Critique of Judgment - Aesthetics

Aesthetics

The first part of the book, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, discusses the four possible "reflective judgments": the agreeable, the beautiful, the sublime, and the good. Kant makes it clear that these are the only four possible reflective judgments, as he relates them to the Table of Judgments from the Critique of Pure Reason.

"Reflective judgments" differ from determinative judgments (those of the first critique). In reflective judgment we seek to find unknown universals for given particulars; whereas in determinative judgment, we just subsume given particulars under universals that are already known, as Kant puts it:

It is then one thing to say, “the production of certain things of nature or that of collective nature is only possible through a cause which determines itself to action according to design”; and quite another to say, “I can according to the peculiar constitution of my cognitive faculties judge concerning the possibility of these things and their production, in no other fashion than by conceiving for this a cause working according to design, i.e. a Being which is productive in a way analogous to the causality of an intelligence.” In the former case I wish to establish something concerning the Object, and am bound to establish the objective reality of an assumed concept; in the latter, Reason only determines the use of my cognitive faculties, conformably to their peculiarities and to the essential conditions of their range and their limits. Thus the former principle is an objective proposition for the determinant Judgment, the latter merely a subjective proposition for the reflective Judgment, i.e. a maxim which Reason prescribes to it.

The agreeable is a purely sensory judgment – judgments in the form of "This steak is good," or "This chair is soft." These are purely subjective judgments, based on inclination alone.

The good is essentially a judgment that something is ethical – the judgment that something conforms with moral law, which, in the Kantian sense, is essentially a claim of modality – a coherence with a fixed and absolute notion of reason. It is in many ways the absolute opposite of the agreeable, in that it is a purely objective judgment – things are either moral or they are not, according to Kant.

The remaining two judgments - the beautiful and the sublime - occupy a space between the agreeable and the good. They are what Kant refers to as "subjective universal" judgments. This apparently oxymoronic term means that, in practice, the judgments are subjective, and are not tied to any absolute and determinate concept. However, the judgment that something is beautiful or sublime is made with the belief that other people ought to agree with this judgment - even though it is known that many will not. The force of this "ought" comes from a reference to a "sensus communis" - a community of taste. Hannah Arendt, in her Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, suggests the possibility that this sensus communis might be the basis of a political theory that is markedly different from the one that Kant lays out in the Metaphysic of Morals.

The judgment that something is beautiful is a claim that it possesses the "form of finality" - that is, that it appears to have been designed with a purpose, even though it does not have any apparent practical function. The judgment that something is sublime is a judgment that it is beyond the limits of comprehension - that it is an object of fear. However, Kant makes clear that the object must not actually be threatening - it merely must be recognized as deserving of fear.

Kant's view of the beautiful and the sublime is frequently read as an attempt to resolve one of the problems left following his depiction of moral law in the Critique of Practical Reason - namely that it is impossible to prove that we have free will, and thus impossible to prove that we are bound under moral law. The beautiful and the sublime both seem to refer to some external noumenal order - and thus to the possibility of a noumenal self that possesses free will.

In this section of the critique Kant also establishes a faculty of mind that is in many ways the inverse of judgment - the faculty of genius. Whereas judgment allows one to determine whether something is beautiful or sublime, genius allows one to produce what is beautiful or sublime.