Critique of Judgement

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Immanuel Kant

The Critique of Judgment (KdU) is Immanuel Kant's third major work after the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason , published in 1790 . In a first part it contains Kant's aesthetics (doctrine of aesthetic judgment) and in the second part teleology (doctrine of the interpretation of nature by means of categories of purpose).

Position in the factory

Kant's intention - detailed in the introductions to the KdU - was to mediate between nature (object of theoretical reason) and freedom (object of practical reason) in this third criticism and thus to complete the building of critical philosophy. This idea of ​​the completion of the Kantian system architecture finds little echo outside of special research today.

The third critique is closely connected with the two preceding works of the critique of reason. For Kant, philosophy was then divided into two areas: a theoretical (pure reason) and a practical ( ethics , legal and religious philosophy ). So that the sensual and the moral world, nature and freedom do not stand suddenly (irreconcilably) next to each other, a mediator is needed to overcome the gap, a "bridge" between sensuality and morality, because freedom wants to become practical and should develop in the sensory world . For Kant, this mediation is the power of judgment that recognizes the particular in general.

The third critique is not only intended to mediate between nature and freedom, but also tries to clarify phenomena such as the beautiful in nature and art, the genius, the organic and the systematic unity of nature with the help of a concept of judgment.

The power of judgment has two forms: a determining and a reflective one. The determining power of judgment subsumes something special under a given law or rule, while the reflective power of judgment is supposed to find the general for the given particular. (A 24)

For Kant, expediency is the central concept that denotes the performance of reflective judgment and its mediation between nature and freedom. If something is considered to be useful, one considers the phenomena as a whole and starts from a purpose of the whole. The expediency of nature for Kant is the a priori assumed expectation that nature will be found in a structured and not chaotic manner.

Total faculties of the mind Cognition A priori principles use on
Cognition understanding Lawfulness nature
Feeling of pleasure and displeasure Judgment Expediency art
Desire reason End use freedom
Position of the power of judgment in the system of three critiques, table from the critique of power of judgment (KdU p. 110, or p. 274)

content

In the first part, Kant first analyzes the peculiarities of taste judgments. They are a) aesthetic, not logical, b) disinterested, c) work without concepts and purposes and claim a special form of generality.

taste

In his critical foundation of aesthetics, Kant examines the validity claim of aesthetic judgments. Those who are capable of making aesthetic judgments about the beautiful show taste . Taste judgments are subjective and empirical related to an individual case, a landscape, a work of art: "The taste judgment is therefore not a cognitive judgment, therefore not logical, but aesthetic, by which one understands that whose determining factor cannot be anything other than subjective."

Subjective generality

Although taste judgments cannot be proven, they claim to be generally capable of approval, so are based on general validity and are worded accordingly (“The picture is beautiful”, not: “The picture is beautiful for me”). They claim general validity insofar as they "suggest that everyone should be pleased with an object ..."

In contrast to scientific and moral statements, for Kant aesthetic judgments have no objective, but rather a subjective generality . As in the previous critical works, Kant here occupies a middle position between rationalist and sensualist positions. He differentiates himself from the aesthetics of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten , who saw judgments of taste as a lower form of knowledge, as well as from Edmund Burke , who traced it back to a mere feeling.

The beautiful and the sublime

In the analytical part of the KdU, which is devoted to aesthetics , Kant distinguishes between the beautiful and the sublime . Both are in turn divided into free beauty and attached beauty or the mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime . In rough comparison, the following distinctions can be made:

The beautiful The sublime
Limitation of forms Infinity (for the idea of ​​reason)
quality quantity
Feeling of conveyance of life Feeling of inhibition of life and subsequent outpouring of life
Character: playful Character: seriously
given in form and perception alone requires a certain mood

The genius

With his doctrine of genius, Kant supplements his theory of aesthetic judgment with a theory of "fine art". In his theory of art practice he no longer follows the old principle of imitation ( mimesis ), as it is e.g. B. was still represented by Baumgarten , but places the creative process in the subject. However, this does not mean that from now on man will, as it were, produce the objects of art out of himself. Rather, the genius is endowed with a natural talent which gives him great imagination and originality. The genius is not a social being, but rather a natural being that lives in society. Thus, according to Kant, nature gives its rules to art through the genius of art. (Schneider, p. 51) For Kant, the moment of genius is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the possibility of beautiful art. The artist is not a mere organ of nature, what he does is "creation through freedom" and includes an 'artificial' component. This is justified by the fact that Kant introduces taste as a second component of production aesthetics, which mediates imagination and understanding.

effect

Hegel

  • Regarding Kant's Analysis of Teleology :

It is significant, on the one hand, that Kant introduces a sharp distinction between objective knowledge and subjective judgments in the Critique of Judgment: thus only the understanding concepts identified in the Critique of Pure Reason can provide us with objective knowledge, whereas judgment is tied to the idea of ​​a purpose . “Purpose”, however, according to Kant, is not an objective judgment that belongs to things, but merely a property placed in things by the power of judgment - with regard to the idea of ​​a final cause, Kant says: “We put, they say, final causes into things and do not, as it were, lift them out of their perception. " (KdU p. 33, or p. 194) Hegel and other contemporaries of Kant did not regard this as unproblematic, since observing an organism, e.g. B. of an animal, in their opinion, an objective purpose of this organism could very well be established, i.e. the animal actually has its purpose in itself. On the other hand, it seemed implausible to them to assume that this obvious fact was a merely useful function of our judgment.

It was from this problem area that Hegel was later to develop his dialectic , which aims to avoid this problem. For Hegel there are other motives, but a historical connection point is plausible in this case. In order to avoid the inconsistencies described above, Hegel identified expediency with the organism. (Instead of “organism” one could also say “concept”, because according to Hegel a concept only applies to organisms.) To this end, Hegel ties in with the notion of an intuitive understanding introduced by Kant in the KdU : it can grasp its objects vividly, so it is does not depend on conceptual operations and thus clearly recognizes the structure of the organism. For Hegel, Kant "with the concept of inner expediency (..) revived the idea in general and that of life in particular", but since he did not grant it any objective content, he did not exhaust its potential. Hegel, on the other hand, claims that "only that can be seen as real or in truth for which there is a concept, and that only has a concept that can be interpreted according to the model of an organism." (Emundts / Horstmann p. 72)

Current reception

Kant's analysis of the aesthetic arouses great interest to this day and has often been made fruitful for understanding modern art . The aspects belong to it

  • to understand the beautiful as "disinterested pleasure" without conceptual appropriation of the object
  • the paradoxical status of the taste judgment as subjective and generalizable
  • the aesthetic experience as a free game of cognitive faculties, sensuality and understanding
  • the analysis of the sublime

literature

Web links

Wikiquote: Critique of Judgment  - Quotes
Text output
Secondary literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Otfried Höffe, Immanuel Kant, p. 260, The philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of the organic, Beck, Munich 1988
  2. ↑ a b KdU, Suhrkamp TB, 2005; or Volume X of the theory work edition (Ed. W. Weischedel)
  3. ↑ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 279, Analysis of Aesthetic Judgment, §1 The judgment of taste is aesthetic, works in six volumes, Volume 5, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1983
  4. ↑ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 291, Analysis of Aesthetic Judgment, § 8 The generality of pleasure is presented in a taste judgment only as subjective. Works in six volumes, Volume 5, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1983
  5. ^ Norbert Schneider: History of Aesthetics from the Enlightenment to Postmodernism, Reclam Stuttgart 2005
  6. ^ Dina Emundts, Rolf-Peter Horstmann: GWF Hegel, An Introduction, Reclam Stuttgart 2002