While the argument of this book is restricted to showing the way in which cognitive judgement is dependent on a process of cooperation that is only explicitly expressed in aesthetic judgement, I believe the picture of aesthetics that has emerged has a much wider significance. Reason in general is a plural not a unitary process, for we need to think with and against our own thought, in addition to recognising the limitations of thinking. Any logic that views itself as selfcontained, as not open to another position that could introduce a new and necessary perspective, risks falling into dogmatism. Thinking that is aware of its own relational status is open to what stands outside itself. The relation in which aesthetic judgement stands to an aesthetic object is exemplary for the openness of thinking that is required in cognitive, moral and political thinking. In this chapter I look ahead to this wider perspective, while drawing to a conclusion the interpretation of Kant that I have developed in previous chapters.

I argued in the previous chapter that aesthetic judgement provides an exemplary exhibition of a general purposiveness between our subjective capacities and the empirical world of objects. This aesthetic exhibition establishes the possibility of synthesis of an empirical concept with a given empirical intuition, necessary for any cognition whatsoever. In conclusion I now need to delineate more closely how exactly aesthetic judgement is exemplary of cognitive synthesis without counting as a species of the latter.