Critique of Judgment

BlackOxford

Rating: really liked it
The Sublimity of Measurement

My recent interest is in the aesthetics of measurement, that is, in the criteria we use to chose a scale, or metric, when we make measurements of any kind, scientific or as part of everyday life. This choice of metric is the most important factor in measurement since mistakes in choosing an inappropriate metric are far more significant than any subsequent errors in using a metric. Mistakes in the choice of metric are also far more difficult to detect because they involve judgmental not technical lapses. Judgments about these criteria of importance and value tend to become ‘self-sealing’ by eliminating rival criteria as a matter of course.

Immanuel Kant wrote a great deal about aesthetics but almost all of what he wrote concerns the limited area of beauty in art. This is a subject treated with special depth in The Critique of Judgment. So, although there is unlikely to be much explicit about the broader considerations of aesthetics, I’m hopeful of some inspiration that can be useful in my own theory.

As far as I am aware Kant unfortunately says nothing systematic about measurement. Nevertheless there are hints and suggestions about his views scattered in The Critique of Judgment. My intention is to investigate a few of these clues to his thinking, and to steal them if I can for my own purposes.

As part of his analysis, Kant assesses what he calls ‘teleological judgment’, that is the choices we make about ends, purposes and goals, rather than about the means to achieve these. This is where I shall focus my investigation since it most closely touches on the pivotal question in any measurement: Why? This is a question of value that is typically neglected in the discussion of measurement simply because measurement can appear to be purely instrumental. That it never is places it squarely in the realm of teleological judgment.

For Kant, judgment is a human ‘faculty’, a capability which has certain powers and limits. Judgment is “the capacity to subsume under rules, that is, to distinguish whether something falls under a given rule.” In my terminology this ‘rule’ is the practical name for an aesthetic. In choosing such a rule, we are taking a definite ‘stance’ regarding the world. The rule is both a filter and an ordering principle. The act of judgment presumes, I believe, that the rule is more or less articulate and therefore subject to conscious revision. In other words, we can learn about the rule.

Judgment has two functions therefore: determining and reflecting. Determining involves finding the right ‘universal’, that is concept or word for the situation at hand. Thus this function covers the choice of rule or aesthetic, that is, the metric of measurement. Reflective judgment is particularly relevant to the related activities of aesthetic choice and purposeful behaviour. It is the source of what Kant calls ‘empirical concepts’, that is, for my purposes, the range of aesthetic rules or metrics that one has at one’s disposal.

An aesthetic judgment, Kant says, is based on a ‘feeling’, that is a sensory perception of satisfying ‘rightness’. Unlike subsequent 19th century philosophers and 20th century neo-liberals, Kant does not consider such a feeling fixed or isolated from social effects, so I have no objection to using feeling as the basis for aesthetic judgments in measurement. Once again, since this feeling is the emotional equivalent to a rule, it can be, indeed must be, made more or less explicit in language.

Kant’s ideas about beauty, although stimulating for my purposes, are not directly relevant to the issues of measurement. But his concept of the Sublime is. “The experience of the sublime consists in a feeling of the superiority of our own power of reason, as a supersensible faculty, over nature.” The specific category of the ‘mathematically sublime’ appears especially important for empirical measurement.

The feeling of the mathematically sublime is not one of human arrogance but of a recognition that we can reason beyond that which we can imagine. For example, we can’t imagine what infinity is or looks like, but we can use the idea of infinity in our reasoning with little difficulty. The mathematically sublime, therefore, appears to me as a sort of power of transcendent imagination, what the 19th century American philosopher, C S Peirce would call ‘abduction’. Briefly, this power manifests itself as the ability to create, invent, discover novel hypotheses about the world. Such hypotheses can be neither inductively nor deductively derived. They appear more as intuitive but plausible guesses about what might fit best with our intentions.

