In his lucid and interesting paper, Joseph Cannon argues that Kant's theory of artistic genius in §§46–50 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment undermines his claim in §42 that only an ‘intellectual’ interest in natural beauty, not an interest in artistic beauty, is a ‘mark of a good soul’, because it is only natural beauty, that is, the beauty of things other than artefacts made by human beings, that ‘show some trace or give a sign that it contains in itself some sort of ground for assuming a lawful correspondence of its products with our satisfaction that is independent of all interest’ (Critique of the Power of Judgment, §42, 5: 300).Footnote 1 The reason for taking the theory of genius to undermine the rejection of the possibility of an intellectual interest in artistic beauty is that on Kant's own account genius itself seems to involve the very kind of cooperation between human intentions and nature beyond the control of human intentions that is supposed to be a sign of the possibility of cooperation or harmony between our moral intentions and nature in which we are so interested. Since I had argued much the same thing some years ago,Footnote 2 Cannon attempts to distinguish his version of the use of Kant's theory of genius against his denigration of the moral significance of interest in art from mine. Cannon argues that while I had supposed genius to include a harmony between conceptually grounded and therefore rule-governed human intention on the one hand and the gift of nature on the other, which I took to make it a perfectly good symbol of the cooperation between human intention and nature that is of interest to us from a moral point of view, the relevant harmony does not in fact lie within artistic genius, but rather between genius and taste, which must if necessary ‘clip the wings of genius’ (§51, 5: 319), where genius is the innate gift for the invention of aesthetic ideas but taste the acquired ‘corrective’ or ‘discipline’ necessary to ‘polish’ such ideas and make them suitable for the audience for art in general and not just for other geniuses. My main point in response to Cannon is that the difference between us is not very great, because Kant's initial inventory of the elements of genius includes a talent for the presentation of aesthetic ideas that makes a gift for intersubjectively valid and therefore quasi-rule-governed communication as well as one for the sheer invention of such ideas part of genius from the outset, although that talent no doubt needs polishing and can be polished, perhaps in a way that the talent for sheer invention does not and cannot be. Before I expand on that point, however, let me mention one point in the background to the issue of the intellectual interest in the beautiful that Cannon does not, but that makes it all the more natural to take either artistic genius itself or its relation to taste as a sign of the harmony between nature and human intention that is of such interest to us from the moral point of view.
This is the fact that what is of primary importance for the possibility of human moral conduct is harmony between the moral principle or principles acknowledged by human practical reason and the entire domain of human feelings and predispositions (the Anlagen to which Cannon does refer) that must be not extinguished but must rather be regulated by practical reason for us to act morally. Since it is a harmony between reason within us and natural feelings within us that is of such importance for morality, not harmony between ourselves and nature outside us, it would seem that evidence from the domain of aesthetics and thus outside of the domain of morality that there can be harmony within us, whether that is understood as part of genius or as the relation between genius and taste, would be more important than evidence of any harmony between ourselves and nature outside of us. Thus it would seem not only that intellectual interest in artistic beauty and not just in natural beauty should be possible, but even that our intellectual interest in artistic beauty should be greater than our interest in natural beauty. Now, to be sure, there is one theme in Kant's moral philosophy that does seem to concern harmony between our own intentions and nature outside of us, namely the complete moral or highest (derived) good, which might be thought to be a harmony between human virtue, something entirely within human beings, and natural conditions that can make them happy proportionately to their virtue, something that might be thought to be outside of human beings. However, here it must be noted that Kant does not suggest that the harmony between nature and our purposes that is the basis for our intellectual interest in beauty has anything to do with the highest good. It might also be noted that at least in his first discussions of the highest good, in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant does not suggest that the highest good is a condition that can obtain within nature, only in a ‘life that is future for us’ (Critique of Pure Reason, A811/B839). To be sure, in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant may already be modifying this position still evident in its discussion of the postulate of immortality, in the postulate of the existence of God, who is conceived of as the author of nature in accord with the demands of morality. But be that as it may, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment Kant discusses the highest good only in the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment, not in the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment. In the discussion of beauty, it seems to be only the harmony between our acknowledgement of the moral law and our feelings that is necessary for us to act morally which is at issue.
