maintain the gap between culture and morality. Kant’s later aesthetics was meant to serve the bridge over this gap.
	The contribution of aesthetics to the general conception of teleology lies in the description of the experience of aesthetic enjoyment as the purposeful play between imagination and understanding. Starting the entire argument from the assumption of the autonomy of morality by relying on the idea of the general teleology of world-order, once elaborated the ideal of the purposeful harmony between the laws of nature and morality, he attempted to point out the unity of the philosophical system of natural laws with the unity of moral laws. Kant starts to build up this argument from the „system of freedom” – that is to say, from the realm of ends. Insofar as Kant has achieved at all to unify the two separate systems of the law of nature and that of moral law, this attempt and its possible success was inconceivable without the matter of freedom. The link between the theoretical and the practical realms into one single all-embracing teleology was supposed to be completed by The Critique of judgment. Kant’s aesthetics is directly related to his general considerations on freedom.

„But this systematic unity of ends in this world of intelligences – a world which is indeed, as mere nature, a sensible world only, but which, as a system of freedom, can be entitled an intelligible, that is, a moral world (regnum gratiae) – leads inevitably also to the purposive unity of all things, which constitute this great whole, in accordance with universal laws of nature (just as the former unity is in accordance with universal and necessary laws of morality), and thus unites the practical with the speculative reason. The world must be represented as having originated from an idea if it is to be in harmony with that employment of reason without which we should indeed hold ourselves to be unworthy of reason, namely, with the moral employment – which is founded entirely on the idea of the supreme good. In this way all investigation of nature tends to take the form of system of ends, and in its widest extension becomes a physico-theology. But this, as it has its source in the moral order, as a unity grounded in freedom’s own essential nature, and not accidentally instituted through external commands, connects the purposiveness of nature with grounds which must be inseparably connected a priori with the inner possibility of things, and so leads to a transcendental theology – a theology which takes the ideal of supreme ontological perfection as a principle of systematic unity. And since all things have their origin in the absolute necessity of the primordial being, that principle connects them in accordance with universal and necessary laws of nature.”

	The reason why the quote from above belongs to the critical system of views is, the subjective character of the assumption of the systematic world order. This fact already prepares the third Critique.
	These considerations clarify, that the general heuristic principle of teleology embraces the order of things as we can know them, including the moral and aesthetic system of the world. In this conceptual framework no specialized field of philosophy, of thinking in general can be conceived - be it the critique of pure reason, moral theory, or aesthetics - which could be elaborated separately from the assumption of the all-encompassing teleological order of the world as we can know it. Hence the study of morality inevitably implies the indirect results of a teleological enquiry, which links it in the meantime to aesthetics. The overlaping function of the idea of purposefulness also offers a clue to see in which sense is it meaningful to grasp aesthetic experience as something which unifies the sensual and the intellectual dimensions of human nature. The possibility to overcome the gap between history and morality lies in the non-historical character of freedom which manifests in the act of judgment of taste and in artistic creation.

B. Teleology and History
In his essay on The Critique of Judgment Schopenhauer defines Kant’s aesthetic undertaking in comparison to other noteworthy attempts to describe the phenomena of the beautiful. (Schopenhauer mentions Aristoteles, Home, Burke, Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder and Hume.) He claims that the fundamental difference between Kant and the others is that he was neither examining the aesthetic phenomena from an empirical perspective nor did he elaborate anything like some teaching on what is beautiful or ugly, on what should be followed as a model in this respect, and on how we can rich the experience of the beautiful. What Kant did was the a priori description of the mechanism of arriving to label something as beautiful. Contrary to Hume Kant did not start from experience, but he elaborated an a priori critique. Schopenhauer claims that by proceeding in this way Kant drove back the whole problem of the beautiful to the individual subject. The price for his focusing on the subjective experience of the beautiful was that Kant gave up to assert anything about the beautiful itself. Schopenhauer illustrates this by comparing Kant’s approach to the situation in which one elaborates the theory of colors from the point of view of the blind. Further Schopenhauer claims that by building up his entire theory of the beautiful from the notion of purposefulness Kant does not manage to find any final principle of the beautiful - like Schopenhauer himself, the principle of the will. The only aspect of Kant’s aesthetics that won Schopenhauer’s appreciation is the theory of the sublime.
	It is not difficult to see that the main thing which Schopenhauer took as missing from Kant’s asthetic theory was the objectifying type of approaching on the beautiful, something, that Kant had consciously avoided as the “metaphysical” way of examination and instead of which he had undertaken the “critique” of the subject matter. What distances Schopenhauer from Kant is not just a normal difference between two thinkers or two schools, but it is a difference of two opposed world-views. The essential feature of this difference is the Copernican turn.
After considering Schopenhauer, now with a huge jump in the history of philosophy we can consider Bourdieu’s attack of Kant’s aesthetics which targets its very heart. He claims that the a priori itself is historically constructed, and with this claim, in fact, he annihilates the very concept of a priori. Within a basically Marxist framework of enquiry Bourdieu claims that there is nothing like art and artist: the entire aesthetic phenomena is non-existent outside of a historically constituted network of social and cultural roles, without which the necessary definitions and self-definitions which make the artist, to be an artist, the piece of art, to be a piece of art would all be meaningless. Hence his thesis that Kant’s aesthetics is mistaken in its ahistorical position toward something which only makes sense in particular historical contexts. Moreover he asserts that the universality of art only manifests itself in the historical particularity of aesthetic phenomena. Hence his suggestion that it is in fact formalism in this aesthetics that looses sight of the conditions of the validity of aesthteic phenomena rather, than the historically changing contents of this validity.
Bourdieu’s objection to Kant’s a priori aesthetics disregards Kant’s intentions. The problem does not lie in Bourdieu’s thesis on the historical embededness of aesthetic phenomena, but in the fact that he targets his criticism into a direction where there is no Kant. Bourdieu’s criticism resembles Schopenhauer’s in the sense that it rejects Kant’s un-contextual formalism. And Bourdieu’s criticism obviously resembles every anti-formalistic discourse in general which has been linked to various philosophies throught the history of philosophy. Of course in Bourdieu’s case the need for context does not occur in a conservative/communitarian ontology, but in a Marxist one. The main idea is that the context as such – be it historical, social, cultural etc - is in-escapable. As long as it concerns the in-escapable contextuality of aesthetic phenomena Bourdieu is convincing. But Kant’s a pioristic phenomenology aimed at describing the mental phenomena of how to come to judgments of taste at all (überhaupt) rather than describing aesthetic phenomena is not a true alternative to Bourdieu’s own thesis on the historical rooting of aesthetic phenomena. Bourdieu’s criticism against Kant would only hold if Kant, relying on his transcendental approach, would claim anything about particular works of art. But given that this is not case, Bourdieu’s criticism is not accurate. And his statement that the a priori is historically constructed is mistaken because it annihilates the very meaning of a priori.
What deserves special attention in Bourdieu’s article however is that he relates an aesthetic-epistemological consideration to one of the sociology of production. The linking idea developed at the end of the article is the problem of the context-ladenness of seeing (aesthetically understood), and further, the awareness of the possibility (or inevitability) of such a context-ladenness. The idea itself that aesthetic perception is not a priori in the Kantian sense, but it is historically structured leads in the direction of the more general thesis of the „Gestalt-character” of taste and of the aesthetic phenomena in general. The problem of seeing which in case of taste obviously opens up the sociological and historical relativity of aesthetic validity itself offers a more generous lesson than the weak criticism against Kant, which it includes. Hence his clarification that he is not arguing for relativism, but on the contrary, he wants to rescue aesthetic phenomena from ahistorical formalism. The strongest argument concerning the problem of seeing and the socio-historical determination of aesthetic perception appears in the last endnote. What Bourdieu clarifies here is that contrary to the charge of relativism against the sociological analysis of aesthetic phenomena the goal of the sociological approach is, on the contrary, to rescue aesthetic phenomena from arbitrariness (exactly by drawing attention to the changing conditions of perception). By doing this, we can demonstrate that no matter which are the actual conditions of perceptions at hand, it is always possible that two entirely differently socialized person would come to the same judgment of taste regarding the same work of art. The crucial lesson in Bourdieu’s text is that he shows, that it is exactly history in which the autonomy of the aesthetic phenomena appears. In other words, the virtual independence of art from history occurs in history. Bourdieu’s thesis implies the vision of the ultimate freedom of taste. Paul Guyer demonstrates that Kant had only been able to solve this problem, by falling back to something that he had been permanently looking forward to avoid namely, into psychologism. Schaper makes a similar point, when she talks about Kant's tendency to conflate arguments about conceptual features with phenomenological descriptions of the human mind.
	
C. The Epistemology of Autonomy
The controversial nature of the autonomy of aesthetic phenomena appears in one of Eva Schaper’s essays in an epistemological context. She claims that in the deduction of taste Kant does not manage to prove the requirement of the necessary presupposition of communicability, as the justification of the a priori universal validity of judgments of taste. Accordingly Kant even violates the requirement of the autonomy of the aesthetic criteria from non-aesthetic criteria like goodness and usefulness set by himself. Schaper claims that this incompatibility lies in an argument which Kant intends to use in the final justification of the requirement of the general agreement in judgments of taste. This argument asserts that the universal agreement in these judgments is conclusively supported, if we discover, that the beautiful is a symbol of the morally good. Schaper’s objection is that Kant falls into a metaphysical justification of the significance of the beautiful - something, which was contrary to his intentions.
	Schaper’s mistake is that she disregards Kant’s intention to bring into play the requirement of communicability and the whole idea of the validification of judgments of taste by relying on some public authority. As a matter of fact the role of the public in Kant’s theory of judgment is not of empirical nature. Kant does not think of taste as something that actually has to depend on public approval – or even if he does, this is not the main intention of this idea. The public dimension of taste is supposed to be the hypothetical anticipation of how others would judge, and the stake of this is the self-restrictive nature of taste: the essence of reflective judging – which in its self-restrictiveness also carries a moral dimension.
	In is book on Kant Roger Scruton argues, that in aesthetic judgments the state of mind of being freed from concept means that conceptuality only remains present "either wholly indeterminate, or if determinate as not applied." Scruton exemplifies this interpretation of the second case through a possible instance. He explores the image of a face, where face enters the imaginative synthesis, but it is not applied to the object. Scruton states that Kant was more interested in the first case, in which we see a pattern for instance. In such a case we don't possess a determinate concept, but experience a conceptually indeterminate order. He claims that this is the background for Kant's formalistic conception of the beautiful in art.

No matter whether the turning point of the particular objection targets the epistemological, the psychological, or the historical aspects of Kant’s theory of taste, the critical reflections of the authors from above all attack the underlying freedom of taste, because this is the type of criticism, which – if successful – undermines the whole construction. Kant might obviously fall pray of not maintaining the autonomy of his criteria of judgments of taste from history, from lack of history, from any concrete definition of the beautiful as an independent attribute, from the presence of other individuals capable for judging, the final stake of his understanding of judgments of taste and accordingly, the stake of refuting him is immediately related to the degree of freedom he can defend in case of judgments of taste.

4. The Way Toward the Others: Neigung zur Geselligkeit
Kant’s epistemological foundation of the social rooting of judgments of taste lies in its anti-sensualism. It is this basic anti-sensualism of Kant’s aesthetic theory that isolates judgments of taste from the purely personal sensual judgments, and locates them in the realm of the intersubjective reports on individual aesthetic experiences. The most significant passage from the description of the judgments of taste in paragraph 31 is the idea that these judgments are both generally valid and generally un-coercive. This means that despite its general validity, a judgment of taste does not necessarily imply general agreement. This seems to be contradictory. The problem which appears in this contradiction is that it addresses the logical tension between the individual character of judgments of taste on the one hand and the a priori foundation of their collective validity on the other. This is the most important aspect of Kant’s entire elaboration of the mechanism of judgments of taste, which highlights its implicit theory of freedom.
	Latzel considers that in Kant’s understanding judgments of taste demand for recognition from anybody as true claims. Latzel argues that this relies on Kant’s assumption that there is something which all men share: understanding. Going further it can be asserted that Kant’s elaboration of the public character of judgments of taste relies upon the epistemological premis of rejecting the purely sensual – which for Kant means – purely personal validity of such judgments. As already mentioned the role of this public character is of double nature: aesthetic and moral. Even if Kant applies the requirement of the hypothetical public assent for justifications in matters of taste, the idea of the requirement of restricting the personal element in the act of judging inevitable carries a moral meaning. The system of dichotomies sensual – intellectual, individual – public, pleasurable – beautiful recalls the potential of political theorizing within the framework of aesthetic theory at hand. The simple reason is that these dichotomies all refer to the relationship between the individual and the others. In this light notions like pleasurable, sensual and subjective are related to egotism - to a solipsistic universe. Contrary to this notions like beautiful, intersubjective and communicability are related to sociability (Geselligkeit) – to an epistemological environment in which meanings are only constituted (they are only „meaningful”) as a result of (possible) public validation. In the following I address the task of the public character of the beautiful from the triadic perspective of an aesthetic, moral and political theory.

Paragraph 40 is often mentioned as the turning point in the third Critique which links aesthetics to political philosophy. Before explaining why paragraph 41 seems to me to be more convincing in this respect I recall the main ideas of 40.
The most valuable contribution of paragraph 40 to the entire volume is that it offers crucial definitions and clarifications concerning the notion of taste and sensus communis. „However, by the name sensus communis is to be understood the idea of a public sense, i. e. a critical faculty which in its reflective act takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of every one else, in order, as it were, to weigh its judgment with the collective reason of mankind, and thereby avoid the illusion arising from subjective and personal conditions which could readily be taken for objetive, an illusion that would exert a prejudicial influence upon its judgment.” As „the idea of a public sense” sensus communis is clearly defined as a regulative principle. This is further clarified as follows: „This is accomplished by weighing the judgment, not so much with actual, as rather with the merely possible, judgments of others, and by putting ourselves in the position of every one else, as the result of a mere abstraction from the limitations which contingently affect our own estimate.” In this last sentence we obtain a clear explication of the hypothetical, regulative nature of judgments of taste.
The key matter is that the a priori requirement for the judgment is that it is suppossed to take into account the fact of the subjectivity of the possible (or actual) judgment of others. This is the meaning of Kant’s words, namely that it is „the collective reason of mankind” that has to be considered rather, than the contingent, subjective individual judgment of the other person. Therefore it is the mere fact of the subjectivity of the other (as well as one’s own) that has to be taken into consideration rather than the actual content of each subjective perspective. The general disposition to take into account the judgment of the other person is superior to just being influenced by the actual judgment of the other person. Implicitly Kant puts forward at this point a model of democracy, which postulates the fact of the presence of the others. (My relationship to other citizens is not simply my relationship to those citizens which I happen to know personally, but a general stance, which I have to apply in my everyday life as being just one of those citizens.) Accordingly the judgment which I anticipate from the others is not supposed to be an actual judgment, but a possible one. (The entire construction looks like a de-ontic ethics.) This harmonizes with the spirit of paragraph 41 in its commitment to an a priori way of addressing the matter of judging rather than to an empirical way of addressing it. The regulative character of this commitment lies in its detachment from any kind of contingency of empirically given circumstances.
The a priori, detached, non-empirical way of how Kant describes the notion of sensus communis in paragraph 40 is in fact identical to the attitude sensus communis itself demands. This a priori stance of both the thinker who talks and the hypothetical individual who acts prepares the ground for the closer relationship between judgments of taste and a broader meaning of judging, which is of essentially social nature and which opens up the final relationship between aesthetic, moral and political judging. What links this broader meaning of judging to taste is sensus communis. Hence the definition of taste offered in the same paragraph, namely that taste is „a kind of sensus communis.” The final step in this chain to link aesthetic judging to a broader meaning of judging is the one which directly reveals the social character of judgments of taste. This comes to light when Kant clarifies the features of sensus communis. We learn first of all that the meaning of sensus communis entails the following requirement for the one who judges: „by putting ourselves in the position of every one else, as the result of a mere abstraction from the limitations which contingently affect our own estimate.” But this is still just a further clarification of the epistemological nature of sensus communis. It is still not the direct link between judging aesthetically and judging otherwise. However by touching upon the epistemological nature of sensus communis this passage already reveals a further feature it entails - a normative feature: the relatedness to others: „to weigh its judgment with the collective reason of mankind, and thereby avoid the illusion arising from subjective and personal conditions which could readily be taken for objetive, an illusion that would exert a prejudicial influence upon its judgment.” Therefore by having in mind „the collective reason of mankind” while judging, we can eliminate the lasting effect of the contingency of our momentary condition; and Kant adds something interesting, namely that in fact we eliminate the „illusion” of taking the influence generated by our subjective condition as something objectively valid.
The result of the paragraph in the process of the clarification of the meaning of a broadly understood judging that links aesthetic, moral and political judging in one single faculty is, that it shows the connectedness of the epistemological character of sensus communis to its normative character. The transfer lies where Kant explains how the process of self-restriction, through which we can get rid of our contingent, particular determinacy is actually carried out: „This is accomplished by weighing the judgment, not so much with actual, as rather with the merely possible, judgments of others, and by putting ourselves in the position of every one else, as the result of a mere abstraction from the limitations which contingently affect our own estimate.” There are two conditions mentioned here: firstly, to consider the possible (or actual) judgment of the other person and secondly, to hypothetically place oneself in the position of the other one. It is the second part of this passage that Arendt relates to the notion of imagination, as the act through which we can make present something which is absent. And a further element that Arendt explores in her reconstruction of Kant’s aesthetics as an implicit political philosophy, is the main idea of this passage namely, the thought experiment of the reversed perspective. It is this reversed perspective that finally links the epistemological description of the mechanism of sensus communis to its normative aspect which gradually develops into the final link between the meaning of judging as aesthetic, moral and political judging. However the full realization of this thought is in paragraph 41:

"Abundant proof has been given above to show that the judgment of taste by which something is declared beautiful must have no interest as its determining ground. But it does not follow from this that after it has once been posited as a pure aesthetic judgment, an interest cannot then enter into combination with it. The combination, however, can never be anything but indirect. Taste must, that is to say, first of all be represented in conjunction with something else, if the delight attending the mere reflection upon an object is to admit of having further conjoined with it a pleasure in the real existence of the object (as that wherein all interest consists). For the saying, a posse ad esse non valet consequentia, which is applied to cognitive judgments, holds good here in the case of aesthetic judgments. Now this ’something else’ may be something empirical, such as an inclination proper to the nature of human beings, or it may be something intellectual, as a property of the will whereby it admits of rational determination a priori. Both of these involve a delight in the existence of the Object, and so can lay the foundation for an interest in what has already pleased of itself and without regard to any interest whatsoever.
The empirical interest in the beautiful exists only in society. And if we admit that the impulse to society is natural to mankind, and that the suitability for and the propensity towards it, i. e. sociability, is a property essential to the requirements of man as a creature intended for society, and one, therefore, that belongs to humanity, it is inevitable that we should also took upon taste in the light of a faculty for estimating whatever enables us to communicate even our feeling to every one else, and hence as a means of promoting that upon which the natural inclination of every one is set.
With no one to take into account but himself a man abandoned on a desert island would not adorn either himself or his hut, nor would he look for flowers, and still less plant them, with the object of providing himself with personal adornments. Only in society does it occur to him to be not merely a man, but a man refined after the manner of his kind (the beginning of civilization) – for that is the estimate formed of one who has the bent and turn for communicating his pleasure to others, and who is not quite satisfied with an Object unless his feeling of delight in it can be shared in communion with others. Further, a regard to universal communicability is a thing which every one expects and requires from every one else, just as if it were part of an original compact dictated by humanity itself. And thus, no doubt, at first only charms, e. g. colours for painting oneself (roucou among the Caribs and cinnabar among the Iroquois), or flowers, sea-shells, beautifully coloured feathers, then, in the course of time, also beautiful forms (as in canoes, wearing-apparel, &c.) which convey no gratification, i. e. delight of enjoyment, become of moment in society and attract a considerable interest. Eventually, when civilization has reached its height it makes this work of communication almost the main business of refined inclination, and the entire value of sensations is placed in the degree to which they permit of universal communication. At this stage, then, even where the pleasure which each one has in an object is but insignificant and possesses of itself no conspicuous interest, still the idea of its universal communicability almost indefinitely augments its value.
This interest indirectly attached to the beautiful by the inclination towards society, and, consequently, empirical, is, however, of no importance for us here. For that to which we have alone to look is what can have bearing a priori, even though indirect, upon the judgment of taste. For, is even in this form an associated interest should betray itself, taste would then reveal a transition on the part of our critical faculty from the enjoyment of sense to the moral feeling. This would not merely mean that we should be supplied with a more effectual guide for the final employment of taste, but taste would further be presented as a link in the chain of the human faculties a priori upon which all legislation must depend. This much may certainly be said of the empirical interest in objects of taste, and in taste itself, that as taste thus pays homage to inclination, however refined, such interest will nevertheless readily fuse also with all inclinations and passions, which in society attain to their greatest variety and highest degree, and the interest in the beautiful, if this is made its ground, can but afford a very ambiguous transition from the agreeable to the good. We have reason, however, to inquire whether this transition may not still in some way be furthered by means of taste when taken in its purity."

What makes paragraph 41 to be more important with regard to the relationship (or rather the fusion) between aesthetics and politics (implicitly morality) lies first of all in its focus on the notion of interest, more precisely on the relationship between interest and inclination in the development of taste as a sense created by the refinement of the individual through socialization. The salience of this relationship lies in its linking the natural, un-educated inclinations of the individual to something like a „second nature” in which the naturally given inclinations give birth to socially created ones. We can see at this point the return of the distinction between phenomenal and noumenal, the world-view elaborated in the first Critique, as a model that shapes the three main works of Kant’s critical turn. By creating society we do not leave nature, but start to inhabit a second world too, in which we make the law.
As put in paragraph 41 by warranting the transition from sensual pleasure to moral feeling, the "ambiguous transition from the agreeable to the good", taste is "a link in the chain of a priori human faculties upon which all legislation must depend". As the faculty to estimate, to judge taste is the overall capacity of judgment both in aesthetic and in moral matters. This occurs through the empirical exercise of its social dimension which is transcendentally given from the outset. With regard to the notion of interest in the paragraph from above the following considerations have to be made.
By elaborating the observation that interest is the key element of political theory it can be observed that the aspect which may link the aesthetic phenomena to the political one is the idea of interest in the beautiful and the related idea namely, that this interest is only constituted in society. Kant clarifies that the interest attached to the beautiful due to our inclination toward society (Neigung zur Geselligkeit), is not of major importance in the context of his enquiry, because he aims at grasping the a priori aspects of judgments of taste, whereas the socially constituted interest in the beautiful is of empirical nature. To relate interest to the beautiful is a crucial matter in Kant because he describes judgments of taste as referring to their object without any interest. Thus beautiful as well as the other aesthetic categories generate a disinterested contemplation. Following paragraph 9, under the title, „Definition of the beautiful drawn from the second moment” Kant defines the beautiful as follows: “The beautiful is that which, apart from a concept, pleases universally.” But then how can the interest in the beautiful re-gain access into the whole enquiry?
The resolution of this twofold relationship between interest and the beautiful is, to understand the meaning of interest in the disinterestedness in the beautiful. Given the social nature of this interest the notion can only be empirically meaningful. This makes Kant to treat this matter carefully and to only talk about it conditionally that is to say, as only about the mere possibility of a desirable a priori grounding of the interest in the beautiful. He asserts that the a priori grounding of the relationship would imply the lawful establishing of the transition from sensual pleasure to morality filling in this way, the gap in the chain of the a priori capabilities. Unless we can reach the a priori explication, so Kant's argument goes, the fact that taste serves inclination, we cannot get rid of the diversity of inclinations, which can play some role in the interest in the beautiful. Therefore merely upon the grounds of the empirical interest in the beautiful the transition from the pleasurable to the good cannot be warranted. In the end Kant closes the paragraph by asserting, that it still worth considering the possibility of the capacity of pure judgments of taste to enable this transition.
Paul Guyer argues that Kant makes two apparently contradictory statements about the moral interest in the aesthetic phenomena. He quotes the following passages to confirm his argument: "Taste is the faculty for estimating an object or manner of representation through a delight or aversion apart of any interest. The object of such a delight is called beautiful" (Quoted from the „Definition of the beautiful derived from the first moment” following paragraph 5); "taste is, in the ultimate analysis, a critical faculty that judges of the rendering of moral ideas in terms of sense (through the intervention of a certain analogy in our reflection on both); and it is this rendering also, and the increased sensibility, founded upon it, for the feeling which these ideas evoke (termed moral sense), that are the origin of that pleasure which taste declares valid for mankind in general and not merely for the private feeling of each individual. This makes it clear that the true propeedeutic for laying the foundations of taste is the development of moral ideas and the culture of the moral feeling. For only when sensibility is brought into harmony with moral feeling can genuine taste assume a definite unchangeable form" (paragraph 60). As Guyer comments these two passages are diametrically opposed because whereas the first one states, that the exercise of the faculty of taste as well as the pleasure linked to it must occur without any interest, the second passage states that the development of taste depends on the cultivation of moral reasoning and of the disposition to morality. He considers that the resolution of this apparent contradiction is that Kant reconciles his notion of disinterestedness with the claim that taste is the faculty of the sensible representation of moral ideas.
According to Guyer the requirement of disinterestedness of judgments of taste can be clearly grasped from Kant's understanding of aesthetic pleasure as satisfying without its being subsumed under any determinate concept. Hence the further description of judgments of taste as relying upon the free and lawful nature - purpose without purpose - type of the aesthetic experience. Guyer observes that the requirement of disinterestedness does not exclude the possibility that this purpose without purpose - the unconstrained harmony between imagination and understanding in the aesthetic experience - can serve broader purposes – or even the purpose in the continued existence of beautiful objects themselves. Guyer concludes that the requirement of disinterestedness is consistent with the capacity of taste to function as the sensible representation of moral ideas. He even claims that Kant's idea of the beautiful as the symbol of the good can be clarified in this way. We will see later that it is exactly the disinterestedness in the delight in the aesthetic experience which enables it to serve as the sensual intermediation of moral interest. The essence of this apparently strange relationship is that moral interest is not a heteronomous interest, but it is the interest of the reason in the manifestation of the moral law.
Kaulbach attempts to disclose the link between the aesthetic, the moral and the political phenomena by considering the broader Kantian meaning of the notion of interest. By bringing into discussion the notion of interest Kaulbach touches upon an important angle from which the overlaping – aesthetic-moral-political/social - function of the concept of disinterestedness can be looked at, but he stops his approach, before actually considering the concept of disinterestedness. Kaulbach claims that the notion of freedom, formality and sociability all carry the general Kantian tone of Enlightenment. Hence the path from the egotism of particular interests, to disinterestedness which marks „aesthetic freedom” (Kaulbach’s formulation) as the true content of the „idea” of sensus communis. Kaulbach’s claim promises a possible explanation of the aesthetic-moral-political „triad”, but he does not elaborate the matter of disinterestedness deeply enough, as to clarify the tension between the requirement of the interest in the beautiful and the requirement of disinterestedness. This key to the understading of the role of the pair of concepts interest-disinterest leads us to the next paragraph.
In the context of the sensible representation the origin of the idea of interest has to be looked for in paragraph 42. Kant states here that reason is interested in its ideas to appear as objectively real things. The idea derives from his broader thesis expressed in some of his works and in this passage as follows: "it is of interest to reason that nature should at least show a trace or give a hint that it contains in itself some ground or other for assuming a uniform accordance of its products with our wholly disinterested delight (…)". (We have to bare in mind that Kant refers to natural beauty.) Beyond its slight fuzziness the passage reveals an important idea of the entire critical period which is at the same time the basic idea of the third Critique itself namely, that there is a harmony between nature and the way we see it. This is the central idea which prepares the argument on the beautiful as the symbol of morality. (And as well-known it derives from the result of the teleological considerations.) The categorical imperative cannot differ in scope from the general teleology of nature. Hence there is a consonance betwen the realization of the beautiful and the realization of morality, because both of them display the purposefullness of nature. In this respect it is important to recall the point made in paragraph 17 that reason seeks sensible representation in the beautiful. In paragraph 42 Kant makes an analogy between this seeking of reason for its sensible representation on the one hand and the intellectual interest in the beautiful on the other hand. Accordingly reason's interest in the existence of beautiful objects is analogous to the realization of virtuous intentions in the sensible world. In paragraph 59 we learn that what we have is not just an analogy, but that interest in the beautiful has to be actually grounded in the interest in the morally good. This appears as follows in the same passage as the continuation of the previous sentence, "a uniform accordance of its products with our wholly disinterested delight": ""it is of interest to reason that nature should at least show a trace or give a hint that it contains in itself some ground or other for assuming a uniform accordance of its products with our wholly disinterested delight" (…) „That being so, reason must take an interest in every manifestation on the part of nature of some such accordance. Hence the mind cannot reflect on the beauty of nature without at the same time finding its interest engaged. But this interest is akin to the moral. One, then, who takes such an interest in the beautiful in nature can only do so in so far as he has previously set his interest deep in the foundations of the morally good. On these grounds we have reason for presuming the presence of at least the germ of a good moral disposition in the case of a man to whom the beauty of nature is a matter of immediate interest.”
It is this idea of not just pointing out the analogy, but to actually establish the interest in the beautiful in the interest in morality – something which Guyer finds weak. According to him this is not more compelling than to identify the final ground in pleasure. But Guyer disregards the specific role interest plays in morality; it is this specific role, to which the aesthetically understood interest is related to – and this in turn is just the opposite of the heteronomy of pleasure. Guyer is wrong in this matter. The weakness of the passage lies rather in its undermining the independence of the mechanism of aesthetic phenomena from morality as its explanatory framework. As an expression of the relationship (even interaction) between aesthetics and morality is so radical that it virtually undermines aesthetics as a self-relying are of approach – as tematically independent from moral theory.
Apart from its weakness the passage is a very straightworward expression of the apparently paradoxical idea of interest in the disinterest. It is clear that Kant implicitly distinguishes between two kinds of interest: the self-originating, self-sustaining interest of reason on the one hand and any further interest which is external to that previous one on the other hand. Interest in the second sense refers to interest of reason in the final end. Contrary to this in the first case we deal with an instrumentally understood interest, which refers to the immediate usefulness rather than to the final end. Hence the central role of practical reason as the link between aesthetics and morality: the overlaping sense of interest is the interest of the practical reason. Interest in the disinterest is not a paradox if seen in the sense of the final teleology of practical reason.
In his comments on mainly paragraph 42, as well as on paragraphs 17, 35, and 49, Gadamer claims that the fundamental problem which motivates Kant’s aesthetics is the recognition of the fact that the beautiful engages our interests. In his analysis of the role of interest in the aesthetic phenomena as described by Kant Gadamer starts from the idea that the matter of interest appears differently (in fact in an opposed way) in case of natural and artistic beauty. He observes that although in the doctrine of the ideal beauty art appears to have an advantage over natural beauty, because it is presented as having a more direct expression of morality, in paragraph 42 we learn that it is natural beauty which is advantaged over the artistic one. The argument in Kant is that given that in case of natural beauty there is, no significance in content it is a more pure expression of judgment of taste – there is, no particular interest involved.  The crucial formulation in the paragraph states, that the interest in the natural beauty is „akin to the moral”. The realization of the beautiful in nature, that is to say the recognition of the fact, that nature has produced that beauty generates interest for morality, but only in someone, who „he has previously set his interest deep in the foundations of the morally good”.
	Gadamer highlights that although it is artistic beauty which best displays the ideal of the beautiful, it is natural beauty which is a better representation of morality, because by spontaneously displaying the purposefullness of nature it is a more pure form of the expression of disinterestedness, than the inevitable intentionality the artist places in his work. It is the obvious lack of artificiality in natural beauty that enables it to play this role. Gadamer claims that this explains the reason why Kant considers in paragraph 45, that „A product of fine art must be recognized to be art and not nature. Nevertheless the finality in its form must appear just as free from the constraint of arbitrary rules as if it were a product of mere nature.” Contrary to that in case of real art, the re-production of nature is more subtle, therefore it appears as spontaneously, as if it would actually be the product of nature itself. Gadamer considers that it is the genius as described by Kant that finally clarifies the meaning of the difference between natural and artistic beauty, because it is the spontaneous nature of the genius that displays the essence of natural beauty in its non-adherence to rules. Gadamer’s argumentation on this matter suggests that the genius is the one who is capable to link somehow natural beauty to the artistic one, because it is his „nature” to re-produce natural beauty as if it would have remained natural.
The salience of Gadamer’s comments is that he observes the role of disinterestedness in the relationship between the beautiful and morality. He falls short however to relate this connection to the general conception of freedom Kant’s aesthetics and ethics share along the very matter of disinterestedness.
Without the requirement of disinterestedness Kant’s main step in comparing the nature of morality and aesthetics as put in paragraph 59 would not make sense. In paragraph 59 Kant makes the following statement which is the core idea of the whole paragraph and also of his argument on the beautiful as the symbol of the good. "Now, I say, the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good, and only in this light (a point of view natural to every one, and one which every one exacts from others as a duty) does it give us pleasure with an attendant claim to the agreement of every one else, whereupon the mind becomes conscious of a certain ennoblement and elevation above mere sensibility to pleasure from impressions of sense, and also appraises the worth of others on the score of a like maxim of their judgment."
We obtain four statements here. The first one is the straightforward claim itself that the beautiful is the symbol of the good. In the second statement Kant adds something to his idea namely, that from the intellectual-sensual character of judgments of taste it is the intellectual part that makes communicability possible. The present statement highlights that there exists a claim ("attendant" to pleasure) for something like the collective agreement on the beautiful, and this claim is constituted upon the symbolically represented morality. Moreover the statement continues in a further one namely, that the claim for agreement is also a pleasure in itself. Given that as elaborated in paragraph 59 the symbolical representation of morality in the aesthetic experience is nothing else but the sensual representation of morality, the present statement tells us, that the claim for the agreement of others on the beautiful actually relies on the symbolical representation of morality. The next statement claims that the act of claiming agreement on the beautiful is experienced by the claimer as an ennbolement of his initial sensation of pleasure, which, by becoming a collectively shared experience, it steps on a higher cognitive level than the level of the initial merely individually - let's call it "consumed" pleasure. This also explains what the pleasure, which is attended by the claim for agreement from the previous statement actually means. The passage reveals the difference between two kinds of pleasures: the individually experienced "consumed" pleasure - the one which is attended by the claim for agreement and which is of a lower cognitive level than the second pleasure, which – although it is also individual - it is generated by the very experience of sharing the pleasure with others. The word "attendant" suggests that it is not the claim for agreement itself that generates the second, social level of pleasure, but according to the logic of the passage (and to the logic of the previous paragraph too) it is the pleasure of sharing, the very act of communicating. Later we will see how paragraph 59 clarifies that this second-level pleasure is the refined pleasure - not individual like mere pleasure, but specific for taste – because it is social. Finally it can be learned from the closing statement that in the state of mind of claiming for agreement from the others, praising (or blaming) the others also becomes possible: in the social environment of gaining pleasure by sharing pleasure, the appraisal of each other's judgment, that is to say, judging the others as they judge also occurs. Although individual judgments of taste are not sociological anticipations of how others would judge, they are transcendental postulations of the inevitable form of the possible harmonization of appraisings. This turns the issue of the horizon of meaning within which individual judgments can make sense at all. It is interesting in this respect to recall Kaulbach’s analyzes of the third Critique.
According to Kaulbach judgments of taste carry on an implicit world-relatedness of the one, who judges. Without this context, judgments would not make sense. The aesthetic freedom one experiences in the very acts of judgments of taste is in fact a relation of the judging individual to the world itself, within which his judgment is meaningful. He claims that the very notion of sensus communis only acquires sense by the fact of this world-relatedness of the individual judgments. Kaulbach observes that what sensus communis demands from us is not a proposition like, “es wird nicht zugestimmt”, but one like, “es soll zugestimmt werden”. That is to say, the propositions in question are not descriptive but normative. This normativity however is not mandatory in the prescriptive sense of moral imperatives, but in the sense of a hypothetical consent, which one would anticipate from the others. To demonstrate his thesis Kaulbach refers to an idea which does not only reveal its possible justification but also an other one, which opposes it. Accordingly the common sense from which judgments of taste derive is in fact an ideal norm upon which the one who judges assumes that the same instance of anyone else’s expressed delight would function as a rule of judgments of taste valid for anyone. Besides of what Kaulbach expects from this idea for the sake of strengthening his own point, the idea also reveals that the rule-making process of a judgment of taste shares a common feature with the rule-making process in case of moral judgments. More precisely it is the idea that the expressed delight referring to some particular object can count as a rule that reminds us about the same requirement of the categorical imperative. Although the main difference between the two types of judgments is well-known – whereas in case of moral judgments the principle is objective, in judgments of taste it is subjective. The common element is that the judging person bears the burden of anticipating the possible agreement of the others. This higlights that autonomy is a basic feature shared by moral and aesthetic judgments. And this in turn sheds light on the common normativity between the aesthetic and the moral acts of judging: the aesthetically judging subject is the same as the morally judging one. We are not different in these two types of acts. We display the same capability to take responsibility for the act of judging – and also for any action which we derive from it. The fact is not only that whenever we judge aesthetically we remain the same person as in the moments when we judge morally, but that in both cases we exercise the same act of self-imposed rule-following. Moreover in both cases we subject our judging to the hypothetical assessing of how the other people would judge: we apply the act of placing oneself into the perspective of the other one, which is, in Kant’s description one of the three main features of judgments of taste.

