If some of our knowledge cannot be articulated, how does it make itself manifest? It will not surprise anyone who has followed the argument of this book up to now that there are things that we can do with knowledge besides talking about it. Millikan, as we saw, used his knowledge of experimentation and of professional discourse to guide his exemplary investigations of the charge of the electron. Neither was something he made explicit; I doubt that he (or anyone) could have. No practitioner who looked at Millikan’s work found any basis for these accusations, because their training endowed them with a knowledge only available to practitioners. They all made effective use of this knowledge, despite not being able to articulate its content. That kind of knowledge manifests itself not in the form of beliefs, but rather in the scholar’s sense of how things seem.

The aim of this chapter is to show how objects of beauty in the world indirectly exhibit the supersensible “without,” that is, the Idea of the highest good. This I take is the meaning of Kant’s claim that beauty is a “symbol of morality.” The fact that the experience of beauty serves as a sign that the world may be hospitable for the realization of the highest good can have a merely psychological significance, namely, that of maintaining the existent moral disposition. Yet, the significance of this sign can move beyond its merely psychological effects insofar as it reinforces the view that the final end must be the end of nature. The experience of beauty renders the Idea of the highest good objectively real in a special way, which adds the cognitive dimension to aesthetic experience that is best explained in proximity to Kant’s notion of practical cognition.

This chapter demonstrates that fundamental to the free harmony of the faculties is reflection understood as “an action of the power of imagination” and not as “the logical actus of the understanding.” The imagination, following its own law, provides, as it were, a schema of a universal that goes over and above the formal conditions of the possibility of empirical cognition while still being consistent with the latter. The free harmony of the faculties in which neither faculty is determining nor determined by the other gives us license for an indirect or analogical exhibition of the “supersensible substrate” of freedom, or what I call is the supersensible “within,” that is, the soul. Pure aesthetic pleasure, therefore, helps us close the gap between our phenomenal and our supersensible nature insofar as it intimates a unifying supersensible ground of our phenomenal nature, of our different inclinations and their anticipated satisfactions.

The book’s Afterword turns from style to aesthetic judgment, considering how aesthetic judgments do not simply serve to hierarchize styles or render verdicts of approvement or opprobrium. Rather, aesthetic judgments are what allow us to see styles as styles; they are subjective projections on objective forms of aesthetic coherence. It is such interplay between the subjective and the objective that makes both style and judgment into important forms of humanistic knowledge.

Cavell proposed that the ordinary language philosopher’s appeals to “what we say when” are to be modeled on aesthetic judgments in Kant’s sense. Both judgments express what Kant called “a universal voice.” However, both also share another feature that stands in tension with their universal purport in being open to seemingly intractable disagreement. Cavell’s insistence – following Kant – that there are judgments with such a logical form is significant, for the idea that there are judgments with this logical form cuts against a prevailing assumption: if a judgment does not enjoy the objectivity of a theoretical judgment, its content must be understood to be constrained by, or be an expression of, psychological or sociological fact.

These claims are essentially first-personal, not transferrable by testimony, are claims“in which” one’s community with others, or lack thereof, can be established, as opposed to claims that are made “about” a community, whether aesthetic or linguistic, from a third-person, anthropological point of view. Blindness to the existence of judgments with this pair of logical features is a form of psychologism about judgment, a failure fully to recognize the irreducibility of the first person, in both its singular and plural forms, in our relation to the world.

In "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy" Cavell draws together Wittgenstein’s philosophical procedures and the grammar of aesthetic judgment as Kant articulates it in the "Third Critique." Cavell primarily focuses on the universal voice. But there is an internal relation between the four different moments, and in particular, I would argue, between the second and the fourth, in which Kant shows aesthetic judgment to presuppose a common sense.

The relation between the universal voice and common sense is articulated in terms of a polarity of expression and ground. The expressive pole in aesthetic judgment is most evident in acts of criticism of art in which, judging with a universal voice, one takes oneself to be representative. But it is equally important that this expression be of a natural ground that underlies our common existence in language. The ground we stand on in judging is not a position, but rather a form of life in common. I end my chapter with an analysis of Cavell’s surprising turn to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to illuminate this recognition of a ground of attunement, a common world that can be called my world, in and through our judgments of art.