Feeling and judgment in Kant: Aesthetic judgment, practical judgment and the creation of beauty in art

In the Critique of Judgment Kant claims that judgments of taste are necessary not only for the evaluation of art, but also for its creation. If we take this claim seriously, its consequences lead us to a re-examination of the role of feeling in judgment in Kant's work.;Judgments of taste have two components, an object in intuition that is judged and the "state" of the judging subject. This state manifests as a feeling of pleasure or displeasure. A judgment of taste "compares" the object in intuition with the felt state to which it gives rise. There has been much debate about how to interpret feeling's role in this judgment. Is it a "raw feel" interpreted by means of the context in which it arises, or does it have its own intentionality? I argue that judgments of taste must have a complex intentionality to guide the creation of art. One must be aware of a relationship between the object in intuition and of one's own "state" via feeling, and a 'raw feel' is incapable of supporting this. But this interpretation seems to conflict with Kant's claim that feeling is purely subjective and cannot be a source of knowledge.;I show that Kant's claims about the pure subjectivity of feeling are consistent with an account of intentionality not bound to objects of possible knowledge, and can support an account of judgment under conditions of indeterminacy, where discursive knowledge is not possible. This is possible because the "state" one is aware of in feeling is not passive; it is the state of one's mental (and physical) activity vis a vis an object. Pleasure for example, is the feeling of one's activity "furthered," not mere passive enjoyment.;The pure subjectivity of feeling is not a problem for Kant's account of aesthetic judgment. It is a necessary part of it: Judgments about beauty necessarily take place under conditions of indeterminacy. There is no public criterion for correctness in particular judgments about beauty. This is for Kant the power of beauty. It is in the individual case inexhaustible---our encounter with it, and the conversation it engenders, never concludes.