In his Critique of Judgment Kant makes powerful use of the notion of an ‘aesthetic idea’. This notion seems to me to be instructive, not just for the discipline of aesthetics, but for the way to proceed in philosophy more generally, since it gives us a hint about how to delineate meaning, about the limits and form of any attempt to do so.

Kant's notion seeks to capture a dynamic state of mind, such as is to be found in aesthetic experience, to capture not only its form, but also, and, in a way, much more interestingly, its dynamism. Philosophers usually do not see that meaning is really a dynamic structure of mind, and that it is revealed in a peculiarly intense way within aesthetic experience. In my view Kant makes a unique contribution to our understanding of both through his hesitant, exploratory account of ‘genius’, the faculty of producing ‘aesthetic ideas’, and its relation to aesthetic experience. R. K. Elliott (1973) describes it as ‘a state of intense psychic vitality’ and talks about how Kant effectively makes poetic evocativeness a criterion of success in art. (Indeed, for Kant, the expression of aesthetic ideas is, surprisingly, a criterion of natural beauty as well.) Again, the notion of poetic evocativeness can instruct us in how to deal philosophically with meaning. Meaning is not to be defined but evoked.