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

 III

Kant presupposes that both aesthetic and teleological judgments are legitimately made by reasonable men and women, and he is motivated to write the Critique of Judgment in part to justify these judgments. His claim that reflecting judgment (reflectierend Urteil) can mediate between understanding and reason is prefigured by two other mediations, one in the Critique of Pure Reason and the other in the Critique of Practical Reason. In the former, the schema mediates between the pure concepts of the understanding and the imagination and intuition. In the latter, the typus mediates between the moral law of reason and the understanding. 

In the Third Critique, Kant identifies feeling as that which mediates between the cognitive power of the understanding and the power of desire of pure practical reason. Feeling mediates by connecting pleasure with nature. It links the lower will as determined by sense and the higher will as determined by the moral law. While understanding legislates in the domain of nature and reason legislates in the domain of freedom, reflecting judgments -- legislating with respect to pleasure and displeasure -- link these two legislations.  

For Kant, the feeling of pleasure undergirds the universal subjective validity of judgments of taste. This feeling is not directed to something in particular. Instead, as Pluhar writes, it is directed toward the conditions of empirical judgment in general, i.e., to the "harmony of imagination and understanding," to conditions "presupposed to be the same for everyone" (Pluhar, Lxxxviii).  The power of judgment "with its indeterminate concept of nature's subjective purposiveness" governs or legislates to feeling" (CJ, lxxxvii).  Simply put, the power of judgment governs feeling through its employment of an indeterminate concept of the subjective purposiveness of nature.  

Pluhar, in his Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, points out that for Kant, the systematicity of the mental powers -- for instance, judgment mediating between understanding and reason -- mirrors the systematicity of the "worlds with which these mental powers deal" (Pluhar, Lxxxvii).  

Clearly, Kant supposes there are three levels of consideration in each Critique: the level of the supersensible, the realm of appearances, and the powers which legislate the realms. In the Critique of Pure Reason, the supersensible is indeterminate, application of the understanding produces lawfulness giving empirical nature, and the result is cognition.  In the Critique of Practical Reason, the supersensible is practically determined, reason uses final purpose producing freedom, and the result is the specification of the power of desire. In the Critique of Judgment, the supersensible is practically determinable, judgment employs purposiveness with respect to art, and the result is the feeling of pleasure and displeasure (CJ., 38). 

Kant seeks to give accounts of the mediation between understanding and reason at multiple levels. Since his account of aesthetic and teleological judgment involve the supersensible, he must give an account of how the supersensible in judgment, relates to the supersensibles of understanding and reason. Pluhar explains: 

Now understanding and the (theoretical) cognitive power deal with the "world" of appearance as it is but tell us nothing about the "world" underlying it, the supersensible "world" in itself, except that it is logically possible. Reason and the (higher) power of desire deal with the "world" of appearance as it ought to be and also tell us about the supersensible conditions of making it so: supersensible freedom, immortality of the soul, and God. As Kant sees it, he has not (fully) justified his claims about the supersensible, and the three Critiques cannot form a system (and thus be scientific), unless not only the mental powers but also those "worlds," especially as there are in themselves, are show to form a system.  That is why it is especially important for Kant to show not only that the power of judgment, just like understanding and reason, also points to a supersensible, viz., the supersensible basis of nature's subjective purposiveness, but also that this supersensbile mediates between the other "two" supersensibles and thus unites the "three" supersensibles in one (Pluhar, lxxxviii).  

While what Pluhar is trying to say may be clear enough, his way of expressing it could cause confusion.  Talk of "one," "two," or "three" supersensibles seems to presuppose there would be some way to individuate supersensibles, but what could this be? Just as regions of space "fall within" other regions, it would seem that supersensibles would do the same. Clearly, other than freedom, immortality and God, there are no discernible supersensible objects that might be classed into different sets. Only these three supersensible beings, the result of reason's practical postulates, give any determinacy to the supersensible. Pluhar is simply pointing out that the indeterminate supersensible underlying nature and its laws, the determinate supersensible underlying morality and its laws, and the determinable supersensible underlying beauty and its laws are one and the same. They together just are the supersensible. 

Pluhar believes that the key to successfully mediating the supersensibles of the understanding and reason is the "supersensible basis of nature's subjective purposiveness." What, however, warrants talk about this latter supersensible basis? The First Problem to which Pluhar attends is this: Given that the three supersensible must be united, on what basis does this unification happen? The solution, he thinks, is Kant's identification of "judgment's indeterminate concept of nature's subjective purposiveess and the indeterminate concept of the supersensible basis of that same purposiveness" (Pluhar, lxxxviii).  Specification of the solution involves solving the problem of the conflict in the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment. 

