A power of judgment that is to be dialectical must first of all be rationalistic, i.e., its judgments must lay claim to universality, and indeed do so a priori, for the dialectic consists in the opposition of such judgments. Hence the incompatibility of aesthetic judgments of sense (about the agreeable and the disagreeable) is not dialectical. Even the conflict between judgments of taste, insofar as each person appeals merely to his own taste, does not constitute a dialectic of taste, since no one has any thought of making his own judgment into a universal rule. Thus there remains no other concept of a dialectic that could apply to taste except that of a dialectic of the critique of taste (not of taste itself) with regard to its principles: namely, where mutually conflicting concepts of the basis of the possibility of judgments of taste naturally and unavoidably emerge. A transcendental critique of taste will thus contain a part that can bear the name of a dialectic of the aesthetic power of judgment only if there is an antinomy of the principles of this faculty, which makes its lawfulness and hence also its inner possibility doubtful.

Representation of the antinomy of taste.

The first commonplace of taste is contained in the proposition by means of which everyone who lacks taste thinks to defend himself against criticism: Everyone has his own taste. That amounts to saying that the determining ground of this judgment is merely subjective (gratification or pain), and the judgment has no right to the necessary assent of others.