It’s often pointed out that Kant’s Critique of Judgment is actually a Critique of the Power of Judgment, a critique of Urteilskraft, the Kraft, power, of Urteil, judgment, and not (just) of Urteil, judgment.
I want to point out the significance of this claim by appeal to a distinction between two different questions about sensation.
- How can I be certain that the thing in front of me is red?
- How can I be certain that I’m seeing (something that is) red?
The first question, let’s just say, has no answer, no decent answer, no good answer I can think of. But the second question has as straightforward an answer as the first question has basically none. That is to say, the sensation itself is, if you need to call it this, “proof” of the fact that I am seeing red. Or to put it more precisely, we would say, it is not in need of proof at all.
With that distinction in mind: What is Kant talking about in the third Critique?
- One answer is judgment. That is to say, he’s trying to figure out the sorts of judgments I can make.
- Another way of looking at it would be to say that he is talking about—which is literally true—the faculty of judgment. Then his question is, How is the possession of such a faculty possible?
Now, the thing to notice here is that, in this second case, we’re not actually asking questions like, What sorts of judgments am I licensed to make? That question is more or less bracketed or suspended. Instead, we’re beginning from the supposition that we do have a faculty or power for forming judgments. And we’re going on to ask the subsidiary question, What else must be true, let’s say, of me, in order for it to be true that I have a faculty of judgment. And what I want to stress is that this is a radically different question from a question like, What sorts of judgments can I make?
Now, I want to zoom right into a problem that will make this distinction straightforward. It’s something we’re going to talk about next week or the week after. And it’s this: When Kant goes on to ask the question, in the “deduction” of aesthetic judgment, for example, What are the grounds for the justification of aesthetic judgment? there are two radically different ways of reading this question.
- One way is to say he really wants to know what justification I have for calling an object beautiful, say. And if the deduction is successful along these lines, I’ll have an account that demonstrates the validity of holding such and such true for all, let’s say, subjects.
- And another way of viewing the deduction is as posing the question, What must be true if I do have a faculty of aesthetic judgment?
Now, to anticipate one of the prominent debates about this, you should note that the demand is significantly lower in answering this second question. In other words, it need not be true that this or that claim about what is or isn’t beautiful is universally valid, and let me go out on a limb here and suggest even that there is nothing that is universally acknowledged to be beautiful.
Perhaps then it need only be true for Kant’s question that I have a faculty that is evidently licensed to make such claims; no claims of the sort actually need to be true.
Now, I think—and details to this effect are going to emerge fairly quickly—the evidence favors the second interpretation. Kant isn’t asking whether this or that judgment of beauty is universally valid.
To go back to the sensation analogy, he’s not asking the unanswerable question, How can I be certain that the thing I’m looking at is red? Instead, he is asking the—let me typify it in two ways: critical and phenomenological question—What are the grounds of the possibility of such judgments?
So, for example, he’s not answering the question, Why is Guernica so powerful? He’s asking the question, How must we be made up such that it is possible for us to find Guernica powerful?