Problem I: Solving the Conflict in the Antimony of Teleological Judgment 

There is an apparent conflict in the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment between these two maxims: 

• All material objects and their forms must be judged as possible only in terms of mechanical laws.
• Some material objects cannot be judged possible merely on the basis of mechanical laws, but require laws appealing to the category of final cause. 

Is this conflict one of judgment between the necessity of mechanism and the contingency of purposiveness? Are we then only dealing with two kinds of regulative principles, the first which thinks X rationally in accordance with deterministic efficient causality, and the second construing X rationally in accordance with teleological final causality?  

After citing in an extended footnote Kant scholars who do understand the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment in terms of two different rational regulative principles, Pluhar assures us that Kant is not reneging on the results he established in the First Critique: "The universal laws of nature -- in particular, the principle of necessary efficient (mechanical) causality -- are legislated to nature by our understanding and hence are constitutive and determinative, not regulative" (Pluhar, xc).  The Antinomies are not merely a matter of two regulative uses of reason, but rather they point to the need to buttress mechanical explanations by appeal to another principle. The mechanism of the First Critique is insufficient for judging the totality of natural objects and natural law.  

Pluhar argues that Kant wants to reconcile mechanical and teleological explanation objectively (AK, 413).  In order to do this, the "necessity" of mechanical explanation cannot be an all-encompassing necessity, and the "contingency" of teleological explanation an all-encompassing contingency. But how is this possible? It is possible if we are not dealing with concepts here, but with the things themselves.  Pluhar explains: 

Kant says "objectively," rather than "determinatively," because for the same object or the same causal connection to be determined as both necessary and contingent would imply that they in fact are both necessary and contingent, which would indeed by contradictory and hence would not be possible (Pluhar, xci, fn. 94). 

Pluhar believes that Kant's appeal to objectivity requires an appeal to the supersensible itself.  He writes: 

Kant solves the antinomy between the necessary mechanism and the contingent teleological principle as he solves all his antinomies: by invoking the supersensible. . . Our understanding, Kant argues, has the peculiarity of being discursive, conceptual; and all concepts abstract (to some extent) from the particular: hence our understanding does not determine (legislate) the particular, but determines only the universal leaving the particular contingent.  As for our a priori intuitions, they too cannot determine all the particular that understanding leaves contingent (Pluhar, xci).

In order for the "maxims" of mechanistic and teleological judgment to be applied consistently to material objects, there must be some basis in the supersensible that would allow this. This basis in the supersensible concerns particulars. The particularity of biological organisms can neither be thought conceptually through application of the pure concepts of the understanding nor can such organisms be constituted out of intuitions conforming to the pure a priori forms of sensibility: space and time. So what is their basis? 

Pluhar believes that Kant here makes an appeal to intellectual intuition. 

[Implied is] the idea of a possible different understanding, an understanding that is not discursive (i.e., does not omit the particular in its legislation) but is intuitive. Such an understanding would legislate a "synthetic" universal, i.e., a undersell in the sense of a whole that includes determination of the particular in that whole.  An intuitive understanding would thus be an understanding that simply determines, and hence would be an understating "in the most general sense," for, while any understanding requires intuition (to supply the particular needed for cognition), we are not entitled to assume that any understanding must have, as ours does, an intuition which is separate from it and through which the particular is merely given (empirically) rather than legislated along with the universal. . . Such an understanding's intuition would thus not be a mere receptivity (which is passive), and hence not a sensibility as our own intuition is, but would be an intellectual intuition, a complete spontaneity (i.e., it would be completely active): it would determine objects completely (Pluhar, xcii). 

This type of intuition would not need sensible intuition and imagination for cognition, but "would determine objects in terms of the harmony within this understanding itself" (Pluhar, xcii).  Since intellectual intuition would not require that the particular be provide outside of or to the understanding, the particular could be present along with the universal. If this were the case, however, objects would be constituted as "complete, as things in themselves, no as mere appearances" (Pluhar, xcii).  What is the significance of this? 

If one grants intellectual intuition, then things in themselves would have a particularity in themselves.  Pluhar explains: 

Nature in itself would simply be the intellectual (supersensible) intuition of the intuitive understanding, just as our world of experience simply is the experience that consists of our empirical intuition as structured in harmony with our categories (Pluhar, xcii).  

