Art and Experience, Utrecht, © 1996. All rights reserved

Free play of the cognitive faculties. Kant uses this notion to understand aesthetic experience in as far as it legitimates our aesthetic judgements. In practice, when we are appreciating some work of art, our cognitive faculties will be at free play--guided by the imagination. However, in aesthetic arguments no reference to one's having gone through the requisite experience is going to prove a thing's beauty. Because of this, the free play, though empirically real, must be understood as transcendentally ideal--in Kant's terminology. As an argument in aesthetic discourse the aesthetic experience is merely a regulative ideal: all persons involved in such a discussion accept its regulative role (or else they wouldn't be taking part in an aesthetic argument), but no-one will actually want to appeal to it. Cf. Dempster, Savile, subjectivism, aesthetic evaluation, and aesthetic ideas. (IV:4, V:1).