## 1. The Faculty of Judgment and the Unity of the Third *Critique*



Kant's account of aesthetics and teleology is ostensibly part of
a broader discussion of the faculty or power of judgment
[*Urteilskraft*], which is the faculty "for thinking the
particular under the universal" (Introduction IV, 5:179).
Although the *Critique of Pure Reason* includes some discussion
of the faculty of judgment, defined as "the capacity to subsume
under rules, that is, to distinguish whether something falls under a
given rule" (A132/B171), it is not until the *Critique of
Judgment* that he treats judgment as a full-fledged faculty in its
own right, with its own *a priori* principle, and, accordingly,
requiring a "critique" to determine its scope and
limits.



Kant describes judgment in the *Critique of Judgment* as having
two roles or aspects, "determining" [*bestimmend*]
and "reflecting" [*reflektierend*] (Introduction
IV, 5:179 and FI V, 20:211). Judgment in its determining role subsumes
given particulars under concepts or universals which are themselves
already given. This role coincides with the role assigned to the
faculty of judgment in the *Critique of Pure Reason*; it also
appears to correspond to the activity of imagination in its
"schematism" of concepts. Judgment in this role does not
operate as an independent faculty, but is instead governed by
principles of the understanding. The more distinctive role assigned to
judgment in the *Critique of Judgment* is the reflecting role,
that of "finding" the universal for the given particular
(Introduction IV, 5:179). Kant's recognition of judgment as a
faculty in its own right, and hence of the need for a
*Critique* not just for theoretical and practical reason but
also for judgment, appears to be connected with his ascription to
judgment of a reflecting, in addition to a merely determining,
role.



Judgment as reflecting, or reflective judgment [*reflektierende
Urteilskraft*], is assigned various different roles within
Kant's system. Kant describes it as responsible for various
cognitive tasks associated with empirical scientific enquiry, in
particular, the classification of natural things into a hierarchical
taxonomy of genera and species, and the construction of systematic
explanatory scientific theories. Kant also suggests that it has a more
fundamental role to play in making cognition possible, in particular
that it enables us to regard nature as empirically lawlike (see
especially Introduction V, 5:184), and, even more fundamentally, that
it is responsible for the formation of all empirical concepts (see
especially FI V, 20:211-213).



But reflective judgment is also described as responsible for two
specific kinds of judgments: aesthetic judgments (judgments about the
beautiful and the sublime) and teleological judgments (judgments which
ascribe ends or purposes to natural things, or which characterize them
in purposive or functional terms). These, along with associated
topics, are discussed respectively in Section I, the "Critique
of Aesthetic Judgment, " and Section II, the "Critique of
Teleological Judgment. " The discussion of the role of judgment
in empirical scientific enquiry is confined to a few sections of the
Introduction and First Introduction.



Although reflective judgment is exercised in both aesthetic and
teleological judgment, Kant assigns a special role to its exercise in
the aesthetic case, and specifically in judgments of beauty
(Introduction VIII, 193; FI XI, 243-244). More specifically, he
says, it is in judgments of beauty (as opposed to the sublime), and
even more specifically, judgments about the beauty of nature (as
opposed to art), that "judgment reveals itself as a faculty that
has its own special principle" (FI XI, 244). The especially
close connection between judgments of beauty and the faculty of
judgment is reflected in Kant's view that the feeling of
pleasure in a beautiful object is felt in virtue of an exercise of
reflective judgment (Introduction VII, FI VIII).



Much of Kant's aesthetics and theory of teleology is developed
without any explicit reference to the faculty of judgment, and the
"Critique of Aesthetic Judgment" makes no mention of
reflective judgment as it figures in empirical scientific enquiry (in
fact, the term "reflective judgment" does not
appear in the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment" at
all). The only suggestion in the "Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment" of an important role for the faculty of judgment in
Kant's aesthetics is in the Deduction of Taste, where he
describes the principle of taste as the "subjective principle of
judgment in general" (SS35, 286) and suggests that the
relation of aesthetic judgment specifically to the faculty of judgment
in general is crucial for the legitimacy of judgments of beauty
(SS38, 290). Accordingly, much of the secondary literature on
Kant's aesthetics has treated it in isolation from the more
general account of judgment in which it is embedded, and the same is
true, perhaps to an even greater extent, in the case of Kant's
teleology. Conversely, discussions of Kant's "theory of
judgment" have typically taken little or no account of
Kant's treatment of judgment in the third *Critique*,
suggesting thereby that Kant's views on judgment are exhausted
by his account of cognitive (in particular non-aesthetic) judgments in
the *Critique of Pure Reason* and the *Logic*. (The
article
 "Kant's Theory of Judgment"
 in the present Encyclopedia [Hanna 2004 [2018]] is one example.)



However, since the late 1980s philosophers working on Kant have become
increasingly interested in the notion of judgment in the third
*Critiqu*e. One way in which this interest has been pursued is
through an exploration of the relation of Kant's notion of
judgment in the third *Critique* to his account of cognition in
the *Critique of Pure Reason* and the *Logic*.
Longuenesse (1993 [1998]) maintains that there is a close connection
between the "capacity to judge" [*Vermogen zu
urteilen*] in that work and the faculty of judgment in the
*Critique of Judgment*, a connection which she summarizes by
describing the faculty of judgment as the "actualization"
of the capacity to judge in relation to sensory perceptions (1993
[1998: 8]). According to Longuenesse, the activity of reflective
judgment corresponds to the "comparison, reflection and
abstraction" which Kant describes in the *Logic*
(SS6, 9:94-95) as responsible for the formation of empirical
concepts, and which she understands as, in turn, a necessary condition
of the application of the pure concepts of understanding to the
manifold of sensible intuition (1993 [1998: 163-166 and
195-197]). Longuenesse's view on this point is endorsed
and elaborated in Allison 2001: ch. 1.



Another manifestation of interest in the notion of judgment has been
the exploration of connections between Kant's account of
aesthetic experience and judgment in the third *Critique* and
his theory of cognitive judgments in the first *Critique*. Bell
(1987) and Ginsborg (1990a) both argue that, for Kant, the possibility
of aesthetic experience to be, in some sense, a condition of the
possibility of cognitive judgment; Makkreel (1990), from a more
Continental, and specifically hermeneutical perspective, also argues
for deep connections between Kant's aesthetics and his account
of cognition. Kukla (2006) collects together a number of essays
exploring the relation between Kant's aesthetics and his theory
of cognition; the introduction to Kukla 2006 offers some historical
perspective on the increased interest in Kant's aesthetics as
playing a systematic role in Kant's epistemological program.
Hughes (2007: ch. 5) argues that Kant's views in the
*Critique of Judgment* are necessary for a full understanding
of Kant's account of synthesis in the first Critique and for the
Transcendental Deduction of the categories in the first
*Critique*. Ginsborg (2006) and Geiger (2020) both argue for a
connection between the possibility of aesthetic judgment and that of
the acquisition of empirical concepts. Breitenbach (2021) proposes
that aesthetic judgment and cognitive judgment share a "common
core" of imaginative reflection which helps account for
scientific creativity. Makkai (2021: ch. 1), while sympathetic to the
idea that Kant's aesthetics makes a contribution to his view of
cognition, argues that several attempts to make out the connection,
including those of Bell (1987) and Allison (2001), rest on a mistaken
construal of Kant's notion of judgment. Rather than endorsing
the idea that aesthetic judgment is somehow presupposed by cognition,
she proposes that they are parallel, both having a basis in reflective
judgment (Makkai 2021: ch. 4).



An important reason why commentators have been interested in
Kant's account of judgment in the *Critique of Judgment*
is as a potential solution to the question of what unifies the various
parts of the *Critique of* Judgment, and, in particular, what
connects the discussion of aesthetics in the first half of the book
with that of teleology in the second half of the book. Until the
1980s, many commentators were skeptical that there was any real
philosophical connection between the "Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment" (Part I) and the "Critique of Teleological
Judgment" (Part II); for expressions of this view see for
example Schopenhauer (1819/1859 [1969: vol. I, 531]), Marc-Wogau
(1938: 34n.), and Beck (1969: 497). But since then there has been much
more interest in understanding the work as a unified whole, where this
involves recognizing connections, not only between the "Critique
of Aesthetic Judgment" and the "Critique of Teleological
Judgment", but also between those two sections and the
Introduction (and First Introduction) to the *Critique of
Judgment* as a whole. (The decision by the editors of the present
Encyclopedia to treat the seemingly disparate topics of Kant's
aesthetics and Kant's teleology in a single article represents
one illustration of this general orientation towards the unity of the
work.)



One way in which commentators have tried to find unity in the
*Critique of Judgment* is by connecting Kant's aesthetics
with his discussions, in the Introduction and First Introduction, of
the search for a system of empirical concepts and laws. Examples of
this approach include Ginsborg (1990a), Hughes (2007), Zuckert
(2007a), and Geiger (2020). Another, potentially complementary, way is
to find connections between his theory of beauty and his views on
biology in the Critique of Teleological Judgment. Zumbach (1984:
51-53) suggests that works of art are analogous to organisms;
Makkreel (1990: ch. 5) sees the connection as turning on the idea of
pleasure as the feeling of mental life. Aquila (1992) draws a
connection between the internal structure of organisms as one in which
the whole determines the parts, and the internal structure of a
judgment of beauty as one in which a feeling of pleasure rather than a
concept serves as a predicate. Ginsborg (1997a) connects Kant's
aesthetics and his biological views in terms of the idea of
purposiveness construed as normativity: the normativity in the
functioning of organisms parallels the normative claim to universal
agreement made by a judgment of beauty. Zuckert (2007a) offers an
especially detailed account of the connection, also emphasizing the
notion of purposiveness, but construing it as unity in diversity,
which is manifested in beautiful objects and organisms alike. Geiger
(2020) suggests that organisms play a special role as objects of
aesthetic judgment, and suggests that our aesthetic judgments about
organisms are closely allied to our sorting of nature into kinds and
hence our acquisition of empirical concepts.



A contrasting approach to the unity of the *Critique of
Judgment* goes by way of Kant's moral teleology, and invokes
Kant's claim that the *Critique of Judgment* is intended
to bridge the gulf between nature and freedom (Introduction II and
III, 175-177). This approach is implicit in many discussions of
the relevance of Kant's aesthetics to his account of morality
(see
 Section 2.8),
 which in turn can be connected to his theory of teleology through the
idea that the human being, as a free and rational agent, is the
"ultimate purpose" [*Endzweck*] of nature (see
 Section 3.6).
 Gardner (2016) offers an explicit defence of this kind of approach,
drawing on the idea that aesthetic experience reveals the suitability
of nature for human moral agency; this idea is also emphasized in
Wicks (2007). Savile (2021) invokes a related idea and ascribes it to
Kant under the label of "aesthetic humanism". Vaccarino
Bremner (forthcoming) develops this kind of approach in detail by
focussing on Kant's idea of culture, which Kant identifies as
the ultimate purpose [*letzter Zweck*] of nature (5:429), and
which, on her view, mediates between nature itself and the final
purpose [*Endzweck*] of nature, that is the human being as a
moral agent.



The theme of the unity of the *Critique of Judgment* is closely
related to that of the role of the *Critique of Judgment* in
Kant's overall philosophical system. Pollok (2017: ch. 9) offers
some brief but suggestive remarks on that topic; Huseyinzadegan (2018)
addresses both the internal unity of the *Critique of Judgment*
and its relation to Kant's *Opus Postumum.*


## 2. Aesthetics



An aesthetic judgment, in Kant's usage, is a judgment which is
based on feeling, and in particular on the feeling of pleasure or
displeasure. According to Kant's official view there are three
kinds of aesthetic judgment: judgments of the agreeable, judgments of
beauty (or, equivalently, judgments of taste), and judgments of the
sublime. However, Kant often uses the expression "aesthetic
judgment" in a narrower sense which excludes judgments of the
agreeable, and it is with aesthetic judgments in this narrower sense
that the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment" is primarily
concerned. Such judgments can either be, or fail to be,
"pure"; while Kant mostly focusses on the ones which are
pure, there are reasons to think that most judgments about art (as
opposed to nature) do not count as pure, so that it is important to
understand Kant's views on such judgments as well.



The "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment" is concerned not only
with judgments of the beautiful and the sublime, but also with the
production of objects about which such judgments are appropriately
made; this topic is discussed under the headings of "fine
art" or "beautiful art" [*schone Kunst*]
and "genius".



The most distinctive part of Kant's aesthetic theory, and the
part which has aroused most interest among commentators, is his
account of judgments of beauty, and, more specifically, pure judgments
of beauty. (Following Kant's own usage, the expression
"judgment of beauty" without qualification will refer, in
what follows, to pure judgments of beauty.) The most important
elements of this account are sketched here in
 Section 2.1
 and
 Section 2.2,
 and which correspond roughly to the "Analytic of the
Beautiful" and the "Deduction of Pure Aesthetic
Judgments" respectively.
 Section 2.3
 and
 Section 2.4
 are concerned, respectively, with interpretative issues that have
arisen in connection with the account, and with criticisms which have
been made of it.



Other elements of Kant's theory are sketched in the remainder of
the section. Section 2.5 is concerned with judgments of beauty that
are not pure, in particular judgments of "adherent" as
opposed to "free" beauty;
 Section 2.6
 with beautiful art and genius;
 Section 2.7
 with judgments of the sublime;
 Section 2.8
 with the relation between aesthetics and morality; and
 Section 2.9
 with other implications of Kant's aesthetic theory.


### 2.1 What is a Judgment of Beauty?



The first section of the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment",
the "Analytic of the Beautiful", aims to analyse the
notion of a judgment of beauty or judgment of taste, describing the
features which distinguish judgments of beauty from judgments of other
kinds, notably cognitive judgments (which include judgments ascribing
goodness to things), and what he calls "judgments of the
agreeable". Kant is not explicit about the pretheoretical
conception of judgments of beauty which is the subject of his
analysis, and there is room for controversy about what does and does
not count as a judgment of beauty in Kant's sense. Not every
predicative use of the word "beautiful" signals the making
of a judgment of beauty, at least in the paradigmatic sense with which
Kant is concerned (for a useful discussion, see Savile 1993: ch. 1).
For example, at SS8 Kant denies that the judgment that roses in
general are beautiful is a judgment of beauty or judgment of taste
proper: it is not an "aesthetic" but an
"aesthetically grounded logical judgment". There is also
room for debate about whether the intuitive notion of a judgment of
beauty, for Kant, allows for negative judgments of beauty (see
 Section 2.3.6
 below). However, at a first approximation, we can say that it is the
mental activity or content typically expressed by, or manifested in, a
sincere utterance of "that's beautiful" in reference
to a perceptually presented object.



