Introducing the Critique of Judgement

The Guyer/Matthews translation

The first use of the term ‘aesthetics’ was by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, who introduced it in his Reflections on Poetry of 1735 to mean ‘the science of sensory cognition’. However, his Wolffian Latin treatises seem hard to relate to today. The real founder of modern aesthetics was Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Judgement (Kritik der Urteilskraft) was written only 55 years later in 1790, but feels much closer to how the contemporary world thinks about aesthetics. Kant mostly takes only a marginal interest in art, yet the Critique of Judgement is one of the most systematic and influential texts on aesthetics ever written.

For anyone seriously interested in aesthetics, this is essential reading. You should read the Critique simply because it is an amazing piece of work. It is packed with ideas, some of them so groundbreaking and influential that they changed theory for ever. 

That said, Kant is notoriously difficult to read. The first time I approached his work I could make little sense of it – it might as well have been written in Latin. Others have had the same impression:

He wearies by frequent repetitions, and employs a great number of words to express, in the clumsiest way, what could have been enounced more clearly and distinctly in a few. The main statement in his sentences is often overlaid with a multitude of qualifying and explanatory clauses; and the reader is lost in a maze, from which he has great difficulty in extricating himself.¹

The difficulty arises because he is discussing a multitude of complicated ideas in a system dense with technical terms, and writes long, complex sentences that, for example, frequently refer back to ‘formers’ and ‘latters’ that you can barely identify any more. He also has his own particular concerns arising from his critical philosophy, which have a different focus to most books about art and beauty, and can make his work seem alien and excessively abstract. But although the Third Critique makes no concessions to the new reader, one gradually becomes accustomed to its language and concerns, and becomes immersed in its remarkably rich ideas. Compared to the baffling verbiage of certain recent philosophers, Kant’s style is actually relatively uncluttered. And Kant’s use of language is precise. This is not to claim that he never makes mistakes or causes confusions; it is to say that his sentences, torturous though they often are, are carefully formulated so as to say one thing and avoid saying another. True, we may not always find it easy to follow what those things are, because he makes little allowance for the reader. I think you need to have a grasp of his whole argument before the particulars become clear.

If you can, read the Third Critique in the original. Otherwise there are some good English translations. The current scholarly standard is Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews’ 2000 translation, which keeps as close as possible to the structure of Kant’s German. There are issues, as with any translation – personally I would prefer Zweck to be translated as ‘purpose’ instead of ‘end’ for example – but this is the edition I will refer to for quotation and referencing. Also highly rated is the 1987 translation by Werner S. Pluhar, and the 1892 translation by J.H. Bernard has the advantage of being available online. There’s nothing to stop you dipping into different versions if you have access to them. And of course there is a lot of good secondary literature that can help you through.

The title is usually translated as the Critique of Judgement. In German, Urteilskraft is a compound word made from Urteil (judgement) and Kraft (strength, force, power), and thus literally means ‘the power of judgement’. Guyer and Matthews prefer this more literal title: Critique of the Power of Judgement. (An even more literal rendering would be the Critique of the Judgement-Power.) For simplicity I will follow the older translations and just call it the Critique of Judgement, or CoJ for short.

A note on terminology: when studying Kant you have to be particularly careful about the correct use of technical language. ‘Emotion’ is different to ‘feeling’, the faculty of judgement in general is different to the judgement of taste, he loves to split things into two distinct types, and so on. And this is complicated by occasional sloppiness or lack of clarity by Kant himself. I hope I have not made mistakes in these articles... but be attentive to every word, both in Kant and in any secondary reading.

Theories as complex as this raise all kinds of debates, but my purpose here is mostly to try and explain the basics of Kant’s theory – though in Kant, ‘basics’ probably needs to be in ironic quotes. If readers are interested in the critical intricacies, you can consult the work of a bevy of Kant experts such as Henry E. Allison, Paul Guyer and others.

The structure of the CoJ

Title page of the first German edition

Despite Kant’s reputation for being methodical, the CoJ is not the best-organised work. Its divisions are sometimes confusing and there are unnecessary repetitions.

It has two introductions. Alongside the one that was originally published, most translations also include the so-called ‘First Introduction’, which Kant replaced for reasons of length and content.

Then it divides into two parts:
1. Critique of the Power of Aesthetic Judgment (§§1–60)
2. Critique of the Power of Teleological Judgment (§§61–91)

People interested in aesthetics usually only read the first part, which directly concerns aesthetic judgement, and skip the second, which discusses teleology in relation to organisms and natural purposes. Even published studies of the CoJ often discuss the latter only in passing. For time reasons, I will do the same, but while one may read the two halves independently, it is a shame to neglect half the book and thus the unity of Kant’s argument. The second part, though much less interesting to most readers, is inextricably bound with the themes of the book as a whole. Kant looks at both aesthetics and teleology because he thinks they offer a way to reconcile human freedom with nature.

So let’s look at the first part.

