Kant's Regulative Principle of Aesthetic Excellence:
The Ideal Aesthetic Experience
By Rob van Gerwen
Dept. of Philosophy, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Introduction
It is rather intriguing that we will often try to persuade people
of what we find beautiful, even though we do not believe that they
may subsequently base their judgement of taste on our testimony.
Typically, we think that the experience of beauty is such that we
cannot leave it to others to be had. Moreover, we are often aware
of the contingency of our own judgements' foundation in our own
experience. Nevertheless, we do think that certain aesthetic,
evaluative conceptions do relate to specific experiences in a non-
trivial way, especially that of aesthetic excellence. Now the
discussion within analytical aesthetics concerning the question of
what kinds of truth values adhere to aesthetic judgements of
various kinds, has evident bearing on the problem of aesthetic
experience's relevance for evaluation, because we may in the end
be better off evading the problem altogether by treating aesthetic
values in objectivist ways, as natural properties, or as reducible
to such properties, descriptions of which will then be true or
false.1 However, I think that contrary to such an evasive account
we would do better in elaborating the subjectivism that David
Wiggins has defended, which does not deny the role played by
objective properties, but which neither neglects the subjective
import. He claims that aesthetic values are somehow a kind of
