On Reflecting Judgment and the Transcendental Media
Quaeritur
Utrum iudicium reflectens, quod inter intellectum et rationem mediare intendit, in ipsa ratione humana exprimat imaginem intellectus divini, ita ut ratio finita per participationem eiusdem logici ordinis possit adunare naturam et libertatem in unitate transcendentalis finalitatis.
Whether the reflecting judgment, which mediates between understanding and reason, expresses within human reason an image of the divine intellect, such that the finite mind, by participation in that same logical order, may unite nature and freedom within a transcendental unity of finality.
Thesis
The reflecting judgment is the finite echo of divine intelligence. Whereas the determining judgment merely applies universals already possessed, the reflecting judgment searches for the universal latent within the given particular. In this creative search the human intellect mirrors the divine act by which the Logos draws form out of multiplicity and unites it within a purposive whole. It is therefore the participatory point at which human reason, open to both nature and freedom, attests its origin in the transcendent order of divine reason.
Locus Classicus
Kritik der Urteilskraft, §77 (AA V:406):
“Die Urteilskraft hat also ein Prinzip a priori für die Möglichkeit der Natur, als eines Systems der Gesetze; aber nur in ihrer reflektirenden, nicht in ihrer bestimmenden Gebrauch.”
Kritik der Urteilskraft, §57 (AA V:179):
“Die Urteilskraft überhaupt ist das Vermögen, das Besondere als unter dem Allgemeinen enthalten zu denken. Ist das Allgemeine (die Regel, das Prinzip, das Gesetz) gegeben, so ist das Urteil, welches das Besondere darunter subsumirt, bestimmend. Ist aber nur das Besondere gegeben, wozu sie das Allgemeine finden soll, so ist das Urteil reflectirend.”
These passages locate the Urteilskraft reflectirend as that faculty through which human reason, lacking the divine intellect’s immediate unity of concept and intuition, nonetheless participates analogically in the Logos by seeking the universality immanent within the given.
Explicatio
Kant distinguishes between two uses of judgment:
Determining judgment (bestimmende Urteilskraft) applies a known universal to a particular. It functions executively, reproducing a conceptual order already supplied by the understanding.
Reflecting judgment (reflectierende Urteilskraft) begins with the particular and seeks the universal appropriate to it. It functions creatively, establishing unity where none is given.
This difference corresponds to two modes of intellect. The determining judgment imitates the providential intellectus ordinans, the intellect that administers law already decreed. The reflecting judgment, by contrast, imitates the intellectus creator, the divine mind that gives form to what has no prior rule.
In the Critique of Judgment, Kant introduces this reflective power to mediate between nature and freedom, the realms sundered by his earlier critiques. The reflecting judgment discovers a Zweckmäßigkeit der Natur, a purposiveness of nature that, though not demonstrable as an objective property, is nonetheless necessarily presupposed by human reason. This purposiveness is not a law among others but the very possibility of lawfulness as such.
The mind, in reflecting upon nature, finds itself compelled to think the world als ob it were ordered for cognition and moral vocation. In this “as if,” finite intellect testifies to its participation in an order beyond itself. The reflecting judgment, therefore, is not a mere psychological projection but the echo of divine ordering, the resonance of the Logos within the act of human intellection.
Whereas the bestimmende Urteilskraft operates within a finished creation, the reflectierende Urteilskraft experiences the world as if it were still being formed. It is the cognitive analogue of divine creativity: the search for unity that mirrors the eternal act in which the divine intellect knows both universal and particular as one.
Here the theology of the Logos as gathering becomes luminous. The Logos unites the dispersed into intelligible wholeness; it is the principle in which multiplicity coheres. Likewise, the reflecting judgment performs, within the finite mind, this same gathering act by drawing together the scattered manifold of experience, and seeking the universal that would make them one. In this unifying motion the intellect imitates the divine Logos, whose gathering of creation into order is mirrored analogically in every act of reflective understanding.
Thus, the reflecting judgment may be called participatory: its movement from the particular to the universal is an analogical repetition, in finitude, of God’s movement from universal wisdom to particular creature. Through it, the human intellect becomes aware that all understanding presupposes being already gathered into intelligibility by the Word.
The transcendental media through which this participation is perceived are two:
Aesthetic judgment, wherein beauty intimates purposive unity without concept;
Teleological judgment, wherein the order of nature is discerned as if it were designed.