Before I turn back to the main point, let me also mention that Kant does offer some positive reasons why interest in art might not be morally significant or might even be morally deleterious. He specifically mentions that decoration of our persons or our environments by art might be a basis for vanity (Critique of the Power of Judgment, §42, 5: 298), and he also suggests that, if the imitation of nature, which after all is not uncommon in art, becomes deception, then it is morally distasteful (§42, 5: 302). These objections to an interest in art are not to be gainsaid, although they also do not exclude the possibility of moral significance in interest in art. After all, even morality itself could become morally distasteful, for example if one takes excessive pride in doing the right thing instead of just doing it. But that would be no reason for rejecting the importance of morality as a whole! Life is complex, and the possibility of perversion lurks everywhere, as Kant's analysis of radical evil in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason spells out. A complete discussion of Kant's views on art and morality, or the morality of art, would have to consider these matters too.
But let me return to the issue, minor as it may seem, that divides me and Cannon. I say that genius itself includes a harmony between the natural inventiveness of imagination and the ability for successful communication that can be taken as evidence of the harmony between feeling and reason that is crucial for morality, while he argues that the morally significant harmony can be found only in the relation between genius and taste, indeed in the subordination of genius as the sheer power of invention to taste as ‘a discipline exercised on the products of genius’ (p. 118). The basis for my position is Kant's inventory of the elements of genius in the concluding part of §49, where he sums up what he has argued in the preceding four sections. After an initial statement that genius is ‘a talent for art, not for science’, which can be taken to signal the difference between his account and that offered by Alexander Gerard in his 1774 Essay on Genius, translated into German in 1776, and frequently cited in Kant's lectures on anthropology (the lecture course in which he presented his aesthetic theory most extensively)Footnote 3 (I will return to Kant's relation to Gerard briefly below), Kant then makes three further points: first, that as a ‘talent for art’, genius ‘presupposes a determinate concept of the object, as an end, hence understanding, but also a representation (even if indeterminate) of the material, i.e., of the intuition, for the presentation of this concept, hence a relation of the imagination to the understanding’; second, genius ‘displays itself not so much in the execution of the proposed end in the presentation of a determinate concept as in the exposition or expression of aesthetic ideas, which contain rich material for that aim, hence the imagination, in its freedom from all guidance by rules, is nevertheless represented as purposive for the presentation of the given concept’; and finally, ‘the unsought and unintentional subjective purposiveness in the free correspondence of the imagination to the lawfulness of the understanding presupposes a proportion and disposition of this faculty that cannot be produced by any following of rules, whether of science or of mechanical imitation, but that only the nature of the subject can produce’ (§49, 5: 317–18). The first of these statements emphasizes that the concept which is in some sense the ultimate content and guiding conception of a work of art (in spite of his earlier reference to musical ‘fantasias (without a theme)’ (§16, 5: 229), Kant here assumes that all works of art have content) must be presented to the senses in some way or other, in ‘intuition’. The second statement emphasizes that works of art do not present their contents in the form of ordinary, determinate concepts, but in the form of aesthetic ideas, which are non-rule-governed intimations, in intuition, of ideas, typically ideas of reason, that cannot be determinately presented. But both statements imply that both the content and the matter of works of artistic genius must be successfully presented, and the third statement makes explicit that genius is a natural gift, which cannot be produced by following mechanical rules, for creating a proportionate correspondence or relationship between imagination and understanding, between free invention on the one hand and lawlikeness and communicability on the other. Thus I take these statements to imply that a requirement for the communicability of the inventions of imagination is not something external to genius and only added to it by taste, but that it is internal to genius. This is why I take genius itself and not a relation between it and taste as if taste were something additional to it to be what is suitable for representing the harmony between reason and feeling that is essential to morality, indeed even more suitable for this purpose than natural beauty.
Now it might seem as if Kant's statement that genius cannot be produced by ‘any following of rules’ would distinguish genius from taste, which might seem to involve following rules. But Kant has been emphatic in his earlier discussions of taste that it does not involve following rules, even though it is to yield intersubjectively valid judgements. For of course it was about judgements of taste, not artistic production, that he was talking when he stated in the Analytic of the Beautiful that ‘That is beautiful which pleases universally without a concept’ (§9, 5: 219), and when, in the run-up to the Deduction of Judgments of Taste, he reiterated as the Second Peculiarity of the Judgment of Taste that ‘The judgment of taste is not determinable by grounds of proof at all, just as if it were merely subjective’ (§33, 5: 284), which it is not, because it can reasonably be claimed to be intersubjectively valid in spite of the absence of ‘grounds of proof,’ that is, rules from which judgements of taste could be mechanically derived. That judgements of taste cannot be made mechanically is of the very essence of taste, thus Kant's reference to the impossibility of mechanical rule-following in his account of genius signals that taste is part of genius, not external to it. This is not to say that taste cannot be polished by example or instruction, perhaps unlike the sheer power of imaginative invention, but it is to say it is never a matter of mechanical rule-following, and in this regard identical to, or to a component of, genius.
