  We may now turn to the two main topics of Herder’s criticism, namely Kant’s theory of the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment and of his doctrine of the purposeless play of imagination and understanding as the basis of such judgment. Herder had already expressed doubt about disinterestedness as a fundamental aesthetic category in his polemic with Riedel in the fourth Grove, where he had rejected Riedel’s definition of the beautiful as “that which can please without an interested aim [interessierte Absicht] and which also can please if we do not possess it” (“Fourth Grove,” p. 291). At that time, however, Herder’s objection seemed to be only that the concept of disinterestedness is not “original,” that is, that disinterestedness by itself cannot explain our pleasure in the beautiful and thus could at best be a consequence of some more fundamental explanation of beauty. In Kalligone, however, he argues much more broadly that our pleasure in beauty is not disinterested, but rather that it is intimately connected with our most fundamental interest, our interest in life itself. He does this by rejecting Kant’s rigid distinction between the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good, arguing that all of these notions are intimately connected and that they all reflect our fundamental interest in enjoying a harmonious, well-adapted life.