Critique of Judgment
The Critique of Judgment, also translated as the Critique of the Power of Judgment, is a 1790 book by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Sometimes referred to as the "third critique", the Critique of Judgment follows the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason.
Context
's Critique of Judgment is the third critique in Kant's Critical project begun in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. 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. The First Critique argues that space and time provide ways in which the observing subject's mind organizes and structures the sensory world. The end result of this inquiry in the First Critique is that there are certain fundamental antinomies in the dialectical use of 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 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 and Reason .
Introduction to the Critique of Judgement
The first part of Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement presents what Kant calls the four moments of the "Judgement of Taste". These are given by Kant in sequence as the First Moment. Of the Judgement of Taste: Moment of Quality"; Second Moment. Of the Judgement of Taste: Moment of Quantity"; Third Moment: Of Judgement of Taste: Moment of the Relation of the ends brought under Review in such Judgements"; and Fourth Moment: Of the Judgement of Taste: Moment of the Modality of the Delight in the Object". After the presentation of the four moments of the Judgement of Taste, Kant then begins his discussion of Book 2 of the Third Critique titled Analytic of the Sublime.Aesthetic Judgement
The first part of the book discusses the four possible aesthetic reflective judgments: the agreeable, the beautiful, the sublime, and the good. Kant makes it clear that these are the only four possible reflective judgments, as he relates them to the Table of Judgments from the Critique of Pure Reason."Reflective judgments" differ from determinative judgments. In reflective judgment we seek to find unknown universals for given particulars; whereas in determinative judgment, we just subsume given particulars under universals that are already known, as Kant puts it:
The agreeable is a purely sensory judgment — judgments in the form of "This steak is good," or "This chair is soft." These are purely subjective judgments, based on inclination alone.
The good is essentially a judgment that something is ethical — the judgment that something conforms with moral law, which, in the Kantian sense, is essentially a claim of modality — a coherence with a fixed and absolute notion of reason. It is in many ways the absolute opposite of the agreeable, in that it is a purely objective judgment — things are either moral or they are not, according to Kant.
The remaining two judgments — the beautiful and the sublime — differ from both the agreeable and the good. They are what Kant refers to as "subjective universal" judgments. This apparently oxymoronic term means that, in practice, the judgments are subjective, and are not tied to any absolute and determinate concept. However, the judgment that something is beautiful or sublime is made with the belief that other people ought to agree with this judgment — even though it is known that many will not. The force of this "ought" comes from a reference to a sensus communis — a community of taste. Hannah Arendt, in her Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, suggests the possibility that this sensus communis might be the basis of a political theory that is markedly different from the one that Kant lays out in the Metaphysics of Morals.
The central concept of Kant's analysis of the judgment of beauty is what he called the ″free play″ between the cognitive powers of imagination and understanding. We call an object beautiful, because its form fits our cognitive powers and enables such a ″free play″ the experience of which is pleasurable to us. The judgment that something is beautiful is a claim that it possesses the "form of finality" — that is, that it appears to have been designed with a purpose, even though it does not have any apparent practical function. We also do not need to have a determinate concept for an object in order to find it beautiful. In this regard, Kant further distinguishes between free and adherent beauty. Whereas judgments of free beauty are made without having one determinate concept for the object being judged, a judgment of beauty is adherent if we do have such a determined concept in mind. The main difference between these two judgments is that purpose or use of the object plays no role in the case of free beauty. In contrast, adherent judgments of beauty are only possible if the object is not ill-suited for its purpose.
The judgment that something is sublime is a judgment that it is beyond the limits of comprehension — that it is an object of fear. However, Kant makes clear that the object must not actually be threatening — it merely must be recognized as deserving of fear.
Kant's view of the beautiful and the sublime is frequently read as an attempt to resolve one of the problems left following his depiction of moral law in the Critique of Practical Reason — namely that it is impossible to prove that we have free will, and thus impossible to prove that we are bound under moral law. The beautiful and the sublime both seem to refer to some external noumenal order — and thus to the possibility of a noumenal self that possesses free will.
In this section of the critique Kant also establishes a faculty of mind that is in many ways the inverse of judgment — the faculty of genius. Whereas judgment allows one to determine whether something is beautiful or sublime, genius allows one to produce what is beautiful or sublime.
Teleology
The second half of the Critique discusses teleological judgement. This way of judging things according to their ends is logically connected to the first discussion at least regarding beauty but suggests a kind of purposiveness.Kant writes about the biological as teleological, claiming that there are things, such as living beings, whose parts exist for the sake of their whole and their whole for the sake of their parts. This allows him to open a gap in the physical world: since these "organic" things cannot be brought under the rules that apply to all other appearances, what are we to do with them?
Kant says explicitly that while efficiently causal explanations are always best, it is absurd to hope for "another Newton" who could explain a blade of grass without invoking teleology, and so the organic must be explained "as if" it were constituted as teleological. This portion of the Critique is, from some modern theories, where Kant is most radical; he posits man as the ultimate end, that is, that all other forms of nature exist for the purpose of their relation to man, directly or not, and that man is left outside of this due to his faculty of reason. Kant claims that culture becomes the expression of this, that it is the highest teleological end, as it is the only expression of human freedom outside of the laws of nature. Man also garners the place as the highest teleological end due to his capacity for morality, or practical reason, which falls in line with the ethical system that Kant proposes in the Critique of Practical Reason and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.
Kant attempted to legitimize purposive categories in the life sciences, without a theological commitment. He recognized the concept of purpose has epistemological value for finality, while denying its implications about creative intentions at life and the universe's source. Kant described natural purposes as organized beings, meaning that the principle of knowledge presupposes living creatures as purposive entities. He called this supposition the finality concept as a regulative use, which satisfies living beings specificity of knowledge. This heuristic framework claims there is a teleology principle at purpose's source and it is the mechanical devices of the individual original organism, including its heredity. Such entities appear to be self-organizing in patterns. Kant's ideas allowed Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and his followers to formulate the science of types and to justify its autonomy.
Kant held that there was no purpose represented in the aesthetic judgement of an object's beauty. A pure aesthetic judgement excludes the object's purpose.
Lewis White Beck suggests that Kant's "Antinomy of Teleological Judgement" can also be interpreted as a radical revision of his initial attempt to resolve the antinomy between the concepts of freedom and determinism which he first presented in the Critique of Pure Reason.