Kant: Aesthetics

kant2Immanuel Kant is an 18th century German philosopher whose work
initated dramatic changes in the fields of epistemology, metaphysics,
ethics, aesthetics, and teleology. Like many Enlightenment thinkers,
he holds our mental faculty of reason in high esteem; he believes that
it is our reason that invests the world we experience with structure.
In his works on aesthetics and teleology, he argues that it is our
faculty of judgment that enables us to have experience of beauty and
grasp those experiences as part of an ordered, natural world with
purpose. After the Introduction, each of the above sections commences
with a summary. These will give the reader an idea of what topics are
discussed in more detail in each section. They can also be read
together to form a brief bird's-eye-view of Kant's theory of
aesthetics and teleology.

1. Introduction
a. Kant's Life and Works

Immanuel Kant is often said to have been the greatest philosopher
since the Greeks. Certainly, he dominates the last two hundred years
in the sense that – although few philosophers today are strictly
speaking Kantians – his influence is everywhere. Moreover, that
influence extends over a number of different philosophical regions:
epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, politics, religion.
Because of Kant's huge importance, and the variety of his
contributions and influences, this encyclopedia entry is divided into
a number of subsections. What follows here will be a brief account of
Kant's life and works, followed by an overview of those themes that
Kant felt bridged his philosophical works, and made them into one
'critical philosophy'.

Kant was born in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kalingrad in Russia) in 1724
to Pietist Lutheran parents. His early education first at a Pietist
school and then at the University of Königsberg was in theology, but
he soon became attracted by problems in physics, and especially the
work of Isaac Newton. In 1746 financial difficulties forced him to
withdraw from the University. After nine years supporting himself as a
tutor to the children of several wealthy families in outlying
districts, he returned to the University, finishing his degree and
entering academic life, though at first (and for many years) in the
modest capacity of a lecturer. (Only in 1770 was he given a University
chair in logic and metaphysics at Königsberg.) He continued to work
and lecture on, and publish widely, on a great variety of issues, but
especially on physics and on the metaphysical issues behind physics
and mathematics. He rarely left his home city, and gradually became a
celebrity there for his brilliant, witty but eccentric character.

Kant's early work was in the tradition (although not dogmatically even
then) of the great German rationalist philosopher Leibniz, and
especially his follower Wolff. But by the 1760s, he was increasingly
admiring Leibniz's great rival Newton, and was coming under the
additional influences of the empiricist skepticism of Hume and the
ethical and political thought of Rousseau. In this period he produced
a series of works attacking Leibnizian thought. In particular, he now
argued that the traditional tools of philosophy – logic and
metaphysics – had to be understood to be severely limited with respect
to obtaining knowledge of reality. (Similar, apparently skeptical,
claims were relatively common in the Enlightenment.)

It was only in the late 1760s, and especially in his Inaugural
Dissertation of 1770 that Kant began to move towards the ideas that
would make him famous and change the face of philosophy. In the
Dissertation, he argued for three key new ideas: first, that sensible
and conceptual presentations of the world (for example, my seeing
three horses, and my concept of three) must be understood to be two
quite distinct sources of possible knowledge. Second, it follows that
knowledge of sensible reality is only possible if the necessary
concepts (such as substance) are already available to the intellect.
This fact, Kant argued, also limits the legitimate range of
application of these concepts. Finally, Kant claimed that sensible
presentations were of only appearances', and not things as they are in
themselves. This was because space and time, which describe the basic
structure of all sensible appearances, are not existent in things in
themselves, but are only a product of our organs of sense. Perceiving
things in space and time is a function of the mind of the perceiver.
The hypothesis that both key concepts, and the basic structure of
space and time, are a priori in the mind, is a basic theme of Kant's
idealism (see the entry on 'Kant's Metaphysics'). It is important to
recognize that this last claim about space and time also exacerbates
the limitation imposed above by proposing a whole realm of 'noumena'
or 'things in themselves' which necessarily lies beyond knowledge in
any ordinary sense. These new and often startling ideas, with a few
important modifications, would form the basis of his philosophical
project for the rest of his life.

After publishing quite often in the preceding 15 years, the
Dissertation ushered in an apparently quiet phase in Kant's work. Kant
realized that he had discovered a new way of thinking. He now needed
rigorous demonstrations of his new ideas, and had to pursue their
furthest implications. He even needed to find a new philosophical
language to properly express such original thoughts! This took more
than a decade of his life. Except for a remarkable set of
correspondence during this period, Kant published nothing until the
massive first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, in 1781 (revised
second edition, 1787).

Over the next two decades, however, he furiously pursued his new
philosophy into different territories, producing books or shorter
publications on virtually every philosophical topic under the sun.
This new philosophy came to be known as 'critical' or 'transcendental'
philosophy. Of particular importance were the so called three
Critiques: The Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), Critique of
Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of Judgment (1790). Kant
quickly became famous in the German speaking world, and soon
thereafter elsewhere. This fame did not mean universal praise,
however. Kant's work was feverishly debated in all circles – his work
on religion and politics was even censored. And by the time of his
death in 1804, philosophers such as Fichte, Schelling and the Hegel
were already striking out in new philosophical directions. Directions,
however, that would have been unthinkable without Kant.
b. The Central Problems of the Critique of Judgment

Kant's Critique of Judgment (the third Critique) was and continues to
be a surprise – even to Kant, for it emerged out of Kant's
philosophical activity having not been a part of the original plan.
(For an account of Kant's first two Critiques, please see the entry on
'Kant's Metaphysics'.) Some philosophers have even claimed that it is
the product of the onset of senility in Kant. After initial enthusiasm
during the romantic period, the book was relatively ignored until work
such as Cassirer's in the early 20th Century. Especially in the last
few decades, however, the Critique of Judgment is being increasingly
seen as a major and profound work in Kant's output.

Part of the surprise lies in the diversity of topics Kant deals with.
For much of the previous two centuries the book was read – and it
still is largely read in this way – as a book about aesthetics (the
philosophy of the beautiful and the sublime). In fact this type of
reading by no means adequately reflects Kant's explicit themes, and is
forced to ignore much of the text. Here, we shall try to sketch out
the range of topics and purposes (including aesthetics) Kant gives to
his third Critique.

There are several commonly available translations of the Critique of
Judgment. Here, we will use Werner S. Pluhar's (Hackett, 1987), but
will make reference alternative translations of key terms, especially
as found in the widely used James Creed Meredith translation. To
facilitate the use of the variety of available editions, passages in
Kant's text will be indicated by section number, rather than page
number.

The basic, explicit purpose of Kant's Critique of Judgment is to
investigate whether the 'power' (also translated as 'faculty' – and we
will use the latter here) of judgment provides itself with an priori
principle. In earlier work, Kant had pretty much assumed that judgment
was simply a name for the combined operation of other, more
fundamental, mental faculties. Now, Kant has been led to speculate
that the operation of judgment might be organized and directed by a
fundamental a priori principle that is unique to it. The third
Critique sets out to explore the validity and implications of such a
hypothesis.

In the third Critique, Kant's account of judgment begins with the
definition of judgment as the subsumption of a particular under a
universal (Introduction IV). If, in general, the faculty of
understanding is that which supplies concepts (universals), and reason
is that which draws inferences (constructs syllogisms, for example),
then judgment 'mediates' between the understanding and reason by
allowing individual acts of subsumption to occur (cf. e.g.
Introduction III). This leads Kant to a further distinction between
determinate and reflective judgments (Introduction IV). In the former,
the concept is sufficient to determine the particular – meaning that
the concept contains sufficient information for the identification of
any particular instance of it. In such a case, judgment's work is
fairly straightforward (and Kant felt he had dealt adequately with
such judgments in the Critique of Pure Reason). Thus the latter (where
the judgment has to proceed without a concept, sometimes in order to
form a new concept) forms the greater philosophical problem here. How
could a judgment take place without a prior concept? How are new
concepts formed? And are there judgments that neither begin nor end
with determinate concepts? This explains why a book about judgment
should have so much to say about aesthetics: Kant takes aesthetic
judgments to be a particularly interesting form of reflective
judgments.

As we shall see, the second half of Kant's book deals with
teleological judgments. Broadly speaking, a teleological judgment
concerns an object the possibility of which can only be understood
from the point of view of its purpose. Kant will claim that
teleological judgments are also reflective, but in a different way –
that is, having a different indeterminacy with respect to the concepts
typical of natural science.

Reflective judgments are important for Kant because they involve the
judgment doing a job for itself, rather than being a mere co-ordinator
of concepts and intuitions; thus, reflective judgments might be the
best place to search for judgment's a priori legislating principle.
The principle in question (if it exists), Kant claims, would assert
the suitability of all nature for our faculty of judgment in general.
(In the narrower case of determinate judgments, Kant believes he has
demonstrated the necessity of this 'suitability' – please see the
entry on 'Kant's Metaphysics'.) This general suitability Kant calls
the finality or purposiveness/ purposefulness of nature for the
purposes of our judgment. Kant offers a number of arguments to prove
the existence and validity of this principle. First, he suggests that
without such a principle, science (as a systematic, orderly and
unified conception of nature) would not be possible. All science must
assume the availability of its object for our ability to judge it. (A
similar argument is used by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason in
discussing the regulative role of rational ideas (see
A642-668=B670-696)). Second, without such a principle our judgments
about beauty would not exhibit the communicability, or tendency to
universality even in the absence of a concept, that they do. It is
this second argument that dominates the first half of the Critique of
Judgment.

As we shall see, Kant uses the particular investigation into judgments
about art, beauty and the sublime partly as a way of illuminating
judgment in general. Aesthetic judgments exhibit in an exemplary
fashion precisely those features of judgment in general which allow
one to explore the transcendental principles of judgment. But Kant has
still higher concerns. The whole problem of judgment is important
because judgment, Kant believes, forms the mediating link between the
two great branches of philosophical inquiry (the theoretical and the
practical). It had been noted before (for example, by Hume) that there
seems to be a vast difference between what is, and what ought to be.
Kant notes that these two philosophical branches have completely
different topics, but these topics, paradoxically, have as their
object the very same sensible nature. Theoretical philosophy has as
its topic the cognition of sensible nature; practical philosophy has
as its topic the possibility of moral action in and on sensible
nature.

This problem had arisen before in Kant's work, in the famous
Antinomies in both the first and second Critiques. A key version of
the problem Kant poses in the Antinomies concerns freedom: how can
nature be both determined according to the laws of science, and yet
have 'room' for the freedom necessary in order for morality to have
any meaning? Ultimately, for Kant this would be a conflict of our
faculty of reason against itself. For, in its theoretical employment,
reason absolutely demands the subjection of all objects to law; but in
its practical (moral) employment, reason equally demands the
possibility of freedom. The problem is solved by returning to the
idealism we discussed in previous section of the introduction. Every
object has to be conceived in a two-fold manner: first as an
appearance, subject to the necessary jurisdiction of certain basic
concepts (the Categories) and to the forms of space and time; second,
as a thing in itself, about which nothing more can be said. Even if
appearances are rigorously law-governed, it is still possible that
things in themselves can act freely. Nevertheless, although this
solution eliminates the conflict, it does not actually unify the two
sides of reason, nor the two objects (what is and what ought) of
reason.

