In this elegant and pellucid essay, Eli Friedlander offers the most compelling defense to date of the classic, Goethean thesis that aesthetic reflective judgment does the great work of mediating and reconciling of bringing into meaningful conversation with one another the dualisms that score Kant s critical philosophy, above all the wrenching dualism between nature and culture, that we are free and self-determining creatures inhabiting living bodies within a living and mechanical universe. Bracing.--Jay Bernstein, New School for Social Research"