Critique of Judgment

Overview

The Critique of the Power of Judgment is four hundred and twenty pages, published in 1790 when Kant was sixty-six, and it is the last of the three Critiques. It is also the strangest, because it puts two subjects between one set of covers that nobody had thought belonged together: judgements of beauty and the study of living things.

The reason they belong together is the book’s thesis. The first Critique dealt with the understanding, which legislates for nature; the second with reason, which legislates for freedom. Between them Kant saw a gulf: the world as science describes it is a causal mechanism, and the world as morality requires it is a place where free agents act for ends. Judgement is the faculty he proposes as the bridge, and it operates in both halves of this book by finding purposiveness in things without being able to prove any purpose is there.

There are two introductions. Kant wrote a long one, decided it was too long, and wrote a shorter one for publication; both are printed in modern editions and the first is clearer about the architecture.

The prose is difficult even by Kant’s standards, and the two halves are usually read separately. The Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, the first half, is the one that gets assigned.

The argument

The four moments of taste. Kant analyses what is going on when someone says a thing is beautiful, using the four headings from the table of categories, and the result is the most influential piece of aesthetics ever written.

By quality: a judgement of taste is disinterested. You take no interest in whether the object exists, whether you can own it, whether it is useful or agreeable. That distinguishes beauty both from the merely pleasant, which is agreeable to me and about which there is no arguing, and from the good, which involves a concept of what the thing is for.

By quantity: it claims universal agreement. This is the puzzle. Nobody says this wine is agreeable and expects others to concur, but people do say this painting is beautiful and mean that others ought to see it. Kant takes that demand seriously rather than dissolving it into preference.

By relation: it presents purposiveness without a purpose. The object strikes us as though it were designed to suit our faculties, without our having any concept of what it is for.

By modality: the agreement is felt as necessary, though no rule can be produced that would compel it. You cannot prove a poem is beautiful; you can only ask someone to look again.

The explanation Kant offers for all four is the free play of imagination and understanding. In ordinary cognition the imagination gathers a manifold and the understanding brings it under a concept. In an aesthetic response the two engage each other without any concept being applied, and the felt harmony of that engagement is the pleasure. Because the faculties are the same in everyone, the demand for agreement is intelligible.

The sublime. A separate analysis for a different experience. The mathematically sublime arises when something is so vast that imagination cannot take it in; the dynamically sublime when something is so powerful that it would crush us, viewed from safety. In both cases there is a moment of failure and then a reversal: imagination’s defeat reveals a capacity in us, reason’s ideas of infinity and of moral freedom, which exceeds anything nature can present. The sublime is therefore not a property of mountains or storms but a discovery about ourselves, occasioned by them.

Genius and art. Fine art cannot be made by following rules, since a rule would only produce imitation, and yet art is not accidental. Kant’s solution is genius: a natural endowment through which nature gives the rule to art. The genius cannot explain how the work was made, produces something exemplary rather than derivative, and supplies what Kant calls aesthetic ideas, representations of the imagination that occasion much thought without any determinate concept being adequate to them.

He also ranks the arts, rates poetry highest, and makes the odd and much-discussed claim that beauty is the symbol of morality.

Teleological judgement. The second half, and a genuine puzzle rather than a curiosity. Kant asks how an organism can be understood. Unlike a machine, a living thing produces itself, repairs itself, reproduces its kind, and each part seems to exist both for the sake of the others and by means of them. A mechanical account of a blade of grass in terms of the motions of matter appears impossible.

His answer is careful and it is the reason the section matters. The concept of natural purpose is regulative, not constitutive. We must investigate organisms as if they were purposively organised, because nothing else lets us frame questions about them, and we are never entitled to assert that nature actually operates for ends. Purpose is a principle of our judgement, not a discovery about things.

Then the sentence everyone quotes: it would be absurd to hope that a Newton will one day arise who could make comprehensible even the generation of a blade of grass according to natural laws that no intention has ordered.

Darwin published sixty-nine years later. Whether that refutes Kant depends on what one thinks he was claiming. Natural selection does explain the appearance of design without intention; it does not obviously abolish the need to describe a heart as being for pumping blood, and biologists still use functional language freely. The passage is worth reading precisely because it states the difficulty at its hardest.

The book closes with a moral argument for the existence of God, which repeats the second Critique’s postulate in the register of purposiveness.

How to read it

Read the introductions, then sections 1 to 22 on the beautiful, then 23 to 29 on the sublime, then 43 to 50 on art and genius. That is the first half’s argument in perhaps ninety pages.

Read the first half before deciding whether you want the second. The teleology is rewarding and difficult and can be taken separately.

Use the Guyer and Matthews Cambridge translation. It is the current standard, the notes are helpful, and Guyer has written the best commentary in English.

Test the four moments against your own experience of something you find beautiful. Kant’s claim that you expect others to agree, while knowing you cannot prove it, is an observation about how aesthetic talk actually works, and it is more accurate than most of what has been said since.

Read section 75 with Darwin in mind, and then decide what the passage was claiming. This is the clearest case in philosophy of an argument about the limits of explanation being overtaken by an explanation, and the interesting question is how much of Kant’s point survives.

Questions it raises

• A judgement of taste demands agreement and cannot compel it. Is that a coherent kind of claim, and what would settle a disagreement?
• Beauty is disinterested. Does anyone actually experience art that way, and does the account survive if they do not?
• The sublime is said to be about us rather than about mountains. Is that convincing, or does it explain away the experience it describes?
• Genius gives the rule to art and cannot say how. Does that explain artistic creation or place it beyond explanation?
• Purposiveness in organisms is regulative only. Can a principle we cannot do without really be one we are not entitled to assert?
• Darwin answered the question Kant said could not be answered. What exactly did he answer, and is anything left of the original problem?