Kant offers a system of reciprocal units which provide answers to his four basic philosophical questions: What is there? How can we know? What must we do? For what can we hope?
The first question is directed at our understanding of the world—the realm of what was once called meta-physics but is now called ontology, and is addressed through the empirical sciences; the second is directed to the nature of that understanding—what was once called revelation is now epistemology, and is taken up by cognitive science and psychology; the third pertains to our desires and actions—the continuing realm of ethics and morality—which is codified in theology, philosophy, and law; the fourth question is more speculative—for it is about beauty and sublimity, art and teleology—and asks whether there is a material basis for appreciating the world-as-rational, and how it instantiates our hopes for progress.
I simplify all this greatly—when the question veers, Kant weaves between the critiques; when it threatens to disappear, he provides new rainment and a differerent home—the argument is nothing if not complex—as is the world it presents.
The aspect of Kant’s philosophy that here concerns me most is the question “for what can we hope, ” which is taken up in his third critique—of “Judgment.” This is where the concept of the “reflective”—as opposed to the “determinate”—judgment appears. Versions of the determinate judgment operate in the earlier critiques—as empirical (scientific) judgment in the first , and as moral (categorical) judgment in the second.
But it is in the third critique that Kant takes up the reflective judgment—primarily, in the apprehension of beauty, secondarily, in the appreciation and creation of art—and finally, as a sensory sign of the world’s evolution towards rationality.
As regards “beauty:” For Kant and, evidently for us as well, there is no listing of physical properties that provides evidence for our judgment that something is beautiful. But we certainly do see aspects of the world as beautiful—we are moved by art—and we often give this a considerable (sometimes metaphysical) importance.
Kant proposes that our reflections on beauty give us hope that the world is harmonious, and support our expectations that it is rational. There is reason, good reason, to want the world to—cognitively and actually—become (be) a unity. There is a different, but compatible, reason—to hope that living will (increasingly) be grounded on an ecumenical morality—as exemplified in beauty. But reasons, however good, are not determinants. They are dependent on what grounds we have for hoping they prevail.
Such grounds can be offered (I expand on Kant’s descriptions) when—on a temperate afternoon, we walk among the trees and grasses, inhaling their odors while looking up at the interplay between clouds and sky. We listen to bird-songs and murmorings of the wind, and we find ourselves completed in our own identity by the feeling that the harmony we experience justifies our hope that the world actually is as we then perceive it. We cannot know this—as we would be able to know the factual findings of experiments—and we cannot demand this—as we would categorically demand obedience to moral law.
But we can hope for a rationality that is also sensately exhibited—linking the holistic nature of the world with the variability of its changes. This is a hope we can neither prove nor demand, but one that is given credence (as Kant would have it) by our experience of beauty.
Kant makes clear what the perception of beauty does not entail—namely—possession, utility, factual analysis. We cannot want, use, or count the contents of beauty. Its perception, in his terms, must be “disinterested” (not “uninterested”)—a knowing that is based on the purity and compatibility of feeling and experience, rather than on fact, use, or obligation—or even—the actual existence of the subject of that experience.
There is another side to the reflective judgment, which is found in the experience of the “sublime.” This experience, like that of beauty, is holistic—but, here, it combines the elements of power, enormity, and fear—the power of a cataract or storm, the infinite scope of the heavens—the fear that our constricted life is not adequate to a threatening reality—so we retreat, in such cases, by fleeing from the perils of lived experience. But Kant turns this retreat back onto itself. The very experience of sublimity—when understood not as fear, but as awe—transforms fear into our capacity, even in dire circumstances, for reflection on totality. The experience of the world as sublime, becomes a capacity for distancing (and yet embracing) that which we fear. This capacity mediates the existential anxiety in our experience through our awareness that we, in fact, can reflect on what we fear. We are given a place, in reflection, for the experience of incompleteness—which thereby gives (our) reason a meliorating power over the limits of our lives—and offers the hope for a larger belonging.
Kant uses artistic creativity as the human model of the natural sublime. The artist, rather than assuming the spectator’s position of disinterestedness in aesthetic appreciation, presents its opposite—a joining with (becoming) the power of sublimity through the creation of art. Here, Kant identifies the artist as a “force of nature”—a force beyond pedagogy or will. This force is instantiated by “genius” whose power transcends both instruction and desire. It is a power “given to” but a few, but through its consequences—great art—it reveals the source of, and compatibity with, the sublime in (human) nature.
The interplay between the experiences of beauty and sublimity brings us closer to direct intuitive knowledge about the nature and juncture of two realities—those of our world and our lives. Such knowledge subsists in the tension between unattainable perfection and overwhelming power—as spectator, through the appreciation of beauty—as artist, through the expression of sublimity. It is our capacity to experience and accept this interplay that affirms the value of our lives—our status (so Kant puts it) as “a member of the kingdom of ends.” This status is also attributed (in the second critique) to the sheer “good will” of the moral person—and is probably as close as Kant wants to come to the experience of God and the immortal soul.
The experience of beauty, for Kant, is not a reference to Plato’s Forms; it is found in the phenomenal world: The perceptive walk in the garden and the appreciation of an art-work are sources. But the quality of beauty—its completeness, its clarity, its timelesness—does not come from the world. Rather, it is through the totalizing capacity of a mental faculty—judgment—that we experience it.
I return here—with a suggestion—to our previous discussion of mind-brain. Reflection, as Kant has it, is a reconciliation of realms. But this truce has a curious turn: As the mental constructions of rules of (logical) coherence and of (empirical) correspondence—whatever their discrete subjects—are both in the mind-qua-brain; and if that amalgam is a proper part of the physical world—then the rules that govern our truths must exist in the physical world as well. I refer not only to phenomenal truths—those scientific truths subject to empirical verification—but to noumenal truths that are determined by pure thought—the a-priori, or analytic, workings of the mind.
I suggest that Kant anticipated a synthesis of the mind-brain duality when he posited the “synthetic a-priori judgment.” There are two sets of distinctions here: The first is [a-priori—a-posteriori] —before (independent of ) experience, as opposed to after (because of) experience. The second is [analytic-synthetic]—the predicate “contained in” the subject, as opposed to the predicate “adding to” the subject.
The first is about the nature of knowledge—whether we can know something (about, say, the nature of thinking) that is not derived from our experience in the world, but which determines (through thinking’s very necessity of making distinctions) the world we do experience.
The second is about the nature of language—the tautology, say, of logical truths (2+2=4) as contrasted with statements in which the predicate adds to the knowledge contained in the subject (the towel is white). Here too, the formulation of a logical truth is not based on empirical experience.