Kant analyses the notion of a judgment of beauty by considering it
under four headings, or "moments", as sketched below:


#### 2.1.1 First Moment (SSSS1-5)



Judgments of beauty are based on feeling, in particular feelings of
pleasure (Kant also mentions displeasure, but this does not figure
prominently in his account; for more on this point, see
 Section 2.3.6
 below). The pleasure, however, is of a distinctive kind: it is
disinterested, which means that it does not depend on the
subject's having a desire for the object, nor does it generate
such a desire. The fact that judgments of beauty are based on feeling
rather than "objective sensation" (e.g., the sensation of
a thing's colour) distinguishes them from cognitive judgments
based on perception (e.g., the judgment that a thing is green). But
the disinterested character of the feeling distinguishes them from
other judgments based on feeling. In particular, it distinguishes them
from (i) judgments of the agreeable, which are the kind of judgment
expressed by saying simply that one likes something or finds it
pleasing (for example, food or drink), and (ii) judgments of the good,
including judgments both about the moral goodness of something and
about its goodness for particular non-moral purposes.


#### 2.1.2 Second Moment (SSSS6-9)



Judgments of beauty have, or make a claim to,
"universality" or "universal validity". (Kant
also uses the expression "universal communicability"; this
has been taken by many commentators as equivalent to "universal
validity" but recently this has been questioned; see
 Section 2.3.8.)
 That is, in making a judgment of beauty about an object, one takes it
that everyone else who perceives the object ought also to judge it to
be beautiful, and, relatedly, to share one's pleasure in it. But
the universality is not "based on concepts". That is,
one's claim to agreement does not rest on the subsumption of the
object under a concept (in the way, for example, that the claim to
agreement made by the judgment that something is green rests on the
ascription to the object of the property of being green, and hence its
subsumption under the concept *green*). It follows from this
that judgments of beauty cannot, despite their universal validity, be
proved: there are no rules by which someone can be compelled to judge
that something is beautiful (Kant expands on this point in
SSSS32-33). More strongly, judgments of beauty are not
to be understood as predicating the concept *beauty* of their
objects: as he puts it later, "beauty is not a concept of the
object" (SS38, 290). Still later, in the "Antinomy of
Taste", Kant seems to go back on this strong claim by saying
that a judgment of beauty rests on an "indeterminate
concept" (SS57, 341); however, by "concept" here
he diverges from the standard use of the term "concept" as
referring to a kind of representation which can figure in
cognition.



The fact that judgments of beauty are universally valid constitutes a
further feature (in addition to the disinterestedness of the pleasure
on which they are based) distinguishing them from judgments of
agreeable. For in claiming simply that one likes something, one does
not claim that everyone else ought to like it too. But the fact that
their universal validity is not based on concepts distinguishes
judgments of beauty from non-evaluative cognitive judgments and
judgments of the good, both of which make a claim to universal
validity that *is* based on concepts.


#### 2.1.3 Third Moment (SSSS10-17)



Unlike judgments of the good, judgments of the beautiful do not
presuppose an end or purpose [*Zweck*] which the object is
taken to
 satisfy.[2]
 (This is closely related to the point that their universality is not
based on concepts). However, they nonetheless involve the
representation of what Kant calls "purposiveness"
[*Zweckmassigkeit*]. Because this representation of
purposiveness does not involve the ascription of an purpose (in an
expression widely used by commentators, it is "purposiveness
without a purpose"), Kant calls the purposiveness which is
represented "merely formal purposiveness" or "the
form of purposiveness". He describes it as perceived both in the
object itself and in the activity of imagination and understanding in
their engagement with the object. (For more on this activity, see the
discussion of the "free play of the faculties" in
 Section 2.2;
 for more on the notion of purposiveness, see
 Section 3.1.)
 The Third Moment, in particular SS14, is the main evidence for
Kant's supposed formalism in aesthetics; for more on
Kant's formalism, see
 Section 2.4.


#### 2.1.4 Fourth Moment (SS18-22)



Judgments of beauty involve reference to the idea of necessity, in the
following sense: in taking my judgment of taste to be universally
valid, I take it, not that everyone who perceives the object
*will* share my pleasure in it and (relatedly) agree with my
judgment, but that everyone *ought* to do so. I take it, then,
that my pleasure stands in a "necessary" relation to the
object which elicits it, where the necessity here can be described
(though Kant himself does not use the term) as normative. But, as in
the case of universal validity, the necessity is not based on concepts
or rules (at least, not concepts or rules that are determinate, that
is, of a kind which figure in cognition; as noted earlier in this
section, Kant describes it, in the Antinomy of Taste, as resting on an
"indeterminate concept"). Kant characterizes the necessity
more positively by saying that it is "exemplary", in the
sense that one's judgment itself serves as an example of how
everyone ought to judge (SS18, 237). He also says that it is based
on a "common sense" (*sensus communis*), defined as
a subjective principle which allows us to judge by feeling rather than
concepts (SS20).


### 2.2 How are Judgments of Beauty Possible?



Running through Kant's various characterizations of judgments of
beauty is a basic dichotomy between two apparently opposed sets of
features. On the one hand, judgments of beauty are based on feeling,
they do not depend on subsuming the object under a concept (in
particular, the concept of a purpose that such an object is supposed
to satisfy), and they cannot be proved. This combination of features
seems to suggest that judgments of beauty should be assimilated to
judgments of the agreeable. On the other hand, however, judgments of
beauty are unlike judgments of the agreeable in not involving desire
for the object; more importantly and centrally, they make a normative
claim to everyone's agreement. These features seem to suggest
that they should be assimilated, instead, to objective cognitive
judgments.



In claiming that judgments of beauty have both sets of features, Kant
can be seen as reacting equally against the two main opposing
traditions in eighteenth-century aesthetics: the
"empiricist" tradition of aesthetics represented by Hume,
Hutcheson and Burke, on which a judgment of taste is an expression of
feeling without cognitive content, and the "rationalist"
tradition of aesthetics represented by Baumgarten and Meier, on which
a judgment of taste consists in the cognition of an object as having
an objective property. Kant's insistence that there is an
alternative to these two views, one on which judgments of beauty are
both based on feeling and make a claim to universal validity, is
probably the most distinctive aspect of his aesthetic theory. But this
insistence confronts him with the obvious problem of how the two
features, or sets of features, are to be reconciled. As Kant puts
it:



> 
> 
> how is a judgment possible which, merely from *one's own*
> feeling of pleasure in an object, independent of its concept, judges
> this pleasure as attached to the representation of the same object
> *in every other subject*, and does so *a priori*, i.e.,
> without having to wait for the assent of others?(SS36, 288)
> 
> 
> 



The argument constituting Kant's official answer to this
question (the "Deduction of Taste") is presented in the
section entitled "Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgments",
in particular in sections SSSS31-39, with the core of
the argument given at SS38. It is also prefigured in the
"Analytic of the Beautiful", in particular at SS9 and
SS22, although the argument of SS22, which appeals to the
notion of a "common sense", takes a somewhat different
form from the presentation in the "Deduction of Taste"
proper.



The argument in all of its appearances relies on the claim, introduced
in SS9, that pleasure in the beautiful depends on the "free
play" or "free harmony" of the faculties of
imagination and understanding. In the *Critique of Pure
Reason*, imagination is described as "synthesizing the
manifold of intuition" under the governance of rules that are
prescribed by the understanding: the outcome of this is cognitive
perceptual experience of objects as having specific empirical
features. The rules prescribed by the understanding, are, or
correspond to, particular concepts that are applied to the object. For
example, when a manifold is synthesized in accordance with the
concepts *green* and *square*, the outcome is a
perceptual experience in which the object is perceived as green and
square. But now in the *Critique of Judgment*, Kant suggests
that imagination and understanding can stand in a different kind of
relationship, one in which imagination's activity harmonizes
with the understanding but without imagination's being
constrained or governed by understanding. In this relationship,
imagination and understanding in effect do what is ordinarily involved
in the bringing of objects under concepts, and hence in the perception
of objects as having empirical features: but they do this without
bringing the object under any concept in particular. So, rather than
perceiving the object as green or square, the subject whose faculties
are in free play responds to it perceptually with a state of mind
which is non-conceptual, and specifically a feeling of disinterested
pleasure. It is this kind of pleasure which is the basis for a
judgment of taste.



Kant appeals to this account of pleasure in the beautiful in order to
argue for its universal validity or universal communicability: to
argue, that is, that a subject who feels such a pleasure, and thus
judges the object to be beautiful, is entitled to demand that everyone
else feel a corresponding pleasure and thus agree with her judgment of
taste. For, he claims, the free play of the faculties manifests the
subjective condition of cognition in general (see for example SS9,
218; SS21, 238; SS38, 290). We are entitled to claim that
everyone ought to agree with our cognitions: for example, if I
perceptually cognize an object as being green and square, I am
entitled to claim that everyone else ought to cognize it as green and
square. But in order for this demand for agreement to be possible, he
suggests, it must also be possible for me to demand universal
agreement for the subjective condition of such cognitions. If I can
take it that everyone ought to share my cognition of an object as
green or square, then I must also be entitled to take it that everyone
ought to share a perception of the object in which my faculties are in
free play, since the free play is no more than a manifestation of what
is in general required for an object's being cognized as green
or square in the first place.



The most serious objection to the argument can be put in the form of a
dilemma; see for example Guyer (1979 [1997: 264]), Meerbote (1982:
81ff.), Allison (2001: 184-192), Rind (2002). Either the free
play of the faculties is involved in all cognitive perceptual
experience, or it is not. If it is, then it would seem,
counterintuitively, that every object should be perceived as
beautiful. (Because of this consequence of grasping the first horn,
the dilemma is sometimes characterized instead as Kant's
"everything is beautiful" problem.) But if it is not, then
the central inference does not seem to go through. From the fact that
I can demand agreement for the state of my faculties in experiencing
an object as, say, green or square, it does not follow that I can
demand agreement for a state in which my faculties are in free play,
since the possibility of experiencing the free play would seem to
require something over and above what is required for cognition
alone.



Most defenders of the argument have grasped the second horn of the
dilemma. One such defence, originally proposed by Ameriks in his 1982
(subsequently incorporated into Ameriks 2003), relies on an
understanding of judgments of taste as objective, and hence as making
a claim to universal agreement which is akin to that made by cognitive
judgments. (For more on the objectivity of taste, see
 Section 2.3.5).
 Another, offered by Allison, rejects the objection as presupposing an
overly strong interpretation of what the Deduction is intended to
accomplish. The objection tells against the Deduction only if it is
construed as entitling us to claim universal agreement for particular
judgments of taste; but, as Allison reads it, the Deduction is
intended only to establish that such claims can, in general, be
legitimate (Allison 2001: ch. 8; see especially 177-179). A
similar position is taken by Kalar (2006: 134). However, some
commentators have taken this kind of defence to be inadequate, holding
that the argument must establish not only a general entitlement to
demand agreement for judgments of beauty, but an entitlement in each
particular case (Savile 1987, Chignell 2007).



Another, less commonly accepted, option for defending the argument
would be to grasp the first horn, accepting that, on Kant's
account, every object can legitimately be judged to be beautiful.
Gracyk (1986) argues, independently of the argument of the Deduction,
that this is Kant's view, and it might also be noted that, if
judgments of beauty are not objective, there can be no feature of an
object which rules it out as a candidate for being legitimately found
beautiful. Commentators who emphasize this point include Ginsborg
(2017) and Breitenbach (2021).



A number of commentators have taken the dilemma, or considerations
related to it, to be fatal to Kant's view that judgments of
beauty make a legitimate claim to universal validity: see for example
Meerbote 1982, cited above, and Guyer (1979: 284-288; although
Guyer offers a more positive assessment, see his 2003b: 60n15). Others
have argued that Kant's view can be saved by drawing on
considerations not mentioned in the official argument of the
Deduction. As noted below
 (Section 2.8),
 Kant draws a close connection between our capacity for aesthetic
judgment and our nature as moral beings, and even though Kant himself
does not appeal to this connection in the deduction of taste, some
commentators, including Elliott (1968), Crawford (1974), Kemal (1986)
and Savile (1987), have taken moral considerations to constitute the
ultimate ground of the legitimacy of judgments of beauty. Another
strategy drawing on considerations outside the Deduction itself has
been to appeal to Kant's theory of aesthetic ideas (see
 Section 2.6),
 which is ostensibly part of his theory of art, rather than his core
theory of taste. This strategy is adopted in Savile 1987 and Chignell
2007; Chignell's view differs from Savile's in that it
does not make any appeal to moral considerations. Finally, some
commentators have held that while the argument of the official
Deduction at SS38 is unsuccessful in avoiding the dilemma, the
version of the argument offered at SS21, which appeals to the
notion of a "common sense", is more effective; see in
particular Rind (2002) and Kalar (2006: ch. 5).



The assessment of the objection, and of Kant's Deduction of
Taste more generally, is complicated by a number of more fundamental
interpretive issues, which are discussed in the next section.


### 2.3 Judgments of Beauty: Interpretive Issues



This section describes eight issues which have arisen in connection
with Kant's account of pure judgments of taste, and which are
relevant to the assessment of his argument for the possibility of such
judgments. Although these issues are central to understanding the core
of Kant's view, readers seeking a more general survey of
Kant's aesthetics can omit this section.


#### 2.3.1 Pleasure and judgment



What is the relation between the pleasure which is felt in an object
experienced as beautiful, and the judgment that the object is
beautiful, that is, the judgment of taste? Kant describes the judgment
of taste as "based on" a feeling of pleasure, and as
claiming that everyone ought to share the subject's feeling of
pleasure, or, as he puts it, as claiming the "universal
communicability" of the pleasure. This seems to imply that the
pleasure is distinct from the act of judging, and more specifically
that the pleasure precedes the judging: we first feel pleasure, and
then claim, perhaps based on characteristics of the pleasure (such as
its disinterestedness), that the pleasure is universally communicable
and hence that the object is beautiful. But in the crucial section
SS9 of the *Critique of Judgment*, Kant appears to reject
that implication: rather than the pleasure preceding the judging, he
says, the "merely subjective (aesthetic) judging of the
object" both "precedes" and "is the ground
of" the pleasure (218). Since SS9 is specifically addressed
to the issue "whether in a judgment of taste the feeling of
pleasure precedes the judging of the object or the judging precedes
the pleasure", a problem whose answer is "the key to the
critique of taste and hence deserves full attention" (216),
commentators have taken very seriously the task of reconciling SS9
with Kant's other characterizations of the judgment of
taste.



