Kant’s Third Critique

Contents:

1. Some scribblings
2. Per IEP article.
3. Per SEP article.
4. Per NDPR: The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom.

Some Scribblings…

It’s not a priori obvious why Kant should concern himself with beauty, especially not with the regard and the significance with which he describes it within his overall architectonic. There are of course historical reasons for his focus (esp. considering Kant as sharing and responding to interests held by other, closely contemporary philosophers and writers), but those are unable to imagine whether an understanding of the beautiful could contribute to Kant’s critical project a posteriori (e.g. as Kant describes in the third Critique). Aside from those two perspectives (i.e. historical, and a posteriori theoretical), is the possibility that Kant’s experiences, in his life and including his philosophical investigations up to that point, could or should have led him to be concerned with beauty (i.e. despite the case that this contradicts historical and theoretical evidence). This is a purely interest-driven, phenomenologically focused question, and any putative answer could never inform the actual Critique of Judgment, only a possible doppelganger. This thought experiment is of interest to a reading of a Critique of Judgment as found in the Library of Babel (nb. that universe in which authors are heuristic devices, comparable with gauge fields in quantum physics).

Once we’ve questioned Kant’s motivation for investigating beauty, one aspect of what makes it curious is the very delineation of beauty as a phenomenon needing explaining. In the historical paradigm, this can be eschewed, since Kant is merely responding to other intellectual writers. But if that were not known, then a first step would be to ask, why is this particular experience so unique as to require a dedicated explanation. If beauty may be described as a quality of experience, then it must (for Kant) be fundamentally different from other qualities. Only two sets of experiences seem to be analogous to beauty, insofar as they involve an object (i.e. a synthesized manifold) and a feature that exists tangential to that object; emotions and judgments*. This problem can resolve itself by referring to Kant’s existing (i.e. two) Critiques. Beauty is unique in four ways…

* There are too many examples of ways in which “emotions” can be attached to objects in this context, e.g. x made me sad, x is sad, x is aggravating, x is pitiful, etc. Also: I mean “judgments” as different to normal, necessary, judgments, so instead of like “x is green”, like “x is practical”.

Thus, Kant’s solution to beauty is already justifying its investigation. However, taking a step back; even if there is a premise that beauty is interesting, how should or could it be investigated?

Per IEP article^[1]

Judgment

• Acts to subsume particular under a universal.
• Bridges understanding (provides concepts) and reason (draws inferences)
• Two types:
  • Determinate = Concept contains sufficient information to identify a particular case
  • Reflective = Judgment without an a priori concept. This is harder to explain and raises aesthetics to relevance.
    • This would be proven possible by the suitability or purposiveness of nature, i.e. the suitability of all of nature for our faculty of judgment.
    • Judgments of beauty support “suitability” since they demand some sort of universality for coherence.
    • This would join theoretical and practical philosophy; what is and what ought.

