The Third Critique from the perspective of the complete works

The Third Critique, with its treatment of the concept of purpose, is located, if Kant´s entire printed work is understood as one, stringent argument, at the intersection of several lines of arguing.[1] It works out differentiations of the concept of purpose, bases the synthesis on the principle of formal expedience, repeats the significance of the concept of system for epistemology, reconciles mechanism and teleology when it comes to the principles of the natural sciences, emphasizes the relevance of perception and sentience for the evidence of insight and experience, integrates the analysis of taste into metaphysical epistemology, provides the differentiation into reflective and determining judgement as well as a specific kind of hermeneutics, and it explicates the theory of the free play of capability.

Furthermore, two contradicting art theories are crossed-over, and questions on the narrowing of beautifulness and morality are discussed. Dignity is taken up once again[2] and formally redefined. The debate on the concept of the ultimate purpose as the highest good is continued, physico-theology is presented and rejected, in more detail than in Theory of the Heavens and The Only Possible Argument, indeed hypothetically, in the methodology of the Third Critique in favour of ethico-theology. When it comes to the original being, the presentability of what cannot be presented[3] is expounded, thus showing the limits of the possibilities of presentation.

That is why the Third Critique is characterised by a complex composition and great variety of references and questions. It is an element of all those curves Kant´s train of thought between the early essays, in particular Theory of the Heavens and Observations, the middle period of his works and the opus postumum consist of. The Third Critique lays the foundation for the topic of anthropology, featuring in the last third of his works, such as on the talents which make man human, and among which, as a part of reason, there particularly counts judgment. When it comes to style, the Third Critique is one of the liveliest essays of his complete works, for Kant includes many anecdotes, jokes and examples.

Thus, this text would require a much more comprehensive analysis – in my opinion in the sense of being a key element of the system of Kant´s metaphysics. The common focus of Kant research on the First critique – or actually only on the transcendental analysis of the First critique – should be reconsidered. Kant´s Third Critique is a contribution to logics and epistemology. In Kant, aesthetics as the theory of beautifulness judged by taste is integrated into the entirety of, to have it in Baumgarten´s words, “gnoseologically” extended logics. Kant assesses conditions for epagogic reasoning which, starting out from the particular, strives for achieving general, scientific statements, such as in the case of inductive or analogical conclusions. For this purpose, those shares of gaining insight as being attributed to intuition, perception and sentiency are contextualised with the beautiful and further, together with the analyses of pleasure and displeasure, with expediency.

The achievement of connecting the general with the particular, which cannot be defined following a fixed pattern, is, operatively, a matter of judgement and element of synthesis. The rules for judging on the beautiful, it says, cannot be “made subject to principles of reason”.[4] „Es kann keine objective Geschmacksregel, welche durch Begrife bestimmte, was schön sey, geben. Denn alles Urtheil aus dieser Quelle ist ästhetisch; d. i. das Gefühl des Subjects, und kein Begrif eines Objects ist sein Bestimmungsgrund“.[5]

If something particular is subsumed under one given concept, i. e. under something general, this is like going down the ranks of the epistemic order.[6] If, starting out from the particular, one looks for something general, this is like ascending. Traditionally both, e. g. classified as ars iudicandi and ars inveniendi, have always been an element of logics. In this concern, Kant differentiates the necessary operations by way of procedures of determining and reflecting on judgement.[7]

The Third critique analyses the conditions for this ascending and thus the schematising methods of the synthesis. In Kant, both in the case of involuntary experience (on this see the first part of the Third Critique) and in the case of intended, purposeful or insight-generating actions (on this see its second part) the judgement of taste as well as the concept of purpose are related to aesthetics as a sub-discipline of logics.[8] In Baumgarten, complete thought is beautiful thought, cogitatio pulchre. This refers to the ordo of how the epistemic subjects are related to each other.[9]

Thus, also Kant uses <beautiful> as a logical concept, while at the same time merging the two theoretical approaches to beautifulness and taste existing at his time. Until the sensualists of the 17^th century, beautifulness is no subjective concept but gives expression to the proportionality of nature which is characterised by structural rules and can be described mathematically. Rationalist theoreticians such as Wolff, Baumgarten, Sulzer or Eberhard connect beautifulness as being well-proportioned to the concept of perfection. Kant brings this trait together with the sensualist one, among which we may count Crousaz, André or Hutcheson.[10]

Kant introduces these terms in his early texts, such as beautiful in Theory of the Heavens and The Only Possible Argument, by asking: “Is it not that all this is beautiful, is it not visible purposes achieved by help of prudently applied measures?”[11] In the early texts, beautifulness is connoted with order, perfection, correctness, decency, well-rhyming, usefulness, harmony, regularity and dignity.

