While the main drive of Kant’s arguments is toward the clarification of beauty, genius, judgment, the sublime, the classification of the arts, and related problems, there is a recurrent hint that the beauty of nature and the beauty of art are expressive of an underlying spiritual reality. […] It is in our experience of beauty that the congruence of nature and the moral will is realized for us, to such an extent that it becomes a meaningful postulate of reason to assert that man as a moral being inhabits a universe compatible with his spiritual longings.

Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns, introduction to Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger, edited by Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns