Nature and Culture Revisited: Pragmatizing Free vs Adherent Beauty in Kant

Beauty, in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, is the object of a judgment grounded solely upon the subjects’ feeling of pleasure, which, however, claims universal validity. In this paper I begin with an interpretation of such pleasure-based subjective universality as the most emblematic form of the human capacity for orientation in the realm of the contingent (1) and I then pursue this interpretation through Kant’s distinction between «free» and «adherent» beauty (2). Afterward, I develop this distinction in the direction of a pragmatist, deflationary understanding of the nature/culture divide (3), instantiating and substantiating it in the conclusion through a brief discussion of «pleasure gardens» in Kant (4).