I
Werner Pluhar "Translator's Introduction" to Kant's Critique of Judgment is not simply a brief summary of the main results of Kant's final critique, but it is rather an attempt to make plausible the unity of Kant's critical philosophy, a unity for which the power of judgment plays a central role. Pluhar writes:
. . . it is the power of judgment that mediates the transition from the completely indeterminate supersensible as substrate of nature to the morally determined supersensible, and hence from the realm of nature of the first Critique to the realm of freedom of the second Critique . . .The power of judgment, especially the aesthetic power of judgment . . . performs the mediation by means of its indeterminate concept of nature's subjective purposiveness, as equivalent to the indeterminate concept of the supersensible basis of this purposiveness . . . It thereby unites the three Critiques in a system (Pluhar, lxxxv).
What is going on here? Far from understanding the Critique of Judgment as a work of aesthetics in Kant's declining declining years, Pluhar sees the work as Kant did, a work that is supposed to somehow bridge the fissure between the first two Critiques. Kant is quite clear in both of his Introductions to the Critique of Judgment about the task given to the Critique of Judgment. In Section III of the Second Introduction to the Critique of Judgment -- the one published during Kant's lifetime -- the philosopher writes:
The concepts of nature, which contain a priori the basis for all theoretical cognition, were found to rest on the legislation of the understanding. The concept of freedom was found to contain a priori the basis for all practical precepts that are unconditioned by the sensible, and to rest on the legislation of reason (Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar edition, 16).
But how might these two connect? Kant in the Third Antinomy of Pure Reason discussed the tension between physical human beings who fall under the mechanistic determinism of the First Critique and these same beings simultaneously acting out of duty for the sake of the moral law falling under freedom in the Second Critique. How is this possible? Kant explains:
Therefore, both these powers, apart from being applicable in terms of logical form to principles of whatever origin, have in addition a legislation of their own in terms of content which is not subject to any other (a priori) legislation, and hence this justifies the division of philosophy into theoretical and practical (CJ, 16).
Kant is claiming that while the Understanding legislates over the realm of nature and Reason (practically considered) over the realm of morality, and while the two must remain in their own spheres, there is nonetheless a way to connect these legislations, a way not subject to the a priori legislations of either, a way that grants some unity to philosophy in both its theoretical and practical uses. What is this way?
Kant argues that there is a mediating link between understanding and reason, and this link is judgment. He writes:
And yet the family of our higher cognitive powers also includes a mediating link between understanding and reason. This is judgment, about which we have cause to suppose, by analogy, that it too may contain a priori, if not a legislation of its own, then at least a principle of its own, perhaps a merely subjective one, by which to search for laws. Even though such a principle would lack a realm of objects as its own domain, it might sill have some territory, and this territory might be of such a character that none but this very principle might hold in it (CJ, 16).
Judgment does not legislate a priori as do the understanding through pure concepts and practical reason through the determination of the will by the moral law, but it nonetheless does something. It is, in fact, an a priori subjective principle that has a territory, though not a domain. It is concerned with coherence and systematicity, with the unity of our a priori legislative endeavors. Kant declares that judgment used in such a mediation of understanding and reason pertains to an "ordering of our presentational powers, an ordering that seems even more important than the one involving judgment's kinship with the family of cognitive powers" (Ibid.). Given that Kant spends considerable time in the Critique of Pure Reason reflecting upon, clarifying and developing the notion of judgment employed there, the assertion that the notion of judgment developed in this Third Critique is "even more important" is almost shocking. Kant explains how judgment so conceived relates to understanding and reason.
For all of the souls' powers or capacities can be reduced to three that can't be derived further from a common basis: the cognitive power, the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, and the power of desire. The understanding alone legislates for the cognitive power when this power is referred to nature, namely, as a power of theoretical cognition . . . for only with respect to nature (as appearance) is it possible for us to give laws by means of a priori concepts of nature, which are actually pure concepts of the understanding. For the power of desire, considered as a higher power governed by the concept of freedom, only reason (which alone contains that concept) legislates a priori. Now between the cognitive power and the power of desire lies the feeling of pleasure, just as judgment lies between understanding and reason. Hence we must suppose . . . that judgment contains an a priori principle of its own, and also suppose that since the power of desire is necessarily connected with pleasure or displeasure, . . . judgment will bring about a transition from the pure cognitive power, i.e., from the domain of the concepts of nature, to the domain of the concept of freedom, just as in its logical use it makes possible the transition from understanding to reason (CJ, 16-8).
