  Kant’s conception of an intellectual interest in the beautiful does not seem entirely remote from Herder’s view that our sense of well-being in an object is accompanied with a corresponding sense of our own well-being, although there are two key differences. For one, Herder insists upon a recognition of an objective well-being to which our subjective feeling of well-being is a response, while for Kant well-being is always subjective, that is, our own, and the satisfaction of our aesthetic aims and of our moral aims may be parallel, but are both subjective. Our aesthetic pleasure in natural beauty is a sign of the possibility of our moral well-being in nature, not a response to a harmony in nature that has nothing to do with us. Second, Kant clearly wants to keep the connection between the satisfaction of our aesthetic aims and the satisfaction of our moral interests separate although connected, thus not collapsing aesthetic pleasure into moral satisfaction. Further, Kant seems to suggest that a sound moral interest in nature’s amenability to our objectives is a condition of the intellectual but aesthetic interest in the existence of (natural) beauty. From Herder’s point of view, that might seem to be an excessive moralization of an interest in the beautiful that should be entirely natural, although from Kant’s point of view Herder’s insistence on the continuity of the beautiful and the good might actually run the risk of an excessive moralization of aesthetic experience. So no doubt there are differences between them, but it is misleading of Herder to suggest that Kant simply fails to recognize that we have a real attachment to the interest in the beautiful. Kant did recognize that, but wanted to keep that attachment somewhat complicated and indirect in order to avoid the risk of an excessive moralization of the aesthetic but at the same time also avoid the risk of an excessive aestheticization of the moral.