My suggestion is that the mathematically sublime is the source of metrics, as both a range of alternatives and as a particular choice from among these. Metrics are not found in nature; they are imposed upon it. As far as we know, only human beings have this power of imposition. Things like numbers and metrics can’t be considered as anything other than ‘real’, but their reality is the consequence of human reasoning not natural evolution. Sublimity strictly speaking “is not contained in anything in nature, but only in our mind”

Thus the mathematically sublime, or abduction, or any other description of this ability is a “faculty of the mind which surpasses every standard of sense.” In other words, the mathematically sublime goes beyond ‘mere’ feeling. It may have its roots in feeling but according to Kant, it then transcends feeling completely. This, I believe, is the pivotal link between aesthetics and measurement in his philosophy. Measurement imposes our purpose on whatever is being measured. This is a crucial recognition. The properties measured are not part of the object, they are the product of our intention.

This recognition also raises the possibility of a ‘morality of measurement’. If we inevitably impose our purposes on things measured, we have at least two moral responsibilities: to consider those purposes explicitly and to recognise that measurement is not a morally neutral or objective activity of inquiry. The aesthetic judgments involved in measurement are arguably the most significant and profound of any in science.

Thank you, Immanuel, for your inspiring thought.

Erik Graff

Rating: really liked it
I've previously reviewed both The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Practical Reason, describing some of the reasons why the reading of the three critiques led to what might be called a conversion experience--or perhaps an intellectual mystical or jnana experience.

For one who has sedulously studied Kant, the third critique is a kind of capstone as it brings a lot of loose threads of his arguments together in a rather ecstatically inspiring manner. I certainly experienced a kind of intellectual ecstasy, repeatedly, during the course of this study--a process which involved most of a summer sitting from eight to fourteen hours a day at the Hungarian Pastry Shop at Cathedral and 110th St. and which included reading a number of his ancillary works as well as the magisterial commentary of the first critique by an early translator, Norman Kemp Smith.

A rather cheap way to get at the point of the third critique would be for someone informed by the Christian tradition to read his Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. If you like the Jesus of the gospels--as opposed to the Jesus of Revelation--you will find that to be similarly inspiring, a relatively quick rush. Unfortunately, however, that apologetic does not have the compelling force of the detailed definition and argumentation of the three critiques. You'll have the rush, but it will pass.

And what is the point of the Critical project? Well, of course there are many points which you'll find described pretty clearly in the book description appended under the list of contents to this edition, but the real point is what that much-edited Wikipedia writer refers to in his concluding remark about Fichte et alia. Kant was basically a mystic, even a metaphysician, but much more careful about it than his antimetaphysical successor Nietzsche. This seems a contradiction to the programme of the first critique. It is, but The Critique of Pure Reason simply lays the groundwork for the two following books. We are, so far as we operate as rational beings, Logos incarnate.

Aeisele

Rating: really liked it
This is probably my favorite of Kant's three critiques (Pure and Practical Reason being the other two). However, when it comes to reading Kant, saying "favorite" is not quite right: he was such a bad writer, and such a brilliant thinker, its hard to deal with some times.
In any case, this is very interesting because he looks at judgment as a reflective action, both concerning objects of art that are beautiful or sublime, and teleological reflection in nature.

Scott Langston

Rating: really liked it
Whist I have to admit I had to read this for study, I'm phenomenally glad that I did. It's horribly impenetrable, though. Very, very hard work to get through, let alone digest. Do I understand Kant? No, not really. Can I talk about him and his ideas comfortably? Well, yes, kind of. Would I recommend this? Not as light reading, or for fun. If you want to understand Kant, there are far more accessible works by better writers explaining him!

Steven Felicelli

Rating: really liked it
the book I most respect and least enjoyed reading

Leonard Houx

Rating: really liked it
Isn't this, like, one of the most important books on philosophical aesthetics or something? No one told me that Kant actually tries to tell jokes in it (most of it is not jokes, though, and even the jokes aren't really that funny).

I feel like for me to rate this book would be ridiculous, so I am not doing that.

