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61 Chapter 4 The Critique of Judgment: A Preliminary Investigation The previous two chapters have provided an indirect introduction to the problematic of the Critique of Judgment. They implicitly position Kant’s 1790 work within the development of his critical philosophy. The present chapter gives a preliminary introduction to the third Critique. It moves along historical lines in order to address three different sets of issues. First, it presents a critical confrontation with the methodological strategies generally employed in the interpretation of this work; second, it briefly follows the emergence of the problematic of the third Critique in Kant’s philosophical development; and third, it addresses the question of the internal genesis of the text. 1. “Tout est dit” and the Critique of Judgment Viewed from the standpoint of the enormous amount of literature that the Critique of Judgment has produced since its publication in 1790, Kant’s third Critique seems to escape any definition. Two crucial preliminary questions— what is the specific content or topic of Kant’s last Critique? and how should this work be read and interpreted?—have been answered in an astonishing variety of ways. If a conclusion had to be drawn on the basis of all these interpretations, it would be the admission that the Critique of Judgment contains everything along with its opposite. In 1968, Luigi Scaravelli began an important essay on Kant’s third Critique with a claim that today can only be reinforced:1 “The famous tout est dit with which La Bruyère begins his Caractères could very well be extended to every new work on the Critique of Judgment . . . What novelty can one hope to find—or imagine to find—in a book that at this point has been studied again and again in all its problems and disassembled again and again in each single part?”2 Indeed, Scaravelli’s claim had an openly ironic intention. Kant’s last enterprise in critical philosophy has been interpreted, among other things, both as the final chapter of the history of eighteenth century aesthetics and as the “first manifesto”3 of Romantic aesthetics—as the very beginning and source of the philosophy of German Idealism. On the one hand, it has been 1. Scaravelli’s claim has been recently reinforced by E. Garroni and H. Hohenegger in the introduction to their new Italian translation of the third Critique, Critica della facoltà di giudizio, a cura di E. Garroni, H. Hohenegger, Torino, Einaudi, 1999, see xii. 2. L. Scaravelli, “Osservazioni sulla Critica del giudizio,” in Scritti kantiani, Firenze, La Nuova Italia, 1968, 336–528, 341. 3. L. Pareyson, L’estetica di Kant. Lettura della “Critica del giudizio,” Milano, Mursia, 1984, 9. 62 Chapter 4 viewed as a chaotic assemblage of heterogeneous material, as a book that precisely for its excessive richness served as inspiration for the generation to come. On the other hand, attempts have been made to see the Critique of Judgment as the triumph of a systematic spirit that allegedly took hold of Kant in his late years. According to this view, Kant brought together in the extrinsic form of a third Critique topics that do not have anything in common, such as the contemplation of works of art and the explanation of organized beings. From this perspective, the idea of unifying aesthetic and teleological judgment in the form of the “reflective faculty of judgment” has been seen as a forceful move due exclusively to the spirit of the system. Contrary to this position, however, it has also been claimed that the connection between aesthetics and teleology was already present in the tradition, that Kant simply took up and repeated a conventional idea, and that precisely for this reason his contemporaries easily accepted this part of his doctrine without ever questioning it.4 Correspondingly, in looking for a methodological key to the heart of Kant’s third Critique, all kinds of interpretive approaches have been tested. (i) The most frequent reaction to the heterogeneity of topics that occupy Kant in his 1790 work consists in dismembering this work by focusing exclusively on one of those topics . In this way, and more generally, the Critique of the Aesthetic Faculty of Judgment and the Critique of the Teleological Faculty of Judgment are studied as independent parts without any necessary connection to each other.5 Moreover, the fact that Kant did bring up the need to integrate these two parts into a unitary theory —which is precisely the thought that brought him from the...

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