Critique of Judgment

1. Introduction

Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790) is the third and final work in his critical project. It analyzes the faculty of judgment (Urteilskraft) in order to explain how human cognition can relate the world of natural necessity to the realm of moral freedom without collapsing one into the other.

The work is best known for two major lines of inquiry. First, it offers a systematic account of aesthetic judgment, including judgments of the beautiful and the sublime, and of artistic creativity. Kant asks how such judgments can claim a kind of normativity and quasi-universality even though they are based on feeling rather than on concepts or theoretical knowledge. Second, it investigates teleological judgment in the domain of living nature, examining how organisms can be regarded as natural ends whose internal organization seems purposive.

In both domains, Kant focuses on reflective rather than determining judgment. Reflective judgment does not apply pre-given concepts to objects; instead, it searches for concepts and principles that can make sense of individual cases. The key principle it employs, according to Kant, is purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit): the idea that nature can be judged as if ordered for our cognitive and practical capacities.

The Critique of Judgment has been read as an attempt to “complete” the critical system by supplying the mediating link between the first two Critiques. Aesthetic and teleological reflection, on Kant’s account, reveal a perspective from which nature appears hospitable to our rational vocation, without thereby yielding speculative knowledge of metaphysical purposes. Subsequent sections of this entry treat each of these themes, and their internal debates, in detail.

2. Historical and Intellectual Context

The Critique of Judgment emerged from late 18th‑century debates in aesthetics, natural science, and metaphysics. Kant’s project engages and reworks several intellectual currents.

2.1. Aesthetic and Artistic Debates

Kant wrote against the backdrop of burgeoning German aesthetics. Earlier in the century, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten had proposed aesthetics as a science of “sensuous cognition,” and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoon (1766) had drawn sharp distinctions between poetry and the visual arts. British sentimentalist and associationist theories—Shaftesbury, Hume, Burke—had also emphasized feeling, taste, and the sublime.

Kant’s account of disinterested pleasure and the sensus communis is often seen as responding to these traditions, while recasting aesthetic judgment in a more strictly critical and transcendental framework. Scholars differ on the weight they assign to specific influences, but most regard Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) as an important background for Kant’s treatment of the sublime.

2.2. Scientific and Teleological Background

In natural science, the success of Newtonian mechanics raised the question of whether all natural phenomena, including life, could be explained mechanically. At the same time, natural history and early biology (e.g., Buffon, Blumenbach) were developing rich descriptions of organisms that seemed to exhibit goal-directed organization. Traditional physico‑theology had treated such purposiveness as evidence for divine design.

Kant’s earlier pre‑critical works had participated in physico‑theological reasoning, but in the critical period he sought to constrain such inferences. The Critique of Judgment reinterprets teleology as a regulative principle of reflective judgment rather than a constitutive explanation of nature.

2.3. Systematic and Philosophical Context

The work also responds to Kant’s own system-building concerns after the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87) and Critique of Practical Reason (1788). Discussions among his contemporaries raised worries about a persistent dualism between nature and freedom in his philosophy. The question of a “transition” or “bridge” between the two domains was actively discussed in the 1780s, including in correspondence with figures such as Reinhold.

Within this context, the Critique of Judgment attempts to clarify the status of judgment as an autonomous faculty and to show how its principles can provide a systematic unity to reason without reverting to pre‑critical metaphysics.

3. Author and Composition of the Work

Kant composed the Critique of Judgment relatively late in his career, between roughly 1787 and 1790, while serving as professor in Königsberg. Biographical and textual evidence suggests that the work arose from both external prompts and internal developments within his critical philosophy.

3.1. Genesis and Drafting

Scholars typically divide the genesis into two strands:

1. Aesthetic strand. Notes from the 1770s and 1780s show Kant reflecting on taste, genius, and the sublime, often in relation to lectures on logic and anthropology. These reflections were initially not integrated into the critical system. Some commentators argue that the aesthetic project coalesced after the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), when Kant became more concerned with the communicability and intersubjective validity of cognition.

2. Teleological strand. Kant’s engagement with teleology dates back to earlier writings on natural history and cosmology, but it took a distinctively critical form in the late 1780s, influenced by discussions of organism and generation (notably Blumenbach’s concept of a “formative drive”). Draft material indicates that the teleological part may initially have been conceived as a separate “Critique of Teleological Judgment” before being combined with the aesthetic critique.