There has been much discussion, beginning in the 1970s, of this basic
issue. Donald Crawford addressed the apparent paradox by
distinguishing the "judging" of the object which,
according to SS9, precedes the pleasure in it, from the judgment
of taste proper, which is based on the pleasure (1974: 69-74). A
very influential approach along these lines was developed in detail by
Guyer (1979), who draws on passages elsewhere in the text to defend
the view that a judgment of taste results from two distinct acts of
reflective judgment, the first identifiable with the free play of the
faculties and resulting in a feeling of pleasure, the second an act of
reflection on the pleasure which results in the claim that the
pleasure is universally communicable. (See especially 97-105 and
133-141.) A difficulty with that approach, however, recognized
by Guyer, is that it conflicts with another passage at SS9, in
which Kant describes the pleasure as consequent on the universal
communicability of the subject's mental state in the given
representation (SS9, 5:217). This implies that the act of judging
which precedes the pleasure must be one in which the subject takes her
state of mind to be universally communicable, requiring us to identify
it with the judgment of taste proper rather than with an activity of
the faculties prior to that judgment.



An alternative approach to SS9, which attempts to accommodate the
problematic passage without emendation, was offered in Ginsborg 1991.
On this "one-act" approach the act of judging something to
be beautiful is a single, self-referential act of judging which claims
its own universal validity with respect to the object and which is
phenomenologically manifested as a feeling of pleasure. The free play
of the faculties on this approach is identical with the judging of the
object to be beautiful and in turn with the feeling of pleasure: the
pleasure does not precede the judging of the object to be beautiful,
and is "consequent" on it only in the sense that we feel
pleasure "in virtue" of the judgment. In its
identification of the pleasure and the judgment the view is like that
of Aquila (1982, see especially 107) and, more recently, Wicks (2007:
43-45), although neither Aquila nor Wicks explicitly endorses
the apparent consequence, that the pleasure or judgment must involve a
claim to *its own* universal communicability.



Since then several commentators have read the relevant paragraphs of
SS9 as requiring some kind of "two-acts" view and, at
the very least, as distinguishing the free play of the faculties and
pleasure in the beautiful from the judgment of taste proper. This
requires addressing the textual difficulty just mentioned. Guyer
himself proposes disregarding the problematic passage at 5:217, since
he takes it to indicate the intrusion of an earlier, incompatible
theory (1979 [1997: 139-140]; for a detailed discussion, see
Guyer 1982); Allison suggests instead that the passage be amended so
that the pleasure is understood as consequent on a "universally
communicable" mental state, rather than on the state's
universal communicability (2001: 115).



Objections to the one-act approach have been raised by a number of
commentators, in particular Allison, who partly endorses
Ginsborg's criticisms of Guyer, but raises difficulties for her
reading of SS9 (2001: 113-115) and, in particular, rejects
the self-referential understanding of judgments of beauty as
"inherently implausible" (2001: 115). Allison objects also
that the one-act view fails to accommodate judgments of the ugly; for
more on Kant's views on the ugly, see
 Section 2.3.6.
 Criticisms of Ginsborg's one-act approach are also to be found
in Pippin (1996), Ameriks (1998), Palmer (2008), Vandenabeele (2008),
Sweet (2009), Guyer (2017a), Makkai (2010 and 2021), and Berger
(forthcoming); Ginsborg replies to Guyer's criticism in her
2017.



Commentators have suggested a number of models for the feeling of
pleasure and its relation to the judgment of beauty that combine
features of both the one-act and the two-act view. Beatrice
Longuenesse offers a view which is in partial agreement with
Ginsborg's in that it understands pleasure in the beautiful
proper as felt in virtue of the subject's awareness of the
universal communicability of her mental state in the presented object
(thus, like the one-act approach, requiring no emendation of SS9).
However, rather than understand the pleasure as awareness of its own
universal communicability, Longuenesse takes it to be awareness of a
prior, and independent, feeling of pleasure elicited by the free play
of the faculties, so that there are two distinct feelings of pleasure
involved in judging an object to be beautiful (2003: 152-155;
2006: 203-208). Sethi (2019 and forthcoming) likewise proposes
that there are two distinct feelings, but denies that they are both
feelings of pleasure: as on Ginsborg's view, the pleasure is
felt in virtue of the subject's claim to the universal
communicability of her feeling, but the feeling for which she claims
universal communicability is not a feeling of pleasure but an
antecedent, *sui generis*, feeling of the harmony of the
faculties. Hughes (2017) argues for a single feeling associated with
the judgment of beauty, but one which has a dual intentional
directedness: towards the object and to the activity of the faculties
in judging the object. Some commentators have endorsed a one-act
approach while, unlike Ginsborg, rejecting the identification of the
pleasure and the judgment: these include, for example Zuckert (2007a:
SSSS1-2 of ch. 8) and Pollok (2017: ch. 9). Berger
(forthcoming) defends a two-acts view, but her view differs from
Guyer's in that the second act is not one of reflection on the
pleasure but rather of subsumption of the pleasure under the concept
of beauty.


#### 2.3.2 The free play of imagination and understanding



Kant's notion of the free play of the faculties (sometimes
referred to as the "harmony of the faculties", or, more
accurately the "free harmony" of the faculties) is
probably the most central notion of his aesthetic theory. But what is
it for the faculties of imagination and understanding to be in
"free play"? Kant describes the imagination and
understanding in this "free play" as freely harmonizing,
without the imagination's being constrained by the understanding
as it is in cognition. Imagination in the free play, he says, conforms
to the general conditions for the application of concepts to objects
that are presented to our senses, yet without any particular concept
being applied, so that imagination conforms to the conditions of
understanding without the constraint of particular concepts. Given
Kant's view that concepts are, or at least correspond to, rules
by which imagination "synthesizes" or organizes the data
of sense-perception, this amounts to saying that imagination functions
in a rule-governed way but without being governed by any rule in
particular. The free play thus manifests, in Kant's terms,
"free lawfulness" or "lawfulness without a
law". But there is an apparent paradox in these
characterizations which is left unaddressed by Kant's own,
largely metaphorical, explanations. It is left to commentators to try
to explain how such an activity is intelligible and why, if it is
indeed intelligible, it should give rise to, or be experienced as, a
feeling of pleasure.



Some commentators try to make sense of the free play by appealing to
the phenomenology of aesthetic experience, for example to the kind of
experience involved in appreciating an abstract painting, where the
subject might imaginatively relate the various elements of the
painting to one another and perceive them as having an order and unity
which is non-conceptual; see for example Bell (1987: 237) and Crowther
(1989: 56). (Filieri 2021 illustrates the free play through the
example of an artwork which is representational rather than abstract.)
Others try to find a place for it in the context of Kant's
theory of the imagination as presented in the *Critique of Pure
Reason*. Two contrasting accounts along these lines are offered by
Guyer, who identifies the free play with the first two stages of the
"three-fold synthesis" described by Kant in the first
edition Transcendental Deduction (Guyer 1979 [1997: 75-76]), and
of Makkreel (1990: 49-58), for whom the free play is an activity
of schematizing pure concepts without the involvement of empirical
concepts.



Ginsborg (1997a) offers an alternative view of the free play derived
from her "one-act" reading of the judgment of taste (see
 Section 2.3.1),
 on which what it is for the imagination and understanding to be in
free play just is for the subject to be in a perceptual state of mind
which involves a nonconceptual claim to its own universal validity
with respect to the object perceived. Zinkin (2006) explains the free
play in terms of the common sense (*sensus communis*) invoked
by Kant at SS20, which she understands as an intensive form of
sensibility, in contrast to the extensive forms of sensibility
represented by space and time. (For more on the common sense, see
 Section 2.3.7.)
 Gorodeisky (2011) criticizes "extra-aesthetic" approaches
to the free play which attempt to relate the activity of the faculties
in the free play too closely to their activity in cognition, failing
to do justice to their distinctly aesthetic character; Ostaric 2017
makes a related complaint. Williams 2022 proposes that the free play
is to be understood in terms of how attention is guided: in cognition,
our attention is guided by cognitive interest, in aesthetics the
subject is guided only by the interests of the imagination, so that
the subject has the freedom to let her attention roam.



As with the deduction of taste (see
 Section 2.2),
 a number of commentators have looked to Kant's doctrine of
aesthetic ideas (officially part of his account of fine art) to make
sense of the free play of the faculties; examples include Rueger and
Evren (2005), Kalar (2006), and Chignell (2007). A particularly
detailed and thorough treatment of this approach is offered in
Rogerson (2008; for an earlier and briefer treatment, see Rogerson
2004).



The question of how to understand the free play is complicated by a
more general interpretive issue concerning the status of Kant's
"transcendental psychology": this issue affects not only
the interpretation of the free play in the third *Critique*,
but also the appeal to activities of imagination and understanding in
Kant's account of the conditions of cognition in the first
*Critique*, in particular in the Metaphysical Deduction and the
Transcendental Deduction. Many commentators assume, whether tacitly or
explicitly, that the free play of imagination and understanding
represents a natural psychological process, taking place in time and
thus subject to natural causal laws. But it is hard to reconcile this
understanding of the free play with Kant's appeal to it to
justify the legitimacy of judgments of beauty, and more generally his
claim to be offering a transcendental account of judgments of beauty,
one which shows such judgments to be founded on an *a priori*
principle. Guyer's approach to the free play, from his 1979
onwards, has been thoroughly naturalistic; in his 2008 he offers a
very explicit defence of this approach, arguing that we should reject
Kant's claim to establish an *a priori* or transcendental
principle justifying judgments of beauty, and instead regard
Kant's theory of aesthetics as a contribution to the empirical
psychology of taste. While this kind of view is rarely explicitly
endorsed, many commentators do in fact offer accounts of the free play
which at least resemble empirical psychological accounts, raising the
question of how Guyer's conclusion is to be avoided.



The views touched on in this section represent only a sampling of the
various accounts of the free play which have been offered. A useful
survey is offered by Guyer (2006), who classifies various accounts
under three heads: "precognitive", according to which the
play of the faculties is a preconceptual state, falling short of
cognition (for example his own 1979 account),;
"multicognitive", in which the free play represents the
playful application of a multiplicity of concepts, and thus a kind of
cognitive excess (for example Allison 2001); and
"metacognitive", in which the manifold is represented as
having a unity which goes beyond what is required for cognition;
Guyer's own view in his 2006, in contrast to that of his 1979,
favours the latter approach. Guyer (2009) discusses a further variety
of approaches; more recent discussions include Gorodeisky (2010,
2011), Matherne (2014), Kuplen (2015), Ostaric (2017), and
Filieri (2021).


#### 2.3.3 The intentionality of the pleasure



Does the feeling of pleasure in a judgment of taste have intentional
content? According to Guyer, the answer is no (see especially 1979
[1997: 88-97]). Although Kant sometimes describes the pleasure
as awareness of the free play of the faculties, Guyer takes the
relation between the free play and the feeling of pleasure to be
merely causal. The pleasure is "opaque", or lacks
intentional content: while one can come to recognize that one's
feeling of pleasure is due to the free play, this is not because the
pleasure makes one immediately aware of it, but rather because
reflection on the causal history of one's pleasure can lead one
to conclude that it was not sensory or due to the satisfaction of a
desire and hence (by elimination) must have been due to the free
play.



While some commentators have shared Guyer's view that the
pleasure is "opaque", and hence that having a feeling of
pleasure does not enable us to know what kind of pleasure we are
feeling (see, e.g., Matherne 2019: 9-10), others have argued for
the intentionality of the pleasure, holding that the pleasure is
intentionally directed towards the object, or towards its formal
structure (Aquila 1982) or that it makes us aware of the free play
(Allison 2001, in particular 53-54 and 122-123). Hughes
(2017) argues that it is intentionally directed both to the object
perceived as beautiful, and to the activity of the faculties in their
free play. Zuckert (2002) argues that, for Kant, pleasure in general,
and not just pleasure in the beautiful, is intentional, in that it
makes us aware of our wanting to continue in our mental state (that of
feeling of the pleasure); Zuckert develops the argument further in her
2007a, ch. 6. Cvejic (2021) agrees with Zuckert that pleasure is
intentional, but argues that the intentionality is of a distinctive
kind, characteristic only of feelings, and unlike the intentionality
of cognitive representations. A. Cohen (2020) also argues that
pleasure in the beautiful, and feelings more generally for Kant, are
intentional, but she denies that the intentionality is intrinsic,
taking it, rather, to be derived from our reflective interpretation of
those feelings. Cohen's view is discussed in Merritt 2021 and
Eran 2021.


#### 2.3.4 The character of the claim to agreement



What kind of claim to agreement is made by a judgment of taste? Kant
seems to suggest that a judgment of taste demands agreement in the
same way that an objective cognitive judgment demands agreement (see,
e.g., Introduction VII, 191 and SS6, 211): just as, in claiming
that a perceived object is green or square, I take it that everyone
else ought to share my judgment that the object is green or square,
so, in judging an object to be beautiful, I claim that all other
perceivers of the object should find it beautiful too. But even if
this is granted, one might still raise questions about the character
of the demand, either because there are in turn questions to be raised
about what it is for a cognitive judgment to claim agreement, or
because it is not clear that the claim can in fact be the same, given
that in the aesthetic case one is claiming that others share
one's *feeling*, as opposed to demanding that they apply
the same concept to the object. Guyer (1979) argues that the claim
should be understood as a rational expectation or ideal prediction
rather than as a normative demand: someone who judges an object to be
beautiful is claiming that under ideal circumstances everyone
*will* share her pleasure (1979 [1997: 123-130 and
144-147]). Savile (1987) and Chignell (2007) follow Guyer in
understanding the claim in this way; Harbin (2020), while not
endorsing the "ideal prediction" interpretation proposed
by Guyer, agrees with him in rejecting the view that judgments of
beauty make a genuinely normative claim on others' agreement;
Feloj (2020) holds a similar view. Harbin's argument is
challenged in Dunn 2020.



