menon of beauty? What gives validity to our aesthetic judgments? The Critique of Practical Reason had granted a glimpse into the realm of freedom where reason holds sway in the role of moral legislator. The dualism of the phenomenal world on the one hand and the noumenal world on the other, required a form of mediation, and beauty as analyzed in the first part of the Critique of Judgment furnished the connecting link. Through the harmonious design of a shell found at the beach, or a melodious sequence of sounds the effectiveness or reason in the phenomenal world is borne in upon the mind which intuitively recognizes in these forms a purposeiveness. This recognition gives a peculiar pleasure at the harmonious interplay of our cognitive faculties and it expresses itself in a judgment which, at the time was incapable of demonstration, but however, claimed universal validity. Friedrich Schiller took up and transformed Kants idea of an interplay of faculties in his Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man. Schiller said that Mans inner life was composed of two basic drives : sensuous instinct and formal instinct. Those two forces can only attain balance through a third force : the play-impulse which constitutes beauty and art. Hence art appeared to him an indispensable instrument for fashioning man into the kind of harmonious personality which he admired in Kant. Friedrich Schlegel, one of the representatives of Christian idealism, combined the idea of play with another element of Kants , the notion of freedom, interpreting the latter as the freedom of the creative mind to rise by means of play above the limitations imposed by fixed form. Shclegels theories were shared by Friedrich von Hardenberg, who then took them a few steps further. He claimed that poetry, philosophy, and life came to be fused in the ecstatic vision of a magic universe. A curious reversal of the preceding development took place. Thr...