The problem is that the legislations of the understanding on nature and reason on the will are fundamentally heterogeneous. One might recall the problem of Descartes. How is the freedom of an immortal soul possible in a fully deterministic, mechanistic universe? Descartes' dualistic causal interactionism was not able to bridge the disparate notice domains of res extensa and res cogitans.
Kant has the same problem, it appears, but in a decidedly Kantian way. Instead of two ontically disparate domains, Kant gives us two different legislations, two different givings of laws: one to that which gives rise to the determination of nature, the other to that which gives rise to the determination of the will. But the determinations of nature and the determinations of the will are quite different: the former is a mechanistic, deterministic-type determination, the latter a free, practical reason-type determination. Both are autonomous human activities; the former theoretical and the latter practical. As a result of our legislation there are two domains, but these domains follow the legislation, they are not prior to it. Kant says all of this quite clearly in Section 9:
The understanding legislates a priori for nature, as object of sense, in order to give rise to theoretical cognition of nature in a possible experience. Reason legislates a priori for freedom and for freedom's own causality, on other words, for the supersensible in the subject, in order to give rise to unconditioned practical cognition (CJ, 35)
But these legislations for the sake of nature and freedom do not integrally connect to each other. There is a disconnect. Kant explains:
The great gulf that separates the supersensible from appearances completely cuts off the domain of the concept of nature under the one legislation, and the domain of the concept of freedom under the other legislation, from any influence that each (according to is own basic laws) might have had on the other. The concept of freedom determines nothing with regard to our theoretical cognition of nature, just as the concept of nature determines nothing with regard to the practical laws of freedom; and to this extent it is not possible to throw a bridge from one domain to the other (CJ, 35-6).
There is nothing in nature that can support freedom in the moral order. The sensible cannot, for Kant, determine the supersensible, but it is possible that the latter can determine the former. Freedom really can manifest itself in nature!
. . . though the bases that determine the causality governed by the concept of freedom . . . do not lie in nature, and even though the sensible cannot determine the supersensible in the subject, yet the reverse is possible . . . and this possibility is contained in the very concept of a causality through freedom, whose effect is to be brought about in the world (but in conformity with the laws of freedom). It is true that when we use the word cause with regard to the supersensible, we mean only the basis that determines natural things to exercise their causality to produce an effect in conformity with natural laws proper to that causality, yet in accordance with the formal principle of the laws of reason as well (CJ, 36).
Kant did, of course, use the term affection to talk about the relationship between the things-in-themselves and empirical objects. There is something in the supersensible that constrains how empirical objects are constituted. While human beings legislate nature, they do not fully construct it because nature (and its empirical objects) is a joint product between human cognizing activity and the thing-in-itself. But in the passage above he uses the term cause, a term that in the First Critique is explicitly tied to application of the pure concepts of the understanding to spatialized-temporalized intuitions. In fact, he uses cause in the way that the older metaphysicians did. The cause of any determination is the logical ground of that determination. The supersensible "grounds" causality in accordance with natural laws, while also "grounding" reason's freedom in its encounter with the moral law. Kant is searching for unity. But by what right does one say there is such unity? What is the grounding of this grounding? \ Is the supersensible grounding a deliverance of metaphysical reason or a result of the understanding's application of its pure concepts? If neither, what is it? Kant elaborates:
It is judgment that presupposes this condition a priori, and without regard to the practical, [so that] this power provides us with the concept that mediates between the concepts of nature and the concept of freedom: the concept of a purposiveness of nature, which makes possible the transition from pure practical lawfulness, from lawfulness in terms of nature to the final purpose set by the concept of freedom. For it is through this concept that we cognize the possibility of [achieving] the final purpose, which can be actualized only in nature and in accordance with its laws (CJ, 36-7).
Judgment unifies the legislations of understanding and reason. It grants a determinability to the supersensible substrate, and thus mediates between it's undetermined nature from the standpoint of the understanding, and its determined nature from that of reason.
The understanding . . . points to the supersensible substrate of nature; but it leaves this substrate wholly undetermined. Judgment, through its a priori principle of judging nature in terms of possible particular laws of nature, provides nature's supersensible substrate (within as well as outside us) with determinability by the intellectual power. But reason, through its practical law, gives this substrate determination. This judgment makes possible the transition from the domain of the concept of nature to that of the concept of freedom (CJ, 37).
