1 Introduction
Let’s start with a really basic picture of who Kant was, and what the third Critique was.
Immanuel Kant was born in 1724, and before he died in 1804 (just shy of 80) he completely revolutionized European philosophy. In the standard ‘canon’ of European philosophers, there are few figures who have so completely changed what philosophy is; after Plato and Aristotle, you would be hard-pressed to find a figure of such immense impact as Kant. And, maybe more importantly, understanding the revolution that is Kantian philosophy is understanding why philosophy is done the way it is done today. Certain habits of thinking prevalent today would be inconceivable before Kant; certain habits of thinking inconceivable today were entirely prevalent before Kant.
It’s not all good, of course. Understanding Kant is partly understanding how philosophy made its way ‘past’ certain knots and problems but also understanding why it is mired in certain other knots and problems.
It’s not all Kant, too. It’s not like everyone bought Kant’s answers to, say, questions about the nature of knowledge or morality, and now we’re just ironing out details. Plenty of philosophers—including most pointedly his immediate successors—have rejected Kant’s view of things, and in certain areas Kantian views are the minority. (In some areas, most gratefully so.) What Kant is responsible for—in the same way that Socrates’ “taking refuge in logoi” to discover the truth radicalizes ancient philosophy—is more a transformation in the nature of philosophical questioning than in actual claims.
Now, if I had to totally simplify how Kant revolutionized philoosphy, I would say it is that he buried the idea that philosophy has the ability to make sense of reality. And, kick and scream as philosophers might have and might still, we live in a world in which making sense of reality is a highly local and empirical thing. Want to know about the nature of reality, about how things ‘are’? Consult the natural sciences. Finis.
But the legacy of Kant is not all clear, either, and that is partly the reason for this course: Undeniably, Kant changed philosophy. And, undeniably, the third Critique is part of that transformation. But what does the third Critique say? I don’t know. And what has been the impact of the third Critique? I can say two things about this: It has been immense, but it has been entirely diffuse. Our job this semester is to try to address these questions within whatever limited scope we can manage in sixteen weeks.
Kant died in 1804 at 79; he wrote the first draft of the first Critique, made the first gesture toward the radicalization of philosophy, in 1781, at the age of 57; produced a second edition of it, and published the second Critique, in 1787, at the age of 63; then published the third Critique in 1790, at the age of 66. Kant claims he wrote the first Critique in four or five months. That’s 341,000 words over a decade; 100 words a day for ten years; then, poof, he’s done, writing at the end of the preface to the third Critique: “With this, I conclude my entire critical undertaking.” And he does weird stuff for fourteen years, and then he dies.
2 The first two Critiques
The third Critique is unlike the first two in that it is much more “inside baseball” than they are. Practically, what that means is that you have to have some kind of working knowledge of the first two Critiques in order to make sense of the third. Once we get into the particulars of the third Critique, this will matter less, but to understand why Kant writes the third Critique, and even just what it is about, we need to know about the first two.
Very generally:
- The Critique of Pure Reason (the first Critique) is about knowledge. Kant claims we can have knowledge of appearances only, not things in themselves. The domain of knowable stuff is what he calls nature.
Now, because our being free is not an appearance, we cannot, in the technical sense of having understanding, know that we are free.
- The Critique of Pure Practical Reason (the second Critique) is about morality. If moral judgment is possible (and for Kant it is), we must be free. But then our freedom belongs to us as an intelligible rather than sensible fact.
This creates a problem: How can the same being occupy both the domain of nature and the domain of freedom?
I want to add just a few details to this bare sketch.
2.1 Critique of Pure Reason
You might separate two sorts of stories in the first Critique. One is about restricting the domain of the knowable to appearances. Another is about the possibility of knowledge.
The first story sounds like a typical early modern empiricist’s or even skeptic’s. Knowledge comes from experience. Experience is only of sensible stuff. Hence we can only know sensible stuff, not things like ‘universals’. The first way in which Kant’s story deviates from the usual skeptical view is in his view (from the “Transcendental Aesthetic”) that space and time are dimensions of experience, not of reality or things; they are also not abstract ideas.
The second story is more distinctively Kantian, and it has two crucial moves. In the “Deduction,” Kant claims that our ability to make sense of objects of experience is derived from the unity that the mind imposes on experience. And in the “Second Analogy,” he argues that certain experiences give us license to infer causal relations.