Judgment seems to relate to both sides, however, and thus (Kant
speculates) can form the third thing that allows philosophy to be a
single, unified discipline. Kant thus believes that judgment may be
the mediating link that can unify the whole of philosophy, and
correlatively, also the link that discovers the unity among the
objects and activities of philosophy. Unfortunately, Kant never makes
explicit exactly how the bulk of his third Critique is supposed to
solve this problem; understandably, it is thus often ignored by
readers of Kant's text. Thus, the central problem of the Critique of
Judgment is a broad one: the unity of philosophy in general. This
problem is investigated by that mental faculty which Kant believes is
the key to this unity, namely judgment. And judgment is investigated
by the critical inquiry into those types of judgment in which the a
priori principle of judgment is apparent: on the beautiful, on the
sublime, and on teleology. We shall return to the grand issue of the
unity of philosophy at the end of this article.

The various themes of the Critique of Judgment have been enormously
influential in the two centuries since its publication. The accounts
of genius, and of the significance of imagination in aesthetics, for
example, became basic pillars of Romanticism in the early 19th
Century. The formalism of Kant's aesthetics in general inspired two
generations of formalist aesthetics, in the first half of the 20th
Century; the connection between judgment and political or moral
communities has been similarly influential from Schiller onwards, and
was the main subject of Hanna Arendt's last, uncompleted, project; and
Kant's treatment of the sublime has been a principle object of study
by several recent philosophers, such as J.-F. Lyotard. Kant's
discussion, in the second half of the book, of the distinction between
the intellectus ectypus and the intellectus archetypus was an
extremely important in the decades immediately after Kant in the
development of German Idealism. And his moral proof for the existence
of God is often ranked alongside the great arguments of Anselm and
Aquinas.

The following entry is divided into two sections, which correspond for
the most part to the major division of Kant's book between the
'Critique of Aesthetic Judgment' and the 'Critique of Teleological
Judgment'. Part A deals with Kant's account of beauty, the sublime,
and fine art. In the first two of these subjects, Kant's concern is
with what features an aesthetic judgment exhibits, how such a judgment
is possible, and is there any transcendental guarantee of the validity
of such a judgment. The treatment of fine art shifts the focus onto
the conditions of possibility of the production of works of art. Part
B deals with Kant's account of teleological judgment, and its relation
to the natural science of biology. However, if the discussion above of
the 'Central Problems' of the Critique of Judgment is correct, a major
part of Kant's interest is less in these particular analyses, than in
their broader implications for e.g. morality, the nature of human
thought, our belief in the existence of God, and ultimately for the
unity of philosophy itself. We will be dealing with these implications
throughout, but especially in sections A5, B2, B3 and B4.
2. Kant's Aesthetics
a. The Judgment of the Beautiful

Overview: The Critique of Judgment begins with an account of beauty.
The initial issue is: what kind of judgment is it that results in our
saying, for example, 'That is a beautiful sunset'. Kant argues that
such aesthetic judgments (or 'judgments of taste') must have four key
distinguishing features. First, they are disinterested, meaning that
we take pleasure in something because we judge it beautiful, rather
than judging it beautiful because we find it pleasurable. The latter
type of judgment would be more like a judgment of the 'agreeable', as
when I say 'I like doughnuts'.

Second and third, such judgments are both universal and necessary.
This means roughly that it is an intrinsic part of the activity of
such a judgment to expect others to agree with us. Although we may say
'beauty is in the eye of the beholder', that is not how we act.
Instead, we debate and argue about our aesthetic judgments – and
especially about works of art -and we tend to believe that such
debates and arguments can actually achieve something. Indeed, for many
purposes, 'beauty' behaves as if it were a real property of an object,
like its weight or chemical composition. But Kant insists that
universality and necessity are in fact a product of features of the
human mind (Kant calls these features 'common sense'), and that there
is no objective property of a thing that makes it beautiful.

Fourth, through aesthetic judgments, beautiful objects appear to be
'purposive without purpose' (sometimes translated as 'final without
end'). An object's purpose is the concept according to which it was
made (the concept of a vegetable soup in the mind of the cook, for
example); an object is purposive if it appears to have such a purpose;
if, in other words, it appears to have been made or designed. But it
is part of the experience of beautiful objects, Kant argues, that they
should affect us as if they had a purpose, although no particular
purpose can be found.

Having identified the major features of aesthetic judgments, Kant then
needs to ask the question of how such judgments are possible, and are
such judgments in any way valid (that is, are they really universal
and necessary).

It is useful to see the aesthetics here, as with Kant's epistemology
and to a certain extent his ethics also, as being a leap over the
terms of the debate between British (and largely empiricist)
philosophy of art and beauty (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Burke)
and Continental rationalist aesthetics (especially Baumgarten, who
invented the modern use of the term aesthetics' in the mid-18th
century). The key ideas of the former group were (i) the idea of a
definite human nature, such that studies of beauty could, within
limits, be universal in scope; (ii) the assertion that beautiful
objects and our responses to them were essentially involved in sense
or feeling, and were not cognitive; (iii) that any 'natural' responses
to beauty were generally overlaid by individual and communal
experiences, habits and customs. The main disagreement with
rationalist thought on the matter was in the second of these ideas.
Baumgarten, following Leibniz, argued that all sense perception was
merely 'confused' cognition, or cognition by way of sensible images.
Thus, although beauty certainly appears to our senses, this by no
means demonstrates that beauty is non-cognitive! Beauty, for
Baumgarten, has more to do with rational ideas such as harmony, rather
than with the physiological.

Kant asserted the basic distinction between intuitive or sensible
presentations on the one hand, and the conceptual or rational on the
other. (See 'Kant's Transcendental Idealism' in the article on 'Kant's
Metaphysics'.) Therefore, despite his great admiration for Baumgarten,
it is impossible for Kant to agree with Baumgarten's account of
aesthetic experience. (By 'aesthetic' here we mean in Baumgarten's
sense of a philosophy of the beautiful and related notions, and not in
Kant's original usage of the term in the Critique of Pure Reason to
mean the domain of sensibility.) In addition, Kant holds that
aesthetic experience, like natural experience leading to determinate
judgments, is inexplicable without both an intuitive and a conceptual
dimension. Thus, for example, beauty is also by no means
non-cognitive, as the British tradition had held.

Thus, Kant begins to analyze the experience of beauty, in order to ask
as precisely as possible the question 'how are judgments about beauty
possible'. Kant's initial focus is on judgments about beauty in
nature, as when we call a flower, a sunset, or an animal 'beautiful'.
What, at bottom, does such a judgment mean, and how does it take place
as a mental act? In order to begin to answer these questions, Kant
needs to clarify the basic features of such judgments. On Kant's
analysis, aesthetic judgments are still more strange even than
ordinary reflective judgments, and must have a number of peculiar
features which at first sight look like nothing other than paradoxes.
We will now describe those features using Kant's conceptual language.

Taking up roughly the first fifth of the Critique of Judgment, Kant
discusses four particular unique features of aesthetic judgments on
the beautiful (he subsequently deals with the sublime). These he calls
'moments', and they are structured in often obscure ways according to
the main divisions of Kant's table of categories (See article on
Kant's Metaphysics).

The First Moment. Aesthetic judgments are disinterested. There are two
types of interest: by way of sensations in the agreeable, and by way
of concepts in the good. Only aesthetic judgment is free or pure of
any such interests. Interest is defined as a link to real desire and
action, and thus also to a determining connection to the real
existence of the object. In the aesthetic judgment per se, the real
existence of the beautiful object is quite irrelevant. Certainly, I
may wish to own the beautiful painting, or at least a copy of it,
because I derive pleasure from it – but that pleasure, and thus that
desire, is distinct from and parasitic upon the aesthetic judgment
(see sect;9). The judgment results in pleasure, rather than pleasure
resulting in judgment. Kant accordingly and famously claims that the
aesthetic judgment must concern itself only with form (shape,
arrangement, rhythm, etc.) in the object presented, not sensible
content (color, tone, etc.), since the latter has a deep connection to
the agreeable, and thus to interest. Kant is thus the founder of all
formalism in aesthetics in modern philosophy. This claim of the
disinterestedness of all aesthetic judgments is perhaps the most often
attacked by subsequent philosophy, especially as it is extended to
include fine art as well as nature. To pick three examples, Kant's
argument is rejected by those (Nietzsche, Freud) for whom all art must
always be understood as related to will; by those for whom all art (as
a cultural production) must be political in some sense (Marxism); by
those for whom all art is a question of affective response
expressionists).

The Second Moment. Aesthetic judgments behave universally, that is,
involve an expectation or claim on the agreement of others – just 'as
if' beauty were a real property of the object judged. If I judge a
certain landscape to be beautiful then, although I may be perfectly
aware that all kinds of other factors might enter in to make
particular people in fact disagree with me, never-the-less I at least
implicitly demand universality in the name of taste. The way that my
aesthetic judgments 'behave' is key evidence here: that is, I tend to
see disagreement as involving error somewhere, rather than agreement
as involving mere coincidence. This universality is distinguished
first from the mere subjectivity of judgments such as 'I like honey'
(because that is not at all universal, nor do we expect it to be); and
second from the strict objectivity of judgments such as 'honey
contains sugar and is sweet', because the aesthetic judgment must,
somehow, be universal 'apart from a concept' (sect;9). Being
reflective judgments, aesthetic judgments of taste have no adequate
concept (at least to begin with), and therefore can only behave as if
they were objective. Kant is quite aware that he is flying in the face
of contemporary (then and now!) truisms such as 'beauty is in the eye
of the beholder'. Such a belief, he argues, first of all can not
account for our experience of beauty itself, insofar as the tendency
is always to see 'beauty' as if it were somehow in the object or the
immediate experience of the object. Second, Kant argues that such a
relativist view can not account for the social 'behavior' of our
claims about what we find beautiful. In order to explore the
implications of 'apart from a concept', Kant introduces the idea of
the 'free play' of the cognitive faculties (here: understanding and
imagination), and the related idea of communicability. In the case of
the judgment of the beautiful, these faculties no longer simply work
together (as they do in ordinary sensible cognition) but rather each
'furthers' or 'quickens' the other in a kind of self-contained and
self-perpetuating cascade of thought and feeling. We will return to
these notions below.

