On Pluhar's Solution to Certain Problems of Uniting the Three Kantian Critiques: Part I & II

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.  

Reflecting on Reflective Judgments and Kant's Attempt to Reconcile His First and Second Critiques

Immanuel Kant famously argued that the categories of cause and substance could only apply to the world of empirical experience.  The pure concepts of the understanding unite the manifold of intuition in ways that deliver to us objects and events in space and time causally connectable to other objects and events.  

To attempt to think metaphysical reality using the categories of cause and substance is, for Kant, to misapply these  concepts beyond the bounds of their proper application.  When these concepts no longer apply to intuitions -- that is to the spatio-temporal particulars resulting in the application of "pure forms of sensibility" of space and time to the realm of things in themselves -- then their use eventuates in a "transcendental subreption" or "transcendental illusion" of thinking metaphysical reality must be structured in the ways in which our thinking conceives this reality. 

By the conclusion of the First Critique, Kant's readers realize that he has indeed provided the necessary philosophical framework to underpin Newtonian mechanics. Instead of holding that substances and causes are in the world apart from human cognition -- and thus being susceptible to the skeptical arguments of David Hume -- Kant places them solidly within the human epistemological domain. While whatever exists apart from us, exists apart from our awareness, perception, conception and language, the empirical order clearly does not. Apart from human beings, there would be no spatio-temporal particulars and no substances which our concepts synthesize from the manifold of sensibility.  The phenomenal world, the only world we can know empirically, is nicely ordered causally because we ourselves apply the category of causality and accordingly order the world causally before we empirically investigate it.  

Kant believes that the only way to save empiricism -- and thus to be an empirical realist -- is to be a transcendental idealist.  If space, time, substantiality and causality were not denizens of our epistemic equipment, the skeptical arguments would finally win the day, and the universality and necessity trumpeted by Newton in his mechanism could never be ultimately justified. In order to have a nature like Newton's, one needed to adopt a transcendental position like Kant's. 

So the story at the end of Kant's First Critique is that nature is closed under the operation of physical causality.  Physical entities, and the events in which they are ingredient, are causally related among themselves. There are no uncaused physical events, and no physical events causing non-physical events. There is no "free play" in the universe. In order to save Newtonian mechanics, Kant gives us an underlying determinism of a mechanical kind. The world of nature must conform to a deterministic mechanism, because our epistemological equipment process the world in this way.  All this is clear. 

But Kant did not want to stop writing books after the Critique of Pure Reason.  In his Critique of Practical Reason, he argues that the things in themselves, which are only mediatedly accessible through knowing the phenomenal world in the First Critique, are immediately and nominally accessible through an encounter with duty and the moral law in the Second Critique. Now the realm of freedom, responsibility and dignity are opened to human beings; we already are living noumenal reality in our moral experience.  While Kant banishes freedom in the First Critique, he gives it back in the Second Critique. The practical postulates of God, immortality and freedom of the Second Critique have no echo in the First Critique.  While the latter is the precondition for encounter with the moral law itself, both God and immortality are postulates needed for a complete moral theory, a theory in which the summum bonum is obtainable, i.e., the "highest good" wherein those doing their virtue and thus "worthy of happiness," can be, in fact, recipients of that happiness. 

Prima facie, the results of the first two Critiques seem to be in tension with each other.  How can a human being with a body possibly have free moral experience when the bodies in and through which that moral experience is had are denizens of the phenomenal realm and its mechanistic determinism? Nobody can do the right thing, it seems, without an act that is somehow physically expressed.  One cannot help a little old lady across the street without a body.  One cannot bring about the good if one cannot bring about anything at all. If nature is the realm of the bodily, and human beings have bodies and presumably act in and through them, then how can one ever do that which is better than some other act. If the phenomenal realm is the realm of "one cannot do other than one did do," and empirical reality is coextensive with the phenomenal, and if human freedom is "one can do other than what one did," then how can freedom be exercised for coporeal human beings?  If one do other than what one does do, then deterministic mechanism is false, and if physical entities cannot do other than what they do, then human freedom is impossible. 

Fortunately, Kant wrote another book, one that is not read as often by philosophers these days, but nonetheless must appear within the top 100 of philosophical classics. This book is entitled Der Kritik der Urteilskraft, translated as The Critique of Judgment, though a better translation would have been The Critique of the Power of Judgment.  In the Introduction to this book, Kant claims that he wishes to reconcile the two earlier Critiques, and introduces the notion of a reflective judgment.  Unlike a determining judgment which operates determinately to think a given particular under a given universal, the reflective judgment is one wherein their is freedom to think a universal on the basis of the particular.  It provides, as it were, some "free play" in understanding the particular.  After introducing this, Kant launches into a wide-ranging and very famous discussion of the notion of beauty and related concepts, followed by a discussion of teleology and purpose in their relationship to the aesthetic.  Many readers become frustrated in the The Critique of Judgment because it does not seem that Kant ever gets around to providing a sustained argument for what is promised: a reconciling of the results of the first two Critiques.  

It is possible, however, to provide an overview of his intended "solution." The relevant sections of the Critique are these: #8 and #9 in the Introduction, and #70 - #85 in the Dialectic of Teleological Judgment and the Methodology of Teleological Judgment.   

