7 - The Interest of the Reflecting Power of Judgment and the Deduction of Judgments of Taste

Summary

Satisfaction of the a priori principle(s) of the faculty of judgment by a representation is the means for achieving the faculty’s interest. In concept application and formation, this interest is the harmony of imagination and understanding. Since the application of available concepts is not accompanied by pleasure, such ‘unfree harmony’ must be distinguished from the ‘free harmony’ in concept formation and taste. The imagination apprehends a manifold and is here free because it is not guided by a concept; in concept formation, however, it is still bound to the empirically given manifold, while in taste it is ‘productively free’, it invents its own forms. When such freely invented forms agree with the given forms of conceptualized objects, we register this in the pleasure of taste. This revised view of the ‘free play’ of the faculties leads to a novel interpretation both of the ‘deduction of judgments of taste’, and of the relation of the two versions of the principle of judgment.