Critique of the Power of Judgment

"I now want to consider another book that Kant wrote. In English, the title is translated in different ways. It used to be regularly translated as the ‘ Critique of Judgement ’ but a more recent English edition has come out with the title translated as the ‘ Critique of the Power of Judgement ’ [1790]. There is so much going on in this book that I cannot even begin to do justice to it now. It’s the book in which Kant tackles questions about aesthetics: the whole idea of beauty (which he considers at great length); the whole idea of the sublime. He also considers questions of scientific methodology and looks at how our conception of teleology is relevant to the way in which we pursue science. He covers a vast amount of territory. From that point of view, it’s like the Critique of Pure Reason : it’s staggering just for its breadth. So I’m not even going to try to summarise it. But what I will do is say just a little bit about how this work fits in with the other two that we’ve been considering so far. After you’ve read the Critique of Pure Reason , and after Kant’s ethical work including the Groundwork , you have this powerful sense of this fundamental divide between appearance and reality which we’ve already seen is very important to Kant. But you also have a slightly schizophrenic feel, because you realise that one of the important features of Kant’s whole picture is that we, ourselves, are located on both sides of this divide. Part of the reason why it’s so important for Kant that we are located on both sides of the divide is that we are free rational beings in ourselves: that’s a fact about us that transcends the world of space and time. But, on the other hand, we also, of course, ordinarily think of ourselves as creatures within the world of space and time. So, we’ve got all this moral machinery that only applies to us because of our status as free rational beings in the real world. And then we’ve got everything that science is concerned with: the world of space and time, the world of appearances. One of the questions that Kant is shaping up to when he writes the Critique of the Power of Judgement is ‘What does it feel like to be a creature with a split personality of this kind, a moral agent exercising freedom and yet thinking of oneself as an animal creature in the world of space and time, governed by causal laws?’ Get the weekly Five Books newsletter One of the things going on, and one of the reasons why this Critique of the Power of Judgement is such a fascinating work, is that Kant asks some fundamental questions about the way things must make sense to us for us to negotiate this divide. There he is in the Groundwork trying to explain or unearth the fundamental principles of morality, telling us what the fundamental distinctions between right and wrong ultimately come to; here we are, trying to put that into practice. It’s only going to be possible for us to think about this, ultimately, in spatio-temporal terms. But there’s no guarantee that it’s going to be possible for us to do even that. The way our actions show up in the spatio-temporal world might not have any discernible relevance to the exercises of freedom that are underpinning them. Maybe, if I do the right thing—if I exercise my freedom in the right way—as far as the consequences in the world of space and time are concerned, that will always result in misery and catastrophe. There just might not be any harmonious interplay between the world of appearance and the world of reality in the way that we need there to be if this is ultimately going to make any kind of sense to us. We’d like to think that the difference between doing right and wrong had some sort of relationship to our ability to avoid misery and catastrophe. And to the extent that we find that there is a harmonious interplay between these two worlds, to the extent that we can make sense of things, to that extent we feel a certain kind of pleasure. So, this comes back to the question of what it feels like to be in this situation. That is ultimately Kant’s story about what beauty is. The pleasure that we’re feeling there is our sense of the beautiful – and the beautiful is partly that which pleases us because it helps us to make integrated sense of our lives."

"Kant divides the sublime into two main kinds: the mathematical sublime and the dynamical sublime. It’s a bit jargony, but it’s a matter of what facet of reason is in relation to the imagination. Generally, the sublime is an aesthetic experience in which the imagination is in an ultimately harmonious relation between imagination and reason. In the mathematical case, it is theoretical reason—because this is what gives us the idea of the infinite—and in the other case, it’s practical reason. This is the kind of sublime that we feel when confronted with something that threatens us, like a storm or hurricane. The idea here is that we have a sensory disclosure of our own freedom. And it is practical reason that is being disclosed. I think that’s right. We’re going to talk about Schopenhauer in a moment. He very much takes up the dynamical sublime, more than anything, in his examples. Certainly, much of the writing either seems to go back to Burke or to Kant, depending on whether you are more psychologically oriented or more philosophically—maybe literarily—oriented. Would you like to know why I put Kant on the list? Apart from his being enormously influential. He really defends the idea that the experience of the sublime has a universal validity, as we were saying earlier. So it’s not just something you feel that is personal or a matter of preference, but something that all human beings share, and in the same circumstances would very likely agree on, or would have that same response. This is called ‘transcendental’ philosophy, or it is an element of his transcendental philosophy. But at the same time, he’s very sympathetic to Burke. I think he calls him the “foremost author” of the “physiological and psychological method.” What’s interesting in Kant is it’s kind of combining the two approaches, even though the book itself is a work of transcendental philosophy. He’s very much open to the empirical approach, he just thinks that the problem with Burke’s approach is that it doesn’t account for the experience’s necessity and universal validity."