This text is convoluted, especially the first two pages which is basically a back and forth of what Kant says, what he might mean, what he actually means, what other people think he might mean, what he could mean etc... so a bit above the radar.
I have made a few little notes from the text that can maybe clarify his ideas of Aesthetics and their relation to morality.
Contrast between "free" and "dependent" judgments of beauty - dependent judgments presuppose some classification and/or interpretation of an object and serve better as "rules not for taste, but for the unification of taste with reason, i.e. of the beautiful with the good."
Beauty therefore becomes a tool of "intention in respect of the good"
Experience of the beautiful cultivates us, because it prepares us to love something, as with nature, without interest.
Morality requires not just the abstract universality of aims in a kingdom of ends but also communicated - between the cultured and the rude - to serve as a starting point for the founding of taste - or vice versa.
The sublime, aesthetic ideas, and beauty are the symbols of morality - aesthetic phenomena can offer representations of moral conceptions, practical relations and the partnership between moral reason and moral feeling.
An aesthetic idea is a "representation of the imagination which gives much to think about, without any determinate thought, i.e. concept, being adequate to it, which therefore no language can fully reach and make comprehensible.
The beautiful pleases immediately, disinterestedly, as the result of freedom of the imagination and with universal validity.
Virtuous motivation (the moral) pleases immediately although independently of any previous interest (free employment of intellectual faculties) and also, with universal validity.
The difference is that moral feeling depends on the freedom of the will rather than the imagination and it is grounded in concepts rather than being independent of them.
Such ideas prevent an aesthetic object from being exhausted and becoming boring.
He says "where the fine arts are not brought into either close or distant connections with moral ideas (which alone bring with them a self-sufficient delight), over time they must "dull the soul, gradually render the object disgusting, and make the soul moody and dissatisfied with itself."
It is clear that Kant believes that only moral conceptions offer the permanent interest required of aesthetic ideas - these are called "representations of the imagination" - "they strive after something lying beyond the boundaries of experience and attempt to approximate a representation of concepts of reason (intellectual ideas).
Taste therefore, is significant in its capacity to provide sensible representation of moral ideas and declare them valid for everyone, not just "for the private feeling of each."
Taste affords disinterested pleasure and helps in the understanding of moral ideas through beauty (a symbol of morality).
The beautiful object actually stands for the experience of beauty that is necessary in understanding feeling without "sense", or, reason. This is important to Kant because "moral feeling"
For Kant, it is impossible to have "intuition" (a kind of thought-feeling) that directly confirms the reality of "concepts of reason" (ideas) [though it is possible to have this intuition for empirical concepts and schemata for pure concepts]
But these idea-concepts can be understood "symbolically" - so although the concept can only be "thought" with (literally, via) "reason" and no intuition is adequate - the symbolic representation serves to produce, not the intuition itself, but the reflection on it.
The analogy Kant gives is between a "despotic state" and a "handmill" - though the observation of a handmill is not itself an observation of a despotic state, the similarities between their "behaviours" allow similarities in the structure of our thoughts about them.
Therefore, one can serve as a symbol for the other. This is where Kant makes his claim that "the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good"
The aesthetic judgement allows an experience of our capacity for autonomy (free will) and the possibility of harmony between this capacity and the world (nature) outside it. Here Kant is specifically talking about pure aesthetic judgement on the beautiful and not art (because art is never disinterested - it must be taken into account as having a context and an "author" who had intentions)
Kant then argues that the human form (as expressive of the a priori idea of morality) can be the single beautiful object valid for all. Human autonomy is the only candidate for a unique ideal of beauty : "Only man… who determines his ends himself through reason… this man is therefore an ideal of beauty, just as humanity in his person, as intelligence, alone among all objects in the world is capable of an ideal of perfection."
Of course it would be unwise to think that just because every object which is beautiful must be capable of pleasing everybody, there must be some single object which maximally pleases everybody.