II. TASTE AND MORALITY

It is intuitively clear that the double requirement of subjectivity and general validity is a problematic element which Kant has to solve. I consider however that Kant’s main contribution to the understanding of aesthetic phenomena lies exactly in the fact that he doesn’t solve this problem. What he does instead of solving it is to show the limits of solving it. And this strategy is not alien to his general a priori approach which aims at defining the borderlines of enquiries as such. Of course we cannot know Kant’s personal intentions, and as a matter of fact, from the point of view of a theoretical reconstruction this would not even be very important. What matters however is that the ambivalence of taste - although solved by Kant well enough as not to fall pray of a contradiction – appears as an inherent feature of taste. Kant seems to hesitate and attempt to describe taste in some more rigorous way. The best sign of this struggle is paragraph 59, where he does not manage to free himself from a metaphorical description of the phenomena of symbol-creation itself. But the ambivalence of taste in its being both individual and public, both subjective but still a target of general assent remains an organic part of what he actually claims about the nature of taste. This is the sense in which it can be claimed that he didn’t want to solve this ambivalence. And this is the root of the inherent freedom of taste. I consider in this respect that the inherent freedom of judgments of taste lies in this legitimate variety of possible judgments regarding one concrete object: these judgments are both a priori and subjective at the same time. However this mere twofoldness of judgments of taste only shows their ambivalent nature - it cannot yet serve as the full explication of also their inherent freedom. If one can reconstruct the inherent freedom of these types of judgments from the fact of their ambivalence, then it will be possible to explain, how this twofoldness - the a priori and the subjective character at once – can open the way from the freedom of the free play between the sensual and the conceptual element, toward the freedom of judging. The freedom of judging refers to both moral judging and judging in matters of taste. The present task is to discern how is it possible that despite the differences a broader conception of freedom appears in both. The key to understand how the apparent contradictory nature of the partly a priori, partly subjective character of judgments of taste is based upon the more genuine inherent freedom of these judgments is to observe, that in the context of Kant’s theory the requirement of disinterestedness is related to the fact of being freed from something (from anything) in the very act of judging. The final bridge then, which eliminates the apparent contradiction of this ambivalence is the freedom of judging.
	The most explicit formulation of the relationship between freedom and taste appears in the "General Remark on the First Section of the Analitic":

"The result to be extracted from the foregoing analysis is in effect this: that everything runs up into the concept of taste as a critical faculty by which an object is estimated in reference to the free conformity to law of the imagination. If, now, imagination must in the judgment of taste be regarded in its freedom, then, to begin with it is not taken as reproductive, as in its subjection to the laws of association, but as productive and exerting an activity of its own (as originator of arbitrary forms of possible intuitions). And although in the apprehension of a given object of sense it is tied down to a definite form of this Object, and to that extent, does not enjoy free play, (as it does poetry,) still it is easy to conceive that the object may supply ready-made to the imagination just such a form of the arrangement of the manifold, as the imagination, if it were left to itself, would freely project in harmony with the general conformity to law of understanding. But that the imagination should be both free and of itself conformable to law, i.e. carry autonomy with it, is a contradiction. The understanding alone gives the law. Where, however, the imagination is compelled to follow a course laid down by a definite law, then what the form of the product is to be is determined by concepts; but, in that case, as already shown, the delight is not delight in the beautiful, but in the good, (in perfection, though it be no more than formal perfection), and the judgment is not one due to taste. Hence it is only conformity to law without a law, and a subjective harmonizing of the imagination and the understanding without an objective one - which latter would mean that the representation was referred to a definite concept of the object - that can consist with the free conformity to law of the understanding (which has also been called finality apart from an end) and with the specific character of a judgment of taste."

Scruton describes the concept-free nature of judgments of taste by stressing, that instead of relying on a definite concept, these judgments inform about the experience of some kind of unity. This is the unity that occurs in aesthetic experience. Kant recognizes, that as long as these judgments refer to the state of mind of the one who experiences it is subjective, but as long as they refer to an object of the outer world, they adopt a universal claim. It is this universal aspect of a judgment of taste, that appeals to public assent. This is what Kant describes as the nature of such judgments for being both un-debatable (in their subjective dimension) and yet debatable at the same time (in their universal dimension). Scruton identifies the elements in Kant's argument concerning the nature of these judgments which lead to their moral meaning. Although this overlap between the aesthetic and the moral phenomena is accurately described by Scruton, I attempt to highlight it from a different angle.
Scruton identifies the relationship between the aesthetic and the moral phenomena in Kant by claiming, that it is the aesthetic judgment, which directs towards the apprehension of the transcendental world, and it is practical reason that gives content to this apprehension. Scruton labels this as the intimation of God. He argues that aesthetic experience and practical reason are two aspects of morality, through which both the transcendence and the immanence of God can be sensed.
The main message of Scruton's interpretation seems to focus on the Kantian idea of transcendence shared in his aesthetic and moral theory. Accordingly transcendence is both represented in the genuinely beautiful design of nature, which serves as an exemplary pattern for perfect things in general, as well as in the idea of freedom, as the regulative principle in moral action. It is convincing to place Kant's aesthetic theory into the transcendental aspect of his moral theory. However this is not the only way to place Kant's aesthetics into the broader framework of his critical philosophy. In pointing out the overlaps between Kant's aesthetics and his moral theory Scruton discloses the broader framework of Kant's transcendental philosophy, which obviously integrates, both the aesthetic and the moral aspect. However it is also possible to reconstruct this overlap in another way of grasping the nature of judgments of taste as such.
	Beyond the difference Kant specifies in the passage from above between the constraint imposed by a definite concept on the one hand and the freedom of the associations of imagination on the other hand, it is also made clear that both in case of judgments referring to the good and judgments of taste, a certain kind of ruling takes place anyway. These two types of judgments are contrasted to each other along the degree of their freedom, and in this respect it is the judgments referring to the good which appear as un-free in comparison to judgments of taste. But as we know from Kant’s moral philosophy it is exactly the moral realm in which freedom can occur – and it can occur exactly, because of its law-likeness; this law-likeness however lies in the self-imposed nature of the moral imperative. The point is then not the mode of how a law governs an action, but the fact of its being an occurance ruled by either an external or by a self-imposed constraint. Therefore the key matter shared by moral judgments and those of taste remains the requierement of self-imposition: in case of the moral law the reliance of the maxim of some particular action upon the categorical imperative, and in case of judgments of taste the “law without a law” of the free play between imagination and understanding. Understanding tempers the limits of judgments of taste, but it participates in the meantime in the free play, which gives these kind of judgments their specific freedom – but still a freedom, which is not entirely void of self-imposed ruling. It can be concluded that Kant does actually give in our hands an overall conception of freedom which embraces both autonomy and heautonomy: freedom as the outcome of self-imposed constraint.

1. Disinterested Delight as Interest
The notion of disinterestedness is a notion introduced in the third Critique. It carries however a meaning which is present in every major context in which Kant uses the idea of freedom namely, the capability of every mental act which can be labeled as free, to bring into play a self-relying causality which does not coincide with the causality of nature. Man as the final end does not belong to nature – he is situated in the realm of a self-relying causality, distinct from actual natural causality, because he carries his own end within himself. This distinctness is to be thanked to the moral dimension of man. Although this superior causality which is the ground of human freedom itself is above natural causality, the twofold character of the world persists. Hence the tension between culture and morality. (Kant claims that man belongs to two worlds.)
	The definition in paragraph 2, from the third Critique establishes both the meaning of interest and the lack of interest in the given context: “interest (is) the delight which we connect with the representation of the existence of an object”, and “the mere representation of the object in me is accompanied with delight, no matter how indifferent I may be to the existence of the object of this representation.”
		The passage reveals that the essence of judgments of taste does not lie in there being arbitrarily different from each other. If this would be the case, then the requirement of their general validity would not make sense. The essence of judgments of taste lies in their independence from anything impure, heteronomous, purely sensual, or useful. Therefore the legitimate difference between individual judgments of taste referring to the same object of judgment, is due to the presence of disinterestedness, which, because it is more important than that, it over-writes the possible identity of different individual judgments referring to the same object – we saw that it even over-writes the actual (non-transcendental) fact of social approval. Therefore the ambivalent twofoldness of judgments of taste as both a priori and subjective at the same time, their apparent contradictory nature derives from the primacy of disinterestedness. The freedom inherent in judgments of taste lies in their disinterestedness. The definition from paragraph 5, according to which taste is „the faculty for estimating an object or manner of representation through a delight or displeasure without any interest”, makes it even clearer that Kant had repeatedly linked freedom to disinterestedness.
	Once a clear understanding of the presence of freedom in judgments of taste is obtained the terrain for examining the possible shared typology of freedom in the Kantian aesthetic, moral and political theory is ready for start. Relying upon the already elaborated argument regarding the self-imposed character of the rule in both judgments in matters of taste and morality, the following examinations claim that the link is the idea of freedom as autonomy. The concept of autonomy establishes the identical role freedom plays both in aesthetic and moral phenomena. The criterion shared by aesthetic and moral judgments is disinterestedness which results from the autonomous act of the self-imposed law that governs both aesthetic and moral judgments.
	The delight specified in the second passage is the interest specified in the first passage. We learn that the delight which accompanies the representation of an object does not depend on the possible extent to which we might also be interested in the existence of the object in question. It is simply unimportant whether we also have some other attachment to the object, as long as those further motivations do not engage into the dominating one – that of delight in the mere representation. A particular object can play different roles and can acquire different types of importances for me. In case of its aesthetic value I am supposed to maintain the delight in its mere representation and disregard all other possible interests which the object might possibly generate in me. But what does it mean that it is not the existence of the object (or something related to its existence) that raises the interest toward it, but the delight in its representation? This particular feature is directly connected to the object-observer relationship in case of judgments of taste as described by Kant, as being otherwise than causal.
	In her attempt to grasp and solve the above dilemma Eva Schaper observes that by claiming that we can experience delight only, if the object in question cannot be subject of some cognitive awareness Kant runs into a paradox. The problem to be solved, at this point is to explain why do, aesthetic judgments have a different form than the form of empirical judgments of experience. Schaper offers a solution to this problem by pointing out that the relationship between the empirical realm and aesthetic judgments must not to be looked at as a causal one (something which Kant excludes anyway), but rather as a relationship between two types of discourses, which are logically linked to each other. Accordingly the possibility of the aesthetic discourse must rely on the possibility of the empirical discourse otherwise the aesthetic discourse would not make sense. It would not make sense to talk about the beauty of objects, if we would not postulate the empirical possibility of beautiful objects. Schaper argues that it is in this sense that the claim to general assent has to be understood: in case of judgments of taste the human capability to perceive the form in objects is the same as in case of epistemological claims. The presence of the empirical discourse in judgments of taste plays a standard-setting role, which establishes the possibility for general assent, without the objective reference of the involved objects.
	Schaper is mistaken in interpreting the above passages as illustrations of Kant’s point of view to exclude the possibility that a particular object might raise also other kinds of interests than the only one which leads to aesthetic interest – interest in the delight in the representation. As I attempted to point out, as a matter of fact this is not what Kant asserts here. What he asserts is that the structure of the delight in the representation must be void of other interests. Hence he uses the word “indifferent”, referring to the simple unimportance of the presence of interests which are of other kind than the aesthetic type of interest. The simultaneous presence of such other interests is not ruled out. It is simply specified that those other interests must not engage in the aesthetic one. The rest is “indifferent”. (It is another question whether it is possible at all to disregard other interests in the act of appraising an object solely from the perspective of the interest in its mere representation.) The good thing in Schaper’s model is that it fits well the Kant of the first Critique, because she highlights the obvious epistemological link between the two works. She observes that at this point for Kant (as well as in many other contexts) the existence of objects does not appear as an empirical problem, but as a semantic one. Kant invites existential statements only as mere postulations without which a particular discourse would not be meaningful. For Kant the leading matter is always situated in the “überhaupt-type” of enquiry.

A simple speculative play with some of the elements of Kant’s construction might enable us to better grasp the sense of disinterestedness in the delight. Kant explains that beautiful (or ugly) things are unique in their aesthetic value as it appears in the subjective experience. Hence the notion of purpose without purpose and hence the idea that good products of art look as if they would be the creations of nature. Kant’s various modes to explain the inherent law-likeness of a thing as subject of aesthetic appraisal suggest that the aesthetic observation of an object is a moment in which the observer somehow grasps (or rather has an intuition of) the unique character the beautiful (or ugly) thing displays for him. Let’s describe this moment as a momentary addiction to the object of the observation, or more precisely, of the subjective experience the observer gains from it. This addiction attaches the observer to the delight rather than to the empirical existence of the object. The state of mind of disinterest emerges from this momentary addiction. In this particular state of mind the observer is captured by the subjective experience of the aesthetic value of the object. And this captured state of mind is definitly not open toward interests – except for the particular interest in the delight itself the observer goes through in that moment. The disinterestedness in the delight of the beautiful is the outcome of the momentary character of the aesthetic experience.
	Beyond speculation in a closer reading we learn that the requirement of disinterestedness appears in Kant’s argument as stronger than the requirement of communicability. This follows from the fact that the freedom of the act of judging appears as more important than its social acceptance. Its primary importance lies in Kant’s intention to justify taste transcendentally first of all. If Kant wants to remain committed to the meaning of disinterestedness, he has to clean up pure judgments of taste even from something like the pressure of society, of fashion, or anything like that, which could disturb the purity of the very individual act of judgments of taste. This is the intended sense in which Kant uses the notion.  As already mentioned Kant did not mean the requirement of public assent, in judgments of taste sociologically. It was only meant as a transcendental requirement, which means, that judgments of taste have to be ready for public testing, they must be suitable for that paragraph 41 even reveals that they can actually not be otherwise, than public – as opposed to judgments referring to sensual pleasure - their public character is a matter of inevitable form. But the fact that judgments of taste must be suitable for public validation does not exclude their disinterested character. This can finally save Kant’s thesis from inconsistency. The answer then is, that judgments of taste must be both disinterested and suitable for public assent. Suitability for being publicly approved is not identical with the actual fact of public approval. Hence the freedom of any individual judgment of taste against actual public approval relies on the more fundamental freedom of such judgments in their being disinterested. This means that the requirement of disinterestedness in the very definition of the experience of the beautiful is something like a final „remedy” which reveals that judgments of taste do have the final „right” to return to the individual level – hence their ambivalent nature of being partly sensual, partly conceptual statements. 
	Finally we have to recall what has already been observed above namely, that the definition of taste from paragraph 5, as „the faculty for estimating an object or manner of representation through a delight or displeasure without any interest” is, a further confirmation of the fact that Kant had repeatedly linked freedom to disinterestedness.

2. The Good as Beautiful: the Aesthetic Realm as the Sensual Representation of Moral Ideas
Paragraph 59 is dedicated to beauty as the symbol of morality. The argument is the following. In order to present the reality of our concepts we need intuitions (Anschauung). If intuitions are empirical they are called examples. If they are pure concepts of the understanding they are called schemata. It would be however impossible to present in examples the reality of the concepts of reason (like freedom) because there is no intuition that corresponds to them. Every hypotyposis (presentation) falls into one of the two categories of the schematic and the symbolic. Schematic presentation is the one in which the a priori intuition is given by corresponding to a concept of the understanding. We have a symbolic presentation whenever "the concept is one which only reason can think, and to which no sensible intuition can be adequate. In the latter case the concept is supplied with an intuition such that the procedure of judgment in dealing with it is merely analogous to that which it observes in schematism. In others words, what agrees with the concept is merely the rule of this procedure, and not the intuition itself. Hence the agreement is merely in the form of reflection, and not in the content." In case of schemata the presentation is illustrative, in case of symbols it takes place through analogies. In the second case we also apply empirical intuitions. Judgment carries out the analogical presentations by first applying the concept to the object of an empirical intuition, than by applying the mere rule of the very reflection of that intuition to an entirely different object of which symbol is the first object. Kant's demonstration is based upon his earlier definitions of symbol and analogy in his Prolegomena, where he illustrates his idea by relying on the example, that although there is no resemblence between a despotic state and a mill, the rules of our reflections of them and of their causality are similar.
	Gadamer claims that Kant’s considerations on the difference between symbol and allegory, respectively on analogy is the turning point of a clarification that had already shaped scholastic debates. In his reconstruction Gadamer states that the idea of symbol, with its fundamentally metaphysical origin is meant to be the sensual representation of something which transcends the sensual realm. Contrary to this allegory is an expression which in fact refers to something else than itself, but wihout being the sensual embodiement of anything – it is a fundamentally rhetorical means. Moreover symbols are not only arbitrarily chosen objects of sensual representation, but in their sensual nature, they do in fact have a concrete connectedness to what they represent. The common feature is that both symbols and allegories are inter-mediating something which is not immediately present. It is the symbol that demands initiation into the meaning of the representation. Allegory is more descriptive: it is rooted in the logos. The eighteenth century idea to contrast them highlights that whereas the symbol is a fusion of the sensible with the non-sensible realm, the allegory carries an artificial, conventional significance - a coordination of concepts into images - instead of calling for affinity for disclosing the meaning, as in case of symbols. Further Gadamer claims that Kant’s contribution in the history of this task is that he contrasted symbolic and schematic representation. This means that contrary to symbols which only appeal for reflection, allegory contains the proper schema for the concept. Finally Gadamer claims that paragraph 59 had inspired Schiller in his letters on the aesthetic education of mankind. But let us reconstruct further Kant’s own elaboration of his theory.

Lüthe considers that Kant specifies only in the third Critique what the „intuitions without concept” (Anschauungen ohne Begriffe) really are: these are the aesthetic ideas. Contrary to ideas of reason, which are concepts without intuition, aesthetic ideas are intiuitions without concept. For instance certain experiences like the experience of death, of love or of virtue cannot be exemplified in nature. Therefore the role ideas are supposed to play is to rely on experience on the one hand and to make a hint at something on the other hand which experince in itself cannot show. Although intuitions are more concrete means to define than the concepts which belong to them, intuitions are only concrete cases which display the attributes of the conceptual description of the object. Intuitions never step out from the framework specified by the concept. They can only refer to attributes which are already given within the concept. Contrary to this the aesthetic ideas cannot be subsumed under concepts, because the relationship between aesthetic ideas are extensions of the concepts related to them. Contrary to the logical attributes aesthetic attributes do not belong to the intuition of a given concept, but they can be derived from the outcomes of the affinity between them. The aesthetic extension is the associative extension of the sensual feeling we obtain from our experience of an object. What we obtain in the sensual representation of an idea is an equally „belebendes” and forming principle about the aesthetic representation (Darstellung) of the object. As „belebend” it is a subjective capacity (Vermögen), and as forming it is a limiting capacity. Lüthe proves that the aesthetic ideas carry an associative character. Without mentioning anything about the aesthetic representation of morality, this associative character is the key to understand the capability of aesthetic ideas to represent.
	The associative character Lüthe identifies reveals the un-bounded character of the horizon of meaning of aesthetic ideas. For instance someone can understand the idea of immortality in uncounted possible ways which could all fit in the given function the aesthetic idea fulfills in a particular context. This feature of the aesthetic ideas highlights their alusive character – to hint at more, than what can be conceptually specified. Hinting at more than what can be conceptually specified prepares the horizon of meaning within which the freedom for judging otherwise becomes possible. I’ll attempt to show later that one of the applications of this feature of asthetic ideas is political symbolism.
	Utilizing a different terminological framework Kaulbach comes close to observe this alusive character too. He starts from Kant’s elaboration according to which an aesthetic idea is related to the intuition of an object but this occurs in the free play of understanding and imagination, thus it emerges from the inherent freedom of the aesthetic experience. His claim is that the reason why aesthetic ideas cannot supply knowledge, that is to say, they cannot be covered by any particular concept meant to denote some particular object is, that they refer to something that he calls as „world-related meaning” („Weltbedeutung”). This means that the object the aesthetic idea relies upon cannot be represented in an intution, because that particular object only acquires meaning through its reference to the entire „aesthetic world.” For instance the cultural figure „Don Quichotes” can be understood as an aesthetic idea, but it only makes sense in this respect, if one is aware of the exemplarity of this cultural figure in its referring to a world-related meaning, to all what this topos signifies. Therefore the exemplarity of this cultural figure is not the same as the exemplarity of an intution, because it is only a „pretext” for something which is not included in the intuition. „Don Quichotes” serves as a representation for the aesthetic idea(s) which entail the whole range of meanings which are identified with this cultural figure, like naivity, pride, lack of capacity to integrate in the world of „normal” people etc. All these and possibly many other features of Don Quichotes compound a whole type – the aesthetic idea itself, which is represented in the figure of Don Quichotes. As a matter of fact Kaulbach engages into the Kantian distinction between „schemata” as direct representation and „symbol” as indirect representation. He stresses that what the inherent intuition of imagination creates is not the conceptually objectified content of a theoretical imagination (Vortsellung) but a „sense of world” („Weltgefühl”) led by reflection. By highlighting the difference between the conceptually framed objects of understanding and the aesthetic objects of the inner intuition of imagination of which exact area of reference is unknown Kaulbach implicitly addresses the allusive character of aesthetic phenomena and the judgments related to them. By stateing that the difference between the two types of representation lies in the freedom of the subjective principle of the free play between understanding and imagination he specifies, the difference under scrutiny in the freedom of aesthetic representation.
	In considering the relationship between the beautiful and morality Rogerson comes up with the following interpretation: aesthetic appreciation is pleasing because it targets an object which expresses an idea, and given that Kant specifies the goal that ideas should be realizable in the world as a general goal of men, the subjective finality of judgments referring to an object which represents an idea is also morally satisfying, because without the realizability of ideas moral action would not be possible. Hence the link between aesthetic experience and moral interest is established. Rogerson’s way toward the demonstration that this link exists in Kant follows Kant’s notion of the free harmony of imagination and understanding in the act of aesthetic judgment. And given the intrinsic connection of the capacity of aesthetic experience to represent moral ideas to morality itself, we can rule out the trap of considering every object as beautiful. The difference between aesthetically relevant and irrelevant objects as found in experiences will ultimately lie in the presence or absence of the freedom in these experiences. Rogerson’ interpretation disregards however that from the assertion that aesthetic experiences are pleasing because they target an object which expresses an idea, it does not follow that aesthetic experiences are also morally satisfying.
	Paul Guyer observes that although Kant relates the existence of moral capacity to the experience of the sublime (paragraph 60), he claims in paragraph 59, that it is the beautiful, which suits to symbolize moral ideas. Guyer solves the puzzle by relying on Kant’s idea that the delight in the sublime in nature is also negative (paragraph 23), one that hints at the the feeling of the robbery of the freedom of the imagination through itself, because it is purposively determined by another law than that of its empirical use. Guyer considers that it is the un-free character of the sublime, which arrests it to be suitable to represent moral ideas. Correspondingly it is the inherent freedom of the experience of the beautiful which on the contrary, can carry out this kind of symbolic representation. Guyer argues that when Kant talks about freedom as such, the beautiful seems to be the most adequate symbol for it. But once he talks about how rational freedom depends on the law which constraints sensuous nature, it appears to be the sublime that can be best applied as a symbol.
	Contrary to Guyer, in his interpretation of the relationship between the sublime and morality Kaulbach identifies a difference between the beautiful and the sublime which places the sublime closer to morality than to the beautiful. From paragraph 24 we learn from the general structure the beautiful and the sublime share. Accordingly both of them are: of general validity in their quantity; without interest in their quality; subjectively purposeful in their relation; and necessary in their subjective purposefulness. Attempting a creative elaboration of the difference and the similarity between the beautiful and the sublime, Kaulbach engages into the topic as follows.
	He states that whereas the experience of the beautiful is of contemplative, passive nature, the experience of the sublime is active, in which the state of passive suffering, that of the feeling of fear one goes through incites to the response aimed at winning over the frightening forces of nature. Kaulbach highlights the moral dimension of the response to this kind of aesthetic experience and claims that whereas the practical consciousness wins the battle against the frightening power of the overwhelming natural elements (Kaulbach uses the notion of “alien destiny” - fremde Schicksal), through the experience of his own freedom as it appears in his acting (“handelnde”) relationship to the world, in case of the experience of the sublime, this victory of the free agent occurs through the imagery of the same “Handlung.”

