KANT’S CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT: AESTHETICS AS A LINK BETWEEN THE REALMS OF THE CONCEPT OF NATURE, AS THE SENSIBLE AND THE CONCEPT OF FREEDOM, AS THE SUPERSENSIBLE

CHAPTER TWO

KANT’S CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT: AESTHETICS AS A LINK BETWEEN THE REALMS OF THE CONCEPT OF NATURE, AS THE SENSIBLE AND THE CONCEPT OF FREEDOM, AS THE SUPERSENSIBLE

In the preceding chapter, mention was made of the third critique of Kant (Critique of Judgement) being a consummation of the two preceding critiques (Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason). This is rightly so in that in the second section of the Introduction to the Critique of Judgement, Kant argues that

between the realm of the natural concept, as the sensible, and the realm of the concept of freedom, as the supersensible, there is a great gulf fixed, so that it is not possible to pass from the former to the latter (by means of the theoretical employment of reason), just as if they were so many separate worlds, the first of which is powerless to exercise influence on the second: still the latter is meant to influence the former – that is to say, the concept of freedom is meant to actualize in the sensible world the end proposed by its laws; and nature must consequently also be capable of being regarded in such a way that in the conformity to law of its form it at least harmonizes with the possibility of the ends to be effectuated in it according to the laws of freedom. There must, therefore, be a ground of the unity of the supersensible that lies at the basis of nature, with what the concept of freedom contains in a practical way, and although the concept of this ground neither theoretically nor practically attains to a knowledge of it, and so has no peculiar realm of its own, still it renders possible the transition from the mode of thought according to the principles of the one to that according to the principles of the other.[1]

This stems from the understanding of Kant’s division of philosophy into theoretical, as philosophy of nature, and practical, as philosophy of morals. The former is concerned with the general investigation into the possibility and bounds of the faculty of knowledge from a priori principles (which Kant calls pure reason). And the latter, which contains constitutive a priori principles solely in respect of the faculty of desire, gets its holding assigned to it by The Critique of Practical Reason. “But now comes judgement, which in the order of our cognitive faculties forms a middle term between understanding and reason.”[2]

This present chapter examines aesthetic judgement[3] which in the third critique forms a middle term between understanding (concept of nature, as the sensible) and reason (concept of freedom, as the supersensible). To start with, Kant calls that which confines its attention to reason and what it prescribes a priori as a law for desire or morality, Critique of Practical Reason; and calls that which confines its attention to understanding and what it prescribes a priori as a law for nature – the complex of phenomena –  (that is, cognition), Critique of Pure Reason.

2.1:      Critique of Pure Reason: Realm of the Concept of Nature, as the Sensible

            One of Kant’s main problems in the Critique of Pure Reason was to explain the possibility of a pure Science of Nature, and to question how it is possible.[4] He argues that a pure Science of Nature is possible because objects of experience, to be objects of experience must of necessity conform to certain a priori conditions. In other words, objects to be objects must be related to the unity of apperception, to the unity of consciousness. And they are related by being subsumed under certain a priori forms and categories. The complex of possible objects of experience thus forms one Nature in relation to the unity of consciousness in general. And the necessary conditions for relating them are themselves the ground of the necessary laws of Nature. Without synthesis there is for us no Nature; and the a priori synthesis gives laws to Nature. These necessary laws are in a real sense imposed by the human subject; but they are at the same time objective laws, because they are valid, and necessarily valid, for the whole range of possible experience and knowledge.

With regards to knowledge, Kant finds that there are two chief factors from which genuine knowledge arises, namely – first, the faculty or power of receiving impressions, that is, sense experiences, through which objects (raw materials) are given to us, and second, the power of thinking the data by means of concepts, which is also the synthetic, organizing, or ordering activity of the mind. The receptivity of the mind for impressions is called sensibility (sinnlickeit). The faculty of spontaneously producing representations is called understanding (verstand).

