Kant on freedom, nature, and judgment: The territory of the third
critique is Kristi Sweet’s second monograph on Kant, after her
initial Kant on Practical Life: From Duty to History, published
by Cambridge University Press in 2013. It is a novel interpretation of
Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment centered around the
notion of hope. Contrary to philosophical commentaries focused
exclusively on either aesthetics or teleology, Sweet suggests reading
all parts of the text as internally unified under Kant’s famous third
question at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason, namely the
question ‘what I may hope for?’ Previous scholarly attempts on the third
Critique have not thematized how the notion of hope constitutes
the guiding thread of the text itself. The problem of bridging the gulf
between freedom and nature is, according to Sweet, the problem of
overcoming the indifference of nature to humanity through hope. The new
vision of nature Kant proposes – a nature hospitable, fit or amenable,
to what is distinctively human – is given from the perspective of hope.
In what follows, I will reconstruct Sweet’s argument, going through the
chapters of the book. Afterwards, I will raise a few objections, and I
will conclude with a general comment on the scholarly import of the
work.
Chapters 1 and 2 present the core of Sweet’s interpretation. The
starting point is Kant’s faculty of reason, whose nature is to always
seek the ultimate condition for every given condition, and, therefore,
an internally unified whole or totality of everything under its purview.
This is the desire of rational intelligibility (towards a rational whole
of natural order) of theoretical reason, but also of moral
intelligibility (towards a totality of coordinated human ends) of
practical reason. Such objective cannot be satisfied from within reason
itself, because it always meets an exteriority that cannot be annexed
under its purview: nature. Our faculties cannot produce an appearance of
the totality theoretical reason strives for, nor can practical reason
produce the moral world where the highest good – natural good of
happiness caused by virtue – obtains. However, the latter case is
destructive for morality itself: if the highest good is impossible, then
it is irrational to be moral. This is the juncture where the notion of
hope enters the picture: hope is the human answer to the predicament of
the frustration of reason by the exteriority of nature. We hope that
nature can be such that it will not annul our moral vocation. Thus, the
object of hope is the possibility of satisfying reason in a new
conception of a nature amenable to the demands of morality. Kant creates
the space required for this new conception of nature through the
technical notion of the territory, Sweet claims, which appears in Kant’s
geographical and geopolitical metaphors. Sweet eloquently reconstructs
Kant’s metaphor: the faculties of understanding and reason constitute
domains of legislative authority erected upon a territory of objects,
just like two distant cities erected as domains of administration and
jurisdiction upon some land, or soil, connecting and separating them.
The open territory separating nature, the domain where understanding
legislates, and freedom, the domain where reason legislates, is the
mediating space where reflective judgment operates without legislation.
In the notion of reflection, Kant introduces a distinctive mental
activity that constitutes an attempt to make intelligible, or interpret,
a set of objects, like beautiful things or living beings, which cannot
be annexed into a domain, but are rather encountered in the open
territory. Regarding beautiful things in particular, Kant describes a
consciousness, through the feeling of pleasure, of the harmony or
attunement between how the world is and our mental capacity to access
it. However, Sweet notes, this harmony or attunement is not the identity
between mind and world of traditional metaphysics. Instead, it is a
consciousness of belonging to a larger whole – the domains of nature,
freedom, and the territory – beyond the legislative purview of the human
mind, through the feeling of the non-predetermined fittingness of the
world to the mind. In other words, reflection ‘out in the territory,’ as
Sweet writes numerous times, grants humans a sense of a new cosmic whole
that exceeds human reason, which is only a part of it. This point is
crucial for Sweet, as it reaches far beyond the objective of completing
a system of faculties: it essentially redefines the place of human
beings for Kant. Whereas the Copernican turn of the first two
Critiques places the human at center of a cosmos, as a source
of its meaning, the notion of the territory in the third
Critique displaces such centrality. This new ‘cosmos’ is
indifferent to human interests and needs and can only be approached via
hope. All Chapters following expand on the above core interpretation, by
illustrating how key moments and notions in Kant’s text consolidate
it.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 show how the key Kantian notions of life, of
sensus communis, and of genius and aesthetic ideas, fit Sweet’s
overarching argument. Life for pre-critical Kant denotes the union of
force and matter, and this notion is echoed, Sweet thinks, in the union
between freedom and nature that reason demands, and on which judgments
of reflection are patterned. That can be seen more lucidly in Kant’s
account of the ideal of beauty, as the standard or measure of the
maximally beautiful individual instantiation, which can only be found in
the human being. A beautiful human being is one whose natural appearance
in its figure – the sensible – is thoroughly determined or animated by
the rational idea of freedom – the supersensible. The beautiful human
being is a human being whose movements, gesture, or comportment, are
wholly determined through moral ends. Thus, Sweet argues, a beautiful
human figure manifests ‘life’ as a union of matter and force, precisely
because it aesthetically presents the union of freedom and nature that
reason seeks and that is the object of human hope.