You could think of the first Critique as attempting to answer the question whether metaphysics (the theory of reality) is possible, and giving either a resounding ‘no’ or suggesting a different path for philosophy: investigation of the nature of experience rather than of the world. This is Kant’s so-called ‘Copernican turn’:
Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects. On that presupposition, however, all our attempts to establish something about them a priori—by means of concepts through which our cognition would be expanded—have come to nothing. Let us, therefore, try to find out by experiment whether we shall not make better progress in the problems of metaphysics if we assume that objects must conform to our cognition. This assumption already agrees better with the demanded possibility of an a priori cognition of objects—i.e., a cognition that is to ascertain something about them before they are given to us. The situation here is the same as that of Copernicus when he first thought of explaining the motions of celestial bodies. Having found it difficult to make progress when he assumed that the entire host of stars revolved around the spectator, he tried to find out by experiment whether he might not be more successful if he had the spectator revolve and the stars remain at rest. Now, we can try a similar experiment in metaphysics with regard to our intuition of objects. If our intuition had to conform to the character of its objects, then I do not see how we could know anything a priori about that character. But I can quite readily conceive of this possibility if the object—as an object of the senses—conforms to the character of our power of intuition. However, if these intuitions are to become cognitions, I cannot remain with them but must refer them, as presentations, to something or other as their object, and must determine this object by means of them. Since this determination requires concepts, I must make one of two assumptions. I can assume that the concepts by means of which I bring about this determination likewise conform to the object; in that case, I am again in the same perplexity as to how I can know anything a priori about that object. Or else I assume that the objects—or, what amounts to the same thing, the experience in which alone they can be cognized as objects given to us—conform to those concepts. On this latter assumption, I immediately see an easier way out. For experience is itself a way of cognizing for which I need understanding. But understanding has its rule, which I must presuppose within me even before objects are given to me, and hence must presuppose a priori. That rule is expressed in a priori concepts. Hence all objects of experience must necessarily conform to these concepts and agree with them. (CPR B xvi–xviii)
2.2 Critique of Pure Practical Reason
You could tell the story of the second Critique beginning from a similarly ‘Copernican’ perspective. Take for granted that we’re free; but also take for granted the lesson of the first Critique, that we can know only appearances; and notice, reasonably enough, that our freedom is not something that appears to us, that is, in space and time. How then do we know (we are assuming, per the ‘Copernican’ hypothesis, that we do know) that we are free?
In the preface to the second Critique, Kant attempts to answer this question in part with the following thought experiment:
Suppose someone alleges that his lustful inclination is quite irresistible when he encounters the favored object and the opportunity. Ask him whether, if a gallows were erected in front of the house where he finds this opportunity—on which he would be strung up immediately after gratifying his lust—he would not then conquer his inclination. One does not have to guess long what he would reply. But ask him whether, if his prince demanded, under threat of the same prompt penalty of death, that he give false testimony against an honest man whom the prince wished to ruin under specious pretenses, he might consider it possible to overcome his love of life, however great it may be. He will perhaps not venture to assure us whether or not he would overcome that love, but he must concede without hesitation that doing so would be possible for him. He judges, therefore, that he can do something because he is conscious that he ought to do it; and he cognizes freedom within himself—a freedom with which he otherwise would have remained unacquainted, were it not for the moral law. (CPPR 30)
Thus, no matter how depraved we are, we are all aware of a capacity in us that speaks with authority about how we ought to act. What is this capacity? It’s reason. Kant calls the awareness of the moral law within me a “fact of reason.” And, importantly, note that my freedom is a fact about me that is not to be found in me as a material or sensible thing.
2.3 Freedom and nature
You have in the first and second Critique a fairly glaring tension, which is that I experience myself simultaneously in two registers:
- as an appearance, so belonging to the domain of nature, and
- as a free being, so belonging to the domain of freedom.
These two ‘domains’ are irreducibly separate ones; we cannot derive or house one from or in the other. But this is an intolerable result, felt in particular in the fact that my reason demands me to act, in the world of appearances, in ways that conform to the moral obligations that stem from my reason. (As an analogy: It’s like being suited up and equipped to play golf, and then stuck on an ice rink in the middle of a hockey game, and then being told to play golf with the puck.) How do we bridge this gap? This is one of the fundamental questions of the third Critique.
3 The two introductions
One of the things interesting about Kant is that, writing as he does well after the advent of the printing press, editions of his work, drafts, letters, fragments, and so on all create a centrifugal relationship between text and author. ‘What Kant thought’ is a relatively complex thing to evaluate because Kant might say one thing in a letter, a second thing in an edition of a work, a third thing in a later edition of the same work, and so on.
When he wrote the third Critique, he wrote an introduction to it, decided it was too long, wrote a shorter introduction and published it in the third Critique, and withheld the longer introduction. However, he encouraged his student, J.S. Beck, to publish parts of it. The full manuscript survived, and the ‘first introduction’ was finally printed in 1913 as part of the Akademie edition of Kant’s works. (When you see numbers in the margin of Kant texts, those are pages, and sometimes volumes, in the Akademie edition.)
There is a noticeable difference in emphasis between the two introductions. Kant describes, in a sense, two different projects. We’ll get to the difference in due time. Let’s start with the first introduction.
4 The first introduction
I have excerpted here §XI of the first introduction, which Kant calls an ‘encyclopedic’ introduction. Go to the reference on p. 432. First some background:
The third Critique is a critique of judgment. Most generally, judgment is the capacity of relating. We’re making use of judgment when we say “That \(s\) is (a) \(P\).” This operation is called subsumption in the sense of subsuming a particular under a universal. When I say “that animal is a giraffe,” I’m forming a judgment; I’m subsuming some particular thing under the concept or universal giraffe.
