Critique of JudgmentImmanuel Kant
About Critique of Judgment
The third Critique bridges the gulf Kant opened between nature and freedom in his first two. The legislates for the understanding and the world of appearances; the legislates for the will and the moral law. But these two domains seem to occupy different worlds. The asks how they connect.
Kant's answer runs through two kinds of judgment. In the first part, on aesthetic judgment, he analyzes the experience of beauty and sublimity. A judgment of beauty is disinterested, universal, purposive without a purpose, and necessary; it is not a judgment about the object's properties but about the free play of imagination and understanding that the object occasions. The sublime, by contrast, overwhelms the imagination but in doing so reveals the superiority of reason over nature. Both experiences point to a purposiveness in nature that understanding cannot legislate but that judgment can reflect upon.
The second part, the critique of teleological judgment, addresses the problem of organisms. Organisms appear to be organized as if designed, their parts reciprocally means and ends. Kant argues that mechanical explanation alone cannot account for this, but that teleology functions as a regulative principle for investigation, not a constitutive claim about nature. The thus preserves natural science from illicit metaphysics while securing a legitimate place for purposive thinking in biology, aesthetics, and the hope that nature and morality form a coherent whole.