Also in Wolff the congruence of the manifold, expressed by a rule, is perfection.[12] Wolff is one of the first to include the role of sentience, by connecting the perfection of insights to lust.[13] Beautifulness, he says, is the perfection of what makes us feel lust, understood as being congruent with a congruence relation.[14]

Reminiscent of Rousseau´s turn to nature and in the sense of his own concept of liberty and genius, now Kant attributes the rationalist concept of beautifulness to attributed beautifulness, which requires an idea of `what the subject is supposed to be´, that is of its purpose, and contrasts it to free beautifulness.[15] A conventional, culturally motivated way of dealing with beautifulness, which is thus tied to outward purposes, is criticised, just like grounding beautifulness on the concept of perfection.[16]

The mathematical-determining idea of beautifulness, such as in Leibniz, comes along with rejecting the cognitive relevance of sentiences and the claim that sensual ideas are confused and only conceptual ones are clear.[17] Kant´s rejection of this theory runs like a common thread through all his printed works.

Instead Kant, like Hume and Shaftesbury, emphasizes the significance of sentience when it comes to judging on the beautiful – the concept of which Kant nevertheless leaves with its traditional, rationalist meaning of harmony, order, experience. For Hume, beautifulness is no quality of the things. `Beauty is not a quality of the circle.´[18] The attribute beautiful, he says, is not logically included in the concept of the subject but concludes from taking the subject´s each respective sentience into consideration, as underlined by Hume and Rousseau.[19] Against the Cartesian cogito, Rousseau had emphasized the independence of sentiences and their immediate access to truth. `I exist and have senses by which I am affected. This is the first truth I find plausible´.[20]

Now Thomas Reid had stated, against Hume, that beautifulness is indeed a quality of the circle. `Beauty is a quality of the circle, not demonstrable by mathematical reasoning, but immediately perceived by a good taste´.[21] For, he said, the aesthetic judgement is not a private judgement but is due to a sense – a taste – for the whole in relation to its parts. By this definition, which is shared also by Diderot,[22] beautifulness can be judged on as being a relation. Karl Philipp Moritz defines: “this is […] the nature of the beautiful, that one element becomes telling and meaningful by the other one and the whole by itself – that it is self-explaining – that it is self-describing – and that thus, except for the just hinted at pointer at its content, it does not need any further explanation. As soon as a beautiful work of art, except for this hint, required any further explanation, just because of this it would be incomplete. For the first requirement of the beautiful is indeed its clarity.´[23]

Thus, perfection refers to an entirety; however indeed also beautifulness. In the 18^th century perfection, understood as being calculable, is increasingly replaced by the `je ne sais quoi´ of the beautiful. Taste is understood, also e. g. in Montesquieu, to be a capability of grasping the entirety of the beautiful.[24] Based on the judgement of taste being communicable, which rests not on concepts but on a reflecting emotion of lust which is inherent with all humans, as well as by way of redefining the sensus communis as being representative of `human reason´,[25] in Kant taste is labelled as a rational, however not conceptual competence. Immediately connected to taste is the concept of the genius.

Now, it is crucial in Kant that all concepts expounded in the Third Critique, such as beautifulness, taste, the emotions of lust and unpleasure, sentience or the capability of desire, cannot be materially referred to objects, e. g. works of art, which are definitely the subject, but to the subjective which in the Third Critique is marked as belonging to the topical field of the aesthetic. As early as in Prolegomena the theory that the nature of the object causes insight into this object is rejected, the Third Critique being completed by a discussion, in the critical sense referring to the subject, of the latter´s I and its thought functions. That is why the first part does not deal with the fine arts, what is intended there is rather a formal transformation and further development of the concepts of logic and metaphysics.

