Book: Critique of Judgment

Scope and Aim
Kant’s third critique investigates the faculty of judgment as the mediator between the domains previously treated: nature as known by understanding and freedom as legislated by reason. He distinguishes determinative judgment, which subsumes particulars under given laws, from reflective judgment, which seeks a universal for given particulars. Reflective judgment requires a guiding principle: that nature is purposive for our cognitive powers. This principle is not a law of nature but a regulative maxim that helps us find order, unity, and system in experience without asserting objective teleology.

Aesthetic Judgment and Beauty
Aesthetic judgments are judgments of taste that claim universal validity while remaining grounded in a felt pleasure. Kant analyzes them through four moments: they are disinterested in that the pleasure in the beautiful is independent of desire or possession; they demand universal assent, as if everyone ought to agree; they judge an object by “purposiveness without purpose,” finding a fit between form and our faculties without attributing an end; and they possess exemplary necessity, a demand for agreement rooted in a shared “common sense” (sensus communis). The pleasure of beauty arises from the harmonious free play of imagination and understanding when a form invites ongoing, unforced apprehension. Kant distinguishes free beauty, judged without a concept of what the object should be, from adherent beauty, which presupposes a concept of the object’s purpose and measures beauty in relation to it. He also separates the beautiful from the agreeable (merely private liking) and the morally good (esteemed by reason).

The Sublime
The sublime concerns what overwhelms imagination yet elevates reason. In the mathematical sublime, magnitude exceeds our capacity to comprehend intuitively, revealing the superiority of reason’s ideas of totality. In the dynamical sublime, nature’s might threatens us, yet as rational agents we recognize our independence from sensible determination. The displeasure of imagination’s failure is overcome by a pleasure tied to our supersensible vocation, linking aesthetic feeling to moral self-respect.

Genius, Art, and Aesthetic Ideas
Fine art exemplifies beauty through works that are both rule-governed and irreducibly original. Genius is “nature giving the rule to art”: an innate productive capacity that provides exemplary models without fully articulable rules. Artistic success involves aesthetic ideas, rich, suggestive presentations that stir more thought than any concept can capture. Art should appear as nature, with purposiveness unforced and spontaneous, while still guided by taste, which disciplines genius to communicable form.

Teleological Judgment and Nature’s Purposes
The second part addresses organism and purposiveness in nature. Living beings are judged as natural ends: they are both cause and effect of themselves, maintaining and reproducing their form through reciprocal causality of parts and whole. Such teleological judgments are reflective and regulative, not constitutive claims about objective ends in nature. Kant articulates an antinomy: we must explain nature mechanically, yet in some cases we cannot avoid using teleological concepts. He resolves it by restricting both to regulative use: mechanism governs explanation wherever possible, while teleology guides inquiry into organized complexity without asserting final causes.

Bridge between Nature and Freedom
The principle of purposiveness underwrites the systematicity of experience and the possibility of empirical knowledge, while aesthetic and teleological reflection intimates a supersensible ground common to nature and freedom. Beauty signals a fit between the world and our cognitive capacities, and the sublime points to our moral destination. Thus judgment furnishes the mediating standpoint that makes the unity of reason practically thinkable, without overstepping the limits of knowledge.