Summary
The Critique of Judgment, often called
the Third Critique, does not have as clear a focus as the first
two critiques. In broad outline, Kant sets about examining our faculty
of judgment, which leads him down a number of divergent paths. While
the Critique of Judgment deals with matters related
to science and teleology, it is most remembered for what Kant has
to say about aesthetics.
Kant calls aesthetic judgments “judgments of taste” and
remarks that, though they are based in an individual’s subjective
feelings, they also claim universal validity. Our feelings about
beauty differ from our feelings about pleasure and moral goodness
in that they are disinterested. We seek to possess pleasurable objects,
and we seek to promote moral goodness, but we simply appreciate
beauty without feeling driven to find some use for it. Judgments
of taste are universal because they are disinterested: our individual
wants and needs do not come into play when appreciating beauty,
so our aesthetic response applies universally. Aesthetic pleasure
comes from the free play between the imagination and understanding
when perceiving an object.
Kant distinguishes the beautiful from the sublime. While
the appeal of beautiful objects is immediately apparent, the sublime holds
an air of mystery and ineffability. While a Greek statue or a pretty
flower is beautiful, the movement of storm clouds or a massive building
is sublime: they are, in a sense, too great to get our heads around.
Kant argues that our sense of the sublime is connected with our
faculty of reason, which has ideas of absolute totality and absolute
freedom. While storm clouds or a massive building might stretch
our minds, they are nothing compared with reason’s ideas of absolute
totality and freedom. Apprehending sublime objects puts us in touch
with these ideas of reason, so that sublimity resides not in sublime
objects but in reason itself.
In a second part of the book, Kant wrestles with the concept
of teleology, the idea that something has an end, or purpose. Teleology falls
somewhere between science and theology, and Kant argues that the
concept is useful in scientific work even though we would be wrong
to assume that teleological principles are actually at work in nature.
Analysis
While much of what Kant writes about aesthetics might
strike us now as a bit dated, his work is historically very significant.
Kant’s Third Critique is one of the early works in the field of
aesthetics and one of the most important treatises on the subject
ever written. Aesthetics differs from literary criticism and art
criticism, which have existed for millennia, in that it attempts
to explain not only why things are or are not beautiful but also
the concept of beauty and how the perception of beauty arises in
us. Kant takes on the considerable task of making room for the concepts
of the beautiful and the sublime in the complex account of the mind
he gives in his first two Critiques. Unfortunately
for Kant, the success of this project can be understood only in
the context of his complex and abstruse philosophical system, while
its failures are immediately apparent. The close relationship between
art and politics, which became clear in the twentieth century, casts
doubt on Kant’s assertion that our response to art is disinterested,
and his claim that our sense of beauty is universal makes less sense
in a world in which we are exposed to the diversity of artistic
products of different cultures. Although his work continues to influence
work in aesthetics, Kant falls victim to the same problem that touches
everyone who tries to make general claims about art: the very concept
of art has great historical fluidity so that we can never nail down
for all time exactly what it is.
Kant’s account of beauty as based in subjective feeling
as well as his struggles with teleology stem from his desire to
refute all metaphysical proofs of God. Kant is by no means an atheist,
and he makes forceful arguments for why we ought to believe in God. However,
God is the ultimate thing-in-itself, and so, according to Kant’s
epistemology, the nature and even the existence of God are fundamentally
unknowable. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant provides
refutations for all the main “proofs” of God’s existence, one of
which is the Argument from Design. According to this argument, the
patterns and formal perfection in nature suggest the presence of
an intelligent designer. Kant argues that our judgment of beauty
is a subjective feeling, even though it possesses universal validity,
in part because arguing that beauty is objective would play into
the hands of those who make the Argument from Design. If beauty
were an objective property of certain objects in nature, the question
would naturally arise of how these objects were bestowed with beauty.
This question would provide a toehold for the Argument from Design,
an outcome that Kant is determined to avoid.
