Immanuel Kant: Aesthetics and Teleology

The Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft), published in 1790, was the last of the three critiques by Immanuel Kant (b. 1724–d. 1804). In the Introduction to the work, Kant argues that the gulf between the realms of the laws of nature and of freedom, or between theoretical and practical philosophy, needs to be bridged, and that the “reflecting” use of the faculty of judgment can do this while also taking us from the most general principles of natural science to empirical concepts and laws of nature. In the first main part of the work, the critique of the aesthetic power of judgment, Kant analyzes and defends our responses to, and judgments of, the beautiful in both nature and art and the sublime in nature; in the second main part, the critique of the teleological power of judgment, Kant defends our “regulative” rather than “constitutive” judgments of organisms as purposive systems within nature and of nature as a whole as a purposive system that has as its “final goal” (Endzweck) the development of the discipline necessary for the realization of human morality—although as a product of human freedom, morality can never, in Kant’s view, be achieved by merely natural means, only by an act of choice. Kant had been interested in reconciling a teleological outlook with the development of modern science since such early works as the Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens of 1755 and The Only Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the Existence of God of 1763. He had likewise long been interested in issues in aesthetics, having published a popular work of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime in 1764. In addition, following the example of the textbooks by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and Georg Friedrich Meier that he used for his courses on logic, metaphysics, and, beginning in 1772–1773, anthropology, he had touched upon aesthetics in all of those courses. But the idea of addressing aesthetics and teleology in a single book does not seem to have occurred to Kant before the end of 1787, after he had finished writing the Critique of Practical Reason, and he then wrote the third critique very quickly. His deepest reason for having written this book seems to have been his realization that both aesthetic and teleological judgment could support the human effort to be moral without sacrificing what is distinctive to them.