There is debate about which strand was primary. Some interpreters (e.g., Förster) emphasize the teleological and systematic motivations, while others (e.g., Guyer) stress the independent development of Kant’s aesthetics.

3.2. Publication and Editions

The work was published in 1790 in Berlin and Libau by Lagarde and Friederich, dedicated to Karl Theodor, Elector of Bavaria. Kant oversaw the first edition and later authorized a second printing in 1793 with minor corrections but no major structural changes.

3.3. Place in Kant’s Life and Work

The Critique of Judgment is often described as Kant’s “final synthesis.” After its publication, Kant continued to work on related issues (e.g., the Opus postumum), but he did not complete another major Critique. Many commentators interpret the 1790 work as his mature attempt to resolve problems left open by the first two Critiques, particularly regarding systematic unity, the status of organisms, and the cultural significance of art and taste.

4. Place within Kant’s Critical Philosophy

Within Kant’s critical project, the Critique of Judgment is designed to occupy a distinct systematic position between the Critique of Pure Reason (theoretical philosophy) and the Critique of Practical Reason (moral philosophy).

4.1. The “Middle Term” Between Nature and Freedom

The first Critique had established nature as the realm of objects knowable under a priori categories and causal laws; the second Critique had articulated freedom as the domain governed by the moral law. Kant came to see that these domains remained merely juxtaposed. The Critique of Judgment addresses this by examining the faculty of judgment, which mediates between understanding and reason.

Kant characterizes judgment as providing a principle—purposiveness—through which nature can be regarded as amenable to our cognitive and moral vocation. This mediation does not alter the results of the first two Critiques but offers a new standpoint from which their deliverances form a more coherent whole.

4.2. Distinct Roles of the Three Critiques

A common schematic representation is:

Kant suggests that without the third Critique, the system lacks “transition” (Übergang) from the theoretical to the practical. Interpretations differ on how strong this claim is: some view the Critique of Judgment as strictly necessary to complete the system; others regard it as an important but not indispensable supplement.

4.3. Internal Role of Aesthetic and Teleological Judgment

Within this mediating function, aesthetic and teleological judgment play different but convergent roles:

• Aesthetic judgment shows that our cognitive faculties can experience nature as if it were purposively attuned to them, thereby fostering a sense of harmony between human subjectivity and the natural world.
• Teleological judgment provides a way to conceive of living nature as a system of ends, which can in turn be related, at a higher level, to the moral end of rational beings.

Later sections examine these domains separately; here the key point is that both are treated as expressions of reflective judgment and together supply what Kant calls a “critique of the power of judgment” that completes the critical edifice.

5. Structure and Organization of the Critique of Judgment

Kant’s work is carefully architectonic, reflecting his aim to provide a “critique” of a specific cognitive faculty. The organization mirrors, in a modified way, the structure of the first Critique while adapting it to the distinctive character of judgment.

5.1. Main Divisions

The book is divided into front matter, two main parts, and several appendices:

The Preface and Introduction (with their own subsections) set out the problem of mediating nature and freedom and define the faculty of judgment. They distinguish determining from reflective judgment and introduce purposiveness as judgment’s principle.

5.2. Internal Structure of Part I (Aesthetic)

Part I itself has several books and sections:

• Analytic of the Beautiful (§§1–22): analyses the structure of judgments of taste through four “moments” corresponding to the logical functions of judgment (quality, quantity, relation, modality).
• Analytic of the Sublime (§§23–29): distinguishes mathematical and dynamical sublime.
• Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgments (§§30–38): argues for the legitimacy and a priori basis of pure judgments of taste.
• Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgment (§§39–44): addresses antinomies and illusions in taste.
• Doctrine of Method / Art, Genius, Aesthetic Ideas (§§45–60): treats fine art, genius, and the relation of aesthetics to morality and culture.

5.3. Internal Structure of Part II (Teleological)

Part II follows a parallel pattern:

• Analytic of Teleological Judgment (§§60–68): introduces natural ends and the concept of an organized being.
• Dialectic of Teleological Judgment (§§69–78): formulates and resolves the antinomy of teleological judgment.
• Methodological and Theological Reflections (§§79–91): explores teleology’s place in natural science, its relation to theology, and its limits.

