  As noted earlier, Herder’s antipathy to Kant’s central notion of the free play of our cognitive powers is evident from the outset of Kalligone. In his Preface, Herder writes bitterly that “the self-named only possible philosophy” has transformed the arts “into a short or long, boring apelike play” (Kalligone, p.  648). In the body of the text, Herder argues both generally that all response to objects, feeling and sentiment as well as judgment, is accompanied with a concept of the object. He also argues that, more specifically, our pleasure in beautiful objects is always a pleasure in a sensed or felt recognition of their adaptation to their environment, whether natural or artificial, that is impossible without the application of a concept to the object. Herder launches his general attack immediately following his critique of Kant’s first moment. Kant’s second moment, Herder says, asserts that the “beautiful is what pleases without a concept,” and the third speaks of a “Form of purposiveness without representation of an end.” In Herder’s view, however, “ [t]hat something could please without a concept, and indeed please universally, is contrary to nature and experience” (Kalligone, p. 675). Depending on how we take this claim, of course, Herder may not be saying anything with which Kant would disagree: Kant more than anyone else argues that all experience of an object requires consciousness of a concept as well as of empirical intuitions of that object, the matter of which is sensation. But he also holds that we could have a feeling of pleasure in an object without considering what concepts apply to it, and on the basis of such a feeling make the judgment that it is beautiful. Herder is specifically rejecting that claim. On what basis does he do so?