The Critique of Judgement

Summary

The Critique of Judgement (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790) is the third of Kant's Critiques and the one in which he tries to close the gap left by the first two. The Critique of Pure Reason had confined knowledge to nature governed by mechanical law; the Critique of Practical Reason had grounded morality in a freedom that nature cannot show. The Introduction proposes that a third faculty, reflective judgement, mediates between them: when we look for a universal to fit a particular, we must presuppose that nature is purposive, ordered as if for our understanding. The book then examines two kinds of judgement that rest on this principle. Part I, the Critique of Aesthetical Judgement, analyses the beautiful in four 'moments'. A judgement of taste is disinterested (it does not care whether the object exists or serves us); it claims everyone's agreement without resting on a concept; it finds in the object 'purposiveness without purpose', a form that seems designed though we assign it no end; and it supposes a 'common sense' that makes such feeling shareable. Kant then turns to the sublime: the mathematically sublime, where vastness defeats the imagination's power to take it in, and the dynamically sublime, where storms, volcanoes and oceans overwhelm us physically yet awaken a rational and moral power that nature cannot dominate. True sublimity, he concludes, lies in the mind, not in the mountain. A Deduction defends the universality of taste; the discussion of art defines genius as the innate gift through which nature gives the rule to art, ranks the arts (poetry highest), and in a long Remark treats music, jest and laughter as pleasures that further bodily health. The Dialectic resolves an antinomy of taste and ends with the claim that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good. Part II, the Critique of Teleological Judgement, asks how we must think about living things. An organism is a 'natural purpose', a being in which every part is both cause and effect of the whole, unlike a watch. We cannot explain such beings by mechanism alone, yet the idea of purpose is a regulative guide for inquiry, not a proof of design. The Methodology then argues that nature's ultimate purpose for man is culture, that the final purpose of creation can only be man as a moral being, and that physico-theology, reasoning from design to God, falls short. Kant offers instead a moral argument: because the moral law commands us to pursue the highest good, we must assume a moral Author of the world, an assumption held by practical faith rather than theoretical knowledge.

Plot or Argument

• Preface and Introduction: judgement as the bridge

  Kant distinguishes determinant judgement (subsuming a particular under a given law) from reflective judgement (seeking a universal for a given particular). Reflective judgement presupposes that nature is purposively ordered for our cognition, and this a priori principle connects the realm of nature (understanding) with the realm of freedom (reason), and the feeling of pleasure with both.

• Analytic of the Beautiful (§§ 1-22)

  Four moments define the judgement of taste: by quality it is disinterested, unlike satisfaction in the pleasant or the good (§§ 1-5); by quantity it claims universal validity without a concept (§§ 6-9); by relation it apprehends a form of purposiveness without the representation of a purpose, independent of charm and of perfection (§§ 10-17, including the distinction between free and dependent beauty and the 'ideal of beauty'); by modality it claims necessity grounded in a common sense (§§ 18-22).

• Analytic of the Sublime (§§ 23-29 and General Remark)

  The sublime differs from the beautiful in being formless and at first displeasing. The mathematically sublime is the absolutely great, which outstrips imagination (pyramids, St Peter's, the starry heavens); the dynamically sublime is nature as might, fearful yet without dominion over our rational vocation. The General Remark relates the sublime to moral feeling, the biblical prohibition of images, enthusiasm and fanaticism, and criticizes Burke's purely physiological account.

• Deduction of taste, art and genius (§§ 30-54)

  The Deduction justifies taste's claim to universality by the shared conditions of cognition and the sensus communis (§ 40). Kant contrasts empirical and intellectual interest in the beautiful, holding that an immediate interest in natural beauty marks a good soul (§ 42). He defines art, beautiful art and genius (§§ 43-50), divides the arts into arts of speech, formative arts and the art of the play of sensations (§ 51), compares their worth (§ 53), and closes with a Remark on gratification, music, jest and laughter (§ 54).

