The aim of this essay is to identify some peculiar aspects of Kant's treatment of aesthetic sentiment, showing his tensions and balances and also his fecundity to the actual philosophical debate concerning aesthetic problems. I try to demonstrate that Kant's meditation represents a singular moment of instable equilibrium between two different paradigms of aesthetic thought: one, that turns on the category of taste (Geschmack), understood as an aesthetic common sense that invokes a social and communitarian preoccupation, the other, that turns on the category of genius (Genie) and assumes the presupposition of the absolute character of the individual subjectivity as source of creativity; one, that rehabilitate the human sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) and the sensible qualities of objects as contemplated or appreciated by the subject, the other, based on the idea of inner sentiment (Gefühl), considered as something inalienable and as the absolutely subjective dimension of individual experience.
Aesthetic experience; Kant's Aesthetics; Genius; Sensibility; Sentiment; Taste