Commentators often emphasize the structural analogies between the aesthetic and teleological parts (analytic/deduction/dialectic), while also noting asymmetries: the teleological section is more explicitly tied to empirical science, whereas the aesthetic section is more focused on subjectivity and feeling.

6. The Faculty of Judgment: Determining and Reflective

Kant’s central theoretical innovation in the Critique of Judgment is the systematic distinction between determining and reflective judgment, and the claim that the latter operates according to the principle of purposiveness.

6.1. Determining Judgment

Determining judgment (bestimmende Urteilskraft) is the form of judgment primarily at work in theoretical cognition as described in the Critique of Pure Reason. Here a universal (a concept, rule, or law) is already given, and judgment merely subsumes a particular under it. For example, applying the category of causality to an observed event is an act of determining judgment.

Kant treats the principles of determining judgment—especially the categories and their schemata—as constitutive of objects of possible experience: they “make” nature, in the critical sense, by structuring appearances according to a priori rules.

6.2. Reflective Judgment

In reflective judgment (reflektierende Urteilskraft), by contrast, only the particular is given and the universal has to be found. This is characteristic of empirical inquiry when researchers seek laws to systematize observed phenomena, and of aesthetic and teleological evaluation.

Kant holds that reflective judgment cannot, by itself, generate new constitutive laws of nature; instead, it operates under a regulative principle: it must proceed “as if” nature were purposively ordered for our cognition, so that empirical laws can be discovered and unified.

6.3. Purposiveness as Principle of Judgment

The principle of purposiveness of nature for our cognitive faculties guides reflective judgment in two dimensions:

• In aesthetics, purposiveness appears as an experienced harmony between imagination and understanding, yielding pleasure and grounding judgments of beauty.
• In teleology, purposiveness is ascribed to organized beings, which are judged as if their parts existed for and through the whole (natural ends).

Kant insists that this purposiveness is not an objective property known to belong to things in themselves but a subjective yet necessary maxim of our judging activity. Scholars dispute how to interpret this “subjective necessity.” Some emphasize its merely heuristic status, while others (e.g., Ginsborg) argue that it involves a primitive normative response that underlies both empirical and aesthetic judgment.

7. Aesthetic Judgment and the Beautiful

Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgment focuses on judgments of taste that ascribe beauty. These judgments, he argues, are based on feeling yet make a distinctive claim to universal validity.

7.1. Pure Judgments of Taste

Kant distinguishes pure judgments of taste from those influenced by interest or concepts of the good. A pure judgment of taste:

1. Is grounded in a feeling of disinterested pleasure—pleasure independent of desire, possession, or moral approval.
2. Claims a kind of universal voice: the subject judges that everyone ought to share the pleasure.
3. Does not rest on any determinate concept of what the object should be; it is non‑cognitive yet normative.

In §5 he famously writes:

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To deem something beautiful and to demonstrate that I have taste is to expect everyone else to agree with this judgment, and at the same time not to base this on a concept.

— Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Ak. 5:212

7.2. The Four “Moments” of Judgments of Taste

The Analytic of the Beautiful articulates four “moments,” corresponding to logical functions of judgment:

These moments aim to show how a feeling can ground a claim that is universally valid “for everyone,” without invoking rules or concepts of perfection.

7.3. Purposiveness Without Purpose

Kant’s definition of the beautiful as “purposiveness without a purpose” (§17–18) is central. An object is judged beautiful when its form appears as if designed for the free play of imagination and understanding, yielding harmonious activity without reference to any specific end (practical, moral, or cognitive).

Interpretations diverge on how to understand this free play. Some emphasize its role in symbolizing the conditions of cognition; others highlight its phenomenology as a distinctive, contemplative way of being related to objects.

7.4. Common Sense and the Universality of Taste

To explain the universal claim of taste, Kant invokes a sensus communis—a communal standpoint or shared capacity for judgment. This is not empirical consensus but a “subjective principle” that each person must presuppose when judging. Critics have questioned whether this postulated common sense can adequately ground the normativity of taste, or whether it merely restates the demand for agreement.

8. The Sublime: Mathematical and Dynamical

Kant’s account of the sublime analyzes a different kind of aesthetic experience from that of the beautiful, one that involves a complex interplay of displeasure and exaltation.