The interpretations from above exemplify that in the notion of the aesthetic representation of ideas and in the moral relevance of this symbolizing potential of the aesthetic phenomena the element of freedom remains visible from rather different angles of interpretation.
	Finally it worth observing the paralel between the way in which Kant describes the criteria of the purity of judgments of taste and those of the autonomy of moral judgments. In both cases Kant follows his general critical approach, which means that he does not specify substantive criteria either for the aesthetic beauty or for moral goodness. In both cases he describes the form, not the content of the right judgment, be it a moral one, or an aesthetic one. This formalism also results a peculiar way of defining the guidelines for what can count as „wrong” in a moral or in an aesthetic judgment. Obviously the wrongness of such judgments does not lie in their content, but in the way they are conceived. For instance, if one makes a judgment of taste by relating the aesthetic value of a painting to its possible suitability to express national grandour, patriotism, some concrete political ideal, or some other particular normative message, then he fails to express a correct aesthetic judgment - not because of its content however, but because of the form of its content, which brings a conceptual element in the aesthetic value of the painting failing in this way, to consider that value according to the pure aesthetic criteria of lack of concept and of disinterestedness. The aesthetically represented politics is an aesthetic undertaking which according to Kant’s conception fails to be a pure instance for beautiful aesthetic expression. Similarly an evil action is a moral undertaking which fails to be “good”. Both in moral and in aesthetic undertakings any set purpose to which the object is targeted generates heteronomy, that is to say, impurity - the presence of some external interest (not the interest of the reason). One of the types of such transcendental mistakes is indoctrination – be it aesthetic or moral, or political. For instance this is the case of “committed” art which is dedicated to the sensual display of some specified moral doctrine, like some theory of good life or desirable political system. In the Kantian world the sensually represented outcome of such a commitment is never art, because it does not appear as an independent expression but as an expression, which is subjected to pre-set forms of how to express an idea, and which idea to express.
	In finding the aspect which reconciles disinterestedness of judgments of taste with their suitability to sensibly represent moral ideas Guyer relies on the implicit Kantian idea of purpose without purpose in the aesthetic experience as an ultimate purpose in itself. Accordingly the freedom of the human capability of self-determination in moral acts is schematically present whereas in the aesthetic experience it is sensually and conceptually present in a free play of the two. The strength of Guyer’s thoughts is that he indicates the schematical presence of freedom as self-determination in aesthetic experience which establishes a typological similarity between aesthetic and moral judgments. However this does not seem to be sufficient to accept Kant's idea of the beautiful as the symbol of the good. The reason for this is the following. Given that the purpose without purpose, that is to say, the inherent lawfulness of aesthetic experience is not specified by any concrete concept, it is not clear, in what way could the aesthetic experience symbolize moral ideas. The assumption that the aesthetic experience can symbolize morality inevitably leads to the conclusion that in lack of restrictions by concepts or rules any kind of aesthetic experience could symbolize any kind of morality and any kind of idea of reason in general. This can be a reasonable conclusion from the fact that aesthetic experiences are unique. Relying on Kant's clarifications this follows from the epistemological difference between judgments of taste and moral assertions. Whereas in case of judgments of taste freedom occurs in the externally (physically) unspecified way in which we internally create the harmonic unity of the sensual with the conceptual elements, in case of moral statements freedom occurs as the idea of reason, which does not exist in the sensible world. Due to this difference in the epistemological status of freedom we cannot set any standard rule of equivalence between a given aesthetic experience on the one hand and a given moral statement on the other hand. There is no systematic rule to follow the way in which the two different modes of how freedom occurs - the moral one and the one in aesthetic experience - could be related to each other. Therefore the aesthetic symbolization of morality proves to be arbitrary. It is important to highlight that arbitrariness does not emerge from either the moral or the aesthetic freedom, but it lies in the act of representation itself. As we saw in paragraph 59 Kant distinguishes between the merely individual still un-communicated pleasure and the pleasure in communicating it, lifting pleasure in this way to the social level at which the truly aesthetic pleasure is constituted. Kant also highlights in the paragraph, that the social pleasure in the shared aesthetic experience can be achieved through the aesthetic representation of morality. However the fact that the representation itself is arbitrary even degenerates the aesthetic experience into the lower, merely individual experience of pleasure as pure sensation, because the socially shared agreement in the representing function of the beautiful in some given case, will simply be characteristic to the "collective individual" compounded from those individuals, who happen to associate the same moral ideas with a particular aesthetic representation. (One can raise the question whether there is anything like further communicability of pleasure among such collective individuals. This reveals a particular meaning of intersubjectivity referring to something that can be called as communities of taste; and it also reveals the problem of the validity of judgments of taste in general.)

3. The Relationship Between Taste and Culture as a Moral Matter
We saw that from the point of view of the public character of delight the idea that refinement can develop to a stage at which the experience of communicating delight becomes a delight in itself - the delight of sharing delight - is a crucial one. It was concluded that the line of thought in paragraph 41 arrives to the idea of refined inclination as socialized nature or in other words, as second nature that expresses at the same time the role of communicability in this process of refinement, by making it clear, that without a socially shared vocabulary we would not even be able to talk about taste - hence about individual taste either - but only of mere individual pleasure which lacks any standard of the beautiful. That particular stage is supposed to be the outcome of the process of refinement which is identical to the process of civilization. This is the process through which the disposition to live in society identified by Kant as inclination (Neigung zur Geselligkeit) is transformed into its refined form: culture. What puzzles at this point is Kant’s recognition of the fact that an a priori grounding of the transition from the aesthetic experience of agreement in the beautiful to moral refinement, is still to be achieved.
	The difficulty Kant faces in the paragraphs referring to the relationship between taste and morality is that he both has to cope with the lack of an a priori grounding of moral refinement through taste on the one hand and to argue for the suitability of the aesthetic way of expression to symbolically represent morality on the other hand. A possible solution to this challenge should rely more on Kant’s overall conception than on isolated statements of any particular quote. The closing idea of paragraph 41 is twofold: there is no interest at this point in the empirical possibility of the moral refinement of society through aesthetics but its realization is desirable. What Kant does not solve with a priori rigor remains a subject of hope. This is what Schiller follows later: the transcendental possibility and the historical-social hope in the moral refinement of humanity.

Perhaps the most important and earliest program which targeted the continuation of Kant’s transcendental philosophy into a philosophy of culture was the Neo-Kantian School. The Neo-Kantian approach consists of the application of Kant’s concept of form and of his entire epistemology as related to it, to developing a philosophy of culture. The main starting point of Neo-Kantianism was schematism, moreover imagination as the inherent element of the mind in its gaining (more precisely constructing) experiences. Generally speaking they relied upon the inescapable creativity of the mind as a permanent Gestalt-creating element. It was this Kantian epistemology that the Neo-Kantians attempted to turn into a genuine theory of symbolic forms meant to explain cultural phenomena as basic mental imagery.
	Heidegger was among the first and most noteworthy thinkers, who criticized the Neo-Kantian approach in its programmatic elaboration by Ernst Cassirer. In his reflections from 1929, on Cassirer’s volume, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, published in 1925, with special attention concerning the second chapter dedicated to mythical forms, Heidegger puts forward two major lines of objection. Starting from the assumption that Cassirer’s approach is based upon Kant’s Copernican turn, which prepares the understanding of creativity as an inherent feature of the process of gaining knowledge, Heidegger claims firstly, that the construction is incomplete, because it addresses myth as an essential form of human Dasein, but he fails to address the explication of that Dasein in light of the problem of Being as such. Secondly he states that it is not evident how could one continue Kant’s critique of pure reason toward a general philosophy of culture. According to Heidegger this very project fails to clarify Kantian notions like, nature, life, consciousness and spirit.
	Beyond Heidegger’s “eternal return” to his own central notion of the Seinsproblem, which he places into all of his reflections on every possible thinker, his objection, that it is not evident that Kant’s critical philosophy can be extended into a general philosophy of culture is a salient one. It highlights the danger of a forced interpretation of the Kantian approach – the danger Cassirer and the Neo-Kantian program itself might run into.
The only element the present approach shares with the Neo-Kantian approach is the resources of the inquiry itself for considering the potential of the Kantian epistemology for moral, political and social philosophy. The subtle thesis which underlies Kant’s theory of schematism is that without the a priori forms of experience we would not be able to grasp anything, but once we possess these fundamental forms we grasp everything distortedly. This is the idea Cassirer addresses. The weakness of his interpretive framework is exactly its being too much a framework. But to repeat it differently: the strength of this weakness is that it suggests, that if the deepest level of mental formalism offers a permanent pattern for further levels of mental functioning – ultimately for culture - then the difference between art and reality is not significant, if it exists at all. Cassirer enables us to see that form-creation as elaborated by Kant is not fictious, but it is actually the core structure of our mental life. Further Cassirer also helps us to see that the meaning of the word “aesthetics” remains an epistemological term throught the first and the second Critique and any further meaning of it – for art or for culture (including the terminology of the third Critique) derives from this initial epistemological sense of the word.

The general idea that taste is related to morality and that by refining one of them the refinement of the other can also be achieved was a widespread topic in the eighteenth century, and as such, it should not be generally seen as an inclusively Kantian idea. It was Kant who – as a consequence of his anti-metaphysical way of approaching which had fundamentally changed the mode of approaching as such – described the experience of the beautiful for the first time, instead of engaging into explaining what the beautiful is. But although it was Kant who had offered the most accurately elaborated moral and aesthetic theory in modern times, he never offered any systematic elaboration of the relationship between the too. All what we can do is to piece together what he had partly explicitly, partly implicitly written about this topic.
	The various thoughts on the idea itself as well as its relation to some conception of education were ranging from Shaftsbury, Ferguson and Eagleton, to Humboldt, or Rousseau, just to mention some of the most well-known names. The common element of these approaches was the idea of the aesthetic dimension of human life, as embodied in manners able to identify individuals and social groups, and which by stressing certain externalities carries an essential normative power in the life of communities. These conceptions were all implicit or explicit interpretations of nature and society, the individual man and the social group, reason and sensuality. This was also the dawn of the modern discourse of the conceptual pair: private and public. Why was this entire discourse so important and widespread in Kant’s century? The explanations offered by the history of ideas and by social history underline criteria like that of regarding the emergence of certain segments of the European societies in the functioning of politics - for instance the power the third estate gained over the French monarchy, the increasing presence of the masses in the legitimacy of the political power, the emergence of nations and of the various theories and justifications of group identities, the new ways of perceiving politics and public matters in general, as well as the increasing dissemination of information through the exploding emergence of the press. Obviously discussions on taste, behavior, education, and the morals were underlying the agenda of the new environment of human interactions and creations of identity. The remote reason of all this can be seen as secularization. The “absence” of god or more precisely the absence of any society-wide faith in its existence was of course a significant reason why discussions concerning the morals, discussions on good and bad, on beautiful and ugly could occur, as open questions. Ernst Müller interprets the place Kant and Schiller had occupied in their era in light of the relationship between aesthetics and the loss of faith in god of that period.
	Müller considers that Kant’s thoughts about the symbolizing of the ideas of reason, through imagination, and the intermediating role the third Critique itself plays between reason and sensuality seemed to serve as a suitable theoretical ground for arguing on the normative power of the aesthetic phenomena. Relying on Kant’s considerations on the special place aesthetic feeling occupies between the un-touchable ideas of reason and the blind senses one can well have the theoretical means to rescue the notion of the transcendent – and its experience, without theological postulations. If the realm of the ideas can be linked to the empirical realm of human existence, then the ideas of the French Revolution can be realized…
	The society-wide normative potential of taste lies in its capacity to link the educated classes to the un-educated ones: through taste one can educate those, who have the natural disposition to acquire refinement through learning. In order to grasp this process of teaching and learning one has to assume that the capability to learn is universally human: the broad program to integrate society through aesthetic education was a response to both the universalistic/egalitarian and to the elitist demands of that historical period – both relying on some kind of assumption of the universal human disposition for development. Therefore the relationship between taste and the morals was a topic which in its various elaborations could cover very different, even opposed ideologies. Schiller’s explicit program for the theoretical foundation of the realization of this hope was no less part of the integrative/educative potential of the relationship between taste and morality than Kant’s long way to answer the question he raised: what is man?

III. TWO FOLLOWERS: ARENDT AND SCHILLER

The puzzle shared in Kant's, Arendt's and Schiller's approach is the matter of publicly shared judging. And the common outcome of their enquiry on the topic is that they find the normative resources of Kant’s aesthetics for moral and political thought in the presence of a particular feature in Kant’s conception of freedom - both in his aesthetic and moral theory: freedom as autonomy.

1. The Moral Burden of Cognition: Arendt’s Political Reasoning
"Judging" was meant to be the third chapter of Hannah Arendt's volume The Life of the Mind which due to her sudden death, had remained unfinished. Therefore regarding her fundamental ideas on the relationship between the aesthetics and politics in Kant's third Critique the posterity can only rely on her unfinished book, as well as on her lectures on Kant's political philosophy, which were supposed to be parts of the completed book. Arendt highlights that the main topic of the third Critique is reflective judgment. This idea is crucial for her argument on the third Critique as Kant's book in political philosophy.
	The most comprehensive source left as a testimony regarding Arendt’s reading of Kant is the volume published in 1982, which collects her lectures delivered in 1964 at the University of Chicago, as well as in 1965, 66 and 70 at the New School for Social Research. The second most important source of reconstruction is the unfinished volume The Life of the Mind, of which third, finally unwritten part was entitled Judgment. There is a widespread view that this last part of the book was supposed to become the final development of her understanding of the relationship between the aesthetic and the political dimension of Kant's philosophy. It is especially the closing chapter of the first part entitled Postscriptum which offers clues to grasp how Arendt had conceived the reconstruction of this relationship meant to be developed in the last part of the volume.
Jerome Kohn considers that the tripartite structure of the volume resembles not only Kant’s division of his own critical philosophy into three distinct books, but it also resembles Arendt’s other volume, The Human Condition, in which she distinguishes between labor, work and action, pointing in this way to the structuring of the leading question of what it means to carry out action, while we are engaged in mental activities. It can also be seen as the completion of her earlier thoughts on the rejection of the traditional opposition between vita activa and vita contemplativa based on the conviction, that despite its genuine reflective nature, mental activity is not contemplative. According to this central conviction of hers thinking is not the outcome of truth, but on the contrary, it is its beginning.
As a matter of fact, by reading The Life of the Mind, one can only gain an indirect interpretation of Kant. What can directly be obtained is the place Arendt assigned to Kant in her own philosophy. Therefore it is likely that the unwritten passages would have contributed to the final development of her reception of Kant only to the extent to which the written ones have already contributed to namely, by offering the background Arendt's own philosophy had served as traces of a picture of Kant, which she had never had time to entirely show to us. Therefore partly because our sources are limited and partly because to grasp Arendt's argument is only possible within the coherence of her entire life work, one can only reflect on the Kant-lectures by paying attention to the other works which reveal the relationship between her own philosophy on the one hand and her related reception of Kant on the other hand. In this respect it is methodologically necessary to discern Arendt's own theory on the relationship between the aesthetic and the political phenomena from the Kantian approach of the topic as reconstructed by Arendt. This paralel reconstruction enables us to identify the thesis they share.
In his elabortion of the phenomenon of taste Kant relies on the same idea of the social condition of man, which Arendt applies in her political philosophy. Hence, if Kant and Arendt share any thesis on the relationship between the aesthetic and the political realm, then that is based upon this shared conception of the social condition. According to this, the enlarged mind (erweiterte Denkungsart) is the general capacity of thinking, and as such, it establishes the way in which people relate themeselves to each other. Thus enlarged mind is the precondition of both taste and the political dimension. In analogy with our judgments of taste our individual acts are implicitly related to the other people. The public space which Arendt and Kant describe as the arena of the judgments of taste is the space of both individual and public self-display.
In his reconstruction Curtis highlights that the leading element in Arendt's enquiry concerning the relationship between the category of the beautiful and the political sphere is the concept of the public. According to this neither the concept of the beautiful, nor that of the political can be meaningful without two major aspects of thinking: the relationship to others as expressed by the Kantian idea of the enlarged mind that is to say, the human attempt to situate oneself into the perspective of the other; and the act of judgment on what is good, evil, beautiful, and ugly. In her reconstruction of the relationship between the political and the aesthetic phenomena Arendt mainly relies on The Critique of Judgment. It was first in 1961 when she stated in an article entitled Freedom and Politics, that The Critique of Judgment carries the seeds of a political philosophy on grounds, which are different from the Critique of Practical Reason. This assertation is important because it highlights the individual voice of the third Critique in taking a position relevant from political theory, independently from the theory of practical reason. She considers that in his work on the critique of taste Kant pays more attention to the analysis of judgment, than in the Critique of Practical Reason. Arendt argues that in the last critical work, freedom appears as an attribute of imagination, which, through the act of the enlarged mind - that of putting oneself into the perspective of someone else as a general attribute of thinking as such opens, at the same time, the way toward political reasoning.
Beiner points out, that the relationship between aesthetics and politics in The Critique of Judgment, as well as in Arendt's interpretation of it, can be further decomposed into the triadic relationship between the aesthetic, the ethical and the political realms, because as a matter of fact, the role taste plays in Kant is of moral nature. Beiner argues that through the concepts of communication, intersubjective approval and common taste, Arendt identifies the possibility to fill the gap caused by the inexistence of any kind of objective morality, in the moral function of taste. This function is made possible by the fact that judgments of taste are individual and intersubjective at the same time.
It is significant that the triadic relationship between the aesthetic, the ethical and the political realm is a more exhaustive way to clarify the analogy between beautiful and good, than the strategy used by Kant himself. In his profound analysis of The Critique of Judgment Paul Guyer convincingly argues, that the passages referring to the relationship between beautiful and to good are weak, because Kant proves to be unable to get rid of his conceptually unclear, metaphorical hints through which, he only manages to indicate the relationship rather than to clarify it.
The very opening idea of The Life of the Mind is that the "plurality is the law of the earth." Arendt arrives to this by stating, that given, that everything which appears inevitably appears to the eyes of spectators: "nothing that is, insofar as it appears, exists in the singular". She identifies the following topics of The Critique of Judgment as significant for political theory: "… the particular, whether a fact of nature or an event in history; the faculty of judgment as the faculty of man's mind to deal with it; sociability of man as the condition of the functioning of this faculty, that is, the insight that men are dependent on their fellow men not only because of their having a body and physical needs but precisely for their mental faculties - these topics, all of them the eminent political significance - that is, important for the political - were concerns of Kant long before he finally, after finishing the critical business (das kritische Geschäft), turned to them when he was old."
The leading step in her interpretation of the relationship between the aesthetic and the political realm in the third Critique is to consider judgment as a distinct capacity of the mind. Arendt clarifies her claim by pointing to the fact, that we don't arrive to judgments as results of logical inferences. For instance, by judging something as beautiful, our mind doesn't operate in the same way, as by infering from the premises that all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, hence Socrates is mortal. In her interpretation of judgment Arendt points out, that the epistemological background of the term as it appears in the third Critique relies on the distinction Kant makes in the Critique of Pure Reason: "subsuming under a concept" and "bringing to a concept". This distinction is equivalent to the one made in the third Critique between determinant judgment and reflective judgment. Contrary to determinant judgment which subsumes the particular under the general rule, reflective judgment derives the rule from the particular. From the angle of the present thesis the most significant epistemological element in Arendt's argument is her claim on the role of thinking in Kant's book. Her interpretation of the Kantian idea of judgment is prepared in the passages dealing with thinking.
Arendt reconstructs Kant's position that humans are not only interdependent in the satisfaction of their needs which they would not be able to satisfy entirely alone, but also in their thinking, which cannot function outside social life. A further passage is also relevant in this respect in which she sums up Kant's understanding of judgment, as the faculty to deal with the particular and with sociability (Geselligkeit), the last one being the condition of the very functioning of judgment itself. These are clear passages on the link between thinking as the general mental capacity that establishes individual judgments on the one hand and the social reception of individual judgments on the other hand.
It is this ambivalence of the epistemological status of judgments of taste, in which Arendt identifies both the inherent freedom of any individual option and the natural inclination of the individual toward social life. Her best demonstration of this appears in the Kant-lectures in which she analyses the 41th paragraph of the third Critique which mainly deals with the pleasure in the beautiful as an empirical interest in society. Arendt describes pleasure in this context as the potential of the judging and acting for the political realm.
Beiner argues that Arendt is mainly interested in the free functioning of judgment, which according to Arendt only occurs, if the capacity of thinking is cultivated. Accordingly it is thinking and the faculty of judgment in which Arendt sees the cognitive chance as well as the moral responsibility to discern good from evil. Beiner identifies two periods in the development of Arendt's conception of judgment. Firstly Arendt applies the judgment as vita activa that is to say, in the representative and in the exemplary sense of the word, as well as in the sense of the enlarged mind. Later, after 1970 judgment begins to refer to contemplation rather then to vita activa, and to the Kantian notion of disinterestedness. The concept of judgment used in the second period is more directly related to the aesthetic phenomena, because it occurs as the retrospection which according to Kant is characteristic for judgments of taste. Beiner claims that this second meaning of the concept of judgment appears only in the The Life of the Mind.
The initial framework of Arendt’s approach is epistemological. The problem she addresses in this respect is to understand how is it possible to withdraw from the world of appearances without leaving or transcending it. The stake of this withdrawal is of course Arendt’s further goal to clarify how can we attain the state of mind of judgment, which is the state of mind from which any decision between what is right and what is wrong, beautiful or ugly derives. This is the state of mind of the spectator, who although is present in the world, he occupies the position of the disinterested observer. The initial epistemological stance aims at a final moral approach, and it is this moral dimension of Arendt’s inquiry, that includes the aesthetic element. Arendt stresses communicability as the criterion of taste, and common sense as the standard of judging it. She takes sensus communis in the "Thinking" chapter of The Life of the Mind as "the specifically human sense because communication, i.e., speech depends on it." The quoted passage indicates that in her elaboration of Kantian inspiration, Arendt situates common sense as prior to language. Indeed the very possibility that approval in matters of taste can be reached in language is the natural outcome of the fact that common sense warrants the possibility of such moments of shared judging.
Ingeborg Nordmann considers that it is the concept of judgment in Arendt, meant to grasp the particular without subsuming it under some general rule, which par excellence establishes the political attitude. He claims that the intellectual process which led her to this standpoint started with the Eichmann-report. Indeed, it seems that from the Eichmann-report on Arendt gradually elaborates the relationship between judging, thinking and the political attitude of the individual who has reached the stage of Mündigkeit. The obvious similarity between the Report on the Banaliyt of Evil and the thesis on the consideration of the particular without its subsumption under some rule is, the self-relyingness of enlightened thought to consider and judge the situation at hand. Nordmann identifies the implicit political role of imagination in Arendt’s Kant-reception: the experiment of situating oneself into the perspective of the other one as the fundamental model of dialogue.
Arendt discovered that contrary to the usual way of approaching political philosophy in which politics appeared to be the art of governing Kant's conception was, that politics is a commitment to life and Being. She quotes Kant: "I call out to each creature…: Hail us, we are! (Heil uns, wir sind!)" This approach of life and Being, as life and Being in community appears in The Critique of Judgment, in which Kant asserts that each person is a member of a community from the outset. This leads to the Kantian idea of plurality - the basis for Arendt's approach of judgment.
	In its Kantian context Arendt's approach on judgment is mainly based upon her idea of plurality. It is the spectator who sees the whole scene, and whose position is fundamentally impartial, because he is not involved in the actual events. The actor's goal is to achieve the good opinion (doxa) of the spectator. The fact that the public sphere is made up by the spectators follows from their permanently being judged by each other in their individual judgments: the spectators are in the meantime potential spectators of each other. This state of mutually experienceing each other is what gives birth to common sense, as opposed to the private sense (sensus privatus) – egotims, which also appears in Kant as insanity (Eigensinn), the loss of common sense which means the loss of the capability to judge as spectators. Socrates’ neighbour refered to by Arendt expresses the destiny of the thinking man to be always together with somebody: with the neighbour, who is his own consciousness. The cognitive fact of the inherent plurality of the thinking man is the genuine model of plurality as such, to cope with each other’s existence. One can follow the line in Arendt’s interpretation of Kant, that links communicability to the possiblilty of intersubjective testing of judgments – hence the roots in the shared meanings supplied by language which prepare the logical possibility of public approval. For both Arendt and Kant the most important aspect of the selective feature of taste is the pleasure of the general approval (allgemeine Beistimmung). The criterion of this pleasure is communicability and it is of "a public character".
The third Critique links Kant's general thoughts about community elaborated in his various works. Accordingly what links Kant's political ideas as stated in his later writings like Perpetual Peace and What is Enlightenment? to the third Critique is the idea of achieving perpetual peace (ewige Frieden) through taste, as well as through enlarged mind which is the mental ground of taste. The possibility of a general cosmopolitan existence is deeply present in the spirit of the third Critique. Taking this argument further one could argue that as a matter of fact the aesthetic spectator and the political Weltbetrachter emerge from the same ideal of world-community. As we know, the image of such a final development of history, of an already attained state of Mündigkeit appears in Kant’s hopes, also as an ethical community – as the final end of nature. The idea of the final end of nature is in turn part of the aesthetics which is implicit in the teleology of the world. The recognition of this fact has fundamentally inspired Arendt’s thesis on Kant’s aesthetics as an implicit political philosophy. According to this logic there is a clear relationship between Kant's critique of taste on the one hand and his works in which his political theory is explicit on the other. Obviously the relationship between the aesthetic- and the political realm is not restricted to the third Critique.
In her attempt to grasp the mechanism of thinking Arendt recalls Kant's view, that the mutual dependency which exists among people does not only emerge from the fact that in society it is easier to satisfy individual needs, but also from the fact, that thinking itself as an activity would not be possible without the social sphere. Arendt follows the Kantian idea which relates the mental act of judging to social existence. The ground for this relationship is that judgment is the faculty to deal with the particular. Accordingly in society we constantly face particularity. And with step in her arguin Arendt links the cognitive fact of plurality of the thinking individual to the social dimension of the both plurality and of cognition. In his essay on the third Critique with special emphasize on Arendt’s reconstruction of Kant’s aesthetics from the point of view of political philosophy Zoltán Papp claims that Arendt only comes up with negative features shared by debates, on taste and politics in Kant, as links between them, such as the lack of derivability from any objective ground. Contrary to Papp I consider that Arendt does come up with a positive aspect in the relationship between taste and politics in Kant namely, with freedom in the ability to consider (to judge) particularity. It is in this sense, that Arendt relates thinking, judging, and social existence to each other. I interpret this link in Arendt's argumentation, as the link between thinking as the general mental capacity that establishes individual judgment on the one hand and the social reception of individual judgments on the other hand. Thinking is the cognitive bridge between the individiual and the others. In her attempt to grasp Kant’s critical philosophy Arendt interprets thinking beyond the mere cognitive realm. Or more precisely for Arendt there is nothing like the „mere” cognitive realm; for Arendt thinking is always also a moral matter. In Kant the key notion for this is the conduct of thought (Denkungsart), which Arendt also uses. Kant’s formulation which is so often stressed by Arendt, the enlarged mind is a clear indication of the fact that the way of thinking as understood and utilized by Kant in all three critical volumes as well as in earlier works like the Anthropology, is a fundamental notion and it plays from time to time the role of linking to each other a cognitive and a moral sense, of what the faculty of thinking is supposed to mean.
"… what appear to be errors in logic to minds disencumbered of questions that have been uncritically dismissed as 'meaningless' are usually caused by semblances, unavoidable for beings whose whole existence is determined by appearance. Hence in our context the only relevant question is whether they are caused by dogmatic beliefs and arbitrary assumptions, mere mirages that disappear upon closer inspection, or whether they are inherent in the paradoxical condition of a living being that, though itself part of the world of appearances, is in possession of a faculty, the ability to think, that permits the mind to withdraw from the world without ever being able to leave it or transcend it."
This passage preceded by an interpretation of Kant as the first to discover the semblances of the mind, introduces Arendt's underlying idea, that the faculty to think (and to judge) is both the cognitive chance and the moral burden for being able to discern good from evil. Arendt clarifies this by stating, that there is a difference between mistakes which are inherent to the natural weakness of the mind ("authentic semblances") and mistakes which can be corrected by a "closer inspection" ("inauthetntic semblances"). This passage raises the matter of responsibility and as such, it harmonizes with another idea namely, the one in which she distinguishes between sheer opinion and doxa. In both cases Arendt points out the direct relationship between a cognitive capability on the one hand and the moral burden it implies on the other hand. The common element is the epistemic jusitification of something, that one could call as the reasoned expression of particularity before the spectators. In this respect opinion appears as non-reasoned particularity, that is to say, as sheer option for something particular - an option that neglects the moral burden of the mental capacity of thinking and judging. Contrary to mere opinion doxa is the result of reasoned option - of an option which has passed the moral test of thinking and judging.
For Arendt the concept of judgment is also meaningful for the philosophy of history. This meaning can be discerned from some of her writings, especially from the Kant-lectures and from Between Past and Future. In the Kant-lectures the problem of the particular is treated along the elaboration of an anti-deterministic conception of history based upon the idea of judgment as the mental act, through which we are able to assess the unique character of a concrete event and as such, its examplary validity. Beiner considers that this view of history clearly distinguishes Arendt from Kant, who by following a different teleological logic, viewed history as one single story. In this particular question Arendt indeed touches upon certain roots, which are not of Kantian origin. She relies at this point, on another major source of her works namely, on Augustine, whose philosophy had mainly shaped her early writings, but whose influence remained present all during her life. Arendt has linked the Augustinian idea of natality to the Kantian concept of judgment in a very special way. She considers that every judgment reproduces the unique character of natality, the new life, anything which is un-precedented and can shape a new order of things – hence the primacy of the Kantian model of reflcetive judgment meant to handle particularity. For Arendt this un-forseeable newness of judgments entails the inherent human capacity for emancipation – for change in general. This whole idea of the permanent possibility of always new beginnings also plays an important role in her understanding of what revolution is.