Critique of aesthetic judgment

• Four features (aka “moments”) of any aesthetic judgment:
  • 1. Disinterested
    • Interest regards either the (conceptually) good, or the (sensibly) pleasant. Interest thus is linked to real desire and will, and thus depends on the real existence of the object. Disinterested judgment thus does not care whether the object exists.
    • Since sensible properties (e.g. colour) are associated with interest, Kant becomes the proto-formalist when he declares that aesthetic judgment regards the forms of the object.
    • This is opposed by those who regard aesthetic judgment as: related to will (Nietzsche, Freud); necessarily political (Marx); a question of effective response (expressionists).
  • 2. Universal
    • Since aesthetics involves reflective judgment, there can be no initial concept to explain universality, instead, we behave “as if” there were a universal taste, and thus consider disagreements as being due to error.
    • He argues against relativism first by saying that we perceive aesthetics as if they were immediate in the experience of the object, and secondly, by referring to our social considerations (i.e. normal taste).
    • For this to be true “apart from a concept”, Kant uses the idea of “free play”.
  • 3. Object appears “purposive without purpose” (or “final without end”)
    • Neither the purpose of utility (external goal) nor perfection (of imitation).
  • 4. Necessary
    • The judgment is exemplary of aesthetic judgment (without producing a concept of beauty).
    • The judgment is conditioned in being grounded in common sense.
• Common sense = the a priori principle of our taste.
  • Cf. In theoretical cognition, universality of communication, and the object’s objectivity, and the representations basis in a priori concepts = all related.
  • …So too for aesthetic judgments. They link exemplary necessity and a basis in an a priori principle, through a subjective condition of possibility of aesthetic judgment (i.e. called common sense).
    • This subjective condition is the third moment.
    • Kant also suggests that this common sense is also the basis for all theoretical condition (as described in the first critique), or even the same thing.
  • Answering this problem by invoking some concept of taste would be a too weak solution, so Kant eschews it.
• Kant now says that the power of judgment has a principle underlying it, namely that all phenomena is purposive, i.e. is amenable to our concepts. We normally don’t take notice of this, except during aesthetic judgments when we are forced to grope for concepts, and this produces a new form purposiveness.
  • This new form is free play, whereby the same concepts are invoked, but no one determinate set is definitively concluded. Thus intuition is allowed to free play with the lawfulness of the understanding, acting in harmony, in a way Kant calls “common sense”.
  • AJ’s are thus universally valid, i.e. they involve the normal structure and functions of the faculties of cognition.
• The sublime:
  • Mathematical (magnitude)
  • Dynamic (power)
  • Both cause us to reflect on enormity (i.e. the immediate versus the possibility of infinite).
  • The true object of sublime, is our own reason, which can conquer the immediate object that evokes the sublime.
  • Its experience involves a continuous rapid alteration between two feelings: (1) displeasure at the violence against our sensible interests, and (2) a higher pleasure resulting from the strange purposiveness that results.
  • …That is: An initial experience of our senses failing to completely subsume the intuition, and then this failure constitutes a “negative exhibition” of the ideas of reason (which could not otherwise be presented). That exhibition reveals the purposiveness of the experience, and of reason, namely our supersensible vocation. This links to morality in a way more obvious in the case of the dynamic sublime; it reveals the human freedom that is unassailable by the forces of nature.
  • Is the sublime universal? Yes, but contingent on a moral culture that assumes freedom. However, since we all have the transcendental conditions for such a culture (since they are the conditions of experience), therefore, yes.
  • Issues:
    • Only the dynamical sublime directly links to freedom.
    • Are the mathematical and dynamic sublime fundamentally different, including in their relation to moral culture?
    • Why should the object of the sublime become reason (as opposed to the direct object of experience, viz. nature)?
• Fine art and genius:
  • Previously was discussing aesthetics of nature, but Kant is contributing to a historical turning point as the focus transitions to the production of artists. Kant is here concerned with explaining how the artist produces a work of aesthetics. He attributes its possibility to the genius, who is born with a talent (i.e. that they do not produce, nor does their culture, eduction, etc).
    • “Genius is the innate mental predisposition (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art.”
  • Key propositions for the possibility of the above rule:
    • Fine art is produced by individuals but not qua contingent (viz. in their empirically known sense) individuals.
    • Fine art can have no definite rules/concepts for its production. Genius provides the rule for the particular work, on the basis of their mental (nb. essential) structure.
    • …That rule governs what not how. The how is determined by taste.
    • Genius is original, and thus fine art is never imitation (although it may be inspired).
    • Fine art must have the look of nature (meaning outside the normal roles of production, or sensible will); radically original.
  • …Genius provides the matter, taste provides the form. Genius provides “soul” or “spirit” (cf. the sense of a person having sou, qua moral character), this occurs by linking the work to aesthetic ideas.
    • Aesthetic idea = imagination presented but to which no thought is adequate.
    • …Cf. the sublime’s rational ideas to which no sensible/imagined intuition is adequate.
    • Thus the fine art of the genius is special in that while it does also involve the harmonious interplay, it also is an expression of the state of mind that produced it. Nb. there is no sufficient presentation of the latter, thus the strain.
    • Furthermore, re. aesthetic idea = Kant seems to have two interpretations that fit…
      • A presentation of a rational idea (e.g. cosmopolitan justice), which necessarily is in surplus to its presentation.
      • An impossibly perfect representation of an empirical experience and its concept (e.g. death, love). This is not so much presenting a rational idea, as a striving of reason for totality of a series.
• Kant seems to need to explain the beautiful by reference by something analogous to a concept, i.e. a transcendental directing of appearances. But it is not that simple, and he would not use that as a simple add-on concept…
  • “But at the same time, this idealism also necessarily raises the question of what conditions beautiful appearances: if we are asking for a concept that accounts (on the side of the ideal object) for this purposiveness, it must be what Kant calls the realm of the ‘supersensible’ that is ‘underlying’ all nature and all humanity. As we know, no other concept (e.g. a natural concept) is adequate to grasping the beautiful object as beautiful. So, in forming an aesthetic judgment, which judges a beautiful object as purposive without purpose, we must assume the legitimacy of the rational concept of an underlying supersensible realm in order to account for that purposiveness. This assumption is valid only within and only for that judgment, and thus, is certainly not a matter of knowledge. Thus, Kant can borrow the notion of aesthetic idea from his account of fine art and, speaking from the point of view of reflective judgment, say that beauty, in general, is always the expression of aesthetic ideas (sect.51). From the point of view of judgment, everything happens as if the unfolding beauty of the natural world is like the product of a genius. This piques the interest of reason – for judgment has, as it were, found phenomenal evidence of the reality of reason’s more far-reaching claims about the supersensible (see B3 below). The profundity of beauty, for Kant, consists of precisely this assumption by judgment; it allows him to make further connections between beauty and morality, and (as we shall see) ultimately to suggest the unity of all the disciplines of philosophy.”

