In the following pages, I will address the relationship between Jewish thought and aesthetics by bringing Joseph Soloveitchik into conversation with Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Judgment remains an imposing monument in the history of philosophical aesthetics. While Buber and Rosenzweig may have been more accomplished aesthetes, Soloveitchik's aesthetic proves closer to Kant's own. In particular, I draw upon the latter's distinction between the beautiful and the sublime and the notion of a form of indeterminate purposiveness without determinate purpose. I will relate these three figures to Soloveitcchik's understanding of halakhah and to the ideal of performing commandments for their own sake (li-shemah). The model of mitzvah advanced by this comparison is quintessentially modern: an autonomous, self-contained, formal system that does not (immediately) point to extraneous goods, such as spiritual enlightenment, personal morality, or social ethics. The good presupposed by this system proves first and foremost “aesthetic.” That is, immanent to the system. Supererogatory goods enter into the picture only afterward as second-order effects.
The conclusion of the deduction of taste in the dialectic of the power of judgment aesthetic in Kant