Judgment grants the supersensible substrate of nature -- both outside and inside us! -- determinability, i.e. the possibility of determination. Kant continues to explain how it is that judgment mediates between understanding and reason by appealing to the differing powers of each.
Regarding the powers of the soul . . . , for the power of cognition . . . the constitutive a priori principles lie in the understanding; for the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, they lie in judgment, [as far as it is] independent of concepts and sensations, which might have to do with determining the power of desire and hence be directly practical; for the power of desire, they lie in reason, which is practical without the mediation of any pleasure whatsoever, regardless of origin, and which determines of r this power . . . the final purpose that also carries with it pure intellectual liking for its object. Judgment's concept of a purposiveness of nature still belongs to the concepts of nature, but only as a regulative principle of the cognitive power, even though the aesthetic judgment about certain objects (of nature or of art) that prompts this concept of purposiveness is a constitutive principle with regard to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure (CJ, 37).
But what is this pleasure and displeasure of which Kant speaks? It is of a distinctly intellectual kind.
The spontaneity in the play of the cognitive powers, whose harmony with each other contains the basis of this pleasure, makes the concept of purposiveness suitable for mediating the connection of the domain of the concept of nature with that of the concept of freedom, as regards freedom's consequences, inasmuch as this harmony also promotes the mind's receptivity to moral feeling (CJ, 37-8).
Kant argues that the transcendental condition for the possibility of the universality of judgment of taste is found in the way that beautiful objects incite in us a "free play" in the understanding and imagination, a harmony or "proportioned attunement" with respect to which the object is judged prior to the production of pleasure in us. The idea is that the general cognitive features of human beings include a reciprocal harmony between imagination and understanding. While judgments of taste make use of no determinate concepts, they nevertheless have a conceptual nature, and are accordingly reflective.
Thus it is, for Kant, that the reciprocal harmony between understanding and imagination that is a feature of subjectivity within cognition in general also pertains to judgments of taste. A judging of the object prior to the experience of pleasure occurs, and this judging consists in the recognition of the object engendering a harmony of imagination and understanding. Upon this basis a judgment of taste can follow the subject's feeling of pleasure, a judgment which declares the judgment of taste universally valid.
In order to get maximum clarity on Kant's attempt to mediate understanding and reason by judgment, it is necessary to get very clear on what kind of judgment Kant is considering. To this we now turn.
II
For Kant, die Urteilskraft is the power "for thinking the particular under the universal." He distinguishes two kinds of judgments in the Critique of Judgment: determining judgments (die bestimmende Urteile) and reflecting judgments (die reflecterende Urteile).
Determining judgments subsume given particulars under general concepts or universals already given. Kant makes extended use of determining judgments in the First Critique in synthesizing the manifold of intuition and in the act of imagination in "schematizing" its concepts. Judgment in both cases is governed by the categories of the understanding.
Reflecting judgments, on the other hand, are those which locate or find a universal for a given particular. Kant assigns such reflecting judgments different roles in his system. The fact that there exist such reflecting judgments seems a primary motivation for Kant writing the Critique of Judgment.
Kant believes reflecting judgments can be associated with empirical science, for such science presupposes one has the requisite ability to classify natural things into genera and species, and this ability demands reflecting judgment. Moreover, the construction of systematic explanatory theories demands reflecting judgment. Such judgments allow us to form empirical concepts and thus regard nature as empirically lawlike.
But there are other important uses for reflectierende Urteile: They are used both in aesthetic and teleological judgments. Kant believes reflecting judgments are most purely grasped in judgments about the beauty of nature. It is because of reflecting judgments that we can have a feeling of intellectual pleasure when encountering a beautiful object. Kant makes explicit appeal to the notion of reflecting judgment in his Deduction of Taste, where the principle of taste is identified with the "subjective principle of judgment in general."
Kant scholarship often treats the notion of judgment almost entirely as it appears in the Critique of Pure Reason, where it is involved with the pure concepts of the understanding and is accordingly cognitive in nature. More recent scholarship, however, has attempted to understand the notion of judgment employed in the earlier Critique on the basis of the notion of a reflecting judgment in the Critique of Judgment. One might argue that reflecting judgments finally ground comparison and abstraction, both of which are necessary for the formation of empirical concepts. It is these concepts, not treated in detail in the Critique of Pure Reason, that are nonetheless necessary for the application of the pure concepts of the understanding to intuition.