Guyer's understanding of the claim to agreement made by a
judgment of beauty has been criticized by a number of commentators,
including Rogerson (1982), Ginsborg (1990a: ch. 2), Rind (2002), and
Kalar (2006: ch. 1). A basic difficulty is that it apparently fails to
do justice to the normative language used by Kant to describe the
demand: for example that anyone who declares something to be beautiful
holds that everyone ought to [*sollen*] give his approval to
the object and likewise declare it beautiful (SS19, 5: 237).
(Chaouli 2017 surveys the various normative terms used by Kant in this
connection and discusses their significance; see ch. 3, 51-53.)
Rogerson proposes instead that a judgment of beauty makes a moral
demand on others to appreciate the object's beauty, so that the
"ought" is to be understood as rational, and more
specifically moral, rather than merely predictive. The other critics
mentioned take the "ought", and the corresponding claim to
agreement to be non-moral, yet still genuinely normative as opposed to
predictive; a view of this kind is assumed, with varying degrees of
explicitness, by a number of other commentators, including Allison
(2001, see especially 159 and 178-179; 2006, 132).



But this approach, which is perhaps closest to the letter of
Kant's text, raises a question: what kind of normativity is
this, if not that associated with morality or, more generally,
practical rationality? It is tempting to assimilate it to cognitive or
epistemic normativity, where this in turn might be understood as the
normativity involved in the putative principles that one ought to
believe what is true, or, alternatively, what is justified in light of
the evidence. However this appears to conflict with Kant's
commitment to the subjectivity and (relatedly) nonconceptuality of
judgments of taste. To avoid the conflict, while preserving the link
Kant seems to assert between the normativity of aesthetic judgment and
that of cognitive judgment, we need an understanding of the
normativity such that it is a necessary condition of cognition that we
be able to make such normative demands for agreement, yet without the
normativity's simply being identified with the cognitive or
epistemic normativity associated with truth and justification.
Ginsborg (2006) identifies it with what she calls the
"primitive" normativity required for empirical
conceptualization: our grasp of empirical concepts depends on the
possibility of making such primitively normative claims, but they do
not in turn presuppose cognition, which leaves open the possibility
that such a claim is implicit in aesthetic experience and
judgment.



Granted, *pace* Guyer, that the claim is normative without
being moral, further questions can be raised about its strength and
character. Moran (2012) understands the demand as reflecting a sense
of obligation or requirement, distinct from moral obligation, but
stronger than that present in the case of empirical cognitive
judgment. He reads Kant as drawn towards a view on which the beautiful
object itself makes an unconditional demand on the viewer's
attention (of a kind made vivid in the narrator's vow to the
hawthorns in Proust's *In Search of Lost Time*), although
he also takes Kant's denial of the objectivity of taste to debar
him from endorsing such a view. A similar suggestion is made in Makkai
(2010): she takes Kant to hint at the idea that the beautiful object
is found to deserve, or call for, recognition as beautiful, where this
implies a claim on the viewer which goes beyond any claim implicit in
an objective judgment. Roughly, on the view suggested by Moran and
Makkai, the claim implicit in a judgment of beauty is not merely the
conditional claim that others, if they perceive the object, ought to
judge it to be beautiful; it is the unconditional claim that others
ought to perceive it and, in so doing, judge it to be beautiful. The
idea that Kant takes us to be subject to a demand to attend to
beautiful objects is also put forward in Kalar 2006, but Kalar
understands that demand as one of two distinct normative demands made
in the judgment of beauty: a non-moral demand to feel pleasure in the
given object, and a further moral demand to attend to the object
(2006: 2). Makkai (2021) develops further the view that the object has
a claim on us (although she does not see it as a moral claim); Lopes
(2021) seems also to assume such a claim.


#### 2.3.5 Is beauty objective?



Should judgments of beauty be regarded as objective? Ameriks has
argued (1982, 1983, 1998, 2000) that in spite of Kant's claim
that judgments of beauty are "subjectively grounded", they
are nonetheless objective in the same sense that judgments of colour
and other secondary qualities are objective. Similar views are
proposed in Savile 1981 and Kulenkampff 1990; see also the references
offered by Ameriks at (2003: 307n.1). The claim is challenged by
Ginsborg (1998), who defends the subjectivity of taste on the grounds
that Kant does not allow that we can make judgments of beauty on the
basis of hearsay, but must "subject the object to our own
eyes" (SS8, 5:215-216); a similar point is made in
Hopkins 2001, and there is further discussion of aesthetic testimony
in Gorodeisky 2009. Ameriks responds to Ginsborg's challenge in
his 1998; the objectivity of taste is defended further in Makkai 2010.
Ginsborg offers further defence of the subjectivity of taste in her
2017; her approach is challenged in chapter 3 of Makkai 2021.



The question of whether Kant should be interpreted as committed to the
objectivity of taste is closely related to the question of whether
there can be erroneous judgments of taste; for some discussion see T.
Cohen (1982: 222-226) and Allison (2001: 107-108). It is
also related to the question of aesthetic normativity (see
 Section 2.3.4
 above) and to that of the "autonomy of taste" (the
supposed independence of our judgments of taste both from testimony
and from the judgments of experts), which is discussed in Matherne
2019.


#### 2.3.6 Negative judgments of beauty



Kant's discussion of judgments of beauty focusses almost
exclusively on the positive judgment that an object is beautiful, and
relatedly, of the feeling of pleasure in a beautiful object. He has
very little to say about the judgment that an object is not beautiful,
or about the displeasure associated with judging an object to be ugly.
(As noted in
 Section 2.7
 below, he does take the appreciation of the sublime to involve a kind
of displeasure, but this seems to be a different kind from the
displeasure that might be involved in judging something to be ugly.)
Does his treatment allow for negative judgments of beauty, either that
an object is not beautiful or that it is ugly? Shier (1998) argues
that it does not, but this has been challenged by Allison (2001), who
takes it to be a criterion for a satisfactory interpretation of
Kant's theory of taste that it allow for negative judgments of
beauty (2001: 72; see also 184-186). Others who have emphasized
the need to consider the role of the ugly in Kant's account of
aesthetics include Hudson (1991), Wenzel (1999) and Kuplen
(2015).



It is useful, in considering this topic, to distinguish the question
of how we can judge that something is not beautiful, from that of how
we can judge it to be ugly. The former question can be seen an aspect
of a more general problem about how we can make judgments in which
ascriptions of beauty figure in embedded contexts, for example as the
antecedents of conditionals; this is akin to what is often referred to
as the Frege-Geach problem for expressivist accounts of normative
discourse. The second question is more specific and can be framed in
terms of aesthetic experience: can Kant allow for an experience of
displeasure in the ugly, and if he can, is it symmetrical with
pleasure in the beautiful?



Some commentators, for example Brandt (1994), Ginsborg (2003:
175-177), and Guyer (2005b: ch. 6), have denied that there is
such a thing, for Kant, as pure displeasure in the ugly, or,
correlatively a pure judgment of ugliness. Guyer argues that while
there is displeasure in the ugly it always involves an interest;
Ginsborg allows also for disinterested judgments of ugliness, but
denies that these involve a characteristic feeling of displeasure;
rather, we judge that something is ugly if it lacks beauty in a
context where beauty is expected. More generally, on her view, aside
from cases where the judgment is based on perception of an object as
harmful or disgusting, judgments of the ugly depend on recognition of
the context in which the object is presented; Gracyk defends a similar
point, using it to argue that "ugly" objects are those
which resist unification and are thus less pleasurable to perceive
than other objects (1986: 55). Guyer's view is criticized in
McConnell 2008, which offers a useful survey of previous discussions
of the issue, and (partly drawing on Gracyk 1986) provides a defence
of pure judgments of ugliness which appeals to Kant's theory of
aesthetic ideas. A. Cohen (2013) suggests that there can be both
impure and pure judgments of ugliness, arguing for the possibility of
a "foul play" of the faculties in which the play of
imagination and understanding is hindered rather than facilitated and
stand in reciprocal disharmony.


#### 2.3.7 What is the "common sense"?



In the Fourth Moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful, at SS20,
Kant claims that judgments of taste rely on a "subjective
principle" which "determines only by feeling rather than
concepts", and that such a principle must be regarded as a
"common sense" (*sensus communis*) (SS20, 238).
He goes on at SS21, in an argument often regarded as anticipating
the Deduction of Taste at SS38, to argue that we must assume a
"common sense" as a condition of the universal
communicability of cognition. But in order to make sense of the
argument, we must be able to understand Kant's notion of a
"common sense", and this proves to be challenging. In
particular, if the common sense introduced at SS20 is a principle
for judging by feeling, then--assuming, with most commentators,
that what Kant means by "feeling" is the feeling of
pleasure--it seems implausible to suppose that it is a condition
for claiming the universal communicability or universal validity of
our cognitive judgments. For it seems that we do not need to feel
pleasure in order to determine, in the case of a cognitive judgment,
whether it is one that everyone else should share. This raises the
question whether the notion of "common sense"--to
which Kant also returns in SS40--is in fact univocal, or
whether, as proposed by Allison (2001: 153-154), there are two
different species of common sense: one required for the universal
communicability of judgments of beauty, and one required for the
universal communicability of cognition.



A second question associated with the notion of a common sense, raised
by Guyer (1979 [1997: 249-250]) and discussed recently in
Matherne 2019, is that of its ontological status, given that Kant
refers to it variously as as a "feeling", a
"principle" and a "faculty".



A third question, discussed in detail by Guyer (1979 [1997:
264-273]) and Matherne (2019) is raised by Kant himself in
SS22: whether the common sense, understood as a principle or
standard, is regulative or constitutive. This question, which Kant
leaves unanswered, is especially puzzling because it appears from
SS21 that Kant already takes himself to have established that the
common sense is a condition of the universal communicability of
cognition.



Following Guyer's own assessment of the common sense as an
"unnecessary detour" (1979 [1997: 274]) in the overall
argument of the Deduction, many commentators have disregarded the
common sense in their discussions of Kant's theory of taste.
Recently, however, there has been much more attention to the notion of
the common sense. Matherne (2019), who follows Allison in
distinguishing an aesthetic from a cognitive common sense, takes
aesthetic common sense as something that we acquire (thus as
regulative rather than constitutive), and invokes it to help make
sense of Kant's view that taste is autonomous. Makkai (2021: ch.
4) examines and rejects Allison's distinction between an
aesthetic and cognitive common sense, arguing that SS21 points to
a parallel between cognition and taste in that both require a feeling
of "what...calls for judging" or "what
matters" (159). Sethi (forthcoming) also rejects the
distinction, pointing out that the need for it is premised on the
assumption that the "feeling" invoked at SS20 must be
a feeling of pleasure, and arguing (drawing in part on Sethi 2019)
that the feeling of the free play of the faculties is not a feeling of
pleasure (see
 Section 2.3.1).
 She takes the common sense to be necessary for empirical
concept-acquisition, so that the notion of common sense plays a
crucial role in accounting for the relation between taste and
cognition.


#### 2.3.8 Universal validity and universal communicability



Kant describes judgments of beauty both as "universally
valid" and as "universally communicable". Many
commentators have treated these expressions as more or less
equivalent, and Guyer (1979 [1997: 251-252]) points out several
passages where Kant seems to use them interchangeably. (For the most
part, this article follows this way of understanding the
expressions.)



However, several commentators have argued recently that it is
important to distinguish these two notions. The universal
communicability of a judgment of beauty is not just a matter of its
claiming universal validity, but has to do with the possibility of
literally communicating our feeling in the object; for example
bringing it about that another person can share it. Commentators who
have emphasized this distinction include Makkai (2021: ch. 2),
Vaccarino Bremner (forthcoming), and Sethi (forthcoming).


### 2.4 Judgments of Beauty: Some Criticisms



As noted at the end of
 Section 2.2,
 Kant's account of judgments of beauty has been criticized on
the grounds that the argument for their universal validity, that is
the Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgments, is unsuccessful. Criticisms
have also been raised against various aspects of Kant's
characterization of judgments of beauty in the Analytic of the
Beautiful. Objections have been raised in particular to Kant's
view that judgments of beauty are disinterested, and to his supposed
commitment to aesthetic formalism (the view that all that matters for
aesthetic appreciation is the abstract formal pattern manifested by
the object, that is, the way in which its elements are interrelated in
space and/or time). For discussion of the questions of
disinterestedness and formalism, see Guyer (1979 [1997: chs. 5 and
6]), and Allison (2001: chs. 4 and 5); Zuckert offers a sympathetic
reading of Kant's formalism (2007a: 182-189). Kant's
formalism was particularly influential, via the influence of Hanslick,
in musical theory; for discussion see Kivy (2009: ch. 2). Discussions
of this topic often note that although the Analytic of the Beautiful
puts forward a formalist view, Kant's treatment of aesthetic
ideas (discussed in
 Section 2.6)
 is more congenial to an expressivist view of art.



Typically objections to Kant's view of pleasure as disinterested
appeal to the apparently obvious fact that we do in fact take an
interest in the preservation of beautiful objects (see for example
Crawford 1974: 53). A different kind of objection, based on an appeal
to the cognitive role of aesthetic judging, is made in Pillow
2006.



Kant has also been criticized for a view that is taken to be a
consequence of the thesis that judgments of beauty are disinterested,
namely the view that aesthetic experience requires a special attitude
of "psychical distance" or "detachment" from
the object appreciated: this criticism is generally taken to be
implicit in Dickie's well-known (1964) discussion of the
"myth of the aesthetic attitude". Zangwill (1992) argues
that this criticism is misplaced.



Kant's view that the pleasure in a beautiful object is
non-conceptual has been taken to commit him to the supposedly
objectionable view that the capacity to make conceptual distinctions
can play no role in the appreciation of beauty. This criticism, made
by Wollheim (1980) (invoking the idea that aesthetic appreciation
demands an "empty cognitive stock") is addressed in
Janaway 1997. Relatedly, it has been objected that Kant does not allow
room for reason-giving, and more generally, criticism in aesthetics;
that objection is addressed in Crawford 1970 and (on lines suggested
by Crawford) in Wilson 2007. Further defence and explication of a
Kantian approach to art criticism is offered in Tuna 2016.



Baz (2005) criticizes Kant for his apparent view that the value of
beauty lies in its relation to cognition, rather than the beautiful
object's mattering for its own sake; Hughes (2006) offers a
response.


### 2.5 Free and Adherent Beauty



This article so far has been concerned primarily with pure judgments
of beauty. But Kant also allows for judgments of beauty which are not
pure. Judgments of beauty can fail to be pure in two ways.


1. They can be influenced by the object's sensory or emotional
appeal, that is, they can involve "charm" [*Reiz*]
or emotion [*Ruhrung*] (SS13).
2. They can be contingent on a certain concept's applying to
the object, so that the object is judged, not as beautiful *tout
court*, but as beautiful *qua* belonging to this or that
kind.



The second kind of impurity is discussed in SS16 in connection
with a distinction between "free" [*frei*] beauty
and "adherent" or "dependent"
[*anhangend*] beauty.