Has Kant found God theoretically according to Pluhar?  Not quite: 

By the same token, such a supersensible understanding with its supersensible intuitions cannot be called God; rather, the idea of it is utterly inderminate, negative, the mere idea of an understanding that "is not discursive."

 But what Pluhar has found, he believes is enough to solve the antinomy of teleology judgment.  

With this mere idea of an "intuitive understanding," Kant can now solve the antinomy of teleological judgment.  As an intuitive understanding would necessitate even the particular, the mere idea of such an understanding permits us to think of the "contingency" of the particular as being only a seeming contingency, a "contingency for" our understanding with its peculiarity, but as in fact being a necessity.  A merely seeming contingency that is in fact a necessity does not conflict with the necessity implicit in mechanism. Hence "objectively too" it is at least possible to reconcile the mechanistic principle with the teleological, for it is at least possible that the causal connections that we have to judge in terms of purposes and hence as contingent are in fact legislated theoretically and are therefore necessary. The laws covering those necessary but yet particular causal connections would then either have the same basis as mechanism (viz., the intellectual intuition of that intuitive understating) or would perhaps even be identical with the mechanism familiar to us -- identical in the sense of forming part, along with the mechanism familiar to us, of some ideal mechanism, in which case even organisms would be possible on this (ideal) mechanism alone (Pluhar, xciii). 

The solution that Pluhar finds in Kant is that there may be mechanism within the supersensible, one to which human beings have no epistemic access, a mechanism that a "higher understanding" might nonetheless access and legislate. The antinomy of teleological judgment is thus solved because it is possible that a being with intellectual intuition could have access to this mechanism, a mechanism which objectively would allow for our judgments of purposiveness. There is some state of supersensible affairs on the basis of which the thesis and antithesis of the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment can both be asserted without contradiction. That is to say, both assertions are consistent with the supersensible, "objective" existence of such an "ideal mechanism" which would allow for purpose as it appears to us. Pluhar claims that this supersensible state of affairs would allow for both objective and subjective purposiveness. 

. . . the antinomy of "teleological" judgment and its solution apply just as much to the subjective purposiveness of nature which is claimed in the principle of reflective judgment itself, for this purposiveness too is clearly contingent in terms of mechanism and yet is a purposiveness of nature and as such is subject to nature's necessity.  Hence it too can be thought without contradiction only if we think of the "contingency" it implies as in fact being a necessity legislated by an intuitive understanding with its intellectual intuition (Pluhar, xciii). 

Prima facie, this seems consistent with this famous passage from Kant:

Since universal natural laws have their basis in our understanding . . . the particular empirical laws must . . be viewed in terms of such a unity as [they would have] if they too had been given by an understanding (even though not ours) so as to assist our cognitive powers . . ." (Ak, 180, 181, 184).  

Because the "solution" to the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment applies both to objective and subjective purposiveness of nature, it applies "to nature's subject purposiveness as judge aesthetically, i.e., to nature's purposiveness without a purpose" (Pluhar, xciv).  Since this purposiveness has both contingency and necessity, it can "be thought without contradiction only if we have recourse to the idea of a supersensible intuition as necessitating the particular" (Ibid.). It is on this basis that Kant can claim that the antinomy of aesthetic judgment and the antinomy of teleological judgment are merely manifestations of one antinomy.  

We are now in a position to understand Pluhar's statement of the "solution" to Problem I concerning the unity of the supersensible.  Pluhar writes: 

Nature's subjective purposiveness is the indeterminate form (or "lawfulness," i.e., regularity or order) that nature has in the particular; and the indeterminate concept of this purposiveness is the indeterminate concept of that form of the particular. But this concept is contradictory (because of the antinomy) unless we think of this purposive form as necessitated (a priori) by an intellectual intuition.  Moreover, just as our a priori concepts and intuitions are the forms that we give to all objects of appearance, so the purposive form that would be necessitated by this intellectual intuition would simply be that intuition. . . Hence, according to our indeterminate concept of this supersensible intuition, the world in itself would be the completely determinate form which that intellectual intuition is (Pluhar, xcv). 