8.1. Basic Characterization

The sublime arises when the imagination encounters an object that overwhelms its capacity—either by magnitude or power. Initially, this produces a feeling of inadequacy or even anxiety. However, reason then asserts its superiority, revealing a capacity in the subject that transcends sensible limitations. Kant characterizes the sublime as:

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That is sublime in comparison with which everything else is small.

— Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Ak. 5:248

The resulting feeling is mixed: displeasure in the failure of the imagination, followed by pleasure in the awareness of our supersensible vocation.

8.2. Mathematical Sublime

The mathematical sublime (§§25–26) concerns sheer magnitude: starry heavens, vast deserts, or immense numerical series. The imagination cannot form an adequate sensible intuition of totality. This failure points us to reason’s idea of the absolutely great, which is not bound by spatial or temporal conditions.

Proponents of “rationalist” readings stress the role of ideas of reason (e.g., absolute totality) in producing the mathematical sublime. Others emphasize the phenomenology of limit-experiences, highlighting affinities with later Romantic and existential themes.

8.3. Dynamical Sublime

The dynamical sublime (§§28–29) concerns overwhelming power in nature—storms, volcanoes, raging seas. While such forces could physically destroy us, the experience of them at a safe distance reveals that, as rational and moral beings, we are not ultimately subject to such powers. Kant links this to respect for the moral law.

In this case, imagination is confronted with nature’s might; reason then makes us aware of our independence from inclinations and threats, producing a feeling of elevation.

8.4. Comparisons with the Beautiful and Interpretive Debates

Kant underscores several contrasts:

Some interpreters see the sublime as the more explicitly moral dimension of Kant’s aesthetics; others argue that it remains primarily a reflective, not moral, experience, despite its moral “analogy.” There is ongoing discussion over the extent to which the sublime presupposes or reinforces Kant’s ethical doctrine.

9. Genius, Art, and Aesthetic Ideas

Beyond everyday judgments of natural beauty, Kant develops a nuanced account of fine art, genius, and aesthetic ideas, which structures his theory of artistic production and reception.

9.1. Fine Art and Its Distinction

Kant distinguishes fine art (schöne Kunst) from both nature and mere craft. Fine art is the product of human freedom, yet it must appear as if nature itself produced it:

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Fine art must be regarded as nature if, while being aware that it is art, we find it as beautiful as nature.

— Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Ak. 5:306

Unlike mechanical art, which follows determinate rules to achieve external purposes, fine art aims at the presentation of aesthetic ideas and the stimulation of reflective judgment.

9.2. Genius as the Rule-Giving Capacity

Genius (Genie) is defined as the “innate mental aptitude (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art” (§46). Kant attributes to genius:

• Originality: producing that for which no determinate rule can be given in advance.
• Exemplarity: works of genius serve as models for others, even though their production cannot be fully taught.
• Non‑discursiveness: genius cannot explain how it produces its works; its rules cannot be fully articulated.

There is debate over whether genius is primarily a matter of productive imagination, a cultural-historical category, or a function that symbolizes the autonomy of reason.

9.3. Aesthetic Ideas

Kant introduces aesthetic ideas as representations of the imagination that “give more to think than can be grasped and made distinct in a concept” (§49). They are the imaginative counterparts to rational ideas (e.g., freedom, God, world as whole), providing sensible presentations that suggest, without conceptually determining, these supersensible ideas.

Examples might include tragic characters that embody moral freedom or allegorical paintings that evoke complex political or religious notions. Such ideas are inexhaustible in interpretation and invite ongoing reflective judgment.

9.4. Art, Morality, and Culture

Kant also addresses the relation between art and morality. While he denies that the purpose of fine art is moral edification, he allows that art can indirectly support moral culture by cultivating the mind’s capacities and sensibility to ideas of reason.

Interpretations divide over how tightly he binds art to moral and cognitive functions. Some read Kant as giving art a subordinate role, constrained by moral ends; others emphasize the autonomy of aesthetic ideas and their role in enabling a non‑coercive, reflective engagement with rational ideals.

10. Teleology and Natural Ends

In the second part of the Critique of Judgment, Kant analyzes teleological judgment and the concept of natural ends (Naturzwecke), focusing on the organization of living beings.