Dan

Rating: really liked it
Even for Kant, this book stays in the shadow of the other two critiques – as the aesthetic judgments are less important when compared with the rational or practical/moral judgments. However, I found quite interesting his discussions of beautiful vs. sublime and especially that of teleological vs. mechanical determinism. I happened to read this book at the same time as Nagel's “Mind and Cosmos” and I was surprised to realize how relevant Kant and his teleological insights are to the contemporary sciences - especially to biology.

Barnaby Thieme

Rating: really liked it
It would be difficult to overstate Kant's importance, or the greatness of his three critiques, which must be understood as three parts of one unified project, and, I should add, must be read in sequence. European thought still operates within the horizons that Kant demarcated, and as a matter of intellectual history alone, I regard Kant as one of the greatest and most significant thinkers of our world's heritage. As regards to his philosophy, it is fundamental to our conception of what philosophy is, in the same way that Bach and Beethoven tell us what it means to make music.

In his previous critiques, Kant has analyzed the true (what can we know with certainty?) and the good (what ought I to do?), thereby addressing two members of Plato's holy trinity of good, the true, and the beautiful. In the third critique, Kant turns his attention to beauty, and in his analysis of aesthetics, he discerns a curious characteristic regarding the manner in which humans perceive and articulate aesthetic judgments: they regard their determinations of beauty as not merely expressions of personal taste, but as somehow binding for all people. In his reading, we do not regard a sunset as merely beautiful "for us," but prereflexively believe that anyone who sees a sunset must take it to be beautiful.

In analyzing how it is that we posit aesthetic judgments as somehow more than merely subjective expressions of taste, Kant finds that there is no basis for an a priori determination of beauty through either reason or the understanding. That is to say, we cannot posit a universally-binding determination of beauty on the basis of a priori synthetic reasoning (the subject of his first critique), or on the basis of practical norms that must be voluntarily affirmed by all rational agents (the subject of his second critique). In short, this points to a new faculty of human consciousness that demands its own account, which he will call judgment.

There is a lot that one could object to in this account. For example, one could ask if we are not simply mistaken in thinking that our judgments of beauty have any kind of binding force - this objection certainly occurred to me, along with many others.

But I came to conclude in my reading of this work that its value lies not on the level of detail or minutia. When one steps back and brings his larger purpose into view, the power of his argument and analysis becomes clear.

In this case, what Kant is pointing to is that there are some judgments that we perceive to be stronger than mere expressions of opinion, but which cannot be deduced in the same way that we can derive geometry, for example, from various regularities in how all conscious beings perceive space and time.

Ultimately, I believe what he is intuiting is an early prototype of systems thinking, and this is only the first point in this book where I would be powerfully reminded of complexity theory and self-organization. More on that later.

For now, suffice to say that I believe Kant is absolutely right in saying there are kinds of judgments which are not merely subjective, but are intersubjective. In some deep sense, they are deliberations that emerge through the interaction of many individual subjects, and they are not reducible to the sum of individual determinations of taste, just as the movements of a flock of starlings only emerge from the whole acting in conscious, coordinated motion with one another.

And I would also agree that aesthetic judgments are on this order. I would submit that there are expressions of taste that are so misguided as to verge on being factually wrong - if someone argues, for example, that the "Twilight" novels are better-written than Proust's "In Search of Lost Time," saying "I disagree with that opinion," does not really encompass the scope of my disagreement.

And I agree with Kant that the basis for that determination ultimately lies in the fact that judgments of taste are not altogether individual, but are made in coordinated movement with the social groups in which we are embedded, and in that sense are emergent, and transpersonal. In a key passage, Kant argues that one basis for an intersubjective character in aesthetic judgments lies in the fact that we are all humans with similar cognitive and perceptual faculties, and that it is a fundamental law of intelligibility that we assume other conscious agents are basically like us. I absolutely agree - there would be no possibility of understanding speech if we could not assume that when someone says "I want a cookie," we know exactly what they mean without further elaboration.