One reason to think that the distinction is important is that Kant
seems to suggest that all judgments of beauty about representational
art are judgments of adherent rather than of free beauty, and hence
that they are all impure. (This is questioned by Tuna (2018), who
holds that works of art which result from genius can be regarded as
instances of free rather than adherent beauty.) While some art works
can be "free beauties", the examples Kant gives are all of
non-representational art: "designs a la grecque, foliage for
borders or on wallpaper...fantasias in music", and indeed,
Kant adds, all music without a text (SS16, 229). It might be
supposed from this that Kant's core account of judgments of
beauty is only peripherally applicable to art, which would make it
largely irrelevant to the concerns of contemporary aesthetics.
However, this consequence is debatable. For example, Allison argues
that judgments of adherent beauty contain, as a component, a pure
judgment of beauty. The purity of this core judgment is not undermined
by its figuring in a more complex evaluation which takes into account
the object's falling under a concept (2001: 140-141).



Kant's suggestion that representational art has
"adherent" rather than "free" beauty, and that
judgments about such art fail to be pure, might also invite the
objection that Kant takes nonrepresentational art to be superior to
representational art, so that, say, wallpaper designs are
aesthetically more valuable than the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
This objection is challenged by Schaper (1979: ch. 4, reprinted in
Guyer 2003a) and by Guyer (2005b: chs. 4 and 5). Tuna (2018) adopts a
different approach to the underlying problem by arguing that works of
art, if they are works of genius, should not be viewed as cases of
adherent beauty in the first place.



Further discussions of the distinction between free and adherent
beauty include Scarre (1981), Lorand (1989), Gammon (1999), Guyer
(2002a), Kalar (2006: 82-89), Zuckert (2007a: 202-212),
and Rueger (2008). Clewis (2018) provides useful historical context
for the distinction.


### 2.6 Art, Genius and Aesthetic Ideas



While Kant attaches special importance to the beauty of nature (see,
e.g., FI XI, 20:244), he also makes clear that judgments of beauty may
be made also about "fine" or "beautiful" art
[*schone Kunst*]. In the course of his treatment of
beautiful art in SSSS43-54 he discusses fine art in
relation to the production of human artifacts more generally
(SS43), compares fine art to the "arts" of
entertaining (telling jokes, decorating a table, providing background
music) (SS44), and makes some remarks about the relation between
the beauty of art and that of nature, claiming in particular that fine
art must "look to us like nature" in that it must seem
free and unstudied (SS45). Kant also offers a typology of the
various fine arts (SS51) and a comparison of their respective
aesthetic value (SS53), with poetry at the top and music--at
least as far as the "cultivation of the mind" is
concerned--at the bottom. Kant's remarks about music in
SSSS51-54 suggest that music might not even qualify as
beautiful, as opposed to merely agreeable, art. This is seemingly in
tension with Kant's reference to music without words as an
example of "free beauty" (SS16, 5:229).



Of particular interest, within Kant's account of fine art, is
his discussion of how beautiful art objects can be produced
(SSSS46-50). The artist cannot produce a beautiful work
by learning, and then applying, rules which determine when something
is beautiful; for no such rules can be specified (see the sketch of
the Second Moment in
 Section 2.1
 above). But, Kant makes clear, the artist's activity must still
be rule-governed, since "every art presupposes rules"
(SS46, 307) and the objects of art must serve as models or
examples, that is, they must serve as a "standard or rule by
which to judge" (SS46, 308). Kant's solution to this
apparent paradox is to postulate a capacity, which he calls
"genius", by which "nature gives the rule to
art" (SS46, 307). An artist endowed with genius has a
natural capacity to produce objects which are appropriately judged as
beautiful, and this capacity does not require the artist him- or
herself to consciously follow rules for the production of such
objects; in fact the artist himself does not know, and so cannot
explain, how he or she was able to bring them into being.
"Genius" here means something different from brilliance of
intellect. For example, Newton, for all his intellectual power, does
not qualify as having genius, because he was capable of making clear,
both to himself and others, the procedures through which he arrived at
his scientific discoveries (SS47, 308-309).



A further point of interest in Kant's discussion of art is his
claim that beauty is the "exhibition"
[*Darstellung*, also translated "presentation"]
(SS49, 314) or "expression" (SS51, 319) of
aesthetic ideas. Kant describes an aesthetic idea as



> 
> 
> a representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking,
> though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e.,
> concept, to be adequate to it. (SS49, 314)
> 
> 
> 



Such ideas, he says, are a "counterpart" to rational
ideas, that is, representations which cannot be exemplified in
experience or by means of imagination (ibid.). While part of
Kant's point here is to contrast aesthetic and rational ideas,
it is clear that he sees the role of aesthetic ideas as mediating
between rational ideas on the one hand, and sensibility and
imagination on the other. A work of art expresses or exhibits an
aesthetic idea in so far as it succeeds in giving sensible form to a
rational idea. Thus aesthetic ideas "seek to approximate to an
exhibition" of rational ideas. For example, the poet



> 
> 
> ventures to make sensible rational ideas of invisible beings, the
> realm of the blessed, the realm of hell, eternity, creation etc., as
> well as to make that of which there are examples in experience, e.g.,
> death, envy, and all sorts of vices, as well as love, fame, etc.,
> sensible beyond the limits of experience, with a completeness which
> goes beyond anything of which there is an example in nature.
> (ibid.)
> 
> 
> 



One question raised in connection with Kant's account of fine
art concerns the relative importance, for Kant, of artistic and
natural beauty. Guyer (1987) takes Kant to be committed to the primacy
of natural beauty, and argues that that commitment is defensible;
Kemal (1986) offers grounds for holding that, in spite of appearances,
it is artistic beauty which is primary for Kant. (The reprint of Guyer
1987 as ch. 7 of Guyer 1993 includes a postscript challenging
Kemal's arguments.) Other commentators who have argued for the
primacy of artistic over natural beauty include Rueger (2007) and
Ostaric (2010). Friedlander (2015: ch. 3) maintains that neither has
primacy over the other. Another question is whether Kant has a single
account of beauty which is intended to apply to both natural objects
and works of art; Reiter and Geiger (2018) and Halper (2020) argue,
although on different grounds, that Kant has two different accounts
for nature and art respectively.



Commentators have also discussed Kant's ranking of the fine
arts, and particularly of the low ranking he accords to music; on the
latter topic, see for example Weatherston (1996), Parret (1998b), Kivy
(2009: ch. 2), Tuna (2018), and Kuplen (2021). Kant's views
on music have sometimes been criticized as incoherent; Matherne (2014)
offers a explicit defence.



Kant's theory of aesthetic ideas has been regarded by many
commentators as peripheral to his aesthetic theory, but a number of
commentators have argued that it is necessary in order to make sense
of the core of Kant's view of pure judgments of taste; see for
example Savile (1987), Rogerson (2004 and 2008), Rueger and Evren
(2005), Kalar (2006), and Chignell (2007). More recently, the topic of
aesthetic ideas has received considerable attention in its own right.
One issue concerns the role of aesthetic ideas in the beauty of
nature, as opposed to that of art. While aesthetic ideas are discussed
only in the sections of the *Critique of Judgment* which deal
with artistic beauty, and not in the "Analytic of the
Beautiful", which deals with beauty more generally, Kant remarks
parenthetically that natural as well as artistic beauty is the
expression of aesthetic ideas (SS51, 321). How are we to conceive
of the aesthetic ideas expressed by nature? Reiter (2018) and Reiter
and Geiger (2018) propose an interpretation in terms of the notion of
an "aesthetic normal idea" introduced by Kant in the Third
Moment, at SS17, 233, which they relate to a notion of
"ideal form" that was current in art theory at
Kant's time.



A related issue concerns the scope of aesthetic ideas. Matherne (2013)
challenges interpretations on which aesthetic ideas can present or
express only moral or rational concepts, arguing that they can also
present empirical concepts and human emotions. Reiter and Geiger
(2018) also propose expanding the scope of what can be presented in an
aesthetic idea, arguing that, insofar as aesthetic ideas present the
rational idea of humanity in our person, they show the "range
and variety of human freedom". Vaccarino Bremner
(2021) suggests a different way of broadening the scope of
aesthetic ideas, arguing that they do not just present or express
concepts, but call for us to revise them.



Traditionally, Kant's aesthetics has been seen as most readily
applicable to art of his time and (because of his apparent formalism)
to abstract art of the modernist period. Costello (2013) argues for
the applicability of Kant's theory of aesthetics to conceptual
art. For further recent discussions of the applicability of
Kant's aesthetics to contemporary art, including conceptual and
post-conceptual art, see the essays collected in Cazeaux 2021.


### 2.7 The Sublime



Kant distinguishes two notions of the sublime: the mathematically
sublime and the dynamically sublime. In the case of both notions, the
experience of the sublime consists in a feeling of the superiority of
our own power of reason, as a supersensible faculty, over nature
(SS28, 261).



In the case of the mathematically sublime, the feeling of
reason's superiority over nature takes the form, more
specifically, of a feeling of reason's superiority to
imagination, conceived of as the natural capacity required for sensory
apprehension, including the apprehension of the magnitudes of
empirically given things. We have this feeling when we are confronted
with something that is so large that it overwhelms imagination's
capacity to comprehend it. In such a situation imagination strives to
comprehend the object in accordance with a demand of reason, but fails
to do so.



> 
> 
> Just because there is in our imagination a striving to advance to the
> infinite, while in our reason there lies a claim to absolute totality,
> as to a real idea, the very inadequacy of our faculty for estimating
> the magnitude of the things in the sensible world [viz., imagination]
> awakens the feeling of a supersensible faculty in us. (SS25,
> 250)
> 
> 
> 



The fact that we are capable, through reason, of thinking infinity as
a whole, "indicates a faculty of the mind which surpasses every
standard of sense" (SS26, 254). While Kant's
discussion of the mathematically sublime mentions the Pyramids in
Egypt and St. Peter's Basilica in Rome (SS26, 252), it is
not clear that these are intended as examples of the sublime; and Kant
claims explicitly that the most appropriate examples are of things in
nature. More specifically, they must be natural things the concept of
which does not involve the idea of a purpose (SS26,
252-253): this rules out animals, the concept of which is
connected with the idea of biological function, but it apparently
includes mountains and the sea (SS26, 256).



In the case of the dynamically sublime, the feeling of reason's
superiority to nature is more direct than in the mathematical case.
Kant says that we consider nature as "dynamically sublime"
when we consider it as "a power that has no dominion over
us" (SS28, 260). We have the feeling of the dynamically
sublime when we experience nature as fearful while knowing ourselves
to be in a position of safety and hence without in fact being afraid.
In this situation



> 
> 
> the irresistibility of [nature's] power certainly makes us,
> considered as natural beings, recognize our physical powerlessness,
> but at the same time it reveals a capacity for judging ourselves as
> independent of nature and a superiority over nature...whereby the
> humanity in our person remains undemeaned even though the human being
> must submit to that dominion. (SS28, 261-262)
> 
> 
> 



Kant's examples include overhanging cliffs, thunder clouds,
volcanoes and hurricanes (SS28, 261).



The feeling associated with the sublime is a feeling of pleasure in
the superiority of our reason over nature, but it also involves
displeasure. In the case of the mathematically sublime, the
displeasure comes from the awareness of the inadequacy of our
imagination; in the dynamical case it comes from the awareness of our
physical powerlessness in the face of nature's might. Kant is
not consistent in his descriptions of how the pleasure and the
displeasure are related, but one characterization describes them as
alternating: the "movement of the mind" in the
representation of the sublime



> 
> 
> may be compared to a vibration, i.e., to a rapidly alternating
> repulsion from and attraction to one and the same object. (SS27,
> 258)
> 
> 
> 



Kant also describes the feeling of the sublime as a "pleasure
which is possible only by means of a displeasure" (SS27,
260) and as a "negative liking" (General Remark following
SS29, 269). He also appears to identify it with the feeling of
respect, which in his practical philosophy is associated with
recognition of the moral law (SS27, 257).



Judgments of the sublime are like judgments of beauty in being based
on feeling, more specifically on pleasure or liking. They are also
like judgments of beauty in claiming the universal validity of the
pleasure, where that claim is understood as involving necessity
(everyone who perceives the object ought to share the feeling)
(SS29, 266). But as we have seen, the pleasure is different in
that it involves a negative element. The following differences should
also be noted:


1. (particularly emphasized by Kant) In making a judgment of the
sublime, we regard the object as "contrapurposive", rather
than purposive, for the faculties of imagination and judgment
(SS23, 245). While judgments of the sublime do involve the
representation of purposiveness, the purposiveness differs from that
involved in a judgment of beauty in two ways.
	1. It is not the object, but the aesthetic judgment itself which is
	represented as purposive.
	2. The aesthetic judgment is represented as purposive not for
	imagination or judgment, but for reason (SS27, 260) or for the
	"whole vocation of the mind" (SS27, 259).
2. The claim to universal validity made by a judgment of the sublime
rests, not on the universal validity of the conditions of cognition,
but rather on the universal validity of moral feeling (SS29,
255-256).
3. While we can correctly call objects beautiful, we cannot properly
call them sublime (SS23, 245); sublimity strictly speaking
"is not contained in anything in nature, but only in our
mind" (SS28, 264). This means, according to Kant, that there
is no need for a deduction of the sublime.
4. While judgments of beauty involve a relation between the faculties
of imagination and understanding, the faculties brought into relation
in a judgment of the sublime are imagination and reason (SS29,
266).



The importance of the sublime within Kant's aesthetic theory is
a matter of dispute. In the Introductions to the *Critique of
Judgment*, Kant has a great deal to say about the beautiful, but
mentions the sublime only fleetingly (FI XII, 249-250) and in
the Analytic of the Sublime itself he notes that



> 
> 
> the concept of the sublime in nature is far from being as important
> and rich in consequences as that of its beauty
> 
> 
> 



and that the



> 
> 
> theory of the sublime is a mere appendix to the aesthetic judging of
> the purposiveness of nature. (SS23, 246)
> 
> 
> 



Kant's views about the sublime also appear to be less
historically distinctive than his views about the beautiful, showing
in particular the influence of Burke. On the other hand, Kant's
account of the sublime has been influential in literary theory (see
 Section 2.9
 below), and the sublime also plays a significant role in Kant's
account of the connection between aesthetic judgment and morality.
Commentators who have emphasized the importance of the sublime in
connection with moral feeling include Clewis (2009) and Matherne
(forthcoming); the latter explores in particular the experience of the
sublime as enabling the perception of our own freedom.