To the understanding or the faculty of making judgments, that is, of forming the concepts and laws that constitute order and sequence, belong the inborn structural forms of judgment – the universal ways in which the mind synthesizes or orders the contents of sense perception. These forms are the categories, that is, the fundamental and universal forms of thinking objects and their relations. Through the use of these categories, the mind builds up the material of sense perception into a systematized or orderly whole of intelligible experiences; that is, it builds up science and, in so doing builds up Nature.

The categories[5] of Kant correspond to the classification of judgment forms in the traditional logic. There are as follows:  under the title Of Quantity (being the first), we have Unity, Plurality, and Totality; under the title Of Quality (being the second), we have Reality, Negation, and Limitation; under the title Of Relation (being the third), we have Inherence and Substance (substantia et accidens), Causality and Dependence (cause and effect), and Community (reciprocity between the agent and the patient); under the title Of Modality (being the fourth), we have Possibility – Impossibility, Existence – Non-existence, and Necessity – Contingency.[6]

Now the use or application of all the categories means always synthesis, organisation, or unification, in some fashion, of the chaotic manifold of sense experience.[7] Knowledge involves both analysis and synthesis; but there can be nothing recognised as individual, concrete, and persisting for analysis, unless in experience there has already been synthesis – the putting together of sensations. The sense organs alone will not make ‘things’ by putting sensations together. The mind must do that. Now, “the basic condition of all synthesis is the activity of a synthesizer, that can know itself as one and continuous in the successive steps of synthesizing activity.”[8] Thus, the prime condition of science is the activity of the pure or transcendental Ego,[9] the synthetic activity of the non-empirical self. All the categories are forms of the pure self’s synthetic activity.

It amounts to the fact that there could be no such unity of consciousness were the mind not able to be conscious of the identity of function, by which it unites various phenomena in one knowledge. The original and necessary consciousness of the identity of oneself is at the same time the consciousness of a necessary unity in the synthesis of all phenomena according to conception.[10] Hence the human understanding prescribes or puts into sense experience the laws of Nature. Nature is objective, in the sense of being the same for all beings endowed with and dependent for their knowledge in the same senses and the same principles of thinking. Nature is not your individual dream or mine. But Nature, or the world of space-time-causality, and all the sense qualities, is subjective or phenomenal, in the sense that there enters into its making the universal forms and activities of the human mind. Nature does not exist apart from the mind.

In the categories, therefore, nature as a system of necessary laws has its ground and origin. To learn what the special laws of nature are, we must go to experience. Thus for Kant, science, and nature as the object of science, are constituted by the interaction of the pure Ego with the materials of sense perception. Where there is no sense experience, there can be no knowledge. In fact, Kant’s own words are: “without the sensuous faculty no object would be given to us, and without the understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions are blind.”[11] The categories have no application beyond the limits of possible sense experience.

In a sum, Kant, starting from the results of his analysis of knowledge, namely that space and time are human forms of perception and the categories human forms of synthetic thinking, and that these imply in man an active principle of intellectual synthesis, proceeds to the seemingly gratuitous assumption that space, time, and the categories do not apply to things as they are in themselves. He proceeds to this assumption on the grounds that if you “attempt to conceive the universe as totality in space and time, and as a total system or community of causal relations, you run into an inescapable conflicts of reason with itself.”[12]

Hence, if the ultimate reality is space-less and timeless the above conflicts of reason with itself is abolished. And as such, things that are may be taken in two distinct senses, on the one hand as a phenomenon, and on the other hand as a thing-in-itself or noumena. There is no contradiction then in supposing that the very same will, in its visible acts as a phenomenon is not free, but necessarily subject to the law of Nature, while yet, as belonging to a thing-in-itself, it is not subject to that law, but is free. And so we have a leeway to treat of the realm of the concept of freedom.

2.2:      Critique of Practical Reason: Realm of the Concept of Freedom, as the                                                 Supersensible

The postulates of the practical reason, that is, the demands of a faith which has its origin in the moral will, carry us across the gulf impassable by theoretical reason.[13] The ideas of God, Freedom, and Immortality, which ever transcend the reach of science, become immanent for the practical or moral consciousness, on the guidance of which depends the fulfilment of the moral vocations of people. The voice within us, the voice of conscience, utters the categorical imperative.