Then, the Kantian notion of sensus communis is discussed.
Sensus communis is argued to constitute the transcendental
ground of judgments of reflection and, thus, of the entire system of the
faculties out in the territory. This can be seen in Kant’s deduction of
the judgments of taste, where sensus communis is taken to be an
‘original fact’ that gives right or legitimates the claim to the
universal assent of the pleasure felt. That original fact, Sweet claims,
is the most basic sense of commonality in human communication, evident
in Kant’s implicit assumption that all humans universally share the same
faculties. Kant’s sensus communis is the epistemic
consciousness of our own mental state in the coordination of our
faculties, referring at the same time to the socio-practical possibility
of its communication among human beings – a definition that merges,
according to Sweet, the two traditional employments of the term: the
epistemological (from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes), and the
socio-practical (from Roman Stoicism, through Vico, to Scottish
Enlightenment).
Subsequently, Sweet discusses genius and aesthetic ideas. The gist of
the argument here is that humans communicate with nature through the
gift of genius that nature bestows to the artist producing a beautiful
work of art. Nature communicates with us in beauty in general, either
directly – in the cipher of natural beauties – or mediately – through
the gift of genius in art. In both cases, a supersensible substratum to
the natural order is revealed, just as sensus communis reveals
a supersensible substratum for human beings in human communication. The
object of hope is the supersensible kinship between the former and the
latter, in the union between nature and freedom that can only be thought
from the standpoint of the territory.
In the final chapters 6 and 7, Sweet moves to Kant’s teleology in the
second part of the Critique. In the language of the guiding
metaphor, while in aesthetic judgments humans sense their belonging to a
larger cosmos of both nature and freedom by experiencing the territory
of the system, in teleological judgments humans discern the contours of
the domain of nature in its relation to the domain of freedom from their
territorial vantage point. Kant builds the argument of that portion of
the text, Sweet suggests, as follows: he, first, admits the problem of
contingency of nature, namely the fact that mechanism cannot yield
complete intelligibility of nature. Nevertheless, an instance of such
inexplicable by mechanism nature, living beings, prompts us to
reflectively arrive at the concept of a natural end. Our encounter with
living beings, then, gives us a justification to further employ the
teleological principle of reflection to overcome the problem of
contingency and give meaning to nature as a whole. Therefore, by
situating natural products and their relations in a teleological
context, we arrive at the concept of nature as a system of ends with an
ultimate end, which we come to identify with the human being in virtue
of its moral end-setting capacity, its autonomy and freedom. This means
that the end of the system of nature is eventually found outside of it,
in the final end of human beings in the domain of freedom. Such
conception of a purposive nature inevitably leads to the concept of an
intentionally acting cause of such system, an intelligence whose will
intends such a world. This is the argument for the existence God
presented in Kant’s ethicotheology, which is substantially different
from Kant’s arguments given before, according to Sweet, as it arises
from a disinterested reflective standpoint in the territory of the
system – rather than from an interested standpoint from within the
domain of freedom, as, for instance, in the argument found in Kant’s
Critique of Practical Reason. Finally, faith is the last piece
of Kant’s argument: faith in God rests on the traces of the
supersensible in the sensible that nature provides in the organization
of living beings, which incites the teleological reflection that leads
the aforementioned concept of God. Our hope for the realization of our
moral vocation within the natural order is precisely sustained by
faith.
Sweet concludes the book by claiming that the question ‘what I may
hope for’ is nothing other than a question of the meaning and
destination of human beings, as rational moral beings, or the question
‘why things exist’ from a human standpoint, amidst the danger of
existential despair in a cruel world. Despite the answer lying beyond
what humans can comprehend, our encounter with beauty and life gives us
reason to hope that human beings exist to be good, and that the good
done will not be in vain.