10.1. Concept of a Natural End

Kant defines a natural end as an organized being in which the parts are both means and ends for each other and for the whole (§64). Two key conditions characterize such organisms:

1. Self-organization: The parts are possible only through their relation to the whole, and conversely the whole arises from the mutual interaction of the parts.
2. Self-maintenance and reproduction: The organism both produces and maintains its own form, and often generates others of its kind.

He contrasts this with artifacts, where the parts are assembled according to an external plan by an intelligent designer; artifacts do not internally generate or repair themselves in the same way.

10.2. Teleological Judgment as Reflective

Teleological judgment is reflective: it does not assert that organisms truly are designed by an intentional cause but judges them as if they were produced according to purposes. Mechanical laws, Kant argues, seem insufficient to make organisms fully intelligible; teleological concepts enter as regulative principles that orient research.

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We cannot even adequately become acquainted with, much less explain, organized beings and their internal possibility, if we do not use the concept of purposes.

— Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Ak. 5:375

10.3. Mechanism and Teleology

Kant insists that mechanical explanation must be pursued as far as possible in natural science. Teleology is to be used only where mechanism fails to yield sufficient understanding, and then only as a heuristic. This dual commitment gives rise to the later antinomy of teleological judgment (treated in Section 11).

10.4. Influence and Interpretive Issues

Commentators have debated whether Kant’s teleology is primarily epistemic (a feature of our understanding) or whether it reflects deeper features of living systems. Some historians of biology see in Kant a precursor to later organism-centered and systems-theoretic approaches, while others emphasize that he sharply restricts teleology to a reflective standpoint, forbidding inferences to a divine designer from the apparent purposiveness of organisms.

11. The Antinomy of Teleological Judgment

Kant formulates an antinomy of teleological judgment to clarify the status of teleological explanations in natural science. The antinomy concerns an apparent conflict between the demands of mechanistic explanation and the necessity of teleological concepts for understanding organisms.

11.1. The Two Opposed Maxims

The antinomy pits two regulative principles against each other:

1. Thesis (Teleological Maxim). Some natural products, especially organisms, cannot be judged as possible according to merely mechanical laws; they must be judged as natural ends.
2. Antithesis (Mechanistic Maxim). All natural production must be explained entirely through mechanism according to universal natural laws.

Both principles seem necessary for scientific inquiry: the first to make sense of organized beings, the second to preserve the autonomy of physics and the generality of natural law.

11.2. Kant’s Resolution

Kant resolves the antinomy by arguing that both maxims are regulative, not constitutive. They are rules for how we must judge nature, given the limitations of human understanding, not conflicting dogmatic claims about how nature is “in itself.”

Human understanding, Kant claims, is discursive: it proceeds from universals to particulars via rules. Organisms, however, present a kind of reciprocal dependence of part and whole that would be fully intelligible only to an intuitive understanding, which directly grasps individuals and their organization. Since we lack such an understanding, we must use both mechanism and teleology as complementary, non‑exclusive heuristics.

11.3. Intuitive vs. Discursive Understanding

A key move in Kant’s strategy is the contrast between:

By locating the antinomy in the limitations of discursive understanding, Kant claims that no real contradiction arises in nature itself. The apparent conflict is instead a feature of our standpoint.

11.4. Interpretive Debates

Some commentators view the antinomy as a way of safeguarding the autonomy of biology while preserving the primacy of mechanistic physics. Others argue that Kant’s appeal to an intuitive understanding introduces a problematic “third standpoint” beyond theoretical and practical reason. There is also disagreement about how far the resolution licenses teleological notions in empirical research: whether they are mere heuristic devices or point to something irreducible in the structure of living systems.

12. Nature, Freedom, and the Systematic Unity of Reason

One of Kant’s stated aims in the Critique of Judgment is to show how nature and freedom, treated separately in the first two Critiques, can be related within a unified system of reason without compromising their distinct domains.

12.1. The Problem of Systematic Unity

In the Critique of Pure Reason, nature is constituted as a lawful totality under the categories; in the Critique of Practical Reason, freedom is legislated by the moral law. Yet, considered separately, these standpoints threaten to yield a fragmented view of reason: one side governed by causal necessity, the other by autonomy.