The Third Moment. The third introduces the problem of purpose and
purposiveness (also translated 'end' and 'finality'). An object's
purpose is the concept according to which it was manufactured;
purposiveness, then, is the property of at least appearing to have
been manufactured or designed. Kant claims that the beautiful has to
be understood as purposive, but without any definite purpose. A
'definite purpose' would be either the set of external purposes (what
the thing was meant to do or accomplish), or the internal purpose
(what the thing was simply meant to be like). In the former case, the
success of the process of making is judged according to utility; in
the latter, according to perfection. Kant argues that beauty is
equivalent neither to utility nor perfection, but is still purposive.
Beauty in nature, then, will appear as purposive with respect to our
faculty of judgment, but its beauty will have no ascertainable purpose
– that is, it is not purposive with respect to determinate cognition.
Indeed, this is why beauty is pleasurable since, Kant argues, pleasure
is defined as a feeling that arises on the achievement of a purpose,
or at least the recognition of a purposiveness (Introduction, VI).

The purposiveness of art is more complicated. Although such works may
have had purposes behind their production (the artist wished to
express a certain mood, or communicate a certain idea), nevertheless,
these can not be sufficient for the object to be beautiful. As judges
of art, any such knowledge we do have about these real purposes can
inform the judgment as background, but must be abstracted from to form
the aesthetic judgment properly. It is not just that the purpose for
the beauty of the beautiful happens to be unknown, but that it cannot
be known. Still, we are left with the problem of understanding how a
thing can be purposive, without having a definite purpose.

The Fourth Moment. Here, Kant is attempting to show that aesthetic
judgments must pass the test of being 'necessary', which effectively
means, 'according to principle'. Everyone must assent to my judgment,
because it follows from this principle. But this necessity is of a
peculiar sort: it is 'exemplary' and 'conditioned'. By exemplary, Kant
means that the judgment does not either follow or produce a
determining concept of beauty, but exhausts itself in being exemplary
precisely of an aesthetic judgment. With the notion of condition, Kant
reaches the core of the matter. He is asking: what is it that the
necessity of the judgment is grounded upon; that is, what does it say
about those who judge?

Kant calls the ground 'common sense', by which he means the a priori
principle of our taste, that is of our feeling for the beautiful.
(Note: by 'common sense' is not meant being intelligent about everyday
things, as in: 'For a busy restaurant, it's just common sense to
reserve a table in advance.') In theoretical cognition of nature, the
universal communicability of a representation, its objectivity, and
its basis in a priori principles are all related. Similarly, Kant
wants to claim that the universal communicability, the exemplary
necessity and the basis in an a priori principle are all different
ways of understanding the same subjective condition of possibility of
aesthetic judgment that he calls common sense. (As we shall see, on
the side of the beautiful object, this subjective principle
corresponds to the principle of the purposiveness of nature.) Thus
Kant can even claim that all four Moments of the Beautiful are summed
up in the idea of 'common sense' (CJ sect.22). Kant also suggests that
common sense in turn depends upon or is perhaps identical with the
same faculties as ordinary cognition, that is, those features of
humans which (as Kant showed in the Critique of Pure Reason) make
possible natural, determinative experience. Here, however, the
faculties are merely in a harmony rather than forming determinate
cognition.
b. The Deduction of Taste

Overview: There are two aspects to Kant's basic answer to the question
of how aesthetic judgments happen. First, some of Kant's earlier work
seemed to suggest that our faculty or ability to judge consisted of
being a mere processor of other, much more fundamental mental
presentations. These were concepts and intuitions ('intuition' being
Kant's word for our immediate sensible experiences – see entry on
'Kant's Metaphysics'). Everything interesting and fundamental happened
in the formation of concepts, or in the receiving of intuitions. But
now Kant argues that judgment itself, as a faculty, has an fundamental
principle that governs it. This principle asserts the purposiveness of
all phenomena with respect to our judgment. In other words, it assumes
in advance that everything we experience can be tackled by our powers
of judgment. Normally, we don't even notice that this assumption is
being made, we just apply concepts, and be done with it. But in the
case of the beautiful, we do notice. This is because the beautiful
draws particular attention to its purposiveness; but also because the
beautiful has no concept of a purpose available, so that we cannot
just apply a concept and be done with it. Instead, the beautiful
forces us to grope for concepts that we can never find. And yet,
nevertheless, the beautiful is not an alien and disturbing experience
– on the contrary, it is pleasurable. The principle of purposiveness
is satisfied, but in a new and unique way.

Asking what this new and unique way is takes us to the second aspect.
Kant argues that the kinds of 'cognition' (i.e. thinking)
characteristic of the contemplation of the beautiful are not, in fact,
all that different from ordinary cognition about things in the world.
The faculties of the mind are the same: the 'understanding' which is
responsible for concepts, and the 'sensibility' (including our
imagination) which is responsible for intuitions. The difference
between ordinary and aesthetic cognition is that in the latter case,
there is no one 'determinate' concept that pins down an intuition.
Instead, intuition is allowed some 'free play', and rather than being
subject to one concept, it instead acts in 'harmony' with the
lawfulness in general of the understanding. It is this ability of
judgment to bring sensibility and understanding to a mutually
reinforcing harmony that Kant calls 'common sense'. This account of
common sense explains how the beautiful can be purposive with respect
to our ability to judge, and yet have no definite purpose. Kant
believes common sense also answers the question of why aesthetic
judgments are valid: since aesthetic judgments are a perfectly normal
function of the same faculties of cognition involved in ordinary
cognition, they will have the same universal validity as such ordinary
acts of cognition.

The idea of a harmony between or among the faculties of cognition is
turning out to be the key idea. For such a harmony, Kant claims, will
be purposive, but without purpose. Moreover, it will be both universal
and necessary, because based upon universal common sense, or again,
because related to the same cognitive faculties which enable any and
all knowledge and experience. Lastly, because of the self-contained
nature of this harmony, it must be disinterested. So, what does Kant
think is going on in such 'harmony', or in common sense for that
matter, and does he have any arguments which make of these idea more
than mere metaphors for beauty?

Up to now, we have had no decent argument for the existence of common
sense as a principle of taste. At best, common sense was plausible as
a possible explanation of, for example, the tendency to universality
observed in aesthetic judgments. (As Kant admits in sect.17). Such a
demand for universality could be accounted for nicely if we assumed an
a priori principle for taste, which might also explain the idea of
universal communicability. This argument, however, is rather weak.
Kant believes he has an ingenious route to proving the case with much
greater certainty.

Throughout the Four Moments of the Beautiful, Kant has dropped many
important clues as to the transcendental account of the possibility of
aesthetic judgment: in particular, we have talked about
communicability, common sense and the harmony of the cognitive
sub-faculties. Kant then cuts off to turn to the sublime, representing
a different problem within aesthetic judgment. He returns to beauty in
sect.30, which forms the transition to the passages tantalizingly
called the Deduction. These transitional passages feel much like a
continuation of the Four Moments; we will treat them as such here,
since also Kant claims that the sublime does not need a Deduction.

The Deduction in fact appears in two versions in Kant's texts (sect.9
and 21 being the first; sect.30-40 the second, with further important
clarification in the 'Dialectic' sect.55-58). Here, we will discuss
only the second. Both explicitly are attempting to demonstrate the
universal communicability and thus intersubjective validity of
judgments of taste. Which for Kant is the same as saying that there is
a 'common sense' – by which he means that humans all must have a kind
of sensing ability which operates the same way.

Briefly, the argument begins by asserting that aesthetic judgments
must be judgments in some sense; that is, they are mental acts which
bring a sensible particular under some universal (Kant's Introduction,
IV). The four moments of the beautiful are then explicitly seen as
being limitations on the conditions under which this judgment can take
place (no interest, purposive without determining purpose, etc.); all
these Kant summarizes by saying that the judgments are formal only,
lacking all 'matter'. By this, he means that although the judgment is
a judgment of the presentation of a particular (singular) object, no
particular determination of either sensible intuition, or
understanding forms a necessary part of the judgment. (In ordinary
cognition of the world, this lack of restriction would be entirely out
of place. It would be nonsense to judge whether a particular thing was
a sofa without restricting my judgment to that particular thing, and
to the concept of a sofa.) However, considered in general (that is, in
their essence as sub-faculties) the faculties of imagination and
understanding are likewise not restricted to any presentation or kind
of sense, or any concept. This means that Kant is describing the
'proportion' between understanding and intuition as something like the
always present possibility of the faculties being freed to mutually
enact their essence.

Because such faculties in general are required for all theoretical
cognition whatsoever, regardless of its object (as Kant claims to have
proven in the first Critique), they can be assumed present a priori,
in the same form and in the same way, in all human beings. The
presence of the cognitive sub-faculties in their various relations is
equivalent with the principle of the universal communicability and
validity (i.e. common sense) of any mental states in which these
faculties are involved a priori. Therefore, an aesthetic judgment must
be seen to be an expression of this principle. The key move is
obviously to claim that the aesthetic judgment rests upon the same
unique conditions as ordinary cognition, and thus that the former must
have the same universal communicability and validity as the latter. It
is just that, presented with the beautiful, our cognitive faculties
are released from the limitations that characterize ordinary thought,
and produce what above we called a cascade of thoughts and feelings.

It is difficult to know what to make of this argument (with the
various other versions of it scattered throughout the text) and the
hypothesis it purports to prove. For one thing, Kant's work here is so
heavily reliant upon the results of the first Critique as to not
really be able to stand on its own, while at the same time it is not
clear at several points whether the first and third Critiques are
fully compatible. For another, does not all this talk about the
faculties 'in general' seem as if Kant is hypostatising these
faculties, as really existent things in the mind that act, rather than
simply as an expression for certain capacities? However, there is no
doubting the fascinating and profound implications of what Kant is
proposing. For example, the notions of common sense and
communicability are closely akin to key political ideas, leading
several commentators to propose that what Kant is really writing about
are the foundations of any just politics (see e.g. sect.60). Or again,
the 'freedom' of the imagination is explicitly linked by Kant to the
freedom characteristic of the moral will, allowing Kant to construct a
deeply rooted link between beauty and the moral (sect.59). Finally, of
course, there is K
c. The Sublime

Overview: For Kant, the other basic type of aesthetic experience is
the sublime. The sublime names experiences like violent storms or huge
buildings which seem to overwhelm us; that is, we feel we 'cannot get
our head around them'. This is either mainly 'mathematical' – if our
ability to intuit is overwhelmed by size (the huge building) – or
'dynamical' – if our ability to will or resist is overwhelmed by force
(e.g. the storm). The problem for Kant here is that this experience
seems to directly contradict the principle of the purposiveness of
nature for our judgment. And yet, Kant notes, one would expect the
feeling of being overwhelmed to also be accompanied by a feeling of
fear or at least discomfort. Whereas, the sublime can be a pleasurable
experience. All this raises the question of what is going on in the
sublime

Kant's solution is that, in fact, the storm or the building is not the
real object of the sublime at all. Instead, what is properly sublime
are ideas of reason: namely, the ideas of absolute totality or
absolute freedom. However huge the building, we know it is puny
compared to absolute totality; however powerful the storm, it is
nothing compared to absolute freedom. The sublime feeling is therefore
a kind of 'rapid alternation' between the fear of the overwhelming and
the peculiar pleasure of seeing that overwhelming overwhelmed. Thus,
it turns out that the sublime experience is purposive after all – that
we can, in some way, 'get our head around it'.

