 Politics was not the only sphere in which Cohen thought philosophy must engage with culture. In the third part of his System of Philosophy, the Aesthetics of Pure Feeling (1912), he argued that critical philosophy could not leave art without a philosophical foundation (Cohen 1982 [1912], 1.4). In his aesthetics, Cohen sought to avoid Schelling and Hegel’s view that art is an expression of ideas that can be distilled from it and expressed in purely conceptual terms. Likewise, Cohen rejected Helmholtz’s physiological approach to aesthetics, exemplified by his physiological and experimental investigation of tone-perception in music. However, in Cohen’s theory of knowledge and ethics, he had avoided these approaches by adhering to the transcendental method—that is, by starting with a “fact” of (natural or juridical) science and then articulating the a priori, universal laws that constitute that science’s object. But for Cohen, there is no “science of art.” Thus for Cohen, a philosophical aesthetics must begin with only the “fact” that art is central to culture (Poma 1997, Ch. 7; Guyer 2008).