• Dialectic and Methodology of taste (§§ 55-60)

  The antinomy of taste (taste is not based on concepts, yet can be disputed) is resolved by an indeterminate concept of the supersensible. Kant argues that beauty is the symbol of morality (§ 59) and that taste is formed by culture of the moral feeling and the humanities rather than by rules (§ 60).

• Analytic and Dialectic of Teleological Judgement (§§ 61-78)

  Organized beings must be judged as natural purposes: a tree produces itself as species and individual and repairs its own injuries (§ 64); in an organized product every part is reciprocally end and means (§§ 65-66). The antinomy between mechanism and teleology is resolved by treating teleology as a regulative maxim of reflective judgement suited to our discursive understanding (§§ 69-78); Kant reviews and rejects Epicurean, Spinozist, hylozoist and theist systems as dogmatic.

• Methodology of Teleological Judgement and the moral proof (§§ 79-91)

  Mechanism must be subordinated to teleology in organisms; Kant favours the theory of epigenesis and praises Blumenbach (§§ 80-81). Nature's ultimate purpose for mankind is culture, the aptitude for setting ends, including discipline of the will (§ 83). Man as a moral being is the final purpose of creation (§§ 84, 86). Physico-theology cannot reach a God adequate to that purpose (§ 85); ethico-theology yields a moral proof of God's existence, valid for practical belief only (§§ 86-91).

Lessons

• Disinterested delight: why 'I like it' is not 'it is beautiful'

  Kant separates three satisfactions: the pleasant (what gratifies me), the good (what I approve by a concept), and the beautiful (what pleases in mere contemplation). The beautiful alone is free of interest: I need not want to own, eat or use the object. Yet when I call something beautiful I speak as though everyone ought to agree, although I can give no proof. Students can test this against their own speech: we say 'Canary wine is pleasant to me' but not 'this sunset is beautiful to me'. The lesson trains careful distinctions and raises a real question for a classical school: whether beauty is something we discover rather than merely feel.

  • Kant says a judgement of taste claims universal agreement without a concept. Give an example from your own experience where you expected others to agree about beauty and could not prove it.
  • Does Kant's account make beauty subjective, objective, or neither? Find the sentence in § 9 that best supports your answer.
  • How would Augustine or Aquinas, who tied beauty to order and to God, answer Kant's separation of the beautiful from the good?

• Storms, mountains and the moral law: where the sublime really lives

  In § 28 Kant lists overhanging rocks, thunderclouds, volcanoes, hurricanes and the raging ocean, and argues that they please us only when we are safe, because they reveal a power in us that nature's might cannot dominate. Sublimity belongs to the mind, not the object. The General Remark adds that the Mosaic command against graven images is the most sublime passage in the Jewish Law, because it presents the infinite only negatively. Kant also says in § 28 that war carried on with order and respect for citizens' rights has something sublime about it, while a long peace breeds a commercial spirit and cowardice. This is a claim to be examined, not adopted, and it gives students the chance to distinguish courage from the glorification of conflict.

  • Why, according to Kant, must the spectator be in security for a storm to seem sublime rather than simply terrifying?
  • Is it true that the sublime is in us rather than in the mountain? What would the Psalmist ('The heavens declare the glory of God') say?
  • Evaluate Kant's remark about war and long peace in § 28. What does it get right about courage, and where does it go wrong?

• Genius gives the rule: originality and the discipline of taste

  Kant defines genius as the innate disposition through which nature gives the rule to art. Its products must be original, but also exemplary, so that others can learn from them; the genius cannot explain how he produced his work. He contrasts genius with scientific talent: Newton could show every step of his reasoning, while Homer could not. Yet in § 50 Kant insists that when genius and taste conflict, genius must yield: taste 'clips its wings' and makes it fit for lasting approval. Students can weigh this balance against the Romantic cult of untutored genius that followed, and against their own experience of learning an art by imitation.

  • Why does Kant think Newton was a great mind but not a genius in his sense? Do you agree?
  • What does it mean that a work of genius is 'exemplary'? How do apprentices learn from a model without merely copying it?
  • If taste must restrain genius, where does taste itself come from, according to § 60?