Since the ideas of reason (particularly freedom) are also important
for Kant's moral theory, there seems to be an interesting connection
between the sublime and morality. This Kant discusses under the
heading of 'moral culture', arguing for example that the whole sublime
experience would not be possible if humans had not received a moral
training that taught them to recognize the importance of their own
faculty of reason.

Traditionally, the sublime has been the name for objects inspiring
awe, because of the magnitude of their size/height/depth (e.g. the
ocean, the pyramids of Cheops), force (a storm), or transcendence (our
idea of God). Vis-à-vis the beautiful, the sublime presents some
unique puzzles to Kant. Three in particular are of note. First, that
while the beautiful is concerned with form, the sublime may even be
(or even especially be) formless. Second, that while the beautiful
indicates (at least for judgment) a purposiveness of nature that may
have profound implications, the sublime appears to be
'counter-purposive'. That is, the object appears ill-matched to, does
'violence' to, our faculties of sense and cognition. Finally, although
from the above one might expect the sublime experience to be painful
in some way, in fact the sublime does still involve pleasure – the
question is 'how?'.

Kant divides the sublime into the 'mathematical' (concerned with
things that have a great magnitude in and of themselves) and the
'dynamically' (things that have a magnitude of force in relation to
us, particularly our will). The mathematical sublime is defined as
something 'absolutely large' that is, 'large beyond all comparison'
(sect.25). Usually, we apply some kind of standard of comparison,
although this need not be explicit (e.g. 'Mt. Blanc is large' usually
means 'compared with other mountains (or perhaps, with more familiar
objects), Mt. Blanc is large'). The absolutely large, however, is not
the result of a comparison

Now, of course, any object is measurable – even the size of the
universe, no less a mountain on Earth. But Kant then argues that
measurement not merely mathematical in nature (the counting of units),
but fundamentally relies upon the 'aesthetic' (in the sense of
'intuitive' as used in the first Critique) grasp of a unit of measure.
Dealing with a unit of measure, whether it be a millimeter or a
kilometer, requires a number (how many units) but also a sense of what
the unit is. This means that there will be absolute limits on properly
aesthetic measurement because of the limitations of the finite, human
faculties of sensibility. In the first place, there must be an
absolute unit of measure, such that nothing larger could be
'apprehended'; in the second place, there must be a limit to the
number of such units that can be held together in the imagination and
thus 'comprehended' (sect.26). An object that exceeds these limits
(regardless of its mathematical size) will be presented as absolutely
large – although of course it is still so with respect to our
faculties of sense.

However, we must return to the second and third peculiar puzzles of
the sublime. As we saw above with respect to the beautiful, pleasure
lies in the achievement of a purpose, or at least in the recognition
of a purposiveness. So, if the sublime presents itself as
counter-purposive, why and how is pleasure associated with it? In
other words, where is the purposiveness of the sublime experience?
Kant writes,

[W]e express ourselves entirely incorrectly when we call this or
that object of nature sublime … for how can we call something by a
term of approval if we apprehend it as in itself contrapurposive?
(sect.23)

This problem constitutes Kant's principle argument that something else
must be going on in the sublime experience other than the mere
overwhelmingness of some object. As Kant will later claim, objects of
sense (oceans, pyramids, etc.) are called 'sublime' only by a kind of
covert sleight-of-hand, what he calls a 'subreption' (sect.27). In
fact, what is actually sublime, Kant argues, are ideas of our own
reason. The overwhelmingness of sensible objects leads the minds to
these ideas.

Now, such presentations of reason are necessarily unexhibitable by
sense. Moreover, the faculty of reason is not merely an inert source
of such ideas, but characteristically demands that its ideas be
presented. (This same demand is what creates all the dialectical
problems that Kant analyses in, for example, the Antinomies.) Kant
claims that the relation of the overwhelming sensible object to our
sense is in a kind of 'harmony' (sect.27) or analogy to the relation
of the rational idea of absolute totality to any sensible object or
faculty. The sublime experience, then, is a two-layer process. First,
a contrapurposive layer in which our faculties of sense fail to
complete their task of presentation. Second, a strangely purposive
layer in which this very failure constitutes a 'negative exhibition'
('General Comment' following sect.29) of the ideas of reason (which
could not otherwise be presented). This 'exhibition' thus also
provides a purposiveness of the natural object for the fulfillment of
the demands of reason. Moreover, and importantly, it also provides a
new and 'higher' purposiveness to the faculties of sense themselves
which are now understood to be properly positioned with respect to our
'supersensible vocation' (sect.27) – i.e. in the ultimately moral
hierarchy of the faculties. Beyond simply comprehending individual
sensible things, our faculty of sensibility, we might say, now knows
what it is for. We will return to this point shortly. The consequence
of this purposiveness is exactly that 'negative pleasure' (sect.23)
for which we had be searching. The initial displeasure of the
'violence' against our apparent sensible interests is now matched by a
'higher' pleasure arising from the strange purposiveness Kant has
discovered. Interestingly, on Kant's description, neither of these
feelings wins out – instead, the sublime feeling consists of a unique
'vibration' or 'rapid alternation' of these feelings (sect.27).

The dynamically sublime is similar. In this case, a 'might' or power
is observed in nature that is irresistible with respect to our bodily
or sensible selves. Such an object is 'fearful' to be sure, but
(because we remain disinterested) is not an object of fear.
(Importantly, one of Kant's examples here is religion: God is fearful
but the righteous man is not afraid. This is the difference, he says,
between a rational religion and mere superstition.) Again, the sublime
is a two-layered experience. Kant writes that such objects 'raise the
soul's fortitude above its usual middle range and allow us to discover
in ourselves an ability to resist which is of a quite different kind…'
(sect.28). In particular, nature is called 'sublime merely because it
elevates the imagination to the exhibition of those cases wherein the
mind can be made to feel [sich fühlbar machen] the sublimity, even
above nature, that is proper to its vocation' (sect.28, translation
modified). In particular, the sublimity belongs to human freedom which
is (by definition) unassailable to the forces of nature. Such a
conception of freedom as being outside the order of nature, but
demanding action upon that order, is the core of Kant's moral theory.
Thus we can begin to see the intimate connection between the sublime
(especially here the dynamically sublime) and morality

This connection (for the sublime in general) becomes even more
explicit in Kant's discussion of what he calls 'moral culture'.
(sect.29) The context is to ask about the modality of judgments on the
sublime – that is, to they have the same implicit demand on the
necessary assent of others that judgments on the beautiful have?
Kant's answer is complicated. There is an empirical factor which is
required for the sublime: the mind of the experiencer must be
'receptive' to rational ideas, and this can only happen in a culture
that already understands morality as being a function of freedom or,
more generally, conceives of human beings as having a dimension which
in some way transcends nature. The sublime, properly speaking, is
possible only for members of such a moral culture (and, Kant sometimes
suggests, may reciprocally contribute to the strengthening of that
culture). So, the sublime is subjected to an empirical contingency.
However, Kant claims, we are justified in demanding from everyone that
they necessarily have the transcendental conditions for such moral
culture, and thus for the sublime, because these conditions are (as in
the case of the beautiful) the same as for theoretical and practical
thought in general. The claims about moral culture show that, for
Kant, aesthetics in general is not an isolated problem for philosophy
but intimately linked to metaphysical and moral questions. This is one
more reason why it is important not to assume that the Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment is a book merely about beauty and sublimity.
Moreover, this 'link' has an even greater significance for Kant: it
shows reflective judgment in action as it were relating together both
theoretical and practical reason, for this was the grand problem he
raised in his Introduction.

Kant's treatment of the sublime raises many difficulties. For example,
only the dynamically sublime has any strict relationship to the moral
idea of freedom. This raises the question of whether the mathematical
and dynamically sublime are in fact radically different, both in
themselves as experiences, and in their relation to 'moral culture'.
Again, Kant gives an interesting account of how magnitude is estimated
in discussing the mathematical sublime, but skips the parallel problem
in the dynamically sublime (how does one estimate force?). Finally,
many readers have found the premise of the whole discussion
implausible: that in the sublime experience, what is properly sublime
and the object of respect should be the idea of reason, rather than
nature.
d. Fine Art and Genius

Overview: Thus far, Kant's main focus for the discussion of beauty and
the sublime has been nature. He now turns to fine art. Kant assumes
that the cognition involved in judging fine art is similar to the
cognition involved in judging natural beauty. Accordingly, the problem
that is new to fine art is not how it is judged by a viewer, but how
it is created. The solution revolves around two new concepts: the
'genius' and 'aesthetic ideas'.

Kant argues that art can be tasteful (that is, agree with aesthetic
judgment) and yet be 'soulless' – lacking that certain something that
would make it more than just an artificial version of a beautiful
natural object. What provides soul in fine art is an aesthetic idea.
An aesthetic idea is a counterpart to a rational idea: where the
latter is a concept that could never adequately be exhibited sensibly,
the former is a set of sensible presentations to which no concept is
adequate. An aesthetic idea, then, is as successful an attempt as
possible to 'exhibit' the rational idea. It is the talent of genius to
generate aesthetic ideas, but that is not all. First, the mode of
expression must also be tasteful – for the understanding's
'lawfulness' is the condition of the expression being in any sense
universal and capable of being shared. The genius must also find a
mode of expression which allows a viewer not just to 'understand' the
work conceptually, but to reach something like the same excited yet
harmonious state of mind that the genius had in creating

Starting in sect.43, Kant addresses himself particularly to fine art
for the first time. The notion of aesthetic judgment already developed
remains central. But unlike the investigation of beauty in nature, the
focus shifts from the transcendental conditions for judgment of the
beautiful object to the transcendental conditions of the making of
fine art. In other words: how is it possible to make art? To solve
this, Kant will introduce the notion of genius.

But that is not the only shift. Kant stands right in the middle of a
complete historical change in the central focus of aesthetics. While
formerly, philosophical aesthetics was largely content to take its
primary examples of beauty and sublimity from nature, after Kant the
focus is placed squarely on works of art. Now, in Kant, fine art seems
to 'borrow' its beauty or sublimity from nature. Fine art is therefore
a secondary concept. On the other hand, of course, in being judged
aesthetically, nature is seen 'as if' purposeful, designed, or a
product of an intelligence. So, in this case at least, the notion of
'nature' itself can be seen as secondary with respect to the notions
of design or production, borrowed directly from art. Thus, the
relation between nature and art is much more complex than it seems at
first. Kant's work thus forms an important part of the historical
change mentioned above. Moreover, it is clear from a number of
comments that Kant makes about 'genius' that he is an aesthetic
conservative reacting against, for example, the emphasis on the
individual, impassioned artist characteristic of the 'Sturm und Drang'
movement. But, historically, his discussion of the concept contributed
to the escalation of the concept in the early 19th Century.

