Systematicity in the Critique of Judgment: The Emergence of a Unified Subject

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant grounds the diverse and irreducible functions of mind within the life of the subject, thus completing the Critical system insofar as that “system” is understood to be the unification of the subject’s system of mental powers. In the first introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Kant speaks of “system” in a number of ways. On the one hand, he argues that the “real” system of philosophy may be divided into theoretical and practical philosophy.¹ He states that “philosophy as a system” does not include a critique of judgment—even though judgment “mediates the connection between understanding and reason” through its own a priori principle (392/203). Kant introduces the idea of a technic, in part, to illustrate the empirical role of reflective judgments, and he argues that a critique of judgment forms no part of doctrinal philosophy (391/201). Yet he claims that “for the idea of philosophy as a system we also need a critique (even if not a doctrine) of the feeling of pleasure and displeasure insofar as its basis is not empirical” (396/207). The “system” that emerges from the Third Critique, I argue, is what Kant calls a “system of all the higher mental powers” (391/202). The systematicity of these powers is grounded in one of the conditions of subjectivity, for Kant. This feature of subjectivity consists in the individual’s conscious awareness of internal states and his or her capacity to respond to these inner states.

It is generally thought that the Critique of Judgment fails to complete the Critical system in the sense that it fails to demonstrate the compatibility of theoretical and practical reason. Rudolph A. Makreel proposes that the Critique of Judgment be read as an interpretive framework for the first two critiques, rather than a failed attempt at synthesis between the two. He writes: “Unlike the first two Critiques, which ground the doctrinal metaphysical systems of natural science and morals, the Critique of Judgment has no specific metaphysical application. It deals with the harmony of the cognitive faculties and examines the conditions for the systematization of all knowledge.”² John H. Zammito is sympathetic to this reading of the Third Critique, and he characterizes the power of feeling (in its transcendental manifestation) as one that provides a basis for the systematization of our higher mental powers.³ Zammito draws attention to the fact that feeling, insofar as it allows for “self-consciousness” of one’s inner state, is closely connected with the feeling of life (Lebensgefhül) for Kant.⁴ Zammito argues that for Kant, feeling mediates the imagination’s relationship with reason and understanding. This mediating function of feeling, which depends on a self-consciousness of internal states, consists in the reference of a representation to the subject’s feeling of life.⁵ This is a process wherein the feeling of pleasure and displeasure mediates reason and understanding by activating the conditions for practical purposiveness in the world of sense, according to Zammito:

Lebensgefühl is grounded in Kant’s theory of subjective self-consciousness under the rubric of reflection, or what we have identified with that “other kind of judging.” Kant was loathe to call this cognition, yet it is self-consciousness of the subject not as merely passive but as active. The mind has the power to respond to appraisals of its states and to alter them. And it has at least one criterion by which this data—pleasure or pain—is to be evaluated: the feeling of life. What does Lebensgefühl point to, what does it mark by its data of pleasure? Life, for Kant, is the property of an intelligent will, the capacity to choose, to act. It is freedom of the will in its actuality, Willkür, in Kant’s precise sense. The feeling of life, therefore, is the awareness of our empirical freedom, our status as practically purposive in the world of sense. Pleasure, in this context, is either what fosters our consciousness of this freedom, or what accompanies and underscores its efficaciousness. In...