So how is empirical knowledge truly possible for Kant? Does he claim that empirical reality can be known solely on the basis of application of the pure concepts of the understanding to the realm of appearances? It is this question that Kant is concerned with in the Critique of Judgment. The particularity of empirical law demands not only constitutive legislation, but also empirical generalization. Given that the cases are particular, Kant is interested in the universal that applies to them. What might we freely think that could account for the subsumption of individual cases under the universal?
In the Critique of Judgment, Kant deals with judgments of taste, judgments of teleology, and scientific induction generally. Anybody studying the history and/or philosophy of science realize that human beings have, in fact, made sense of the world in different ways. Though nature's particulars are given contingently, human beings are free to think a universal that might account for the particulars, a universal that endeavors to understand these particulars in terms of a greater lawlike structure, i.e., a theory.
The universal of which Kant is herein interested is not, however, that of the a priori which is necessary for the possibility of cognition as such. This universal is not legislated into nature, nor can it be deductively derived from nature's particulars. Kant is rather interested in the multiplicity of empirical forms. But how does this multiplicity of forms get unified? How can a random collection of phenomena not be a "rhapsody," but rather be seen in terms of the unity of nature? Simply put, how is coherent and unitary experience possible in nature's empirical, contingent manifestations?
Since the faculty of judgment is "thinking the particular as contained in the universal," the universal must apply to the particular, and the particular must instance the universal. Judgment connects particular cases to laws that apply to those cases; it connects universal laws with particular cases instantiating those laws.
In a reflecting judgment only the particular is given, and judgment must "find" the universal for the particular instance. Since this task must occur before any further operation of judgment, it is judgment's primary task. Unlike a determining judgment, there is no determination of objects in this judgment; it is merely reflective. While in the Critique of Pure Reason, judgment "gives law" to the particular, in a reflective judgment, judgment searches for laws which can cover the particular. Kant points out that since reflecting judgments do not legislate over an objective order, they actually apply properly only to themselves. They are heuristic, not constitutive. Such judgments nonetheless find the correct universal required by the specific empirical case. One might say they are concerned with proper inductions.
Reflecting judgments are heuristic. While they deal with subsumption, there is no general rule determining that judgment subsumes correctly. Accordingly, reflecting judgment seems to have a precarious existence. Is the faculty of reflecting judgment simply a natural talent that some have, or can a priori principles be specified? Kant's task in the Critique of Judgment is to isolate the a priori principles whereby proper subsumption occur. Reflecting judgments naturally connect to judgments of taste because in these there is a universal rule that cannot be stated, but which is nonetheless connectable with the sensus communis of taste itself.
A primary aim of natural science is to offer a causal account of why things happen as they do. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant is concerned with the objective validity of the universal order which governs the physical world; he is dealing with nature in general. But the world of nature in its empirical specificity is not finally determinable by application of the pure concepts of understanding alone. Something more is needed, something that can mediate between the universal, empirical laws of nature and particular instances of them. He believes that the faculty of judgment provides this mediation.
Kant points out that the manifold, empirical forms of nature are left indeterminate after application of determining judgments. The pure concepts of the understanding do not and cannot explain empirical diversity among the sciences. The only way that particular empirical forms can be determinate is through reflecting judgment. Such judgments are necessary to have a unified, meaningful experience of the manifold empirical forms left indeterminate by application of the pure concepts of the understanding.
In Section V of the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Kant reflects in a sustained way on reflecting judgment in general. He declares:
To reflect . . . is to hold given presentations up to, and compare them with, either other presentations or one's cognitive power [itself], in reference to a concept that this [comparison] makes possible (CJ, 400).
Reflection demands a principle, says Kant, a transcendent principle.
Yet [reflecting judgment] which seeks concepts even for empirical presentations, qua empirical, must make for this [end] this further assumption: it must assume that nature, with its boundless diversity has hit upon a division of this diversity into genera and species that enables our judgment to find accordance among the natural forms it compares, and [so] enables it to arrive at empirical concepts, as well as at coherence among these by ascending to concepts that are more general [though] also empirical. In other words, judgment presupposes a system of nature even in terms of empirical laws, and it does so a priori and hence be means of a transcendental principle (CJ, 400, fn. 21).