It should also be noted that, in the first paragraph of §50, On the Combination of Taste with Genius in Products of Beautiful Art, which is Cannon's primary text, while Kant initially frames his question as ‘whether in matters of beautiful art it is more important whether genius or taste is displayed’, he immediately goes on to say that ‘that is the same as asking whether imagination or the power of judgment counts for more in them’, and that ‘it is in regard to the first of these that an art deserves to be called inspired, but only in regard to the second that it deserves to be called a beautiful art’ (§50, 5: 319). But as our quotations from §49 should have made clear, imagination and the power of judgement are both elements of genius, the combination of which produces proportion between invention and presentation, and the power of judgement is not something external to genius. Kant says that ‘To be rich and original in ideas is not as necessary for the sake of beauty as is the suitability of the imagination in its freedom from the lawfulness of the understanding’, but this is only to rate one element of genius over the other, not to subordinate genius to something external to it: plenitude of ideas on the one hand and the correspondence of the freedom of the imagination to the lawfulness of the understanding are both elements within genius, not genius on the one hand and something external to it on the other.
So why does Kant switch to a contrast between genius and taste in the second paragraph of §49, saying here that ‘Taste, like the power of judgment in general, is the disciplining (or corrective) of genius, clipping its wings and making it well behaved or polished; but at the same time it gives genius guidance as to where and how far it should extend itself if it is to remain purposiveness … capable of an enduring and universal approval’? I must concede that I do not have a good answer to this question, although I might suggest that by so speaking Kant is here signalling that, even though he has previously (§47) strongly disagreed with Alexander Gerard's argument that genius is displayed in scientific discovery as well as in artistic creation, he has no fundamental dispute with Gerard's account of artistic genius itself. For Gerard says precisely, in the translation by Garve with which Kant was familiar, that ‘Der Geschmack giebt dem Genie Anleitung, wie es arbeiten soll, weil er ihm Muster vorhält, und die darinn liegenden Vortrefflichkeiten zeigt’ (Gerard Reference Gerard1776: part III, section 6, p. 390) or ‘Taste gives guidance to genius as to how it should work, in that it holds an example before it, and displays the excellencies that lie within it.’Footnote 4 In treating taste and genius as if they were two separate faculties, one of which should correct the other, Kant is adopting Gerard's way of talking at the risk of obscuring his own analysis of genius. But there seems no reason to think that in the brief §50 he has really meant to revise the analysis that he worked out in so much detail in the more extensive §49.
It might seem as if I have been labouring what is basically a terminological point, and that there is nothing of substance at stake in my disagreement with Cannon. But it seems to me worth emphasizing that taste is internal to genius, not external to it, not only because that more accurately reflects the relation between reason and feeling that is essential to the possibility of moral conduct, of which the existence of beauty is supposed to give us a sign that is our reason for taking an intellectual interest in it, but also because the intimacy of the connection between taste and genius implies that taste no more than genius can be achieved merely by following rules, or that taste can be taught to anyone, even one who has no gift. On the contrary, Kant's view is that taste can be polished by good examples, but never reduced to rules, and therefore it, no more than creativity, cannot be taught in some rote fashion. Judgements of taste aim at universal validity and would be valid for any subject under optimal conditions, but that does not in fact mean that everyone can be successfully taught good taste. Some people may just be taste-deaf, as some are tone-deaf or colour-blind. That seems right to me, and an aspect of Kant's view worth preserving.
There are many other aspects of Cannon's compact but rich paper that I would like to pursue further, such as his important treatment of the connection between Kant and Mendelssohn, whose views in aesthetics I assume Kant knew first-hand and not merely through Lessing's Laokoön. But I think that to go further, ultimately producing a comment as long as the original paper, would presume on the generosity of the editor who invited me to comment on Cannon's critique of my earlier treatment of artistic genius and intellectual interest, as well as on the patience of the reader. So I will stop here.