In a move that cements this work as one of inspired genius, Kant then applies his analysis of human judgment to the domain of teleology, arguing that our determinations that certain things are "for" some purpose is a judgment of the same faculty - an intersubjective judgment that is not merely our personal opinion. Teleological judgments operate in the same weird gray area as aesthetic judgments - even more so. On the one hand, we cannot establish on the basis of pure reason that teeth, regarded as mere objects of experience, are "for" biting and chewing, nor can we be satisfied to say that the determination that they are for biting and chewing is merely our opinion. Something else is going on here.

This is where Kant's book got really exciting for me, and where I believe his work most anticipates systems theory. His analysis of things as functional wholes finds that objects of experience must be perceived as organic totalities in order to be perceived as purposive, and this strongly relates to how, for example, the biologist Stuart Kauffman explains self-organization as a driver of evolution. The point that Kauffman and many others make is that individual organisms do not merely evolve as individuals, their populations evolve as well, because selective pressures operate at multiple levels of analysis. The objects of nature that we regard as purposive do show qualities of emergence - that is, behaviors that are irreducible to the sum of the individual acts of their component parts - and this phenomenon has been well described by many branches of science in the last fifty years. See, for example, Ilya Prigogine's work on complexity.

Kant associates our judgment of purposiveness with our sense that many objects of nature and many natural systems appear to us to function as if by design. This leads him to something like a theory of intelligent design, but to his enormous credit, he carefully maintains that we cannot take the appearance of design by intelligence as proof for such an origin, and admits that there may be physical processes at work that can account for purposiveness in nature that are simply unknown to the sciences of his day.

There are - specifically, the sciences of self-organization and selective adaptation can account empirically and mathematically for many of the phenomena that he is quite right to be baffled by. In the absence of an explanatory mechanism for how the coordinated evolution of complex structures can occur without direction, it is in fact quite rational to ask how on earth a cat could have an eye that sees, if natural systems merely unfold mechanically, driven by the law of entropy. There were quite rational grounds for arguing for the existence of God prior to the development of better explanatory systems to account for purposiveness in natural systems.

Kant concludes the critique with a long "appendix" on theology which I found completely without value, and one of the most boring things I've encountered in his entire corpus.

Most people will probably have heard of this book principally for its discussion of the sublime, which you may notice I have not mentioned yet. It is an interesting argument that would have some special relevance for the Romantics in particular, but compared to what I regard as the primary value of this work, I found it relatively unimportant.

For people generally interested in aesthetics or the roots of Romanticism, I would not recommend this book. If you are not committed to Kant's larger project, then you will surely be repelled by this work. Even for someone steeped in philosophy, it is not easy reading.

For those who are interested in Kant's philosophy per se, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is critical to understanding his complete system, and I found it far more interesting and powerful than his much-better-known writings on moral philosophy. To such readers, I would advise you to be sure you read the other two critiques first - they form a continuous and sequential argument.

Alex Lee

Rating: really liked it
This is a brilliant work, although it is somewhat mis-titled. Kant spends more time with teleology than with judgement, although the two are related. Here he clears the ground for teleological thinking as a whole. In a direct way, Kant is speaking of ideology through teleology as a point of caption for a logical system. He clearly separates this from the suprasensible point of caption and yet with the sublime Kant locates the Other as being the source of this teleological purpose. He closes the immanent phenomenological 'world' through the pragmatic teleological point to denote purpose from a certain view. And then he reproduces this structure with the suprasensible through the 'single design' of the Other.

It is of course, a Lacanian (Zizek) notice that the Other is always defined as a reflective projection of the subject, so that the subject can be absorbed into a greater magnitude of purposefulness.

One wonders what Kant would have been able to do had he been able to think outside the parameters of God. God is necessary to his time, and he had to include God somehow. Kant's insistence that the deployment of individual morality is a sign of a larger design (God) is interesting. We can find concordance with this concept through Hegel, Heidigger and others who would speak of an absolute meaningfulness (knowledge and purpose) founded on the position of an Other.