In #70 Kant distinguishes reflective and constitutive antinomies.   

• Thesis of reflective judgment: "All production of material things and their forms must be judged to be possible in terms of merely mechanical laws."
• Antithesis of reflective judgement: "Some products of material nature cannot be judged to be possible in terms of merely mechanical laws." 
• Thesis of constitutive judgment: "All production of material things is possible in terms of merely mechanical laws." 
• Antithesis of constitutive judgment: "Some production of material things in not possible in terms of merely mechanical laws." (Pluher, 267, KU 367).
  

 Kant points out the the thesis and antithesis of a constitutive judgment are antinomies or contradictories, i.e., the truth of one entails the falsity of the other.  In other words, they cannot both be true at the same time.  But Kant does not believe that the first two statements are contradictory: 

But if we consider instead the two maxims of a power of judgment that reflects [i.e., the first thesis and antithesis above], the first of these two maxims does in fact not contradict [the second] at all. For if I say that I must judge all events in material nature, and hence also all the forms that are its products, in terms of merely mechanical laws as to [how] they are possible, then I am not saying that there are possible in terms of mechanical laws alone (i.e., even if no other kind of causality comes in).  Rather, I am only pointing out that I ought always to reflect on these events and forms in terms of the principle of the mere mechanism of nature, and hence ought to investigate this principle as far as I can, because unless we presuppose it in our investigation [of nature] we can have no cognition of nature at all in the proper sense of the term" (267-68, 387-88).

What is going on here?  

Clearly, Kant is understanding a reflective judgment to be quite different than a determining or constituting judgment.  In the First Critique, Kant had laid out the transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience as such -- an experiencing of empirical nature in Newtonian ways -- as the determining judgments under which intuitions fall.  The result is a mechanistic determinism.  But does Kant's move to a reflective judgment allow him to escape the charge that just as there is a contradiction between the thesis and antithesis of a constitutive (determining) judgment, so there is a contradiction between the thesis and antithesis of a reflective judgment? Is this not a case of what is good for the goose is good for the gander? 

The key to holding that there is no antinomy in the reflective judgment rests upon the ability of the thinker to recognize that the reflective principles in question are heuristic, that far from "carving the beast of reality at its joints" (Plato), they simply are principle by which we might think nature. We attempt to see nature as entirely deterministic, but it is possible that that we adopt a different principle for regions of our empirical investigations.  (Think of how difficult it would be actually to give a mechanistic/deterministic account of beavers building a dam.  One could not use the category of final causality or employ any implicit purposeful functionalistic explanations, e.g, the beavers are acting this way "in order to" bring about some state of affairs.)  It might allow us to understand more about nature to employ the reflective judgment that "some products of material nature cannot be judged to be possible in terms of merely mechanical laws." Something more is needed. 

Kant reconciles the two reflective judgments because there is supersensible ground allowing both judgments to be used heuristically, if not descriptively.  Kant writes: 

If we are to have a principle that makes it possible to reconcile the mechanical and the teleological principles by which we judge nature, then we must posit this further principle in something that lies beyond both (and hence also beyond any possible empirical presentation of nature), but that nonetheless contains the basis of nature, namely, we must posit it in the supersensible, to which we must refer both kinds of explanation" (297, 412). 

But what is accomplished here?  It seems that the thesis and antithesis of the antinomy of reflective judgment still form a contradiction.  Yet Kant is suggesting that this clear and present contradiction is "taken up" by the reality of the supersensible of which the thesis and the antithesis are partial grasps.  So the supersensible substrate supports a coincedentia oppositorum in a way not unlike how God could only be thought in the mystical traditions through dialectical formulations.  'All P is J' and 'Some P is not J' are contradictories and cannot be other.  However, these contradictions are somehow sustained in the ground of the supersensible.  We are permitted to use either because the nature of the supersensible cannot be articulated by either.  When one says them both, one learns something about that which cannot be known.  

The fundamental problem of philosophy since the time of Decartes has been this: "How is human freedom possible in a determinstic physicalist universe?" Kant is taking on this big question and saying that the problem is one of thinking how it is possible, not it being possible.  It is possible after all, because it is actual.  The supersensible substrate is worked up mediately in the First Critique, more immediately in the Second, and these varying accounts put together in the Third.  We can't do metaphysics, so cannot carve this "beast of reality."  We will always end in antinomies when we do.  But nonetheless the supersensible grounds the possibility of corporeal entities acting freely.  Purposefulness in nature attests to an opening by which freedom can be instantiated in a physical system.  

Kant says that the antinomies of reflective judgment are not antonomies because the truth of one does not entail the falsity of the other.  He might have better started to index judgments to standpoints. Clearly, the antinomies are contradictories for us and how we must think the universe. They are contradictory coram hominibus.  But they are not contradictory from the standpoint of the supersensible. That is, they are not contradictory coram deo -- if we might  apply that term here.  Kant knew that ultimately the tools of human understanding and thinking simply were inadequate to think reality as such.

