There was considerable debate about the relationship between beauty and utility in eighteenth-century aesthetic theories from Shaftesbury to Kant. But nobody gave a plausible account of this relationship until Kant, and even he failed to give an extensive statement of the key premise on which his solution to this puzzle rests, or even an explicit statement of his solution, at least until many sections after he had first presented his solution. In this essay, I will try to make Kant's analysis of the relationship between beauty and utility clear and expose the philosophical assumption on which his solution rests.

The debate about beauty and utility began with the third Earl of Shaftesbury. In a well-known passage of The Moralists, Shaftesbury's spokesman Theocles argues that “the property or possession” of the object of a vista, such as a vale or an orchard, is not necessary for “the enjoyment of the prospect,” and then continues to press his interlocutor Philocles: