Satisfaction of the a priori principle(s) of the faculty of judgment by a representation is the means for achieving the faculty’s interest. In concept application and formation, this interest is the harmony of imagination and understanding. Since the application of available concepts is not accompanied by pleasure, such ‘unfree harmony’ must be distinguished from the ‘free harmony’ in concept formation and taste. The imagination apprehends a manifold and is here free because it is not guided by a concept; in concept formation, however, it is still bound to the empirically given manifold, while in taste it is ‘productively free’, it invents its own forms. When such freely invented forms agree with the given forms of conceptualized objects, we register this in the pleasure of taste. This revised view of the ‘free play’ of the faculties leads to a novel interpretation both of the ‘deduction of judgments of taste’, and of the relation of the two versions of the principle of judgment.

Chapter 7 explores ugliness and disgust (Ekel). In providing an overview of the third Critique position, the chapter argues that there cannot be pure aesthetic judgments of the ugly. In his early accounts, Kant views the responses to ugliness and disgust as unpleasant and therefore as (what Kant would call) “interested.” He typically discusses ugliness and disgust in connection with a teleological perspective of the whole of nature and of natural purposes. The ugly is disagreeable, since it is dysfunctional or asymmetrical (or both). A version of this view carries over into the third Critique. The ugly, if and when it is judged by the principle of nature’s purposiveness, would be contrapurposive and therefore disagreeable.