One focus of debate regarding the sublime concerns whether sublimity,
according to Kant, is restricted to objects of nature, or whether
there can also be sublime art; Abaci (2008) defends Kant's
restriction of sublimity to nature; Clewis (2010) defends the opposite
view. For discussion of the Kantian sublime as it might apply to
specific works of art, see chs. 6 and 7 of Lyotard 1988 [1991] (on
Barnett Newman's paintings as an instance of the Kantian
sublime) and Myskja 2002 (which brings Kant's notion of the
sublime to bear on Samuel Beckett's novel *Molloy*).
Zuckert 2021 offers a clear and helpful discussion of Lyotard's
view of Kant's account of the sublime in application to art.



An orthogonal question concerns the proper object of a judgment of the
sublime (whether of nature or art). We might suppose that it is the
physical object occasioning the feeling of the sublime, for example
St. Peter's in Rome, or an erupting volcano. But, as we saw
above, Kant says that sublimity does not belong to objects but is
"only in our mind" (SS28, 264). Commentators have
suggested various candidates for what is properly called sublime,
including rational ideas, human reason, and the feeling of pleasure
which constitutes our experience of the sublime; for discussion, see
Moore (2018).



A good overview of Kant's theory of the sublime and its
connection with Kant's aesthetic theory more generally is
provided in Crowther 1989; other useful expositions include Guyer
(1993: ch. 7), Matthews (1996), Budd (1998), and Allison (2001: ch.
13). The more recent overview in Merritt 2018 offers a helpful account
of the historical sources of Kant's theory, including
Stoicism..


### 2.8 Aesthetics and Morality



The connection between aesthetic judgment and moral feeling is a
persistent theme in the *Critique of Judgment*. As noted in
 Section 2.3.4
 above, some commentators take the demand for universal validity made
by a judgment of beauty to amount to a moral demand, so that
Kant's argument for the universal validity of such judgments
depends on an appeal to morality. A more common view, however, is to
see judgments of beauty not as grounded in morality, but rather, along
with judgments of the sublime, as contributing to an account of moral
feeling, and hence of how morality is possible for human beings (for a
clear statement of the contrast between these views, see the
introduction to Guyer 1993).



The idea that aesthetic judgment plays a role in grounding the
possibility of morality for human beings is suggested at a very
general level in the Introduction to the *Critique of
Judgment*, where Kant describes the faculty of judgment as
bridging "the great gulf" between the concept of nature
and that of freedom (IX, 195). While Kant says that the concept or
principle of judgment which mediates the transition between nature and
freedom is that of the "purposiveness of nature", which
could simply be understood as referring to nature's scientific
comprehensibility (see
 Section 3.2
 below), he also associates judgment in this context with the feeling
of pleasure and displeasure, making clear that it is not only judgment
in the context of empirical scientific enquiry, but also aesthetic
judgment, which plays this bridging role.



The "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment" mentions a number of
more specific connections between aesthetics and morality, including
the following:


1. Aesthetic experience serves as a propadeutic for morality, in that
"the beautiful prepares us to love something, even nature,
without interest; the sublime, to esteem it, even contrary to our
(sensible) interest" (General Remark following SS29,
267).
2. The demand for universal agreement in judgments of the sublime
rests on an appeal to moral feeling (SS29, 265-266)
3. Taking a direct interest in the beauty of nature indicates
"a good soul" and a "mental attunement favorable to
moral feeling" (SS42, 298-299).
4. Beauty serves as the "symbol" of morality (SS59,
*passim*), in that a judgment of beauty "legislates for
itself" rather than being "subjected to a heteronomy of
laws of experience" (SS59, 353); relatedly, feelings of
pleasure in the beautiful are analogous to moral consciousness
(SS59, 354; see also General Comment following SS91,
482n.).
5. Beauty gives sensible form to moral ideas (SS60, 356); this is
related both to the view that there is an analogy between the
experience of beauty and moral feeling (see (ii) above), and to the
view that beauty is the expression of aesthetic ideas (see
 Section 2.6).
 Because of this, the development of moral ideas is the "true
propadeutic" for taste (SS60, 356).



There is an influential discussion of beauty as the symbol of morality
in T. Cohen (1982). Much of Guyer's work on the third
*Critique* subsequent to his 1979 has emphasized the connection
between aesthetics and morality, and in particular the role of
aesthetics in supporting the human moral vocation. As noted in
 Section 1,
 a number of commentators have seen unity of the *Critique of
Judgment* in terms of moral teleology, and their work offers
further discussion of the relation between aesthetics and morality;
see
 Section 1
 for references.


### 2.9 The Broader Significance of Kant's Aesthetics



Kant himself clearly takes his aesthetic theory to be of central
importance for the understanding of the so-called "faculty of
judgment" generally (see
 Section 1
 above): this implies that he takes it to be of importance for
understanding empirical scientific enquiry, and in particular for our
understanding of biological phenomena. As noted in
 Section 2.8
 above, there are also significant connections between Kant's
views on aesthetics and his views on ethics, and, as noted in
 Section 1,
 a number of commentators have, in addition, laid special weight on
the connection between Kant's aesthetics and his views on
empirical cognition. Some commentators have also drawn on Kant's
aesthetic theory to illuminate specific aspects of Kant's views
on cognition; for example, Heidemann (2016) draws on Kant's
aesthetic theory to defend the view that Kant's theory of
cognition is nonconceptualist.



Many philosophers have seen Kant's aesthetics as having
significance for domains of philosophical enquiry outside both
aesthetics and the study of Kant. An important example is Cavell
(1976: ch. 3), who connects the subjective universality which Kant
ascribes to judgments of beauty with the appeal made, in ordinary
language philosophy, to "what we should say" (see
especially 94-96). This connection is explored further in Baz
(2016) and Makkai (2021), both of which draw on Cavell for their
understanding of the philosophical significance of Kant's
account of judgments of beauty. Somewhat relatedly, Bell (1987) draws
a connection between Kant's view of aesthetic judgment and
Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations; Ginsborg 2011
invokes Kant's aesthetic theory as a basis for a response to the
skepticism about rules and meaning which Saul Kripke attributes to
Wittgenstein (Kripke 1982).



In an influential discussion, Arendt (1982) applies Kant's
theory of aesthetic judgment within the sphere of political
philosophy; relatedly, Fleischacker (1999) draws connections between
aesthetic judgment for Kant and moral and political judgment
generally.



The implications of Kant's aesthetic theory for the philosophy
of mathematics and the philosophy of science have been explored in
Breitenbach 2013 and Breitenbach 2018 respectively;
Breitenbach argues that, although Kant does not explicitly claim that
mathematical proofs or scientific theories can be beautiful, we can
nonetheless, on a Kantian view, feel pleasure in both. As noted in
 Section 1,
 Breitenbach (2021) also argues that the imaginative reflection
characteristic of aesthetic experience also characterizes creativity
in scientific cognition.



Kant's aesthetic theory has been extensively discussed within
literary theory, where there has been particular emphasis on
Kant's theory of the sublime. See for example Weiskel (1976) and
Hertz (1978), both of which interpret Kant's account of the
sublime in psychoanalytic terms, as well as the discussions of the
Kantian sublime in de Man (1990) and Lyotard (1991 [1994]).
Kant's aesthetic theory more generally is discussed in Derrida
(1975 [1981] and 1978 [1987]); while the work of Derrida and other
deconstructionists has been largely ignored or dismissed by
commentators within the analytic tradition of philosophy, it has been
influential among literary theorists.


## 3. Teleology



While Kant's ethical theory makes frequent reference to the ends
or purposes adopted by human beings, the "Critique of
Teleological Judgment" is concerned with the idea of ends or
purposes in nature. (For the terms "end" and
"purpose" as translations of the German *Zweck*,
see footnote 2.) Among the most striking elements of Kant's
account of natural teleology are (i) his claim, in the "Analytic
of Teleological Judgment", that organisms must be regarded by
human beings in teleological terms, i.e., as "natural
purposes", and (ii) his attempt, in the "Dialectic of
Teleological Judgment", to reconcile this teleological
conception of organisms with a mechanistic account of nature. These
are described here in
 Section 3.3
 and
 Section 3.4,
 respectively. Prior to this,
 Section 3.1
 outlines Kant's notions of purpose and purposiveness in general
and
 Section 3.2
 sketches nature's "purposiveness for our cognitive
faculties", i.e., its amenability to empirical scientific
enquiry. The discussion of biological teleology and its relation to
mechanism in Sections 3.3 and 3.4 is followed by two sections dealing
with further aspects of Kant's teleology:
 Section 3.5
 deals with Kant's view that nature as a whole may be regarded
as a system of purposes, and
 Section 3.6
 with the implications of this teleological view of nature for
morality and religion.
 Section 3.7
 returns to Kant's biological teleology, considering briefly its
implications for contemporary biological thought.


### 3.1 The Notion of Purposiveness



The notions of purpose or end [*Zweck*] and of purposiveness
[*Zweckmassigkeit*] are defined by Kant in the
"Critique of Aesthetic Judgment", in a section entitled
"On Purposiveness in General" (SS10). A purpose is
"the object of a concept, in so far as the concept is seen as
the cause of the object", and purposiveness is "the
causality of a concept with respect to its object" (SS10,
220). But Kant often uses the terms "purpose" and
"purposive" in ways that are related to, but do not quite
fit, these definitions. In particular "purpose" is
sometimes used to apply to the concept rather than the corresponding
object (e.g., Introduction IV, 180), and "purposiveness"
is usually used to denote, not the causality of the concept, but the
property in virtue of which an object counts as a purpose (e.g., FI
IX, 234). Kant also characterizes "purposiveness" as the
"lawfulness of the contingent as such" (FI VI, 217; see
also FI VIII, 228, Introduction V, 184, and SS76, 404).



Kant's initial definition at SS10 suggests that the paradigm
of a purpose is a human artifact, since this typically comes into
being as a result of the artisan's having a concept of the
object he or she plans to produce, a concept which is thus causally
efficacious in producing its object. Such an object is the result of
design. But Kant goes on to claim that something can qualify as a
purpose, or as purposive, not only if it is in fact brought about as a
result of design, but if we can conceive its possibility only on the
assumption that it was produced according to design:



> 
> 
> an object or a state of mind or even an action... is called
> purposive merely because its possibility can only be explained and
> conceived by us in so far as we assume at its ground a causality in
> accordance with purposes. (SS10, 220)
> 
> 
> 



Kant thinks that this is the case in particular for organisms, which
are "natural purposes" (see
 Section 3.3
 below). But the notion of purposiveness also applies more broadly,
and Kant distinguishes various different kinds of purposiveness
applying not only to organisms and artifacts, but also to beautiful
objects, to nature as a whole (both in so far as it is comprehensible
to human beings, and in so far as it is a system of purposes standing
in purposive relations to one another), to the functioning of our
cognitive faculties in aesthetic appreciation and empirical scientific
enquiry, to geometrical figures, and even to objects that are useful
or agreeable to human beings.



Because Kant's terminology is not always consistent, it is
difficult to provide a definitive characterization of the various
types of purposiveness. However, the following simplified scheme may
serve as a guide. The notion of purposiveness is divided in the first
instance into *subjective* and *objective*
purposiveness. Both kinds of purposiveness are in turn divided into
*formal* and *material* (or *real*). The most
important kinds of purposiveness for the concerns of the *Critique
of Judgment* are (i) subjective formal purposiveness and (ii)
objective material purposiveness. Subjective formal purposiveness
corresponds both to the "aesthetic" purposiveness
displayed by beautiful objects (or by the activity of our cognitive
faculties in the perception of them) and to the "logical"
purposiveness displayed by nature as a whole in so far as it is
comprehensible to human beings (see
 Section 3.2).
 Objective material purposiveness corresponds to the purposiveness
displayed both by organisms qua "natural purposes" (see
 Section 3.3)
 and by arrangements of natural things or processes which stand to one
another in means-end relations (see
 Section 3.5).
 But Kant also allows for subjective material purposiveness, which is
the kind of purposiveness exhibited by an agreeable object, i.e., one
which pleases our senses (FI VIII, 224); and for objective formal
purposiveness, which is exhibited by geometrical figures in virtue of
their fruitfulness for solving mathematical problems (SS62).



A further important distinction is that between objective material
purposiveness which is *inner*, and objective material
purposiveness which is merely *outer* or *relative*;
this distinguishes the kind of purposiveness possessed by organisms
from that in virtue of which one natural thing or process stands in a
means-end relation to another. Kant also claims in one passage (FI
XII, 249-250) that the distinction between inner and relative
purposiveness applies to subjective as well as objective
purposiveness, serving to separate the beautiful from the sublime.



The distinctions among these various kinds of purposiveness are
treated in detail by Marc-Wogau (1938) and Tonelli (1958).



Commentators have disagreed about whether there is any underlying
philosophical unity to Kant's notion of purposiveness, and, in
particular, whether the notion of purposiveness which figures in the
aesthetic context is the same as that which figures in Kant's
account of organisms. Guyer takes Kant to be operating with two
different senses of "purposiveness", one applying to
artifacts (and, presumably, organisms), the other applying to objects
of aesthetic appreciation. While purposiveness in the former sense
corresponds to Kant's account of purposiveness at SS10 in
terms of the notion of design, the notion of purposiveness as it
applies to beautiful objects does not involve the idea of real or
apparent design, but simply that of the satisfaction of an aim or
objective (1979 [1997: 190ff]; see also 1993: 417n.39).



An opposing view is defended in Ginsborg 1997b, which draws on
Kant's characterization of purposiveness as the
"lawfulness of the contingent as such" (FI VI, 20:217; see
also FI VIII, 20:228; Introduction V, 5:184; and SS76, 5:404) to
argue for a univocal conception on which purposiveness is understood
as normative lawfulness. Zuckert also lays emphasis on Kant's
identification of purposiveness as the "lawfulness of the
contingent" (2007a: 5-7), but rejects Ginsborg's
view that this in turn amounts to normative lawfulness as such (2007a:
84n28); on her view, the lawfulness of the contingent is to be
understood as "the unity of the diverse" (2007a: 5) or the
"form of unity of diversity as such" (2007a: 15). The
normative conception of purposiveness is also criticized by Teufel
(2011), who argues that Kant held an etiological and non-teleological
conception of purposiveness: on Teufel's view, an ascription of
purposiveness to an object makes an ontological claim to the effect
that the object is the outcome of a rational, conceptually guided
process. Breitenbach (2017) and Fisher (forthcoming) agree with
Ginsborg in emphasizing Kant's characterization of purposiveness
in terms of the lawfulness of the contingent, but without endorsing
Ginsborg's interpretation of the lawfulness as normative.


