SS 34. An objective principle of taste is not possible

A principle of taste would mean a fundamental premiss under the condition of which one might subsume the concept of an object, and then, by a syllogism, draw the inference that it is beautiful. That, however, is absolutely impossible. For I must feel the pleasure immediately in the representation of the object, and I cannot be talked into it by any grounds of proof. Thus although critics, as Hume says, are able to reason more plausibly than cooks, they must still share the same fate. For the determining ground of their judgement they are not able to look to the force of demonstrations, but only to the reflection of the subject upon his own state (of pleasure or displeasure), to the exclusion of precepts and rules.

There is, however, a matter upon which it is competent for critics to exercise their subtlety, and upon which they ought to do so, so long as it tends to the rectification and extension of our judgements of taste. But that matter is not one of exhibiting the determining ground of aesthetic judgements of this kind in a universally applicable formula- which is impossible. Rather is it the investigation of the faculties of cognition and their function in these judgements, and the illustration, by the analysis of examples, of their mutual subjective finality, the form of which in a given representation has been shown above to constitute the beauty of their object. Hence with regard to the representation whereby an object is given, the critique of taste itself is only subjective; viz., it is the art or science of reducing the mutual relation of the understanding and the imagination in the given representation (without reference to antecedent sensation or concept), consequently their accordance or discordance, to rules, and of determining them with regard to their conditions. It is art if it only illustrates this by examples; it is science if it deduces the possibility of such an estimate from the nature of these faculties as faculties of knowledge in general. It is only with the latter, as transcendental critique, that we have here any concern. Its proper scope is the development and justification of the subjective principle of taste, as an a priori principle of judgement. As an art, critique merely looks to the physiological (here psychological) and, consequently, empirical rules, according to which in actual fact taste proceeds (passing by the question of their possibility) and seeks to apply them in estimating its objects. The latter critique criticizes the products of fine art, just as the former does the faculty of estimating them.