This text´s focus on the system as well as the way of arguing of the structure of the work are, after all, on working out apperception as it is transcendentally-formally founded in the First Critique and explained in the texts on ethics when it comes to the capability of self-determination. That is why the seemingly psychologising characterisations of the `subjective´ aspect of gaining insight in the Third Critique are part of a strategy of reflecting on methods, taking up the questions about the `objective´ validity of knowledge from the works of the middle period and retrospectively assessing some of the claims made there. Now, the possibilities of judgement gained in the course of arguing, such as the progressed distinction between the competence of mathematics and that of philosophy, as they are found in Prolegomena and in Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, become the more informed (compared to the middle period) and thus better organised analysis of the subjective aspects of gaining insight. These aspects are, as it is then unfolded in What Real Progress has Metaphysics Made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff?, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and Opus postumum, the actual a priori conditions for insight, for knowledge as well as for self-awareness. Implicitly, this becomes frequently obvious as early as in the Third Critique.

Accordingly, in Kant also the genius or the creative spirit, esprit créateur[26] or bel esprit, would have to be understood in a much wider sense than only in the sense of art. Nevertheless, in his proven manner Kant gives answers to the contemporary debate on the freedom or regularity of art, which is connected to the concept of the genius, by merging positions.

For Moritz, a work of art is beautiful if it does not serve any outward purpose.[27]  Such an outward purpose of art was the imitation of nature which, in the Aristotelian sense, was considered a basic principle of art.[28] At the beginning of the 18^th century, by Addison, Bacon, and particularly Dubois, who was the first to define genius as an innate capability of creating certain things others cannot create – which is adopted by Sulzer and Baumgarten – and who puts the affection of the heart to the fore,[29] the role of vision, imaginativeness and imagination is emphasized. Dubos recognizes the possibility `to create an excellent work of art without knowledge of the rules´. The genius, he says, is not irrational and inexplicable but `a generally understandable and explicable phenomenon of nature´.[30] Also Young emphasizes the innovativeness of the genius and his/her creative freedom,[31] just the same Bodmer and Breitinger: `Great minds, whose knowledge of their own freedom comes from insight, will not be restrained by any rules, except by those set by nature and reason´.[32] Baumgarten and Gottsched declare Solomonically: neither a bright mind without rules nor rules without a naturally bright mind will achieve anything on their own, but together they may have great effect.[33] Both emphasize the harmonic way in which the intellectually capable cooperate with each other.[34]

Kant emphasizes the significance of genius as a natural talent. The workings of the genius, he says, cannot be learned,[35] which is why the works of the genius must be understood in analogy to the works of nature. Like in Lessing, also in Kant the genius is not subject to rules set by the outside. His/her creative work is the rule itself.

In Kant, as the result of his attempt to deduce the judgement on the beautiful, it concludes that the general validity of this judgement is due to that capability which is inherent with all humans to the same degree, that is having a sense for shapeliness. This way, like in Batteux, it is the human nature which gives evidence to the creative act not happening against but in the sense of nature; in Batteux the imitation of nature is not the goal of creativity, however an inevitable result.[36] Like e. g. Batteux or Gellert, who, together with Pope, emphasize the priority of rules for art, without which not even a genius could do,[37] Kant bases his critique, as the art of judgement, both for theoretical and practical philosophy, on the concept of the rule which covers the formal aspect of the nomological foundation, the concrete aspect of realisation, and the synthesis, as well as all questions concerning the connection condition and the conditioned.

The rule, resp. the law, is crucial for Kant´s logic. The judgement of taste can decide about the correctness of rules and laws.[38] For, for the validity assessment of objective judgement also conditions for truth must be taken into consideration which generally concern data of intuition, concrete experiences or methods of presentation. Indeed because of this the judgement according to taste cannot be grounded in a purely theoretical way, which is why it is not a subject of the analysis of the First Critique.[39]

By attributing relations connected to rules and laws to laws of expedience, Kant, quite in the sense of Pope, formalises the methodology of the rule both for given and for conceptual situations. Pope: `Those rules of old discover'd, not devised/ Are Nature still, but Nature methodized´.[40] Pope finds that most people are born with a certain degree of taste but have been spoiled by wrong education.[41]

Any visualisation of concepts, Kant says, proceeds exemplarily, schematically or symbolically.[42] This works by applying the concept `to the subject of a sensual visualisation´ and then by applying the sheer `rule of reflection on that visualisation to a completely different subject, of which the former is only the symbol´.[43]

In addition to the schematisation procedure of the First Critique, in the Third Critique the entire field of activity of reason, that is also its poietic and reflective shares, is analysed.

