Chapter 3 examines Kant’s account of the Ideal of Beauty. Contrary to most interpretations, it takes Kant at his word that the Ideal forms the measure of the judgment of taste in providing the original pattern that all other beautiful things follow. It further argues that the content of what Kant describes in the Ideal is nothing other than life. Life, for Kant, is the unthinkable causal union between force and matter, freedom and nature. All judgments of taste, then, refer us to such a unity, and thus to an outside of the critical system. Nevertheless, in suggesting the possibility of such a union, the beautiful is able to serve as a transition and likely ground of the two domains of freedom and nature.