Pluhar further speculates in a footnote that the "purposive form of nature's particular might be only part of the form that the intellectual intuition is." It may be that the intuitive understanding legislates through the same intuition "in terms of the mechanism familiar to us, or in terms of laws pertaining to both the purposive and the mechanistic forms in nature, in nature outside and within us" (Pluhar, xcv, fn 99). Pluhar claims that if the purposive form of nature's particulars were but part of the form of the intellectual intuition, it would "still be necessitated by, and hence would still be based on and (in that part) be, that intellectual intuition" (Ibid.).  

Pluhar is thus arguing that the notion of an intellectual intuition, long held by the majority of Kant scholars as something that the philosopher robustly dismisses, does play an important role in Kant's philosophy after all.  As it turns out, "in order to think of nature's subjective purposiveness without contradicting ourselves we must think of this form as being identical with the form that such an intellectual intuition would be" (Ibid.).  Because the intellectual intuition can be thought of as the supersensible basis of nature's subjective purposiveness, the concept of nature's subjective purposiveness is equivalent to the concept of the supersensible basis of that purposiveness. Pluhar wants to clarify: While the concepts are not synonymous, they have the same extension in that the forms to which they refer are identical.  Pluhar explains: 

In order for us to judge, without contradiction, an object as beautiful, this judgment must be taken to imply (noncognitively) that the object has the kind of form that only a supersensible understanding could have given it through its intellectual intuition (Pluhar, xcvi). 

Since the concept of nature's subjective purposiveness is indeterminate, the concept of the supersensible ground of that purposiveness must be indeterminate as well. Moreover, our concept of the form that the intellectual intuition would be and have is also indeterminate. In so far as we contemplate subjective purposiveness, the concepts must be wholly indeterminate, but objective purposiveness does demand some determinacy of concepts, and thus Pluhar believes that "determinate concepts of purposes . . . must be included as details in the otherwise indeterminate concept of [an] intellectual intuition" (Pluhar, xcvii). 

With this, Pluhar believes he has stated and solved Problem I. The question had to do with the universalizability of aesthetic judgments. In response, Kant claims that an indeterminate concept of the supersensible must underly nature's purposiveness if there is going to be any universalizability of judgment. The solution is that one can justifiably treat as equivalent the indeterminate concept of nature's purposiveness for our cognitive power with the indeterminate concept of the of the supersensible basis of that same purposiveness.  

Problem II: The Derminability of the Supersensible

Pluhar's second problem is this: "How can the concept of the supersensible basis of nature's subjective purposiveness make determinable the concept of the supersensible that is contained practically in the idea of freedom, and thus help make the supersensible cognizable practically, even though the concept of the supersensible as a basis of nature's subjective purposiveness in indeterminate?" (Pluhar, xcvii).  How can this supersensible mediate between the other two so that the "three supersensbiles turn out to be one and the same?" (Ibid.). 

Pluhar gives the following argument: 

1. The concept of the supersensible nature of nature's subjective purposiveness is equivalent to the concept of nature's subjective purposiveness.  
2. The concept of nature's subjective purposiveness belongs to the power of judgment. 
3. The power of judgment is a function of the understanding. 
4. Thus, our understanding must be able to think not only the concept of nature's subjective purposiveness, but also the concept of the supersensible basis of that purposiveness.  

But can the understanding do this?  Is it not of the very nature of the supersensible that there be no epistemic access to it?  Again an appeal to intellectual intuition is needed.  Reason can think such an supersensible, but the understanding cannot know it.  

Our understanding is discursive and thus not intuitive.  Intuitions must be given to it through the sensibility.  Because of the limitation of the structure of our understanding, we cannot conceive how an intuitive understanding would be possible. What would be the nature of such an understanding?  Unlike ours, it could legislate not merely the universal, but the particular as well.  It would be able to legislate a "synthetic" universal -- a whole that would make possible the character and combination of the parts -- something we cannot do.  While we can conceive the character and combination of the parts determining the whole mechanically, as it were, we can't understand how the whole could determine the parts.  

This is not to say that we can't have an idea of a whole making possible the character and the combination of its parts.  We have an idea of this, after all; it is called purpose.  We can think of another understanding as causing the particular and determining its form, but we can only conceive this practically.  We have no epistemic access to how it could legislate theoretically the particular.  Our understanding cannot think the particular in any other way than through the category of purpose.  In fact, when we think in terms of purpose, we do so by analogy with our own technically practical ability to produce objects through art by our understanding and reason (Pluhar, xcviii - xcvix). When our understanding thinks by means of judgment's concept of the purposiveness of nature in particular, it thinks the other understanding as an intelligent cause of the world in terms of purpose (Pluhar, xcix). The point is this: Although the concept of supersensible basis of nature's purposiveness remains indeterminate, through an analogy with our technically practical ability, it becomes determinable.  