Critique of the Power of Aesthetic Judgement

Here is a rewriting of the divisions of the Critique of the Power of Aesthetic Judgement, i.e. Part 1 of the book, to make it easier to follow. This is my own spin on the breakdown by Douglas Burnham²:

Division I: Analytic of the aesthetic judgement
     Book 1: Analytic of the beautiful
          Four ‘moments’
          1. §§1-5: Interest/disinterestedness
          2. §§6-9: Universal delight/satisfaction/liking
          3. §§10-17: Purposiveness (incl. discussions of perfection and ideal)
          4. §§18-22: Necessity and common sense
          General comment on first division (i.e. Book 1)
     Book 2: Analytic of the sublime
          §§23-4: Introduction
          §§25-7: Mathematically sublime
          §§28-9: Dynamically sublime
          General comment upon the exposition (i.e. Books 1 and 2)
     Book 3: Deduction of aesthetic judgements
          §§30-7: The problem of a deduction
          §38: Deduction and comment
          §§39-42: Social and moral implications of the universal validity of natural beauty
     Book 4: On genius & fine art
          §§43-5: Art
          §§46-50: Genius, taste and aesthetic ideas
          §§51-3: Division and comparison of the fine arts
          §54: Remark on gratification
Division II: Dialectic of the aesthetic judgement
          §§55-8: Antinomies of taste
          §59: Beauty as the symbol of morality (effectively Kant’s conclusion to Part 1)
          §60: Appendix on methodology

Let’s look at some of those terms. Kant is trying to emulate the structure of the Critique of Pure Reason: for Kant, this structure belongs to the methodology of critical philosophy, so he keeps it for the CoJ even though, frankly, it does not always suit it. 

By ‘Analytic’ (Analytik) Kant means he is going to analyse or dissect something, such as the notions of the ‘beautiful’ or the ‘sublime’, to discern its basic elements or forms of operation.

A ‘Dialectic’ (Dialektik) on the other hand is an attempt to detect judgements which might seem true but in fact are illusory – a critique of the way reason can fall into error by overstepping its own limitations. (This works in the CPR, but in the CoJ the Dialectic is just a collection of observations.³)

By a ‘Deduction’ (Deduktion) Kant is making a legal analogy, and the thing on trial here is aesthetic judgements. Kant in the CoJ calls a deduction ‘a legitimation’ of an aesthetic judgement’s claim to universal validity (§30) and ‘the guarantee of the legitimacy of a kind of judgement’ (§31). So a deduction is an attempt to prove that aesthetic judgements are legitimate and universally valid.

Brief overview

It is significant that the book is not a Critique of Taste (Kant’s original title), or of beauty or aesthetics, but a critique of judgement. Theories of beauty before the 18th century tended to consider the qualities of the object and locate beauty in properties such as harmony and proportion. Kant instead turns inward, studying what happens in the human subject when they make what he calls a ‘judgement of taste’. By moving aesthetics into the framework of his critical philosophy, Kant makes it possible to establish some rules and parameters for such judgements. He does pay attention to how the object occasions the judgement, but the focus is on the relationship between the object and the human subject, and on the relationship between the different faculties of the human mind that make a feeling of pleasure or displeasure in beauty possible.

For Kant, the property of the object that leads to it being called beautiful is merely its spatio-temporal form; however, to judge the object as beautiful requires the human subject, in whom the object arouses what Kant calls a ‘free harmonious play’ of his/her cognitive powers.

The CoJ is a bit patchy, much disputed, and sometimes confusing, but whatever your assessment of its claims, Kant is attempting a sophisticated and ground-breaking theory that can explain why we think that judgements of taste are 1) subjective but 2) governed by rules. In the CoJ, he creates an aesthetics that can stand on an independent and equal basis beside his two previous critiques, granting aesthetics a new-found status. He supplies a major work on each of what he considers the three basic faculties of the human mind: knowledge, desire and feeling.

• Critique of Pure Reason: Knowledge – theoretical
• Critique of Practical Reason: Desire – practical (ethics)
• Critique of Judgement: Feeling – aesthetic

Theoretical and practical philosophy have a priori grounds, so for the CoJ Kant sets himself the task of identifying the a priori grounds for the judgement of taste as a faculty.

Finally, Kant conceives the CoJ as a mediation between the concerns of the first two critiques. On the one hand, nature is governed by deterministic law. On the other, we think we have free will – in fact, the possibility of moral choice means we must have free will. Therefore, we are subject to the laws of nature, as organic bodies that are part of nature, but at the same time part of us is not determined by nature and allows us to act upon it as agents. In the CoJ Kants wants to analyse the relationship between nature and freedom, and find a way to reconcile their apparent contradiction.

Notes

Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790), translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (2000). This is the edition I use.

You can read the 1892 translation by J.H. Bernard online. This is a good translation by all accounts, old though it is. Robert Wicks for example calls it ‘probably the best for someone who is approaching Kant’s aesthetics for the first time.’⁴

You can read the translation by James Creed Meredith online too.

1. Douglas Burnham, An Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgement (2000).
2. J. M. D. Meiklejohn, Preface to his 1855 English translation of Kant’s CPR.
3. The terms analytic and dialectic are subdivisions of logic and ultimately date back to Aristotle. After Kant the analytic-dialectic approach dies out.
4. Robert Wicks, Kant on Judgement (2007), p.xv.