Kant holds that reason has an inherent interest in systematic unity: its principles should form a coherent whole. The task of the Critique of Judgment is to show how such unity is thinkable, given the limits imposed by critical philosophy.

12.2. Purposiveness as a Mediating Concept

The key mediating concept is purposiveness. In aesthetics, we experience nature as if it were purposively attuned to our cognitive faculties; in teleology, we judge organisms as if arranged according to ends. These experiences and judgments, according to Kant, provide a “supersensible substrate” common to both nature and freedom.

This common substrate is not an object of knowledge but a regulative idea: it allows us to think of nature as a system of ends that is hospitable to the highest end of reason, namely the realization of the moral law.

12.3. Moral Ends and the Final End of Nature

In later sections of the work, Kant suggests that the final end (letzter Zweck) of nature can only be the existence of rational beings under moral laws. Teleological judgment thus points beyond itself to morality, while moral reason has an interest in a nature that allows for the effective pursuit of moral ends.

12.4. Systematic Interpretations

Some interpreters (e.g., Allison, Förster) read the Critique of Judgment as establishing a genuine, though non‑cognitive, bridge between the theoretical and practical. Others maintain that the unity achieved is only regulative: it guides our outlook but does not resolve the metaphysical dualism between nature and freedom. The extent to which Kant’s account provides an integrated worldview, versus a carefully managed dual-aspect structure, remains a central issue in the literature.

13. Philosophical Method and Critical Strategy

The Critique of Judgment extends Kant’s critical method into new domains—feeling, taste, and teleology—by asking what a priori principles govern our use of the faculty of judgment and what limits constrain its claims.

13.1. Transcendental Analysis of Judgment

Kant proceeds through a transcendental analysis: he starts from given practices (aesthetic judgments, biological explanation) and inquires into the conditions of possibility for their normativity and coherence. As in the first Critique, he distinguishes:

• Analytic sections, which analyze the structure of certain judgments (e.g., the four moments of taste; the concept of natural ends).
• Deductive or justificatory sections, which seek to show that these judgments have an a priori basis (e.g., the Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgments).
• Dialectical sections, which reveal and resolve apparent contradictions (e.g., the antinomy of taste; the antinomy of teleological judgment).

13.2. Extension of the Notion of A Priori

Kant’s method here broadens the scope of the a priori beyond knowledge and morality to include forms of feeling and reflection. For example, the demand for universal assent in judgments of taste is treated as an a priori principle of judgment, even though it does not yield objective cognition.

This extension has been interpreted in different ways: some regard it as an innovative account of normativity that integrates affective and cognitive dimensions; others worry that it weakens the sharp boundary between a priori knowledge and empirical content.

13.3. Regulative vs. Constitutive Distinction

A key methodological tool is the distinction between regulative and constitutive principles. Kant applies this not only to teleology but also to the notion of systematic unity in science and to the ideal of a communal sense in aesthetics.

Kant’s strategy is to grant these regulative principles necessity for our cognitive economy while denying them direct metaphysical import.

13.4. Self-Limitation and Anti-Dogmatism

As in the earlier Critiques, Kant aims to limit reason in order to secure its legitimate use. He explicitly resists both:

• Dogmatic metaphysics, which would infer real divine purposes from teleological appearances.
• Reductionist naturalism, which would deny any legitimate use of purposive concepts in biology and aesthetics.

His critical strategy is to show that reason itself demands a reflective, purposive standpoint, while also showing why this standpoint cannot be converted into cognitive claims about things in themselves.

14. Contemporary Reception and Early Influence

The Critique of Judgment elicited a complex reception among Kant’s contemporaries and exerted significant influence on early post‑Kantian philosophy, aesthetics, and natural science.

14.1. Initial Reviews and Responses

Early reviews in German periodicals noted both the originality and difficulty of the work. Some critics praised Kant’s analysis of taste for giving aesthetics a rigorous philosophical foundation. Others complained about obscurity and the abstraction of his arguments, particularly in the Deduction of Taste and the teleological sections.

Reactions to the teleology of nature were similarly mixed. Naturalists sympathetic to physico‑theology saw in Kant a partial ally, while more mechanistically minded thinkers worried that he was reopening the door to unscientific explanations. Many reviewers, however, appreciated his insistence that teleology remain regulative.