While I agree heartily with Kant's denotation of the limitations of reason without desire, without pragmatic organization, it seems that he can't help but invert that structure for its own use in order to violate the terms by which he notes as being transcendental illusions. I would speculate that this is a necessary affect of trying to find meaning, in that he has to provide a singular domain for us all to collectively interact otherwise he would risk losing the very thing he seeks to capture, that of a role of reason and thought as the highest forms of concordance and social stability.

Nietzsche would suggest that this is part of the problem of philosophers, that they seek to be teachers and thus are left with a latent content that enables stability of identity, forcing incoherencies to occur in what is otherwise unthinkably incoherent/inconsistent. I agree. Kant's attempt is valiant here but ultimately centered around human subjectivity, undeniably so, because it must be so presented for him to advance as he did.

With this last critique, Kant presents in many ways, the seed for all modern inconsistency and reason with Godel, Turing and Russell. He presents the archetype of ideological state appratuses that Althusser and Foucault would present as logically singular points of consideration founded on nothing but its own purposefulness and in this manner, we still live in Kants shadow as he outlined the very structures and their limitations so that others later on could verify the same problems in countless different ways.

We shall not leave Kant's shadow if we do not avoid the distinctions of method first presented by Descartes as being the nature of rational consistency -- Kant does extend this rationality by demonstrating how sublime marks can organize what would seem like an unorganizable system of consistency. For this reason, Kant's Critiques are very well worth the read.

Lorraine

Rating: really liked it
I don't have the time to read ALL of this. Got through half (study related). Fucking awesome, even though the process initially was like hitting your head repeatedly with a brick. The bloke has neither poetry nor humour. He does, however, have very rich ideas, and it's worth reading because of that

Xander

Rating: really liked it
In Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (1781), Immanuel Kant set out to reconcile rationalism and empiricism in a grand system which we call Transcendental Idealism: there exist two worlds - the phenomenal and the noumenal - and we can only have true knowledge of the noumenal world; the phenomenal world is just an imperfect representation, as constituted by our mental categories, of the world as it is in itself. We should employ Pure Reason to gather synthetic knowledge a priori about the noumenal world.

In the Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft (1788), Kant applied this method of Pure Reason to gather synthetic knowledge a priori about the Moral Law. This led him to the discovery of the Categorical Imperative, which it is our duty to follow - even if it doesn't lead to happiness in the phenomenal world, we will be rewarded by God in the noumenal world. In finding all this, Kant was able to positively prove the existence of our immortal soul, our freedom and God as noumena.

So Kant has dealt with epistemology and ethics and offered us a new world model. In the one world - the phenomenal - we are fully determined by natural causes, in the other world - the noumenal - we are fully free to will that which leads to the highest good (by doing our duty with regards to the categorical imperative). So it seems that we, as thinking intelligences, are both a phenomenon and noumenon and that in us the noumenal world has a causal mechanism by which to enact effects in the phenomenal world. We seem to be portals to both world.

In the third Kritik, the Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), Kant tries to create a bridge between both worlds. This last part of the trilogy consists of two parts, dealing respectively with Aesthetical Judgements and the Purposiviness of Nature.

In the first part, Kant argues that Aesthetical Judgments - which deal with our sensual perception of the phenomenal world, according to our notions of time and space and the 12 categories - are reflective. With reflective, he means that we observe particular instances and try to generalize from these to universal statements. (A person with the right background knowledge sees in this the scientific method of induction by which we abstract mathematical equations as explanations from a collection of particular instances; this is the problem that led David Hume to radical scepticism and Immanuel Kant to his Transcendental Idealism). This is the only knowledge we can have about our world, gained a posteriori, and therefore an imperfect representation of the world as it is in itself.

For Kant, there are only four types of reflective (aesthetical) judgments: (1) the agreeable, (2) the good, (3) the beautiful, and (4) the sublime. He is able to trace these four types of reflective judgments to his original table of judgments (as published in the first Kritik) of quantity, quality, relation and modality. In essence, Kant tries to explain how we judge on agreeableness, goodness, beauty and sublime - these are all phenomena and in that sense aesthetical and subjective.