Critique of Teleological Judgment

• A teleological judgment = regards an object whose possibility cannot be separate to the perspective of its purpose. An object with an “intrinsic purpose” is an object that embodies its purpose, especially living organisms, that are both cause and effect, blueprint and product (cf. the cook’s idea of soup is separate to the soup).
  • An organism’s parts are organized according to the idea of the whole; the parts reciprocally produce and are produced by the whole.
  • Biology as a science is only possible due to the functioning of reflective judgment, that recognizes the intrinsic purpose, and thus delineates organisms for a field of study.
• Intellectus ectypus = Mind like we have, which depends on receiving intuitions from which it synthesizes objects which, in turn, can become experienced as parts of wholes. It contrasts with…
  • Intellectus archetypus = Direct cognition of a thing. “In such a case, there would be no distinction between perceiving a thing, understanding a thing, and the thing existing. This is as close as our finite minds can get to understanding the mind of God.”
• [As I understand it: We can see the parts of man, and then build an object of man in our appearances. A god-mind would conceive of the man-thing directly, and from that, it follows that the parts of man are included. This consideration is relevant to understanding teleological reflective judgments.
  • There is an antinomy between organisms as following from natural causes, and as following from natural purposes. This can be simply solved by realizing that the latter is not a constitutive feature (i.e. does not determine the object’s existence).
  • It can also be solved by considering a god-mind, for which natural/intrinsic purpose can be considered just as necessary as mechanical causes.]

Kant’s Moral Argument for the Existence of God

• Moral law is a duty (and therefore doesn’t depend on consequences per se), but, considers the “highest good” (summum bonum) which is the final purpose/aim of all moral action.
  • …moral action, therefore, assumes a moral author to the world, which would make the summum bonum possible, and thus allow morality to make sense. (Nb. this argument appeals only practical, and not theoretical, reason).
• Begins discussing claims that nature has purposes, and then that man is the highest purpose. These, he rejects, but moves onto discussing “highest purpose”, i.e. one which is not dependent on any other purpose, and thus, one which is dependent merely on the idea of it.
  • Man’s freedom is both cause (qua moral law) and effect (qua existing in chain of cause/effect) and is thus the highest purpose for all of nature (i.e. without it, nature would be barren of purpose).

