Critique of Judgement

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The Critique of Judgement (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), or in the new Cambridge translation Critique of the Power of Judgment, also known as the third critique, is a philosophical work by Immanuel Kant.

Contents 1 Foundations 2 Aesthetics 3 Teleology 4 Influences 5 Judgement vs. Judgment 6 See also 7 External links

[edit] Foundations

Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement, also known as the third critique, simultaneously completes Kant's Critical project and lays the foundations for modern aesthetics. The most popular English translation is the one made by James Creed Meredith, though recently Paul Guyer's translation, part of the new Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation, has gained some ground. 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. Guyer's translation and Werner S. Pluhar's, tend to be preferred over the older Meredith and Bernard editions.

The book is divided into two main sections, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the Critique of Teleological Judgement, 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 article 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 Judgement constitutes a discussion of the place of Judgement itself, which must overlap both the Understanding (which proceeds within the determinist camp) and Reason (which exploits the camp of spontaneity).

[edit] Aesthetics

The first part of the book, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, discusses the four possible reflective judgements - the agreeable, the beautiful, the sublime, and the good. Kant makes it clear that these are the only four possible reflective judgements, as he relates them to the Table of Judgements from the Critique of Pure Reason.

The agreeable is a purely sensory judgement – things in the form of "This steak is good," "This chair is soft," or, "That night of passionate chess was satisfying." They are purely subjective judgements, based on inclination alone.

The good is essentially a judgement that something is ethical – the judgement 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 judgement – things are either moral, to Kant, or they are not.

The remaining two judgements - the beautiful and the sublime - occupy a space between the agreeable and the good. They are what Kant refers to as "subjective universal" judgements. This apparently oxymoronic term means that, in practice, the judgements are subjective, and are not tied to any absolute and determinate concept. However, the judgement that something is beautiful or sublime is made with the belief that other people ought to agree with this judgement - 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 judgement 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 judgement that something is sublime is a judgement 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 noumenon 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 judgement - the faculty of genius. Whereas judgement allows one to determine whether something is beautiful or sublime, genius allows one to produce what is beautiful or sublime.

[edit] Teleology

The second half of the Critique discusses teleological judgement. This way of judging things according to their ends (telos: Greek for end) is logically connected to the first discussion at least regarding beauty but suggests a kind of (self-) purposiveness (that is, meaningfulness known by one's self).

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 (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. 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 Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals.

[edit] 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 Schelling) 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 Judgement 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.

[edit] Judgement vs. Judgment

The British/UK and American spellings of 'judg[e]ment' cause the divergent spellings of the word. While either is generally acceptable if consistent, one needs to be sure to note how a given translator is spelling the word.

[edit] See also

• Schopenhauer's criticism of Kant's schemata

[edit] External links

• Kant's Critique of Judgement TXT online text