14.2. Impact on Early German Idealism

The most profound early influence was on emerging German Idealists:

• Fichte drew on Kant’s notion of purposiveness and systematicity, though he criticized Kant’s retention of unknowable things in themselves.
• Schelling appropriated Kant’s ideas about organisms and purposiveness in nature, moving toward a more robustly objective idealism in which nature itself is inherently teleological.
• Hegel regarded the Critique of Judgment as a crucial advance but criticized Kant for keeping the unity of nature and freedom merely subjective or regulative; Hegel’s own system sought to realize this unity as fully actual in history and spirit.

These thinkers often treated the Critique of Judgment as a stepping stone beyond Kant’s dualisms, especially regarding nature and spirit.

14.3. Influence on Romanticism and Aesthetics

The work had a strong impact on German Romanticism and literary theory. The Schlegel brothers, Novalis, and Hölderlin engaged with Kant’s concepts of genius, irony, and aesthetic ideas, often radicalizing them toward a more open-ended, fragmentary conception of art.

Friedrich Schiller developed his own aesthetics and political philosophy in dialogue with Kant, especially in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), which reinterpret Kantian themes (disinterestedness, play, harmony of faculties) in a more historical and anthropological key.

14.4. Early Scientific and Theological Reactions

In natural science and natural theology, Kant’s critical teleology influenced discussions of organism and design. Some theologians criticized the restriction of teleology to a regulative status as undermining traditional arguments for God’s existence; others adopted Kant’s framework as a way to reconcile natural science with religious belief without overstepping epistemic limits.

Overall, while the Critique of Judgment did not immediately achieve the canonical status of the first Critique, it became an essential reference point for debates about aesthetics, biology, and system in late 18th‑ and early 19th‑century German thought.

15. Legacy and Historical Significance

Over the longer term, the Critique of Judgment has become a foundational text in multiple philosophical subfields and has shaped diverse intellectual traditions.

15.1. Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

Kant’s notions of disinterested pleasure, purposiveness without purpose, genius, and aesthetic ideas have informed subsequent theories of art and taste. Neo‑Kantian and analytic aestheticians have drawn on his account of normativity without concepts to analyze critical judgment, interpretation, and the autonomy of art.

Critics have challenged aspects of his aesthetics—such as the separation of aesthetic from moral and cognitive interests, or the privileging of certain paradigms of beauty—but his framework remains a primary reference point for discussions of aesthetic value and experience.

15.2. Teleology, Biology, and Philosophy of Science

Kant’s treatment of teleological judgment has influenced debates about the status of teleology in biology and the nature of biological function. Some 20th‑century philosophers (e.g., Mayr, Wimsatt) saw affinities between Kant’s regulative teleology and modern notions of teleonomy; others used his distinctions to clarify how purposive language can be scientifically respectable.

Contemporary interpreters have revisited Kant’s distinction between regulative and constitutive principles to address emergent phenomena and systems theory, sometimes reading him as a precursor to non-reductive accounts of living organization.

15.3. System, Normativity, and Post‑Kantian Traditions

The Critique of Judgment has been pivotal for understanding systematicity and normativity in post‑Kantian thought:

• German Idealists and Romantics appropriated and transformed its ideas to develop philosophies of nature, art, and culture.
• In the 20th century, phenomenologists (e.g., Merleau‑Ponty) and hermeneutic thinkers (e.g., Gadamer) engaged with Kant’s concept of sensus communis and reflective judgment in theories of intersubjectivity and interpretation.
• Within analytic philosophy, work on judgment, rules, and norms (e.g., in discussions of aesthetic normativity or the unity of reason) has frequently returned to Kant’s third Critique, sometimes reinterpreting it as a theory of primitive norm responsiveness.

15.4. Critical Reassessments

Recent scholarship has critically examined the cultural and historical presuppositions of Kant’s aesthetic judgments, including their Eurocentric and gendered aspects. Feminist and postcolonial philosophers have questioned whether the claimed universality of taste can be disentangled from specific social norms. Others have revisited Kant’s own examples and classifications in light of contemporary art practices.

Despite these critiques, the Critique of Judgment continues to be regarded as a central work for understanding how human beings relate evaluatively and reflectively to both nature and art, and how such relations inform broader conceptions of reason, culture, and science.