This essay notes how contemporary research in the biobehavioral sciences confirms, in several conceptual parallels, Kant's theories of mental activity during aesthetic experience. In the third critique, Kant postulated universal characteristics of mind--its structures, functions, and adaptability--as the basis for the possibility of a universal taste, and then used this basis to link aesthetic practice (judgment) with an evolving and ethically progressive community. Kant's correlation of aesthetics and the state has been much criticized by Paul DeMan, David Cook, Georg Lukacs, and many others as "aesthetic liberalism," a kind of "cover" for bourgeois capital. On the basis of current research in the sciences, this essay takes issue with this critique, and urges a benign view of Kantian aesthetics, as theorizing a community of taste whose values are not fixed, but may be progressively enlarged, inclusive, and tolerant. [T.S.]