1 Introduction
Instead of talking about big-picture issues, let’s just push our way through three sections here: §§IV, VI, and VII.
2 §IV
Kant begins here with a definition of judgment, and a division of it into the determinate and reflective sorts. Great. See pp. 18–19
There are two ways of motivating the substance of the third Critique, and Kant describes both of them here. The first involves the supposition that empirical laws, even those we don’t know, exist and are discoverable by us. See first this long stretch on pp. 19–20.
Kant then defines what a purpose is, though not in an extremely helpful way. The purpose of something is an answer to the question why it exists. Implicitly such an answer also tells us what the thing is. Thus a purpose tells us what something is and why it exists.
The supposition that nature will make sense to us is purposive. That means two things. The first is that everything in nature has (or: will be found to have) a structure that yields to thinking. But the second is that we do not—for Kant: should not—take this to be literally true of nature.
The belief that nature will make sense to us has its origin, then, in our minds, and specifically in reflective judgment: finding the rule for a given particular.
See p. 20.
3 §VI
We suppose that nature will make sense to us. We do this as a necessary consequence of our desire to find out how things are. But when we discover new laws, the discovery is contingent; it isn’t guaranteed in advance by our demand to know. See p. 26.
When we discover a new natural law, we “attain an aim,” and attaining an aim “is always connected with the feeling of pleasure” (27). In the case of discovering a new natural law, we’re not just satisfying a contingent desire (ice water on a hot day, say) but a necessary supposition of our understanding; hence the pleasure is not just mine, not just local, but universal (that is, belongs to all beings who have the capacity to understand).
Kant illustrates this through the fact—a fact I hope you find immediately odd—that people are happy, sometimes deliriously happy, when they discover new natural laws. See the passage on pp. 27–28.
4 §VII
Sensation has two aspects: a formal and a material one. The material aspect consists in, say, the tingling of my noise, or the impression of light on the surface of my eye. The formal aspect is the arrangement of these sensible inputs into sensible experiences: the pie’s aroma, the sight of the tree. The material aspect of sensation belongs, so to speak, to the world, that is, to nature. The formal aspect belongs to the perceiver; is subjective.
Sometimes we experience pleasure in connection with sensation in this formal aspect, and where we are not simply identifying an object, or discovering its use. The pleasure has to do with the relation between the form of the sensation and our powers for perceiving. Kant analyzes it as a ‘commensurateness’ or ‘fit’ of the one with the other. See pp. 29–30.
Three powers are involved here. First, imagination synthesizes a sensible manifold. Second, understanding demands that this manifold be exhibited in terms of some unity or lawfulness. Third, judgment relates the imagination’s synthesis to the understanding’s demand for unity. Judgment is determinate when the manifold is subsumed under a given or known universal or rule. It is reflective when no such universal or rule is given.
In attempting to make sense of the pleasurable experience of a sensible form, where no determinate universal or rule is given, we refer the manifold to reflective judgment, attempting to discover such a universal or rule. Now suppose two things happen: We don’t discover such a universal or rule, and yet we continue to experience pleasure. What’s going on? Kant thinks what’s going on is that the sensible form, through the back and forth work of reflective judgment, is occasioning an interplay between imagination and the understanding that is pleasurable, and pleasurable precisely because the object appears to play exactly into what it is our cognitive powers are after. This is the “subjective formal purposiveness of the object”: It is as if it existed or were made for the subject to perceive it. Crucially, because the pleasure is formal with respect to the powers of cognition, the ‘beauty’ of the object must hold for all subjects.
As an illustration, consider watching a movie or going to a show with friends, one you all love, but that you couldn’t say exactly why you love, and you engage in constant “and then, and then” talk (work on the part of the imagination to synthesize the manifold of the movie or the show), which simultaneously increases the appreciation of it and makes it less, not more, intelligible.
Let’s consider this passage on p. 30, which introduces us to the concepts of the beautiful and of “taste.”
One final note. Beauty involves cognitive success—a strange breed of success, because the success has to do with the traffic between imagination and reason, but a sort of success. But there is a related though quite different experience, that of the sublime, which registers a sort of failure, but that falls, for Kant, under the same heading of an aesthetic judgment. Here’s an introduction: p. 32.