Kant claims that we must presuppose that nature displays particular forms that we can cognize "in terms of universal laws" (CJ, 400). Not to presuppose this would mean that "all our reflection would be performed merely haphazardly and blindly" (CJ, 401). He points out that with respect to determining judgments, judgment requires no special principle by which to reflect. But for reflecting judgments, this is not the case. Indeed, "judgment needs for it's reflection a principle of its own, a principle that is also transcendental" (CJ, 401). So what is presupposed "whenever we compare empirical presentations in order to cognize . . . empirical laws and specific forms that conform to them?" (CJ, 401). Kant responds:
What is presupposed is that nature, even in its empirical laws, has adhered to a certain parsimony suitable for our judgment, and adhered to a uniformity we can grasp: and this presupposition must precede all comparison, as a priori principle of judgment (CJ, 401).
And what does this suggest about a reflecting judgment and how it might differ from the seeming algorithms by which the pure concepts of the understanding order nature?
It does not deal with them [natural things] mechanically . . . like an instrument, guided by the understanding and the senses; it deals with them artistically, in terms of a principle that is universal but also indeterminate: the principle of a purposive arrangement of nature in a system -- an arrangement [made], as it were, for the benefit of our judgment -- by which the particular natural laws (about which the understanding says nothing) are [made] suitable for the possibility of experience as a system, as we must presuppose if we are to have any hope of finding our way in [the] labyrinth [resulting] form the diversity of possible particular laws (CJ, 402).
While reflecting judgments have their origin in a transcendental principle, Kant claims that it is a principle merely for "the logical use of judgment" (CJ, 402). This use consists in classifying the diverse:
[We must] compare several classes, each falling under a definite concept; and when these classes are completely [enumerated] in terms of their common characteristic, we must subsume them under higher classes (genera), until we reach the concept containing the principle of the entire classification (and constituting the highest genus) (CJ, 402).
In so doing, Kant says, we "make the universal concept specific by indicate the diverse [that falls] under it" (CJ, 403). Kant is dealing here with the universal problem of the assumed homomorphism between the structure of knowing and the structure of being, a homomorphism making possible the knowing of that being. Kant continues:
It is clear that reflecting judgment . . . cannot undertake to classify all of nature in terms of its empirical variety unless it presupposes that nature itself makes its transcendental laws specific in terms of some principle. Now this principle can only by that of [nature's] appropriateness for the power of judgment itself . . . to find among things . . sufficient kinship to be able to bring them under empirical concepts (classes), and bring these under more general laws (higher genera), and so arrive at an empirical system of nature. Now this kind of classification is not [derived from] ordinary empirical cognition, but is artificial: . . . so far as we think of nature as making itself specific in terms of such a principle, we regard nature as art. . . Hence judgment's own principle is: Nature, for the sake of the power of judgment, makes its universal laws specific [and] into empirical ones, according to the form of a logical system (CJ, 403-04).
It is now time to talk of nature's Zweckmaessigkeit (purposiveness). Purposiveness, for Kant, belongs not to reason, but to reflective judgment. Reason would determinately judge purpose to be in the thing-in-itself. But reason's powers are not up to this task. Any talk of purposiveness must relate to reflecting judgment. "It is posited sole in the subject: in the subject's mere power to reflect" (CJ, 404).
For we call something purposive if its existence seems to presuppose a presentation of that same thing; [and] natural laws are constituted, and related to one another, as if judgment had designed them for its own need[s] are [indeed] similar to [the cases where] the possibility of [certain] things presupposes that these things are based on a presentation of them. Hence judgment, by means of its principle, things of nature as purposive, in [the way] nature makes its forms specific through empirical laws (CJ, 404).
Reflecting judgment does not "carve the beast of reality at its joints" (Plato), nor lay down algorithmically the rules by which nature must operate. Rather such judgment allows us to think nature as purposive, not in terms of the purpose of each natural object, but rather in regard to "their relation to one another," that is in so far as "the suitability which, despite their great diversity, they have for a logical system of empirical concepts" (CJ, 404).
The point is that nature is present to us in a manifold manner, but determine judgments and the pure concepts of the understanding cannot think the manifold with respect to its empirical specificity. Thus, a different principle of the unity of the manifold must determine their necessity. This principle which concerns the unity of the empirical manifold must be the principle of reflecting judgment.
Since this faculty does not concern the understanding and its laws, it must display its own principle. The principle of the unity of the empirical manifold just is the principle of the reflective faculty of judgment. Recall this passage from the Critique of Pure Reason.
