Kant on Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment (review)

As the title of her book indicates, Zuckert’s approach to Kant’s Critique of Judgment (hereafter, CJ) differs somewhat from that taken by many recent commentators. Rather than focusing narrowly on aspects of the CJ that are directly relevant to a particular philosophical issue, Zuckert offers an interpretation of the work as a whole that is aimed at vindicating Kant’s claim concerning its unity. According to her interpretation, the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” and the “Critique of Teleological Judgment” are parts of an extended argument for a temporal and teleological conception of human subjectivity that differs significantly from the conception of subjectivity Kant develops in his other works. In Zuckert’s view, this new conception of the judging subject provides the unifying theme of the two main parts of the CJ, but it also marks a problematic transition within Kant’s critical philosophy. The CJ moves beyond the formal structures characteristic of transcendental subjectivity in its concern with the contingent, particular materials of human experience, history, and culture. Even as he offers his own formal idealism in support of a generally Leibnizean way of viewing the relation between nature and freedom, Kant’s emphasis on specifically human subjectivity is seen as setting the stage for post-Kantian rejections of central aspects of Kant’s idealism. If she is right, Zuckert provides a new way of understanding the complicated relations between Kant’s work and that of later German thinkers such as Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.

The controversial main thesis of the book concerns the fundamental principle of judgment that Kant introduces and defends in the CJ. Zuckert claims that it is a principle of purposiveness without a purpose. Although, as she admits, Kant never explicitly refers to the principle of judgment in precisely this way, Zuckert believes that a charitable reconstruction of his position suggests this way of understanding his claims. She also argues that Kant takes this principle to be a substantive principle of judgment, which provides an a priori condition for the possibility of our particular kind of empirical knowledge. She offers her interpretation as an alternative to the standard view, which thinks of the purposiveness of natural objects as their relation to our subjective ends, and believes that we require the principle of purposiveness only for the specific task of introducing systematic order into our empirical knowledge.

Zuckert’s controversial claims are, ultimately, expressions of her view that purposiveness without a purpose is, first and foremost, something that characterizes the activity of the reflectively judging subject. Zuckert takes Kant to be pointing implicitly to this activity, which she characterizes as freely directed towards an indeterminate future, as providing the basic form for judgments concerning the unity of the diverse as such. Since “unity amidst diversity” is a form common to judgments about the systematic order of particular, empirical laws, as well as to aesthetic and teleological judgments about the formal and material purposiveness of particular objects in nature, Zuckert sees the central topics Kant addresses in the CJ as all leading to the principle of purposiveness without a purpose as the fundamental principle of judgment. It is possible for us to judge particular natural objects as having a future-directed, teleological structure because this formal structure characterizes the reflective activity through which human subjects are capable of representing unity amidst sensibly-given diversity.

Zuckert has succeeded in providing a novel, provocative, and potentially attractive alternative to other available interpretations of the CJ. She also seems to be right about several important issues, including the importance of Kant’s criticism of the Leibnizean-Wolffian tradition in aesthetics and teleology, not only for the project of the CJ itself, but also for the historical transition in German thought from the pre-Kantian metaphysics of perfection to the post-Kantian metaphysics of the subject. Even those who agree with her general criticisms of the standard view, however, are likely to...