Kant's Argument for Purpose and the Notion of the Highest Good as the Solution to the Problem of Freedom and Nature

In his Second Introduction to Die Kritik der Urtheilskraft (1790), Kant declares:

"The understanding (Verstand), inasmuch as it can give laws to nature a priori, proves that we cognize nature only as appearance (Erscheinung), and hence at the same time points to a supersensible substate of nature (auf ein uebersinnliches Substrat derselben); but it leaves this substate 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 (Bestimmbarkeit durch das intellectuelle Vermoegen).  But reason, through its a priori practical law, gives this same substrate determination (Bestimmung).  Thus judgment makes possible the transition (Uebergang) from the domain of the concept of nature to that of the concept of freedom" (Kant, Pluhar translation, 37/Kritik der Urtheilskraft, S. 196-7).

Kant's claims are these:

• The understanding, by giving laws to nature a priori, points to an undetermined supersensible substrate.
• Judgment, by judging nature a priori in terms of possible particular laws of nature, provides nature a determinability through its intellectual power.  
• Reason, by its a priori use of practical law, provides the substrate determination.  
• Judgment makes possible transition from the domain of the concept of nature to that of the concept of freedom. 

The supersensible substrate, which is undetermined by the understanding, is determined by reason.  How can that which is undetermined by understanding be nonetheless determined by reason?  Kant argues that judgment links the understanding and reason by providing the undetermined supersensible substrate the very possibility of determination. The undetermined cannot be determined without it having the disposition for determination.  Judgment somehow provides the supersensible the disposition for determination without itself being the actualization of that disposition.  Kant is saying, in effect, that judgment confers potential determination on the supersensible, a potentiality actualized in the employment of reason in its practical use.  But how is this all possible?  Kant argues that the condition for this possibility is the ultimate purpose for the world.  

In Section 86 entitled "Ethicotheology," Kant discusses what ultimately makes the world valuable by considering the notion of final purpose (Endzweck).  He denies that human contemplation (Betrachtung) and cognition (Erkenntnissvermoegen) of the world is sufficient to give the world value (Pluhar, 331/Die Kritik, S. 442: 22-29).  Rather, he claims that "only if we presupposed that the world has a final purpose (einen Endzweck derselben voraussetzen), could its contemplation itself have a value by reference to that purpose (die Weltbetrachtung selbst einen Werth haben)" (331/442).  Accordingly, he staunchly rejects any view that would claim that the final purpose of creation is the feeling of pleasure (der Gefuehl der Lust) that humans might have or develop, or human well-being (Wohlsein), or physical or intellectual enjoyment (Genuss), or ultimately, happiness (Glueckseligkeit) (331/442).  Kant writes: 

"For the fact that man, once he exists, makes happiness his own final intention (Endabsicht) gives us no concept [that tells us] for what end he exists at all, and what his own value is, on account of which his existence should be made agreeable to him (angenehm zu machen).  Therefore, we must already presuppose that man is the final purpose of creation, if we are to have a rational basis (Vernunftgrund) of why nature, considered as an absolute whole in terms of principles of purposes (ein absolutes Ganze nach Principien der Zweck betrachtet wird), should have to harmonize with [the goal of achieving] his happiness (zu seiner Glueckseligkeit zusammen stimmen muesse)" (331-32/442-43).   

Kant is saying that the only way rationally to account for how nature as a whole with its biological teleologies should harmonize with the human goal of happiness is to posit that human beings themselves constitute the final purpose of creation.   He further suggests that human beings have value and the world has final purpose through the "power of desire" (Begehrungsvermoegen).  This "power of desire" does not rest on what human beings might enjoy, but rather concerns the human exercise of freedom, an exercise that is tied to the good will.  Kant declares that this "good will is that through which human existence alone can have absolute worth (absoluten Werth), and in relation to which the existence of the world can have final purpose (Endzweck)" (Die Kritik, S. 443:10-13). 

Kant believes that it is through the good will that the universe has a final purpose.  The moral life of men and women is the final purpose for which nature exists at all.  Kant, however, realizes that a chain of final purposes can be organized according to the relation of "conditions" and the final purpose of human existence is, in some sense, "conditioned" by a higher purpose.  In such a concatenation, one most isolate the unconditional final purpose on the basis of which other final purposes are conditioned.  By acknowledging human beings to be the purpose of creation, there is a rational ground to regard the world as a whole as a system of final causes (die Welt als ein nach Zwecken zusammenhaengendes Ganz und als System von Endursachen anzusehen) (Die Kritik, S. 444:3-4).  Kant writes: 

" . . . we now have . . .  a basis (Grund), or at least the primary condition (Hauptbedingung), for regarding the world as a whole that coheres in terms of purposes (nach Zwecken zusammenhaengendes Ganze), and as a system of final causes (von Endursachen anzusehen). . . in referring natural purposes to an intelligent world cause (verstaendige Weltursache), as the character of our reason forces us to do, we now have a principle that allows us to conceive of the nature and properties of the first cause, i.e., the supreme basis of the kingdom of purposes (obersten Grundes im Reich der Zwecke) and hence allows us to give determination to the concept of this cause (den Begriff derselben zu bestimmen).  Physical teleology was unable to do this; all it could do was to give rise to concepts of this supreme basis that were indeterminate (unbestimmte) and on that very account were inadequate (untaugliche) for both theoretical and practical use" (Pluhar, 333/Die Kritik S. 444:2-11).  