Taste, emotion, sentience and reflection are constitutive for gaining insight.[44] Thus, also in Kant´s lectures aesthetic is attributed to logic.[45] Metaphysics depend not only on thorough, teaching, but also on entertaining, that is beautiful, insights.[46] If features are the grounds on which concepts are understood, even one single feature may be crucially helpful for creating insight. Accordingly Kant, in line with Baumgarten, refers epistemology to a logical and an aesthetic part.[47] `Die Erkentniß ist die Uebereinstimmung einer Vorstellung mit dem Gegenstande. Alle Erkentniß ist entweder intuitus oder conceptus´.[48] `Alles, was nicht in der Beziehung unsers Vorstellungsvermögens aufs Objekt, sondern aufs Subjekt, aufs vorstellende Vermögen beruht, ist ästhetisch´.[49]

Logical `Deutlichkeit wird bewirkt durch wenig Merkmale“; „die ästhetische durch viele Merkmale. […] Zur logischen Deutlichkeit wird Abstraktion erfordert. Zur ästhetischen gehört ein Schwarm von Nebenvorstellungen´.[50] `Die Definition ist die höchste logische Vollkommenheit des Begriffs´.[51] In philosophy, he says, one must `erst abstracte einen Satz durchdenken und hernach ihn sinnlich machen. So kann man allgemeine Maximen in Sentiments verwandeln, wenn man das was jene in abstracto sagen, auf einen einzelnen Fall anwendet´.[52]

Kant distinguishes three degrees of believing something to be true: opinion, belief, knowledge.[53] On one´s way towards perfect insight one starts with preliminary judgements to which one of these levels of certainty is to be attributed;[54] by these preliminary judgements, like e. g. by applying hypotheses, one proceeds purposefully, as by way of comparison one must judge on the suitability of concepts, features, sentiencies. The Third critique completes logic and method by defining comparing, abstracting, determining, inducing and analogising as purposeful operations.

Methods of the judgement on beautifulness and taste show arbitrary and non-arbitrary aspects. By way of distinguishing subjective expedience from objective, “real” expedience, the Third Critique is structured into aesthetics and teleology.[55] Teleology, it says, requires deliberate judgement which decides on the possibility that nature may actually be expedient by way of intellect and reason. Crucial for the development of an appropriate theory, it says, is the development of hypotheses. These, Kant says, are insights which are believed to be true because something may be concluded from them; and in their case one actually concludes on cause from consequence.[56] In the natural sciences, he states, this is indispensable,[57] particularly in view of the strived for systemacity of a theory.

How existing knowledge and individual data from observation could be brought together and reasonably related to each other, and why at all one may assume that individual data are compatible with the laws of nature and can be grounded on them, these are questions asked as early as in Theory of the Heavens and the Second Critique.[58] For this purpose, the Third Critique methodologically links the principle of expediency with induction and analogy as well as with the already mentioned hypothetical function of regulative principles. In Kant, system unity is unity of purpose.[59] The two conclusions in Judgement, analogy and induction, Kant says in Logics, are `nützlich und unentbehrlich zum Behuf der Erweiterung unsers Erfahrungserkenntnisses. Da sie aber nur empirische Gewißheit geben: so müssen wir uns ihrer mit Behutsamkeit und Vorsicht bedienen´.[60]

In the context of Kant´s overall project, the Third Critique is also a reflection on meta-methods.[61] Concerning many points, it immediately connects to the methodology in the Second Critique.[62] Also the Third Critique is specifically structured according to analytics-dialectics and elementary doctrine-methodology. Including its introductions, it consists of four parts[63] analysing the concept of expediency logically, aesthesiologically, teleologically and ethico-theologically: these parts are Introduction resp. First Introduction, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Critique of teleological Judgment as well as Doctrin of Method.