The Unity of Philosophy

• The problem of the unity of philosophy is how thought oriented towards knowledge and thought oriented towards moral duty can result from the same faulty.
  • Similarly: The problem of the unity of the objects of philosophy is how the grounds of that which we know (the supersensible grounds of nature) and the grounds of moral action (the supersensible grounds of nature that allows the summum boum and free will to be possible) can be the same.
• Judgment is based on an a priori principle that all of nature is purposive for judgment. This unifies the objects of supersensible groundings of beauty, nature, and morality.
• “The understanding, inasmuch as it can give laws to nature a priori, proves that we cognize nature only as appearance, and hence at the same time points to a supersensible substrate of nature; but it leaves this substrate entirely undetermined… Judgment, through its a priori principle of judging nature [purposively; in other words judging nature] in terms of possible particular laws of nature, provides nature’s supersensible substrate (within as well as outside us) with determinability by the intellectual faculty [i.e. reason]… But reason, through its a priori practical law, gives this same substrate determination.” (C3 Intro IX)
  • “Moreover, Judgment has, on the side of the subjective mind, made it conceivable to reason that its theoretical and practical employments are not only compatible (that was proved already in the Antinomy concerning freedom) but also capable of co-ordination towards moral purposes. Because, on the one hand, aesthetic judgment were found to be not fundamentally different from ordinary theoretical cognition of nature (see A2 above), and on the other hand, aesthetic judgment has a deep similarity to moral judgment (A5). Thus, Kant has demonstrated that the physical and moral universes – and the philosophies and forms of thought that present them – are not only compatible but unified.”

Per SEP article^[2]

This article contains extensive referrals to secondary literature, including in the context of describing controversial and/or difficult aspects or interpretations of Kant. I have not made a rule to aim to summarize those discussions.
My intention here is to add, without excessive redundancy, to what has already been summarized above (per IEP).

Judgment

• Although important in the first Critique (i.e. as the faculty for subsuming under rules), there it is only discussed in its “determining” role (i.e. since the relevant rule/concept is always given, and thus judgment appears as always governed by the principles of the understanding).
• “Reflecting” role = finding the a universal for the given particular.
• Although he discusses this in the Introduction (1st/2nd), he barely mentions it in the two critiques (aesthetic/teleological) proper. Also limited to a presence in the Intro, is its role in scientific inquiry*. (Nb. it is also important for underlying cognition in general by establishing nature as law-like, and for unifying this third critique).
  • * “…in particular, the classification of natural things into a hierarchical taxonomy of genera and species, and the construction of systematic explanatory scientific theories.”

Critique of Aesthetic Judgment

• First section, “Analytic of the Beautiful”:
  • Re. the first moment. Re. cf. the interested good, note that this can be conceptually good and which includes the term as moral and as apt (i.e. good-for/as).
  • Re. the second moment. The lack of concept, contrasts this judgment from that of non-evaluative cognitive judgments and judgments of the good, both of which make a claim to universal validity based on concepts.
  • Re. the third moment. The “form of purposiveness” can be perceived both in the object itself, and in the activity of the imagination/judgment in free-play.
  • Re. the fourth moment. The “necessity” doesn’t imply that everyone will judge similarly, but that they ought to.
    • Common sense = defined as a subjective principle which allows us to judge by feeling rather than concepts.
• In saying that aesthetic judgments both (a) lack a purpose, yet (b) demand normativity: Kant is reacting against two traditional camps:
  • (1) Empiricists (e.g. Hume, Hutcheson, Hume) = aesthetics is based on feeling.
  • (2) Rationalist (e.g. Baumgarten and Meier) = aesthetics based on cognition of an objective property.
  • “How is a judgment possible which, merely from one’s own feeling of pleasure in an object, independent of its concept, judges this pleasure as attached to the representation of the same object in every other subject, and does so a priori, i.e., without having to wait for the assent of others?” (§36)
  • Official answer is at “Deduction of Taste” in the “Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgments”. Cf. answer at “Analytic of the Beautiful” (§22) involving common sense.
  • Free-play = imagination/understanding acting without bringing the object to a determinate concept. This state of mind involves disinterested pleasure, and is the basis for taste. Since this is based on the conditions of cognition, it parallels a demand for necessity.
• Beauty isn’t necessarily free. Non-free judgments of beauty are impure in two possible ways: (1) influenced by the object’s sensory or emotional appeal; (2) they are contingent on a certain concept’s applying to the object, i.e. is it not judged as beautiful tout court, but as beautiful qua belonging to some kind. The second kind are called “adherent beauties”, and for Kant this includes all representational art.
  • For Allison, adherent beauty’s judgment includes a component that is pure.
• Kant ranks fine-art from poetry to music (i.e. bottom).
• Aesthetic idea = “a representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking, though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it”.
  • Rational idea = representations which cannot be exemplified in experience or by means of imagination
  • Art exhibits an aesthetic idea insofar as it gives a rational idea a form.
  • Although only discussed per artificial beauty, Kant says that they apply to natural beauty too, but doesn’t elaborate.