### 3.2 Nature's Purposiveness for Our Cognitive Faculties



Kant claims in the Introductions to the *Critique of Judgment*
that it is an *a priori* principle of reflecting judgment that
nature is "purposive for our cognitive faculties" or
"purposive for judgment". This principle is, in the
terminology of the *Critique of Pure Reason*, regulative rather
than constitutive. We cannot assert that nature is, as a matter of
objective fact, purposive for our cognitive faculties, but it is a
condition of the exercise of reflecting judgment that we assume
nature's purposiveness for our cognitive faculties. The
assumption that nature is purposive for our cognitive faculties is
not, strictly speaking, part of teleology, since the purposiveness at
issue is subjective, and teleological judgments are concerned only
with objective purposiveness (see, e.g., FI VII, 20:221). But it is
nonetheless relevant to Kant's teleology, since our entitlement
to ascribe objective purposiveness to natural things, in particular to
organisms, derives from our more fundamental entitlement to regard
nature as (subjectively) purposive for our cognitive faculties (FI VI,
20:218; Introduction VIII, 5:193-194).



Kant characterizes the principle of nature's purposiveness in a
variety of different ways which he seems to treat as interchangeable
even though they do not, on the face of it, come to the same thing.
The variety of characterizations stems in part from the variety of
different tasks he seems to ascribe to reflecting judgment itself. In
addition to being responsible for aesthetic judgments, and to
supplying the concept of purposiveness which is required for
teleological judgments, reflecting judgment seems to be ascribed the
following cognitive tasks: the classification of natural things into a
hierarchy of genera and species; the construction of explanatory
scientific theories in which more specific natural laws are
represented as falling under higher and more general laws; the
representation of nature as empirically lawlike
*uberhaupt*; and the formation of empirical concepts
*uberhaupt*. Because the principle of nature's
purposiveness is, in effect, the principle that nature is amenable to
the activity of reflecting judgment itself, it seems to allow of being
formulated in a corresponding variety of ways, that is, as a principle
of nature's taxonomic systematicity, of its explanatory
systematicity, of its empirical lawlikeness, and of its empirical
conceptualizability.



Kant's discussion of the principle of nature's
purposiveness for our cognitive faculties, and his related earlier
discussion (in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic of the
*Critique of Pure Reason*) of the regulative principle of
nature's systematicity, have, together, been seen as very
important for the understanding of Kant's views on empirical
science. Moreover, to the extent that the principle is seen as
required not only for the construction of systematic scientific
theories, but also for the recognition of nature's empirical
lawlikeness or (even more fundamentally) for the possibility of any
empirical concept-formation at all, it takes on great importance for
an understanding of Kant's views on empirical cognition
generally. However, Kant's discussion of the principle has been
thought to pose a number of serious interpretative and philosophical
difficulties, including the following:


1. How are the various formulations of the principle related? Kant
seems to regard them as amounting to the same, and thus to be
committed to the view that if nature is empirically conceptualizable
at all, we must also recognize the empirical regularities it manifests
as lawlike, and the corresponding concepts and laws must fall under a
systematic hierarchy. But it is not clear how such a view is to be
justified. It seems quite conceivable that natural things could be
conceptualizable (say, under familiar concepts like *dog* or
*granite*) without those concepts in turn figuring in a
systematic hierarchy. Relatedly, it also seems conceivable that we
could apply such concepts to natural things without being able to
detect any lawlike connections among the corresponding properties, let
alone connections which in turn allow of being incorporated into an
overarching system of empirical laws.
2. Regardless of how one understands the task of reflecting judgment,
and the content of the corresponding principle, why is it a condition
of the successful exercise of reflecting judgment that we assume that
nature is suitable for reflecting judgment? Why can't we pursue
our attempts, say, to arrive at a systematic hierarchy of natural
concepts and laws, without assuming in advance that nature will favour
our efforts?
3. If the principle is indeed required, as Kant suggests it is, for
the empirical conceptualization of nature and for the recognition of
nature as empirically lawlike, then it would seem to be a condition of
the possibility of experience. But then why is it regulative rather
than constitutive? Relatedly, how are we to reconcile the respective
roles of the pure concepts of the understanding (in particular the
concept of causality) on the one hand, with the principle of
nature's purposiveness for our cognitive faculties on the other?
If Kant has already shown, in the Analytic of the *Critique of Pure
Reason*, that nature is subject to causal laws, then why is there
any need for a further principle to account for the recognition of
nature as empirically lawlike?



Much of the discussion of these and related questions was stimulated
by Buchdahl, who argues (1969a,b) that the principle of causality in
the Analytic of the *Critique of Pure Reason* is insufficient
to account for nature's subordination to particular causal laws
and that, in addition, a principle of systematicity is required to
account for nature's empirical lawlikeness. A similar view is
developed by Philip Kitcher (1986); for a somewhat revised view, see
his 1994. Guyer (1990b) follows McFarland (1970) in ascribing less
cognitive significance to the principle of nature's
purposiveness for our cognitive faculties, holding that it is required
only to provide us with rational motivation for attempts at
systematizing nature; see also Guyer (1990c, 1979 [1997: ch. 2], and
2003c). Other influential discussions from the late 1980s and early
1990s include Horstmann (1989), Brandt (1989), Butts (1990), Friedman
(1992b and 1992a: ch. 5), Patricia Kitcher (1990: ch. 8; 1992), Walker
(1990), and Brittan (1992). Friedman's view is notable in taking
a top-down approach to the systematicity of nature, on which empirical
laws of nature (such as the laws of chemistry) can be justified *a
priori* through a top-down approach illustrated by Kant's
justification of Newton's law of universal gravitation in the
*Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science*. Some of the
literature from this period, especially the views of Philip Kitcher
and Buchdahl, is discussed in Ginsborg 2018a.



A number of commentators have taken Kant's views on the
principle of nature's purposiveness for our cognitive faculties
to be fundamental for understanding Kant's views on the
possibility of empirical knowledge. Floyd (1998) and Allison (2001:
ch. 1) claim that the principle represents Kant's answer to
Hume's problem of induction; Ginsborg (1990a: ch. 4; 1990b)
takes it to be a condition of empirical conceptualization and hence of
all empirical judgment, not just of judgments based on inductive
inference; Patricia Kitcher (1990: ch. 8; 1992) also argues for a
close connection between Kant's views on the systematicity of
nature and empirical concept-formation. An even stronger view is
suggested by Abela (2006), who takes it to be required as a condition
for empirical truth, which he sees as required in turn for the
possibility of any object-directed representation. Geiger (2009) also
holds that the principle is required for all empirical cognition (see
also Geiger 2003), but argues that it is in the "Critique of
Teleological Judgment", and not in the Introductions to the
*Critique of Judgment* (nor in the Appendix to the Dialectic of
the first *Critique*), that Kant offers his fullest argument
for its necessity. Other commentators who take the principle of
nature's purposiveness to be a condition of empirical cognition
in general include Teufel (2017).



The idea that the assumption of nature's purposiveness for our
cognitive faculties is a condition of empirical concept-formation is
potentially helpful in addressing the problem of the unity of the
*Critique of Judgment* (see
 Section 1),
 given that the free play of imagination and understanding
characteristic of judgments of beauty is often seen as closely related
to the activity of imagination which allows us to categorize objects
as having general features and falling into kinds. More generally, the
question of how to relate the principle of nature's
purposiveness for our cognitive faculties to the activity of the
cognitive faculties in aesthetic judgment has been discussed by a
number of commentators; see, for example, Ginsborg (1990b), Pippin
(1996), Allison (2001: ch. 2), Guyer (2003b), Baz (2005), Caranti
(2005), Hughes (2006; 2007: ch. 7), Gentry (2018) and Geiger
(2020).


### 3.3 Organisms as Natural Purposes



In SSSS64-65 of the Analytic of Teleological Judgment,
Kant introduces the notion of a "natural purpose" or
"natural end" [*Naturzweck*] and argues both that
"organized beings", that is, plants and animals,
instantiate the concept of a natural purpose and also that they are
the only beings in nature that do so (SS65, 376). (Kant sometimes
says that they are natural purposes, and sometimes only that they must
be "regarded" or "considered" as natural
purposes.) Organized beings (or, to use the more modern term,
"organisms") are, or must be considered as, purposes
because we can conceive of their possibility only on the assumption
that they were produced in accordance with design. They thus meet the
definition of "purpose" given at SS10. (In the terms
introduced in
 Section 3.1,
 they display "inner objective material purposiveness".)
But they are, or must be considered, as products of nature rather than
products of conscious design.



What makes an organism qualify as a natural purpose is that it is
"both cause and effect of itself" (SS64, 371). Kant
gives a preliminary explanation of this idea at SS64 by calling
attention to three respects in which an organism, such as a tree,
stands in a causal relation to its own existence. First, in producing
offspring which resemble it, a tree "produces itself as far as
its species is concerned", so that the species of the tree
maintains itself in existence. Second, a tree preserves itself as an
individual by taking in nourishment from outside and converting it
into the kind of organic substance of which it, itself, is made.
Third, and most important, the various parts of a tree mutually
maintain one another in existence and hence maintain the whole tree in
existence. For example, while the leaves are produced by the tree as a
whole and depend on it for their growth and maintenance, they are in
turn necessary for the growth and maintenance of the other parts of
the tree, for example the trunk and roots. Kant also mentions a number
of further phenomena illustrating the way in which an organism is
"cause and effect" of itself, in particular the capacity
of certain organisms to regenerate missing parts, and more generally
the capacity of organisms to repair damage to themselves.



Kant goes into more detail about the notion of a natural purpose in
SS65, where he specifies two conditions something must meet in
order to be a natural purpose. The first, that the "parts are
possible...only through their relation to the whole"
(SS65, 373), is a condition on something's being, not only a
natural purpose, but a purpose *tout court*. It thus applies
not only to living things but also to artifacts, such as watches, in
which each part is there for the sake of its relation to the whole,
and is thus in a sense there only on account of its relation to the
whole. The second condition, which applies only to purposes which are
natural, is that "the parts of the thing...are reciprocally
cause and effect of their form" (ibid.). (This corresponds to
the third of the features to which Kant drew our attention in the
example of the tree at SS64.) This condition is not met by
artifacts, a point which Kant illustrates by appeal to the example of
a watch, whose parts, unlike the parts of a plant or animal, do not
produce one another or maintain one another in existence.



Kant is concerned, then, to emphasize both an analogy and a disanalogy
between organisms and artifacts. As in the case of artifacts, we can
make sense of organisms (that is, understand their structure and
workings) only by appeal to teleological notions. We make sense of an
organism by coming to understand what the functions of its various
parts are (e.g., by coming to understand that the function of the
heart is to pump blood round the body, or that the heart is there
"in order to" pump blood round the body) just as we make
sense of an artifact such as a watch by coming to understand the
functions of *its* parts (e.g., that a particular wheel is
there in order to turn the hour hand). But organisms are unlike
artifacts in that they are not produced or maintained by an external
cause, but instead have the self-producing and self-maintaining
character that is revealed in the kinds of vital properties
(reproduction of young, capacity to nourish themselves, reciprocal
dependence of parts, capacity for self-repair) which Kant illustrates
with the example of the tree.



The question of how the natural character of organisms can be
reconciled with their status as purposes, and hence of the very
coherence of the notion of a "natural purpose", is
indirectly addressed by Kant in the Dialectic of Teleological Judgment
in the form of a question about how we are to reconcile the apparently
conflicting demands of mechanistic and teleological explanation with
regard to living things (see
 Section 3.4
 below). But it can also be raised in a more direct form. How is it
possible to regard one and the same object both as a purpose (hence as
something which has been produced as a result of conscious design),
and as natural (hence--on the face of it--something which
has not been produced as a result of conscious design)? To say that we
regard it only *as if* it were designed does not on its own
dispose of the question, for it is not clear what it is to regard
something that is not designed "as if" it were designed:
if we are not ascribing to organisms the property of being artifacts,
then in what respect can we coherently regard them as similar to
artifacts?



Ginsborg (2001) attempts to resolve the problem of coherence by appeal
to a conception of purposiveness as normativity (see
 Section 3.1
 above), arguing that organisms can be regarded as subject to
normative standards without supposing that they were designed to
accord with those standards. Alternative solutions are offered by
Kreines (2005), who agrees that the notion of a purpose has normative
content but denies that organisms for Kant are in fact purposes, and
by Beisbart (2009), who argues that the appeal to normativity is
unnecessary for making sense of organisms as natural purposes, since
we can conceive of a natural object as artefact-like by conceiving of
its parts as produced reciprocally by one another and by the whole (in
the way illustrated by Kant through the example of the tree at
SS64). Gambarotto (2018: 14-22) addresses the problem by
denying that Kant's notion of a natural purpose is coherent;
Kant, according to Gambarotto, holds an "unstable" view,
because he was unable to free the notion of teleology from that of
intention.



While much discussion of Kant's biological teleology has
focussed on the Dialectic of Teleological Judgment, rather than the
Analytic, there is an excellent discussion of the Analytic of
Teleological Judgment in McLaughlin (1990: ch. 1), which sets
Kant's view of organisms in the context of eighteenth-century
biology. Huneman 2007 is a useful collection of articles which also
set Kant's views on organisms in historical context. Other
discussions of the Analytic's treatment of organisms as natural
purposes include Zumbach (1984), Illetterati (2014), Sustar
(2014), and Goy (2014b). Fricke (1990), Guyer (2003b), and Steigerwald
(2006) relate Kant's view of organisms as natural purposes to
his views about reflective judgment more generally. Breitenbach (2014)
argues that the ascription of purposiveness to organisms is a matter
of our regarding organic natural processes as analogous to
reason's intentional activity. An interesting question is raised
by the fact that Kant's conception of an organism appears to
come apart from the idea of a living thing, since Kant describes
"life" as belonging only to beings with desires. Does
Kant, then, not count plants as living things? Nunez (2021) addresses
this question by suggesting that, in a sense, plants have desires even
though they are not conscious.



Guyer (2001a) discusses the apparent threat posed by organisms to
Kant's conception of natural science as unified; a similar
problem is raised in Zammito (2012: 123). Breitenbach (2017) argues
that the threat is illusory, since the laws under which we unify
nature include teleological principles.



While Kant's account of organisms as natural purposes is often
discussed in the context of Kant's account of natural science or
of eighteenth-century biology, some commentators explore its
implications for Kant's moral teleology and views on rational
freedom; see for example N. Fisher (2019) and Ostaric (2021).


