Critique of Judgement
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~130,000 words · 629 passages
Cite this work
- APAImmanuel Kant. (n.d.). Critique of Judgement. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/immanuel-kant/kant-s-critique-of-judgement
- MLAImmanuel Kant. "Critique of Judgement." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/immanuel-kant/kant-s-critique-of-judgement.
- ChicagoImmanuel Kant. Critique of Judgement. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/immanuel-kant/kant-s-critique-of-judgement.
What it is about
The English translation of Kant's third Critique, of 1790, on aesthetic judgement and purposiveness in nature.
Context and history
The German original, which is the authoritative text, is also in the catalogue. The book has two halves that it is surprising to find together. The first is the theory of taste: when we call something beautiful we state no fact and express no private preference, but judge without a concept and nonetheless ask others to agree — a 'subjective universality' which is the book's discovery — and there is also the theory of the sublime and the idea of genius as the one through whom nature gives the rule to art. The second half is about organisms: things that can only be understood as if they had an end, though we can assert none. It is the bridge between the critique of knowledge and the critique of morals.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
We may call the faculty of cognition from principles _a priori_, _pure Reason_, and the inquiry into its possibility and bounds generally the Critique of pure Reason, although by this faculty we only understand Reason in its theoretical employment, as it appears under that name in the former work; without wishing to inquire into its faculty, as practical Reason, according to its special principles. That [Critique] goes merely into our faculty of knowing things _a priori_, and busies itself therefore only with the _cognitive faculty_ to the exclusion of the feeling of pleasure and pain and the faculty of desire; and of the cognitive faculties it only concerns itself with _Understanding_, according to its principles _a priori_, to the exclusion of _Judgement_ and _Reason_ (as faculties alike belonging to theoretical cognition), because it is found in the sequel that no other cognitive faculty but the Understanding can furnish constitutive principles of cognition _a priori_. The Critique, then, which sifts them all, as regards the share which each of the other faculties might pretend to have in the clear possession of knowledge from its own peculiar root, leaves nothing but what the _Understanding_ prescribes _a priori_ as law for nature as the complex of phenomena (whose form also is given _a priori_). It relegates all other pure concepts under Ideas, which are transcendent for our theoretical faculty of cognition, but are not therefore useless or to be dispensed with. For they serve as regulative principles; partly to check the dangerous pretensions of Understanding, as if (because it can furnish _a priori_ the conditions of the possibility of all things which it can know) it had thereby confined within these bounds the possibility of all things in general; and partly to lead it to the consideration of nature according to a principle of completeness, although it can never attain to this, and thus to further the final design of all