uman reason in the discourse of metaphysical, axiological, and epistemological discourse. The Enlightenment concept of reason was meant to capture a significant range of rational capacity. For example, in Critique of Pure Reason Kant makes a case for intuition as a valid category and determinant of human knowledge, with the rational mind refining and moving toward ever sharper insight via logical processes through which significance and principles can be gradually discerned: "The [] understanding . . . through analytical unity . . . introduces also, through the synthetical unity of the manifold in intuition in general, a transcendental content into its representations" (Kant, Pure 111). Equally, it is instructive to know that Wolfgang Iser and his literary theory are creatures of 20th-century intellectual pluralism, or more precisely a series of responses on the part of critics who--whatever the content of their theories--seem determined to valorize (their) method of approaching and judging a literary artifact. Iser is associated with a phenomenological criticism, which can be considered a highly specialized version of close reading, but which emphasizes the role of the reader in the critical enterprise.
Both Kant and Iser are exponents of a subjective approach to aesthetics--Kant because of his focus on the wide-ranging capacity of human reason habituated to systematic thought to reach meaning intuitively and Iser because of his view that the reader's response to and interaction with the literary artifact, which implies that the reader brings a personal and cultural history to the reading exercise, shapes structures of meaning that might be identified.
Immanuel Kant's fundamental claim in Critique of Judgment is that judgments of taste claim a subjective universality, meaning that when we call something beautiful we are reporting a subjective response, not an objective property, but nevertheless are by implication making a judgme...