A political theory based upon aesthetic considerations does neither necessarily imply the politicization of aesthetics, nor does it imply the aestheticization of politics. Despite certain charges (like that of Lionel Abel’s from 1963), Arendt's attempt is the aestheticization of politics either. She was even charged that by an alleged aestheticization of politics she came close to the political existentialists of the prewar period, especially to the decisionists, showing in this way affinity to fascist political ideology, which was itself based upon an aestheticization of politics (Martin Jay 1978). Charges following this line of thought even included the consideration, that Arendt's astheticization of political life results at least an amoral, may be even immoral conception of action. The charge of aesthetic antirationalism has recently continued targeting Arendt's conception of political action and her theory of the public realm.
	There are two poles in this controversy: one which undertakes the consensual communicative politics, and the other one which follows a conception of agonistic performative politics. As a contribution to the praxis - techné distinction, Arendt's conception is crucial for both. Whereas the consensualists only instrumentalize Arendt for their consensual-universalist ends, the other part only observes in her work the element of "agonistic subjectivity" (like Villa in 1992) namely, the political ideal of distinctness (Honig’s case from 1993), of particularity, as against to the political environment of the homogenizing rule. Mary Dietz also questions Arendt's political theory in its aesthetic dimension (1994). Criticizing Arendt for the aestheticism and sentimentalism of her theory, Dietz points put, that since Arendt does not elaborate an action-coordinating theory, she doesn't supply applicable answers to the potential question of "what is to be done" in politics.
At this point I only focus on the charges concerning Arendt's alleged aestheticization of politics. These objections are clearly blind to the difference between the aestheticization of politics on the one hand, and Arendt's specific way to directly relate the political, the ethical, and the aesthetic phenomena to each other by revealing the common normativity which establishes that direct relationship on the other hand. Arendt did not come up with anything like a committed theory of politics upon aesthetic grounds. She didn’t elaborate a normative theory of action or of political thought or ideology. What she offers is a phenomenology of the political mind which according to her view is inseparable from the aesthetic mind. Hence the cultivation of our political sense goes hand in hand with our aesthetic relationship with the world including ourselves and our fellow men.
According to Curtis who has aknowledged the difference between the aestheticization of politics and what Arendt had actually done instead claims, that Arendt was seeking for an aesthetic answer to the ethical dilemma: how can we be "fully alive"? Curtis argues that in seeking for an answer Arendt arrives to two starting points in which she links the ethical, the aesthetic, and the political dimension of human life to each other. These two starting points are the desire to express particularity, and particularity as a permanently present experience in one’s own life. Curtis stresses that Arendt's message to democratic politics is based upon this ethical-aesthetic ontology. The scope of political theory at this point, is to establish and maintain a shared world, which according to Arendt is not possible without the aesthetic cultivation of the sense of reality. Aesthetic cultivation means to permanently cope with the fact of particularity and with the fact of plurality. Arendt considers that by not coping with their reality we loose our belongingness to a world shared with others.
I find it significant that in her meditation upon the moral grounds of the public sphere Arendt constantly pays attention to the idea, that the individual perspectives are virtually inter-changable. This functioning of the enlarged mind, which is in fact the hypothetical placeing oneself into the perspective of someone else, is an aesthetic game based upon imagination with moral consequences. Thus the public sphere can be seen as based upon the genuine aesthetic world-experience of being aware of each other's presence. This is the pre-moral experience of the shared human space. (At this point I use the term "public space" also used by Arendt instead of "public sphere." The term "public sphere" already presupposes the coexistence within the very framework of social norms. Contrary to this the present meaning refers to the pre-normative foundation of any further socially constituted terrain within which the term public space becomes meaningful at all.) All these reconstructions reveal that in Arendt the root of the ethical and of the political dimension of human life lies in the aesthetic moment which we experience by aknowledging the presence of others around us.
In her essay The crisis in culture Arendt writes about cultura animi as taste that is to say, as the exercise of the love of beauty, which is possessed by "a mind so trained and cultivated that it can be trusted to tend and take care of a world of appearances whose criterion is beauty." But one can raise the question whether there is any generally valid ground for deciding about the criteria of beauty. Taste as the exercise of the love of beauty is possessed by the mind, but given that the necessity of judgments of taste is subjective, it cannot be taken for granted that each mind possesses the same taste. Consequently each particular mind can have its own particular understanding of who those "others" are, with whom one wishes to share the same world. If, as Arendt says, to establish and maintain that world shared among its inhabitants is not possible without the aesthetic cultivation of one’s own sense of reality (which emerges from sensus communis), then it can be concluded, that only those can share a world, who follow the same criteria of beauty. If the cultivation of the sense for beauty is the way to cope with the everyday experience of particularity and diversity, but the cultivation of the sense of beauty can occur according to various – even opposed - criteria of what beautiful is, then why could the very responses to the experience of particularity and diversity not be also diverse? By raising this question it can be highlighted that Arendt does not clarify the problem of how to justify any generally valid and unique criteria for the beautiful and its cultivation, as the aesthetic means to cope with the social- and political fact of diversity. In The Life of the Mind she does not run into this trap because she narrows down the focus of her final enquiry on Kant’s aesthetics. Albrecht Wellmer makes a similar observation when he stresses that Arendt attempted to assimilate moral and political judgment into aesthetic judgment.

It can be concluded that the reason why Arendt does not aestheticize politics or political theory is that the relationship between aesthetic and political phenomena does not appear in her enquiry as an assumption on what is beautiful or ugly: she does not explore aesthetic categories in this relationship. She observes instead that our moral and political behaviour rely on the same mental capacity as our taste: the reflective judgment. Therefore the link she identifies between the aesthetic and the political phenomena is of epistemic nature, it focuses on our general capability to judge, as the root for morality and taste, rather than maintaining some concrete aesthetic assumption on the beautiful in politics or something like that. Hence her examination on the functioning of the mind – thinking, willing and judging, as the final framework to study the individual and public aspects of human life. The closing passages of the first volume of The Life of the Mind settle the link between the deeply individual capability and responsibility of judging of the individual who in Arendt’s Augustinian model is the locus of memory and expectation – past and future.

2. Education for the Good, Through the Beautiful: the Trap of Schiller’s Conception of Education?
In their commentary Wilkinson and Willoughby consider that the main issue Schiller raises in the Aesthetic Letters consists of the following questions. The first one is the Aristotelian question raised in the Nichomachean Ethics: what is the relationship between insight and action? Secondly will the understanding of what virtue is necessarily make me virtuous? The final question appears in Plato's Republic: how is art related to politics? Wilkinson and Willoughby consider that the general answer Schiller's Aesthetic Letters offer to these questions is that education to art is the only way to bridge the gap between insight and action.
	One of the most significant puzzles of the Aesthetic Letters is Schiller’s vision of the education of humankind by means of aesthetic experiences, for the sake of its highest possible moral realization. The somewhat vague logic of Schiller’s program of moral improvement of man is that it is conceived as a refinement through refinement – hence the impression of a certain circularity in the entire elaboration, which can be rescued by grasping Schiller’s deepest intentions, which might over-write the accuracy of the steps of his elaboration. In the following I attempt to reconstruct the implicit and explicit assumptions of the teleology set out in Schiller’s idea of education for a morally better state of humankind.

Gadamer considers that in the Fifteenth Letter Schiller transforms Kant’s transcendental idea of aesthetics into a moral demand. This occurs in the statement: “Live aesthetically!” He considers that by proclaiming art as the practice of freedom Schiller relies more on Fichte than on Kant, because he does not only rely on Kant’s idea of the free play of the faculties of knowledge, which he re-interpreted anthropologically, but also on Fichte’s theory of impulses: by harmonizing the play impulse with the form impulse and the matter impulse, and by cultivating the play impulse, one reaches the goal of aesthetic education. According to Gadamer this is what leads to the message of the letters on the aesthetic education of mankind: to educate through art – to art.
	As confessed in his programmatic essay Die Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet, Schiller was fueled by the conviction that neither reason nor pure nature can be the sole resource of human existence. The need for this balance between nature and reason in man has remained the basic inspiration of both his works as a philosopher and as a writer. The educative goals of the Aesthetic Letters derive from the conviction that the first nature of mankind, the yet un-refined human potential already entails the possibility of progression toward the most refined state of the second nature (the aesthetic state). The classicist Schiller identifies the possibility of human liberation from both the constraints of the senses as well as from any kind of constraint of human nature and human institutions, through the phenomena of the beautiful - through the aesthetic experience. This is the basic idea upon which the system of the aesthetic- moral, political and finally educative aspects, are elaborated in the Aesthetic Letters. The outcome is Schiller’s most comprehensive theoretical work written in the spirit of the fundamental anthropological thoughts of the Enlightenment.
	In the above mentioned essay Schiller offers valuable clues for grasping him both as a thinker and as an artist. The short essay develops a relationship between aesthetic experience, politics, education, morality, legality, the nation and humanity along one central aesthetic model which embraces all these aspects: the theatre. According to Schiller’s strikingly early “theory of media” what makes the stage (die Bühne) an especially suitable space for aesthetic education is that its mode of artistic expression is more efficient in addressing the large public than the printed word. Schiller argues that the stage has a stronger effect than morality and law. From this assumption he develops an interesting chain that links education to the aesthetic obligations of the state, which are in fact moral obligations. Accordingly by relying on the theatre the state possesses an artistic means to disseminate ideas which are produced by a restricted elite of the people (he talks about the people, not about the society). Schiller makes an obvious distinction in this respect between a “better”, more refined part and a less educated part of the people. And he asserts that it is the theatre which is able to integrate the members of the people overcoming in this way the social gaps in levels of education and class difference. We also learn that it is the theatre where the universal man appears across nations and as such it fulfills the role of both the national and the universal education.
	The essay suggests in this way that the theatre plays an egalitarian role that links individuals as well as entire people together, linking them in the meantime to the universal essence of humanity, to the different struggles, motifs and situations, all which is generally human. The stage as the scene of human nature is the fundamental model of human action, the choir stands for the public sphere. Finally the stage appears to be the aesthetic expression of the realm of human action in general and of the politically acting man in particular. Accordingly Schiller’s vision on the role of the state regarding the theatre concerns the capability of the state to cope with the authority of an institution of the aesthetic education to control the state from a more general human standpoint. It seems that the educational function of art lies in its capability to disseminate messages which address people as humans, beyond their individual and collective identities. Further, having in mind Schiller’s vocabulary theatre is the embodiment of play: it is the space where play is the only reality. Finally in case of the theatre it is also the mode of expression which best fulfills an egalitarian way of communicating anything which is generally human. The passage that links these levels into one coherent assertion is where he talks about the patriotism of the Greeks which was present in their dramas, in which the political state and the universal man came together - a fact that Schiller describes as the imperative of the great interest of humanity in us.
	It is interesting to observe how Schiller uses at this point the individual, the national (or the popular) and the cross-national, universally human levels. He defines the national spirit as the resemblance as well as the agreement of the opinions and inclinations among the members of a people concerning matters, which are collectively seen differently by other collective bodies. This definition makes clear that beyond his recognition of the individual as an agent who receives education Schiller is obviously thinking in terms of a uniform taste and morality within one single national body – leaving room at the same time for some internal leveling of social categories within this national body, but basically taking these national entities as highly distinguishable ones in matters of shared taste and morality. Then follows the third level, the cross-nationally human level, which is also the final subject matter of art itself and most adequately expressed in the theatre. At the end of the essay Schiller talks about the aesthetic experience in a strikingly similar way to Kant’s description of the mechanism of the judgments of taste, and claims, that in aesthetic experience each of us enjoys the pleasure of his fellow men, and this fact enables him to actually feel himself as a man among others. This is the idea in which the individual, the national and the universal harmonize within one common human world, in which the communication among these levels occurs by the intermediation of art.
	A close reading of his works including the Aesthetic Letters reveals that his poetry, drama and philosophy was “committed.” However the reason why this commitment did not imply anything like the politicization or moralization of art was, that its essence lied exactly in the social and political impact of art as an autonomous realm of human capabilities, rather than in its being subjected to any particular social, political or moral conception. It worth noting in this respect what a recent biography states namely, that Schiller’s pairs of terms like intuition versus concept, poetry versus philosophy, nature versus freedom, antique versus modern, naive versus sentimental, are in fact not aesthetic terms, but concepts of social theory. What Schiller targets in these – let’s say transitional concepts between aesthetics and social theory derive from the antinomies of modern society. His main goal was the pursuit of the “whole” man, who can be reintegrated into his authentic human condition through art. The claim that Schiller’s terminology is a path between aesthetic and social theory, might be too strong (especially, because it is not clear, whether he had elaborated any systematically understood theory of aesthetics, let alone, a social theory). However in a less radical form this claim could highlight that Schiller’s terminology and his way of contrasting certain notions are constantly on the borderline between aesthetics and social- or political theory. The reason for this is that while his terms always refer to aesthetic phenomena, they refer in the meantime, to human condition in some broader sense.
	The Aesthetic Letters can be divided into two main parts. Letters II-V, VIII, IX, and XIV present a three-phase teleology of cultural development. According to this, man progresses from the physical- through the aesthetic- to the moral state. The other part consists of the following letters: IV, VI, VII, XI-XV, and XVII-XXVII. In these ones Schiller elaborates the thesis that the physical and the moral states are to be reconciled in the aesthetic state. Relying on Hans Lutz's commentary Wilkinson and Willoughby consider that Schiller hesitates between the two parts of his overall exposition of the relationship between the sensual, the aesthetic and the moral states, and he is unaware of his own hesitation. It is argued that other ambiguities and contradictions of the whole work emerge from this major one. These are the following: mixing up the two theories, for instance in the Ninth Letter; the presentation of the aesthetic sphere now as means, now as end; freedom appears now in the Kantian sense as moral freedom, now as the aesthetic freedom of personality like in Schaftsbury; Enlightenment is now an ideal, now as something that makes people to fall back into barbarianism, in a Rousseauian sense; the confused utilization of the terms state as political unit (Staat), and as circumstance (Zustand). The Aesthetic Letters which has been also considered as the most systematic summary of Schiller’s theoretical creed looks as if its thoughts were being elaborated while actually being put down.
	What Böhm considers to be un-fulfilled in the Aesthetic Letters is that Schiller does not succeed to define the logic of the imagination as the organ of artistic culture. Wilkinson and Willoughby reply to this that Schiller had never even intended so for the simple reason - so their argument goes -, that the Aesthetic Letters are not focused on the realization of an "artistic culture", but of a state, in which the aesthetic phenomena functions as a modality of the entire psyche, rather than being just one of the faculties. I go further and claim that the two levels of freedom are brought into play precisely in this duality: freedom as the transcendentally given free play of the faculties on the one hand, and the freedom to cultivate what is genuinely aesthetic, into its moral realization on the other hand.
Klaus Düsing observes that with the idea of “Bildung” in the third Critique as the path from nature to freedom Kant identifies the puzzle which remains present in Schiller’s own conception of education namely: what is the relationship between aesthetic and moral education. Düsing highlights the notion of purposefulness as the ground of this relationship and claims that the relationship between the general (ontological), the moral and the aesthetic purposefulness emerges from Kant’s broader conception of the world. Accordingly this teleological concept of the world entails the transcendental warrant for the path from nature to freedom. Thus aesthetic education is an organic part of this entire teleological construction. The aesthetic education embraces a process of refinement which develops from the individual level, to the collective level, reaching finally the ennoblement of the entire mankind. The role of taste in this process lies in its preparing the individual for morality through the exercise of escape from the blind sensual determination. Düsing considers that Schiller continues the general Kantian conception of the gradual path of refinement from mere sensuality to the aesthetically/morally refined mankind, but Schiller fails in the end, to accurately elaborate the idea.
Eva Schaper argues that Schiller had misunderstood Kant. She claims however that this was a “creative misunderstanding”, because it led to Schiller's remarkable aesthetic theory. Schaper reflects upon several works of Schiller, which are relevant for his conception of the aesthetic realm, and she identifies the way in which Schiller's misunderstanding of Kant's aesthetics continues in his most important aesthetic work, the Aesthetic Letters.
Schaper reconstructs the four different ways also reconstructed by Schiller himself, in defining the beautiful. The consideration of these four ways, make Schiller to arrive to his own definition of the beautiful as freedom in the appearance.
The beautiful can either be explained as subjective, or as objective. Further it can either be as sensuous-subjective (Burke), or as rational-subjective (Kant), or as rational-objective (Baumgarten), or finally, as sensuous-objective. Schaper highlights that Schiller interprets the Kantian idea of the position the sensual and the intellectual occupy in the formation of knowledge, as a regrettable fact, which needs to be overcome. Schiller demands from Kant a definition of the beautiful, instead of the analysis of its experience. Such a definition of the beautiful is supposed to be based exactly upon the sensualist objectivism which Kant had consciously avoided as an unsustainable metaphysical approach. Schiller's demand from Kant neglects Kant's terminology and attributes meanings to the words "subjective" and "objective", entirely alien to their Kantian understanding. In his reflections Schiller had in mind the pre-Kantian sense of objectivity as something independently real. Accordingly the position he attributed to Kant was subjective-rationalism.
Finally concerning Schiller's reception of Kant as it appears in the Aesthetic Letters, Schaper states that Schiller's earlier definition of the beautiful, as freedom in the appearance becomes the key concept of the entire work. Accordingly moral actions appear to the senses as instances for the beautiful. To live aesthetically means to possess moral freedom. Schaper interprets the concept of freedom in the appearance as the attribute of anything, which either is alive, or looks so. She claims that this is not the aesthetization of the world, but the conviction that the presence of the duality of human nature in art results the unity and mutual justification of the moral and the natural inclinations. This last idea of major importance focuses on the moral development which Schiller elaborates from his aesthetic claims of Kantian inspiration. It fits well Schaper's remarks on Schiller's earlier struggles to dissolve the Kantian duality of the sensual and the intellectual dimension in something which somehow reconciles both. This includes a further element in Schiller's reception of Kant that Schaper identifies, namely the rejection of the fundamental Kantian requirement in his moral philosophy, to separate moral action from sensual inclination.
We can obtain from Schaper's reconstruction an accurate view on how Schiller develops an aesthetic-moral thesis from his interpretation of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. What I find especially useful in her elaboration is that she demonstrates how Schiller arrives from a totally non-Kantian way to dissolve the analytical difference between the sensual and the intellectual spheres to an aesthetic-moral reception of Kant's idea of the free play.
Schiller believed that the goal of Kant's third Critique was to reconcile freedom and appearance. Accordingly in Kant's transcendental aesthetics the free play of the two mental faculties in judgments of taste does not appear to Schiller simply, as their mutual working, but as their normative reconciliation: they mutually justify each-other. Kant did definitely not offer such a normative aesthetic-moral role to his description of how the mental faculties function in the acts of judgments of taste. He doesn't discover the freedom of these acts in their possible reconciliation with each other, but in the un-definable, un-conceptual character of their free play in the very moments of aesthetic experience.
It is Kant's formalism (in Schaper's opinion entirely alien to Schiller) that seems to have meant to Schiller a philosophically unsustainable mode to properly grasp the final unity in which dichotomies like subjective - objective, sensual - intellectual, inclination - moral law actually coexist in human nature. Schiller does not only reject the hierarchy of the Kantian model in assigning a higher position for reason than for the senses, but he rejects the hierarchy itself, in which any such ranking among the different drives of human acting is possible. In his mode he offers an equal place for both, providing that the outcome is the unity – the total man, which in his view is only fully developed if neither reason nor the senses dominate. Schiller’s solution can be seen as the reversal of Kant’s: he reduces Kant’s objective duality (like to – ought to) to a subjective unity. Whereas Schiller treats the moral law anthropologically, for Kant this is a universal, regulative principle – hence its dominance over the sensual dimension, which might also exist in moral acting, but which has to be permanently controlled by reason, for not becoming the maxim of acting.
	Schiller’s model obviously follows the logic of the non-Kantian models aimed at explaining the aesthetic realm by recurring to the essentialism of some kind of understanding of the attaining of truth as the final goal of aesthetics, like in case of Baumgarten usually mentioned as typical in this sense, or to the metaphysical demand of Vollkommenheit like in case of Moritz. Hence his insistence in his anthropology on the subjective unity of man. Beyond the independence of his own construction Schiller misunderstands Kant in the sense, that he doesn’t follow Kant’s transcendental enquiry. What we can see here is not just two different aesthetic theories, but also two different conceptions of how to approach. Schaper also argues in this sense when she claims that in rejecting Kant's formalism Schiller does not only, not come up with an alternative philosophical world-view, but his texts also remain void of the minimal necessary formalism which would be needed for an accurate methodology of philosophizing as such. Schiller's charge of formalism against Kant however is a crucial problem, because it highlights the different ways in which Kant and Schiller understand good and beautiful.
	I think that the primary Kantian idea, which is relevant for Schiller's conception of the beautiful does in fact, not derive from Kant's own conception of the beautiful. Nor does it emerge from paragraph 13 of the first Critique, in which Kant makes the first, but still very remote step in the clarification of perceiving, which later in the third Critique leads to the description of the structure of perceiving something - not just as an object, but also as a beautiful object. Schiller's first relevant source for his own conception of the beautiful is Kant’s idea that neither experience nor reason are alone sufficient to provide knowledge, because reason alone is only form and experience alone is only content. Knowledge consists of their synthesis. Contrary to the Kallias-Letters, where the beautiful defined as freedom in the appearance is described as the mirroring of the idea of self-determination, in the Aesthetic Letters it is not the idea of man as the essence of moral freedom (as self-determination) that acquires a symbolic relationship with the beautiful, but the idea of the alternation between form and matter. Schiller’s ambivalent relation to Kant’s aesthetics consists in his partial acceptance of Kant’s epistemology; despite his Kantian inspiration Schiller’s own way to assimilate Kant was not Kantian – or at least not systematically so.
	Schiller highlights the well-known Kantian insight that aesthetic phenomena only exist if they are independent from extra-aesthetic criteria: once submerged, there is no aesthetic phenomena any longer. However he is more radical in this respect. His radicalism lies in the argument that the political and the moral realm have to be refined through the social impact of the aesthetic phenomena, which means - through art. This is Schiller’s aesthetic-social thesis which leads him to his conception of education. Kant had never undertaken such a militant stance aiming at the actual transformation of the world. But how did Schiller arrive to an idea of education relying on Kantian aesthetic considerations? What could be seen as his tentative answer to the question of how can we be coherent in assigning an educative public role to aesthetic contemplation respecting at the same time the disinterested nature of aesthetic contemplation?
	Relying on Schiller's Aesthetic Letters the starting point for a possible answer to the question from above should be the following: the true meaning of the two seemingly contradictory ideas that art should be independent from any external constraint on the one hand, and it should have a morally refining social impact on the other hand is, that Schiller conceives the social impact of art precisely in its inherently independent nature – in its autonomous performances. Autonomy is understood in this respect as inherent in artistic creation, because it is governed by the inner laws of the very act of making art, as well as by the inner laws of the reception of artistic objects – both lawfulness belonging to, what Kant describes as purpose without purpose. Consequently art has its most desired social impact precisely in not being committed to anything else, than to its inherent criteria of aesthetic quality. In the context of purely moral acts autonomy is understood by Kant as an act so conceived that it takes into consideration the quality of intelligent beings (vernünftige Wesen) as ends in themselves. Therefore the moral teaching art may have upon society doesn't rely on any particular ideological content, but on its sole act of being an instance for freedom. Following the logic of Kant's idea of the independent beauty, and arguing similarly to Kant's idea of the difference between the heterogeneity and homogeneity of moral acts Schiller adopts the requirement for aesthetic performances to be freed from extra-aesthetic elements. The analogy obviously resides in the common idea, that neither the authentically moral, nor the authentically aesthetic acts can be instrumentalized for external non-moral or non-aesthetic goals, because any such instrumentalization would annihilate them as being purely aesthetic or purely moral acts – they can only entail purely aesthetic respectively, purely moral goals. What makes these acts purely aesthetic or purely moral is their autonomous character – this is the link, or more precisely the idea of freedom, which prepares the shared thesis of moral and aesthetic autonomy. Hence the idea shared by aesthetic and moral autonomy is purpose without purpose. The freedom of these acts resides in the impossibility to make something beautiful by pretending that it is beautiful, or to make something morally good by pretending that it is so. The universalism both of them undertake is not a historical-sociological thesis on taste, but the indication of the a priori conditions of how moral and aesthetic standards should look like, regardless of the possible variety of socio-cultural criteria.

Schiller's theory on the aesthetic education has an underlying theory of knowledge. Beyond its specific character this epistemology is of Kantian inspiration. Its Kantian background consists of the general assumption that knowledge has a double structure: it has a conceptual and of a sensual part. Schiller's letters on the aesthetic education follow this view of the nature of knowledge even in the stylistic form of the elaboration itself. Accordingly Schiller alternatively applies both, a theoretical and an allusive - poetical way of expressing his own ideas. The form of the Aesthetic Letters and its content do in this way reproduce precisely the relationship between form and content which persists as a leading problem of the work itself. In his theory Schiller relies on a particular aspect of the overall Kantian philosophical framework, namely on the idea that neither experience nor reason are alone sufficient to provide knowledge, because reason alone is only form, and experience alone is only content. Further contrary to Kant Schiller believes that it is not, understanding but reason that plays its constitutive role in the act of judging objects as beautiful. The element, which underlies both the structure of the Aesthetic Letters and its philosophical content, is the assumption of this duality of knowledge as such. His thesis on education also harmonizes with this underlying epistemology. This relationship between a particular epistemological standpoint and a conception of education related to it, is explicitly illustrated in the following passage from the notes Schiller had made in his own copy of the third Critique: “Es gibt also für die schöne Kunst nur eine Manier (modus), nicht Lehrart (methodus). Der Meister muß es vormachen, was und wie es der Schüler zustandebringen soll; und die allgemeinen Regeln, darunter er zuletzt sein Verfahren bringt, können eher dazu dienen, die Hauptmomente gelegentlich in Erinnerung zu bringen, als sie ihm vorzuschreiben.” The distinction made between “Manier” and “Lehrart” shows the indicative character of the “art of teaching art”. The knowledge to produce art cannot emerge from a doctrine. The demonstrative character of teaching demands the ability of the flexible application of examples which cannot indoctrinate the right way of carrying out but it can show instances of properly made pieces.

3. The Continuation of Kant’s Conception of Freedom in Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters
Concerning the intersecting position freedom occupies between Kant’s moral and aesthetic theory Hegel claims that if in its contribution to moral refinement aesthetic phenomena itself would not maintain its independent stance then aesthetics itself as a separate field of research would not be possible. Accordingly the doctrine of the independence of aesthetic phenomena is the primary condition for aesthetics as a distinct field of research. Hegel considers that Kant was the first thinker who systematically paied attention to the necessity of freedom in aesthetic phenomena. This argument is similar to Schiller’s who claimed that it is exactly its genuine free character that makes possible for aesthetic phenomena to play a refining role for morality. According to Hegel the matter of the freedom of aesthetic phenomena had appeared more consequently in Schiller’s works, including his poetry than in Kant. More precisely Hegel considers that Kant’s fundamental innovation in the topic, namely the reconciliation of the sensual and the intellectual dimension of man is better elaborated by Schiller. Hegel blames Kant with subjectivism, and claims that Schiller had better expressed the idea of the totality of the beautiful; he did that not just as a thinker, but also as an artist. Schiller worked out the concept of education as the means of intermediation between the generality of reason on the one hand and the diversity of the phenomenon of the specific in nature on the other hand. Contrary to Kant who does not objectify the beautiful, Schiller asserts that the beautiful is the unity of reason and sensuality. Hegel claims that Schiller’s solution is related to the idea that man’s individuality is either dissolved in the generality of the state, or it is elevated to that generality man can only partake in the idea of humanity. By reconciling reason and sensuality in the beautiful, Schiller also reconciles the particularity of the individual on the one hand and the generality of the state on the other, and expresses that the beautiful, as the reconciliation of these two is, in fact the true reality itself.