So, in order to understand how art is possible, we have to first
understand what art is, and what art production is, vis-á-vis natural
objects and natural 'production'. First, then, what does Kant mean by
'nature'? (1) On the one hand, in expressions like 'the nature of X'
(e.g. 'the nature of human cognition'), it means those properties
which belong essentially to X. This can either be an empirical claim
or, more commonly in Kant, a priori. On the other hand, nature as
itself an object has several meanings for Kant. Especially: (2) If I
say 'nature as opposed to art' I mean that realm of objects not
presented as the objects of sensible will – that is, which are quite
simply not made or influenced by human hands. (3) If I say 'nature as
an object of cognition' I mean any object capable of being dealt with
'objectively' or 'scientifically'. This includes things in space
outside of us, but also aspects of sensible human nature that are the
objects of sciences such as psychology. (4) Nature is also the object
of reflective judgments and is that which is presupposed to be
purposive or pre-adapted with respect to judgment.

Kant begins by giving a long clarification of art. As a general term,
again, art refers to the activity of making according to a preceding
notion. If I make a chair, I must know, in advance, what a chair is.
We distinguish art from nature because (though we may judge nature
purposive) we know in fact there is no prior notion behind the
activity of a flower opening. The flower doesn't have an idea of
opening prior to opening – the flower doesn't have a mind or a will to
have or execute ideas with.

Art also means something different from science – as Kant says, it is
a skill distinguished from a type of knowledge. Art involves some kind
of practical ability, irreducible to determinate concepts, which is
distinct from a mere comprehension of something. The latter can be
fully taught; the former, although subject to training to be sure,
relies upon native talent. (Thus, Kant will later claim, there can be
no such thing as a scientific genius, because a scientific mind can
never be radically original. See sect.46.) Further, art is
distinguished from labor or craft - the latter being something
satisfying only for the payoff which results and not for the mere
activity of making itself. Art (not surprisingly, like beauty) is free
from any interest in the existence of the product itself.

Arts are subdivided into mechanical and aesthetic. The former are
those which, although not handicrafts, never-the-less are controlled
by some definite concept of a purpose to be produced. The latter are
those wherein the immediate object is merely pleasure itself. Finally,
Kant distinguishes between agreeable and fine art. The former produces
pleasure through sensation alone, the latter through various types of
cognitions

This taxonomy of fine art defines more precisely the issue for Kant.
What, then, 'goes on' in the mind of the artist? It is clearly not
just a matter of applying good taste, otherwise all art critics would
be artists, all musicians composers, and so forth. Equally, it is not
a question of simply expressing oneself using whatever means come to
hand, since such productions might well lack taste. We feel reasonably
secure that we know how it is possible for, for example, clockmakers
to make clocks, or glass-blowers to blow glass (which doesn't mean
that we can make clocks or blow glass, but that as a kind of activity,
we understand it). We have also investigated how it is for someone
looking at a work of beauty to judge it. But it is not yet clear how,
on the side of production, fine art gets made.

Kant sums up the problem in two apparent paradoxes. The first of these
is easy to state. Fine art is a type of purposeful production, because
it is made; art in general is production according to a concept of an
object. But fine art can have no concept adequate to its production,
else any judgment on it will fail one of the key features of all
aesthetic judgments: namely purposiveness without a purpose. Fine art
therefore must both be, and not be, an art in general.

To introduce the second paradox, Kant notices that we have a problem
with the overwrought – that which draws attention to itself as
precisely an artificial object or event. 'Over-the-top' acting is a
good example. Kant expresses this point by saying that, in viewing a
work of art we must be aware of it as art, but it must never-the-less
appear natural. Where 'natural' here stands for the appearance of
freedom from conventional rules of artifice; this concept is derived
from the second sense of 'nature' given above. The paradox is that art
(the non-natural) must appear to be natural.

Kant must overcome these paradoxes and explain how fine art can be
produced at all. In sect.46, the first step is taken when Kant, in
initially defining 'genius', conflates 'nature' in the first sense
above with nature in the third sense. He writes,

Genius is the talent (natural endowment) that gives the rule to
art. Since talent is an innate productive ability of the artist and as
such belongs itself to nature, we could also put it this way: Genius
is the innate mental predisposition (ingenium) through which nature
gives the rule to art. (sect.46)

In other words, that which makes it possible to produce (fine art) is
not itself produced – not by the individual genius, nor (we should
add) through his or her culture, history, education, etc. From the
definition of genius as that talent through which nature gives the
rule to art follows (arguably!) the following key propositions. First,
fine art is produced by individual humans, but not as contingent
individuals. That is, not by human nature in the empirically known
sense. Second, fine art as aesthetic (just like nature as aesthetic)
can have no definite rules or concepts for producing or judging it.
But genius supplies a rule, fully applicable only in the one, concrete
instance, precisely by way of the universal structures of the genius'
mental abilities (which again, is 'natural' in sense one).

Third, the rule supplied by genius is more a rule governing what to
produce, rather than how. Thus, while all fine art is a beautiful
'presentation' of an object (sect.48), this partly obscures the fact
that genius is involved in the original creation of the object to be
presented. The 'how' is usually heavily informed by training and
technique, and is governed by taste. Taste, Kant claims, is an
evaluative faculty, not a productive one (sect.48). Thus, the end of
sect.47, he will distinguish between supplying 'material' and
elaborating the 'form'. Fourth, because of this, originality is a
characteristic of genius. This means also that fine art properly is
never an imitation of previous art, though it may 'follow' or be
'inspired by' previous art (sect.47). Fifth, as we mentioned above,
fine art must have the 'look of nature' (sect.45). This is because the
rule of its production (that concept or set of concepts of an object
and of the 'how' of its production which allows the genius to actually
make some specific something) is radically original. Thus, fine art is
'natural' in sense two, in that it lies outside the cycle of
production and re-production within which all other arts in general
are caught up (and thus, again, cannot be imitated). This leads Kant
to make some suggestive, but never fully worked out, comments about
artistic influences and schools, the role of culture, of technique and
education, etc. (See e.g. sect.49-50)

Having made the various distinctions between the matter and the form
of expression in genius' work, or again between the object and its
presentation, Kant applies these to a brief if eccentric comparative
study of the varieties of fine art (sect.51-53). According to the
manner of presentation, he divides all fine arts into the arts of
speech (especially poetry, which Kant ranks the highest of the arts),
the arts of visual form (sculpture, architecture and painting), and
the arts involving a play of sensible tones (music). The last pages of
this part of Kant's book are taken up with a curious collection of
comments on the 'gratifying' (non-aesthetic but still relatively free
activities), especially humor.

However, we have not yet clarified what kind of thing the 'rule'
supplied by genius is; therefore we have not yet reached an
understanding of the nature of the 'talent' for the production of fine
art that is genius.

Genius provides the matter for fine art, taste provides the form. The
beautiful is always formal, as we have already discovered. So, what
distinguishes one 'matter' from another, such that genius might be
required? What genius does, Kant says, is to provide 'soul' or
'spirit' ('Seele', sect.49) to what would otherwise be uninspired.
This peculiar idea seems to be used in a sense analogous to saying
that someone 'has soul', meaning to have nobility or a deep and
exemplary moral character, as opposed to being shallow or even in a
sense animal-like; but Kant also, following the Aristotelian
tradition, means that which makes something alive rather than mere
material. There can be an uninspired fine art, but it is not very
interesting (pure beauty, mentioned above, may be an example). There
can also, Kant warns, be inspired nonsense, which is also not very
interesting. Genius inspires art works – gives them spirit – and does
so by linking the work of art to what Kant will call aesthetic ideas.

This is defined in the third paragraph of sect.49. The aesthetic idea
is a presentation of the imagination to which no thought is adequate.
This is a 'counterpart' to rational ideas (which we encountered above
in talking of the sublime), which are thoughts to which nothing
sensible or imagined can be adequate. Each is excessive, we might say,
but on different sides of our cognitive apparatus. Aesthetic ideas are
seen to be 'straining' after the presentation of rational ideas – this
is what gives them their excess over any set of ordinary determinate
concepts.

In the judgment of the beautiful, we had a harmony between the
imagination and the understanding, such that each furthered the
extension of the other. Kant is now saying: certainly that is true for
all judgments of taste, whether of natural or artificial objects. And
yet we can distinguish between such a harmony which happens on the
experiencing of a beautiful form simply, or a harmony which happens on
the experiencing of a beautiful form that itself is the expression of
something yet higher but that cannot in any other way be expressed.
(The notion of 'expression' is important: what Kant is describing is
an aesthetic process, rather than a process of understanding something
with concepts, and then communicating that understanding.) Inspired
fine art is beautiful, but in addition is an expression of the state
of mind which is generated by an aesthetic idea.

The relevant passages in sect.49 are both confused and compressed.
Kant seems to have two different manners in which aesthetic ideas can
be the spirit of fine art. First, the aesthetic idea is a presentation
of a rational idea (one of Kant's examples is the moral idea of
cosmopolitan benevolence). Of course, we know that there is no such
adequate presentation. An obvious example might be a novelist or
playwright's attempt to portray a morally upright character: because,
for Kant, an important part of our moral being transcends the world of
phenomena, there must always be a mis-match between the idea and the
portrayal of the character. Here the aesthetic idea seems to function
by prompting an associated or coordinated surplus of thought that is
directly analogous to the associated surplus of imaginative
presentations demanded by rational ideas. (We saw a similar relation
between the demand of rational ideas and imaginative activity in
Kant's analysis of the sublime. Indeed, arguably there is an analogy
here to the concept of 'negative exhibition'.) In practice, this will
often involve what Kant calls 'aesthetic attributes': more ordinary,
intermediate images: 'Thus Jupiter's eagle with the lightning in its
claws is an attribute of the mighty king of heaven'.

Second, the aesthetic idea can be an impossibly perfect or complete
presentation of a possible empirical experience and its concept
(death, envy, love, fame are Kant's examples). Here the aesthetic idea
is not presenting a particular rational idea so much as a general
function of reason: the striving for a maximum, a totality or the end
of a series (as in Kant's account of the mathematical sublime). And
again, the effect is an associated 'expansion' of the concept beyond
its determinate bounds. In either case, the aesthetic idea is not
merely a presentation, but one which will set the imagination and
understanding into a harmony, creating the same kind of
self-sustaining and self-contained feeling of pleasure as the
beautiful.

