Kant's Critique of Judgement

79 [Cf. Aristotle’s Poetics, c. iv. p. 1448 b: ἃ γὰρ αὐτὰ λυπηρῶς ὁρῶμεν, τούτων τὰς εἰκόνας τὰς μάλιστα ἠκριβωμένας χαίρομεν θεωροῦντες οἷον θηρίων τε μορφὰς τῶν ἀτιμοτάτων καὶ νεκρῶν. Cf. also Rhetoric, I. 11, p. 1371 b; and Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful, Part I. § 16. Boileau (L’art poétique, chant 3), makes a similar observation:

“Il n’est point de serpent ni de monstre odieux Qui, par l’art imité, ne puisse plaire aux yeux. D’un pinceau délicat l’artifice agréable Du plus affreux objet fait un objet aimable.”]

80 [Second Edition.]

81 [Cf. p. 199, infra.]

82 [In English we would rather say “without soul”; but I prefer to translate Geist consistently by spirit, to avoid the confusion of it with Seele.]

83 [These lines occur in one of Frederick the Great’s French poems: Épître au maréchal Keith XVIII., “sur les vaines terreurs de la mort et les frayeurs d’une autre vie.” Kant here translates them into German.]

84 [Withof, whose “Moral Poems” appeared in 1755. This reference was supplied by H. Krebs in Notes and Queries 5th January 1895.]

85 Perhaps nothing more sublime was ever said and no sublimer thought ever expressed than the famous inscription on the Temple of Isis (Mother Nature): “I am all that is and that was and that shall be, and no mortal hath lifted my veil.” Segner availed himself of this Idea in a suggestive vignette prefixed to his Natural Philosophy, in order to inspire beforehand the pupil whom he was about to lead into that temple with a holy awe, which should dispose his mind to serious attention. [J. A. de Segner (1704–1777) was Professor of Natural Philosophy at Göttingen, and the author of several scientific works of repute.]

86 [Second Edition.]

87 The three former faculties are united in the first instance by means of the fourth. Hume gives us to understand in his History of England that although the English are inferior in their productions to no people in the world as regards the evidences they display of the three former properties, separately considered, yet they must be put after their neighbours the French as regards that which unites these properties. [In his Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime, § iv. sub init., Kant remarks that the English have the keener sense of the sublime, the French of the beautiful.]

88 The reader is not to judge this scheme for a possible division of the beautiful arts as a deliberate theory. It is only one of various attempts which we may and ought to devise.

89 [Second Edition.]

90 [I.e. the case of Plastic art, with its subdivisions of Architecture and Sculpture, as is explained in the next paragraph.]

91 That landscape gardening may be regarded as a species of the art of painting, although it presents its forms corporeally, seems strange. But since it actually takes its forms from nature (trees, shrubs, grasses, and flowers from forest and field—at least in the first instance), and so far is not an art like Plastic; and since it also has no concept of the object and its purpose (as in Architecture) conditioning its arrangements, but involves merely the free play of the Imagination in contemplation, it so far agrees with mere aesthetical painting which has no definite theme (which arranges sky, land, and water, so as to entertain us by means of light and shade only).—In general the reader is only to judge of this as an attempt to combine the beautiful arts under one principle, viz. that of the expression of aesthetical Ideas (according to the analogy of speech), and not to regard it as a definitive analysis of them.

92 I must admit that a beautiful poem has always given me a pure gratification; whilst the reading of the best discourse, whether of a Roman orator or of a modern parliamentary speaker or of a preacher, has always been mingled with an unpleasant feeling of disapprobation of a treacherous art, which means to move men in important matters like machines to a judgement that must lose all weight for them on quiet reflection. Readiness and accuracy in speaking (which taken together constitute Rhetoric) belong to beautiful art; but the art of the orator (ars oratoria), the art of availing oneself of the weaknesses of men for one’s own designs (whether these be well meant or even actually good does not matter) is worthy of no respect. Again, this art only reached its highest point, both at Athens and at Rome, at a time when the state was hastening to its ruin and true patriotic sentiment had disappeared. The man who along with a clear insight into things has in his power a wealth of pure speech, and who with a fruitful Imagination capable of presenting his Ideas unites a lively sympathy with what is truly good, is the vir bonus discendi peritus, the orator without art but of great impressiveness, as Cicero has it; though he may not always remain true to this ideal.

