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.

In this chapter, I argue that Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment in the third Critique, a conception according to which aesthetic judgment has its own a priori principle, left open the possibility for a pure aesthetic judgment of ugliness. This judgment however could not arise in response to a quality in the object of nature, but instead could only be limited to works of art. More specifically, the origin of ugliness as a pure aesthetic category for Kant is epistemic, that is, in the failure of the artist’s power of judgment, a failure of the artist to find the appropriate form or concept for the manifold content of her imagination. In the third Critique, Kant calls these works of art “original nonsense.” I conclude that, once limited to works of art, pure judgments of ugliness cannot represent a threat to Kant’s more general project of moral teleology.

Chapter 4 argues that the sensus communis forms the keystone of Kant’s critical system. Kant develops his idea of the sensus communis as a response to the quid juris of the judgment of taste – by what right may I claim that this is beautiful? As a judgment made out in the territory, without a law, a judgment of taste is always in question. Kant’s development of the sensus communis is shown to rely on two senses of its historical usage, epistemological and social. Both of these uses of the term are developed in response to skepticism. Kant’s own use of the term, which refers to a sense that we can communicate with all other human beings, discloses to us that all human beings share a way of having the world, and, too, that we share a world in common. It thus grounds the universal character of both cognition and moral life.