Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment, Critical Essays

This collection gives an excellent overview of English-language work on the Critique of Judgment in recent decades. The first essay, by the editor Paul Guyer, is an ambitious attempt to show how the various aspects of the notion of ‘reflecting judgment’ accord with Kant’s definition of such judgment as the search for the unknown universal for a given particular. To do this, Guyer proposes, we must “replace the simple idea of an unknown universal with the more subtle idea Kant actually deploys: the ideal of a system that is given in abstract form but the concrete realization of which has to be sought in an ongoing process of reflection” (57-8).

When Kant claims that pure aesthetic judgment is ‘disinterested,’ Nick Zangwill argues, he does not mean that it involves the adoption of a special, disinterested ‘aesthetic attitude,’ but rather that it rests on a pleasure in the mere form of an object. Christopher Janaway considers Kant’s assertion that pure aesthetic judgment is not a matter of subsuming an object under a concept and argues that it does not mean that we are not allowed to have a concept of the object of judgment. Anthony Savile addresses Kant’s claim that pure aesthetic judgments rest on a feeling of subjective, as opposed to objective purposiveness. This does not mean, he argues, that beautiful objects merely seem purposive. Rather, they are truly purposive for judgment; beauty, he puts it, is “the spiritual analogue of food” (91). Eva Shaper’s discussion of free and dependent beauty aims to correct the view that Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment favors aesthetic formalism, and abstract over representational art. Malcolm Budd critically examines Kant’s conception of the sublime in nature, proposing that “rather than identifying this pain … as arising from the imagination’s fruitless struggle to come up with an appropriate unit of measure for an aesthetic estimation of nature’s boundless magnitude, it would seem closer to the truth to see it as an effect on, a shock to, our everyday self-concern and self-esteem brought about by a vivid realization of our relative insignificance in the immense order of nature” (133).

In “Kant’s Theory of Creative Imagination,” Donald Crawford explores analogies between mathematical thinking and artistic making, contrasting both with philosophical method. Brigitte Sassen investigates the relation between genius and creativity. In contrast to Crawford, she emphasizes the distinction between the use of productive imagination in mathematics, where it is under the control of a priori rules, and its use by the genius to arrive at aesthetic ideas.

Jane Kneller continues Crawford’s and Sassen’s exploration of ‘creative imagination’, raising the question of how Kant’s notion of it is related to the possibility of social progress. She notes that Kant, in denying that aesthetic value depends on the ability of a work of art to produce moral improvement, departs from the consensus of the German Enlightenment in a very striking way, but suggests that his teaching provides a bridge between Lessing’s notion of literary freedom and Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, in which Kant’s teaching about imaginative freedom issues in the notion of an Aesthetic State. This shows, Kneller argues, that Kant’s teaching is implicitly political, though she says that Kant “shrinks from these implications” (192) of his notion of imaginative freedom because too much imaginative freedom might threaten the established order. Lambert Zuidervaart suggests that aesthetic ideas form part of an “ethical hermeneutics” in which art offers as a means of interpreting reality so as to “make knowing and acting coincide.” “In aesthetic ideas nature is not merely placed in the light of human freedom but re-created and liberated from theoretical laws” (205). Like Knewller, he holds that Kant does not fully embrace the political implications of his teaching.

Peter McLaughlin’s learned “Newtonian Biology and Kant’s Mechanistic Concept of Causality” argues that Kant’s treatment of mechanism and teleological judgment is influenced by vitalism, which he characterizes as “quite legitimate extensions of the Cartesian program in mechanistic biology with Newtonian means” (209). Henry Allison’s impressive “Kant’s Antinomy of Teleological Judgment” contradicts McLaughlin’s view of the status of mechanism in the Critique of Teleological Judgment. Whereas McLaughlin takes Kant to be saying that we are constrained to follow mechanism—understood as the explanation of wholes through parts—because he is unconsciously influenced by the science of his time, Allison argues that Kant’s claim that we need to follow the principle of mechanism in this sense is based on a very lucid reflection on the conditions of discursive thought.

An interesting feature of this volume is the interest in aesthetic ideas as a means towards political or moral transformation—an interest shared by Sassen, Kneller, Zuidervaart, and perhaps Savile as well. This focus on aesthetic ideas comes at the expense of the political and moral significance of judgments of taste, hinted at by Kant himself (in #40 and #60). Sassen and Savile reject Kant’s claim that taste can be the object of a moral interest, unless taste can be understood in terms of creative energy or aesthetic ideas. It is not surprising, therefore, that when Kneller invokes Schiller to argue for the political implications of Kant’s doctrine of imaginative freedom she does not mention Schiller’s view that the political value of Kant’s doctrine of aesthetic pleasure is above all that it can help us avoid revolutionary fanaticism.

In their discussion of the political significance of Kant’s aesthetics, neither Kneller nor Zuidervaart takes note of Kant’s hints that that significance lies largely in its bearing on the religious attitudes of superstition and enthusiasm, the chief dangers to Enlightenment. Their wish to appropriate the doctrine of aesthetic ideas for a project of transforming the world may not be compatible with attention to Kant’s worries about enthusiasm. Their ignoring of Kant’s discussion of attitudes towards the transcendent may result from their preference for an immanent salvation. Budd’s replacement of Kant’s Longinian conception of the sublime as transcendence with a Heideggerian authenticity based on anxiety may express a related preference for the immanent over the transcendent. Guyer’s construal of the assumption of a purposive unity at the base of nature as merely heuristic has a similar motive. With the exception of Allison’s, the papers in this volume avoid the theological and antitheological implications of Kant’s thought. It is perfectly legitimate to investigate the Third Critique without looking into these, but it does leave certain questions unaddressed.