According to Schiller it is taste, through which the anthropological uniformity of imagination becomes the socially shared experience of freedom. Relying on the main lines of Kant’s elaboration regarding the general conditions of taste Schiller arrives to the vision of a social state within the positive state, which is the aesthetic state: the state of the third character. The thesis which survives in Schiller's letters on the aesthetic education toward the good - the thesis which remains defendable for moral- and political theory is that he places the intersecting element between the aesthetically beautiful, the morally good and the politically right in the Kantian idea of freedom as self-determination. Hence Schiller’s reliance on Kant’s idea of autonomy broadly understood.
	Guyer considers that contrary to Kant, who in paragraph 60, by claiming that „the art of reciprocal communication of ideas between the more cultured and ruder sections of the community”, a medium between „higher culture and the modest worth of nature” comes up with a modest assessment of the actual political potential of aesthetics, Schiller is much more generous in his conclusions on the relevance of aesthetics for politics, already in the Kallias Letters, and in the Aesthetic Letters he develops the political dimension of the entire topic even further. Guyer highlights that by rejecting Plato, Schiller establishes a link between the harmony of human soul and the harmony of the social order which consists of harmonious individuals. He recalls the passage from the Twenty-Second Letter namely, that „the aesthetic state (is) the most fruitful of all in respect of knowledge and morality.” Guyer claims that the cooperation between the sensual and the intellectual dimensions of man can be learned from aesthetic experiences and this process of refinement can bring man even closer to the cooperation between morality and politics. And in the same letter the following passage further confirms his hypothesis: „Every other state into which we can enter refers us back to a preceding one, and requires for its termination a subsequent one; the aesthetic alone is a whole in itself, since it comprises within itself all the conditions of both its origin and continuance.” As Guyer shows Schiller appropriates Kant's aesthetics through the idea of disinterestedness, more precisely, by following the very meaning of the interest in disinterest: the aesthetic interest in freely serving the interest of morality: the interest of reason to appear in the sensual realm.
	The relationship between the aesthetic experience and morality is dominated by the primacy of practical reason, called by Guyer as "the view of all sources of value". The aesthetic experience manifests what Kant tells us in paragraph 52 namely, that only moral ideas can "bring a self-sufficient delight" with them. In that paragraph we obtain two different meanings of "delight". Kant both applies the metaphorical meaning of delight as referring to some sought of pleasure in our aknowledgeing the idea of reason of the moral law, and he also applies its non-metaphorical meaning, which refers to the sensual representation of the idea of reason. In aesthetic contemplation we experience freedom which otherwise can only be thought by practical reason and embodied in moral acts. Hence the idea of aesthetic experience as the symbol of morality in the reconstruction from above. And hence the problematic element in Kant's arguing we identified namely, that the idea of the sensual representation of morality does not exclude the possibility, that any kind of aesthetic experience could symbolize any kind of morality – consequently the idea of this very analogy is loose. Guyer observes however that whereas for Kant this analogy is an indirect one, for Schiller it is seen as direct.
	The concept of disinterestedness leads Schiller on his way further toward linking aesthetics, morality and politics on Kantian grounds: the further Kantian concept which also belongs to the family of concepts related to freedom, and which he directly explores in his political theory is self-determination. The notes Schiller wrote on his own copy of the third Critique show, that by trying to familiarize himself with Kant’s work, he had observed the conception of freedom which is implicit in Kant’s volume. In the note in which he refers to the matter of freedom, he acknowledges the significance of inclination in Kant’s conception of freedom, with special regard to its relationship with “Lust”: “Ein Gegenstand der Neigung, und einer, welcher durch ein Vernunftgesetz zum Begehren auferlegt wird, lassen uns keine Freiheit, uns selbst irgend woraus einen Gegenstand der Lust zu machen.” The passage shows that Schiller had acknowledged the un-free character of the state of mind determined by both sensual impulses like inclination, as well as by the law-giving power of reason. If one relies on this particular passage only, it looks like Schiller does not distinguish between “laws of reason” and “laws of understanding.” He seems like taking together everything from Kant which concerns the intellectual dimension in general – and which is in the meantime all what Schiller sees to be in conformity to his criticism of Kant as not being enough open to consider the positive role of the senses in our moral life. But given that understanding creates concepts and reason creates ideas, and given that Kant links aesthetic phenomena to reason by claiming that art is capable to represent ideas, reason and understanding are supposed to be treated differently. Moreover for Kant freedom is inconceivable without reason. Freedom is an idea of reason and only reason is able to set final goals. Contrary to this Schiller adheres to some general Enlightenment-reception of reason as the capacity to liberate, but with his consequent rejection of anything which arrests the freedom of the sensual drive in man, he is, in fact critical against reason - or at least he is not uncritically following the Kantian meaning of reason. Although Schiller seems to be aware of the distinction between understanding and reason, in his own way of following Kant, he reduces the Kantian construction roughly to an intellectualizing part of the overall Kantian approach on the one hand and to a theory of sensuality and aesthetic pleasure which could be turned into a less rigid theory which links aesthetics and morality, on the other hand. However this narrowing way to consider the Kantian vocabulary did not stop Schiller to grasp the relationship Kant identifies between concepts and the freedom of imagination in the acts of aesthetic judgment: “Die Freiheit der Einbildungskraft besteht darin, daß sie ‘ohne Begriff schematisiert.’ At this point Schiller acknowledges not only the meaning of conceptuality and schematizing in the acts of imagination, but he also remarks the relationship between imagination understood in this way, and freedom. Further, inclined to consider Kant’s philosophy in its spirit rather than accurately following its details, he grasped and joined the epistemological unity of the general Kantian world-view which embraces thinking, acting and judging at once. The following passage confirms that Schiller had recognized the epistemological rooting of Kant’s conception of freedom in moral and aesthetic theory: “Die Bedingungen der freien ästhetischen Lust sind gleich den allgemeinen Bedingungen der Erkenntnis überhaupt.”
	All these passages demonstrate Schiller’s affinity to the relationship between freedom and the aesthetic phenomena as put forward in the third Critique. But these passages (especially the first two) also reveal that Schiller’s way to follow Kant was un-systematic and un-consequent. The task of the researcher is to attempt to follow the “fate” of the different ideas in Kant from their initial context to the specific mode of how Schiller applies them. In this respect it is important to turn our attention toward paragraph 59 of the third Critique. 
	The matter of the sensual representation of ideas as put forward in paragraph 59 was identified by Gadamer as an obvious inspiration for Schiller in conceiving his letters on the aesthetic education of mankind. By reading his notes in his personal copy of Kant’s volume, one can observe even without Gadamer’s contention, that Schiller had explicitely came across this matter: “(…) und geben eine ästhetische Idee, die jene Vernunftidee statt logischer Darstellung dient, eigentlich aber, um das Gemüt zu beleben, indem sie ihm die Aussicht in ein unabsehliches Feld verwandter Vorstellungen eröffnet.” Gadamer claims that in the Aesthetic Letters Schiller relied on the interpretation of symbols as described by Kant in paragraph 59 of the third Critique. Accordingly Schiller’s inspiration for his idea that education for morality through taste is possible was in fact gained from paragraph 59 itself, namely from the implication of Kant’s considerations on the sensual representation of ideas in art, that taste is a means to establish connection between the supra-sensual, ideal realm and the sensual realm. Gadamer refers to the following passage from paragraph 59: „Taste makes, as it were, the transition from the charm of sense to habitual moral interest possible without too violent a leap (…)” Gadamer considers that a new understanding of what symbol is appears first in the correspondence between Goethe and Schiller. In the letter to Schiller, on the 17th of April, 1797, telling about his time spent in Frankfurt offers a symbolic significance to the reality he has experienced there. He talks about objects which are representative examples in their standing for other objects, and as such, their embraceing a totality. Schiller accepts this stance in general, but he rejects it partly, because he does not accept the symbolic grasping of reality. Therefore he moves the meaning of symbol towards the aesthetic phenomena.
	Schiller appropriates Kant's idea of aesthetic experience as the symbol of morality through the element shared by both areas, which they obtain from the primacy of practical reason: freedom. By defining the beautiful as freedom in the appearance Schiller clearly commits himself to Kant's aesthetic epistemology. Gadamer states however that Schiller diverges from Kant in undertaking a “realistic” stance instead of Kant’s “nominalism”. Accordingly whereas Kant describes the mental functioning of taste, Schiller focuses on the genuine independence of aesthetic phenomena - of the artistic performance as such - turning in this way Kant’s basically methodological approach into substantive one.
	In the eighteenth century there were two major currents in aesthetic theory: the sensualists, like Hume, Home and Burke, who claimed that the work of art causes certain sensual impressions, and the rationalists, like Baumgarten, Mendelssohn and Moritz, who claimed that the beautiful is the final realization (Vollkommenheit) of something. Schiller rejected both currents (and Kant also did). Besides his rejecting these currents, according to certain interpretations Schiller was, to a certain extent also influenced by the British aesthetics of the eighteenth century. Witte discovers in this respect Shaftesbury’s influence on Schiller’s way to reject Kant’s aesthetic world-view, by undertaking an anthropology, in which the spiritual and physical, intellectual and sentimental - briefly the opposed aspects of the dual nature of humankind are supposed to work together in a joint harmony, rather than in Kant’s anthropology, in which these are isolated from each other.
	Schiller has to be seen as an “objectivist” in the sense that he understood the beautiful as freedom in the appearance which always appears as objectified, as embodied in something. It is in this respect that contrary to Kant’s understanding play for Schiller does not refer to the mechanism of judging, but to the significance of art in the process of the realization of mankind. Georg Lukács considers that Schiller develops Kant’s subjective idealism into objective idealism, and that in this respect, Schiller was a forerunner of Hegel. In his early writings, as in the Kallias Briefe the objectifying perspective for Schiller is that it is not the world which is reflected in art, but it is the self which is reflected in the world: in the leading role of imagination (as phantasy) the borderline between the self and the world is blurred. This antropo-centric standpoint clearly survives in the Aesthetic Letters. In this respect Wolfgang Düsing’s observation about the Kallias Briefe is salient, because it highlights how Schiller expresses aesthetic form, not just as a form of the object, but also as a projection of subjectivity. Hence Schiller’s symbolic understanding of the idea of autonomy - that of freedom. In the concept of Selbstbestimmung the aesthetic object and the aesthetic subjectivity, merge. The experience of the aesthetic object appears as analogical to the experience of freedom.

As mentioned elsewhere the way Schiller follows Kant is rather un-systematic and it even runs into contradictions. This is the main reason why Schiller’s Kant-reception has to be considered from the perspective of the overall impact Kant had imprinted in Schiller’s thoughts. This assumption demands a holistic strategy of interpretation, with the hope that such a way of reconstruction enables us to place the random elements of Schiller’s Kant-reception into some coherent whole. Given the focus of the present work on the Aesthetic Letters, the above strategy of reconstruction must be applied within the Aesthetic Letters as well as by bringing into discussion thoughts of a Kantian inspiration from other works of Schiller too. Probably the most important notions of which utilization by Schiller reveals both the above mentioned lack of systematicity and an important clue for the differences between them are the notions of the beautiful and the sublime.
	The definition of the beautiful as freedom in the appearance formulated in the Kalliasbriefe remains the same in the Aesthetic Letters too, but Schiller never really distinguishes between the sublime and the beautiful. Moreover the difference between the two notions with regard to their relationship to morality as explained by Kant disappears in Schiller. Whereas Kant asserts about the experience of the sublime that “zum Moralischen ähnlich ist”, Schiller does not highlight any such difference. Kant claims that given that Sittlichkeit does not manifest free play in its functioning, but on the contrary it exemplifies the subjection of the senses to reason, it is not the beautiful, but the sublime that carries Sittlichkeit. As a matter of fact by avoiding to, engage into these Kantian distinctions Schiller remains consequent to his different view about nature as well as to the relationship between nature and morality as he sees it in the Aesthetic Letters too. His rejection of Kant’s exclusion of the senses from morality inevitably re-organizes the relationship of the beautiful and the sublime to morality. Wolfgang Düsing considers that the understanding of the beautiful and the sublime which Kant and Schiller share is the relatedness of these two notions to the awareness of freedom. The relationship between reason and understanding with regard to the sublime gains final clarification in the Aesthetic Letters, where we learn, that they contribute to the realization of freedom of the gemischten Natur (mixed nature) in the aesthetic experience. Schiller’s anthropological model (especially in the Seventh Letter) is an aesthetic attempt relying on Kant, to rescue the unity of the disintegrated man, by demonstrating that this unity - which harmonically embraces both our sensual and intellectual nature – can only be realized through art (or more precisely through the entire aesthetic phenomena).
	Gemischten Natur is a notion which covers more than what we obtain from it for the clarification of the relationship between understanding and reason with regard to the sublime. The notion discloses Schiller’s teleological world-view which is both similar to and different from Kant’s teleology. What links them is the general confidence in the progression of mankind from nature to culture, from the individual natural man, to the citizen, who is the member of an ethical community. In this respect – besides Schiller’s clear commitment to follow Kant’s ideas on the relationship between aesthetic and moral refinement, the similarity between their responses to the underlying matter of human progression is in essence, no different from a particular mood of their century. However the differences between Kant and Schiller in this respect are no less significant than the similarities. The idea of human progression appears in case of both authors in their shared context of the aesthetic refinement. In case of Kant this matter possesses also the broader aspect of teleology. The essential difference is that whereas for Kant the goal of history is the final development of a “Bürgergesselschaft”, understood as the outcome of the antagonism of forces, the definitive impact of art and science, for Schiller human progression in history only targets cultural development, the realization of the aesthetic state. Whereas for Kant the progression of mankind occurs under the supervision of reason, for Schiller the endpoint of this development is the realization of the aesthetic subjectivity, of which basic model is the autonomy of the artist. As Feger considers, with his definition of the beautiful as freedom in the appearance Schiller counterbalances the negative projections of imagination which recall fear, with the creative potential of imagination. Hence Feger’s idea that Schiller anthropologizes Kant’s notion of imagination. The anthropologizing element Feger identifies in case of the notion of imagination is valid for the entire Aesthetic Letters. The way in which Schiller utilizes Kant’s conceptual world is a more direct application of Kant’s considerations for social and anthropological thought than Kant had carried out – a tendency which is gained at the expense of a less rigorous reliance on Kant’s fundamentally epistemological/transcendental approach. With regard to the idea of freedom the most significant difference between Kant and Schiller is, that whereas for Kant the notion of freedom itself is an idea of reason, for Schiller freedom is not related to reason in any way, not even in the sense of being thought by reason. Moreover for Schiller reason is not sufficient for freedom – an idea, which doesn’t fit at all Kant’s conceptual construction. Hence Schiller’s notion of gemischten Natur, which hints at his anthropology of a synthetically understood mankind.
	As Ostermann argues in his pursuit to reconcile history and morality Schiller demonstrates his independence in responding to certain problems raised by Kant. There are also other respects in which Schiller follows Kant offering at the same time an independent reading and continuation of some of Kant’s approaches. As a matter of fact Schiller’s rejection of Kant’s position to exclude sensuality from morality can also be seen as part of Schiller’s attempt to reconcile history and morality, since history is part of the sensual realm - for both authors.
	A fundamental criticism Schiller poses to Kant shows the difference between their conceptions of freedom. This can be found in Schiller’s charge that Kant excludes sensuality from morality. This is indeed opposed to Schiller’s anthropological world-view – his idea of the harmonious man, and as such, it runs against his conception of freedom too. Hence the distinction made between two kinds of nature in the Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung: the first one, which is the topic of naive poetry the unity between man and nature is still original, and the second one, which is the topic of sentimental poetry this unity is re-gained, but already within the conditions of the developed freedom, in the state in which man has already been freed from the originally understood nature – an anthropological stance which led Schiller to a theoretical viewpoint on poetry and gave birth to one of the polemics between him and Goethe. 

The idea that the aesthetic and the moral realms can be seen as parallel already appears in the First Letter: "I shall be treating of a subject which has a direct connection with all that is best in human happiness, and no very distant connection with what is noblest in our moral nature. I shall be pleading the cause of Beauty (…)." At this point the moral and the beautiful are defined as not far from each other. The next passage tells us something else about their relationship. "What was asserted above of moral experience, must hold even more of the phenomenon we call Beauty." Here the relationship is taken further and is obviously seen to be a closer one as in the first passage. Whereas in the first passage Schiller talks about the moral and the beautiful as not very far from each other, in the second one we can read, that what is valid for one of them is valid for the other one too. But what does Schiller define as being not only true for the moral, but also for the beautiful? Another passage from the same letter offers an explanation.

"Concerning those ideas which prevail in the Practical part of the Kantian system only the philosophers are at variance; the rest of mankind, I believe I can show, have always been agreed. Once divested of their technical form, they stand revealed as the immemorial pronouncements of Common Reason, and as data of that moral instinct which Nature in her wisdom appointed Man's guardian until, through the enlightenment of his understanding, he should have arrived at years of discretion. But it is precisely this technical form, whereby truth is made manifest to the intellect, which veils it again from our feeling. For alas! Intellect must first destroy the object of Inner Sense if it would make it its own. Like the analytical chemist, the philosopher can only discover how things are combined by analysing them only lay bare the workings of spontaneous Nature by subjecting them to the torment of his own techniques."

	Wilkinson and Willoughby interpret “immemorial pronouncements” (“verjährter Aussprüche”), as the contrast between the technical and non-technical modes of utterance in which the concept of the technical refers to what Kant says namely, that his philosophy had expressed something technically which had already been expressed from time immemorial in the language of conscience and common sense. By "the working of spontaneous Nature" ("das Werk der freiwilligen Natur") Schiller understood the spontaneous functioning of moral conduct, which the philosopher reconstructs, by analytically de-composing it from its natural form of appearance in a similar way as the chemist does. Further "until, through the Enlightenment of his understanding" ("bis die helle Einsicht ihn mündig macht") is meant to refer to the Kantian idea of man's emergence from tutelage which resulted the state of Mündigkeit. "For alas! Intellect must first destroy the object of Inner Sense if it would make it its own." ("denn leider muss der Verstand das Objekt des innern Sinns, erst zerstören") is taken in their commentary as Schiller's expression of his "ambivalent attitude to the 'destructive' procedures of the analytical understanding". The sentence from the Letter VIII subscribes to the same program: “It is not, then enough to say that all enlightenment of the understanding is worthy of respect only inasmuch as it reacts upon character. To a certain extent it also proceeds from character, since the way to the head must be opened through the heart. The development of man’s capacity for feeling is, therefore, the more urgent need of our age, not merely because it can be a means of making better insights effective for living, but precisely because it provides the impulse for bettering our insights.” The task is therefore not education for conceptual thinking, but education for the aesthetic sense.
	Kant’s Enlightenment is the development of the intellect, Schiller’s Enlightenment is the development of the sentiments - as we read in the Sixth Letter about the fall of man in the modern age into a fragmentary existence of his genuine potentials: “That polypoid character of the Greek States, in which every individual enjoyed an independent existence but could, when need arose, grow into the whole organism, now made way for an ingenious clock-work, in which out of the piecing together of innumerable parts, a mechanical kind of collective life ensued. State and Church, laws and customs, were now torn asunder; enjoyment was divorced from labour, the means from the end, the effort from the reward.” Schiller’s ideal of the realization of the harmony of the sensual and the intellectual drives in man appears in various ways throughout the letters and is permanently linked to a certain holistic mode of expression. With regard to the ideal of the harmony of the total, perfectly realized man - the free man, whose liberation can only be achieved through beauty, the remote inspirations are to be found in Schiller’s classicist inspiration. The Sixth Letter offers a broader horizon within which harmony is meaningful in Schiller’s terminology. He reports at this point to the fall of modern man whose life is fragmented compared to Greek man, who “enjoyed an independent existence but could, when need arose, grow into the whole organism”.
“(…) man himself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel that turns, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon his own nature, he becomes nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or of his specialized knowledge.”
	The passage could have been written in the twentieth century, and the author could be either Adorno and Horkheimer, with their idea on the fall of rationalism into irrationality, or Habermas who following the same path identified the myth of reason in the scientism and technicism of late modernity, but also by Heidegger who elaborates the distinction between “what is the man” and “who is the man”, respectively by anyone among those who came up with some later version of the problem of alienation, the decline of man within the conditions of the division of labor, the fall of classical culture, the atomization of the individual in modern society. Ortega and Spencer could also be mentioned in the context of this cultural mood. Schiller explicitly mentions alienation in the same latter: “the State remains for ever a stranger to its citizens since at no point does it ever make contact with their feeling”. The idea shared by these authors – of rather different intellectual roots - is the fall of the western civilization. Schiller appears at this point as a forerunner of these authors insofar as the empirical terrain of the disharmony between the sensual and the intellectual drives he talks about is the emerging modern society he witnesses. In the above quoted letter he consciously refers to civilization as the fragmenting factor of human essence – something, which according to him - can only be regained in civilization: “This disorganization, which was first started within man by civilization and learning, was made complete and universal by the new spirit of government.” The government Schiller talks about is the modern government which is not the same as the government of the state he envisions, and of which best historical instance is seen by him to be the Greek political model.
	The most striking element which turns the longer quoted passage as if it was written at least one century later is the metaphor of the wheel of which monotonic noise infringes the expression of human harmony. The true “Schillerian” part of the passage is the closing idea that the failed realization of harmony is in fact the failure of the individual representation of the entire humanity. Schiller’s early diagnosis of the divided self shows the difference and the confrontation between the model of society as a whole which transforms the individual into a mere part of its mechanism and the model of humanity as another whole – the true one – which is reflected in every single free individual. Schiller’s holism is not a social one, but one, which defines the realized individual man itself as an independent entity. Schiller’s aesthetically realized social model is the ideal of a world in which the collective and the individual levels are not seen as a power relation, but as two faces of the same general human wholeness.
Partly following Wilkinson and Willoughby's reconstruction from above, I interpret the previous passage from the First Letter as Schiller's implicit criticism of Kant's philosophy and also of the Enlightenment, as the philosophical attitude which is able to de-compose, but is not able to re-compose the elements of the spontaneous manifestations of morality again. Hence Schiller's more explicitly made criticism of what he calls analytical. Accordingly the analytical is supposed to be the way of doing philosophy by detaching the constituting elements of an object under scrutiny from each other - and from the whole as such - but not being able to see them together in the whole they belong to. Düsing considers that the idea of Selbstbestimmung always appears in Schiller in the context of the resolution of contradicting forces (Düsing mentions nature and technique as an example). He claims that the Kantian idea of Selbstbestimmung is a crucial notion for Schiller.
In the present context the key concept from this passage is Common Reason (gemeine Vernunft). Wilkinson and Willoughby understand common sense as a synonime to Gemeinsinn, which they interpret as having the following meanings: 1. "the faculty of primary truth" as the predominant sense, the common bond of the five senses, which as separated from each other cannot grasp the truth; 2. as Gemeingut, or common good in the Lockeian sense, possessing the connotations of accumulated common experience and collective wisdom, as healthy human understanding (Gesunder Menschenverstand) in the educational sense of the Enlightenment of a philosophical knowledge, democratically accessible to all, and finally as common intellect (gemeine Vernunft) equated by Schiller with moral instinct (moralischer Instinkt) as opposed to the technicalities of ethics referring to the organ of primary moral truth - the ethical counterpart to Gemeinsinn.
Finally I consider, that what Schiller takes in the First Letter to be equally valid for morality and aesthetics is a kind of holism and as such, it can be summarized as follows: we perceive (more precisely we live) both of them as wholes, which we first have to analytically de-compose in order to grasp them, but we can only really grasp them if we replace these parts into the wholeness of their appearance. It seems that what Schiller considers to be equally characteristic for good and for beautiful is that both of them consist of a formal (organizing) and of a non-formal (dispersed, sensual) part. He criticizes the attitude of the philosopher who can only see just one of these two constituting features. This interpretation can directly lead us to his overall understanding of the aesthetic realm as the middle-way (mittlere Zustand) between what is formally structured and what is not. The regulative model of this conception seems to be the Kantian description of the aesthetic experience as the free play between understanding and imagination. Schiller further confirms this fact as the underlying model, not only for beautiful things, but also for good things. It seems that this is his consideration behind the parallel between good and beautiful, and which is finally developed in the central idea of the Aesthetic Letters, namely in the idea of the aesthetic state, as the middle-way (middle state) between the pre-rational sensuality and the purely rational intellectuality. In this context the meaning of the word state obviously fits the interpretation of Wilkinson and Willoughby namely, that the aesthetic state is the modality of the entire psyche.
Schiller starts to relate the aesthetic, the moral, and the political realm to each other, in the Second Letter. However in this case the relationship is allusive rather than explicit. The oscillation between allusive and clear statements persists throughout the entire Aesthetic Letters. Therefore most of the statements can only be accurately reconstructed by showing, how they derive from both allusive and explicitly made elements. The (also allusive) introduction of the idea that the aesthetic, the moral, and the political realms are connected to each other by some shared meaning can be discerned from the following passage. "Is it not, to say the least, untimely to be casting around for a code of laws for the aesthetic world at a moment when the affairs of the moral offer interest of so much more urgent concern, and when the spirit of philosophical inquiry is being expressly challenged by present circumstances to concern itself with that most perfect of all the works to be achieved by the art of man: the construction of true political freedom?"
Although this passage does not explicitly highlight the relationship between the aesthetic, the moral, and the political realms, by raising all three within one single idea it is the first passage in the Aesthetic Letters, which is relevant for this relationship. It presents in a meaningful chain some of the key concepts of the whole work: perfection, work of art, freedom and finally the idea of the political as such. Without any further knowledge of the way, in which these concepts are linked to each other, as well as to other concepts throughout the Aesthetic Letters, certain implicit and explicit statements are already being made. Immediate implications are statements like "freedom is perfection", "work of art is perfection" and that "freedom occurs in work of art". What seems to me to be the most challenging implicit idea is, that the political community (of course only if it reaches the highest perfection of its freedom) as such is seen as work of art. This idea has a striking implication namely, that in some sense, the political community can be beautiful. But in which sense? What is the sense of the idea that a political community can be seen beautiful (or as a work of art anyway)? The quoted passage offers a first clue to answer this question. It reveals that Schiller sees works of art as perfect things and that a political community is closest to perfection, if it is really free. Thus it is freedom that links political community to the aesthetic realm. In the Twenty Second Letter we learn further characteristics of the relationship between work of art and freedom.
"Since in actuality no purely aesthetic effect is ever to be met with (for man can never escape his dependence upon conditioning forces), the excellence of a work of art can never consist in anything more than a high approximation to that ideal of aesthetic purity; and whatever the degree of freedom to which it may have been sublimated, we shall still leave it in a particular mood and with some definite bias." "Beauty however, is the only way that freedom has of making itself manifest, in appearance." "Beauty is, admittedly, the work of free contemplation, and with it we do indeed enter upon the world of ideas (…)" "Since, as I have argued in the preceding letters, it is the aesthetic mode of the psyche which first gives rise to freedom (…)" What is the joint meaning of these passages? The conviction, that the beautiful is the phenomenal (sensual) expression of freedom. Pure beauty can never be experienced therefore anything which we experience as beautiful is just an approximation to pure beauty. The first passages also claim that the everlasting approximation to pure beauty runs parallel to a similar approximation to the even higher degree of freedom. The passage, which defines beauty as the expression of freedom in the appearance, carries their parallel teleology further and states, that beauty is in fact freedom itself in its sensual expression. By pursuing pure beauty one pursues the highest possible expression of freedom too.
Going further it can be argued that it is the dual - conceptual and sensual nature of the beautiful together which makes possible the closest representation of something, which is only conceptual. But in these passages Schiller doesn’t offer any particular clue in this sense. What Schiller claims here is, that both the cognitive resource in the act of observing something, as beautiful, as well as what the beautiful object itself exemplifies or, embodies is freedom. Schiller clearly follows Kant’s idea that in the act of judging something as beautiful the experience of freedom occurs, and that the cognitive ground of this experience is the free play between understanding and imagination. The difference is of course that Kant would never say that the beautiful is actually embodied in something which belongs to the sensual world. First of all he always refers to the experience of the beautiful rather than to anything like its actual physical embodiment. Secondly he always keeps the relationship between the phenomenal and the noumenal apart from each other – the merge between them is always a subjective occurrence in the experience of the free play of imagination and understanding. Kant speaks from a semantic standpoint and undertakes an “as if” position. Schiller speaks from an objectifying standpoint and tends toward the historical concretization of a teleology which for Kant remains just a matter of hope.
A further element to the Schillerian picture of the constituents of freedom and its relationship to other notions can be learnt from the Twentieth Letter, in which we read a systematic definition of what aesthetic phenomena means:

"Our psyche passes, then, from sensation to thought via a middle disposition in which sense and reason are both active at the same time. Precisely for this reason, however, they cancel each other out as determining forces, and bring about a negation by means of an opposition. This middle disposition, in which the psyche is subject neither to physical nor to moral constraints, and yet is active in both these ways, pre-eminently deserves to be called a free disposition; and if we are to call the condition of sensous determination the physical, and the condition of rational determination the logical or moral, then we must call this condition of real and active determinability the aesthetic."