### 3.4 Mechanism and Teleology



The same considerations which lead Kant to claim, in the Analytic,
that we must regard organisms as purposes, lead him to claim, in the
Dialectic, that their production cannot be mechanically explained and
that they must instead be accounted for in terms which ultimately make
reference to teleology. In a well-known passage he declares that it
is



> 
> 
> absurd for human beings...to hope that there may yet arise a
> Newton who could make conceivable even so much as the production of a
> blade of grass according to natural laws which no intention has
> ordered. (SS75, 400)
> 
> 
> 



The mechanical inexplicability of organisms leads to an apparent
conflict, which Kant refers to as an "antinomy of
judgment", between two principles governing empirical scientific
enquiry. On the one hand, we must seek to explain everything in nature
in mechanical terms; on the other, some objects in nature resist
mechanical explanation and we need to appeal to teleology in order to
understand them (SS70, 387).



The question of how Kant resolves the Antinomy is controversial. At
least part of Kant's solution consists in the claim that both
principles are merely "regulative" rather than
"constitutive", that is, that they do not state how nature
really is, but only present principles which we must follow in
investigating nature. Kant develops this solution in detail by arguing
that both the need for mechanistic explanation for nature as a whole,
and the specific need to regard some products of nature (specifically,
organisms) in teleological terms, are due to peculiarities of our
human cognitive faculties. The core of this argument is given in
SS77, where Kant differentiates two kinds of understanding, the
"discursive" understanding of human beings, and a
contrasting "intuitive" understanding which (although Kant
does not say so explicitly) might be ascribed to God. While a being
with a discursive understanding cannot understand how an organism
could come about in ways that do not involve teleological causation,
this does not mean this could not be understood by an intuitive
understanding, and hence that the production of organisms is
impossible without such causation.



This argument on its own is not sufficient to address the question of
how the principles are to be reconciled in scientific enquiry, that
is, how we are to seek a mechanical explanation of organisms (as
required by the first principle) while still acknowledging that we
cannot understand them except by appeal to purposes. Kant's
ostensible answer to this question is that we must
"subordinate" mechanism to teleology (SS78, 414). Even
in the case of organisms, we must pursue the search for mechanical
explanation as far as possible, yet while still recognizing the need
for an ultimate appeal to purposes. The subordination of mechanism to
teleology is clarified in SSSS80-81, in the
"Methodology of Teleological Judgment", where Kant
connects his views to some of the biological controversies of the day,
regarding both the origin of the various species of plants and
animals, and the origin of individual plants and animals belonging to
already existing species. In the case of the origin of species, Kant
tentatively endorses a view which allows the natural development of
higher species out of lower ones, but which denies the possibility
that the lower species in turn could develop out of unorganized matter
as such. The view is "mechanical" to the extent that it
understands the development of one species from another as a natural
law-governed process which does not require special appeal to an
purpose in the case of each new species; but the mechanism is
"subordinated to teleology" in the sense that the
starting-point of the process, namely matter which itself has
organization and life, is intelligible only by appeal to purposes
(SS80). In the case of the origin of particular organisms, Kant
endorses a view (epigenesis) on which the emergence of an apparently
new plant or animal is not just the expansion or unfolding of one
which already existed in miniature (as on the preformationist view),
but a natural process whereby a new living thing comes into being. At
the same time, he denies that a living thing can come to be out of
non-living matter: the matter from which the embryo develops must
already be teleologically organized. The view is
"mechanical" in the sense that it denies that each living
thing was produced, like an artifact, in accordance with a specific
intention, and allows instead that once matter is endowed with life
and organization it has the power to produce other living things. But
again, as in the case of the origin of species, this
"mechanism" depends on living matter, whose possibility we
can understand only in teleological terms.



It is difficult to understand the implications of Kant's
discussion of mechanism and teleology without knowing what he means by
"mechanism", and unfortunately this is very hard to
determine from the text. Many commentators have taken the notion of
mechanism to be equivalent to the notion of causality in time which
figures in the *Critique of Pure Reason*, so that the principle
of mechanism is equivalent to the causal principle which Kant takes
himself to have proved in the Second Analogy. If the notion of
mechanism is understood in this way, then Kant's solution to the
antinomy of teleological judgment is radically at odds with his views
in the *Critique of Pure Reason*, since it involves the claim
that the principle of mechanism is merely regulative as opposed to
constitutive. McLaughlin (1989, 1990), and following him Allison
(1992), reject this reading, instead taking the notion of mechanism in
the relevant sense to correspond to a more specific type of causality,
namely the causality by which the parts of a thing determine the whole
rather than the whole's determining the parts; this view is also
taken by Zanetti (1993). Ginsborg (2001) offers a third proposal, on
which a thing can be explained "mechanically" if its
existence can be accounted for in terms of the intrinsic powers of the
matter out of which it comes to be. The topic of mechanism in the
context of the *Critique of Judgment* is discussed further in
Breitenbach (2008) and Geiger (2017).



A related interpretative issue concerns the grounds on which organisms
resist mechanical explanation, and hence need to be understood
teleologically. Many commentators, including McLaughlin (1990),
Allison (1992), and Guyer (2001a, 2003b), take organisms to be
mechanically inexplicable in virtue of the self-maintaining and
self-producing character which distinguishes them from artifacts (see
 Section 3.3).
 On this approach, organisms have to be explained teleologically
because, in contrast to machines, their parts cannot exist
independently of the whole to which they belong. Against this,
Ginsborg (2004) argues that the self-maintaining character of
organisms is irrelevant to their mechanical inexplicability in the
relevant sense. Kant's point in emphasizing the contrast between
organisms and machines is not to show that organisms require
teleological explanation (since machines such as clocks are no less in
need of such explanation), but on the contrary to show that, as
natural objects rather than artefacts, they are not to be explained in
terms of a designer's intentions. The disagreement is discussed
further in Breitenbach 2006, Watkins 2009, and McLaughlin 2014, all of
which engage with the related issue of how the Antinomy is
resolved.



There is a very helpful overview of the Antinomy of Teleological
Judgment in chapter 4 of Quarfood 2004 which includes many references
to relevant secondary literature. More recent discussions of the
Antinomy include, in addition to the articles mentioned in the
previous paragraph, Quarfood 2006, Breitenbach 2008, Quarfood 2014,
Nuzzo 2009, Huneman 2014, and Shimony 2018: the latter three articles
deal specifically with Kant's distinction between discursive and
intuitive understanding in SSSS76-77.


### 3.5 Nature as a System of Purposes



Kant is concerned with the role of teleology in our understanding not
only of individual organisms, but also of other natural things and
processes, and of nature as a whole. Experience presents us with many
cases in which features of a living thing's environment, both
organic and inorganic, are beneficial or indeed necessary to it: for
example rivers are helpful to the growth of plants, and thus
indirectly to human beings, because they deposit soil and thus create
fertile land (SS63, 367); grass is necessary for cattle and other
herbivorous animals, which in turn provide food for carnivores
(SS63, 368). Kant makes the negative point (a version of which he
had earlier argued at length in the *Only Possible Argument for the
Existence of God* of 1763) that we can understand these
arrangements without appeal to purposes. We can account for the origin
of rivers mechanically, and even though grass must be regarded as an
purpose on account of its internal organization, we do not need to
appeal to its usefulness to other living things in order to comprehend
it. However, he does hold that the natural objects figuring in these
useful arrangements have a type of purposiveness, namely outer or
relative purposiveness. They can be counted as purposive in this
relative sense as long as the thing to whose existence they contribute
is a living thing, and hence has inner purposiveness (this condition
is stated most clearly at SS82, 425).



The idea of the outer or relative purposiveness of one natural thing
for another, which is made possible by the idea of a natural purpose,
in turn makes possible the idea of nature as a system of purposes,
where everything in nature is teleologically connected to everything
else through relations of outer purposiveness. Kant puts this by
saying that the concept of a natural purpose "necessarily leads
to the idea of all of nature as a system in accordance with the rule
of purposes" (SS67, 379), but he also puts the point more
weakly by saying that the step from the idea of a natural purpose to
that of nature as a whole as a system of purposes is one which we
"may" [*durfen*] make (SS67, 380). This
does not mean that we are entitled, still less required, to ascribe an
intentional cause to purposive arrangements in nature, but it does
allow us to think of them as standing not only in a mechanical, but
also in a teleological order. The thought of such a teleological order
in turn leads to two further ideas: the idea of the *ultimate
purpose* [*letzter Zweck*] of nature, which is something
within nature for whose sake all other things within nature exist
(SS82, 426ff), and the idea of the *final purpose*
[*Endzweck*] of nature, which is something outside of nature
for whose sake nature as a whole exists (SS67, 378f.; SS84,
434ff.). While experience does not allow us to identify either
nature's ultimate purpose or its final purpose, Kant argues on
*a priori* grounds that the final purpose of nature can only be
man considered as a moral subject, that is, considered as having the
supersensible ability to choose purposes freely (SS84, 435). To
consider man in this way is to conceive him as noumenon, rather than
as part of nature. But human beings are capable of realizing their
noumenal freedom only in virtue of their capacity, as natural beings,
to set themselves purposes and to use nature to fulfil them. Kant
calls the development of this capacity "culture", and
takes it to require the acquisition both of specific abilities
("culture of skill") and of the ability to make choices
without being influenced by the inclinations to enjoyment stemming
from our animal nature ("culture of discipline"). Culture
is the ultimate purpose of nature because it prepares man for what he
must do in order to be the final purpose of nature (SS83,
431).



Kant's views about the teleology of nature are discussed in
Guyer 2001b and 2014 and Watkins 2014; the latter offers a very
helpful discussion of Kant's justification for the extension of
his views about teleology in individual organisms to nature as a
whole. See also A. Cohen's (2006) discussion of the relation
between Kant's views on the generation of organisms and his
conception of the final purpose of nature. N. Fisher (2019)
understands human freedom as an example of the "teleological
lawgiving" responsible for the purposiveness of both organisms
individually and nature as a whole, and uses this as the basis for an
interpretation of Kant's argument that the final purpose of
nature is human beings insofar as they are free.


### 3.6 Teleology, Morality and Religion



Part of Kant's aim in the "Critique of Teleological
Judgment" is to clarify the relation of natural teleology to
religion, and to argue in particular against
"physicoteleology", that is, the attempt to use natural
teleology to prove the existence of God. (The topic of physicotheology
was of concern to Kant throughout his career: Kant proposes a
"revised physicotheology" in the *Only Possible
Argument for the Existence of God* (1763), and offers a more
far-reaching criticism of physicotheology in the *Critique of Pure
Reason*, at A620/B648ff.) Appeal to natural teleology may justify
the assumption of an intelligent cause of nature, but it cannot
justify the assumption that this cause has wisdom, let alone that it
is infinite in every respect, and in particular supremely wise
(SS85, 441). For this we need to appeal, not to natural, but to
moral, teleology, and in particular to the idea (itself belonging not
to natural, but to moral teleology) of man as final purpose of nature.
The idea of nature as purposively directed towards the existence of
rational beings under moral laws allows us to conceive of an author of
nature who is not merely intelligent, but also has the other
attributes associated with the traditional idea of God, for example
omniscience, omnipotence and wisdom (which includes omnibenificence
and justice) (SS86, 444). We have to assume the existence of a
being with these attributes if we ourselves are to adopt the purpose
required by the moral law, a purpose which Kant calls the
"highest good" and which is discussed in his moral
writings.



Although natural teleology cannot prove the existence of God, it
nonetheless has a positive role to play with respect to religion and
morality, in that it leads us to ask what the final purpose of nature
is, and relatedly, to inquire into the attributes of God as author of
nature. Thus, as Kant puts it, it "drives us to seek a
theology" (SS85, 440), and thus serves as a preparation or
"propadeutic" to theology (SS85, 442). Kant also
claims that "if the cognition of natural purposes is connected
with that of the moral purpose" then "it is of great
significance for assisting the practical reality of the idea [of
God]" (SS88, 456). The positive role of natural teleology in
establishing religion and morality has been emphasized by Guyer (see
especially 2000, 2001b, 2002a), who takes the "Critique of
Teleological Judgment" to provide an important argument from
natural teleology to morality.



A different kind of connection between Kant's natural teleology
and his views about morality is suggested in Kain 2009, which
interprets Kant's biological theories as supporting his view
that all members of the human species (including infants and the
severely disabled) have moral status.



The connection between teleology and morality is often thought to be
central to making sense of the *Critique of Judgment* as a
unified work; see
 Section 1.


### 3.7 Relevance of Kant's Natural Teleology to Contemporary Biological Theory



Kant's writings on natural teleology take for granted the
biological theories of his time, which were very different from those
of the present day. While theorists at the time that Kant was writing
were prepared to consider the possibility that present-day species
evolved out of earlier and more primitive forms of life--and even
out of mere matter as such--they had no inkling of Darwin's
theory of natural selection, nor of Mendel's laws of
inheritance. Moreover, it was widely assumed that living beings were
made of a different kind of matter from that found elsewhere in the
universe; and while some biological theorists rejected this
"vitalist" assumption there was, as yet, no experimental
evidence against it. Kant himself follows Blumenbach in assuming a
distinctive kind of living matter which can be understood only in
teleological terms. It might seem implausible, then, that Kant's
views could have any relevance to contemporary biological thought.



However, there are reasons to think that contemporary biological
theory is no less committed to teleology than its eighteenth-century
counterpart, in particular through biologists' use of functional
language in their characterizations of the parts and behaviour of
organisms. Kant can thus be seen as addressing a problem which is also
of concern to present-day philosophers of biology: how to make sense
of the idea that biological entities and processes can have purposes
or functions without presupposing the existence of a divine designer.
A number of interpreters have recently drawn on Kant to propose a
solution to the problem, although without necessarily agreeing on what
a Kantian solution amounts to. Examples of explicitly
"Kantian" approaches to teleology include ch. 3 of
Quarfood 2004, Walsh 2006, A. Cohen 2007, Breitenbach 2009, and
Ginsborg 2014. McLaughlin's (2001) book on functional
explanation, while not explicitly proposing a Kantian approach, draws
on Kant at several points. A different suggestion regarding the
relevance of Kant's views to contemporary biology is offered by
Roth (2014), who argues that Kant's anti-reductionism regarding
organisms--that they cannot be understood as composed out of
pre-existing parts--offers a model for contemporary molecular
biology.



The view that Kant's theory is relevant to the contemporary
debate about biological functions is challenged forcefully in Zammito
2006.