Kant believes we must think this being not simply as intelligence (Intelligenz) and as giving laws to nature (gesetzgebend fuer die Natur), but as a sovereign (Oberhaupt) that gives laws in a moral kingdom of purposes.  In relation to the highest possible good (Gut) -- the existence of rational beings under moral laws -- we must think this primal being (Urwesen) as omniscient (allwissend), as omnipotent (allmaechtig), and as omnibenevolent (allguetig) and just (gerecht).  Kant believes the latter two conditions are necessary if we are to think the highest cause of the world as constituting the highest good under moral laws.  The same is true of all the transcendental properties, e.g., eternity and omnipresence (Allgegenwart), etc., which are presupposed by final purpose.  Kant argues that "in such a way, moral teleology supplements (ergaenzt) what physical teleology lacks, and for the first time grounds a theology" (Die Kritik S. 444: 13-29).    

Kant then concludes that the principle that allows us to relate the world to a supreme cause (oberste Ursache), is itself sufficient, and by driving our attention to the purposes of nature and in investigating the great art (grossen Kunst) lying hidden under nature's forms, the ideas that pure practical reason supplies (herbeischafft) might find incidental (beilaeufige) confirmation (Bestaetigung) in natural purposes (Naturzwecken) (Die Kritik, S. 445:1-4).  The notion of a highest being giving laws to the moral kingdom of purposes is necessary to connect the ideas of pure practical reason --ideas that have according to Kant's First Critique no echo in the physical universe -- nonetheless to nature via the notion of natural purposes.  A universe ordered teleologically is not ultimately alien to a purposeful moral agent.  It is, in fact, the kind of place in which a purposeful moral agent might dwell.  The universe and the beings inhabiting it are teaming with purpose.  Moreover, the moral kingdom of purposes require a highest being giving laws to both it and nature, a being that can and must be thought if freedom is ever to be present in and through nature. 

For Kant, Judgment is the faculty by which the indeterminate supersensible substrate might become determinable, that is, that it might be made capable of determination by pure practical reason.  But is this supersensible substrate the noumenal?  Or is it a transcendental concept, i.e., a transcendental condition for thinking how freedom and nature might be connected, a  concept that is itself not the noumenal?  If the latter, then it is determinable on the basis of itself being a concept capable of predication.  But if this is so, then the determinability of the concept is of a different order than the indeterminateness of the noumenal.  Since the noumenal remains undetermined, there is no ultimate bridge between freedom and nature.   While they can be thought together, at the ontological level they remain wholly disparate.  An unbridgeable dualism remains.  So what is that which unifies the fissure between freedom and nature?  Is it the idea of God, or is it God Himself?  It is to the oft-neglected "moral proof of the existence of God" in Die Kritik der Urtheilkraft that we turn in the next post.  

Kant and The Putative Contradiction between Determinism and Freedom, and the Move towards Common Ground

As is well-known, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) wrote two very famous works that seem to give very different results.  Like many who have studied philosophy, I have spent considerable time in the texts of both his First and Second Critiques, but never seriously in his Third.

Of course, I have known for a very long time what is in his 1790 Die Kritik der Urtheilskraft.  It is, after all,  famous for its position on the subjective universality of aesthetic judgments; its development of the concept of beauty with its "four moments" that include disinterestedness, universality, necessity, and feeling; and his development of teleology and highlighting of purpose.  One can read parts of the work and be alternately convinced and puzzled by Kant's arguments.  I have known also that Kant thought that somehow his Third Critique could address the putative fissure between the results of his first two tomes, though I have not hitherto tried to examine carefully the specific arguments by which he tries to establish this.  What I write below is my first step in trying to correct this deficiency.

The Kritik der reinen Vernunft from 1781 (first edition) and 1787 (second edition) argued persuasively that all empirical objects, properties, relations and events are constituted by the Understanding (Der Verstand), that is, that the pure and empirical concepts of the understanding ultimately work to "synthesize the manifold of sensation" such that the denizens of the empirical domain can be known in their universality and necessity.  While Kant speaks of the Ding an sich (thing-in-itself), he realizes we have no epistemic access to it.  But while the nomenal realm of the things-in-themselves cannot be known, the phenomenal realm of things-as-they-are-for-us -- things as they have been constituted by, and given to consciousness -- is epistemically accessible.  We can know the latter, but not the former.   What we know is a domain whose inhabitants are connected by strict causal laws.  There are, accordingly, no uncaused events in this domain.  All that happens is a result of other things that have happened.  Accordingly, a mechanical determinism characterizes the phenomenal order of the Ding fuer uns ("thing-for-us").

The Kritik der praktischen Vernunft from 1788 argued persuasively that human beings are immediately confronted by duty, and that in the face of this duty they are free: The fact that one ought to do X presupposes that one is free to do X.  Ought implies the freedom to do; ought implies can.  (Try to think of a situation where it can meaningfully said that something ought to be done when there is no ability for what has not been done to have been other than it is.)  Famously, Kant argues that we are confronted with a categorical imperative that while empty of content, formally gives conditions of universality, impartiality, and necessity.  His subjective maxims of the categorical imperative are these: 1) So act such that in your act, your act can become a universal law of humanity, 2) So act always to treat the other as an end-in-itself and not as a means to one's own end.  But this action requires freedom, a conclusion seemingly incompatible with the results of the First Critique.

