 Aesthetic ideas are imaginative representations that cannot be exhausted by any given concept—think of an abstract painting and of the multitude of things it could look like or symbolize. Aesthetic ideas are crucially involved in our experience of the beautiful, and Kant goes as far as to define beauty as the expression of aesthetic ideas (Kant 1790: §51). In his discussion of music, Kant states that the form of a composition—he explicitly mentions “harmony and melody”—expresses