Problems

• Problem: If free-play is not involved in all cognitions, then what right have we to demand that everyone should experience it (i.e. in beauty). Such a conclusion requires an additional argument to show that free-play is an inevitable result of the common basis of cognition.
  • One solution is by Allison: he rejects the objection for presupposing an overly strong interpretation of what the Deduction is intended to accomplish. The objection requires the Deduction to entitle us to claim universal agreement for particular judgments of taste; but for Allison the Deduction is intended only to establish that such claims can, in general, be legitimate.
  • Another strategy is to solve the problem by involving aesthetic ideas in forming aesthetic’s necessity.
• There are various explanations of the relationship between the pleasure, the universal communicability, the free-play, and the judgment of taste proper. Some of these require a two-act process, e.g. Guyer holds an initial free-play resulting in pleasure, followed by a reflective judgment of the pleasure’s universability. Some two-act processes involve two sensations of pleasure, esp. Longuenesse, for whom there is an initial feeling coinciding with the free-play and a secondary feeling coinciding with the reflective judgment.
• Free-play seems to be a paradoxical feature.
  • Ginsborg says that it is the very feature of nonconceptual universality.
  • Guyer says that it is the first two stages of the “three-fold synthesis” described by Kant in the first edition Transcendental Deduction.
  • Guyer explicitly, along with some others (although some only implicitly) commentators, assumes that the free play represents a natural (i.e. spatiotemporal, causal) psychological process. This, however, contradicts Kant’s appeal to it to justify the legitimacy of judgments of beauty, and more generally his claim to be offering a transcendental account of judgments of beauty. Thus Guyer argues that we should reject Kant’s claim to establish a transcendental principle justifying judgments of beauty, and instead regard Kant’s theory of aesthetics as a contribution to the empirical psychology of taste.

Sublime

• Mathematical = causes us to realize the superiority of our reason over the limitation of our sense
• Dynamic = causes us to realize our fundamental freedom of agency despite our limitation before power.
• Versus beauty:
  • We judge purpose not for the object, but for the judgment itself, and (not for imagination/understanding but) for reason or the mind’s vocation as a whole.
  • Universal validity is due (not to basis of cognition but due) to the universal validity of morality.
  • It is a relation (not of understanding/imagination but) of imagination and reason.
• Although influential, Kant’s philosophy here is less original (cf. Burke), and considered less important overall (although relevant to linking aesthetics/morality).

Aesthetics-morality

• Aesthetic experience serves as a propaedeutic for morality, in that “the beautiful prepares us to love something, even nature, without interest; the sublime, to esteem it, even contrary to our (sensible) interest” (General Remark following §29).
• Universal agreement in judgments of the sublime rests on an appeal to moral feeling.
• Interest in the beauty of nature indicates “a good soul” and a “mental attunement favorable to moral feeling”.
• Beauty is a symbol of morality, as it is self-legislating rather than being subject to the laws of experience.

Critique of Teleological Judgment

• Purpose = an object “is called purposive merely because its possibility can only be explained and conceived by us in so far as we assume at its ground a causality in accordance with purposes”
• Nature’s purposiveness for our cognitive faculties = this is an a priori principle of reflecting judgment, viz. it is a condition for the possibility of reflective judgment.
  • Problem: Why is this a condition; why can’t we proceed to search for a systematic nature (viz. that enables science) without assuming it.
• Kant holds that organisms can evolve from one another, but not that life can evolve from non-life (nb. life is made of vital matter).
• The idea of the outer or relative purposiveness of one natural thing for another, which is made possible by the idea of a natural purpose, in turn, makes possible the idea of nature as a system of purposes, where everything in nature is teleologically connected to everything else through relations of outer purposiveness.
  • This leads to the ideas of “ultimate purpose” and “final purpose”. The former is man qua moral subject, and the latter is culture, which prepares us for our ultimate purpose.
  • “Culture” includes “culture of skill” (specific abilities) and “culture of discipline” (ability to make choices without being influenced by the inclinations to enjoyment stemming from our animal nature).
  • This requires the assumption of an Author that allows the possibility of nature’s highest good.

Per NDPR: The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom^[3]

This is based on my reading of the NDPR review (by Lara Osteric) of the book (by Robert R Clewis).
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