What is a ‘critique of judgement’?

Kant’s Critique of Judgement (CoJ) is imposing. Let us begin with the title. What is a ‘critique’? And what exactly does Kant mean by ‘judgement’?

What is a critique?

It is no accident that Kant’s three most famous books all have ‘critique’ (Kritik) in their title. A critique (hence critical philosophy) is a distinctive approach to philosophy that Kant invented to answer his concerns about rationalist metaphysics. Metaphysicians make some ambitious claims about God and reality, but as Hume and others showed, it is difficult to prove them. Kant thinks that instead of speculating over the external world, we must examine the mental faculties through which we get knowledge of it. A critique tries to define the extent and limits of what a given mental faculty can do.

Kant points this out in the CoJ when he observes that the investigation of the ‘possibility and boundaries in general’ of reason ‘can be called the critique of pure reason’.¹

What can the faculty do by itself? What can’t it do? How does it condition our knowledge? How does it relate to other mental faculties? By establishing this we gain a clearer understanding of how our minds structure our sensations, and the limits of knowledge itself. Here we see the ‘turn’ from metaphysics to epistemology.

There is a nice discussion by Douglas Burnham of how this works:

If I try to apply some concept (for example, the concept of a horse) outside its range, that is to some other but inappropriate concept (for example, the concept of ‘colourless’) the result will be nonsense (‘that colourless is a horse’). Usually, we can tell immediately when this has happened – everyone laughs. In this example, however, the problem is basically grammar. More interesting would be those propositions that make grammatical sense, but are still nonsense from the point of view, for example, of any possible knowledge of the world. When concepts become very abstract – that is, are not so clearly related to real objects in the world – it may be less obvious when nonsense is produced. For example, is it, or is it not, nonsense to say ‘God is the cause of the universe’, or ‘space is infinitely vast’?... A useful first approximation to what Kant calls ‘critique’ is the process of deciding when the use of a concept such as ‘cause’ or ‘infinitely large’ is appropriate.²

Through critique we can work out which statements make sense, and then go on to work out whether or not they are true. Rather than try to validate every individual sensation, concept and idea, Kant wants to scrutinise how we use the mental faculties that produce them. There may be beings that can know objects in the universe directly and completely (like gods) but we humans are not among them.

A critique of judgement, specifically, is an analysis of the extent and limits of our human ability to make judgements about the world.

This is an important shift in philosophy. For two thousand years, philosophers had taken metaphysics to be primary and foundational, and indeed called it ‘first philosophy’, a term taken from Aristotle. Kant belonged to a new generation that considered itself a voice of the Enlightenment, and in this capacity he wrote a famous note in the CPR:

Our age is the genuine age of criticism [Kritik], to which everything must submit. Religion through its holiness and legislation through its majesty commonly seek to exempt themselves from it. But in this way they excite a just suspicion against themselves, and cannot lay claim to that unfeigned respect that reason grants only to that which has been able to withstand its free and public examination.³

The focus of philosophers was shifting away from the outside, objective world and towards to the internal, subjective world of the human mind and how its powers determined our knowledge. Critical philosophy is Kant’s attempt at a framework for answering those kinds of questions, and may be seen as the highest achievement of the epistemological turn.

What is judgement?

The difference between judgement (Urteil) and the power of judgement (Urteilskraft), as in the work’s title, is the judgement is what is done by the power or faculty of judgement.

In everyday language we often think in terms of value judgements, such as when we judge how good a movie was, or whether someone has acted immorally. But in Kant’s philosophy, judgement (Urteil) is a kind of cognition made possible by our faculty of judgement. In simple terms it happens when we decide what an object is – or, to cite Burnham again, ‘a judgement happens every time we think something about something’. In a way, a judgement is just an assertion.

To get more technical, Kant in the Introduction (IV) says:

The power of judgement in general is the faculty of thinking of the particular as contained under the universal.

