1. Alix Cohen makes a related point, showing that Kant thinks, in the Observations, that sympathy and honor ensure the survival of the human species. See Alix Cohen, “Kant’s ‘Curious Catalogue of Human Frailties’ and the Great Portrait of Nature,” in Kant’s “Observations” and “Remarks”: A Critical Guide, ed. Susan Meld Shell and Richard Velkley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 144–62.
2. On this point, see Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 16–19. Kant seems to have believed that there were no a priori principles of taste even up to the Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781. There, he maintains that “the putative rules or criteria [of taste] are merely empirical as far as their sources are concerned, and can therefore never serve as a priori rules according to which our judgment of taste must be directed, rather the latter constitutes the genuine touchstone of the correctness of the former” (A21n/B35n). To be clear, although Kant comes to believe in the Critique of the Power of Judgment that we can justify judgments of taste by reference to an a priori principle, he also claims that this principle is accessible only through feeling. So, Kant would still consider what passed for “rules or criteria of taste” in the aesthetics textbooks of the time as nothing more than empirical generalizations, which in the best case could be based on universally valid judgments of taste. See, for example, Kant’s dismissal of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s and Charles Batteux’s attempts to “prove” the beauty of an object (CJ 5:284).
3. For a more detailed analysis of Kant’s claim that taste must be devoid of all interest, see Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 167–206; and Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 48–130.
4. This point has been discussed in detail by many commentators. See, for example, Klaus Düsing, “Beauty as the Transition from Nature to Freedom in Kant’s Critique of Judgment,” Noûs 24, no. 1 (March 1990): 84. G. Felicitas Munzel also discusses the relationship between aesthetic and moral education. See G. Felicitas Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character: The “Critical” Link of Morality, Anthropology, and Reflective Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 296–313. Salim Kemal also provides a detailed discussion of the role that fine art in particular plays in facilitating our transition to morality. He explains that the purpose of developing one’s taste is to establish a unity or balance between reason and feeling in an individual human for the sake of attaining the highest good.
5. See Salim Kemal, Kant and Fine Art: An Essay on Kant and the Philosophy of Fine Art and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 84–98. See also Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom, 34–35.