A comment on Dietmar Heidemann’s account on Kant’s Non-Conceptual Aesthetics: Against an active understanding

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to an ongoing and controversial debate about non-conceptuality in Kantian aesthetics. It is a replica on a paper of Dietmar Heidemann in  Con-Textos Kantianos  N.° 12 , to which I do consent, but I’d like to give some additional  comments on a specific issue: I show in this paper that the problem about whether or not the understanding contributes to aesthetic  judgment can be elucidated by means of a revaluation of the imagination’s capacity of formal  representation and the subsuming activity of the power of reflective judgment. I argue that the understanding is considered by the power of reflective judgment merely in his lawfulness in order to find a universal under which the  imagination’s  particular, the formal representation of the beautiful shape, can be subsumed.