The Critique of Judgment (Great Books in Philosophy)

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Summary: You kan't get away from your own presuppositions
Review: Kant is a genius; I give him that. Still, his primary problem is that he presupposes in all his philosophy that there can be nothing beyond the natural and material world. His aesthetics suffer as he tries to find a completely "objective" way of interpreting and appreciating the arts. Not only does this not work in theory, but every human knows empirically that music, sunsets, and Monet are simply not capable of being interpreted completely void of feeling or pleasure.

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Summary: Reductive and, in parts, outmoded aesthetics
Review: The "Critique of Judgement" is Kant's third and crowning work of his critical-transcendental philosophy. In it, he expounds his theory of aesthetics, broken down into two divisions, the "Analytic of the Beautiful" and the "Analytic of the Sublime". The "Analytic of the Beautiful" attempts to explain what we perceive to be beautiful, which is, Kant contends, a four-step process. First, the material for the perception of the beautiful is supplied by the faculty of sensibility, as the basis of the judgement of the beautiful. Secondly, the faculty of the understanding is linked, by means of a unique causal mechanism, to the faculty of the imagination, thus enabling a judgement to be made. In the third part of the process, the judgement is presumed to be disinterested, i.e. "purposive without purpose" -- the subject making the judgement, Kant argues, has no stake in the object of contemplation (being disinterested). Which is to say, he/she regards it as merely beautiful for its own sake. Fourth, this judgement of the beautiful, though singular in logical form, -- i.e., "the vase is beautiful", has the status of universal validity, since the judgement is made in the "a priori" supposition that all rational beings should regard it as valid. Kant's valuable formulation is that there is a distinction between an object which is sensually attractive (the basis of a mere "sensory judgement") and the true object of aesthetic contemplation -- the beautiful itself. However this reductive analytic aesthetics fails to acknowledge that the line between the sensory and the aesthetic may be very unstable. It also cannot preclude the dimension (stressed by later aestheticians such as Nietzsche and Freud and many contemporary philosophers of art) of the drives, out of which the whole realm of the aesthetics exclusively derives, though via the sublimation of affects and percepts, thus ruling out by fiat that any aesthetic contemplation could be "disinterested". The "Analytic of the Sublime" is perhaps the most enduring contribution of Kantian aesthetics, which has been seized on by one of the leading philosophers of postmodernity, namely, Lyotard. Kant defines the sublime as possibly being contained in an object "even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or its presence provokes, a representation of 'limitlessness', yet a superadded thought of its totality." -- In other words, the sublime lies beyond the confines of sense-experience, leading us to form concepts of pure reason. Like the rest of Kant's critical philosophic works, "The Critique of Judgement" is written in the eighteenth century style of the German academy, and is devoid of anything even remotely resembling a single literary flourish. It is best approached as reference text. A livelier work of critical-transcendental aesthetics would be Schiller's "Letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man". Schiller casts his own artistic, political and ethical interests within the paradigm of his master Kant, but being a man of letters, he at leasts presents the theory to the reader in a more amenable form.

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Summary: Someday we will understand this book
Review: The Critique of the Power of Judgment (the 3rd Critique) is the most important work in Modern philosophical aesthetics. The Guyer and Pluhar editions are to be preferred to that of Bernard, as the first two have more extenisve notes, and better translations, including of the First Introduction.

The 3rd Critique presents a vision of beauty, sublimity, and art that avoids reduction of them to them to the biological, a la Nietzsche or Freud. Instead, Kant describes the *justification* of reflective aesthetic judgments in terms of the conditions for using jugment, stressing the contemplative and harmonious character of the experience of beauty. Beauty is linked to cognitive and moral betterment; sublimity, a secondary subject, is discussed more purely in terms of it connection with morality.

The work is difficult; however, there is no substitute for close reading of the whole work. (Certainly not Schiller, who goes far beyond Kant in claiming beauty and art as foundational for knowledge). The 3rd Critique is still very contemporary in its import, including its theory of disinterestedness, which is compatible with intelligent accounts of affect.