Kant and Beauty 3

Judgments of beauty have, or make a claim to, “universality” or “universal validity.” That is, in making a judgment of beauty about an object, one takes it that everyone else who perceives the object ought also to judge it to be beautiful, and, relatedly, to share one's pleasure in it. But the universality is not “based on concepts.” That is, one's claim to agreement does not rest on the subsumption of the object under a concept. Relatedly, judgments of beauty cannot, despite their universal validity, be proved: there are no rules by which someone can be compelled to judge that something is beautiful. The fact that judgments of beauty are universally valid constitutes a further feature (in addition to the disinterestedness of the pleasure on which they are based) distinguishing them from judgments of agreeable. For in claiming simply that one likes something, one does not claim that everyone else ought to like it too. But the fact that their universal validity is not based on concepts distinguishes judgments of beauty from non-evaluative cognitive judgments and judgments of the good, both of which make a claim to universal validity that is based on concepts.

Emmanuel Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Second Moment (§§2-9)