E.g. we see a particular panting thing with legs and a tail, and we apply to it the general concept ‘dog’. In theoretical knowledge we might judge, e.g., ‘All dogs are mammals.’ In practical (moral) knowledge, we might judge, e.g., ‘This woman’s statement is a lie.’ Kant thinks of a concept as a kind of rule or law that governs the universal validity of the judgement.

Kant loves distinctions: he continues by dividing judgement into two types, determinative and reflective. He explains the difference thus:

The power of judgment in general is the faculty for thinking of the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, then the power of judgment, which subsumes the particular under it... is determining [bestimmend]. If, however, only the particular is given, for which the universal is to be found, then the power of judgment is merely reflecting [bloß reflektierend]. (Introduction IV, p66-67)

The world is full of particular things. To experience them, Kant thinks, we subsume a particular under a universal (a concept) that explains what it is. If we have a concept ready for the object we encounter, we can make a determinative judgement. If we don’t – if it is not something we can recognise – we must cast about for a concept.

• Determinative: the particular is determined by a concept/rule; the concept comprises enough information to identify what the thing is. Kant considers judgements of this sort in the Critique of Pure Reason.
• Reflective: the particular is not determined by a concept/rule, though the judgement may go on to form one. Aesthetic judgements (which are based on feeling) are of this kind, and the problem of what a non-conceptual judgement could be is one of the tasks of the Critique of Judgement.

We shall explore these more in this series of articles.

Types of judgement

Judgements (we could alternatively say propositions or statements) can take a variety of forms, which Kant inherited from earlier philosophers. For example, we may make an epistemological distinction based upon the kind of knowledge involved:

• A priori judgements: based upon reason alone, independent of sensory experience, and therefore universal and necessary. E.g. ‘2+2=4.’ Two plus two must always necessarily add up to four regardless of context.
• A posteriori judgements: must be grounded upon experience, and are therefore limited and contingent. E.g. ‘All US presidents have been male.’ There is nothing about US presidents that makes them necessarily male. Whether in practice they have all been male or not (thanks to prevailing sexism) is a matter of observation.

Note we have mentioned here another, metaphysical distinction:

• Necessity: Necessary truths must happen and cannot not happen; they cannot be false. E.g. ‘Dogs are mammals’ – there is no world in which this could be false.
• Contingency: Contingent truths could happen or not, depending on circumstances; they could be either true or false. E.g. ‘My cat is black’ – it could have been the case that my cat was white.

We could also consider judgements from a semantic perspective, based on the information they convey in a subject-predicate relationship:

• Analytic judgements: their predicates are contained in their subjects and are true by definition: e.g. ‘all bachelors are unmarried’ or ‘triangles have three sides’. The predicate adds nothing to the subject – any bachelor must by definition be unmarried – so they are effectively just tautologies and give us no new information.
• Synthetic judgements: their predicates are distinct from their subjects and are only true by experience, i.e. by reference to the outside world. You can’t tell if they’re true by relying purely on the meaning of the words: e.g. ‘Shostakovich likes football’ or ‘it is raining in Berlin’. They might be true, they might not: you have to go into the world and find out. They give us information about the world.

Let’s review these three kinds of distinction:

• A priori  / a posteriori: A priori judgements do not depend on experience (rational); a posteriori judgements do depend on experience (empirical).
• Necessary  / contingent: Necessary judgements are always true; contingent statements might be true (conditional).
• Analytic  / synthetic: Analytic judgements can be proved true by analysing the meaning of their terms (tautological); synthetic judgements cannot be proved true by analysing the meaning of their terms.

These three distinctions bunch naturally together. The terms in each group are very similar though slightly different:

• Rational: The judgement ‘all bachelors are unmarried’ is a priori, necessary and analytic. It does not rely on experience and must always be true. We don’t need to go around checking the marital status of every bachelor in the world to confirm it.
• Empirical: The judgement ‘it is raining in Moscow’ is a posteriori, contingent, and synthetic. It does rely on experience, i.e. it might be true, but only observation of the world can confirm it.⁴ Sometimes it does rain in Moscow, other times it doesn’t.

