Regulae II

Volume II of Regulae treated beauty as a meeting between an attuned aesthetic subject and an artwork’s staged properties, made possible at the transcendental level by the fact of feeling and, at the empirical level, by the discipline of soft observation leading to the aesthetic attitude. It began by arguing that the fact of feeling was the aesthetic analogue of the factum rationis : an irreducible, non-deducible condition of possibility for experiences of beauty that grounded the claim to the shared validity of judgments of taste without appealing to a transcendent ontology. On this critical and transcendental footing, it articulated a ladder of beauty, from the pleasant through satisfaction, exquisiteness, excellence, and exemplarity up to the limit-experience of sublimity, and linked each rung to specific ways in which the aesthetic subject could be addressed and transformed by an aesthetic object. It showed how these rungs were actualized over time by the temporal hubs of gasp, glow, and afterglow, in which first contact, sustained engagement, and retrospective clarification each played a distinct role in the aesthetic process. On this basis, it introduced ten harmonic keys that mapped the main ways in which the transcendental aesthetic subject and the transcendental aesthetic object could be practically harmonized without collapsing the dyad, ranging from objective and subjective art to social, revolutionary, total art, and beyond. These keys functioned as hyper-concepts within critical aesthetics : these maxims allowed concrete works to be classified, compared, and criticized as more or less successful instantiations of specific harmonizations, while remaining immanent to lived aesthetic experience. This apparatus was tested in detailed readings of exemplary works in painting, sculpture, and classical music, using the ladder of beauty, the temporal hubs, and the ten harmonic keys to argue for judgments of excellence and exemplarity. In doing so, it maintained the distinction between critical aesthetics and immanent metaphysics : beauty was treated as a practice of giving and asking for reasons about what ought to be found beautiful within the horizon of lived experience, grounded in the fact of feeling and in the principles and norms of critical aesthetics, without appeal to a transcendent realm.