No One Can Judge for You

Someone whose taste you trust tells you a poem is beautiful, and you nod. Immanuel Kant thinks nothing has happened yet. A proof can be handed over, a moral argument can be talked through, but a judgment of beauty is one you have to make from your own pleasure, and Paul Guyer says this is autonomy again, the same word that runs Kant's whole philosophy. There is a young poet who will not hear his critics, a teacher who can only set the table, and then the cathedrals: if a church must have a cruciform plan, where does the beauty get in? Guyer has an answer close to home.