Having presented the main thesis and the structure of the text, I
will now raise a couple of objections against specific points made by
Sweet, rather than against her main line of interpretation. The first
concerns the discussion of the ideal of beauty in Chapter 3. Sweet
mentions several times that the ideal of beauty gives us the original
pattern for all judgments of taste, “as the epitome and
culmination of what all judgments of taste are” (p. 202).
However, Kant rejects free beauty (and the pure judgment of taste) as a
candidate for beauty resting on an idea, and admitting an ideal. He
rather holds that such an ideal applies only to a case of adherent
beauty (namely, human beauty), and occurs in a partly intellectualized,
rather than pure, judgment of taste. Although Sweet quotes Kant on this
point (p. 95), she does not clarify how her claim that the ideal of
beauty is the pattern for all judgments of taste can stand against that
apparently contradictory statement by Kant. A solution would have been
to provide an additional account of how the union between the sensible
and the supersensible is also manifested in the free beauties of nature.
Exegetically, that would require a different route, as it is hard to see
how a beautiful wildflower, for instance, manifests ‘life,’ or the
determination of the sensible by the supersensible, in the same manner a
human figure does. If that additional account is not possible, or Sweet
does not hold that life is also manifested in free beauties, then the
reader could be given an explanation of why the exclusion of free
beauties is not a problem for the proposed interpretation.
The second objection concerns an aspect of Sweet’s take on sensus
communis in Chapter 4. Sweet dismisses at the beginning of the
chapter (pp. 109-110) the claim that sensus communis can be
anything other than an original fact. This is based on the formal
structure of the deduction, as a very particular genre of legal text in
Kant’s time (which Henrich’s influential historical reconstruction has
shown). Consequently, she dismisses interpretations, such as Kalar’s,
seeing sensus communis as a regulative ideal, and therefore
“something futural … [that] cannot be a legitimate ground of judgment’s
claim to assent” (p. 110). However, and despite the form of the
deduction as a textual genre, Kant concludes the ‘Analytic of the
Beautiful’ in §22 with a paragraph on the question whether sensus
communis is a constitutive principle of the possibility of
experience or the product of a regulative principle of reason, leaving
the answer in abeyance, as a matter that cannot be investigated there
(Kant, 2000, 5:240). The fact, nevertheless, that Kant poses the
question as warranting an investigation in the first place means that
the answer is not as straight-forwardly evident as Sweet takes it to be
– let alone the syntax of Kant’s rhetorical question in that paragraph
being crafted to predispose the reader towards the second alternative.
Hence, I believe that Sweet owes the reader a more convincing
justification for her rejection of the alternative, including a direct
engagement with Kant’s aforementioned passage and an examination of what
sensus communis as a regulative ideal would amount to.
Despite the above objections, Kant on freedom, nature, and
judgment does not only feature the virtues of an insightful and
original interpretation, showcasing philosophical proficiency and rigor.
More importantly, the text is set to leave a lasting mark in the field,
by introducing new concepts – like the concept of the territory of the
system of, or the concept of the cosmic whole. Likewise, certain major
claims made by Sweet – such as the claim that the third
Critique displaces the human centrality of the Copernican turn
of the first two Critiques, through the expanded notion of
cosmos it entails, or the claim that the Kantian harmony or attunement
between mind and world differs substantially from the identity of
traditional metaphysics – will become reference points in the years to
come. Finally, I think Sweet’s brilliance also lies in in her ability to
always contextualize technical discussions within a bigger picture that
the reader never loses sight of. In that sense, the Critique of the
Power Judgment is not seen by Sweet as unified merely by the
technical notion of reflective judgment, or the notion of purposiveness,
which is a common move by Kant commentators. Rather – Rather, reflective
judgment is indexed to the central theme of hope, as the human stance on
the predicament of the new cosmic order human beings find themselves in
.– By doing so Sweet opens up a new perspective for Kant readers: Kant
devises philosophical solutions in order to face the deeper existential
question of what it means to be human. I firmly believe that Kant on
freedom, nature, and judgment is destined to become a classic in
Kant scholarship.
References
Kant, I. (2000). In P. Guyer (Ed.) Critique of the Power of Judgment. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Sweet, K. (2023). Kant on freedom, nature, and judgment. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
