Introduction
Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment completes the Critical project
begun in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason (the
First and Second Critiques, respectively). The book is divided into two main
sections: the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and the Critique of Teleological
Judgment, and also includes a large overview of the entirety of Kant's Critical
system, arranged in its final form. The so-called First Introduction was not
published during Kant's lifetime, for Kant wrote a replacement for publication.
The Critical project, that of exploring the limits and conditions of
knowledge, had already produced the Critique of Pure Reason, in which Kant
argued for a Transcendental Aesthetic, an approach to the problems of
perception in which space and time are argued not to be objects but ways in
which the observing subject's mind organizes and structures the sensory world.
The end result of this inquiry is that there are certain fundamental antinomies
in human Reason, most particularly that there is a complete inability to favor
on the one hand the argument that all behavior and thought is determined by
external causes, and on the other that there is an actual
"spontaneous" causal principle at work in human behavior.
The first position, of causal determinism, is adopted, in Kant's view,
by empirical scientists of all sorts; moreover, it led to the Idea (perhaps
never fully to be realized) of a final science in which all empirical knowledge
could be synthesized into a full and complete causal explanation of all events
possible to the world.
The second position, of spontaneous causality, is implicitly adopted by
all people as they engage in moral behavior; this position is explored more
fully in the Critique of Practical Reason.
The Critique of Judgment constitutes a discussion of the place of
Judgment itself, which must overlap both the Understanding
("Verstand") (whichsoever operates from within a deterministic
framework) and Reason ("Vernunft") (which operates on the grounds of
freedom).
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Summary
The Critique of Judgment, often called the Third Critique, does not have
as clear a focus as the first two critiques. In broad outline, Kant sets about
examining our faculty of judgment, which leads him down a number of divergent
paths. While the Critique of Judgment deals with matters related to science and
teleology, it is most remembered for what Kant has to say about aesthetics.
Kant calls aesthetic judgments “judgments of taste” and remarks that,
though they are based in an individual’s subjective feelings, they also claim
universal validity. Our feelings about beauty differ from our feelings about
pleasure and moral goodness in that they are disinterested. We seek to possess
pleasurable objects, and we seek to promote moral goodness, but we simply
appreciate beauty without feeling driven to find some use for it. Judgments of
taste are universal because they are disinterested: our individual wants and
needs do not come into play when appreciating beauty, so our aesthetic response
applies universally. Aesthetic pleasure comes from the free play between the
imagination and understanding when perceiving an object.
Kant distinguishes the beautiful from the sublime. While the appeal of
beautiful objects is immediately apparent, the sublime holds an air of mystery
and ineffability. While a Greek statue or a pretty flower is beautiful, the
movement of storm clouds or a massive building is sublime: they are, in a
sense, too great to get our heads around. Kant argues that our sense of the
sublime is connected with our faculty of reason, which has ideas of absolute
totality and absolute freedom. While storm clouds or a massive building might
stretch our minds, they are nothing compared with reason’s ideas of absolute totality
and freedom. Apprehending sublime objects puts us in touch with these ideas of
reason, so that sublimity resides not in sublime objects but in reason itself.
In a second part of the book, Kant wrestles with the concept of
teleology, the idea that something has an end, or purpose. Teleology falls
somewhere between science and theology, and Kant argues that the concept is
useful in scientific work even though we would be wrong to assume that
teleological principles are actually at work in nature.
Analysis
While much of what Kant writes about aesthetics might strike us now as a
bit dated, his work is historically very significant. Kant’s Third Critique is
one of the early works in the field of aesthetics and one of the most important
treatises on the subject ever written. Aesthetics differs from literary
criticism and art criticism, which have existed for millennia, in that it
attempts to explain not only why things are or are not beautiful but also the
concept of beauty and how the perception of beauty arises in us. Kant takes on
the considerable task of making room for the concepts of the beautiful and the
sublime in the complex account of the mind he gives in his first two Critiques.
Unfortunately for Kant, the success of this project can be understood only in
the context of his complex and abstruse philosophical system, while its
failures are immediately apparent. The close relationship between art and
politics, which became clear in the twentieth century, casts doubt on Kant’s
assertion that our response to art is disinterested, and his claim that our
sense of beauty is universal makes less sense in a world in which we are
exposed to the diversity of artistic products of different cultures. Although
his work continues to influence work in aesthetics, Kant falls victim to the
same problem that touches everyone who tries to make general claims about art:
the very concept of art has great historical fluidity so that we can never nail
down for all time exactly what it is.
Kant’s account of beauty as based in subjective feeling as well as his
struggles with teleology stem from his desire to refute all metaphysical proofs
of God. Kant is by no means an atheist, and he makes forceful arguments for why
we ought to believe in God. However, God is the ultimate thing-in-itself, and
so, according to Kant’s epistemology, the nature and even the existence of God
are fundamentally unknowable. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant provides
refutations for all the main “proofs” of God’s existence, one of which is the Argument
from Design. According to this argument, the patterns and formal perfection in
nature suggest the presence of an intelligent designer. Kant argues that our
judgment of beauty is a subjective feeling, even though it possesses universal
validity, in part because arguing that beauty is objective would play into the
hands of those who make the Argument from Design. If beauty were an objective
property of certain objects in nature, the question would naturally arise of
how these objects were bestowed with beauty. This question would provide a
toehold for the Argument from Design, an outcome that Kant is determined to
avoid.
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