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In his lucid and interesting paper, Joseph Cannon argues that Kant's theory of artistic genius in §§46–50 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment undermines his claim in §42 that only an ‘intellectual’ interest in natural beauty, not an interest in artistic beauty, is a ‘mark of a good soul’, because it is only natural beauty, that is, the beauty of things other than artefacts made by human beings, that ‘show some trace or give a sign that it contains in itself some sort of ground for assuming a lawful correspondence of its products with our satisfaction that is independent of all interest’ (Critique of the Power of Judgment, §42, 5: 300).Footnote 1 The reason for taking the theory of genius to undermine the rejection of the possibility of an intellectual interest in artistic beauty is that on Kant's own account genius itself seems to involve the very kind of cooperation between human intentions and nature beyond the control of human intentions that is supposed to be a sign of the possibility of cooperation or harmony between our moral intentions and nature in which we are so interested. Since I had argued much the same thing some years ago,Footnote 2 Cannon attempts to distinguish his version of the use of Kant's theory of genius against his denigration of the moral significance of interest in art from mine. Cannon argues that while I had supposed genius to include a harmony between conceptually grounded and therefore rule-governed human intention on the one hand and the gift of nature on the other, which I took to make it a perfectly good symbol of the cooperation between human intention and nature that is of interest to us from a moral point of view, the relevant harmony does not in fact lie within artistic genius, but rather between genius and taste, which must if necessary ‘clip the wings of genius’ (§51, 5: 319), where genius is the innate gift for the invention of aesthetic ideas but taste the acquired ‘corrective’ or ‘discipline’ necessary to ‘polish’ such ideas and make them suitable for the audience for art in general and not just for other geniuses. My main point in response to Cannon is that the difference between us is not very great, because Kant's initial inventory of the elements of genius includes a talent for the presentation of aesthetic ideas that makes a gift for intersubjectively valid and therefore quasi-rule-governed communication as well as one for the sheer invention of such ideas part of genius from the outset, although that talent no doubt needs polishing and can be polished, perhaps in a way that the talent for sheer invention does not and cannot be. Before I expand on that point, however, let me mention one point in the background to the issue of the intellectual interest in the beautiful that Cannon does not, but that makes it all the more natural to take either artistic genius itself or its relation to taste as a sign of the harmony between nature and human intention that is of such interest to us from the moral point of view.
This is the fact that what is of primary importance for the possibility of human moral conduct is harmony between the moral principle or principles acknowledged by human practical reason and the entire domain of human feelings and predispositions (the Anlagen to which Cannon does refer) that must be not extinguished but must rather be regulated by practical reason for us to act morally. Since it is a harmony between reason within us and natural feelings within us that is of such importance for morality, not harmony between ourselves and nature outside us, it would seem that evidence from the domain of aesthetics and thus outside of the domain of morality that there can be harmony within us, whether that is understood as part of genius or as the relation between genius and taste, would be more important than evidence of any harmony between ourselves and nature outside of us. Thus it would seem not only that intellectual interest in artistic beauty and not just in natural beauty should be possible, but even that our intellectual interest in artistic beauty should be greater than our interest in natural beauty. Now, to be sure, there is one theme in Kant's moral philosophy that does seem to concern harmony between our own intentions and nature outside of us, namely the complete moral or highest (derived) good, which might be thought to be a harmony between human virtue, something entirely within human beings, and natural conditions that can make them happy proportionately to their virtue, something that might be thought to be outside of human beings. However, here it must be noted that Kant does not suggest that the harmony between nature and our purposes that is the basis for our intellectual interest in beauty has anything to do with the highest good. It might also be noted that at least in his first discussions of the highest good, in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant does not suggest that the highest good is a condition that can obtain within nature, only in a ‘life that is future for us’ (Critique of Pure Reason, A811/B839). To be sure, in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant may already be modifying this position still evident in its discussion of the postulate of immortality, in the postulate of the existence of God, who is conceived of as the author of nature in accord with the demands of morality. But be that as it may, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment Kant discusses the highest good only in the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment, not in the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment. In the discussion of beauty, it seems to be only the harmony between our acknowledgement of the moral law and our feelings that is necessary for us to act morally which is at issue.
