How to Comprehend the Role of Understanding in Aesthetic Activities-A New Interpretation on An Essential Question in Kant's Aesthetics

Basing beauty on the free harmony between imagination and understanding, Kant has not clarified the aesthetic role of understanding sufficiently, and scholars in international academy propose "precognitive interpretation", "multicognitive interpretation" and "metacognitive interpretation" on its function. We attempt to avoid confusing the relationship between aesthetic activities and concepts with that between aesthetic activities and cognition, and defend a "multiconceptprecognitive interpretation". Aesthetic activities neither depend on determinate concepts of understanding and cognition, nor generate cognition. In aesthetic activities understanding thinks indeterminately with concepts about schemata from the capacity of imagination, and play with imagination freely. We expound the complex function of understanding in aesthetics, and discuss the former interpretations, to establish that Kant not only fully demonstrates the aesthetic autonomy and the independence of beauty from determinate concepts and cognition, but also reveals the significant aesthetic role of the free activities of understanding and its concepts.