The formulation free disposition (freie Bestimmung) denotes the aesthetic moment as the moment in which it is freedom that functions the most, because it is the state, in which both the sensual and the intellectual parts are active, but none of them is more powerful than the other one. The core idea is of clear Kantian inspiration: the free play between sensuality and conceptuality. However it is also clear, that the Kantian establishment suffers certain modifications. Kant would have never said that the psyche passes in some way from the sensual to the conceptual. Further Kant did not claim that the aesthetic realm is situated "between" the sensual and the conceptual parts - although he sometimes seems to imply such a meaning of his words. Clearly, the only element which is entirely taken over from the Kantian understanding of the aesthetic phenomena is the idea of freedom, as a state, which occurs in the interaction between sensuality and conceptuality. Both the occurrence of freedom in the aesthetic realm, as well as its emergence from the interaction of the sensual and the conceptual parts is imported from Kant. However Kant is more precise and careful, in describing the emergence of freedom in this interaction as the free play between sensuality and conceptuality, and he is definitely not talking about anything like their mutually exclusive opposition. Schiller’s way of approaching this whole mechanism is rather metaphysical. Neither goes Kant that far, as to identify the conceptual with the moral and the sensual with the physical, and to claim in this way, that in the free disposition of the aesthetic state of mind, we are in fact situated between the moral and the physical realm.
As already mentioned Lutz claims that Schiller commits a major contradiction, by treating the aesthetic phenomena both as the means and the goal of education. It is also important to observe that Schiller is aware of this difficulty and he even offers a solution to it. In the Ninth Letter we read as follows: "But is this not, perhaps, to argue in a circle? Intellectual education is to bring about moral education, and yet moral education is to be the condition of intellectual education? All improvement in the political sphere is to proceed from ennobling of character - but how under the influence of a barbarous constitution is character ever to become ennobled? To this end we should, presumably, have to seek out some instrument not provided by the State, and to open up living springs which, whatever the political corruption, would remain clear and pure."
This passage addresses the paradox of the entire Aesthetic Letters namely, that the moral-aesthetical refinement of the political community presupposes an already existing moral-aesthetic quality, which enables to start the refinement itself. At this point Schiller realizes that his reasoning is both ontologically and sociologically unsustainable. The question is, whether he comes up with any defendable solution. What Schiller suggests in this respect is twofold. Firstly, he shyly mentions that it is the state from which we have to expect the solution. It is not clear however what exactly would the state offer in this respect. It looks like Schiller is thinking in terms of a self-correcting system of the state which can handle the vision of improvement in such a way that the contradiction in question can be practically overcome. Secondly, he comes up with the role of aesthetic phenomena, or more precisely with the role art is supposed to play. And at this point he is arguing more accurately and points to the final direction of the solution which would harmonize with his general idea of some aesthetic-moral- and political-/social model: In the Ninth Letter we read the following clues: "This instrument is Fine Art;" "Art, like Science, is absolved from all positive constraint and from all conventions introduced by man; both rejoice in absolute immunity from human arbitrariness. The political legislator may put their territory out of bounds; he cannot rule within it. He can proscribe the lover of truth; Truth itself, prevail. He can humilate the artist; but Art he cannot falsify." "But how is the artist to protect himself against the corruption of the age which besets him on all sides? By disdaining its opinion. Let him direct his gaze upwards, to the dignity of his calling and the universal Law, not downwards towards Fortune and the needs of daily life." "The pure moral impulse is directed towards the Absolute." "To the young friend of truth and beauty who would inquire of me (…)" "Impart to the world you would influence a Direction towards the good (…)""The seriousness of your principles will frighten them away, but in the play of your semblance they will be prepared to tolerate them; for their taste is purer than their heart, and it is here that you must lay hold of the timorous fugitive."
Obviously when he is talking about beauty and truth as only authentic if not instrumentalized politically, he highlights their essence as being fundamentally independent from external goals. Accordingly whereas art, similarly to science can be politically submerged (as an activity), it can only be institutionally distroyed, but never detached from its essential independence (from its philosophical nature). It is not necessary to think that with the idea of the independence of art and of the beautiful as such, Schiller necessarily commits himself to the Kantian idea of independent beauty. But it is clear, that the idea fits the general Kantian conception of the independence of the aesthetic value from non-aesthetic criteria. The above quotes powerfully describe the inherent independence of art from politics, but fall short to explain, how can art with its inherent independence enter into the political sphere in such a way, that it refines the political culture and the morals, without being corrupted by them. Schiller attempts to rescue the freedom of art by offering a model of the attitude the artist has to follow in order to keep himself away from the narrow-minded particularity of his historical age. But this cannot solve the underlying paradox to reconcile the freedom which occurs in the privacy of aesthetic enjoyment with its public role. Schiller’s initial intention is to show a way toward the resolution of the problem in the particular historical community – in the state and in the society. But by not finding a viable solution to overcome the contradiction he runs into, he recurs to rely on the psychological strategy of the individual artist to get rid of the oppression of the external conditions. This way however generates a further difficulty which can be summed up as follows: what Schiller addresses, but fails to define without contradiction is the public role of the aesthetic phenomena – more precisely of the production of art. He comes up with a speculative model which refers to the inherent freedom of artistic creation, and he also comes up with a good advise regarding, the moral/psychological stance the artist has to undertake. But none of these two answers resolve the problem he assigns to himself to resolve: how should art engage into the public realm, without being corrupted – how can art has an improving impact upon politics and the morals without loosing the freedom it needs for this improving impact itself? The inherent freedom of art as an answer does not solve the dilemma of the “ivory tower” namely, to survive a political dictatorship, but without being able to gain terrain for the involvement Schiller expects from art. The reason why Schiller fails to come up with a clear answer is due to the fact that he doesn't distinguish between art as a human activity and art as a mode of human existence.
The idea that "they (the people) will be prepared to tolerate them" (i. e. the principles of the artist), "for their taste is purer than their heart" – makes sense if placed into contexts of which meaning can be taken for granted in the overall context of the Aesthetic Letters. It would be entirely contradictory on Schiller's part to explain, how the political culture and the morals of a society can be improved, by claiming, that the principles designed for this refinement will be well-received, because people's taste is purer than their heart, from the outset. As already mentioned, Schiller oscillates between two approaches of taste, which sometimes even merge, a sociological and an anthropological/epistemological one. In the present context it is the sociological one which would lead to a contradiction. The idea that "their taste is purer than their heart" has to be interpreted along the epistemological approach. As we have seen, the epistemological approach of taste relies on the Kantian understanding of taste as rooted in the free play of the conceptual and the sensual dimension of aesthetic experience. By talking about taste as better than heart Schiller refers to the a priori potentiality of taste people have, which enable them to be open to the "Direction towards the good". Therefore the artist can rely upon this openness of the a priori of taste, when educating them. Thus Schiller remains committed in his own way to the Enlightenment (and Kantian) faith in progression warranted by the innate human potential for an always better state of affairs. In this logic the final chances of education for good and for beautiful rely upon the a priori givenness of human nature. The opposition between heart and taste fits this picture, as the opposition between the un-educated sentiment and the educated aesthetic-moral feeling. Both are natural, but the last one is already the refined, reflected nature embodied in taste, which is both genuine and open for further refinement.
The entire process of refinement contains a further puzzle, which endangers the conception of freedom of Kantian inspiration of the Aesthetic Letters: this is the problem of education as an act which presupposes the authority of some to educate others. Given that the process of refinement links taste and morality to each other as separate stages of both the individual and the collective human development, the question of who has the authority to educate others, affect both the aesthetic, the moral, and finally the political part of Schiller’s construction. It is not clear where can be found clues in the Aesthetic Letters to clarify the ontological or social authority through which the aesthetic and moral authority of some over others could gain justification. As we saw the possibility of education lies in the a priori givenness in human nature for beautiful and for good. This assumption can serve as a possible clue to solve the ambivalence of the commitment for freedom on the one hand and the un-reflected assumption of the un-equally distributed authority in society to educate on the other hand.
Although the general assumption of the Aesthetic Letters that humanity possesses an innate potential for individual and collective improvement in its historical existence it seems that the ambivalence in question belongs to the deeper one, that refinement can only be started from an already achieved level of refinement: the empirical/social possibility of the realization of that normative human potential remains unclear. All we obtain is the transcendental indication of the a priori chances of humanity to follow a certain direction, the puzzle of how to start remains in the fog of the social dimension of the whole approach, never discussed in concrete terms. Hence Schiller’s utopia as mainly a transcendental one built upon Kantian categories. But as a construction of Kantian inspiration it implicitly follows the question: wie ist es möglich überhaupt? Which means that he comes up with the transcendental conditions of the possibility of the moral-aesthetic development as such, rather than coming up with any concrete utopia.
In spite of this the transcendental temporality of human development is somehow connected by Schiller to historical time. Janke observes in this respect that in the Tenth Letter, Schiller establishes a relationship between time, the beautiful and man, to whom these two categories can exist at all. Janke claims that Schiller develops this relationship and the thoughts he derives from it upon the analytic of the beautiful and upon the deduction of the categories from Kant. He claims that without accurately following Kant’s argument to relate the beautiful to freedom, Schiller arrives to the idea (especially relying upon the formulation regarding the sole free pleasure - „einzige freie Wohlgefallen” - from paragraph 5) that Kant’s description of the experience of the beautiful refers to the single way for the human race to escape the burden of the temporality of its existence. According to Janke this is the thought that fuels the „aesthetic humanism” of the letters on the aesthetic education - the link, between the idea of the final realization of mankind and the Kantian concept of the beautiful.

It is useful to distinguish between the technical and the intellectual meanings of the word state as Schiller utilizes them. The first category fulfills an analytical function, the second one a normative function. In the first case Schiller refers to the actual etymology he offers to the term, in the second case he deals with the broader meaning of state, which embraces the political, the ethical and the psychological meanings the term acquires in the entire elaboration of the Aesthetic Letters. It is in this broader respect that state appears not only as Staat, but also as Zustand - state of affairs, as well as state of mind.
	The Aesthetic Letters postulate the aesthetic state (both in the broader, ideal meaning of the word and in the sense of actual political state) as a utopian state of human affairs. Contrary to this the ethical state refers to the yet un-completed stage of the development of refinement which gradually arrives to the final realization of the aesthetic state. In the Fourth Letter we learn that whereas “The setting up of  a moral State involves being able to count on the moral law as an effective force, and free will is thereby drawn into the realm of cause and effect, where everything follows from everything else in a chain of strict necessity (…)” ”because the State must be an organization formed by itself and for itself, it can only become a reality inasmuch as its parts have been tuned up to the idea of the whole.” This distinction raises the complexity of meanings Schiller attaches to the word state. Borchmeyer considers that although Schiller announces at the beginning some vision of the Vernunftstaat, in the end he seems to abandon it and to replace it with the aesthetic state, without clarifying the relationship between the two versions of the utopian plan.
	Karlheinz Barck observes that the utopia of the aesthetic state starts with Schiller who relies on Kant’s critique of judgment. Barck claims that the idea had remained present all during romanticism. He recalls Novalis on the topic, who asserts that the main idea of political romanticism was that the political state is supposed to be like a work of art. It is crucial to pay attention to the ambivalence of this leading metaphor. The requirement for works of art to be suitable to generate the experience of a purpose without purpose highlights the self-sufficient character of each piece of art: each artistic creation is a world in itself. The idea that the political community can form a perfectly harmonious state, which is similar to a work of art through all what works of art imply in the context of a given aesthetic world-view is a positive utopia, which turns features of harmony, like the balance between individuals and the community as the whole they compound, the free play of the parts and the whole into metaphors, including of course also the aesthetic idea of creation, of purpose without purpose. Schiller’s aesthetic-political landscape does not only import elements from Kant, but also from another way of modeling the world, which is closer to the Leibnizian inspiration of Karl Philip Moritz – an aesthetic monadology, which thinks in terms of parallel essences which participate in one major common essence. The attention Schiller pays to nations which are to be refined in sake of an even better participation in the common essence of humanity links him to pre-Kantian models which he combines with not just Kant’s model, but also with the philosophy of the Enlightenment as the most complete expression of the ideal of universal mankind in that age.
	However the holism this metaphorical description entails also implies the danger of sacrificing the “piece” – the individual person – to the whole of the political state. In this holistic logic the citizen is just a part of the political body which is to be seen as work of art and as such, the individual can only have the ontological role of being a mere detail. In this possible reading the individual ceases to appear as an end in itself. Therefore the metaphor of the work of art, as the image of the state carries the possibility of the symbolic representation of an order, of which parts are only significant as parts, not as wholes in themselves. This might look like the aestheticized description of an authoritarian state.
	But Schiller’s intentions were neither autoritarian nor communitarian of any kind. In the Fourth Letter, he makes clear that the individually human and the generally human must be united. The Tenth Letter also discloses a tension between the historical realization of the ideal of beauty and the ideal itself and proposes the identification of a rationally articulated ideal beauty. (The problem is of similar kind to Kant’s discovery of the contrast between the unfulfillment of the moral law in history and the purity of the moral law as an idea.) The passage is the following:

"(…) there are voices worthy of respect raised against the effects of beauty, and armed against it with formidable arguments drawn from experience. 'It cannot be denied', they say, 'that the delights of the Beautiful can, in the right hands, be made to serve laudable ends. But it is by no means contrary to its nature for it to have, in the wrong hands, quite the opposite effect, and to put its soulseducing power at the service of error and injustice.” “(…) it would first have to be established beyond all doubt that the beauty of which we are speaking, and the beauty against which those examples from history testify, are one and the same.” (…) “This pure rational concept of Beauty, if such could be found, would therefore - since it cannot be derived from any actual case, but rather itself corrects and regulates our judgment of every actual case - have to be discovered by a process of abstraction, and deduced from the sheer potentialities of our sensou-rational nature. In a single word, Beauty would have to be shown to be a necessary condition of Human Being"

The pursuit of an ideal beauty runs parallel to the pursuit of an ideal political state and of the ideal man: the link is the idea of aesthetic realization as a general teleological endpoint. The relationship between the individual and the state as explained in Letters IV – VI is a clear indication of this idea:

"Every individual human being, one may say, carries within him, potentially and prescriptively, an ideal man, the archetype of a human being, and it is his life's task to be, through all his changing manifestations, in harmony with the unchanging unity of his ideal.* This archetype, which is to be represented by the State, the objective and, as it were, a canonical form in which all the diversity of individual subjects strive to unite. One can, however, imagine two different ways in which man existing in time can coincide with man as Idea, and, in consequence, just as many ways in which the State can assert itself in individuals: either by the ideal man suppressing empirical man, and the State annulling individuals; or else by the individual himself becoming the State, and man in time being ennobled to the stature of man as Idea."

	The passage comprises major ideas of Schiller’s conception of political philosophy. The starting point is that there is a potential ideal man in every human being. Then he claims as a requirement that this ideal man has to be incorporated by the state. We also learn that the temporal coincidence between the historical (empirical) and the ideal man is possible, and this possibility can be actualized through the state. Schiller observes that the state can play this intermediating role between the empirical and the ideal man in two opposing ways: in a dictatorial form, by suppressing the individual man through the imposition of the ideal man, and by the other way round, in which it is the state that as the embodiment of human manifoldness constantly displays the human ideal and ennobles in this way the individual man. Given that it applies the symbolic example of the work of art to an idea of unity in which the superior status of the whole is not the external, uniforming constraint of the mechanical system of division of social roles, the aesthetic symbolism of Schiller’s political theory is not to be understood as a kvazi-organicist model but as the higher unity of humanity, which is higher but not above the individual level of distinctness and freedom. It is the mediating role the aesthetic state can play through which we can overcome the alienation of the state from the individual. Schiller makes clear in its present form the state is not ready to be such an embodiment of human essence – of “Gattung” – yet.
	Hegel considers that Schiller was Kant’s forrunner in recognizing and attempting to solve the problem of the tension between sensuality and the intellect in art. Schiller was proceeding both as an artist and as a philosopher in the realization of their unity. Schiller pointed out the relationship between the interest toward art and the relationship of this interest with philosophy itself. His starting point is that every single man possesses the capability of becoming an ideal man and it is this state which abstractly represents the unity of what appears in the diversity of the individuals. There are two distinct ways of how the temporal man can meet the ideal man: either through the integration of the individual into the moral, reasonable unity of the race (Gattung) as properly realized in the state, or through the upheavel of the individual to the race by which the individual becomes so refined as to merge with the ideal man. Now whereas reason demands unity as according to the race, nature demands diversity. It is aesthetic education that can mediate between these two realms, through the refinement of inclination, sensuality, instinct, and high spirit in such a way that they become altogether reasonable. Hence reason and freedom get rid of their abstractness and become united with the manifoldness found in nature. The outcome of this final unity is reality. It is the very ideal of this unity that later becomes in Schelling the principle of knowing and being.
	The Sixth Letter reveals that the paralell antinomies of the part and whole, the individual and the state, the ideal and the actual non-ideal manifestations of the beautiful join into a thesis of the immanence of the human material:

"When the artisan lays hands upon the formless mass in order to shape it to his ends, he has no scruple in doing it violence; for the natural material he is working merits no respect for itself, and his concern is not with the whole for the sake of the parts, but with the parts for the sake of the whole. When the artist lays hands upon the same mass, he has just as little scruple in doing it violence; but he avoids showing it. For the material he is handling he has not a whit more respect than has the artisan; but the eye which would seek to protect the freedom of the material he will endeavour to deceive by a show of yielding to this latter. With the pedagogic or the political artist things are very different indeed. For him Man is at once the material on which he works and the goal towards which he strives. In this case the end turns back upon itself and becomes identical with the medium; and it is only inasmuch as the whole serves the parts that the parts are in any way bound to submit to the whole. The statesman-artist must approach his material with a quite different kind of respect from that which the maker of Beauty feigns towards it. The consideration he must accord to its uniqueness and individuality is not merely subjective, and aimed at creating an illusion for the senses, but objective and directed to its innermost being."

	We can obtain an important testimony of the aesthetic priority of objectivity as opposed to what he calls subjective. But what are the underlying definitions of objectivity and subjectivity in this passage? The meanings are only indicated but in the context of the passage they play a meaningful role: it seems that the difference lies in the fact that the objectivity of “the uniqueness and individuality” which the “statesman-artist”, “the maker of the Beauty” has to place in the material – who is the Man himself – is something that this material already contains – it is its being and finality, its essence, and as such, it is a means for that end at the same time. Hence the material “the pedagogic or the political artist” works with is a material which “For him (…) is at once the material on which he works and the goal towards which he strives.” Two further formulations refer to this: “in the end turns back upon itself and becomes identical with the medium”, “the whole serves the parts that the parts are in any way bound to submit to the whole”. These are the features of the human material, which distinguish it from the non-human one. It is in this context that Schiller relates objectivity to the immanence of the object, to education and to the political work – the Man. The side opposed to this is the pure natural material, which in its initial form is only a means and it does not contain the end, which the maker also strives for. Thus it “merits no respect for itself and his concern is not with the whole for the sake of the parts, but with the parts for the sake of the whole”. As we saw the idea of this last key formulation re-appears in later letters like the sixth and ninth one which in some way or another all deal with the immanence of the human material. In both cases it is the human material that Schiller compares to the work of art: once the individual man and once the political body itself - by switching to political theorizing, Schiller does not cease to remain within an aesthetic approach.
	The holism of Schiller’s conception of education namely, the idea that education through the aesthetic experience enables the individual man to see the whole thing is to be understood as a model for social integration, characteristic for the eighteenth century. To observe the whole, by considering it from its parts prepares the individual for „Geselligkeit”, for the capability to live among people.”A further example of Schiller’s intentions is recalled by Dieter Borchmeyer, namely, that the danger of political utopias is that the historically real man is sacrificed for the temporal projection of the morally ideal man as the realization of some idyllic future. The utopia of the aesthetic ontology of politics was concieved by Schiller as the final collective realization of the moral-aesthetic refinement, which develops first of all in individuals. The harmony of political communities depends on the harmony of the individuals they live in them. In this respect Schiller follows his Kantian inspiration of considering freedom as an antropological givennes which develops from the individual to the collective level and announces that the collective freedom of the political entities itself would not be possible, if they would not be the realization of the joint effort of individuals who have already individually riched the stage of their own Mündigkeit – hence they are free.

A further element Kant and Schiller share in their linking freedom to aesthetics is the concept of play.
In paragraph 14 we read: “All form of objects of sense (both of external and also, mediately, of internal sense) is either figure or play. In the latter case it is either play of figures (in space: mimic and dance), or mere play of sensations (in time).” The passage reveals that for Kant the concept of play fulfills a well-defined function in his epistemology. From later passages it becomes clear, that sometimes he utilizes the word play also in a metaphorical sense. In paragraph 9 he claims the following about the relationship between play and freedom: “The cognitive powers brought into play by this representation are here engaged in a free play, since no definite concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition.” (…) “As the subjective universal communicability of the mode of representation in a judgment of taste is to subsist apart from the presupposition of any definite concept, it can be nothing else than the mental state present in the free play of imagination and understanding (so far as these are in mutual accord, as is requisite for cognition in general):” In paragraph 27, in the analytic of the sublime we learn the following about the same topic: “But the judgment itself all the while steadfastly preserves its aesthetic character, because it represents, without being grounded on any definite concept of the Object, merely the subjective play of the mental powers (imagination and reason) as harmonious by virtue of their very contrast.” Further in 22: “But where all that is intended is the maintenance of a free play of the powers of representation (subject, however, to the condition that there is to be nothing for understanding to take exception to), in ornamental gardens, in the decoration of rooms, in all kinds of furniture that shows good taste, &c., regularity in the shape of constraint is to be avoided as far as possible.” (…) “On the other hand, anything that gives the imagination scope for unstudied and final play is always fresh to us. We do not grow to hate the very sight of it.” In paragraph 29, comparing artistic beauty to natural beauty, he writes: “a feeling for the sublime in nature is hardly thinkable unless in association with an attitude of mind resembling the moral. And though, that feeling, the immediate pleasure in the beautiful in nature presupposes and cultivates a certain liberality of thought, i.e. makes our delight independent of any mere enjoyment of sense, still it represents freedom rather as in play than as exercising a law-ordained function, which is the genuine characteristic of human morality, where reason has to impose its dominion upon sensibility.”
Given that these passages contain fundamental elements of the entire construction of the third Critique, it is clear, that the function of play’s relatedness to freedom is a recurring aspect of the entire elaboration of Kant’s aesthetic theory. Winfried Sdun considers that it is paragraph 29, which explicitly asserts that freedom is a constitutive principle of play. Sdun further observes that the concept of play also appears in the context of illusion, that is to say, in a negative connotation - he quotes from paragraph 21: “a mere subjective play of the powers of representation.” Sdun identifies the one single place, where play is utilized in the sense of “as if” (als ob), which is  -  by the way - a recurring formulation in the third Critique concerning the representative functioning of judgments of taste.
All these passages reveal that the sense in which the concept of play and freedom are related to each other refers to the conceptually un-defined character of judgments of taste and to further characteristics of aesthetic phenomena like, purposefulness, disinterestedness, and communicability. This free play in turn, is also general and necessary, as put forward in the entire theory. Thus play and its relatedness to freedom is a fundamental element in the whole construction. Beyond its conceptual un-boundedness aesthetic phenomena possess specific rules, which – according to the essence of the whole theory – build up their inherent purposefulness which does not rely upon external purposes of usefulness, or upon various interests. Play in this respect appears as the embodiment of freedom indeed, which does not mean lack of any possible rules, but independence from “other” rules, than the ones which are unique in every single beautiful thing. By the occasion of play, with its special relatedness to freedom, this particular understanding of independence from rules on the one hand and the self-originating nature of the inherent rules of the play on the other hand exemplify Kant’s overall conception of freedom as Selbstbestimmung, freedom as autonomy. The imagination from which judgments of taste emerge is linked to a concrete structure of spatial form and one of perceptual form (Wahrnemung) as temporal succession. Hence the subjective universality of such judgments and hence their “schema without concept”. Whereas the schema establishes the objectivity of the object, “play” establishes its beauty.
	Sdun considers that it is play as a special form of freedom that leads Schiller to actually link it to his definition of the beautiful as freedom in the appearance. (Although we saw that according to Janke’s reconstruction Schiller’s definition suffered an important transformation between the Kallias Letters and the Aesthetic Letters, his theoretical struggle to link freedom and the beautiful in the matter of the realization of human nature had remained present.) Sdun highlights that by actually coming up with a definition of the beautiful Schiller objectifies the very relationship between freedom, play and the aesthetic phenomena which Kant had held in the subjective realm. In this respect the topic was reversed by Schiller. However with regard to the major goals of the entire Kantian approach on freedom and the aesthetic phenomena, as well as to their relationship with the moral human essence as Selbstbestimmung was well continued by Schiller - in a conceptually less rigorous elaboration however.	Janke works out convincingly how Schiller had relied on the related Kantian thoughts and highlights that Schiller had developed those thoughts into a picture in which play and art are understood as the embodiments of freedom, which is also described by Schiller as the sensual appearances of eternity. All these instances of the phenomenal expressions of eternity are at the same time instances of the manifestation of Selbstbestimmung: hence the human essence as found in play and art.
	With regard to the relationship between play and freedom the insights of György Mihály Vajda address a deeper level of this matter. First of all he makes a thoughtful remark concerning the relationship between Schiller’s aesthetically and politically understood notion of freedom. Accordingly the inner liberation of man precedes his political freedom. There is no artistic creation without freedom and artistic creation itself is an expression of our inner freedom. Schiller distinguishes between three phases of human existence: the natural man, the reasonable man and the intermediary aesthetical man, and relates a particular instinct to each one - the material instinct, the form instinct and finally the play, which is characteristic to the aesthetical man. And by taking the intermediary one as the true nature of man (hence the mittlere Zustand between the sensual and the reasonable realm) he comes to the definition of the real man as the man who plays. The instinct of play is the ground of art. And given the relatedness of play to freedom, through the act of playing, art makes man free. In order to make this freedom constant man himself, has to become a piece of art. The model of man is the perfect piece of art – hence Schiller’s classical inspiration in this line of thought. Finally in the Second Letter we learn that the most perfect creation of art is the real political freedom. Two further ideas are related to this one. Although the final outcome of human perfection is the development of the best political body that is to say, something which goes beyond the level of individual education for harmony, the final realization of human harmony is the harmonious collectivity. Witnessing the terror the French Revolution had degenerated into, Schiller believes that politics in itself falls short to bring up reasonable people; the means for this would be the aesthetic education.
According to György Mihály Vajda this internalization of freedom into the soul of the individual leads to give up the goal of the realization of external, politically achieved freedom. His conclusion however contradicts even his own reconstruction of Schiller’s aesthetic/moral conception of freedom, in which on the contrary he claims, that the collective harmony is only feasible if harmony exists on the individual level. Hence the un-hierarchical relationship Schiller sees between the individual man, the nation he belongs to and humanity in general: the essence of humanity – the harmony between the sensual and the intellectual drives – once achieved in an individual person or in case of a whole nation or in a political body is equally present on the individual as well on these higher collective levels. The human essence itself is omnipresent. In the context of Schiller’s thesis of the immanence of the human material we could see, that this is the reason why his apparent collectivism and nationalism is of either kind; he does not speak against the individual, but elevates him to the higher levels of his possible realization.

Although Schiller follows Kant’s thoughts regarding the role of taste and of aesthetic phenomena in general to refine morality and to lead in this way to the direction of a more civilized society, he never reaches the logical depth of Kant’s theory of taste. What he imports from Kant is the main idea of human development, which Schiller integrates into his own terminology, like third character or aesthetic state. By loosing sight however of certain logical aspects of Kant’s theory which are related to its underlying thesis on the freedom of taste, Schiller restricts his development of the idea of freedom supplied by Kant’s aesthetics, to the freedom inherent in the liberating potential of production, as well as of the consumption of art. If he would have reached the logical depths of Kant’s theory, he would have acknowledged, that what Kant thinks about taste is that although we can describe the rules of the functioning of judgments of taste, we cannot derive particular judgments of taste regarding particular objects; which means that we are not in possession of the laws of taste itself. Hence Kant’s formulation of “subjective necessity” which highlights the half-way trip we can make to the realm of taste. Whereas Schiller identifies freedom in the aesthetic phenomena, Kant’s notion of “subjective necessity” and the ambivalence of the validity of judgments of taste which follows from it testifies the presence of another meaning of freedom: the freedom for judging otherwise.

IV. KANT – SCHILLER – ARENDT: SHARED MATTERS

By considering the ways in which Schiller and Arendt had attempted to follow the possibility of a political philosophy in Kant’s aesthetics, one inevitably arrives to Kant’s theory of freedom as autonomy as the normative resource both authors share in their individual attempt to reconstruct the possibility of a political theory from Kant’s aesthetics. Kant, Schiller and Arendt all put forward a conception of freedom based along human development from the natural state, to some vision of the political state which is supposed to be at the same time the higher (possibly even the highest) moral realization of human life. It is in this triangle within which autonomy – more precisely the sense of autonomy as self-determination - gains the role of fundamental common principle.

The puzzle of Kant’s, Schiller’s and Arendt’s starting point is the matter of publicly shared judging. More precisely the dilemma of the possibility of the publicly shared individual judgments which despite their being publicly shared remain free and individual.
	As mentioned before it is crucial to highlight that by identifying the idea of autonomy as the fundamental source of the way in which both Schiller and Arendt reconstruct the hidden political philosophy in Kant’s aesthetics does not entirely cover Kant’s own terminological distinction between the notion of autonomy and the notion of heautonomy – the last one only applied for reflective judgments. The reason why one can afford to treat the concept of autonomy from a more general perspective (within the Kantian framework) is, that the notion of heautonomy itself is a derivation of Kant’s broader conception of what autonomy means. By applying the notion of heautonomy for reflective judgment Kant does not create a new conception of autonomy as such, but just a new link within the already elaborated broader one. As long as Schiller and Arendt had observed some common normative element shared by the aesthetic, the moral and the political phenomena at all, that was inspired by Kant’s idea of freedom as autonomy - as self-determination. This concept entails the possibility of a political philosophy in Kant’s aesthetics. A detailed reconstruction of this relationship demands the study of the overlaps and differences between the contexts in which the concept of freedom appears in the works under scrutiny.

1. Freedom as an Epistemological Gift
According to Henry E. Allison, Lewis White Beck and Ralf Meerbote share the strategy to consider the problem of freedom of the first Critique in light of the third Critique - as Allison formulates - "as a way of saving Kant from himself." Allison claims however that their strategy is misguided.
	Lewis White Beck distinguishes between five different senses in which Kant uses the concept of freedom: transcendental, empirical and moral freedom, spontaneously free action and finally freedom as a metholdological postulate. Beck claims that Kant's notion of transcendental freedom conflicts our intuitions regarding responsibility and agency as such. In this respect he recalls Kant's passage which states that voluntary actions are predetermined in the empirical character (Sinnesart). Beck raises the dilemma of how to reconcile the phenomenal determinacy of actions with their noumenal freedom (self-determination). Allison's account of transcendental idealism is the way to eliminate this difficulty. According to this solution the two different modes of describing the determinacy of an event or action are not to be viewed as a two-aspect problem, but as a two-reading problem. As Allison formulates we deal with a matter of both/or instead of dealing with a matter of either/or, as Beck sees it. Before presenting Allison's account of the relationship between freedom and the noumenal-phenomenal distinction in more details, an important element in Beck's approach deserves special attention.
	Beck argues that by 1790 Kant realized that the causal principle of the Second Analogy elaborated in the first Critique re-appears in the context of the Dialectic of Teleological Judgment from the third Critique as merely a regulative principle. Beck concludes from this, that the difference between the mechanistic and the teleological ways of causal explanation seen in this light, leads to the notion of freedom as a methodological postulate (one of the five meanings of freedom Beck distinguishes in Kant). Accordingly this results the resolution of the apparent conflict between freedom and causality by turning it into the difference between two ways of reading: firstly, freedom and causality can appear as explanatory frameworks; secondly, these two notions can refer to an ontological difference between the empirical and the intelligible character (Sinnesart, Denkungsart).
	Allison criticizes Beck's attempt to view the Third Antinomy of the first Critique from the perspective of the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment in the third Critique. Allisons' objection is that whereas the first one is a transcendental principle of the possibility of experience, the second one is a maxim of reflection, a mode of how one should explain experience. Transcendental freedom is defined in the Dialectic as "the power (Vermögen) of beginning a state spontaneously (von Selbst). Kant clarifies that although organic processes have to be considered (beurteilt) teologically rather than explained mechanistically, those processes remain subject to the Second Analogy, and the same is applied to free actions of moral agents. This objection is of course consistent with Allison's distinction between the two aspect - type of interpretation and the two readings - type of interpretation of the relationship between freedom and causality in Kant.
	The thesis of the Third Antinomy claims the existence of a non-mechanistic kind of causality, one, that emerges from spontaneity as transcendental freedom. The antinomy occurs because any set of conditions can be taken either as being determined by a first member which is itself not conditioned, or as infinite. Whereas the thesis recognizes the possibility of the causality of freedom, that is to say, of the possibility of a spontaneously working first element in a chain of causation, the anti-thesis denies this, and affirms that there can be no other element in a causal set of events, than the one according to the law of nature that always necessitates a previous element that causes the next one, therefore - although there must be a first event – that particular event cannot be a spontaneous one. As the thesis, the anti-thesis also accepts the requirement of a not yet acting cause, but it rejects the possibility of transcendental freedom. It excludes the possibility of spontaneity as a first event, which does not rely on a previous event which has caused it.
According to Allison a crucial feature of the anti-thesis is, that it rejects the possibility of transcendental freedom on the verificationist ground namely, on the ground that anything which is not an object of experience must be impossible. This is important with regard to the way in which Kant solves the Third Antinomy. Kant's solution relies on the non-sensible character of the first cause. Hence the possibility of transcendental freedom is solved along the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible character. The thesis states the necessity of the intelligible character of the first cause, whereas the anti-thesis denies its very possibility. But as Allison observes, the anti-thesis only rejects transcendental freedom as incompatible with experience. By solving the dogmatic nature of both sides, both the thesis and the anti-thesis can remain correct: the thesis affirms transcendental freedom as intelligible, as such, outside of experience, and the anti-thesis denies the possibility of transcendental freedom, but only within the limits of the sensible world, as a possible object of experience.
	According to Allison, however, two puzzles emerge. Firstly without a more throughout elaboration of Kant's overall position, it is not obvious, how does he conceive the intelligible character of reason as distinct from empirical character on the one hand, but still being in some kind of causal relationship with each other on the other hand. Secondly Kant insists on the presence of psychological determinism on the empirical level, but he denies the existence of psychological laws. Allison's solution to the second problem employes Kant's distinction between lawfulness in the regulative sense and lawfulness in the sense of the regularities of the possibility of experience accessible to scientific knowledge. As Allison notes lawfulness in its regulative sense is refered to by Kant in the Appendix to the Dialectic of the first Critique and in the Introduction to the third. Kant denies that we possess such a science of psychology, but he can still coherently sustain, that lawfulness in the regulative sense does indeed play the role of a determining effect in the empirical character - for instance, in the way in which desires and pleasures determine human action and lead in this way to a logical process in which – as Allison observes – beliefs appear as causes.