Before I turn back to the main point, let me also mention that Kant does offer some positive reasons why interest in art might not be morally significant or might even be morally deleterious. He specifically mentions that decoration of our persons or our environments by art might be a basis for vanity (Critique of the Power of Judgment, §42, 5: 298), and he also suggests that, if the imitation of nature, which after all is not uncommon in art, becomes deception, then it is morally distasteful (§42, 5: 302). These objections to an interest in art are not to be gainsaid, although they also do not exclude the possibility of moral significance in interest in art. After all, even morality itself could become morally distasteful, for example if one takes excessive pride in doing the right thing instead of just doing it. But that would be no reason for rejecting the importance of morality as a whole! Life is complex, and the possibility of perversion lurks everywhere, as Kant's analysis of radical evil in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason spells out. A complete discussion of Kant's views on art and morality, or the morality of art, would have to consider these matters too.
But let me return to the issue, minor as it may seem, that divides me and Cannon. I say that genius itself includes a harmony between the natural inventiveness of imagination and the ability for successful communication that can be taken as evidence of the harmony between feeling and reason that is crucial for morality, while he argues that the morally significant harmony can be found only in the relation between genius and taste, indeed in the subordination of genius as the sheer power of invention to taste as ‘a discipline exercised on the products of genius’ (p. 118). The basis for my position is Kant's inventory of the elements of genius in the concluding part of §49, where he sums up what he has argued in the preceding four sections. After an initial statement that genius is ‘a talent for art, not for science’, which can be taken to signal the difference between his account and that offered by Alexander Gerard in his 1774 Essay on Genius, translated into German in 1776, and frequently cited in Kant's lectures on anthropology (the lecture course in which he presented his aesthetic theory most extensively)Footnote 3 (I will return to Kant's relation to Gerard briefly below), Kant then makes three further points: first, that as a ‘talent for art’, genius ‘presupposes a determinate concept of the object, as an end, hence understanding, but also a representation (even if indeterminate) of the material, i.e., of the intuition, for the presentation of this concept, hence a relation of the imagination to the understanding’; second, genius ‘displays itself not so much in the execution of the proposed end in the presentation of a determinate concept as in the exposition or expression of aesthetic ideas, which contain rich material for that aim, hence the imagination, in its freedom from all guidance by rules, is nevertheless represented as purposive for the presentation of the given concept’; and finally, ‘the unsought and unintentional subjective purposiveness in the free correspondence of the imagination to the lawfulness of the understanding presupposes a proportion and disposition of this faculty that cannot be produced by any following of rules, whether of science or of mechanical imitation, but that only the nature of the subject can produce’ (§49, 5: 317–18). The first of these statements emphasizes that the concept which is in some sense the ultimate content and guiding conception of a work of art (in spite of his earlier reference to musical ‘fantasias (without a theme)’ (§16, 5: 229), Kant here assumes that all works of art have content) must be presented to the senses in some way or other, in ‘intuition’. The second statement emphasizes that works of art do not present their contents in the form of ordinary, determinate concepts, but in the form of aesthetic ideas, which are non-rule-governed intimations, in intuition, of ideas, typically ideas of reason, that cannot be determinately presented. But both statements imply that both the content and the matter of works of artistic genius must be successfully presented, and the third statement makes explicit that genius is a natural gift, which cannot be produced by following mechanical rules, for creating a proportionate correspondence or relationship between imagination and understanding, between free invention on the one hand and lawlikeness and communicability on the other. Thus I take these statements to imply that a requirement for the communicability of the inventions of imagination is not something external to genius and only added to it by taste, but that it is internal to genius. This is why I take genius itself and not a relation between it and taste as if taste were something additional to it to be what is suitable for representing the harmony between reason and feeling that is essential to morality, indeed even more suitable for this purpose than natural beauty.
Now it might seem as if Kant's statement that genius cannot be produced by ‘any following of rules’ would distinguish genius from taste, which might seem to involve following rules. But Kant has been emphatic in his earlier discussions of taste that it does not involve following rules, even though it is to yield intersubjectively valid judgements. For of course it was about judgements of taste, not artistic production, that he was talking when he stated in the Analytic of the Beautiful that ‘That is beautiful which pleases universally without a concept’ (§9, 5: 219), and when, in the run-up to the Deduction of Judgments of Taste, he reiterated as the Second Peculiarity of the Judgment of Taste that ‘The judgment of taste is not determinable by grounds of proof at all, just as if it were merely subjective’ (§33, 5: 284), which it is not, because it can reasonably be claimed to be intersubjectively valid in spite of the absence of ‘grounds of proof,’ that is, rules from which judgements of taste could be mechanically derived. That judgements of taste cannot be made mechanically is of the very essence of taste, thus Kant's reference to the impossibility of mechanical rule-following in his account of genius signals that taste is part of genius, not external to it. This is not to say that taste cannot be polished by example or instruction, perhaps unlike the sheer power of imaginative invention, but it is to say it is never a matter of mechanical rule-following, and in this regard identical to, or to a component of, genius.