Kant's theory of genius – for all its vagueness and lack of
philosophical rigor – has been enormously influential. In particular,
the radical separation of the aesthetic genius from the scientific
mind; the emphasis on the near-miraculous expression (through
aesthetic ideas and attributes) of the ineffable, excited state of
mind; the link of fine art to a 'metaphysical' content; the
requirement of radical originality; the raising of poetry to the head
of all arts – all these claims (though not all of them entirely unique
to Kant) were commonplaces and wide-spread for well over a century
after Kant. Indeed, when modernists protested (often paradoxically)
against the concept of the artist by using 'automatic writing' or
'found objects' it is, for the most part, this concept of the
artist-genius that they are reacting against.
e. Idealism, Morality and the Supersensible

Overview: Let us return to the notion of beauty as tackled in sections
A1 and A2. Viewed from the position of our knowledge of nature, the
supposed purposiveness of nature looks like nonsense. Not only does
our scientific knowledge seem to have no room for the concept of a
purpose, but many and perhaps all beautiful natural objects can be
accounted for on purely scientific terms. Thus, any principle of
purposiveness can only be understood as ideal. That is, such a
principle says more about the particular nature of our cognitive
faculties than it says about what nature really is.

But the principle of purposiveness is still valid from the point of
view of the activities of judgment. This in turn means that, for
judgment, the question is valid as to how this natural purposiveness
is to be explained. The only possible account is that the appearance
of purposiveness in nature is conditioned by the supersensible realm
underlying nature. But this means that beauty is a kind of revelation
of the hidden substrate of the world, and that this substrate has a
necessary sympathy with our highest human projects. To this, Kant adds
a series of important analogies between the activity of aesthetic
judgment and the activity of moral judgment. These analyses lead Kant
to claim that beauty is the 'symbol of morality'.

Above, at the end of section A1, we saw Kant claim that his whole
account of the transcendental possibility of judgments on the
beautiful could be summed up in the notion of common sense. This
principle of common sense is the form that the general a priori
principle of the purposiveness of nature for judgment takes when we
are trying to understand the subjective conditions of aesthetic
judgments of beauty. That is, where the principle is taken as a rule
governing the conditions of aesthetic judgments in the subject, then
it is properly called 'common sense'. But where the principle is taken
to be functioning like a concept of an object (the beautiful thing),
then it is to be seen as the principle of the purposiveness of all
nature for our judgment (see sect.55-58). But nature, understood
scientifically, is not purposive. This strange situation gives rise to
what Kant calls a 'dialectic' – merely apparent knowledge claims or
paradoxes that arise from the misuse of a faculty. Just as in the
'dialectic' sections in the first two Critiques (see the entry on
'Kant's Metaphysics'), he Kant solves the problem by way of an appeal
to the rational idea of the supersensible. Dialectical problems, for
Kant, always involves a confusion between the rational ideas of the
supersensible (which have at best a merely regulative validity) and
natural concepts (which have a validity guaranteed but restricted to
appearances). This particular form of dialectical problem involves two
contradictory, but apparently necessary, truth claims – Kant calls
such a situation an 'antinomy'. (See Introduction 2 above, and the
entry on 'Kant's Metaphysics'.) A similar dialectical problem will
arise in the 'Critique of Teleological Judgment' where we will resume
our discussion of these issues. For the moment it is enough to observe
that the Antinomy of Taste seems to involve two contradictory claims
about the origin of beautiful objects.

However, it could be the case that nature as the object of scientific
laws ('nature', as Kant is fond of saying, according to the 'immanent'
principles of the understanding), is itself responsible for the
beautiful forms in nature (Kant's example is the formation of
beautiful crystals, understood perfectly through the science of
chemistry). This possibility demonstrates the idealism of the
principle of purposiveness. Kant thus writes, 'we … receive nature
with favor, [it is] not nature that favors us' (sect.58).

He writes,

Just as we must assume that objects of sense as appearances are
ideal if we are to explain how we can determine their forms a priori,
so we must presuppose an idealistic interpretation of purposiveness in
judging the beautiful in nature and in art… (sect.58)

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.

The last major section of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment famously
considers the relation between beauty and morality, which recalls the
earlier treatment of the sublime and moral culture. Here, Kant claims
that beauty is the 'symbol' of morality (sect.59). A symbol, he
argues, is to be defined as a kind of presentation of a rational idea
in an intuition. The 'presentation' in question is an analogy between
how judgment deals with or reflects upon the idea and upon the
symbolic intuition. Thus, if 'justice' is symbolized by a blind
goddess with a scale, it is not because all judges are blind! Rather,
'blindness' and 'weighing' function as concepts in judgments in a way
analogous to how the concept of 'justice' functions. In showing how
beauty in general is the symbol of morality, Kant lists four points:
(1) Both please directly and not through consequences; (2) Both are
disinterested; (3) Both involve the idea of a free conformity to law
(free conformity of the imagination in the case of beauty, of the will
in the case of morality); (4) Both are understood to be founded upon a
universal principle. The importance of this section is two-fold:
first, historically, Kant is giving a philosophical underpinning to
the notion that taste should be related to and, through cultivation,
also promotes morality. This is a claim that is often rolled out even
today. Second, the link to morality is a detailing out of the basic
link between aesthetics in general and the pure concepts of reason
(ideas). First aesthetic judgments (both the sublime and the
beautiful), and then teleological judgments will form the bridge
between theoretical and practical reason, and (Kant hopes) bring unity
to philosophy. We shall return to this in section B4.
3. Kant's Teleology
a. Objective Purposiveness and Science

Overview: The second part of Kant's book deals with a special form of
judgment called 'teleological judgment'. The word 'teleology' comes
from the Greek word 'telos' meaning end or purpose. A teleological
judgment, on Kant's account, is a judgment concerning an object the
possibility of which can only be grasped from the point of view of its
purpose. The purpose in question Kant calls an 'intrinsic purpose'. In
such a case, we have to say that, strictly speaking, the object was
not made according to a purpose that is different from the object (as
the idea of vegetable soup in the mind of the cook is different from
the soup itself), but that the object itself embodies its purpose.
Kant is talking mainly about living organisms (which he calls 'natural
purposes'), which are both cause and effect, both blueprint and
product, of themselves. The problem here is that such a notion is
paradoxical for human thought in general, and certainly incompatible
with scientific thought.

This raises two issues. First, the paradoxical nature of any concept
of a natural purpose means that our minds necessarily supplement
judgment with the concept of causation through purposes – i.e. the
concept of art, broadly speaking. In other words, for lack of any more
adequate resources, we think natural purposes on an analogy with the
production of man-made objects according to their purpose. Second,
just as with aesthetic judgments, Kant does not claim that such
judgments ever achieve knowledge. Kant argues that teleological
judgments are required, even in science – but not to explain
organisms, rather simply to recognize their existence, such that
biological science can then set about trying to understanding them on
its own terms.

The word 'teleology' comes from the Greek word 'telos' meaning end or
purpose. A teleological judgment, on Kant's account, is a judgment
concerning an object the possibility of which can only be grasped from
the point of view of its purpose.

The second half of Kant's book (the 'Critique of Teleological
Judgment') is much less often studied and referred to. This is of
course related to the fact that Kant's aesthetics has been hugely
influential, while his teleology has sparked less contemporary
interest; and also the fact that, in the Introduction to the whole
text, Kant writes that 'In a critique of judgment, [only] the part
that deals with aesthetic judgment belongs to it essentially.'
(Introduction VIII). This is because, as we saw above, in aesthetic
judgment the faculty of judgment is, as it were, on its own – although
certainly the action of judgment there has implications for our
faculty of reason. In teleological judgment, on the other hand, the
action of judgment – although still reflective – is much more closely
linked to ordinary theoretical cognition of nature. Judgment in its
teleological function is not, let us say, laid bare in its purity.
However, it would be wrong to ignore the 'Critique of Teleological
Judgment' either on the grounds of its lesser influence, or especially
on the assumption that its content is intrinsically less interesting.

The main difference between aesthetic and teleological judgments is
the 'reality' of the purpose for the object. Whereas the object of
aesthetic judgment was purposive without a purpose, the objects of
teleological judgment do have purposes for which a concept or idea is
to hand. There are, Kant claims, two types of real purposes: first, an
'extrinsic purpose' which is the role a thing may play in being a
means to some end. An example would be an object of art in the general
sense: a shoe for example, or a landscaped garden – something that was
made for a purpose, and where the purpose is the reason behind it
being made.

However, just as in the critique of aesthetic judgment, such ordinary
examples are not (apparently) troubling and are thus not what Kant has
in mind. So, Kant notes that there is a second type of real purpose,
an 'intrinsic purpose'. In this case, rather than the purpose being
primarily understood as 'behind' the production of a thing, a thing
embodies its own purpose. These are what Kant calls 'natural purposes'
(also translated as 'physical ends'), and the key examples are living
organisms (sect.65).

Such an organism is made up of parts – individual organs, and below
that, individual cells. These parts, however, are 'organized' – they
are determined to be the parts that they are – according to the form
or 'purpose' which is the whole creature. The parts reciprocally
produce and are produced by the form of the whole. Nor is the idea of
the whole separate to the organism and its cause (for then the
creature would be an art product.) A mechanical clock may be made up
or organized parts, but this organization is not the clock itself, but
rather the concept of the clock in the mind of the craftsperson who
made it. The organism is such insofar as it intrinsically and
continually produces itself; the clock is not an organism because it
has to be made according to a concept of it.

But how does this principle relate to the sciences of nature? Such an
account of organisms as teleological is not original to Kant. It
extends back to Aristotle, and, despite increasing hostility to
Aristotle's physics since the Renaissance, remained a commonplace in
European biology through the 18th century and beyond. Kant is very
careful to distinguish himself from the rationalist position which, he
claims, takes teleology as a constitutive principle – that is, as a
principle of scientific knowledge. Importantly, Kant claims that such
a teleological causation is utterly alien to natural causation as our
understanding is able to conceive it. However, since natural
mechanical causal connections are necessary, this means that a
physical end has to be understood to be contingent with respect to
such 'mechanical' natural laws. Reason, however, always demands
necessity in its objects (the principle of reason here is akin to
Leibniz's notion of the principle of sufficient reason; see entry on
Leibniz's Metaphysics). Accordingly, reason provides the idea of
causation according to ends (on the analogy of art being the product
of a will). As we know, however, a purely rational concept has no
constitutive validity with respect to objects of experience. Instead,
Kant claims, teleological judgment is merely reflective, and its
principle merely regulative. The teleological judgment gives no
knowledge, in other words, but simply allows the cognitive faculty to
recognize a certain class of empirical objects (living organisms) that
then might be subjected (so far as that is possible) to further,
empirical, study. In effect, Kant is saying that, were it not for the
reflective judgment and the principle of its functioning here (the
rational idea of an 'intrinsic' end or purpose), the ability to
experience something as alive (and thus subsequently to study it as
the science of biology) would be impossible. Ordinary scientific
judgments will be unable to fully explore and explain certain
biological phenomena, and thus teleological judgments have a limited
scientific role.