Palpably, if there is one or more free acts in the universe, then the mechanistic determinism of the First Critique is wrong.  Conversely, if all events are determined in accordance with strict natural laws, as Kantian universality and necessity seem to imply, then the freedom of the Second Critique is incorrect.  How might this tension be mitigated?

In his Kritik der Urtheilskraft, Kant takes up this issue, particularly in Section IX of his second Introduction that deals with how judgment can connect the legislations of the understanding and reason.  There is a footnote in this section where Kant explains how it is that the results of the first two Critiques are not in opposition with each other.  Because of the difficulty of the argument, I shall often quote it in the original German, offer my own translation of relevant portions, and analyze what it is the Kant is attempting to do.  It is hard enough to understand exactly what Kant means when he is writing in his own language employing his own technical vocabulary.  I believe that the task only becomes more challenging when trying to read him in translation where the attempt to render him intelligible in English has sometimes occluded the precision of that vocabulary.  Here is the footnote:

"Einer von den verschiedenen vermeinten Widersprüchen in dieser gänzlichen Unterscheidung der Naturcausalität von der durch Freiheit ist der, da man ihr den Vorwurf macht: daß, wenn ich von Hindernissen, die die Natur der Causalität nach Freiheitsgesetzen (den moralischen) legt, oder ihre Beförderung durch dieselbe rede, ich doch der ersteren auf die letztere einen Einfluß einräume. Aber wenn man das Gesagte nur verstehen will, so ist die Mißdeutung sehr leicht zu verhüten. Der Widerstand, oder die Beförderung ist nicht zwischen der Natur und der Freiheit, sondern der ersteren als Erscheinung und den Wirkungen der letztern als Erscheinungen in der Sinnenwelt; und selbst die Causalität der Freiheit (der reinen und praktischen Vernunft) ist die Causalität einer jener untergeordneten Naturursache (des Subjekts, als Mensch, folglich als Erscheinung betrachtet), von deren Bestimmung das Intelligible, welches unter der Freiheit gedacht wird, auf eine übrigens (eben so wie eben dasselbe, was das übersinnliche Substrat der Natur ausmacht) unerklärliche Art den Grund enthält" (Kritik der Urteilskraft, S. 195, fn.)

Kant points out here one of the objections to his finding no contradiction between the causality of nature and freedom is this:  "When I speak about obstacles that nature lays in the way of the laws of freedom (moral laws), or the furthering of the same, I thus concede that the former has an influence on the latter."  Kant says, however, that this is a misinterpretation of his position, a misunderstanding that is easy to avoid it.  He continues, "The resistance (Widerstand) or furtherance (Befoerderung) is not between nature and freedom, but between the former as an appearance and the effects of the latter as an appearance in the world of sense (Sinnenwelt)."  Kant is clearly explaining that this is not a situation of nature and freedom in conflict.  Rather, the apparent conflict occurs between appearances, i.e., between the appearance that is nature and the appearance of the effects of freedom.  

Kant then declares that "the causality of freedom (of pure and practical reason) is the causality of that subsumed natural cause -- the subject, as a human being, thus considered as an appearance."  He further explains that in the determination (Bestimmung) of this natural cause, "the intelligible, which is thought under [the concept] of freedom, contains a ground (Grund) in an unexplained way -- even as the same comprises the supersensible substrate of nature."  

Kant is claiming that freedom and nature do not conflict because in some sense both are appearances of an underlying reality which, though it itself cannot be explicated, nonetheless grounds the intelligible, that is, a reflective judgment of freedom, a judgment that humans can think, and in that thinking locate the perspective by which freedom and nature do not conflict.

But can we become clearer on what Kant is saying?  How does this all cohere with Kant's examination of both aesthetic and teleological judgments that comprise most of the Kritik der Urtheilskraft?  

In light of the footnote above, I want to read closely Section IX of Kant's second Introduction to the Kritik.  While it does not provide a detailed explanation of how the intelligibility of the judgment linking the domains of nature and freedom connects to the ground of the supersensible, it does nicely lay out the direction in which an explanation might take us.  Kant begins the section by distinguishing the understanding and reason.  Because the German is straightforward, I quote Werner Pluhar's translation as follows:  

"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 prior for freedom and for freedom's own causality, in other words, for the supersensible in the subject, in order to give rise to unconditioned practical cognition" (Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, p. 35/Kritik, S. 195:4-8).  

This statement of the results of the First and Second Critiques is followed by what I shall call Kant's independence axiom:

"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 (eine Bruecke von einem Gebiete zu dem anderen hinueberzuschlagen) (Critique, p. 35-6/Kritik, S. 195:13-16).  