It should also be noted that, in the first paragraph of §50, On the Combination of Taste with Genius in Products of Beautiful Art, which is Cannon's primary text, while Kant initially frames his question as ‘whether in matters of beautiful art it is more important whether genius or taste is displayed’, he immediately goes on to say that ‘that is the same as asking whether imagination or the power of judgment counts for more in them’, and that ‘it is in regard to the first of these that an art deserves to be called inspired, but only in regard to the second that it deserves to be called a beautiful art’ (§50, 5: 319). But as our quotations from §49 should have made clear, imagination and the power of judgement are both elements of genius, the combination of which produces proportion between invention and presentation, and the power of judgement is not something external to genius. Kant says that ‘To be rich and original in ideas is not as necessary for the sake of beauty as is the suitability of the imagination in its freedom from the lawfulness of the understanding’, but this is only to rate one element of genius over the other, not to subordinate genius to something external to it: plenitude of ideas on the one hand and the correspondence of the freedom of the imagination to the lawfulness of the understanding are both elements within genius, not genius on the one hand and something external to it on the other.
So why does Kant switch to a contrast between genius and taste in the second paragraph of §49, saying here that ‘Taste, like the power of judgment in general, is the disciplining (or corrective) of genius, clipping its wings and making it well behaved or polished; but at the same time it gives genius guidance as to where and how far it should extend itself if it is to remain purposiveness … capable of an enduring and universal approval’? I must concede that I do not have a good answer to this question, although I might suggest that by so speaking Kant is here signalling that, even though he has previously (§47) strongly disagreed with Alexander Gerard's argument that genius is displayed in scientific discovery as well as in artistic creation, he has no fundamental dispute with Gerard's account of artistic genius itself. For Gerard says precisely, in the translation by Garve with which Kant was familiar, that ‘Der Geschmack giebt dem Genie Anleitung, wie es arbeiten soll, weil er ihm Muster vorhält, und die darinn liegenden Vortrefflichkeiten zeigt’ (Gerard Reference Gerard1776: part III, section 6, p. 390) or ‘Taste gives guidance to genius as to how it should work, in that it holds an example before it, and displays the excellencies that lie within it.’Footnote 4 In treating taste and genius as if they were two separate faculties, one of which should correct the other, Kant is adopting Gerard's way of talking at the risk of obscuring his own analysis of genius. But there seems no reason to think that in the brief §50 he has really meant to revise the analysis that he worked out in so much detail in the more extensive §49.
It might seem as if I have been labouring what is basically a terminological point, and that there is nothing of substance at stake in my disagreement with Cannon. But it seems to me worth emphasizing that taste is internal to genius, not external to it, not only because that more accurately reflects the relation between reason and feeling that is essential to the possibility of moral conduct, of which the existence of beauty is supposed to give us a sign that is our reason for taking an intellectual interest in it, but also because the intimacy of the connection between taste and genius implies that taste no more than genius can be achieved merely by following rules, or that taste can be taught to anyone, even one who has no gift. On the contrary, Kant's view is that taste can be polished by good examples, but never reduced to rules, and therefore it, no more than creativity, cannot be taught in some rote fashion. Judgements of taste aim at universal validity and would be valid for any subject under optimal conditions, but that does not in fact mean that everyone can be successfully taught good taste. Some people may just be taste-deaf, as some are tone-deaf or colour-blind. That seems right to me, and an aspect of Kant's view worth preserving.
There are many other aspects of Cannon's compact but rich paper that I would like to pursue further, such as his important treatment of the connection between Kant and Mendelssohn, whose views in aesthetics I assume Kant knew first-hand and not merely through Lessing's Laokoön. But I think that to go further, ultimately producing a comment as long as the original paper, would presume on the generosity of the editor who invited me to comment on Cannon's critique of my earlier treatment of artistic genius and intellectual interest, as well as on the patience of the reader. So I will stop here.