Such judgments only apply (with the above mentioned constraints) to
individual things on the basis of their inner structure, and are not
an attempt to account for their existence per se. Nevertheless, even
this suggests to reason by analogy the idea of the whole of nature as
a purposive system, which could only be explained if based upon some
supersensible foundation – although it is hardly necessary in every
instance to take the investigation so far (sect.85). In fact, the
whole of nature is not given to us in this way, Kant admits, and
therefore this extended idea is not as essential to science as the
narrower one of natural purposes (sect.75). Nevertheless, the idea may
be useful in discovering phenomena and laws in nature that might not
have been recognized on a mechanical understanding alone. (Recent
ecological thought, for example, has often tended to think of whole
eco-systems as if they were in themselves organisms, and whole species
of plants and animals (as well as the physical environment they
inhabit) are their 'organs'. Such an approach may be fruitful for
understanding the inter-connectedness of the system, but also may be
dangerous if taken too far – when it begins to see as necessary what
in fact has to be considered as contingent.)

Thus Kant believes he has discovered a role, albeit a limited one, for
teleological judgments within natural science. In fact, of course, the
whole conception of biological science was moving away from such
notions, first with the theory of evolution, and subsequently with the
idea of genetics. Nevertheless, there is something fascinating about
Kant's conception of a natural purpose, which seems to capture
something of the continuing scientific and philosophical difficulties
in understanding what 'life' in general is.
b. 'The Peculiarity of the Human Understanding'

Overview: Why is it the case that a proper concept of a natural
purpose is impossible for us, and has to be supplemented with the
concept of production according to a separate purpose? It is because
of a fundamental 'peculiarity' of the human understanding, according
to Kant. Our minds he describes as 'intellectus ectypus', cognition
only by way of 'images'. That is why it is impossible for us to
understand something that is at the same time object and purpose. Kant
then claims that this characterization of the human intellect raises
the possibility of another form of intellect, the 'intellectus
archetypus', or cognition directly through the original. 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.

However, in dealing with the limited role discussed above, there is an
implicit danger. If reason does not pay sufficient critical attention
to the reflection involved the result is an antinomy (sect.70) between
the basic scientific principle of the understanding – to seek to treat
everything as necessary in being subject to natural laws – and the
teleological principle – that there are some objects that are cannot
be treated according to these laws, and are thus radically contingent
with respect to them. Kant's basic solution to this antinomy is given
immediately (sect.71): the problem is simply that reason has forgotten
that the second of these principles is not constitutive of its object
– that is, does not account of the object's existence. There could
only be an antinomy if both principles were understood to be so
constitutive. Kant, however, continues for several sections the
discussion of the antinomy and its solution, in the end proposing a
remarkable new solution.

In sect.77, Kant is at pains to point out that the teleological,
reflective judgment is a necessity for human minds because of a
peculiarity of such minds. (This discussion recalls the treatment of
idealism in the 'Critique of Aesthetic Judgment' above.) In our
understanding of the world (and for any other understanding we could
imagine the workings of), the universal principle (law of nature)
never fully determines any particular thing in all its real detail.
Thus these details, although necessary in themselves as part of the
order of nature, must be contingent with respect to our universal
concept. It is simply beyond our understanding that there should be a
concept that, in itself, determines as necessary all the features of
any particular thing. (At this point, Kant is clearly influenced by
Leibniz's idea of the 'complete concept' – please see the entry on
Leibniz's Metaphysics.) As Kant explains it, an object so understood
would be a whole that conditions all its parts.

But a living organism would be just such a whole. As we have seen, to
understand its possibility we have to apply (through reflective
judgment) the rational idea of an intrinsic purpose. Here, as we have
just seen, the problem of the contingency with respect to natural law
is exacerbated. But this idea is of a presentation of such a whole,
and the presentation is conceived of as a purpose which conditions or
leads to the production of the parts. Ours, in other words, is an
understanding which always 'requires images (it is an intellectus
ectypus)' (sect.77).

This peculiarity of our understanding poses the possibility of another
form of intelligence, the intellectus archetypus, an intelligence
which is not limited to this detour of presentations in its thinking
and acting. Such an understanding would not function in a world of
appearances, but directly in the world of things-in-themselves. Its
power of giving the universal (concepts and ideas) would not be a
separate power from its power of forming intuitions of particular
things; concept and thing, thought and reality would be one. From the
point of view of such an understanding, what we humans must conceive
as the contingency of natural purposes with respect to the universal
concept, is only an appearance. For the intellectus archetypus, such
natural purposes would indeed be necessary, in the same sense as
events subject to mechanical natural law. Thus, the notion of an
intellectus archetypus – and the corresponding distinction for us
between appearances and things-in-themselves – gives Kant a more
complete way of solving the above antinomy. Because of the limitation
of our understanding, we are incapable of knowing the details of the
necessity of all natural processes. The idea of a natural purpose is
an essential additional principle which partly corrects for this
limitation, but also produces the antinomy. But the contingency
introduced by the new principle is (or, rather, may be) only a
contingency for us (as intellectus ectypus), and therefore the
principle of natural purposes does not contradict the demand of reason
for necessity.

Such an idea clearly takes us in the direction of theology – the study
of the divine being, and that being's relation to creation. But it is
above all important to remember that, at this point, Kant is not
claiming that there is, or must be, or that he can prove there to be,
such a being. Thus, for example, given Kant's concern with
purposiveness and design, one might think he would make a case for the
so-called 'argument from design' (the argument to the existence of a
creator from the apparently designed quality of creation). But, in
fact, Kant believes this to be an extraordinarily weak argument (see
for example sect.sect.85, 90 and 'General Comment on Teleology'),
though interesting. Kant, however, thinks he has an argument which is
related to it, and which (within certain limits) works much better. It
is this argument which occupies most of the second half of the
'Critique of Teleological Judgment'.
c. The Final Purpose and Kant's Moral Argument for the Existence of God

Overview: The notion of the intellectus archetypus is clearly heading
in the direction of philosophical theology. Kant's book culminates
with his most sustained presentation and discussion of his Moral Proof
for the Existence of God.

Kant's work already included some very famous critiques of other such
proofs. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he provides some of the
standard attacks on the cosmological and especially the ontological
arguments. And in the Critique of Judgment, he argues that the
argument from design, at least as normally stated, is very weak.
Kant's own proof, he thinks, avoids the problems typical of other
arguments, precisely because it does not conclude by stating that we
know the existence of God. This is because Kant is quite happy with
the idea that God's existence could never be necessary for theoretical
reason. But he then asks whether practical reason – i.e. the moral
side of our intellect – has the same limitation.

In Kant's account of practical reason, the moral law is conceived of
as duty. Acting from the mere pure and universal form of the moral law
is everything, the consequences of action do not enter into the
equation (see entry on 'Kant's Metaphysics'). However, Kant claims
that the moral law obligates us to consider the final purpose or aim
of all moral action. This final purpose of moral action Kant calls the
'highest good' (summum bonum). This means the greatest possible
happiness for all moral beings. Importantly, this goal is not the
ground of morality – unlike ordinary instances of desire or action,
wherein I act precisely because I want to reach the goal. Moral action
is grounded in duty – but, subsequently, so to speak, we must be
assured that the final purpose is actually possible.

Just as moral action must be possible through freedom, so the summum
bonum must be possible through moral action. But the possibility of
the summum bonum as the final purpose in nature appears to be
questionable. Therefore, if our moral action is to make sense, there
must be someone working behind the scenes. This could only be activity
of a 'moral author of the world' which would make it at least possible
for the summum bonum to be reached. Moral action, therefore, assumes
the existence of a God. But that the postulation of God lies 'within'
moral action in this way automatically discounts the 'moral proof'
from any theoretical validity.

After an extended discussion of the ins and outs of the role of
teleological judgments in science, from sect.78 to around sect.82,
Kant's discussion begins to shift to a quite different topic. In
sect.82 he argues in this way: it might seem, he says, that certain
features of nature have as an extrinsic purpose their relations to
other features: the nectar for the honey, the river for the irrigation
of land near its bank, etc. (Ultimately, again, these might be seen as
part of the intention or design of the intelligent cause of creation.)
This, Kant says, is a perfectly understandable way of speaking
sometimes, and even helps us to cognize certain natural processes, but
has no objective foundation in science. There is always another way of
looking at things for which what we thought was a purpose is in fact
only a means to something else entirely (e.g. the nectar is simply a
way of attracting bees for the purposes of pollination).

It is sometimes even claimed (often on a religious basis) that human
beings are the real, 'ultimate' purpose of nature, and all other
things have, in the end, the benefit and use of humans as an extrinsic
end. But 'in the chain of purposes man is never more than a link'
(sect.83). Nature per se does not, then, contain or pursue any such
purposes, not even for man. But Kant is not quite yet finished with
these kinds of problems, and introduces in sect.84 the idea of a
'final purpose'.
Kant defines a 'final purpose' as 'a purpose that requires no other
purpose as a condition of its possibility' (sect.84). This is no
longer an extrinsic purpose that nature might have. Still, it is clear
that, again, there can be no intrinsic final purpose in nature -all
natural products and events are conditioned, including the world
around us, our own bodies and even our mental life. (And living
beings, qua natural purposes, are conditioned by themselves.) So, what
kind of thing would such a final purpose be? Kant writes, '… the final
purpose of an intelligent cause must be of such a kind that in the
order of purposes it depends upon no condition other than just the
idea of it' (sect.84).

As we have discovered on several previous occasions, for Kant human
beings are not merely natural beings. The human capacity for freedom
is both a cause which acts according to purposes (the moral law)
represented as necessary, and yet which has to be thought as
independent of the chain of natural causation/purposes. Kant then
writes, carefully, '… if things in the world … require a supreme cause
that acts in terms of purposes, then man [qua free] is the final
purpose of creation' (sect.84). (As Kant emphasizes on several
occasions – e.g. in the last part of sect.91 – it is the fact of
freedom that forms the incontrovertible first premise of the argument
he is about to put forward.) Put more grandly, 'without man [as a
moral being] all of creation would be a mere wasteland, gratuitous and
without a final purpose' (sect.86). Thus, the question that really
'matters', Kant writes, 'is whether we do have a basis, sufficient for
reason (whether speculative or practical), for attributing a final
purpose to the supreme cause [in its] acting in terms of purposes'
(sect.86). Certainly, the argument will not involve a 'speculatively'
(i.e. theoretically) sufficient basis.

Kant's 'moral proof for the existence of God' is given beginning in
sect.87. Actually, this proof first appeared in the Critique of
Practical Reason a few years previously (see entry on Kant's
Metaphysics), and is in fact assumed through the Critique of Pure
Reason. But Kant's most detailed discussion is in the third Critique.

The rational idea of purposiveness, although never constitutive, seems
to be relevant everywhere so far: in Kant's account of the possibility
of science in his Introduction, in the account of beauty (and in a
different way in the sublime), and in the treatment of teleological
judgments. Because these are one and all reflective judgments, they
entail neither a theoretical nor a practical conclusion as to what
might be behind these purposes. Even where teleological judgments
about purposes in nature leads us to consider the possibility of a
world author, this approach leaves quite indeterminate (and thus
useless for the purposes of religion or theology) our idea of that
world author (thus Kant's ultimate criticism of what he calls
'physicotheology' in sect.85). But, Kant asks, is there any reason
requiring us to assume nature is purposive with respect to practical
reason?

