Critique of Judgment - Foundations

Foundations

Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment simultaneously completes his Critical project and lays the foundations for modern aesthetics. The most popular English translation is the one by James Creed Meredith, though recently Paul Guyer's translation, part of the new Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation, has gained some ground. Guyer translates the title as the Critique of the Power of Judgment, though this title has not caught on as the standard way of referring to the text. The Guyer and Werner S. Pluhar translations tend to be preferred over the older Meredith and Bernard editions.

The book is divided into two main sections, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and the Critique of Teleological Judgment, and also includes a large overview of the entirety of the Critical system, arranged in its final form. The so-called First Introduction was not published during Kant's lifetime, for Kant wrote a replacement for publication.

The Critical project, that of exploring the limits and conditions of knowledge, had already produced the Critique of Pure Reason, in which Kant argued for a Transcendental Aesthetic, an approach to the problems of perception in which space and time are supposed not to be objects but ways in which the observing subject's mind organizes and structures the sensory world. The end result of this inquiry is that there are certain fundamental antinomies in human Reason, most particularly that there is a complete inability to favor on the one hand the argument that all behavior and thought is determined by external causes, and on the other that there is an actual "spontaneous" causal principle at work in human behavior.

The first position, of causal determinism, is adopted, in Kant's view, by empirical scientists of all sorts; moreover, it led to the Idea (perhaps never fully to be realized) of a final science in which all empirical knowledge could be synthesized into a full and complete causal explanation of all events possible to the world.

The second position, of spontaneous causality, is implicitly adopted by all people as they engage in moral behavior; this position is explored more fully in the Critique of Practical Reason.

The Critique of Judgment constitutes a discussion of the place of Judgment itself, which must overlap both the Understanding (which operates from within a deterministic framework) and Reason (which operates on the grounds of freedom).