But he then qualifies this statement of independence with this startling assertion that I must quote in the original German: 

"Allein wenn die Bestimmungsgründe der Causalitaet nach dem Freiheitbegriffe . . . gleich nicht in der Natur belegen sind, und das Sinnliche das Übersinnliche im Subjekte nicht bestimmen kann: so ist dieses doch umgekehrt . . . möglich and schon in dem Begriffe eine Causalitaet durch Freiheit enthalten, deren Wirkung diesen ihren formalen Gesetzen Gemäß in der Welt geschehen soll . . .(Kritik, S. 195:17-24)." 

Kant declares that "even though the grounds of the determination of causality according to the concept of freedom do not lie in nature, and the sensible cannot thus determine the supersensible
in the subject, the converse is possible, and already in this concept, a causality through freedom is contained, [a causality] whose effect must happen in the world according to its [freedom's] formal laws."  Clearly, Kant is saying that the supersensible can somehow determine the sensible in conformity with the formal laws of freedom.  This is a bold claim for the one who wrote persuasively in his Kritik der reined Vernunft  that metaphysics has been shipwrecked on the shores on reason's antinomies.  The "supersensible" clearly smacks of metaphysics, does it not?  But Kant is not done:  

" . . . obzwar das Wort Ursache, von dem Übersinnlichen gebraucht, nur dem Grund bedeutet, die Causalitaet der Naturdinge zu einer Wirkung gemäß ihren eigen Naturgesetzen, zugleich aber doch auch mit dem formalen Princip der Vernunftgesetze einhellig zu bestimmen, . . .  (Kritik, S. 195:24-27).  

Kant is pointing out that when the word 'cause' is used with respect to the supersensible, we mean only the ground (Grund) determining the causality of natural things to bring about an effect according to their own laws of nature, and at the same time to do so in conformity with the formal principle of the laws of reason.  By qualifying his assertion in this way, Kant seeks to avoid a metaphysical claim.  'Cause' used here is not a usage according to the pure concepts of the understanding or the pure ideas of reason, but instead points to a basis or ground in the noumenal by which casual connections can be drawn in the phenomenal, a basis or ground that at the same time can allow these causal connections to obtain in a way consistent with the laws of reason in the moral order.  It is a use that is possible for reflective judgment, not for the theoretical judgments of the First Critique.  It is a use that nonetheless allows for the fact that we have no insight into how this is possible (wovon die Moeglichkeit zwar night eingesehen).   

It is important to recall at this point Kant's distinction between determinative and reflective judgments.  While the theoretical exercise of pure reason and the practical use of pure practical reason employ the former, the second type of judgment is saved mostly for the kinds of concerns Kant examines in the Third Critique, e.g., aesthetics and teleology.  In a determinative judgment, the universal is that which is known and which determines the particular in accordance with it.  In a reflective judgment, however, it is the particular which is known and one is allowed thereby freely to think a universal (identifies a universal) under which the particular might fall.   

It is in such a judgment that Kant then connects this supersensible ground to the concept of purpose.  It is through a final cause that freedom and the world of nature in which it is advanced must exist. In lines that clearly suggest the development of Fichte that will soon follow, Kant writes: 

"Die Wirkung nach dem Freiheitsbegriffe ist der Endzweck, der (oder dessen Erscheinung in der Sinnenwelt) existieren soll, wozu die Bedingung der Möglichkeit desselben in der Natur (des Subjects als Sinnenwesens, nämlich als Mensch) vorausgesetzt wird" (Kritik, S. 195:30 - 196:3).   

Purpose is the effect according to the concept of freedom, which must exist in the sensible world, and which is presupposed by the condition for the possibility in nature of human beings, subjects that are denizens of the sensible.  He continues: 

" . . . die Urteilskraft giebt den vermittelnden Begriff zwischen den Naturbegriffen und dem Freiheitsbegriffe, der die Übergang von der reinen theoretischen zur der praktischen, von der Geseztsmaessigkeit nach der ersten zum Endzwecke nach dem letzten möglich macht, in dem Begriff einer Zweckmässigkeit der Natur an der Hand; Den dadurch wird die Möglichkeit des Endzwecks, der allein in der Natur und mit Einstimmung ihrer Gesetze wirklich werden kann, erkannt" (Kritik, S. 196:4-11).  

The power of judgment provides a mediating concept between the concepts of nature and freedom.  It is the concept of the purposiveness of nature that makes possible a transition from the theoretical to the practical, from the lawfulness of nature to the purpose of the practical.  We can know only through the possibility of a final purpose (Endzwecks) how freedom is actualizable in accordance with the laws of nature.  The understanding which determines the phenomenal order leaves the supersensible substrate of nature undetermined.  While reason in its practical use according to the moral laws does determine this substrate, it cannot point to how freedom might be thought actualizable in nature.  Kant declares: 

"Die Urteilskraft verschafft durch ihr Princip a priori die Beurteilung der Natur nach möglichen besonderen Gesetzen derselben ihrem übersinnlichen Substrat (in uns sowohl als ausser uns) Bestimmbarkeit durch das intellektuelle Vermögen. Die Vernunft aber giebt eben demselben durch ihr praktisches Gesetz a priori die Bestimmung; und so macht die Urteilskraft den Übergang von Gebiete des Naturbegriffs zu dem Freiheitsbegriffs möglich" (Kritik, S. 196:15-22).     