Kant discusses all of this. By subordinating mechanism to purposive causality, our understanding can conceive of a world whose purposiveness if caused by some intelligence. "It can go on to conceive of this intelligent cause as using mechanism, just as we humans do, as the means to the purposes it pursues (Ak. 414,390), 'as an instrument, as it were' (Ak. 422)" (Pluhar, xcix).  

In subordinating mechanism to purposiveness, understanding does not resolve the antinomy. We cannot think such a subordination.  However, reason can appeal to the notion of an intellectual understanding using intellectual intuition. Understanding and its judgment cannot think the apparent purposive order in nature's particularity as involving necessity, but reason can think of an intellectual intuition that could resolve that antinomy at its supersensible basis. 

The point is that the indeterminate concept of the supersensible underlying nature in the Critique of Pure Reason is now a determinable concept of the supersensible.  How is this?  It is determinable practically, i.e., morally by reason. Pluhar explains: 

While we could not intelligibly have described a mere (utterly indeterminate) "supersensible basis of nature" in moral terms, viz., as being a "nature in itself created, in terms of the final purpose, by a God having all the divine perfections," we certainly can intelligibly describe in such terms a nature in itself created, as an intentional purpose, bu an intelligent cause.  In other words, we can now think of this cause as moral author of the world by reference to the final purpose, and hence we can almost think of nature as being forced by this moral author to cooperate with our attempt to achieve the final purpose" (Pluhar, ci).  

The solution is upon us.  As we have seen in the first problem, the antinomy of teleological (and aesthetic) judgment could only be solved by appeal to the supersensible basis of nature's subject and objective purposiveness.  But the concept of the supersensible basis for nature's purposiveness is at the same time the concept of the intuitive understanding with its intellectual intuition. But since our discursive understanding cannot think the intuitive understanding, it thinks instead the supersensible basis of nature's purposiveness as an intelligent cause of the world, a designer. This concept, now determinable, "mediates" between the indeterminate concept of the supersensible in the Critique of Pure Reason, and the determinate concept of the supersensible in the Critique of Practical Reason.  Simply put, through the mediation of judgment's concept of the supersensible basis of nature's purposiveness, the three supersensibles are united in one.  Pluhar declares, "the substrate of nature was merely made determinate enough to be nature in itself as the purpose brought about by an intelligent cause, and then to be nature in itself as cause by a moral author, a God" (Pluhar, cii). 

Problem III: Mediation and the Spontaneity in the Play of the Cognitive Powers

Kant claimed that nature's purposiveness is "suitable" for mediation because it involves a "spontaneity in the play of the cognitive powers, whose harmony with each other contains the basis of [the] pleasure [that we feel in judging the beautiful" (Ak. 197). Pluhar points out that Kant also claimed that the "essential" part of the Critique of Judgment is the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Pluhar, cii).  Unlike teleological judgment which appeals to reason with its determinate concepts of purposes, judgments of taste are grounded only in the power of judgment (Ibid.).  Why are judgments of taste more suitable for mediation than judgments involving reason and its determinate concepts of purpose? 

Pluhar gives a number of reasons why these judgments are more suitable. Although the mediation involves supersensibles, this mediation is paralleled by a mediation within our the higher cognitive powers, a  mediation of our legislative powers. In fact, there are three levels in which judgment mediates: 1) A mediation among our cognitive powers, 2) a mediation among the worlds of appearance, and 3) a mediation among supersensibles. The power of judgment is to mediate nature and freedom at these three different levels. Subjective purposiveness, that is a purposiveness without a purpose, constitutes the domain of the aesthetic, and this purposiveness "is 'analogous' to or 'symbolic' of the supersensible form that the moral law enjoins us to impose on nature"(Pluhar, ciii). Pluhar explains: 

What makes this purposiveness analogous to supersensible (moral) form is that, since it involves no determinate concept of a natural purpose with its objective with its objective . . . purposiveness, it is a purely formal and free purposiveness. It is formal, as the moral law is formal; it is free, as our will is free to obey or disobey the moral law . . .  Moreover, the 'play' in which our cognitive powers are when we judge subjective purposiveness aesthetically is 'spontaneous': i.e., this play is 'active' inasmuch as it sustains itself . . . and in this respect it is again similar to our will's freedom, which is active by being a special causality  (Pluhar, ciii). 

