We experience a beautiful object as having a kind of unity ordinarily found by subsuming objects under determinate concepts, but independently of any such subsumption.

Starting from the claim that Francis Hutcheson had made in 1725 and Mendelssohn reintroduced in 1785, Kant begins his analysis of the judgment of taste, that is, our claim that a particular object is beautiful, from the premise that our pleasure in a beautiful object occurs independently of any interest in the existence of the object as physiologically agreeable (CPJ, §3, 5:205–7) or as good for some purpose expressed by a determinate concept of utility or morality (CPJ, §4, 5:207–9). But neithe