In the context of the topic of teleology we saw already, that Kant’s overall considerations on the concept of freedom cannot be separated from the process starting in the pre-critical period, which had gradually led him to the full elaboration of his conception of autonomy. The most considerable topic that precedes and prepares the relationship between moral and aesthetic phenomena is actually accomplished is the teleology of nature. This is the broadest topic that links the conception of moral and aesthetic normativity of the critical works to the pre-critical period. The more specific link is the matter of freedom. We learn from the first Critique that the two main topics of philosophy are nature and freedom. But given that Kant specifies that the final end in nature is freedom, freedom can probably be seen as the leading topic of Kant’s entire philosophy.
	Seen from the perspective of his entire critical philosophy Kant’s teleological considerations had already been carrying the highest stake he had ever been striving to resolve: the problem of freedom in the individual application of the categorical imperative. Again, Kant’s way of approaching addresses a topic first and foremost in its mere possibility – the possibility for the individual to be free, and in this way the possibility of freedom as such. Considered in retrospect the practical philosophy is deeply rooted in the much earlier elements of the whole critical construction.
In the Dialectic Kant defines practical freedom, as the "will's independence of coercion through sensuous impulses." He specifies the difference between the "pathologically affected" will on the one hand, which is informed by sensuous motives, and the "pathologically necessitated" will on the other, which is arbitrariness (Willkür). Kant specifies that whereas it is only in case of animals that the will is pathologically necessitated (arbitrium brutum) in case of humans we talk about arbitrium sensitivum, which is nonetheless free, in the solely human sense of the word. In the Canon Kant similarly distinguishes between arbitrium brutum and arbitrium liberum. The second one is meant to refer to determination through reason alone - which is practical freedom. These distinctions drawn in the Canon lead to a foundation of moral philosophy as built upon the teleology of world order on the one hand and upon the autonomy of ethics on the other. This turns out to be the goal of nature with reason, and this is the fact, which implies the categorical imperative. As a teleological being man’s calling is to set things as the targets of his own goal, and to form a community with the other men, in which ideally everybody can be the subject of every human goal. Accordingly so the argument in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals goes, the reason why man is a purpose in itself is that man is not a mere thing, but „the subject of ends.” This would be the sought of transcendental utopia of the realm of ends, in which the genuine teleology of world-order would be the principle of every human action and of every natural event too. This would be the shared field of nature and freedom, in which no particular abuse of every single thing of the world to fit the final purposefulness of the world would occur. The specific character of the human teleology appears primarily as a moral problem. We learn from the Critique of Practical Reason that the fact of man as a purpose in itself follows from his being the subject of the moral law. However at this point Kant does not rely on teleological considerations any longer. As Tengelyi argues man does not appear at this point, as a purpose in itself simply because he is able to set the ends, but because he has a moral character. Tengelyi claims that this modification of the moral essence of man runs parallel to the modifications in the meaning of the relationship between morality and freedom. Contrary to the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in which by moral action man only occupies the place set for him in nature, that is to say, in which the validity of the moral law is deduced from the fact of our freedom in the second Critique we learn, that man can only assign to himself a higher goal, through moral autonomy. In the second case moral law appears as an un-proveable gift, which cannot be deduced from anything. These modifications can be seen as outcomes of the clash between autonomy and the world order, between ethics and teleology, and they lead to the end of the collaboration between ethics and teleology in the foundation of morality. Given that Kant had conceived a system in which the law of nature and the moral law can finally be unified the theoretical goal to bridge the two major branches of philosophical inquiry was still to be fulfilled.
To solve the above challenge Kant returns to his initial solution to the resolution of the antinomies through the genuine purposefulness of reason. This strategy opens a new chapter for this pre-critical idea in the critical period and as such, it opens up the leading transcendental concern of the third Critique namely, to find the bridge between imagination and understanding. Although Kant discovered antinomy between nature and freedom, his definition of philosophy as teleologia rationis humanae that is to say as the science, which teaches us the organization of our entire stock of knowledge in the service of the purposeful end of our reason does, in fact bridge that antinomy. However the pre-critical element does not imply also a full return to the pre-critical approach. The difference is twofold: firstly for this time, Kant arrives to the idea of the order of the world as an outcome of reason; secondly Kant asserts at this point, that we only arrive to the transcendental teleology - that means, to the theory of world order - through moral teleology - through the practice of autonomy. The first difference - which is more of interest here - means that from the perspective of transcendental teleology the conditions of the purposeful use of reason are at the same time the conditions of the possibility of the existence of physical things. However since the order of the world refers to the subjective ordering of human knowledge rather, than to what is out there objectively, those „things” are not dinge an sich. This distinction prepares the perspective of the third Critique.
With regard to the dilemma which gave birth to the third Critique namely, to which extent could be the teleology of nature seen as a general model for moral teleology too, Höffe highlights that the human development from nature to morality and finally toward culture is organically placed within the entire system of teleology, and he especially refers in this respect to paragraphs 83 and 84 in which Kant, by the end of his elaboration of the teleological judging returns to morality as the final development of the entire teleological world order. But even though the teleologia rationis humanae – as we saw – bridges the gap between nature and freedom by showing the place for human autonomy within nature, it is still a question, whether the causal order of nature satisfies the purpose of morality. The problem of the disacrepancy between culture and morality is the line of thought along which Paul Ricouer engages into discussing the task of teleology.
Ricouer’s contribution to the understanding of Kant’s notion of teleology is the analysis of its overlaping meaning between Kant’s aesthetics, his philosophy of history and the implicit political thought this notion entails. It is in this last respect that Ricouer takes a look on Arendt’s incomplete interpretation of Kant’s aesthetics as an implicit political philosophy. Ricouer’s starting point is the relationship between aesthetic and historical teleology. Insofar as he claims that as a matter of fact Kant’s political philosophy is much more elaborated in his philosophy of history than anywhere else he brings into discussion the extension of Kant’s conception of teleology into the direction of a theory of political judgment as he calls it. In the end Ricouer comes up with an examination of Kant’s notion of teleology on three pillars: aesthetics, philosophy of history and political philosophy. Although he is very carefull regarding both Arendt’s interpretation of Kant, as well as regarding the actual potential of Kant’s aesthetics for political thought in this essay Ricouer identifies a few notions which by relying on this broader approach on teleology offer valuable clues on the continuation of Kant’s aesthetics into a Kantian political theory. The linking notions he identifies are the following: exemplarity of the particular, reflective judgment, disinterestedness and communicability.
Ricouer identifies the particular exemplarity as a link between aesthetic and political judgment: this is the target of sensus communis. In his explanation the retrospective nature of exemplarity gives a prophetic perspective to reflective judgment for aesthetics and hope in history. The reason for this is that exemplarity runs against natural finality. (The idea follows the same logic as Arendt’s „natality” – the capability to start something new. And both Arendt’s and Ricouer’s version go back to Kant’s explanation of a causal chain which is different from the physical one, and it is initiated by the freedom of Denkungsart.)  And although there seems to be a tension between the visionary stance of historical teleology and the retrospective stance of reflection in aesthetic judgment Ricouer claims that the solution lies in the hope of the particular example. This is the critical distancing inherent in reflective judgment. The lesson we obtain from works of art as well as from historical events is only conceivable because of the existence of actual examples. Ricouer observes that disinterestedness and communicability go together in the third Critique and constitute the „enlarged mind” in paragraph 40, of which end point is the cosmopolitan point of view – the merge of the aesthetic and the political Weltbetrachter – the spectator, and here Ricouer explicitly invites Arendt into his own approach. Ricoeur’s concluding idea is based on a quote from the eights thesis of the Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View which reflects Kant’s all-embracing vision of teleology: the hope that finally a universal cosmpolitan condition will emerge.  Ricouer’s conclusion is that the teleological and the aesthetic judgment ally in an unwritten political philosophy. This can be read as the final conclusion never written by Arendt.
The novelty of Ricouer’s essay is that instead of rejecting Arendt’s approach, he offers an interpreting framework which proves that even if one wants to disclose the political dimension of Kant’s philosophy in his aesthetics, one has to start from a broader view of Kant’s philosophy. Therefore Ricouer partly rejects Arendt’s contribution to the topic, by claiming that her approach is a relatively narrow path into the matters she wants to consider, but he incorporates her attempt into his own. What Ricouer’s essay implies but does not make explicit is that the final target of teleology which can be morally meaningful is hope because it projects the final realization into the transgression of historical time.

2. The Inherent Freedom of Individual Judgments of Taste
The matter of the inherent freedom of individual judgments of taste turns the issue of taste as having both an individual and a public component. The potential conflict of this twofold character of judgments of taste is the blurred borderline between individual judging and common judging. Karlheinz Barck considers that contrary to Schiller’s fatalism Kant’s critique of judgment serves as an alternative because, through the idea of linking aesthetic judgment to political judgment it suggests the permanent possibility of re-defining the concrete meaning of politics. In this interpretation Schiller’s aesthetic model and its utopic imagery is more rigid than Kant’s aesthetic model which carries the potential for a theory in political thought. Barck’s interpretation seems to be more sensitive to the affinity between Arendt’s idea on the eternal possibility of new beginnings in politics and Kant’s conception of judgment based upon the logic of Selbstbestimmung.
The matter of the inherent freedom of aesthetic phenomena and its special relation to Kant’s aesthetic formalism is profoundly addressed by Ernst Bloch. Bloch argues that Kant’s formalism in his conception of appraising the aesthetic value of concrete objects reflects a specific bourgeoise Weltanschauung in its mirrorring a closed universe, one in which things are ready made and in which the form is definite, the concreteness of any content is partial and as such it lacks the necessary rigour of judgments of taste. Through the identification of Kants formalism in this way, Bloch depicts the implications of Kant’s universalism for aesthetic and social thought. In the present context it is not significant to import the hardcore Marxist line of Bloch’s argument - its subtle criticism of the bourgeoise world-order and world-view. But it is significant to follow the utopian inspiration of his argument, especially his idea of hope. In this essay entitled, „Art and Society,” Bloch’s central idea is the assumption of the existence of the inherent utopic resources of aesthetic phenomena. Accordingly it is art in which the eternal possibility to overcome historical reality is inherently given, because pieces of art do not only capture reality, but they project them in the mean time into an eternal moment in such a way, that the consumer of art gains the impression of being „beyond” reality. Therefore art is both related to reality and it is situated beyond it. This is what he describes as the hope inherent in art. He considers in this context that Kant’s formalism, his insistance on the delight in the form of an object, thus the exclusion of the historical matter from the judgment of taste and from the value of the aesthetically appraised object itself, Kant excludes from his approach that very surplus, which in Bloch’s Marxist conception is the essence of art: its inherent hope, its transgression of reality by the simultaneous incorporation of its embeddedness into reality. Interestingly besides Kant’s requirement of the appraisal of aesthetic values in accordance to the forms of objects which Bloch depicts as an another mark in Kant’s ahistorical formalism of the exclusion of hope - of the surplus that enables the consumer of art to exceed the material determinacy of the historical present - is, the requirement of disinterestedness in the delight of the beautiful object.
It seems however that Bloch did not pay attention to the fact that Kant’s understanding of disinterestedness does not refer to the exclusion of any kind of sensitiveness toward reality in sake of its transgression, but it refers to the independence of the aesthetic phenomena and of artistic performance from the determinacy of the historical substance. Seen in this light Kant’s conception of disinterestedness and his formalism in general is much closer to the broader understanding of the idea of autonomy and of self-determination from the Enlightenment, which also inspired Marx and than Bloch himself, than Bloch seems to have ever thought. Even the problem of hope itself is fundamentally inspired by Kant’s teleological considerations – more precisely from the ontological warrant of the possibility of improvement across history. As we saw this hope as well as its philosophical foundation was highly present in Schiller too. But its most systematic elaboration was made by Kant.
It worth observing that by stressing ahistorical formalism as a weakness of Kant’s aesthetics Bloch and Bourdieu engage into a criticism based upon the same Marxist pattern: the problem of alienation - alienation which is the outcome of a yet un-fulfilled modernity. In this respect Schiller, Marx and later the Frankfurt School, as well as Bloch and Bourdieu all speak from a shared tradition and mood. The ultimate ground of that tradition and mood is Kant’s concept of Selbstbestimmung. The charge Bloch and Bourdieu share against Kant is, in this respect, that an aesthetic approach, which is un-sensitive to historical and social contextualization, looses sight of the aesthetic phenomena – both of its social production and of its actual meaningfulness.
The objection against both of them in defence of Kant is that Kant’s formalism, his a priori approach on the mental mechanism of judgments of taste and his requirement of the disinterestedness in the delight in the beautiful, all target the autonomy of the aesthetic phenomena, its inherent independence from anything else. Well this fact in turn speaks against the alienation of art and in favor of its emancipatory potential. Kant’s aesthetics does not fall short in considering the existential rooting of art and of the aesthetic phenomena in general, but it interprets its essence in its transcendental independence from historical-empirical contexts. And this transcendental independence carries exactly the hope Bloch believes to be missing from Kant. The confusion lies in not paying attention to the difference between alienation and the independence of art; a confusion which disregards the fact that the Marxist ideal of the inherent freedom of art, its utopic and emancipatory potential both authors address is, in fact, of Kantian inspiration.
However there is also an important difference between the Marxist approach of Bourdieu and Bloch and the Kantian heritage they partly rely upon. The difference can be identified exactly along the matter of formalism. Kant’s ethical and moral thought as well as his philosophy of right is based upon the formalism Marxists usually oppose: the formally warranted conditions of a justice on state level which is insensitive to the arbitariness of the differences which result from the brute luck within the society. Hence the problem of alienation itself. According to Bloch’s and Bourdieu’s logic Kant’s just state is an alienated state in which there is no further negotiation concerning the degree of justice of the occupied positions, since the normative functioning of law is pre-established on the a priori of the categorical imperative. In the Kantian state there can be no empirical argument for such negotiations because the pre-established normativity is to be seen as the inherent rule of an already given transcendental public agreement. Schiller’s objections against Kant’s formalism are made from the same speculative stoff. What is of special interest here is the relationship between form and consent. This is the difference and these are the two terms which constitute an immediate link between these considerations of the philosophy of right and moral philosophy on the one hand and aesthetics on the other. The reason why the subjective necessity of judgments of taste bridges the gap between Kant’s formalistic state and Schiller’s aesthetic state is that in his aesthetics Kant gives up the objectivity of aesthetic agreement and elaborates an intermediary status of such judgments between pure reason and pure sensuality. The endpoint of Kant’s compromise is Schiller’s aesthetic state.

3. Imagination as the Aesthetic Relationship with the World
Schiller’s well-known idea on the cooperation of the senses with the intellect is expressed in the insight that: “By means of beauty sensuous man is led to form and thought; by means of beauty spiritual man is brought back to matter and restored to the world of sense.” (Eighteenth Letter) Showing up in numerous passages this idea concerns Schiller’s programmatic distinction between the split between the realm of form and the realm of things. The idea reminds us about Arendt’s thoughts on the aesthetic nature of the relationship with the world as common world, shared with the other people. Accordingly, as we saw the scope of political theory is to create and take care of a shared world, and this in turn, is not possible without copeing with particularity and plurality. The exercise of always taking into account the presence of particularity and plurality is the cultivation of the sense of reality. We know that for Arendt this means the exercise of erweiterte Denkungsart - situating oneself into the place of the other person through the thought experiment inherent in reflective judgment. The exercise of erweiterte Denkungsart is an epistemic, a moral and an aesthetic exercise in the meantime. The following passage from the Third Letter is of similar vein: “This natural state (as we may term any political body whose organization derives originally from forces and not from laws) is, it is true, at variance with man as moral being, for whom the only Law should be to act in conformity with law. But it will just suffice for man as physical being; for he only gives himself laws in order to come to terms with forces. But physical man does in fact exist, whereas the existence of moral man is as yet problematic. If, then, Reason does away with the Natural State (as she of necessity must if she would put her own in its place), she jeopardizes the physical man who actually exists for the sake of a moral man who is yet problematic, risks the very existence of society for a merely hypothetical (even though morally necessary) ideal of society.”
	It worth considering the shared returning idea of things which are specific, small-scale, particular, and which are contrasted to what is general, objective and uniformly settled. In the last passage Schiller’s application of this idea to political modelling, is made explicit. The idea of the „physical man” reveals that the passage, with its essentially political content is inspired by the constant affinity of the author for the rights of the sensual realm, often expressed by one of his most loved terms: Schein – and Erscheinung related to it. The shared affinity for the things of the world as instances of particularity links politics and aesthetics as domains of life of which resources are found in the „world of appearances,” as Arendt formulates. The astonishingly similar terminology testifies one more common feature which again, relates these thoughts to Kant: the idea that reflective judgment is the faculty to consider the particular thing. Given that according to Kant each beautiful thing displays a unique purpose without purpose, Arendt’s and Schiller’s own way of identifying the objects of reflective judgment discloses the common world of appearances of aesthetic and political affairs: we learn from the Twenty-Sixth Letter that „Schein” is the essence (Wesen) of all fine arts. And the same paragraph testifies that Schiller had aknowledged the allusive character of aesthetic ideas, the open horizon of the meaning they refer to, which is intelligible to those, who are in possession of de-coding the idea that lies behind an aesthetic representation: “(…) und geben eine ästhetische Idee, die jene Vernunftidee statt logischer Darstellung dient, eigentlich aber, um das Gemüt zu beleben, indem sie ihm die Aussicht in ein unabsehliches Feld verwandter Vorstellungen eröffnet” (“induce much thought”). The “unabsehliches Feld verwandter Vorstellungen” refers to meanings which are only intelligible for those who share “verwandter Vorstellungen” – the “family resemblance” among associations which disclose some common field of experiences. It is this common field of experiences whithout which associations would not make sense, and which link aesthetic and political phenomena to the shared realm of the public constitution of meanings.

Habermas considers that Schiller actually goes back to a meaning of common sense which had initially been political rather than aesthetic. Accordingly given the ancient Greek rooting of his communicative theory of politics Schiller comes close to Arendt’s similar thoughts on the public realm of Aristotelian inspiration. The salience of Habermas’ observation is not the actual similarity between Schiller’s and Arendt’s political theory (especially, because none of them has in fact fully elaborated such a theory) but the common ontological rooting of their thoughts concerning the public realm. Their considerations on the aesthetic phenomena appear in this context. Accordingly the space where the relatedness of each one who occupies one’s own position to everyone else actually takes place is the public space. This is Arendt’s central idea in her works in which she focuses on Kant. One could claim in this respect that the inevitable perspective of the one, who judges is not a standpoint, but a genuine position, which makes any standpoint possible. The genuine ontological perspective of always being "somewhere" in the world, in a given position from the outset, from which we relate ourselves to anything and anyone else in the world, raises the problem of morality in the sense, that we are never alone – we are always related to the others and we have to be aware of this fact: according to Arendt “plurality is the law of the earth”. Already “the stop and think” situation of the individual carries the experience of thinking - the genuine fact of being always in the plural, even in the lonely act of thinking. Hence Arendt’s referring to Socrates, who explains to one his disciples that he lives together with a neighbor who is always objecting him. Arendt’s world excludes solipsism first and foremost by describing it as an epistemological failure which can ultimately lead to the moral failure of egotism – to the illusion of being alone in the world. Thus Arendt’s view on thinking as a genuine plural occurence and the related idea that the fact of plurality calls for an inevitable relationship with the others are also connected to her further idea that „the activity of thinking as such (…) could (…) be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually ’condition’ them against it.” Having in mind Arendt’s confessed Kantian inspiration, her idea that thinking is directly related to moral stance - to our capability to „condition” ourselves against something and in favor of something else - recalls Kant’s notion of Denkungsart (conduct of thought), and it prepares Arendt’s contribution to the link this notion establishes between epistemology and ethics, between thinking and doing. Hence Arendt’s great discovery on something which she labels as a great discovery of Kant namely, that he specified the distinction between knowing and thinking: „knowledge which uses thinking as a means to an end, and thinking itself as it arises out of ’the very nature of reason.’”
	Arendt’s entire elaboration implicitly assumes that the faculty of judgment carries a moral function which is superior to mere rational choice which is un-sensitive to consider particularity. Wellmer’s observation is of enormous importance, because it suggests that Arendt’s approach on judging - including the moral function of this capability - potentially suffers of infinite regress. Wellmer claims that it is exactly her exaggerated Kantianism that arrests Arendt to come up with a broader rationality which would include both the rationality of the intellect and that of reason. Such a combination of a scientistic rationality - one of logical demonstration - and a discursive, speculative rationality of what she calleed „thinking” would have allowed Arendt to tie reflective judgment to rational argument. But Arendt was too „loyal” to Kant, who - according to Wellmer - was stressing the universalizing character of the categorical imperative, therefore he did not pay attention to the intersubjective validity of formal moral correctness. Before continuing to reflect upon this argument we have to consider another commentary.
	Jerome Kohn shows that attempting to follow the Kantian background of her approach Arendt utilizes the notion of judgment as an act of self-imposed rule creation. He shows that Arendt highlights the faculty of judgment as the capability to reflect upon and may be to reject the collectively shared standards of how to judge. Arendt observes that the faculty of judgment carries the possibility of the individual freedom to run against standardized rules. This freedom enables us to consider particularity - the singular event. As a singular fact each particular event has its own truth. Kohn highlights that these are the considerations which led Arendt to stress that in exceptional instances of the manifestation of evil, like Auschwitz we are still supposed to possess the capability to judge the singularity of that actual brute fact. In those cases we do not have to rely on any given rule: this sought of events have to be considered in their particularity rather than as instances of some general rule – hence Arendt’s reliance on a broader understanding of reflective judgment. (Kohn’s observation harmonizes with Ricouer’s recognition of the significance of the exemplarity of the particular as carrying a shared meaning between aesthetic and political judging.) Arendt sees the moral potential of the reflective type of judging in its capability to consider the uniqueness of the case at hand, without relying on un-reflected social or other types of standards: „(…) that human beings be capable of telling right from wrong even when all they have to guide them is their own judgment, which, moreover, happens to be completely at odds with what they must regard as the unanimous opinion of all those around them. (…) Those few who were still able to tell right from wrong went really on their own judgments, and they did so freely; there were no rules to be abided by, under which the particular cases with which they were confronted could be subsumed. They had to decide each instance as it arose, because no rules existed for the unprecedented.”
	We can observe in this passage the moral teaching in Arendt’s general considerations on the nature of judging. It is especially interesting to see that by stressing the moral importance of the affinity of reflective judgments for singularity Arendt establishes the analogy between the act of judging beautiful or ugly things and the act of judging a moral event. In her notion of judging the two senses of the word merge. In both cases we face the capability of judging to consider the particular event in its singularity without subsuming it to any particular rule: be it an aesthetic event, in its purpose without purpose as it displays its own uniqueness, or be it an event to be morally considered, in both cases we can observe the faculty of judgment to reflectively judge the particularity of the case in question. (The analogy between the two also follows Kant’s definition of analogy.) However Wellmer’s considerations from above which show in the direction of the possibility of some infinite regress in the act of judging remains valid, because he points out the fact that the validity of judging cannot entirely escape its dependence on its fundamental subjective character.
	But one can raise the question: upon which considerations do we judge? A possible reply could be that in Arendt’s logic the end point of judging which stops it to run into infinite regress is just the autonomus human capability to grasp the inner teleology of the observed phenomena and to consider it - to judge it accordingly. For Arendt the main starting point is not of Kantian inspiration but it comes from Augustine, and it derives from the term natality – the genuine human capability to always begin something new. Natality is the final ground for judging. Despite of this possible defence in favor of Arendt the question remains open: is the faculty of judgment a warrant for telling right from wrong? Can one tell right from wrong without already having an idea of what right or wrong is – which would obviously influence his judgment? As Wellmer points out, although she starts from an Aristotelian stance Arendt does not follow any particular conception of right or wrong, beautiful or ugly. She understands sensus communis as a regulative principle (as Kant does). And I think that this does not change in The Life of the Mind either, because in that work she still doesn’t take any of the terms borrowed from Kant’s aesthetics in some substantive (aesthetic or moral) sense, but as notions, which describe the general capability to tell right from wrong: she relies on the merged understanding of moral and aesthetic judging. She follows in this respect Kant’s basically transcendental stance.  (It is her essay The Crisis in Culture in which she goes quite far in adopting aesthetic notions for morality in a substantive way, because she explores the thought experiment of the aesthetically refined sense of public care.) The role of sensus communis as a regulative principle shows how Arendt tries to rescue the autonomy of judging attempting in this way to avoid the possibility of infinte regress in the normative foundation of judgments. Wieland points out that the very notion of judgment as utilized by Kant excludes the demand for further steps in the possible chain of reaching judgment itself. The judgment actually closes the line of any such further regress and as such it has the priviledge to even break some existing rule. Arendt’s thoughts on the possibility of a political theory in Kant’s aesthetics can be seen as the description of the limits of modernity and of modern politics as such, in its being un-sensitive for particularity - for its being unable to consider individuality. Hence her affinity for judgment as the faculty which can break any usual chain of causation and can give another direction to occurences: judging is the exercise of freedom.

4. Taste and Politics
The third Critique does not come up with any specific theory on the relationship between taste and politics. The implicit thoughts which tell us something on this matter can only be discerned from what is stated by Kant on the relationship between taste and morality, as well as on the nature of taste itself. In this respect paragraph 5 which compares the three different kinds of delight is a crucial one: “(…) where the moral law dictates, there is, objectively, no room left for free choice as to what one has to do; and to show taste in the way one carries out these dictates, or in estimating the way others do so, is a totally different matter from displaying the moral frame of one’s mind. For the latter involves a command and produces a need of something, whereas moral taste only plays with the objects of delight without devoting itself sincerely to any.”
	The most important lesson of the passage is the distinction made between the nature of freedom in case of moral judgments and judgments of taste. The key word in this sense is “play”, which defines the difference between the rigour of the dictates of moral judgments which “involve a command and produce a need of something” on the one hand and the (moral) taste, which only “plays with the objects of delight” without any particular commitment on the other hand. The word “freedom” is not utilized, but it is clear, that the turning point, which refers to the difference between the two types of freedom is “free choice”, which appears as characteristic for taste, rather than for moral action.
	We know from other works of Kant that moral action is free and it is exactly its freedom which derives from its being governed by the moral law. What we learn from this paragraph is that free choice in particular is a matter of taste in which we do not have commitments, as opposed to the dictates of the moral law which call for clear commitments. The main difference is that in matters of taste there is no law. Thus in case of moral judgments we do not relate ourselves on how others do or judge something, but solely to the requirements of the moral law. The argument highlights the solipsistic nature of moral action of which validity does not depend on anything else than on the moral law. (What I call solipsism in this sense is not be understood as self-exclusion from the world shared with others, on the contrary: this solipsism occurs in the actual way of carrying out moral judgments – moments in which to judge means that we think of the requirement of the moral law and disregard anything else, and of course anyone else as an auxiliary motivation of judging.)
	There is however another underlying statement on solipsism – that of judgments of taste. This is suggested in the idea of the “play with the objects of delight without devoting itself sincerely to any.” The implicit solipsism suggested in this sentence lies in the non-commitment of the one who is free to play with the objects of delight, without being committed to any of them. This solipsism lies in the lawless individual free choice. The common feature of these two types of solipsism is that both of them are individual acts (judgments) which implicitly take into consideration the existence of other people. My view is that what links this lawless free choice to moral action – to the moral law itself – is that not being committed to any of the objects of delight is also an attitude; and as an attitude it carries an implicit relatedness of oneself to the other people. This is the link between the moral, the aesthetic and the political dimension of judging.
	What takes us closer to Kant’s thoughts about politics which are implicit in his aesthetics is the relationship he establishes between taste and freedom. I attempt to follow the development of this relationship from the transcendental/epistemological level of the a priori conditions of judging, where freedom appears as an inherent attribute of these acts, to the individual level of making such judgments as different from other people’s judgment, and finally to the social level, on which shared individual judgments of taste form virtual communities of taste. The significance of this last level of the freedom of taste for political theory is that it points out the difference between the intersubjectively shared delight and consensus.

The following passage reveals that the overlap between the aesthetical and the moral meaning of one and the same concept is not simply an interpretive attempt to link the separate fields of Kant's critical philosophy, but that the actual possibility of such links have been explicitely offered by Kant himself in his own philosophical vocabulary. The following passage is from paragraph 6 in The Conflict of the Faculties, published seven years after the second edition of The Critique of Judgment, in 1798.
	„It is simply the mode of thinking of the spectators which reveals itself publicly in this game of great revolutions, and manifests such a universal yet disinterested sympathy for the players on one side against those on the other (…) Owing to this universality, this mode of thinking demonstrates a character of the human race at large and all at once; owing to its disinterestedness, a moral character of humanity, at least in its predisposition, a character which not only permits people to hope for progress toward the better, but is already itself progress in so far as its capacity is sufficient for the present.”
According to the passage disinterestedness is a concept which directly links aesthetics to morality. Further the phrase informs us about the „predisposition” of the conduct of thought (Denkungsart) as well as about the fact that this predisposition is disinterested. The passage examplifies also the all-embracing function of the notion of character in Kant’s philosophical creed. Further it links Kant’s philosophy of history to his aesthetics as well as to the politically relevant meaning of his aesthetics into one single view (even Weltanschauung) along the notion of character. It is significant that Kant links disinterestedness, thinking and moral character to each other: progress is to be awaited from thinking rather than from knowledge - the spectator of the world of human affairs is the thinking man. The passage is a telling illustration of a vision shared by Kant, Schiller and Arendt: the utopia of the moral improvement of humanity. What they all take as a stake is the responsibility of what is innate: the moral burden of the cognitive chance to think, judge and act in one way or another. The chain Kant builds up from the disinterestedness of the spectator, thinking and moral character is further invested into the hope in progress, of which human background – the already given human capability for improvement - imports the hope in progress as an achievement already existing in the present: the teleology of hope is brought back in this way to historical time.
Heller aknowledges the bridge between aesthetics and morality in the third Critique not by identifying this link as „both,” but rather as „neither, nor” – in the sense that this bridge is to be seen as a suspended state for good as well as for beautiful. A state in which no one has the authority to rank, nobody claims anything from interest and everybody is happy for a moment. Heller’s imaginative description of aesthetic experience, as something like a state of weightlessness addresses in fact freedom as the essential element of this, both individual and collective state of mind. She specifies a distinction between the two types of freedom. She describes moral freedom in its universality, as a power that equally rules everyone. Contrary to this, in case of judgments of taste which, as the outcomes of the free play between understanding and imagination, are born in the harmony between nature and freedom. And in this second case every new instance of the free play is a distinct free act and as such, it is unique. Heller highlights the difference between the two types of freedom, by recalling the different relationship each of them has to some general law. She points out how differently the freedom of such judgments looks like, but we do not learn from this, what is their freedom as a matter of fact – in what does freedom for aesthetics and morality consist? I consider that answer is that the content of this shared freedom is disinterestedness.