The role of aesthetic judgment is displayed in consciousness. In judgments of taste we are nonconceptually conscious "of the free harmonious play of imagination and understanding", and this nonconceptual consciousness just is that feeling of pleasure we have in judgments of taste (Pluhar, ciii).  Because there is a connection between this pleasure and the moral law and its freedom, the pleasure presented in judgments of tase our linked to moral feeling, that is, respect for the moral law and our own freedom in performing it. Because of this "spontaneity in the play of the cognitive powers, as accompanied by our awareness of it, can lead to moral feeling" (Pluhar, civ).  

A Problem Not Solved

So there are the three problems and their solutions. But are all things solved?  Pluhar points out that they are not, for the solutions of the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment in the Critique of Judgment conflicts with the solution of the Third Antinomy in the Critique of Pure Reason.  

The problem is that in "solving" the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment, Kant has "pushed" the supersensible in the direction of necessity and has seemingly abandoned freedom. If a non-discursive, intellectual intuition could understand how nature works without appealing to purpose, then the ground upon which the concepts of subjective and objective purposiveness rests, a ground indeterminate but now determinable, seems unable to allow for freedom as it is in itself with regard to the practical reasoning of the Critique of Practical Reason.  

On the other hand, if one were to take very seriously practical reason's declaration that there really is freedom, then the categories of the Critique of Pure Reason which legislate mechanistic determinism fall wholly within in the realm of appearance, and this appearance brings illusion. We human knowers will always understand every event to have a cause, but the causality involved in human action is real. Cognition involves reflection through concepts, and it is with reflection that mechanism arises. But human freedom is real, and ultimately human beings in their moral autonomy escape the fate of the natural. Thus, Kant is solidly a Romantic after all!   

So the mediation proffered by judgment may not be ultimately successful to overcome the Kantian dualism.  Either the determinability at judgment's supersensible is a higher-level mechanism, and no freedom is possible, or there is real freedom, and the mediation by judgment in the direction of such a mechanism is itself only an appearance.  

Overcoming dualism is difficult for the connection between the two domains generally falls into one domain or the other.  It seems to have happened here as well. 

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.  

Documents Pertaining to the Founding of the Institute of Lutheran Theology: A Lutheran House of Studies

There was once an organization called the Fellowship of Confessional Lutherans (FOCL), and they had a publication which I recall was called FOCL News. I penned this article on the new "Lutheran House of Studies" for that publication in order to get the word out. I believe it was written and published sometime in the summer of or fall of 2006.  You can see that I was interested from the beginning in establishing a theological ethos at ILT, and wanted to address this question: Given the different interpretations of subsequent traditions of foundational documents, what can ILT do to vouchsafe some normative approach to interpreting those documents? Theological realism, semantic realism, and the possibility of theophysical causation are advanced as possible "grammars" by which foundational documents could be read. 

__________

A Lutheran House of Studies

Dennis Bielfeldt, Ph. D. 

WordAlone earnestly desires to establish a new confessional Lutheran theological house of studies.  But some ask, “Why?  Why does Lutheranism need another place trying to train pastors confessionally?  What is so wrong with what we have?  While things aren’t perfect, perhaps, they aren’t that bad either.  Why does WordAlone think it can establish an institution more confessional than what has already been planted in ELCA, LCMS or WELS soil?  Why does it believe that the effort and expense will bear good fruit?”

These are important questions, of course, and it seems that the so-called “Director of the WordAlone Lutheran theological house of studies” (my official title these days) should have ready answers to them.  When the WordAlone Convention in May adopted a plan for implementation of the house of studies, it voted on a report in which I spoke of several challenges facing seminary education within the ELCA.  At that time, I saw six major issues:  

• an economic challenge
• a sociological challenge
• a leadership challenge
• a theological challenge
• an authority challenge
• a rights challenge

I still believe that these identify the major difficulties facing theological education within the ELCA, and I recommend that FOCL readers examine the Report and form their own opinions as to its accuracy. This report, I believe, gives the rationale for why another Lutheran institution is necessary for the training of future pastors and teachers.    

If this list is accurate, however, and is successfully answers questions of why we need a confessional House of Studies now within the ELCA context, it does not address the further question of the general theological contour of that house of studies.  Given that the house of studies is “confessional,” what does “being confessional” mean for its curriculum and teaching?   Even more profoundly, what does “being confessional” mean within Lutheranism generally in our time?  