They are in line with the sequence of Metaphysica generalis, with its sections Ontologia, Psychologia rationalis, Cosmologia rationalis and Theologia rationalis, this sequence, with the exception of the first section, being reshaped in a transcendental-philosophical way, according to the self-criticism of the capability of reason, to the sequence: SOUL – WORLD – GOD. In the Third Critique, the soul as well as the aesthesiological analysis of purpose which is attributed to it become No. 1. It is followed by the world as well as questions of possible cosmological knowledge as well as a discussion on the conditions for the possibility to have knowledge of God, whose possible function is hypothetically claimed in the Third Critique to be the final purpose of human action and knowledge. Ontology is always the first section of a Metaphysica generalis; it discusses the basic concepts. In the Third Critique it is matched by the introductions.

In its cosmological part, the Third Critique refers to the question of the justification of teleological principles in the natural sciences. Leibniz, to have it in Hans-Jürgen Engfer´s words, had defended `teleological thought´, had `once again´ made it `the foundation of a comprehensive draft of a system´ and had made it `compatible with the causal thought of the natural sciences in the Modern Age´.[64] His principles of the natural sciences are teleological ones.[65] Wolff, however, strictly rejects any confounding of the causal nexus with the purpose nexus: something may be explained teleologically only if it can be perfectly proven that `the event has been purposefully planned and intended by an imaginable authority´.[66] Already Wolff, says Engfer, had turned to the subject when it comes to questions of the validity of causal and teleological theories; for him, causal and teleological thought are `two different ways of considering the same things in the world from different points of view´.[67]

Kant discusses physico-teleological thought as being problematic for the scientific systemicity of theories, as natural purposes form only aggregates and are no system. As such, he says, these would have to be concluded on from a final purpose; the Third Critique discusses such a dubious final purpose in the sense of a steering unit under several aspects. In Kant, the idea of a supreme law-making reason as the supreme condition, from which any unity of purpose and system could be concluded on, can only be imagined as `ein uns unbekanntes Substratum der systematischen Einheit, Ordnung und Zweckmäßigkeit der Welteinrichtung´.[68] Can nature be such a steering authority for natural processes? On this, the Third Critique clarifies that final explanations could only be regulative judgements with subjective validity. We may just imagine a context as if it was organised purposefully.

With Aristotle and against Leibniz, Kant uses the term `technique of nature´ instead of `art of nature´. Concerning the products of a production method, we may ask about the producing authority, and as concerns nature, God would be the only possibility. However, in the Third Critique this is not assumed but assessed. As a conclusion, not God but the enlightened, thinking subject is proven to be the final purpose of this subject as such.[69]

Apperception as self-consciousness and the consciousness of the self´s frequent identity, he says, cannot be grounded descriptively but transcendentally; however, it can be explicated in the sense of the liberty of this self, which is not only the foundation but also the goal of human life, and it cannot be explicated without the concept of purpose and not without the capability of judgement of taste which is able to grasp the entirety of human existence. Furthermore, it says, the concept of taste includes the aspect of tasting in `sapere´.[70]

Creative thought as creative action, which is required for justifications both in ethics and in the theoretical sciences, refers to genius in the sense of an ideal talent which is potentially owned by any human, and it is no random action but, in the case of success, first of all creative action.

Moral schematism, just like schematism referring to insight, requires relating the individual case and the rule to each other.[71] The relation purpose and means in the context of action must be assessed, and the motivation to act must not primarily be a purpose which is just the consequence of action as a sub-aspect of the whole. E. g. human happiness cannot be the purpose of an action based on purely practical reason. For example an obligation must be followed for its own sake, otherwise it would be nothing than a means. Thus, establishing an analogy between the situation of acting and the natural law as a `type of moral law´[72] may contribute to answering the question of what, in a given situation, must be formally determined in which way. Accordingly, being formally determined means being determined as purpose, means, reason, consequence or even final purpose.

In view of the thus required basic concepts and logical knowledge, the Third Critique is capable of justifiably combining the realms of natural causality and the causality of freedom, which originally, for rhetorical reasons and for methodical and strategical purposes, were strictly separated from each other.

Translation: Mirko Wittwar