 What is the relation between the pleasure which is felt in an object experienced as beautiful, and the judgment that the object is beautiful, that is, the judgment of taste? Kant describes the judgment of taste as “based on” a feeling of pleasure, and as claiming that everyone ought to share the subject’s feeling of pleasure, or, as he puts it, as claiming the “universal communicability” of the pleasure. This seems to imply that the pleasure is distinct from the act of judging, and more specifically that the pleasure precedes the judging: we first feel pleasure, and then claim, perhaps based on characteristics of the pleasure (such as its disinterestedness), that the pleasure is universally communicable and hence that the object is beautiful. But in the crucial section §9 of the Critique of Judgment, Kant appears to reject that implication: rather than the pleasure preceding the judging, he says, the “merely subjective (aesthetic) judging of the object” both “precedes” and “is the ground of” the pleasure (218). Since §9 is specifically addressed to the issue “whether in a judgment of taste the feeling of pleasure precedes the judging of the object or the judging precedes the pleasure”, a problem whose answer is “the key to the critique of taste and hence deserves full attention” (216), commentators have taken very seriously the task of reconciling §9 with Kant’s other characterizations of the judgment of taste.