Immanuel Kant

In effect, the work of Kant's aesthetic philosophy revitalized notions of beauty, opening up the possibility of multiple coexisting aesthetic systems, united by the pan-human power or ability to make aesthetic judgments. Such a notion would have been foreign to Winckelmann (despite his own ultimate revitalization or historicization of his beloved Greek ideal) but Kant appears to have accepted this as a challenge to understanding the problem of the universality of the human capacity for aesthetic judgment. What distinguished Kant from Winckelmann was in the former's understanding of Enlightenment, which he linked to his 'aesthetic conception of the public sphere as an inter-subjective space of free discussion not mediated by a concept or a rule'.

At the same time that Kant's philosophy opened up the possibility of multiple aesthetic tastes, he also closely tied aesthetics to morality, of which he held that beauty was the symbol or analogue. Beautiful objects, he argued, arouse in us sensations that are analogous to the awareness we have in the mental state produced by moral judgments. In linking together aesthetics and ethics, Kant made it possible to imagine linking together degrees of genius and taste with the moral character of an artist or a viewer.