• No Newton of a blade of grass: the limits of mechanism

  Part II argues that living things are different in kind from machines. A watch's wheels do not produce one another or repair the watch; a tree produces its own kind, grows by organizing foreign matter, and heals its injuries. In § 75 Kant declares it absurd to hope that another Newton will explain the production of a blade of grass by laws that no design has ordered. Yet he refuses to turn this into a scientific proof of a designer: purpose is a regulative idea for our kind of understanding. The section is a good model of intellectual humility, and a starting point for comparing Kant with Paley before him and Darwin after him.

  • List the three features of a tree that Kant uses in § 64 to show it is a natural purpose. Are they still persuasive?
  • Why does Kant say we must judge organisms 'as if' they were designed, but may not claim to know that they are?
  • Did Darwin answer Kant's challenge about the blade of grass, or does the question remain open? Support your view.

• The moral argument for God and the life of the righteous unbeliever

  In §§ 86-87 Kant argues that without men as moral beings creation would be a waste without final purpose, and that the moral law commands us to pursue a highest good which nature alone cannot guarantee. We must therefore assume a moral Author of the world. He illustrates with a righteous man, Spinoza, who denies God and immortality yet obeys the moral law, and sees the honest and the dishonest alike swallowed by one wide grave. Kant insists that this is practical faith, not theoretical proof. Students should distinguish carefully between Kant's argument and Christian teaching: the argument affirms God as a postulate of moral reason, and leaves revelation aside.

  • Summarize Kant's moral argument in three steps. Which step is weakest?
  • Why does Kant think physico-theology (the argument from design) cannot reach a God worthy of worship?
  • How does Kant's portrait of the righteous unbeliever compare with the problem of the prosperity of the wicked in Psalm 73 or Ecclesiastes?

Context

The book appeared at Easter 1790 from Lagarde and Friederich in Berlin and Libau, when Kant was sixty-six, completing the critical system begun in 1781. It answers an eighteenth-century debate about taste in which British writers (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume's essay 'Of the Standard of Taste', Burke's Philosophical Enquiry of 1757, which Kant read in German translation) treated beauty as a feeling or sense, while German rationalists after Baumgarten treated it as confused knowledge of perfection. Part II enters debates in natural history over the generation of organisms, where preformationists held that embryos exist ready-made and epigenesists, including J. F. Blumenbach, argued for a formative drive in organized matter.

Composition

Kant originally planned a 'Critique of Taste'; his letter to K. L. Reinhold of December 1787 reports his discovery of an a priori principle for the feeling of pleasure and pain. The scope widened to include teleology. A longer first draft of the Introduction was set aside for being too long and later published separately (the 'First Introduction'). Second and third editions followed in 1793 and 1799. The library's text is J. H. Bernard's English translation (2nd ed., 1914), which keeps the older spelling 'Judgement' and renders Zweckmäßigkeit as 'purposiveness'.

Reception

Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) built directly on the book, and Goethe valued its treatment of art and nature together. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel took the idea of an intuitive understanding and natural purposiveness as starting points for post-Kantian idealism. The analysis of the sublime shaped Romantic writing about landscape, and the definition of genius was widely taken up, often without Kant's insistence that taste must govern it. In the twentieth century the book became central to philosophical aesthetics and, through Part II, to discussion of the philosophy of biology.

Comparisons

• Critique of Pure Reason

  The first Critique restricts knowledge to appearances under mechanical laws; the third accepts that limit and asks how beauty and organisms can nonetheless be judged as purposive without breaking it.

• Critique of Practical Reason

  The second Critique's postulate of God for the highest good reappears in §§ 86-91 in a new form, now reached from the question of creation's final purpose rather than from the demand that virtue and happiness be proportioned.

• Poetics

  Aristotle defines tragedy by its plot, end and effect and treats art as imitation; Kant defines beautiful art by its free play and by genius, and ranks poetry highest because it expands the mind rather than because it imitates action.

• Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

  Hume's Philo attacks the argument from design as weak analogy; Kant agrees that physico-theology cannot reach a sufficient God but keeps purposiveness as an unavoidable maxim for judging nature and moves the case for God to moral grounds.

• On the Origin of Species

  Kant's claim that no Newton could explain a blade of grass by undesigned law is the challenge that Darwin's natural selection was later taken to meet; reading § 75 against Darwin's chapter on organs of extreme perfection shows exactly what changed.

• Parts of Animals

  Aristotle explains organs by the end they serve and holds that nature does nothing in vain; Kant restates the maxim that nothing in an organism is in vain, but as a principle of our judgement rather than a cause in nature.

• A History of Philosophy, Vol. VI: Wolff to Kant

  Copleston's chapters on the third Critique give a clear map of the book's two parts and their place in the system, useful before attempting the Introduction.

Quotes

Medical Lens

A philosophical treatise, but three passages matter to a history-of-medicine or psychiatry reader. The General Remark on the sublime uses the period's psychiatric vocabulary, distinguishing enthusiasm (likened to madness, a transient state a sound mind may suffer) from fanaticism (likened to monomania, a lasting disease of the understanding); this is an analogy in a discussion of religious feeling, not a clinical classification, though it shows how such categories circulated among philosophers. The Remark to § 54 gives an explicitly physiological theory of pleasure, music and laughter as movements of the intestines, diaphragm and lungs that further health, and calls the mind the body's physician. Part II engages contemporary embryology: Kant judges organisms as self-organizing and self-repairing, and in § 81 sides with the theory of epigenesis and Blumenbach's 'formative impulse' against individual preformation. Kant's Anthropology (1798) and his essay on the diseases of the head (1764) treat mental disorder more directly; they are not in this volume.

• Part I, General Remark upon the Exposition of the Aesthetical Reflective Judgement

  Enthusiasm compared to madness and fanaticism to monomania; the first an unbridled transient affection, the second a brooding passion that unsettles the understanding.

  Madness Psychosis Obsession Monomania
• Part I, General Remark upon the Exposition of the Aesthetical Reflective Judgement (closing paragraphs)

  Kant compares his transcendental account of the sublime and beautiful with the physiological exposition of Burke, and grants Epicurus that gratification is bound up with bodily feeling.

  Mind Body
• Part I, § 54 (Remark)

  Gratification as a feeling of the furtherance of life and health; music and jest as bodily animation excited by ideas; laughter explained physiologically through the intestines, diaphragm and lungs; Voltaire's remark that heaven gave us hope and sleep against life's miseries.

  Mind Body
• Part II, § 64-65

  A tree reproduces its species, grows by organizing foreign matter, and repairs injuries by nature's self-help; unlike a watch, an organism is self-organizing.

  Mind Body
• Part II, § 81

  Theories of generation: occasionalism, individual preformation ('involution') and epigenesis; Kant favours epigenesis and praises Blumenbach's formative impulse.

  Heredity Degeneration

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Choose one landscape you have seen (or one painting of a storm or mountain) and test Kant's claim in § 28 that its sublimity lies in your mind rather than in the scene.

• Dialogue

  Write a dialogue between Kant and William Paley in 1802 about whether a watch and an eye are alike, using § 65 and Paley's watchmaker analogy.

• Classroom

  Bring three objects to class (a flower, a tool, a piece of music). For each, identify what is pleasant, what is good and what, if anything, is beautiful in Kant's sense.

• Poetry

  Write a short poem on a blade of grass that answers Kant's remark about Newton in § 75.

Further Reading

• A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke

  The physiological account of the sublime that Kant discusses at the end of the General Remark.

• Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich Schiller

  The most important early attempt to build on Kant's aesthetics.

• Natural Theology, William Paley

  The design argument at full strength (1802), useful for comparison with § 85.

• Kant and the Claims of Taste, Paul Guyer

• Kant's Theory of Taste, Henry E. Allison

• The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, ed. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla

  The British background to Kant's analysis.