It is the power of judgment that, through its own a priori principle, judges nature according to its possible particular laws, and accordingly possesses the intellectual capability (intellektuelle Vermoegen) to give the supersensible substrate determinability (Bestimmbarkeit).  This determinability of the supersensible substrate links to the determination (Bestimmung) by practical reason of that same supersensible substate.  Judgment thus allows the transition from the domain of the concept of freedom to that of the concept of nature.   

What Kant is saying is that judgment is free to think the notion of a final purpose under which both moral freedom and the determinism of nature might fall.  One can conceive of a ground -- though not articulate its structure -- under which its determination of nature, and its determinability by practical reason is possible.  The intelligibility of this ground in uns sowohl als ausser uns is found in the final purpose for which nature and freedom exist.  Our permission contemplatively to think nature as purposeful allows us to think how it is that a purposeful moral agent might exercise freedom in the domain of nature.  Ultimately, it is only the appearance of nature that stands in opposition to the life of the moral subject.  In reality, the deepest nature of that nature is consonant with our moral strivings.  

How could it be that the fissure between freedom and nature is overcome?  It is simply that we must penetrate beyond the mere appearance of their opposition and grasp the identity of their ground in the seeming disparate difference of their domains.  With this move, Kant, and not Fichte, palpably becomes the true father of German Idealism.  

To achieve more clarity on the nature of purpose and teleology for his program of finding an underlying unity between nature and freedom, however, demands that we examine carefully relevant selections of pertinent texts in Part II of the Kritik der Urtheilskraft on teleology.  I shall return to this task in a later post. 

Reflections on Teleology in Theology

When I was young I captivated by the natural sciences - - particularly physics.   Now this should not be taken to mean that I actually knew a great deal of physics.   The specifics of physics aside, I loved the idea of physics, that idea that one could describe the initial state of a system, apply the relevant laws of nature, and calculate with certainty the position of the system at a later time.   

It always seemed to me that physics was like logic.   The initial state of the system corresponds to the axiom set, the laws of nature to the transformation rules or allowable logical operations, and subsequent states of the system to theorems.  Just as one can continue to derive theorems in the propositional logic, so can one continue to calculate  future states of a physical system.   The major disanalogy pertains to time.  While it is needed to actualize subsequent states of the physical system, it is irrelevant to logical derivation.   God could, after all, intuit all theorems of a logical system simultaneously because all theorems of a logical system obtain simultaneously.  Things are different in physics.  God could foreknow future states of the system, but there is a sense in which these states are not yet present.   (For purposes of the illustration let us not assume Boethius' view that eternity, for God, is the "whole simultaneous and perfect possession of unbounded life," and thus, for the divine, the future states of any physical system already hold in the fullness of the unbounded present.)  

When I was young it seemed to me that the more mathematics one knew, and the more one knew about the structure of scientific theory, the more one might hope in principle to know something definite about the world.   The world was the kind of thing that could be captured in scientific theory that makes appeal to nothing more than the regularities of nature and the category of efficient causality.   While it has proven very difficult to give an analysis of 'cause' that stands philosophical scrutiny, scientists do seem to make good use of the category and we humans seem to presuppose it in our dealings with the world.  (OK . . . I admit that Kant always seemed right on this point.)    I admit always being tempted to thinking of cause in terms of Mackie's INUS condition:  A causes B if and only if A is an insufficient but necessary part of a unnecessary but sufficient condition.  While I shall spare you the specifics of his account, the idea is simple enough: The short-circuit causes the fire because it is an indispensable part of a complex situation which, together with the short-circuit, causally produces the fire.  

I talk about causality because it is a basic metaphysical building block of what we think the world is.   Whether we think causes are events, facts, features or states of affairs, we think there are  such things.  Our view of the world is one in which there are things (e.g., events) causally related to one another.  Accordingly, one event is said to cause another when it is sufficient to produce it, and, in some sense, when the second event would not have happened were the first not to have happened.  Understood in this way, the causal relation is the metaphysical glue of the universe; it is what gives our experience cohesion and stability.   Chairs simply do not pop in and out of existence in my room because there is no causal mechanism sufficient and necessary for these events to occur.   

Some time ago I simply started paying attention to nature.   Not the nature that I learned about in the physics laboratory, but the nature that I saw all around me as a child on an Iowa farm but somehow had systematically blocked out.   I was watching a swallow  build a nest and thought about giving a nice causal explanation of its movements in the building of this nest.   Now this is not a particularly deep thought.   We all observe nature and we all know that it seems to be purposeful. Watching the activity of the swallow building her nest is that which seems filled with purpose, but if we really know that the causal map of the universe is finally an efficient causal one, this nest-building activity should give a naturalist at least some pause.   How could it be that the swallow goes and searches for mud and straw and seems to stitch them together into a nest to birth and then nurse her young?   

Aristotle would have no problem with this, of course, and most of us never really think twice about the situation.   We know that it is instinct after all that pushes the swallow forward in this way.   Perhaps the possession of genetic information coupled with  rudimentary antecedent conditioning nicely explains this.   It is not that such explanations cannot be given, after all.  How could anyone have a problem somehow thinking that nest-building is irreducibly teleological or purposeful?   All of this is very clear.   

