The aim of this chapter is to show how objects of beauty in the world indirectly exhibit the supersensible “without,” that is, the Idea of the highest good. This I take is the meaning of Kant’s claim that beauty is a “symbol of morality.” The fact that the experience of beauty serves as a sign that the world may be hospitable for the realization of the highest good can have a merely psychological significance, namely, that of maintaining the existent moral disposition. Yet, the significance of this sign can move beyond its merely psychological effects insofar as it reinforces the view that the final end must be the end of nature. The experience of beauty renders the Idea of the highest good objectively real in a special way, which adds the cognitive dimension to aesthetic experience that is best explained in proximity to Kant’s notion of practical cognition.

This chapter clarifies how for Kant conforming our desire for happiness to the demands of morality leads to moral Glaube and the postulates of God’s existence and the soul’s immortality. I show that Kant’s conception of moral Glaube can be approached from both an anti-realist and a realist perspective. According to the former, moral Glaube is speculative reason’s “presupposition” of the objects of these Ideas in order to either avoid its own inner contradictions or to help one maintain one’s moral disposition. It is anti-realist in spirit because the assumptions that reason makes may have nothing to do with how things are in reality. However, if closer attention is paid to Kant’s neglected notion of practical cognition additional evidence becomes available for supporting an understanding of Kant as a realist with respect to moral Glaube and for explaining why the anti-realist interpretations do not adequately capture Kant’s view.

The novelty in Kant’s conception of the highest good in the third Critique is not limited to its form, namely, that of an ethical community. Kant refers to his earlier conception of the highest good as having a reality only insofar as it is a necessary object for us. However, in the third Critique, the highest good must be also the end of nature. I argue in this chapter that it is the role of reflective judgment to represent nature as aiming toward the realization of the highest good in the world, so that it is no longer sufficient that we intellectually “conceive” its possibility but that we can also perceive it as furthered by nature. In this way, the highest good and the Idea of God as the object of moral Glaube receive a special kind of realism, which I will refer to as “moral image realism” (MIR).