Critique of Judgement

By: Immanuel Kant

Narrated by: Michael Lunts

Length: 15 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

Kant’s Critique of Judgement is the third and final part of his series of Critiques, which began with Critique of Pure Reason and continued with Critique of Practical Reason.

Critique of Judgement was published in 1790 and is divided into two parts, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the Critique of Teleological Judgement.

Our ‘judgements of taste’, as Kant describes our aesthetic judgements, have both a personal and a universal function: personal because we have a subjective aesthetic response to the ‘agreeable’, the ‘beautiful’, the ‘sublime’ and the ‘good’; but also there is a ‘universal’ aspect because our aesthetic response has a ’disinterested’ element. This brings under Kant’s spotlight, for example, the concept of beauty and the perception of beauty. Teleology, the idea that something has an end or purpose, is discussed in the second section. Here Kant, though not an atheist, questions, among other things, metaphysical proofs of God, including God as an intelligent designer.

Translation of Critique of Judgement by James Creed Meredith.

Public Domain (P)2018 Ukemi Productions Ltd

Absolute Genius

One of the most brilliant (and most challenging) works on the existence of God ever written, by one of the most brilliant men who has ever lived.

Great Philosophic Treatise

Immanuel Kant was undoubtedly a very intelligent man. I find it quite amazing that men of his time period were endowed with such great intellectual insight.

This audiobook, read by Michael Lunts is yet another excellent production from Ukemi. Michael did a superb job reading the text, and the sound quality is outstanding - thank you Ukemi!

Our mankind's apriori judgement foundation is...

The real aesthetical faculty was remained to be in silence before this critic. Because faculty itself denied by non-generalized thought which under a ruling by dogmatic or skepticism. Kant, in here this book, investigates that the ultimate foundation of the faculty. Not only by brain, please read this by total sympathy to author. That leads you to a world of full of wonder.

Excellent abeyance of haste

if you're here, there's a reason why you sought this material at this particular level of your experience

Conceptual Labyrinth: nibble, nibble, nibble

Overall, the book could have used some editing, but fulsome, German prose begins to grow on you after a while. It does help tremendously that it is divided into 91 sections, the last two being the longest, so you can keep tabs along the way. Here is a bird's eye view of the book's contents:

Introduction
First Part: Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment

First Section, First Book: Analytic of the Beautiful
First Section, Second Book: Analytic of the Sublime
Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgments

Second Section: The Dialectic of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment
Appendix: On the Methodology of Taste

Second Part: Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment
First Division: Analytic of the Teleological Power of Judgment
Second Division: Dialectic of the Teleological Power of Judgment
Appendix: Methodology of the Teleological Power of Judgment

Let it be known that these contents are extracted from 'The Critique of the Power of Judgment', translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, not 'The Critique of Judgment' as read for the audiobook, which I think is the one translated by James Creed Meredith.

Kant is notorious for inventing idiosyncratic idioms to stretch and compact language to catch relevant concepts that hadn't yet been caught. So, comprehending Kant's philosophy is not unlike the experience of learning a foreign language. Luckily, depending on your translation, the footnotes come to the rescue with increasing urgency. To be completely honest, even though I won't read this again for a while, I confess that the work affects my mind like storm clouds. The sheer density of the book is taxing at times. You get a temporary reprieve now and then with a charming metaphor or some rare instances of pleasing diction, but overall it's a slog through a thick jungle of unfamiliar nomenclature related overall to Kant's grand metaphysical vision, which itself takes some time to get used to. I suspect that after you become familiar with the jungle, you'll enjoy it more.

What about the Aesthetic Power of Judgment? This divides into the Beautiful and the Sublime. The gist of Kant's point about the Beautiful, at the risk of outraging the Kantian specialist and misleading the novice, is that when you make an aesthetic judgment, you're subsuming a particular under a universal, but the judgment is reflective, not determinative, which means you're not saying anything about The World as it is in itself, you're saying something about the principles by which you conceive The World. In this case, such principles are the product of the 'free play' between your Imagination and your Understanding.

Now, as crestfallen as I am that my judgments of the Beautiful aren't saying anything about The World, I find this idea of 'free play' intriguing. As I think about my own aesthetic experiences, Kant gives me a helpful conceptual scheme through which to interpret them. My imagination unifies the parts of some whole. My understanding interprets those parts and relates them together into some 'aesthetic whole'. The dynamic continues when my imagination unifies the parts of that whole differently, either by supplementing the original interpretation or replacing it altogether.