The absolutely binding character of the moral imperative involves moral freedom or the power to obey the imperative. Hence we have a practical consciousness of freedom. Through the sense of duty we know that we must be free; through freedom we are able to obey the commands of duty, and thus to fulfil the law of our supersensible being.[14] But the fulfilment of our moral vocation is an endless task or progress. Such a “progress is not possible in this world, but only in the eternal world or noumena on the condition of immortality.”[15]

If this moral vocation of humans be not a mocking delusion, if it be a realizable ideal, then the whole of nature must be subservient to the moral order. Virtue and happiness, which by no means coincide here and now, must, in the long run, coincide. Righteousness must triumph and rule in the cosmos. And, since only a will is righteous and good, it means that God exists as the righteous will who governs the universal order.[16] Thus the highest objects of reason’s quest which, from the theoretical standpoint, were problematical become, from the practical standpoint of the moral life, the objects and abiding place of reasonable faith.

In a sum, in our scientific knowledge we are strictly limited to the space-time world of sensuous phenomena, with its endless and iron-bound causal sequences. In this world our bodies and our empirical selves are but ephemeral fragments, whose origin, career, and decease are as inevitable as the course of a mote or a planet. We find, in the phenomenal realm, no freedom, no God, and no self, except the logically presupposed self of the pure universal thinker, the principle of intellectual synthesis. But this whole phenomenal order is incomplete and dependent. Through moral insight we are led to see that it is but the appearance of the noumenal order, in which, for moral faith, God, freedom, and immortal souls are the supreme and abiding realities.

But we must ask, what is the relation of faith to science? What is the positive relation of the phenomenal or space-time world to the space-less and timeless world of the self-existent God and free moral causality? What is the relation of our empirical and ever changing selfhood to our spiritual or free selfhood? What is the relation between that timeless act of freedom, by which a moral will begins a series in time, and the temporal phenomenal causal order which has neither first or last term? How can we be both creatively free and temporally determined? Empirically our every volition, as well as our every bodily movement, is cursed by antecedents? When, then, and how, can we, by an act of free obedience to duty, break through this iron sequence? What is the relation of God to nature? How can the world of time be the appearance of a timeless world? And is not the appeal to moral consciousness, as the key to the interpretations of the noumenal or thing-in-itself, an appeal to experience? These and many more questions stand to portray the feelings of the necessity for bridging the gulf between sensible and supersensible worlds.

2.3:      Of the Necessity of a Connecting Link between the Sensible and the Supersensible    Realms

            This same feeling towards a richer and more unified concept of experience moved Kant, that in his Critique of Judgment, he argued that in the judgment of aesthetic feeling, in other words, in the experiences and valuations of beauty, grandeur, and sublimity, which we have in aesthetic contemplation of nature and works of art, we have hints of how the gaps might be closed between the sensible and the supersensible realms.[17]

We cannot help seeing purpose in nature, especially in living organisms, and we cannot help feeling beauty in nature and art. Beauty is the feeling of the perfect harmony of the world with intelligence. The judgment of purpose in nature gives us the idea of the world as an organic system. The perception of beauty in nature seems to show us an organismic teleology. It suggests a cosmic purposiveness, operating in ways other than the halting and circumscribed purposiveness of human endeavour. Thus, in judgments of purpose and of aesthetic feeling, we get suggestions as to how the world of nature may be a living and worthful whole, one organism and life.