Now, what does Kant tell us about these four types of judgments?

(1) Judgments on the agreeable are subjective and sensual. I like the smell of this flower, I like the tast of this wine, I like the view of this landscape. These are 'just' personal remarks.

(2) Judgments on the good are objective and ethical. I fulfil my duty towards the Moral Law or not (as outlined in the second Kritik), and I observe that others do this too or not.

(3) Judgments on the beautiful are related to the purposiveness of objects. Kant claims that we look for beauty in objects that seem to have a certain functionality or purpose, but are in reality fuctionless or purposeless. In others words: the form of the object pleases our mind and triggers our faculties of imagination and cognition.

(4) The last type of judgments deal with the sublime. According to Kant, these judgments have their origin in objects that (seem) to lay beyond our mental capacity. We cannot comprehend these objects and this triggers some sort of fear in us, which leaves us in awe of the object.

So much for the types of aesthetical judgments that we make about the phenomenal world around us. In the second part of this book, Kant proceeds to another - though at some points slightly relating - subject: teleology.

According to Kant, we perceive a purposiveness in nature. We look at bees, flowers and horses and see functionality. It looks as if these objects are designed for a specific purpose. This is called teleology (from the greek word 'telos' meaning goal): when looking at nature, we abstract the appearant design of these objects and form teleological judgments.

Kant explains that we see nature as having an objective purposiveness (compared to the subjective purposiveness in objects that we perceive as beauty), but this objective purposiveness is and remains our reflective aesthetical judgment. This, in other words, means that we judge as if (!) nature is teleoligcally constituted - our aesthetic judgments constitute a purposive nature around us, but this is and remains our ouw subjective judgment. We cannot know if nature has an objective purpose as a thing in itself, since this is not attainable for us, as Kant explained in the first Kritik.

Kant even claims that man is justified to see nature as a grand teleological system, in the sense that nothing exists without a purpose and everything has to be expected to be the most suitable design for that particular purpose. But even though this seems to sound a lot like William Paley (who would later use the appearant teleology of nature as a proof for the existence of God, as a master watchmaker), Kant has to add the caveat that this is not real objective teleology. He has to do this, because in the first Kritik he explained that ALL of our aesthetical judgments are imperfect representations of the world as it is in itself. Therefore, it is logically impossible for us to know if nature truly is teleological. So this is a sort of bridge between the first and the third Kritik.

A second sort of bridge, this time between the second and third Kritik, involves Kant's claim that there is - besides natural purposiviness - also ethical purposiveness. In the second Kritik, Kant told us to see man as an object in itself (as a noumena) and that we, as man, have freedom (also a noumena). But this freedom deals with us acting accordingly in the phenomenal world, in nature. So we apply causality and teleology in the natural world by using our freedom.

To summarize all of the above, Kant explains in the third Kritik, that we continually aesthetically judge about the world around us. We use our imperfect apparatus of categories, space and time, to constitute the phenomenal world around us. We judge as if nature is teleological, has a purpose, but this is and remains a subjective judgment (i.e. we will never know if nature has a purpose). We also judge ourselves to be teleological, in the sense that - in morality - we apply our own will to nature and to our fellow human beings. Kant seems to say that man is the object, the purpose of nature.

While I could appreciate the first two Kritiks, this third one confuses me. Not only that, I get the impression that Kant himself was highly confused about it all. I can see all the pieces of the puzzle fit together, with the closing of this last book - I agree in this. I can even see the necessity Kant had to have felt in writing his third Kritik, since he needs our aesthetical judgments as a bridge between our Understanding (imperfect knowledge of the phenomenal world, constituted according to the categories) and our Reason (perfect knowledge of the categories and the moral law). Kant needs to explain how it is possible that we - as noumenon AND phenomenon - are fully free in a deterministic world. The purposiviness of nature, including all the causality (and with this the seemingly inescapable determinism), is only appearant. We are ourselves purposiveness - we are objects in themselves - we are ourselves able to apply purposiveness to nature.