The easy answer to the question of what “being confessional” means is this: For an educational institution to be confessional is for it to privilege the historic confessions of its tradition such that they become foundational (and normative) for the piety, teaching and research of the institution.  

Unfortunately, this definition is inadequate.  Because our postmodern times allow (and often encourage) multiple readings of texts, two or more institutions grounded on the same confessional texts might have quite different theological trajectories.  All the ELCA seminaries can make a claim to privilege Scripture and the Lutheran confessional writings, yet it is obvious that some have departed more significantly from traditional Lutheran theological affirmations than have others.  Many celebrate this departure from the tradition as a departure entailed by the radicality of God’s love for us in Christ.  (This is clearly true with regard to the sexuality/homsexuality debate raging within the ELCA.)  

So how can this situation be fixed?  Indeed, how might one fix the interpretations of the Confessions so that they might not drift?  What kind of interpretation of Scripture can block interpretations attempting to say that Scripture itself says nothing about the sinfulness of homosexuality?  What kind of interpretation of the Confessions and the confessional tradition can block interpretations saying that the Reformers “earnestly desired” to retain Bishops in historical succession with Rome, and thus that Lutherans are mandated by their own confessions to seek visible, ecclesial unity with Rome? 

In the absence of a present normative consensus as to what the texts of the Confessions mean, it becomes important to make clear from the beginning that it is not the text itself that grounds a tradition, but rather a particular interpretation of the text.  A particular reading of the text, established in part by its situational context, functions normatively and determines, at least partially, the character of any educational institution regarding that text as foundational. 

My motivation in offering the WordAlone “fundamentals” is to try to determine if there is sufficient theological clarity in the WordAlone movement to establish normatively a range of interpretations of the Lutheran confessional documents.   Given that Lutherans holding to Scriptures and Confessions believe many different things about what Scriptures and Confessions mean and presuppose, is there sufficient clarity within WordAlone to be able to determine for these documents a range of appropriate meanings?  What “take” on Scripture and Confessions has seemed to be operating in the WordAlone movement since its inception, a “take” that might be worked up into a list of central theological affirmations or assumptions? 

My own attempt at articulating these affirmations of WordAlone appear on the WordAlone website, but I include them also below.  I believe that these assertions function as the differentia which give WordAlone its identity as a species within Lutheranism.      

• Theological statements have truth-conditions
• God is real, that is, God exists out and beyond human awareness, perception, conception and language
• God is causally related to the universe
• All temporal structures, institutions and conceptual frameworks are historically-conditioned      Nothing finite is infinite
• The true church is not visible, but remains hidden
• The Holy Spirit works monergistically, not synergistically, upon sinners effecting saving faith

While all seven statements are important, the first four are especially significant in our theological context and thus I have developed them quite extensively in a longer article that I hope to have published soon. I have space here only to touch upon the first four. 

The first assertion makes the semantic claim that what makes a theological statement true is some extra-subjective reality that is relatable to the subject.  This statement clearly denies that theological language could merely refer to the self, or to the attitudes, values and orientations of a community.  In addition, it claims that theological statements must be more than simple rules by which a community organizes its religious life together.   Theological statements function as rules, I believe, only if the community believes them true, only if it thinks these statements state what is, in fact, the case.   

The second and third assertions are ontological.  They claim that there is some reality to God that is not merely reducible to human experience.  Over and against the dominant theological tradition of the last 200 years, the third claim is that God is causally connected to the universe, that there are at least some physical events that would not have obtained had God not causally-influenced them to do so.  These two assertions are important because they bring God out of the “causal isolation” presupposed in the development of much Lutheran theology since the time of Kant in 1781.  For Kant, God could not be a substance causally-related to the universe, but was instead an “ideal of pure reason.”    

Finally, assertion four has epistemological consequences.  All objects of knowledge, and all acts or knowing, are denizens of time and are thereby limited by other events within time.  Thus, there can be no knowledge of any such objects that are not affected by history.  Every act of knowing is historically-conditioned.  We have no immediate knowledge of things as they are in themselves, no “bird’s eye view” from which to gaze out on things and know them absolutely.  This is so for all acts of knowing, even when it is the divine that is known.  This affirmation clearly admits that God is hidden, but does not thereby make a diminished ontological claim about God simply because we cannot know God as He is apart from Christ.   

So how is it that the proposed house of studies might successfully establish a normative standpoint on the Confessions such that they become the foundational documents which they must be if they are to govern the subsequent educational trajectory of the institution?  How does the WordAlone House of Studies guarantee that it will not become just another expression of a liberal Protestant ethos in North America?