There are two sorts of judgment in Kant: determinate and reflective. Determinate judgments are like those just described, where I subsume a particular under a given universal. I already have the universal in hand; my question is about the particular: whether, say, the thing crawling in front of me is an alligator or a crocodile.
Reflective judgments involve a given particular but no universal to subsume it under. Aesthetic experience is a particularly conspicuous instance where reflective judgment is called for. You see, say, a painting at a museum, but it challenges your ideas about what painting or art is; you’re not sure what to make of it. In these cases, your question isn’t what is this? so much as it is what is the more general kind of which this thing is a particular instance?
What I want you to note is that, when we ask this sort of question, we presume there will be an answer. Presuming there will be an answer is a necessary supposition of trying to find it. Now, what Kant wants to know is, What is the content of that supposition? Let’s put it this way: It is the supposition that we will eventually be able to make sense of the thing and its kind. And in fact we presume this about basically everything: that there will be an answer to the questions what is it and what kind of thing is it; and that the answers will make sense to us. Thus, in general, we suppose that every possible item of experience—everything that could possibly appear to us; all of nature—is constituted in such a way that we will be able to make sense of it. This is what Kant calls the “transcendental principle” of judgment.
See now the highlighted passage on p. 432.
One of the crucial things to keep in mind is that, for Kant, the supposition of a “purposiveness” in nature very specifically does not include the claim that nature has purposes. The purposiveness supposition is merely a theoretical posit of judgment, a kind of epistemic encouragement; something that, let’s say, goads us on to finding out what is the case. To put it differently: The supposition has no intrinsic worth or truth, but these only in relation to what follows from making the supposition.
The value of the supposition, moreover, doesn’t attach to individual judgments so much as to the fact that all such judgments adhere to it, and in such a way that, as a whole, they (can, might) form a system, that is, an organized understanding of nature. The supposition that nature ‘makes sense’ is thus as much about the sense of this or that proposition as it is about the sense of all such propositions as a whole.
See the passage on p. 433.
5 Aesthetic and teleological judgments
There’s an important difference between the two sorts of judgment, aesthetic and teleological, that Kant is interested in in his Critique of Judgment. First, here are some examples to train your focus:
- Aesthetic judgment: “That tree is beautiful”
- Teleological judgment: “Marsupials have pouches in order to carry their young”
Each of these involves a judgment about purpose, and purposes, for Kant, are not things I am warranted to claim exist in nature (because nature is entirely mechanical). In the case of teleological judgments, the purposive dimension is obvious (“ . . . in order to . . . ”). But we have to understand aesthetic judgments in a certain way to make out the purposive element.
For Kant, when I say “That tree is beautiful,” I’m expressing a pleasure, but not the sort of pleasure I experience when I get what I want. When I experience the pleasure of drinking ice water on a hot day, the water satisfies a particular, contingent desire. Kant calls pleasure of this sort agreeable. The pleasure of beauty is different. When the tree seems beautiful to me, its form seems especially well suited to the way my mind works. My imagination apprehends the tree as an object, and my understanding looks for intelligible unity in it. In the experience of beauty, imagination and understanding seem to work together in a particularly harmonious way.
This is what it means to say that beauty is subjectively purposive. The purposiveness is subjective because, unlike teleological judgments (where the seeming purpose lies in the object), in aesthetic judgments the seeming purpose lies in the relation between my cognitive capacities, and their relation(s) to the object. The experience of the beautiful tree occurs as if the tree existed to be enjoyed in this way. Moreover, to the extent that aesthetic judgment appeals to my cognitive capacities as such, the intended reach of an aesthetic judgment is universal for beings like me.
(Let me stress that this is my current best guess about this, and there are tons of really good questions about all of this, which we’ll get to in due course, and then perhaps we’ll revise everything.)
In the case of a teleological judgment, the purposive element has to do with an object (this exists in an object for that purpose). In the case of an aesthetic judgment, the purpose element has to do with me, the subject (this scene suits my cognitive powers as if it were made to be enjoyed by them). In general, the question motivating Kant in the third Critique is: Where and how do we get off forming judgments of purpose?
Kant says that a teleological judgment “merely follows the principle of reason” (433). We might gloss this to mean that it is not in need of a justification separate from the already established rule that certain principles of reason can be regulative with respect to the pursuit of knowledge.
But an aesthetic judgment is not similarly justifiable, because it amounts to a purportedly necessarily true claim, not so much about an object, but about the constitution of my faculties for perception and cognition. This needs a justification, hence a critique.
There are thus two prerogatives shaping the two-part construction of the Critique of Judgment:
- that it deals with judgments of purposiveness requires that it deal with aesthetic judgments (subjective purposiveness) as well as teleological judgments (objective purposiveness)
- that it provide a ‘critique’ (in the sense of a justification) of the power of aesthetic judgment