  Starting from the claim that Francis Hutcheson had made in 1725 and Mendelssohn reintroduced in 1785, Kant begins his analysis of the judgment of taste, that is, our claim that a particular object is beautiful, from the premise that our pleasure in a beautiful object occurs independently of any interest in the existence of the object as physiologically agreeable (CPJ, §3, 5:205–7) or as good for some purpose expressed by a determinate concept of utility or morality (CPJ, §4, 5:207–9). But neither does a judgment of taste does not express a merely idiosyncratic association of pleasure with an object. Rather, to call an object beautiful is to speak with a “universal voice,” to assert that the pleasure one takes in the object is one that should be felt by anyone who responds to the object, at least under ideal or optimal circumstances, even though “there can also be no rule in accordance with which someone could be compelled to acknowledge something as beautiful” (CPJ, §8, 5:216). How can one’s pleasure in an object be independent of its subsumption under any determinate concept and its satisfaction of any determinate interest and yet be valid for all who properly respond to the object? Kant’s answer is that although our pleasure in a beautiful object is not a response to its subsumption under a determinate concept, it is an expression of the free play of the cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding that such an object induces, and those cognitive faculties must in fact work the same way in everyone. His underlying idea is that we experience a beautiful object as having the kind of unity that we ordinarily find in objects by subsuming them under a determinate concept, but independently of any such subsumption. Because finding such unity is our ultimate cognitive aim, we take pleasure in this discovery, especially since the unity we find must appear contingent, as it were unexpected, if it is not linked to any determinate concept (see CPJ, Introduction VI, 5:186–7).  (This is not to say that we do not subsume an object we find beautiful under any determinate concepts at all; we must if we are even to identify the object of our pleasure and judgment of taste in any determinate way. Kant’s theory must rather be that when we find an object beautiful we experience it as having a degree of unity that cannot be explained by any of the determinate concepts under which we do subsume it). Kant thus appeals to the concept of free play, hinted at by Mendelssohn and developed further by Sulzer, to solve the problem of taste that was emphasized by British aestheticians such as Hutcheson and Hume, with whose works Kant was intimately familiar.