Critique of Judgment
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The Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), also known as the third critique, is a philosophical work by Immanuel Kant.
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Foundations
Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), also known as the third critique, simultaneously completes Kant's Critical project and lays the foundations for modern aesthetics. The standard English translation is the one made by James Creed Meredith, though recently Paul Guyer's translation, published by Cambridge University Press, has gained some popularity. Guyer translates the title as the Critique of the Power of Judgment, though this title has not caught on as the standard way of referring to the text.
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 the Critical system, arranged in its final form.
The Critical project, that of exploring the limits and conditions of knowledge, had already spawned 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 supposed not to be free-standing entities but manners in which the mind organizes and structures the sensory world. The end result of this inquiry (and this articler declines to plod through the argument) 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 goings-on in 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 (which proceeds within the determinist camp) and Reason (which exploits the camp of spontaneity).
Aesthetics
The first part of the book, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, discusses the four possible aesthetic judgments - the agreeable, the beautiful, the sublime, and the good. Kant makes it clear that these are the only four possible aesthetic judgments, as he relates them to the Table of Judgments from the Critique of Pure Reason. The agreeable is a purely sensory judgment – things in the form of "This steak is good", "This chair is soft", or "This night of sexual passion is satisfying." They 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, to Kant, or they are not.
The remaining two judgments - the beautiful and the sublime - occupy a space between 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 determinite 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 Metaphysic of Morals.
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. 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 noumenonl order - and thus to the possibility of a noumenal soul possessing free will.
In this section of the critique Kant also establishes 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 judgment. This sort of judging of things, according to their ends (telos: Gk for bullseye), is logically connected to the first discussion at least insofar as beauty, but suggesting itself a sort of purposiveness.
Kant writes about the biological itself 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 phenomenal 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 himself says explicitly that while efficiently causal explanations are always best (x causes y, y is the effect of x), there “will never be a Newton for a blade of grass”, and so the organic must be explained “as if” it were constituted as teleological.
Influences
Though Kant consistently maintains that the human mind is not an “intuitive understanding”—something that creates the phenomena which it cognizes—several of his readers (starting with Fichte, culminating in Schiller) decided that it must be (and often give Kant credit, to his posthumous dismay). In this way, Kant accidentally sounds the death knell for the Enlightenment and so gives birth to Romanticism.
Kant’s discussions of schema and symbol late in the first half of the Critique of Judgment also raise questions about the way the mind represents its objects to itself, and so are foundational for an understanding of the development of much late 20th century continental philosophy: Jacques Derrida is known to have studied the book extensively.
Much of modern Aesthetics owes a debt to Kant for providing a framework in which aesthetic questions could be debated; no longer was the claim that “there is no disputing about taste” recognized as a universal call to quiet on the topic.
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