Yet, I'm glad that my crash course of Kant is finished. I really enjoyed his original ideas in the first Kritik, I appreciated his humanity in the second Kritik, but I am flatly at a loss for words with this third Kritik. It all seems to fall into place, but I cannot help but notice the artificality and fragility of it all. Kant seems to overstretch himself a lot, and just when he is about to snap, he retreats safely into his two worlds-solution. We seem to see purpose in nature, but that would need an explanation (such as a designer, or at least a process of causality), so let's just fall back on the 'we constitute this purposiveness ourselves, with our incomplete apparatus for cognition." How convenient!

Throughout his three Kritiks, Kant seems to build up the tension every time: letting the reader think he will make a daring and impressive jump, and at the supreme moment he seems to shy away again and offer us some lame excuse. I do acknowledge the genius of Kant, I do appreciate his originality and creativity, but at the same time I lament his conservational approach to it all. Positing two worlds is original, but he then sets out to use these two-world-hypothesis as an easy way out when he encounters problems. Proving God exists because we need him for our morals; following a flawed imperative is the definition of freed; this is all undeserving for a birhgt mind like Immanuel Kant. It is in this last Kritik that it really started to bother me, so I will not rate this book very highly - even though it was interesting to read.

Greg

Rating: really liked it
Many moons ago I studied Kant at a superficial level in freshman philosophy and I found that of all philosophers, Kant's ideas most strongly resonated with me. In my introductory studies, we never touched upon his original works, so I was excited to see the writing that caused such a revolution in the philosophical community.

Kant's writing style here is almost impenetrable to the casual reader. His language is dense and intelligible only with careful study and thought. The surest way to obfuscate ideas is to cloak them in indecipherable verbiage and vague generalizations. I think Dan Dennett summarized this type of writing best:

Some philosophers think that using examples in their work is, if not quite cheating, at least uncalled for—rather the way novelists shun illustrations in their novels. The novelists take pride in doing it all with words, and the philosophers take pride in doing it all with carefully crafted abstract generalizations presented in rigorous order, as close to mathematical proofs as they can muster. Good for them, but they can’t expect me to recommend their work to any but a few remarkable students. It’s just more difficult than it has to be.

I did enjoy a few moments of Kant's eloquent writing. For example, his rigorous analysis of humor:

Whatever is to arouse lively, convulsive laughter must contain something absurd (hence something that the understanding cannot like for its own sake). Laughter is an affect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing. This same transformation certainly does not gladden the understanding, but indirectly it still gladdens us in a very lively way for a moment. So the cause of this must consist both in the influence that the presentation has on the body and in the body's reciprocal effect on the mind-but not because the presentation is objectively an object of our gratification (for how could an expectation that turned out to be false gratify us?), but solely because it is a mere play of presentations which produces in the body an equilibrium of the vital forces.

He proceeds to explain how the end result of a joke is, "a corresponding alternating tension and relaxation of the elastic parts of our intestines that is communicated to the diaphragm. The lungs, meanwhile, rapidly and intermittently expel air, and so give rise to an agitation that is conducive to our health."

This ironically humorous passage reminds me of the saying, "A joke is like a frog - it is ruined if you dissect it." And Kant just dissected the very foundation of humor. Everything is ruined.

Critique of Judgement is a deeply academic read that I can only recommend to those with a profound interest in philosophy.

Amani

Rating: really liked it
Kant is hella difficult to read.

read PART of this for a class. a class taught by the same guy who edited and was lead translator for this edition of the book. basically, the class was only *SLIGHTLY* more intelligible than the book.

Shyam

Rating: really liked it
I only read Part One — Critique of Aesthetic Judgement

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Anmol

Rating: really liked it
Some very interesting ideas here, but Kant's infamous style of writing really takes the wind out of any potential interest that one could derive from his discussions.