The Sublime judgment refers to experiences that overtax your Imagination. The 'mathematical' sublime does this through the idea of infinity. The 'dynamically' sublime does this through phenomena in Nature. Here is an example of the latter. Imagine you're on a beach and the ocean water suddenly recedes miles into the distant horizon. In that distant horizon, you see what is undeniably a gigantic tidal wave barreling toward you! Fortunately, you're protected by an impenetrable force field and so the wave won't harm you. But there it is, getting closer and closer, until it's about 50 yards away, towering over you. It looks like its terrible crest could scrape the sky. And then the inevitable happens. That terrible crest begins to curl directly over where you're standing. You're filled with dread. But . . . you're absolutely safe from harm. And there is an odd pleasure about this. It's a combination of the titanic wave and snug safety.

(You might feel something similar as you watch a YouTube video of some adrenaline junkie hang-gliding over the peak of some majestic mountain. He flies over the top of the mountain and then . . . a thousand-foot drop, miles of craggy majesty, and a gorgeous phantasmagoria of cliff faces, ravines, hills, boulders, snow, foliage, and lakes. You're safe in your living room as you watch, but watching it gives you that sublime feeling that Kant is talking about.)

Then there is the section on teleology. To reiterate, aesthetic judgments aren't about anything in the world. You're supposed to be in a state of pure disinterestedness, so when you ascribe teleology to whatever prompted that aesthetic judgment, this is again not going to be a product of determinative judgment. This is the transcendental deduction that Kant is known for. The world itself is not teleological, but the 'a priori' principles that make teleological judgment possible have to be transcendentally 'fixed' for our judgments to make any sense.

Kant is adamant that Natural Theology is bunk, based on his noumenal/phenomenal distinction in the first critique, so much is made about the fact that you can't infer God's existence from the unavoidability of teleological judgment. All you can infer about teleological judgment is the fact that when we try to make sense of the world, and ourselves, we can't conceive of this 'properly' without subsuming it under the hegemony of 'mechanical laws'. However, the borders of this Kingdom are restricted by your mind's inability to conceive an unavoidable aspect of yourself and the world without imbuing it with 'final causation'. And that's where teleological judgment comes in. Lots of affinities to Davidson's 'anomalous monism' and even Quine's Indispensability Arguments based on his Criterion of Ontological Commitment (in my opinion) here.

Further, Kant applies his thoughts on teleological judgment to Biology. Different biological theories are discussed and dismissed. The idea of "purposiveness without a purpose" is introduced. The best I can make of this is that there is no overriding purpose imposed from without, but that some kind of purpose is conjured within. (Again, take what I say with a grain of salt because I'm not confident about this.) The view is called 'epigenesis'. It's the idea that biological organisms do come into being. New species don't evolve out of anything 'non-organismic' at a more fundamental level, so he denies that matter can emerge from non-matter. All emergence of this kind involves latent teleological blueprints for the emerging organism to follow. So, if matter emerges, something was already latent in wherever it came from to 'guide' its emergence. The takeaway is that not everything in biology is ruled by mechanical laws. Final causes are required. Required for what? It's required as the 'a priori' principle constitutive of our 'regulative' teleological judgment of biological reality.

So, once again, we're basically trapped in our minds to make room for Kant's, enlightenment-era understanding of 'faith'. That doesn't mean the book is a waste of time at all. Kant is an intellectual titan. To wrestle with his thoughts is to wrestle with the efflorescence of an entire, conceptual epoch. You'll grab tons of souvenirs along the way. I recommend doing what I said in the title: nibble, nibble, nibble - especially if you're reading it for the first time. The SEP article, 'Kant’s Aesthetics and Teleology', is a very helpful as a roadmap. I also profited from the section on this Critique in The Bloomsbury Companion to Kant. Re-read sections you don't understand and jot down Kantian idioms as they come. It'll save you lots of time. Nothing is random and Kant painstakingly ties them together into an intricately related mosaic of concepts. Its legacy is contested by some, as is its relevance to contemporary aesthetic studies, but from what I've read, Kant is making a comeback. And even if he wasn't, I've found, time and again, that the most up-to-date scholarship dismisses views on the flimsiest of foundations sometimes. So, judge for yourself!