Paul Guyer explains this same reality when he argues that the problem that has apparently not been solved by the earlier two Critiques is that of showing that our choice to act in accordance with the moral law, as the fundamental principle of all laws of freedom, a choice that can be free only if it is conceived of as taking place in a “supersensible” or noumenal realm that is not governed by the deterministic causal laws of “sensible” or phenomenal nature, must nevertheless be efficacious within that phenomenal world, and able to transform the natural world into a “moral world” where people really do act in accordance with the moral law, and ends imposed upon us by that law can be realized. And in the third Critique Kant somehow offers a solution to this problem.[18]

But what problem about the efficacy of the laws of freedom in the realm of nature could remain to be solved after the first two Critiques? The Critique of Pure Reason had argued that although we can disprove the possibility of any breach in the determinism of the natural world, and cannot have theoretical knowledge of the freedom of our will in the noumenal world, nevertheless we can coherently conceive of the latter. Then the Critique of Practical Reason argued that we can confidently infer the reality of our noumenal freedom to choose to do whatever morality requires of us from an immediate awareness of our obligation under the moral law combined with the principle that if we ought to do something then we must be able to do it.[19]

Informed by the above, we understand that there are four conditions that need to be met in order to bridge the gulf between nature and freedom by making our abstract grasp of the contents and conditions of morality palpable to our sensuous nature.[20] These conditions actually serve to ensure the link between the sensible and the supersensible realms through aesthetic judgment.

The task of the third Critique will then be to show how both aesthetic and teleological experience and judgment provide sensuous confirmation of what we already know in an abstract way, but also need to feel or make palpable to ourselves, namely the efficacy of our free choice of the fundamental principle of morality in the natural world, and the realizability of the objectives which that choice imposes upon us.[21]

2.4:      Critique of Judgment: Aesthetics as a Link between the Sensible and the Supersensible Realms

Kant thinks that our aesthetic experiences and judgments can bridge the gulf between our abstract, intellectual understanding of the requirements and conditions of morality and a palpable, sensuous representation of those requirements and conditions. The following serve to satiate this necessity for a bridge between freedom and nature. These include:

First, the sensuous presentation of moral ideas, above all through the works of artistic genius, but perhaps also through the image of a maximally coherent character expressed by the beautiful human figure as the “ideal of beauty,” offers a depiction of the moral law itself. This can be taken ultimately to represent the requirement of consistency among our own free choices and between them and the choices of others. It may also serve to represent other thoughts connected to morality, such as the blessedness that comes from fulfilling the demands of morality, or the contempt deserved by their rejection.[22]

Second, the feeling of our freedom to choose to live up to the demands of morality in spite of all the threats of nature that we experience in the dynamical sublime, and the tendency to interpret the beautiful as a symbol of the morally good, are ways in which the freedom of will that we can intellectually infer from our consciousness of the moral law becomes palpable to us as sensory creatures. It is our nature, in other words, to seek sensible symbols even of that which is too abstract to be fully grasped by the senses, and just as we may use the image of a hand mill to represent the despotism of absolute monarchy, so we may use the sensuous experience of the freedom of the imagination to represent the indubitable but intangible fact of the freedom of our will.[23]

Third, the experience of beauty gives us a hint that nature is amenable to the realization of our objectives, and this hint can be interpreted as sensible evidence for what is otherwise only a postulate of pure practical reason, namely the consistency of the laws of nature and the law of freedom. Kant calls the pleasure that we take in such sensory evidence the basis of an “intellectual interest” in beauty, presumably because the fact that beauty confirms for us is of interest to us as agents with pure practical reason, but not in the merely empirical way that the possibility for agreeable socializing or disreputable self-aggrandizement through the possession of valuable works of art does. Nevertheless, the evidence for the amenability of nature to our objectives that the existence of beauty offers us is evidence for our senses, and thus supplements the postulate of pure practical reason.[24]

Finally, Kant famously claims that the experience of beauty prepares us to love disinterestedly, and that of the sublime to esteem even contrary to our own interest, so that aesthetic experience may help bridge the gaps between the different classes and interest-groups that inevitably arise in any complex polity.[25] In making these claims, he is suggesting that aesthetic experience can make a vital contribution to our disposition to act as morality requires.

  These therefore reveal ways in which our natural sensuous dispositions can be used as means to the realization of the goal set by our purely rational disposition to be moral.