However exaggerated and absurd it may sound to say that the understanding is itself the source of the laws of nature, and so of its formal unity, such an assertion in nonetheless correct and is in keeping with the object to which it refers, namely experience. Certainly, empirical laws as such can never derive their origin from the pure understanding. That is as little possible as to conceive completely the inexhaustible multiplicity of appearances merely by reference to the pure form of sensible intuition. But all empirical laws are only special determinations of the pure laws of the understanding, under which, and according to the norm of which, they first become possible (A127-8).
The empirical laws are "special determinations" of the universal laws of the understanding. The latter make the former possible. In the footnote to Section 2 of the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Kant is clearly aware of the problem of connecting these two.
The possibility of an experience in general is the possibility of empirical cognitions as synthetic judgments. Hence this possibility cannot be derived analytically from a mere comparison of perceptions . . . for the connection of two different perceptions in the concept of an object (to yield a cognition of it) is a synthesis, and the only way in which this synthesis makes empirical cognition, i.e., experience, possible is through principles [(Prinzipien)] of the synthetic unity of appearances, i.e., through principles [(Grundsätze)] by which they are brought under the categories. Now these empirical cognitions do form an analytic unity of all experience according to that which they necessarily have in common (namely those transcendental laws of nature), but they do not form that synthetic unity of experience as a system that connects the empirical laws even according to that in which they differ (and where their diversity can be infinite) (CJ, 393, fn. 2).
In the Critique of Pure Reason, application of the understanding to appearances resulted in a synthetic unity of apperception such that the understanding legislated the general laws of nature. Kant here calls this "analytic" by virtue of their transcendental nature in our empirical cognition of nature. It is with regard to the further problem of the unity of the manifold of nature's empirical forms they are analytical because they deal with what all experiences have in common. Since they cannot speak to how different empirical laws actually differ, they cannot ground the synthetic unity of the empirical laws of nature.
Universal laws tell us what empirical objects have in common. But the homogeneous nature of this domain cannot account for the heterogeneous nature of the actual empirical world. Universal principles do not allow exploration of the particularity and the concreteness of empirical experience. The Critique of Judgment is interested in the synthetic unity of the empirical laws in so far as these laws or heterogeneous. There are, after all, many more conditions to empirical objects other than simply being in time and space and subject to universal laws of synthesis. Kant knows that "specifically different natures, apart from what they have in common as belonging to nature in general, can still be causes in an infinite variety of ways."
Kant understands that the universal laws of nature legislated by understanding, while granting explanation in nature in terms of universal laws of motion, nonetheless are inadequate in connecting the heterogeneity of nature. For this we need principles allowing systematicity. Since systematicity presupposes "purposiveness" (Zweckmaessigkeit), we must have recourse to the latter category in order for nature not to be utterly chaotic.
Kant claimed in the Critique of Pure Reason that were there no pure concepts of understanding, there would be only a "rhapsody of perceptions." But Kant is dealing with a similar problem of rhapsody with respect to reflecting judgment. If we did not assume an a priori principle regulating the synthetic unity of particular forms in the manifold experience of nature, we could not connect these particular forms. But this a priori of reflecting judgment is not the a priori of the understanding, but rather one that is merely regular, heuristic, and subjectively necessary.
For Kant, "nature specifies its universal laws according to the principle of purposiveness for our cognitive faculty." Through reflecting judgment our empirical cognitions can be placed into a coherent unity. Such reflecting judgments form the transcendental ground common to both our aesthetic and teleological experience of nature in the manifold of particular forms. Such judgments mediating understanding and reason, finally account for the overall unity of our cognitive and moral lives.
One might also think of things this way: Given our experience of the world and apparent teleological systems we find in it, e.g., biological organisms or human psychology, how can we think such teleology? How can we think purpose? It is excluded, after all, from the domain of nature resulting from our legislation of the pure concepts of understanding. Where might it be? It cannot be asserted of things in themselves, because such a metaphysical assertion would be a "transcendental illusion." We may encounter purpose practically in our moral lives, but how does that practical encounter relate to our theories? So how can we account for the purpose we find in biology and the purpose we find in ourselves and our moral lives if we cannot find purpose through our legislations of understanding and reason? Kant believes reflecting judgments make purposiveness possible. We shall now turn explicitly to Pluhar's argument to see whether Kant has succeeded in his efforts to find in reflecting judgment the mediator of understanding and reason.
No comments:
Post a Comment