And the clear story proceeds to sketch a view wherein supervenient layers of entities, properties, events and/or states of affairs having putative teleological properties are somehow asymmetrically determined by subvenient layers that finally terminate in a most basic microphysical description that is not teleological at all.   Somehow the higher levels of a system - - the swallow and its nest building, for example - - are realized by a set of microphysical actualizations, the presence of which, metaphysically determines the determinate contour of the swallow's nest building.   The story goes on to say that this swallow's nest building could have obtained were another set of microphysical actualizations present, that, in fact, the swallow's nest building is multiply realizable microphysically.   This is important, as it turns out, because one would not want to reduce the type of swallow nest-building to some particular actualization of the microphsyical.  Reduction, after all, is decidedly out of favor.   While there can be no old-style reduction in this matter, one can simply say that some microphysical actualization or other realizes the swallow's nest-building and seemingly skip merrily home. 

So as I look at the swallow building its nest, I am evidently to cheer because its seemingly purposeful activity is not reducible to the microphysical, but somehow simply realizable by it.  Presumably two atom-by-atom microphysical replicas within a region will yield two replicas of the swallow and its nest building within that region.   There can be no swallow nest-building difference without a microphysical difference!   

But the thought that struck me that day is that just as one can't pull a rabbit out of a hat, one cannot pull macrophysical purpose out of microphysical efficient causal determination.  This thought, which is clearly a thought that most in the western philosophical tradition have had, is not a thought that prohibits our time from such tryings.  We are, after all, physicalists at heart:  We believe that what ultimately exists are those entities which are fated to be quantified over by our final fundamental particle theory.   We know this so deeply, that we simply must start with this and then try, through philosophical reflection (or lack thereof), to provide an account whereby the apparent purposefulness of nature can be made compatible with this deeply-held physicalism.   We thus specify teleonomic laws and give functionalist explanations that work in their own region of explanation, knowing that somehow all of this is realized by microphysical systems far removed from purpose.  We know that philosophy has a humble task, that it probably can't explain or give an adequate account of downward causality - - the notion that the distribution of properties within   lower levels is causally affected by actualization at the upper levels - - but that we can only ask so much of philosophy.   We must keep at the task!!  

Watching the bird make its nest I thought about what it would be like to think our thoughts again for the first time, to roll back the clock, as it were, and see the world without deep physicalist assumptions.  What could be clearer than that the swallow is acting purposefully, that it has a goal it wants to reach and that it has a nicely programmed set of objectives by which to reach that goal!  (Some of you may be groaning at this anthropomorphism.)   The activity of the swallow is best understood by knowing what it is that the swallow is attempting to do.  Maybe the category of  final causality, that most unscientific of all categories of thinking, simply is the best way to explain  why the physical system of the swallow's nest-building has been actualized.  

I like to dream and I started to dream about purpose.   What if many things in nature actually do have a purpose, that is, that their purpose is as objective as the efficient causal chain that produced them?  What if we humans really had such purpose?   What if the universe had such purpose?  What if we went back to Plato and Socrates and started with a macro-world of purpose instead of to Leucippus and Democritus and began with a micro-world of determinacy?   What if instead of making the problem how to get apparent purpose out of an underlying causal mechanism, we made the problem how to get underlying causal determinacy out of a universe clearly filled with purpose?   

Lutheran theology for many reasons has not cared deeply about teleology for the past 200 years.   Granting the truth of Kant's First Critique, and never clearly understanding the subtlety of his Third Critique, we Lutherans have made a cottage industry out of adjusting our semantic fields to make the language of Lutheran theology play in a world without purpose.   Survey the tradition and think about this.   What did Ritschl and his School assume about the metaphysical constitution of the world?  How about Bultmann, Gogarten, and Ebeling?   For these great men, whether the world ultimately had purpose was somehow irrelevant to doing Lutheran theology, to preaching Law and Gospel, to proclaiming the forgiveness of sins in Christ Jesus.  One could have highly nuanced and sophisticated theological argumentation without thereby resorting to teleology - - at least teleology in the grand old tradition.  Ritschl simply moved theology to the realm of value, and while his Lotze-inspired understanding of value is not that of today's advocates of understanding theology and religion valuationally, the central move was clear enough.   And if anybody has missed it, here is the central move.  

Theology is unredeemably teleological.   Since the days of Kant, constructive Lutheran theology has attempted to do theology in a way that is indifferent to questions of metaphysical teleology.  It has consistently reminded us to look at Christ and not at the world with its metaphysical questions. But in so doing, the very semantic field of Lutheran theology has changed.  'Creates,' 'redeems' and 'sustains' no longer connote causal production, because there is no divine being existing apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language that has a particular intentionality for the world.  Creation is not a purposeful act of God, but is a natural process that can, in theology, be understood as if it were a purposeful act of the divine.  The meaning of many of the central theological terms have shifted.  This has happened so gradually, that users and hearers of the language have not understood the changes.   

My sense is that we may never get clear on theology again if we don't get clear on teleology.   I have not had time to argue all of that directly here, but will try to do so at a later time.