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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Part II, § 81

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