The simple answer is this:  If the WordAlone Network can agree on some rather key theological issues, it can establish its house of studies upon on the ground of this consensus.  Without some normative theological underpinning, a WordAlone house of studies will drift and shift according to the prevailing theological winds of the day.  Let us examine how establishing a normative theological center might affect the house of studies.    

Lutherans within and outside the WordAlone Network will likely agree that God confronts us in Law and Gospel, and that the address of the Gospel has salvific significance for its auditors.  Lutherans within and outside WordAlone will emphasize the performative nature of first-order statements - - statements referring to the primary objects of theology - - bespeaking God’s grace in and despite human sinfulness.   But clearly a majority of folks within the ELCA see no tension between this emphasis and the practice of a mandated historic episcopate.  Thus, there is a disconnect between a lively Law/Gospel application of Scripture and “issues of church organization” like the acceptance of the historic episcopate.  The problem is a very deep one, and it goes to the very heart of some rather profound theological issues.  

I believe that a presupposition of much ELCA thinking is that second-order theological language - - statements dealing with the relationship of theological objects and the first-order sentences bespeaking them - - does not literally have truth-conditions (that is, that its statements are not literally true or false).  While all can agree on the abundance of God’s grace in the linguistic encounter in sermon and text, many will assume that further statements about God are unwarranted and even misleading.  For instance, why would one ever want to say that ‘God exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language’ or that ‘God is causally-related to the universe’?  Why would one need to say these things, if the reality of God’s grace is communicated through first-order language?   For many liberal Protestants, the problems begin when one begins to speak about God.  If this is true, why would one want to affirm statements about God?  

The response to this is two-fold: 1) We need second-order language about God to state what it is we actually believe, and to ground what it is we shall teach about God; and 2) What it is we actually believe about God does influence the hearer’s appropriation of the words of Law and Gospel.  

In regard to the second response, we must point out that the logic of being forgiven entails that there is one to forgive.  In like manner, the logic of living under divine wrath requires that there is a God who is righteously angry. While one might have an experience of being forgiven without there being God, or might have an experience of being under divine wrath without God, one simply cannot be forgiven by God or truly live under divine wrath unless there is a God.  Moreover, the contour of the experience of wrath and forgiveness is related to whether or not there is One whose wrath is kindled, and who nonetheless graciously and mercifully forgives.  What human beings believe about God dialectically links to howGod confronts us in Law and Gospel.  For instance, if John doesn’t believe God has a personal agency, then the experience of grace John has hearing the Gospel will surely be different than what he would have had were he to have held that God was a personal God.         

As another example of this, take the words of Scripture ‘fear not!’  In a particular situation, these words spoken can be words of Gospel and grace.  They certainly were so for people like Luther who understood the gift of God’s grace and forgiveness over and against a backdrop of divine wrath.  Luther and the reformers actually thought that God existed outside of them, and that this God could (and did) adopt particular attitudes about them.  Luther thought that God in his hiddenness was so awe-full, that he counseled others to keep their eyes riveted on the Christ.  The Words of Gospel promise are so sweet because the human condition before the inscrutable will of the hidden God is so dire.  

For Luther, the necessary condition for being a hidden God with inscrutable will that terrifies man and woman outside of Christ is that God is a real being having causal relations within the universe.  God is no mere idea of reason, no abstract thought about the unity or mystery of all things.  God is a living reality that is a threat to sinners - - and all of us are sinners.  It seems, that even though God is hidden, some reflection upon, or encounter with, God’s being is necessary if one is going to understand the situation as Luther did.  It should come as no shock that the confessional documents read in quite a different way to those who believe that God has independent existence outside the self.  At that point, all thinking about the gift of language stops and we are thrust back into the primal experience of awaiting a word of Gospel from God- - not because it is a word, but because it comes from God.  

Much more could be said about these things, but the point is clear.  If WordAlone can arrive at some consensus of theological opinion, then there is a foundation upon which to ground a Scripturally-engaged, and confessionally-grounded Lutheran theological house of studies.  If WordAlone is unable to define clearly what it is to be both Scripturally-engaged and confessionally-grounded, then its house of studies shall likely not prosper, and the critics who claim it ill-advised and wasteful to have attempted its establishment will themselves perhaps be vindicated.  As with most human endeavors, it is extremely important to start correctly.