Beauty, Disinterested Pleasure, and Universal Communicability: Kant's Response to Burke

Although Kant (wrongly) holds that the universal communicability of aesthetic judgments logically follows from the disinterested character of the pleasure upon which they are based, Kant's emphasis on the a priori validity of judgments of beauty can be viewed as a rebuttal of the kind of empiricist arguments that Burke offers to justify the social nature of the experience of beauty. I argue that the requirement of universal communicability is not a mere addition to the requirement of universal validity and is far more relevant to an adequate characterisation of the beautiful than has customarily been assumed. I further argue that the 'exemplary necessity' of pure judgments of taste, if understood correctly, reveals beauty's primordial social significance, enabling us to become alive to a profound universal solidarity among aesthetic subjects.