Thus Kant recognizes that there is “the natural need of all human beings to demand for even the highest concepts and grounds of reason something that the senses can hold on to, some confirmation from experience or the like.”[26] In other words, that we are sensuous as well as rational creatures, and need sensuous as well as rational presentation and confirmation of the conditions of the possibility of morality. Kant argues that there are crucial aspects of our moral condition that are symbolized by the beautiful.

The beautiful for Kant, is the symbol of the morally good because there are significant parallels between our experience of beauty and the structure of morality, and indeed that it is only insofar as the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good that we have any right not merely to predict that under ideal circumstances others agree with our appraisals of beauty but actually to demand that they do so.[27] Kant adduces “several aspects of this analogy,” the most important of which is that the freedom of the imagination (thus of the sensibility of our faculty) is represented in the judging of the beautiful as in accord with the lawfulness of the understanding.[28]

Now, because the experience of beauty is an experience of the freedom of the imagination in its play with the understanding, it can be taken as a palpable symbol of the freedom of the will to determine itself by moral laws which is necessary for morality but not something that can be directly experienced.[29] In other words, it is the very independence of aesthetic response from direct determination by concepts, including moral concepts, that makes the experience of beauty an experience of freedom that can in turn symbolize moral freedom.

Presumably this can be reconciled with Kant’s claim that the sublime is the most appropriate symbol of morality by observing that while the experience of beauty makes the freedom of the will palpable to us, it is only the mixed experience of the sublime that brings home to feeling that this freedom must often be exercised in the face of resistance offered by our own inclinations.[30] And so, Kant divides his Analytic of the Aesthetic Judgment into the ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’ and the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’. This work is chiefly concerned with the Analytic of the Beautiful and that is the preoccupation of the next chapter.

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[1]Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement (trans., Meredith, C, James) in Mortimer J. Adler, (ed.), Great Books of the Western World: 39, Kant, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. 1990), p. 465

[2]Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement (trans., Meredith, C, James) in Mortimer J Adler, (ed.), Great Books of the Western World: 39, Kant, Ibid., p. 461

[3]Kant understands Judgement generally as the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the universal, or put simply as a faculty by which laws are prescribed a priori. Now, a transcendental principle of judgment is one through which we represent a priori the universal condition under which alone things can become objects of our cognition generally and as such is the principle of the formal finality of nature. Hence aesthetic judgment is the aesthetic representation of the Finality of Nature, as the conceived harmony of nature in the manifold of its particular laws with our need of finding universality of principles; since that which is purely subjective in the representation of an object, that is, what constitutes its reference to the subject, not to the object, is its aesthetic quality. (cf. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement (trans., Meredith, C, James) in Mortimer J Adler, (ed.), Great Books of the Western World: 39, Kant, Ibid., pp. 467 - 472 )

[4]Frederick Coplestone, A History of Philosophy: the Enlightenment – Voltaire to Kant, (New York: Continuum Books, 1960), p. 265

[5]The categories are the forms and activities of judgment as applied to the matter of experience. Thus there is a category, or form of unification, corresponding to every judgment form. (Cf. Joseph Leighton, The Field of Philosophy: an Introduction to the Study of Philosophies (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1930), p. 263) Let us note that Kant treats of his categories fully but we shall only highlight them here as they have a full treatment in the next chapter as the Four Moments in the Judgment of Taste.

