Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) stated that we do not understand beauty by means of cognition, “but rather relate it by means of imagination (perhaps combined with understanding) to the subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure. Do you agree with that?
Your question is in my view analogous to the debate in moral psychology between the "rational" vs "emotional" view of how we determine our moral positions.
The rational position is that we think through the pertinent issues before coming to our moral position i.e. thought precedes feeling. The emotional position is that we have a visceral reaction to moral issues and then rationalise this post-hoc with a convenient explanation. Jonathan Haidt takes the latter position, but discusses both approaches quite nicely, in his exposition of his model - The Social Intuitionist Model.
Perhaps then our view of beauty is very much in line with The Social Intuitionist Model i.e. we like what we are viscerally/emotionally drawn to and then come up with post-hoc rationalisations for why we find that beautiful. This would seem to be consistent with Immanuel Kant’s view as you have cited it.
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