In Kant's account of practical reason, the moral law is conceived of
as duty. Acting from the mere pure and universal form of the moral law
is everything, the consequences of action do not enter into the
equation. However, as Kant makes clear in the Introduction to the
Critique of Judgment, the practical faculties in general have to do
with desire – i.e. purposes motivating action – and the free will is
termed the 'higher' faculty of desire. Kant claims that the moral law
necessarily obligates us to consider the final purpose of moral
action. However, it is not to be considered as the ground of morality,
as would normally be the case in desire, when the presentation of the
result (my aim) causes the action (action leading to that aim). This
final purpose linked to the higher, moral, faculty of desire Kant
calls the 'highest good' (summum bonum). Conceived of as a state of
natural beings, this means the greatest possible happiness for all
moral beings.

Kant is using this inter-implication of moral law and final purpose of
moral action as a premise of his argument. The obvious question that
arises is why, given the stress Kant always makes on the absolutely
unconditioned nature of moral freedom, he should feel able to make
this claim. It would seem as if precisely the purity of the free will
would make any connection to purposes immoral. Kant writes that, even
speaking practically, we must consider ourselves

… as beings of the world and hence as beings connected with other
things in the world; and those same moral laws enjoin us to direct our
judging to those other things [regarded] either as purposes or as
objects for which we ourselves are the final purpose (sect.87).

In other words, practical reason is a human faculty – where, as always
for Kant, being human is defined in terms of a unity of a lower,
sensible nature together with a higher, supersensible dimension. Our
sensibly conditioned will is not a different thing from our free will,
but is the same faculty considered now as phenomenal psychology, now
as noumenal activity. This must be the case if our actions in the
phenomenal world are to be considered moral in any sense of the word.
But this sensibly conditioned will does require attention to be paid
to consequences – to the object of our action. Free will may determine
itself unconditionally through the mere form of the moral law, but it
remains the faculty of will, that is the higher faculty of desire, and
thus retains the essential link to purposes.

Just as moral action must be possible through freedom, so the summum
bonum must be possible through moral action. The impossibility of
achieving this end would make a nonsense of moral action, because it
would in effect mean that free will was no longer will, that practical
reason was no longer practical (because it could not be said to act).
Kant is claiming that it is just part of the meaning of an action –
even a purely and formally determined action, i.e. one not conditioned
by its purpose – to also posit the possibility of achieving its
purpose.

But the possibility of the summum bonum as the final purpose in nature
is not at all obvious. Indeed, a cynic might claim that moral action
makes no difference at all – that the good man is no more happy for
it, and that 'nice guys finish last'. Kant writes,

.. the concept of the practical necessity of [achieving] such a
purpose by applying our forces does not harmonize with the theoretical
concept of the physical possibility its being achieved, if the
causality of nature is the only causality (of a means [for achieving
it]) that we connect with our freedom. (sect.87)

The obvious inference then is that the 'causality of nature' cannot be
the 'only causality' – and there must also be the moral causality of a
moral author of the world which would make it at least possible for
the summum bonum to be reached. Without the postulate of such a moral
author – who, as we saw above, must have our free morality in mind as
a final purpose, if anything – our free moral action could not be
represented as possible. Moral action, precisely as both moral and as
action, within itself assumes the existence of a God. Of course, in
acting morally we may not be conscious either of the summum bonum as
final purpose, nor of the necessary postulation of God as moral author
of the world – we are just doing what is right. Nevertheless, when
that duty is fully understood, these necessary implications will be
found within it.

But that the postulation of God is 'within' moral action in this way
automatically discounts the 'moral proof' from any theoretical
validity. Theoretical philosophy must continue to operate within its
legitimate grounds, treating so far as possible all of nature as
intelligible in terms of mechanical cause and effect and requiring
neither purpose nor creator. This distinction is extremely important
for Kant, as despite the link to morality and the 'fact' of our
freedom, the 'moral proof' does not make of religion anything but a
matter of faith (e.g. sect.91). This involves noting that the
conception of God involved in the moral proof is and must be bound up
with how things are cognizable by us. (This of course continues the
treatment of the intellectus ectypus begun in sect.77 and of the
idealism of reflective judgment in sect.58.) Kant writes, As for
objects that we have to think a priori (either as consequences or as
grounds) in reference to our practical use of reason in conformity
with duty, but that are transcendent for the theoretical use of
reason: they are mere matters of faith. [...] To have faith … is to
have confidence that we shall reach an aim that we have a duty to
further, without our having insight into whether achieving it is
possible. (sect.91)

The summum bonum, God as moral author (and the immortality of the
soul, treated in the Critique of Practical Reason) are all such
objects of faith. For Kant, this stress on faith keeps religion pure
of the misunderstandings involved in, for example, fanaticism,
demonology or idolatry (sect.89). Kant spends the last fifth of the
'Critique of Teleological Judgment' dealing with how his proof is to
be understood, the nature and limitations of its validity, and various
metaphysical and religious implications, including those for his own
conception of critical philosophy.

Kant's argument and later variations are generally considered to be
one of the great arguments for the existence of a God. Obviously,
questions can be raised about its validity. For example, whether the
possibility of the final purpose is somehow necessarily linked to any
moral action. However, the typical objection – that the argument is
insufficient to give any knowledge – is just irrelevant, since Kant is
not interested in knowledge at this point.
4. The Problem of the Unity of Philosophy and its Supersensible Objects

Overview: Let us conclude by looking at Kant's grand conception for
his Critique of Judgment.

The problem of the unity of philosophy is the problem of how thought
oriented towards knowledge (theoretical reason) can be a product of
the same faculty as thought oriented towards moral duty (practical
reason). The problem of the unity of the objects of philosophy is the
problem of how the ground of that which we know (the supersensible
ground of nature) is the same as the ground of moral action (the
supersensible ground of that nature in which the summum bonum is
possible – together with freedom within the subject). Kant only makes
some rather vague suggestions about how proof of these unities is to
be established – but it is clear that he believes the faculty of
judgment is the key

We will briefly look at the second of these problems. The central move
is the a priori principle of nature's purposiveness for judgment. This
amounts to the assumption that judgment will always be possible, even
in cases like aesthetic judgment where no concept can be found. As we
discussed in A5, this principle makes a claim (though only from the
'point of view' of judgment) about the supersensible ground of nature.
This claim leads to two assertions. First, that the supersensible
ground of beauty in nature is the same as the undetermined ground of
nature as an object of science. Second, it is also capable of moral
determination and thus also the same as the supersensible ground of
moral nature. Together, these two prove the unity of the supersensible
objects of philosophy.

Let us very briefly look at the grand problem Kant poses for himself
in the Critique of Judgment. The problem comes down to the
implications of the 'abyss' that Kant opened up between theoretical
and practical philosophy; or, as we may as well put it, between the
side of our being that knows or tries to know the world, and the side
that wills (or fails to will) according to moral law. Although this
issue dominates Kant's two introductions to his book, the book itself
contains only occasional references to it, and certainly no clear
statement of a solution. But arguably there is sufficient material to
suggest what Kant's solution might have been.

The following quotation contains the kernel." 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" (Introduction IX, translation modified). Kant
is referring to the first Critique and especially to his solution to
the Antinomies therein. The solution there merely required that we
recognize the distinction between appearances and
things-in-themselves. But this solution required nothing further of
the latter other than its mere negative definition: that it not be
subject to the conditions of appearance.

Kant continues, '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].' He is referring here particularly
to the principle of reflective judgment (and especially aesthetic
judgments on the beautiful) that nature will exhibit a purposiveness
with respect to our faculty of judgment, that 'particular' laws of
nature will always be 'possible'. This purposiveness can only be
accounted for if judgment assumes a supersensible that determines this
purposiveness. This supersensible is the 'same' supersensible
substrate underlying nature as the object of theoretical reason. It is
no longer merely indeterminate. But because the particular laws are as
yet only 'possible' – and this is exacerbated in aesthetic judgment
with the notion of purposiveness 'without purpose' – the substrate
remains left open, it is 'determinable' but not 'determined'. That is
to say, judgment conceives of the supersensible as capable of
receiving a determinate purpose, should there be good reasons for
assuming there to be such a purpose.

Kant continues, 'But reason, through its a priori practical law, gives
this same substrate determination.' The determination in question is
the one Kant introduced in the moral proof for the existence of God:
that is, from the point of view of our moral selves, the 'same'
supersensible is the ground of phenomenal nature's co-operation in our
moral projects. It carries the summum bonum as its final purpose.

Kant accordingly concludes: 'Thus judgment makes the transition from
the domain of the concept of nature to that of the concept of
freedom.' Judgment has also made the transition such that the
supersensible objects of reason have to been seen as 'the same'.
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.
5. References and Further Reading
a. Works by Kant

The standard edition of the collected works in German is Kant's
gesammelte Schriften, Edited by the Deutsche Akademie der
Wissenshaften, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Equally widely available is
the Werkausgabe in zwölf Bänden, edited by Wilhelm Weischedel,
Frankfurt am Mein: Suhrkamp. There are alternative, perfectly
acceptable, translations of most of the following. Cambridge
University Press, at the time of writing, is about half-way through
publishing the complete works in English.

* Aesthetics and Teleology. Ed., Eric Matthews and Eva Schaper.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
* Critique of Judgment. Trans., Werner Pluhar. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987)
* Critique of Judgment. Trans., James Creed Meredith. (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1988)
* Critique of Practical Reason. Trans., Ed., Lewis White Beck.
(Oxford: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1993)
* Critique of Pure Reason. Trans., Werner Pluhar. (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1996)

b. Other Primary and Secondary Works

For a treatment of various themes in Kant, please also see the
introductions to the above editions.

* Burnham, Douglas. An Introduction to Kant's Critique of
Judgment. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press [in the US, Columbia
University Press], 2000)
* Caygill, Howard. The Art of Judgement.(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989)
* Cohen, Ted and Guyer, Paul. Essays in Kant's Aesthetics.
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982)
* Crawford, Donald. Kant's Aesthetic Theory. (Madison: Wisconsin
University Press, 1974)
* Crawford, Paul. The Kantian Sublime. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)
* Gibbons, Sarah L. Kant's Theory of Imagination.(Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994)
* Guyer, Paul, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Kant.(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992)
* Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Taste. (Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1979)
* Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Experience of Freedom.(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996)
* Henrich, Dieter. Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the
World. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992)
* Kemal, Salim. Kant and Fine Art. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)
* Kemal, Salim. Kant's Aesthetic Theory. (London: St Martin's Press, 1992)
* Makkreel, Rudi. Imagination and Understanding in Kant. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994)
* McCloskey, Mary. Kant's Aesthetic. (London: Macmillan, 1987)
Schaper, Eva. Studies in Kant's Aesthetics.(Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1979)
* Zammito, John H. The Genesis of Kant's Critique of
Judgement.(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)