 The non-determining character of aesthetic feeling is related to the distinctive kind of normativity that characterizes artistic production and aesthetic appreciation. An expression borrowed from Kant is fitting here: on the romantic picture, both artistic production and aesthetic appreciation are “lawful without a law”. Both are the source of their own normativity, without being subject to any external law. Given that, they are appropriate for approximating the Absolute insofar as this approximation must be non-determining (applying no conditions), but normatively governed rather than arbitrary.