experiences, or an identification of its actual instances is being
attempted.4 The first strategy sacrifices a core item of our
aesthetic discourse, whereas the second inevitably forces us to
acknowledge, first, that an identification of empirical,
contingent aesthetic experiences will not help advancing a
theoretical, general account of aesthetic evaluation, and
secondly, that no satisfactory identification of empirical
aesthetic experiences will even be possible, as none of its
conditions will be necessary and sufficient at the same time.
Obviously, the notion is hard to apprehend. Now what I think is
wrong with these two strategies is that they do not distinguish
between our actual experiences and the use to which we put them in
grounding our judgements in them. In what follows I shall not
explicitly criticize these two strategies but propose instead an
interpretation of Kant's aesthetic theory that sustains a third
strategy that does not suffer from their disadvantages.5 It will
be up to subsequent investigation to establish if and how this
third strategy fits in with the more general, currently made
distinction between contents and justificatory grounds of
aesthetic judgements, or with Wiggins' characterization of
aesthetic evaluation. What I am interested in here is to account
for the functionality of the notion of aesthetic experience within
a specific region of aesthetic discourse, in ways which Kant seems
to have suggested to us.
According to Kant then, judgements of taste, which make up the
core of aesthetic discourse merely have as their determining
ground the pleasure we feel about the subjective finality of our
aesthetic experience. Nevertheless they involve a claim to
universal validity, which suggests a standard of taste. Now if we
can make these two points come together and find the resultant
theory a plausible one, we may have found a way out of the dilemma
put before us by the two unfortunate strategies. This is what I
shall do: first, I shall present an interpretation of Kant's
Critique of Judgement showing that Kant legitimizes aesthetic
discourse with the specific awareness of the communicability of
our determinations of the object, which shows forth from our
feeling of subjective finality; with an awareness, i.e., and not
merely with the communicability that is its subject matter.
Discourse on aesthetic excellence is ultimately founded upon our
pleasant, reflective acknowledgement of a common sense:
description of natural properties is insufficient fuel for
evaluation if it remains without a certain experiential
supplement.6 Wiggins might take this as an illustration of his
account, and I do not necessarily disagree. However, I do think
that normally we endorse a more substantial notion of the
experience of aesthetic excellence than is offered in Wiggins'
idea of a process of thinking, and talking about natural
properties and our perceptions of and responses to them, which
leads to the point of some Aha-Erlebnis where the penny drops and