[6]Cf. Beatrice Longuenense, Kant on A Priori Concepts: the Metaphysical Deduction of the Categories, in Paul Guyer (ed.,) the Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 129 – 168  

[7]In order to illustrate Kant’s argument and theory it will suffice to show the application of a few of the categories: (1) Unity. The mind unites various sensations, for example, colour, form, weight, size, odour, and taste into the unity or identity of an orange. (2) Plurality. The mind in order to count a bag of oranges, must repeat, say twelve times, its identification of unity and add or synthesize each one to the previously recognised number, as it goes along. (3) Substance. The mind can recognise change only by something permanent. Without consciousness of permanence there is no consciousness of change and vice versa. Could we not recognise change in our experiences, we could never become conscious of permanence or identity. (4) Causality. A causal relation is one of necessary and irreversible sequence. A is the cause of B means that it is necessary that A should first occur if there is to be an occurrence of  B. but from sense experience alone we could never derive the idea of necessary and irreversible sequence. (Cf. Joseph Leighton, The Field of Philosophy: an Introduction to the Study of Philosophies, op.cit., p. 264

[8] Joseph Leighton, The Field of Philosophy: an Introduction to the Study of Philosophies, Ibid., p. 265

[9]By calling this ego ‘transcendental,’ Kant means that it transcends sense experience. It cannot be experienced, but it is the logical condition of there being an articulate and intelligible experience. (Cf. Joseph Leighton, The Field of Philosophy: an Introduction to the Study of Philosophies, Ibid.,

[10]John Watson, Selections from Kant, p 62, as quoted in Joseph Leighton, The Field of Philosophy: an Introduction to the Study of Philosophies, Ibid., p. 266

[11]Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (trans. J.M.D. Meiklejohn) in Mortimer J Adler, (ed.), Great Books of the Western World: 39, Kant, op.cit., p. 34

[12]Cf. Joseph Leighton, The Field of Philosophy: an Introduction to the Study of Philosophies, op.cit., p. 269

[13]Cf. Joseph Leighton, The Field of Philosophy: an Introduction to the Study of Philosophies, Ibid., p. 270

[14]Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott) in Mortimer J Adler, (ed.), Great Books of the Western World: 39, Kant, op.cit., p. 344 

[15]This is the first of the two postulates which Kant uses to resolve his antinomy of practical reason. Kant’s argument should not be taken for a proof of immortality. It is only a postulate or a hypothesis, which is beyond proof and disproof. A proof is an item of knowledge; a postulate is an item of belief. (Cf. T.K. Seung, Kant: A Guide for the Perplexed, (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007), p.128)

[16]This is the crowning postulate of the moral life which serves to resolve the antinomy of practical reason. (Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott) in Mortimer J Adler, (ed.), Great Books of the Western World: 39, Kant, op.cit., pp. 344 – 348)

[17]Cf. Joseph Leighton, The Field of Philosophy: an Introduction to the Study of Philosophies, op.cit, p. 273

[18]Cf. Paul Guyer, Bridging the Gulf: Kant’s Project in the Third Critique in Bird Graham (ed.,), A Companion to Kant, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2006), pp. 424 – 425

[19]Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, (Akademie Edition, Vol.5), (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1902), p. 30;

[20]Cf. Paul Guyer, Bridging the Gulf: Kant’s Project in the Third Critique in Bird Graham (ed.,), A Companion to Kant, op.cit, p. 432

[21]Cf. Paul Guyer, Bridging the Gulf: Kant’s Project in the Third Critique in Bird Graham (ed.,), A Companion to Kant, Ibid., pp. 425 – 426

[22] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, (Akademie Edition, Vol.5), (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1902), p. 314

[23] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, (Akademie Edition, Vol.5), Ibid., p. 351 – 354

[24] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, (Akademie Edition, Vol.5), Ibid., p. 425 – 436

[25] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, (Akademie Edition, Vol.5), Ibid., p. 267;355 – 356

[26]Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Akademie Edition, Vol.6), (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1902), p.109

[27]Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, (Akademie Edition, Vol.5), op.cit., p. 53

[28]In the moral judgment the freedom of the will is conceived as the agreement of the latter with itself in accordance with universal laws of reason (Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, (Akademie Edition,Vol.5), Ibid, p. 354 )

[29] Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, (Akademie Edition, Vol.5), Ibid, p. 29

[30] Paul Guyer, The Symbols of Freedom in Kant’s Aesthetics, in Hermann Parret (ed.), Kant’s Ästhetik [Kant’s Aesthetics], (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 338–355