The types of judgement we’ve just considered may be combined to give us some new possibilities:

• Analytic a priori judgements: these include logical truths and are necessarily true. Not controversial.
• Synthetic a posteriori judgements: matters of fact we acquire by means of sensory experience. These are the opposite of analytic a priori judgements and they, too, are not controversial.
• Analytic a posteriori judgements: these don’t really make sense. For Kant they were paradoxical: an analytic a posteriori judgement would contain the predicate within the subject but would have to be grounded in experience. It’s hard to see how that applies to a statement like ‘a triangle has three sides’ – we don’t have to experience a triangle to know it’s true.⁵

We can see how all these distinctions play into the problems of Kant’s critical philosophy: how can we find a role for reason and metaphysics when we only gain new information from empirical judgements? Fortunately we still have a fourth possibility, absent from Hume or Leibniz:

• Synthetic a priori judgements: these are Kant’s innovation, and the purpose of the Critique of Pure Reason is to prove they are possible. They provide new information about the world but are always, necessarily true without reference to contingent empirical events. This sounds strange. But take the judgement, ‘the sum of the angles in a triangle equals 180 degrees’. This is always true, but the concept of 180 degrees is not contained in the concept of a triangle in the way that ‘having three sides’ is: it is something that must be found out, and once found it gives us new information about the triangle.

	A priori	A posteriori
Analytic	All bachelors are unmarried	N/A
Synthetic	All events have causes	The cat is on the mat

Another example would be Newton’s Second Law of motion, f = ma (force = mass × acceleration). This physical law is necessarily true, but things like ‘acceleration’ are not concrete things we can see, taste or touch, so we can’t experience them directly, though we can test them experimentally – nor can we experience every instance of them in operation across the universe. With the synthetic a priori, Kant defends from Humean scepticism reason, Newtonian science, and also metaphysics, which can’t be based on analytic a priori judgements (which give us no new information) or on synthetic a posteriori judgements (which require experience that we cannot have when it comes to metaphysical matters).

Through this union of reason and experience, Kant argued that it was possible to build a bridge between empiricism and rationalism. 1) We need empirical sense data, but 2) our mental concepts fundamentally shape and define that experience. We have a priori categories of the understanding that make the teeming empirical data of experience intelligible to us (e.g. by imposing the properties of space and time) and are the necessary conditions for the possibility of our sense perceptions.

The rationalists and empiricists were both right. Human cognition is subjective, and yet a priori. The two prongs of Hume’s Fork may, in fact, touch – and it is reason that sets up the conditions for experience and knowledge. (Kant is therefore technically a rationalist, albeit of a special kind.)

Thus Kant had an answer to Hume’s scepticism about causality: we could see events follow one another (which is empirical) while relying upon an a priori concept of causality to explain it (which is rational). Whether or not causality was objectively real ‘out there’ (it’s impossible for us to say for sure), it was a fundamental part of our cognition: a law we impose upon our experiences.

This is very interesting, but what has it to do with aesthetics? The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy offers a succinct answer:

[Kant] argues that it is our faculty of judgment that enables us to have experience of beauty and grasp those experiences as part of an ordered, natural world with purpose.⁶

How he does that will unravel as we proceed through the CoJ. So I will leave the specific question of aesthetic judgements, which deserves its own post, for another time.

Notes

1. Preface to the first edition, p.55.
2. Douglas Burnham, An Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgement (2000), p7-8.
3. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, footnote to A xi (i.e. the first edition), p101 in Guyer/Allen translation.
4. Some philosophers, such as Quine, reject the analytic/synthetic distinction, but we are discussing Kant so we can’t get into that here.
5. Again, there are more recent philosophers who disagree.
6. Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: http://www.iep.utm.edu/kantaest/