The main context in which exemplifies attempts to empirically link aesthetics to politics, aesthetic phenomena to political practice is political symbolism. The symbol which represents a given political identity plays the role of linking the phenomenal character of that political identity in its historical thus physical existence to the noumenal character. The noumenal character of a political identity lies in its constancy. This constancy is not meant to be historical but it can only exist in history. Symbols are attempts to link history to eternity by sensually representing identities in images which as images, are eternal, but in their particular representations they are inevitably historical. As stable representations symbols are claims regarding the existence of some timeless essence. Seen from the perspective of the particularity of historical time, symbols are instances of hope, because they are attempts to sensually link the present to the expectation of a teleological (even „escatological”) development.
	Both political theory and practice have shown interest to the function art and aesthetic phenomena as such can play in the actual mechanism of politics. The broader horizon of this interest includes the role of passions and the power of the irrational in general in the mental relationship between the state and its citizens. This last broader version was thoughtfully addressed by the historian of ideas Maurizio Viroli. A more concrete historical testing of the direct aesthetic version of the topic was discussed by George L. Mosse. In the present context his volume deserves some more attention.
Mosse claims that the national symbolism had already been present in the idea of popular sovereignity and the general will in the eighteenth century. His book The Nationalization of the Masses can be taken as a refutation of Arendt’s thesis that the isolation of the individuals from each other, the desintegration of their social networks prepares the ground for the total control of the political power upon society and it also preserves this state of affairs once achieved. By showing that the Nazi Germany and Italy under Mussolini had realized an environment of political and national cult which was embodied in architecture, art and national festivities, Mosse demonstrates that these symbolic acts reflected the totalizing aspirations of the political regime as well as the organization of the people into a cohesive space of their national-cultural identity. From this empirical assumption Mosse concludes that by organizing the crowd into community the possibility of control became much higher than in the ideally atomized environment imagined by Arendt. According to him the reason for this was that the unification of the people through collectively experienced symbolic acts, did not only result control from above but also the individual self-identification with the collective experience itself, which was the direct expression of collective consciousness. Therefore the success of the organization of the masses in this way lies in peoples’ consent to the power, as the outcome of a shared enjoyment. This consent is sanctified through the ritual in which both the power and the people participate – an act in which the power and the people become equal members of the nation. Due to this self-identification the individual and the collective experience of an ordered world did not have to be imposed – it was realized spontaneously. Mosse stresses the subtlity through which the apparent terror was in fact a system of mass-democracy and through its consensual potential it appeared as an alternative to parlamentary democracy. He stresses that the national symbolism already present in the Weimar Republic did not prove to be sufficiently powerful, because parlamentary democracy could not offer that particular sense of unity which was finally achieved in the Third Reich. Mosse describes this process as a secular religion.
An aesthetic approach of political symbolism inevitably turns the issue of aestheticized politics of which mirror image is of course politicized aesthetics. The assumption behind this kind of use (or more precisely abuse) of art as a means for some contingent goal is the un-critical faith in the representation and in the predictable causality of the impact of representation upon human consciousness. Mosse does not address the failure of this underlying conviction of the political power which recurs to such utilizations of some alleged – or at least intended – aesthetic effect. By not being able to aknowledge the self-relyingness of products of art this kind of instrumentalization of art and the aesthetic phenomena in general he obviously, doesn’t aknowledge the problem which made Kant to carefully formulate his words on the sensual representation of moral ideas namely, that we do not possess any particular rule of inference for the actual functioning of this kind of representation in concrete cases. All what we learn from Kant in this respect is, that art is „capable” for such representation – it can be used in this sense, but there is no general rule for this. Probably, any struggle to force art to rely on the responsive power of art, to world occurs (or it does not occur) in pieces of art themselves; once stressing this inherent power, one runs into the trap of forceing art to perform something which art only performs, if it is not forced… Adorno expresses this problem very aptly, when he writes, that art is the world once more. („Kunst ist die Welt noch einmal, dieser so gleich wie ungleich.”) As we saw, Schiller demonstrates that a politicized aesthetics actually fails as aesthetics. Similarly to his non-moralizing moral theory Kant’s aesthetics is also non-aestheticizing, and this general (essentially a priori) theoretical stance remains constant even in the intersecting matters between moral and aesthetic phenomena in the third Critique. The notion of refined inclination refers to civilizing without moralizing.
In her essay on Kant’s aesthetics Heller observes that in the same way as aesthetics can be latent politics and political philosophy, politics can also be a latent aesthetics. She claims that this symmetry can be well illustrated in mass culture as the environment of permanent choice in matters of taste – which appears to be just as valid for political choice as for cultural preferences. Heller’s observation refers to mass culture as the environment for something like a common modelling between aesthetics and morality rather than to aestheticization or politicization itself. Her observation however also highlights that the root of this symmetry lies in the act of free choice as a fundamental model both in matters of taste and in modern politics. She opts for the more conservative view to consider products of art as not entirely open to unlimited individual free appraisal.

If we rely on the preceeding considerations on the epistemic nature of the aesthtic experience, we can state, that the illusion behind the impact of aesthetic experiences in political communication is the presupposition of some kind of causality between the experience and the message it is meant to convey. Remaining within the same theoretical framework however we can also state, that there is a viable impact as well, which emerges exactly from the non-causality of the relationship between aesthetic experience and the intended message. In this respect the reason why aesthetic experience makes a difference in political communication is that the rule of the free play between the sensual and the conceptual dimension of the experience, consequently the relationship between the sensual effect and the conceptual content is unclear. The political power of aesthetic experience lies in its allusive character; in the fact that it shows an un-defined open horizon of meanings, without clarifiying in the meantime, any particular statement-like of message, which could be refuted, rejected, objected, or justified. The role of aesthetic experience in political communication lies in the impreciseness of the meaning the experience it carries – if it carries any such meaning at all. The following considerations address this task in some depth.
	
5. Taste and Communication
The intersubjective character of judgments of taste turns the issue of the difference between pleasure and agreement. As Schaper remarks the problem to be solved in the third Critique is to justify the claim of judgments of taste for their universal validity, but holding at the same time the distinction between such judgments and objective knowledge claims. This is the dilemma Lewis White Beck addresses in his comments to paragraph 37. Beck claims that the role of the a priori in judgments of taste is not sufficiently clarified by Kant. Beck's solution is to label judgments of taste not, as judgments of a priori necessity, but as judgments of a priori commitments. He explains this as follows. Contrary to knowledge claims in which we can necessarily impute agreement, in case of judgments of taste it is the judgment itself which is necessary. Hence Beck argues that Kant correctly observes, that judgments of taste are only analogous to claims to universality and necessity. Beck claims that what is a priori is neither the statement on something being beautiful, nor the statement on the universal validity itself, but the principle of justifying the connection between the two.
Although the distinction between the a priori of claims for knowledge and of judgments of taste can be methodologically specified, it makes sense to pay attention to how judgments of taste might look like knowledge claims. Although the difference between agreement in matters of moral and factual statements on the one hand and judgments of taste on the other hand is clear it is possible, that judgments of taste function as if, they would impose agreement. In everyday life judgments of taste function rather un-critically. When we consider something as beautiful we claim this as a firm conviction and although we know that taste is in principle open to debate, we are usually committed to our statements in matters of taste and as such, we assert them as if they were „obvious” knowledge claims, in the form: „how can you say that this is not a beautiful painting?” Replies to such a question would possibly stress either the argument of „we have different taste”, or the argument of „you have a bad taste.” Even if highly self-critical and tolerant people would formulate their judgments of taste in a somewhat hypotetical manner the possible clashes of views in this respect highlight the fact that whenever we argue in such disputes, beyond motivations emerging from personal convictions the possible arguments we rely upon inevitably derive from the stock of anything that counts as an argument in matters of taste in the given environment of meanings. Thus there may be a difference between what judgments of taste transcendentally are (in terms of their commitments) and the way they are actually applied. And no matter what that particular environment of meaning would be, the problem of agreement in its most general form, always leads to the problem of the outer world - to its meaning and role in judgments of taste.
It seems to be plausible that the link between the outer world in the first Critique and the aesthetic experience of the beautiful in the third Critique is imagination. Kant claims that by experiencing we also imagine. Imagination is inherent of experience, because we cannot make sense of what is inner without presupposing what is outer (B 275). Imagination doesn't begin with aesthetic experience, but with ordinary experience. What is relevant for Kant's theory of aesthetics for his conception of taste and the beautiful is his fundamental thesis, that mind is inherently creative.
Eva Schaper considers that Kant's notion of Einbildung is misleading because it seems to refer to making up something, whereas this is not the true meaning of imagination for Kant. She also lists three major types of interpretations of what imagination means in Kant's critical philosophy. The first one is a metaphysical interpretation, according to which imagination is the bridge between nature and morality, between knowledge and freedom. According to the psychological view imagination is the third element of the mental faculties between sense and understanding. The third interpretation takes imagination as being both empirically and transcendentally employed by Kant. Schaper rejects these views, first of all, because she considers that to conceive imagination as located between sense and understanding, nature and morality is false. There is no room for a third faculty. The perceptual-conceptual distinction is a sufficient model to verify experiences. She recalls the modifications Kant made in the second edition of the first Critique, as the clarifying instances for what imagination means for Kant. The role and meaning of imagination can be discerned from Kant's refutation of idealism, more precisely of Hume's subjective idealism. Whereas for Hume the world is the product of imagination, for Kant the objects of experience are the necessary presuppositions which make it intelligible at all, to talk about an experiencing subject on the one hand, and the world of objects which exists independently from the experiencing subject on the other hand. The introduction of the notion of the transcendental unity of apperception in the Transcendental Deduction reveals that imagination is the act through which experience can be attributed to a single consciousness which remains identical over time. Without this requirement we would not be able to subsume the flux of the items of experience under concepts. Further without the necessary presupposition of the objects of our experience as existing independently from our consciousness, it would not be possible to claim knowledge as such. Schaper mentions that the problem of the conditions of the application of the concept to sense data raises the issue of what constitutes someone's own experience of objects, which are also experienced by others. Later she explains the importance of the independence of the object of the experience from the subject who experiences the possibility of the reference of subjective experiences to a world of "public objects." I would like to stop by the formulation "public objects" and its significance for my enquiry.
Clearly the problem of warranting that contrary to pure sense data experience refers to knowledge claims concerning "public objects" turns the issue of what I have formulated as the problem of the outer world, its meaning and role in judgments of taste. It is also clear that this is developed around the problem of agreement, insofar as agreement can only take place, if the objects of experience can be seen as independent from the subject and as such, they can be publicly shared.
	The matter of communication is one of the core matters of Kant’s aesthetics, especially of his theory of taste. Allgemeine Mitteilbarkeit, the requirement of the univarsal communicability of judgments of taste is one of the four requirements of such judgments. The public character of the beautiful, more precisely, of aesthetic phenomena in general emerges from the transcendental foundation of the partly sensual, partly conceptual nature of judgments of taste and in a later stage from the social nature of their subjectively necessary validation. It is their intersubjetive nature that makes sense to the requirement of universal communicability. Given that the four requirements of judgments of taste includes the requirement of communicability, an un-communicable judgment is not a judgment of taste. Let us stop at the inescapable fact of the public character of judgments of taste as expressed in Kant’s elaboration of their universal communicability.
	The idea that communication and human knowledged are logically related to each other already appears in Kant’s Vorlesungen über Logik: „Unser Wissen ist nichts, wenn andere es nicht wissen, daß wir es wissen.” The sentence is not supposed to be read in the context of the third Critique, but it involves an idea which is also salient for the aesthetical work, namely, that the test for the validity of judgments is to be carried out intersubjectively. The link between Kant’s idea of the function of communicability in matters of knowledge in general and the special meaning of this requirement for his aesthetics is well expressed in paragraph 21 from the third Critique, which concerns the question, of whether it is possible to presuppose common sense: „COGNITIONS and judgments must, together with their attendant conviction, admit of being universally communicated; for otherwise a correspondence with the Object would not be due to them. They would be a conglomerate constituting a mere subjective play of the powers of representation, just as scepticism would have it.” It worth observing that in this case „Spiel” does not refer to its meaning from the formulation, „free play of imagination and understanding”, but it explicitely appears as „mere” (bloß), that is to say, as the conceptually un-ruled loose alteration of momentary impressions. This is the cognitive state of egotism, in which we do not relate our judgments to other people. This is what happens to judgments which are not generally communicable. And this is the same problem the passage on insanity is telling about: the lack of the control of validity by a cognitively presupposed public.
		Another significant passage in which the matter of communicability of judgments is related to the problem of loosing one’s world – the public character of validation itself appears in paragraph 53 of the Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht: „Das einzige allgemeine Merkmal der Verrücktheit ist der Verlust des Gemeinsinnes (sensus communis) und der dagegen eintretende logische Eignsinn (sensus privatus) (…) Denn es ist ein subjektiv-notwendiger Probierstein der Richtigkeit unserer Urteile überhaupt und also auch der Gesundheit unseres Verstandes: daß wir diesen auch an den Verstand anderer halten, nicht aber uns mit dem unsrigen isolieren und mit unserer Privatvorstellung doch gleichsam öffentlich urteilen.”
	We obtain from this passage an important clue regarding the problem of freedom of judging otherwise. The passage highlights the difference between simply judging otherwise and failing to judge adequately. Both the sentence from the work in logic and the two other quoted passages express an idea which fuels Kant’s explication of the escape from egotism in matters of taste, and links at the same time his entire aesthetic theory to something like an „epistemic democracy” so characteristic to the Enlightenment: its us, who know something, not just me, the individual – reason is a public matter and a public gift.
	In the dual mental structure of judgments of taste it is understanding that makes debate possible. Contrary to this it is the sensual part which due to its personal character arrests any further debate. Kant’s idea that given the freedom of the play between understanding and imagination as well as its conceptually un-defined nature, and given that the threshold of their presence in experience is also un-defined, agreement in delight is not a conceptual agreement but an agreement in the happiness experienced in the shared delight. Therefore those who share their judgments of taste form a virtual community which is not based upon conceptual agreement but upon the delight generated by the common play of the intellect and the senses. Thus the foundation of the virtual communities of taste is the fact of the shared happiness: the difference between the "us" and the "others" is nothing else but the difference between those who share happiness and those do not share the same happiness. With regard to communicability this means that judgments of taste cannot be accountable, acceptable or refutable in terms of their validity. Judgments of taste are not judgments of some publicly accepted validity, but judgments based upon a collective experience: they cannot be refuted; they can only be subject either of joy or of dislike. Therefore the virtual community of those who share judgments of taste is not a community of consens formed along arguments, which are rationally testable in their validity, but the aesthetic community of shared happiness. One can only belong to this community through shared pleasure, not by shared consent. In this way communication does not rely on shared conceptual validity, but upon the non-conceptual hint to the publicly shared experience. In the conceptually un-definable interplay between understanding and imagination of judgments of taste, hint takes over the role of communication from knowledge claims. Whereas hints demand conceptually un-defined intersubjectively shared associations, the purely conceptual moment of communication is meant only to denote the targeted object in a given judgment of taste. Therefore it only demands the minimal consent for the validity of the external reality, whithout which there would be, no common ground for the objective references of judgments of taste. Let’s call this type of consent semantical. As already discussed, if this element of judgments of taste would not be warranted by understanding, then these judgments would be totally boundless associations of subjective rather than a priori impressions, which are individual and cannot be matters of universal communicability and allgemeine Beistimmung. But it is immediately visible that the virtual community of taste does not rely upon this consent regarding the external reality, but upon the sharing of subjective representation – not on the consent of conceptual agreement, but on the consent of intersubjectively shared pleasure. By recalling the passage: „ein unabsehbares Feld verwandter Vorstellungen eröffnet”, especially to the word “unabsehbar,” one can obtain a clue on the place the matter of this conceptually un-specified way of Beistimmung can occupy in Kant’s theory: it links the features of the act of the free play between understanding and imagination to the feature of aesthetic ideas in their functioning as associative extensions of the intuitions of concepts.
		The reason why ethical and political communities are possible at all is that reason is intersubjectively given. In the meantime these communities can only be compounded by individuals, who possess their own reason (Vernunft). And in turn the end result of one’s own reason and of its product Mündigkeit is individual responsibility. It is this double - individual and collective nature of reason that overcomes the tension between individual action and the relatedness of the individual to the others. Therefore reason only exists in the collective bodies constituted by reasonable (vernünftig) individuals. Kant distinguishes between reason, understanding and judging. In each case he is talking about universal faculties, equally present in every reasonable being. Therefore knowing, acting and judging are capabilities which are present in every single individual. Moreover they only manifest on the individual level. Thus Kant is permanently careful about applying universalism together with individual autonomy. Kant’s individuals are not parts of a whole which are in-existent without that whole, but they are self-relying subjects who share universal features, which manifest precisely in this self-reliance. Accordingly common judging does not mean that we judge together, but that we constitute a community in which every single individual is judging as an individual, but the faculty of judging itself, is common. The tension between the individual and the collective level is in this way overcome in the act of judging, because each of us possesses the capability, with which we judge as individuals. This is what makes sense to what Kant understands under the concept of communicability.

6. Moral Character as the Final Framework of Judgments of Taste
Kant defines character in the first Critique as follows: "Every efficient cause must have a character, that is, a law of its causality without which it would not be a cause". There are two types of characters, empirical or sensible (Sinnesart) and intelligible (Denkungsart). (A further notion to be discussed later – Gesinnung – is linked by Kant to virtue.) According to Allison the distinction between empirical and intelligible character appears in two different senses in Kant: once in the sense in which intelligible character is the noumenal cause, whereas empirical character is its phenomenal effect; and once in the sense in which the empirical character appears as the sensible schema of the intelligible one. According to Allison the second meaning offers a possibility to make sense to the idea of the causality of reason, by viewing the empirical character as the sensible expression of the intelligible character. Allison highlights that Kant's distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal realms is not a so called two-world theory, but a two-aspect reading of what man really is. This observation fits well in Kant’s main goal with the third Critique to bridge the gap between the two determining poles of human nature: the sensual and the intellectual.
This pair of concepts is a constitutive element of Kant's thinking of man as belonging to two distinct worlds, to the noumenal and to the phenomenal one. The distinction between these two concepts is the ontological background of Kant's idea that although we are subject to the laws of physics, there is a realm, in which we make the laws of what we do - we determine ourselves. This second realm is the intelligible realm in which our moral life is constituted. Hence the concept of self-determination. However we never cease to belong to the causal chain of nature – the other world. Obviously, the two must constitute one and the same world that includes both: hence Kant’s view of a teleological world-order, that embraces the place for free moral acting. As a matter of fact freedom, as resting in the capability of self-determination can be seen as a peculiar determinism namely, as a non-empirical causal theory of freedom. This is the realm in which we are free. Kant states in the Metaphysik der Sitten, that we can only act, under the idea of freedom. The main problem Kant faces in the Third Antinomy is to reconcile the epistemological difficulty of man as the subject to the physical laws on the one hand and being free on the other hand. The resolution of this difficulty lies in Kant's recognition of the purely intelligible nature of our awareness of our thought acts. As elaborated in the first Critique in the Appendix to the Dialectic, we are capable to form ideas and we are also able to reflect upon the act itself. In our very awareness of ourselves as thinking beings we are merely situated in the intelligible realm. Kant's crucial idea to support the self-relying nature of the intelligible character is that the act of reflection upon the fact that I am forming ideas is not an act of experience, but a purely intelligible one. Hence his idea that we belong to “two worlds”. Briefly, transcendental apperception is not an act of experience. It is important to stress that the identification of the awareness of our thinking, as merely belonging to the intelligible realm does not exclude that we are also subjects to the physical laws of the phenomenal world. It only distinguishes the nature of determinacy of our thinking side, from the nature of determination of our side as being physically present in the world.
The role – more precisely the role of the abscence – of causality in the relationship between freedom and taste is crucial, although Kant never mentions this particular aspect. Given that freedom is seen as independent from the causal chain of natural processes – from causality as such – and it is related to the human mental capability to initiate chains of causation, and given that the actual aesthetic content of an aesthetic experience is not caused by external impulses, but it is the outcome of the so called free play which is a subjective occurence, Kant implicitly asserts the epistemologically free nature of judgments of taste.

As we learn from Kant's later work Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, if we would not be permanently tempted by our desires emerging from our phenomenal side to carry out morally impure acts, then there would be no moral performance, in our selecting into the maxims of our actions solely the motivations which are in accordance with the categorical imperative. Therefore as a matter of fact, our moral quality lies in our capability to let our intelligible side win over our phenomenal side. The capability for self-determination virtually undermines the possible excuses to choose the heteronomous way of acting, that is to say, to act upon desires. Hence the inevitability of responsibility. (I consider however, that the ambivalent nature of man as  belonging - although distinctly, but equally - to both the phenomenal and the intelligible realms, leads to the direction of the moral ambivalence, that ultimately undermines Kant's requirement of homogeneity of moral agency.) However through the category of the moral character Kant introduces an explanatory element in his theory of action which is able to cope with the moral ambivalence of man. This extra element is due to the aesthetic resources of the notion of moral character. Moral character is a more complete response to the factor of personality in moral acts, than the mere yes / or no nature of the categorical imperative.
	The closer view of the relationship between the aesthetic and the moral realm is offered by Felicitas Munzel in his analysis of a motif in Kant, which directly relates disinterestedness to morality: the moral character. According to Munzel the most accurate definition of the notion of character (Denkungsart, which in Munzel’s translation means conduct of thought and in emprical contexts Sinnesart, translated by Munzel as compartment of mind.), appears in the first Critique (already quoted): „Every efficient cause must have a character, that is, a law of its causality, without which it would not be a cause” (A 539 / B 567). The empirical character of an action as it appears (its Sinnesart) is determined by the intelligible character of the conduct of thought (Denkungsart) as clarified in the first Critique (A 551 / B 579). In the second Critique character is discused as „the highest good in a human being.” The term appears first in a context of moral theory in the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, from 1764. It appears there as Gesinnung (comportment of mind) and it refers to virtue. Munzel mentions that in this particular context (in B 214-17), where virtue is discussed as Gesinnung, virtue is also described as sublime. (Virtue is defined in the first Critique as the application of moral principles based on maxims which in turn rely on feelings, inclinations and passions (A 54-55 / B 79).) Finally character appears in paragraph 40 of the third Critique as the ultimate principle of all the maxims of our understanding labelled, as the resolute conduct of thought.
	It is clear that the notion of character appears both in an epistemological and in a moral context, as well sometimes in an extended aesthetic context, in which morality is related to the aesthetic realm, like in the contexts of the sublimity of the respect toward the moral law, as well as in the description of the meaning of virtue. The epistemological meaning of the term – or rather of the pair of terms: Sinnesart, Denkungsart – emerge from and remains strongly related to the matter of causality.	For Kant character is a principle of principles; it is a final maxim which indicates how to apply maxims at all. It is the mental framework which defines the mode of utterences. This is the sense in which it is a conduct. As mentioned before the Critique of Practical Reason clarifies that the “factum” of man as a purpose in itself follows from his being the subject of the moral law, and that in this respect Kant does not rely on teleological considerations any longer: man is not seen any more as a purpose in itself as a result of his capability to define goals, but because he has a moral character. In the following, relying on both some of Kant’s texts, as well as on Munzel’s detailed analysis of the topic it will be reconstructed the way in which Kant links the epistemological and the moral meaning of character through its all embracing aesthetic function.
Munzel specifies his own hypothesis which inspires the analysis of Kant’s notion of character. Accordingly character as the concrete manifestation of reason in the world is the fulfillment of the reconception and justification of reason as a whole. Character is also the final locus of the unity of moral as well as aesthetic matters in the individual. Munzel highlights the ultimate individualism in Kant’s enquiry - which links Kant at the same time to a philosophical tradition starting with Socrates - according to which, conduct of thought is the inescapable burden of the individual. As Socrates says in the Menon, the city can teach a lot to its children, but it cannot make them good – virtue cannot be taught in such a direct manner. The maxim of the resolute conduct of thought lies in the hands of the individual citizen. (By distinguishing between modus and methodus Schiller asserts the same about art: he claims that the production of art cannot be simply taught - it has to be shown by the master to his disciple in terms of a model which can only be actually turned into a particular piece of art in a unique way. This idea harmonizes with Kant’s conception of products of art as being un-repeatable, unique objects which exemplify their own particular way of displaying a purpose without purpose – an inherent purposefullness.) The fact that character understood as the resolute conduct of thought lies in the hands of the individual citizen indicates that the concept of character links the morally and aesthetically understood freedom of judging otherwise. This particular significance of the concept of character survives also in the elaboration of the three main features of reflective judgment: thinking for oneself (the maxim of understanding), thinking from a universal standpoint (the maxim of judgment) and finally the maxim of thinking in one voice (mit sich einstimmig) as the inner principle of the conduct of life. The following considerations are an attempt meant to highlight the decisive role character plays in the constitution of the notion of judging shared by moral judgments and judgments of taste.
	Upon which considerations do we give priority to a certain moral alternative as opposed to any other one: upon further moral considerations? In order to eliminate the infinite regress this question leads to, we could start from the idea that in considering the priority among various moral alternatives, the decision to decide in favor of any of the moral alternatives at hand cannot be in itself based upon moral considerations. The individual moral imperatives, our statements on good and evil do not in themselves carry the criteria upon which we either accept or reject them. The meaning of these sentences refer to how we want to act and to the question of what we take to be good. But they do not in themselves carry any meaning on why someone will act in a particular way and not in some other way. More precisely these sentences do not show the actual reason for carrying out a given act itself. I must have some reason why I am going to act according to a given moral sentence as opposed to any other one. Well the reason itself for choosing in that particular way cannot be the meaning of the sentence I choose. And as I have already mentioned, in case that the reason for choosing, would be a further moral sentence, would imply infinite regress. The question is then, that if acting according to a particular moral sentence is in itself not of moral nature, then what is the nature of such a reason? According to Kant the ultimate reason for acting is to be found in one's character. As an attempt to explain the role of the notion of character as a bridge between aesthetic and moral normativity – between the sollen of beautiful and the sollen of good – we can argue as follows.
	A normative statement is no one's statement. Contrary to this, the character is always someone's – it belongs to somebody. In case of a normative statement there is no one who talks. Contrary to this, character always belongs to someone. A normative statement is in fact not asserted by anybody. Contrary to this, character cannot exist without somebody. A normative statement has a meaning. But from the mere fact that somebody expresses such a statement, it does not follow anything on what that sentence means for that person, that is to say, it does not follow, whether that particular person considers that particular statement as a reason for his future acting, or not. A decision upon which the acting ultimately is carried out cannot be deduced from any normative statement, but only from what that statement particularly means for the one who is acting. The man who steals might also announce the statement: "do not steal!" but the fact that he steals derives from what that statement particularly means for him. The statement "do not steal!" is not connected to the person who steals. But the fact of stealing itself is definitely connected to the person. Therefore we face two meanings here: the meaning of the normative statement, and the meaning that statement particularly carries for somebody in particular. The statement is either anyone's or no one's. But the act is always someone's. A normative statement is not related to who I am. It is only related to an impersonally set meaning of words. Contrary to this, what a normative statement means for me defines who I am, because my particular reading of the meaning of that statement is my own individual reading.

These considerations are meant to clarify the role the notion of character can play in linking moral theory to aesthetic theory. Character offers a general normative framework within which moral assertions make sense at all. It is a framework of a broader normativity than any singular maxim which simply meets the requirement of the categorical imperative. Character indicates the horizon within which such a maxim is not just true in its harmonizing with the categorical imperative but it also defines the place (the meaning) of that maxim for the acting person. Hence the burden of freedom moral character carries: beyond the test of the categorical imperative, it specifies the individual sense of acting according to the categorical imperative. Denkungsart (conduct of thought) is the concept which does not just link the epistemologically and morally understood way of how one thinks, but as the ultimate maxim of options it is the concept which covers the freedom for judging otherwise. Hence Denkungsart - as long it also shapes action - is also a link in the direction of judgments of taste and as such it links epistemology, morality and aesthetics – and also politics.

CONCLUSION

Kant’s philosophy is a philosophy of knowing ourselves rather than knowing the world. He warns us that it is semantically impossible to talk about the world if the world does not even appear in our discourse as a postulate, but he does not conclude any kind of empiricist statement from this. Therefore he approaches to reality with a permanent as if which offers a hypothetical character of his statements. Hence his epistemological, moral and aesthetic formalism which aims at specifying conditions rather than offering actual solutions. This is the reason why we don’t find final conclusions regarding the actual content of reality, good and beautiful. We find however the analysis of the way in which we approach to these questions. This a priori stance implies a de-contextualized manner of handling issues.
	In The Critique of Judgment the matter which bridges morality and aesthetics, good and beautiful and leads to the common thesis the book entails on thinking judging and acting is freedom. The link which establishes an identical role for freedom in both aesthetic and moral phenomena is the idea of self-imposed law - freedom as autonomy. The idea of autonomy is shared, both by moral actions and judgments of taste; it equally appears in the judgments aimed at the appraisal of aesthetic as well as of moral values. The central notion which establishes the impact Kant’s concept of freedom as autonomy has both upon his ethics and his aesthetics is the notion of disinterestedness.
	The common stance Kant, Schiller and Arendt undertake with regard to the relationship between aesthetics, morality and politics can only be grasped from what they share about the notion of judging. Accordingly, judging is a mere possibility; it is the mental attribute which always poses a cross-way to the one who finally takes an option. The moral burden of judging lies in its neutral openness toward any possible direction it can be driven to. This is the root of its genuine freedom. The implicit thesis Kant, Schiller and Arendt share on the nature of judging is that once we judge, we inevitably take a position – an attitude toward the rest of humanity. Individual judgments never occur in a world which is only inhabited by that one, single person, who actually judges. It is in this sense that every single act of judging is an implicit statement on how we share a common world with each other: judging is the intersecting moment of one’s own position regarding beautiful, good and right.
	The common philosophical standpoint of Kant, Schiller and Arendt is that both individual freedom and the freedom of societies constituted from free individuals can be reconstructed from the role taste plays in those societies, because contrary to judgments of fact as well as to moral judgments, only judgments of taste are related to both individual options and to the recognition of the fact of the presence of others who also make their own individual judgments. The vision shared by Kant, Schiller and Arendt: the utopia of the moral improvement of humanity. What they all consider to be at stake is the responsibility of what is innate: the moral burden of the cognitive chance to think, judge and act.

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