Both express, under finite conditions, the infinite intelligibility of creation.
Objectiones
Ob. I. Kant's earlier critical idealism claimed that the purposiveness of nature is only regulativ, not konstitutiv. It guides reflection but asserts nothing about things themselves. To identify this structure with divine intellect reintroduces dogmatic metaphysics which the Critique sought to overcome.
Ob. II. Empirical naturalism hold that the sense of purposiveness is an anthropomorphic projection. Human cognition evolved to impose order for survival; teleology is a byproduct of adaptation, not a window into divine reason.
Ob. III. Dialectical theology asserts that there can be no analogia entis between Creator and creature. The reflectierende Urteilskraft is a natural faculty, bound by sin, incapable of genuine participation in divine knowing. Revelation alone bridges the gap.
Ob. IV. Heidegger supposes that the Urteilskraft remains imprisoned within subject-object metaphysics. What it calls purposiveness is merely the forgotten openness of Being (Seinsvergessenheit). Participation must be replaced by Ereignis, the event in which Being itself discloses.
Responsiones
Ad 1. The regulative status of purposiveness does not preclude its metaphysical significance. What Kant calls “regulative” may, from the theological side, be seen as the phenomenal trace of divine constitutivity. The intellect’s necessity to think unity reveals that reality is not chaos but already grounded in the rational order of the Logos. The “als ob” points beyond itself: it is the finite mirror of a unity that truly is.
Ad 2. Empirical projection theory presupposes the very congruence of mind and world it seeks to explain. If teleology were merely adaptive, its success in tracking real structures of order would be inexplicable. The evolutionary account explains why we look for unity, not why unity is there to be found. Purposiveness in cognition presupposes purposiveness in being.
Ad 3. The analogia entis asserted here is ontological, not salvific. It concerns the structure of reason as created participation in divine wisdom, not redemptive grace. To deny all analogy makes revelation unintelligible, for the Word can address humanity only because humanity shares, however finitely, in the Logos’ capacity for meaning.
Ad 4. Heidegger’s Ereignis can be read as a radicalized form of the same insight: manifestation itself presupposes participation in the source of manifestation. The reflecting judgment is the finite act through which Being’s intelligibility becomes known. It is the cognitive correlate to what phenomenology calls Erscheinen, the shining-forth of being.
Nota
The reflectierende Urteilskraft is Kant’s most theologically potent discovery. In it, reason ceases to dominate and begins to listen; it seeks to discern the universal latent within the given particular.
The bestimmende Urteilskraft resembles divine providence as administration of established law; the reflectierende Urteilskraft resembles divine wisdom as creation in act. Its searching movement from particular to universal is the finite image of that divine understanding in which all multiplicity is comprehended at once.
Through this faculty, human reason discloses its participatory vocation: to seek, to gather, and to unify in correspondence with the eternal act of the Logos. Thus, the Critique of Judgment quietly reinstates metaphysics at the heart of critique—an ontology of participation veiled beneath epistemological modesty.
Determinatio
The reflectierende Urteilskraft differs from the bestimmende not only functionally but ontologically: it imitates, under finite conditions, the creative act of divine intelligence.
The “regulative” purposiveness Kant describes is the phenomenal sign of a deeper, constitutive order grounded in the Logos.
The finite mind’s search for unity mirrors the divine intellect’s perfect intuition of unity; the difference is not of kind but of mode. It is participation not possession.
The reflectierende Urteilskraft thus mediates nature and freedom by attesting that both share a common root in supersensible reason.
Human judgment, in its reflecting capacity, bears witness that intellect itself is a participation in the divine actus essendi intelligibilis, the act by which the Word comprehends all things as ordered.
Transitus ad Disputationem XXXVIII: De Substrato Supersensibili et Fundamentis Finalitatis
If the reflectierende Urteilskraft reveals the mind’s participatory openness to divine unity, then the next question concerns the ground of this unity itself. What is the hidden bond that makes both nature and freedom intelligible within one order of purposiveness?
Therefore we proceed to Disputationem XXXVIII: De Substrato Supersensibili et Fundamentis Finalitatis, wherein it shall be examined whether Kant’s das übersinnliche Substrat—the supersensible substrate underlying both natural and moral purposiveness—may be interpreted as the ontological depth of the Logos: the living foundation of all teleology and the inner intelligibility of creation itself.
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