93 [From this to the end of the paragraph, and the next note, were added in the Second Edition.]

94 Those who recommend the singing of spiritual songs at family prayers do not consider that they inflict a great hardship upon the public by such noisy (and therefore in general pharisaical) devotions; for they force the neighbours either to sing with them or to abandon their meditations. [Kant suffered himself from such annoyances, which may account for the asperity of this note. At one period he was disturbed by the devotional exercises of the prisoners in the adjoining jail. In a letter to the burgomaster “he suggested the advantage of closing the windows during these hymn-singings, and added that the warders of the prison might probably be directed to accept less sonorous and neighbour-annoying chants as evidence of the penitent spirit of their captives” (Wallace’s Kant, p. 42).]

95 [Cf. “Parturiunt montes, nascitur ridiculus mus.”]

96 [The First Edition adds “as in the case of a man who gets the news of a great commercial success.”]

97 [The jest may have been taken from Steele’s play, “The Funeral or Grief à la mode,” where it occurs verbatim. This play was published in 1702.]

98 [Henriade, Chant 7, sub init.

“Du Dieu qui nous créa la clémence infinie, Pour adoucir les maux de cette courte vie, A placé parmi nous deux êtres bienfaisants, De la terre à jamais aimables habitants, Soutiens dans les travaux, trésors dans l’indigence: L’un est le doux sommeil, et l’autre est l’espérance.”]

99 We may describe as a rationalising judgement (judicium ratiocinans) one which proclaims itself as universal, for as such it can serve as the major premise of a syllogism. On the other hand, we can only speak of a judgement as rational (judicium ratiocinatum) which is thought as the conclusion of a syllogism, and consequently as grounded a priori.

100 [Cf. p. 241, infra.]

101 [Second Edition.]

102 [Antiparos is a small island in the Cyclades, remarkable for a splendid stalactite cavern near the southern coast.]

103 The intuitive in cognition must be opposed to the discursive (not to the symbolical). The former is either schematical, by demonstration; or symbolical as a representation in accordance with a mere analogy.

104 [I read Geselligkeit with Rosenkranz and Windelband; Hartenstein and Kirchmann have Glückseligkeit.]

105 As in pure mathematics we can never talk of the existence, but only of the possibility of things, viz. of an intuition corresponding to a concept, and so never of cause and effect, it follows that all purposiveness observed there must be considered merely as formal and never as a natural purpose.

106 [The allusion is to Vitruvius de Architectura, Bk. vi. Praef. “Aristippus philosophus Socraticus, naufragio cum eiectus ad Rhodiensium litus animadvertisset geometrica schemata descripta, exclamavisse ad comites ita dicitur, Bene speremus, hominum enim vestigia video.”]

107 [Second Edition.]

108 We can conversely throw light upon a certain combination, much more often met with in Idea than in actuality, by means of an analogy to the so-called immediate natural purposes. In a recent complete transformation of a great people into a state the word organisation for the regulation of magistracies, etc., and even of the whole body politic, has often been fitly used. For in such a whole every member should surely be purpose as well as means, and, whilst all work together towards the possibility of the whole, each should be determined as regards place and function by means of the Idea of the whole. [Kant probably alludes here to the organisation of the United States of America.]

109 [These words are inserted by Rosenkranz and Windelband, but omitted by Hartenstein and Kirchmann.]

110 In the aesthetical part [§ 58, p. 247] it was said: We view beautiful nature with favour, whilst we have a quite free (disinterested) satisfaction in its form. For in this mere judgement of taste no consideration is given to the purpose for which these natural beauties exist; whether to excite pleasure in us, or as purposes without any reference to us at all. But in a teleological judgement we pay attention to this reference, and here we can regard it as a favour of nature that it has been willing to minister to our culture by the exhibition of so many beautiful figures.

111 The German word vermessen is a good word and full of meaning. A judgement in which we forget to consider the extent of our powers (our Understanding) may sometimes sound very humble, and yet make great pretensions, and so be very presumptuous. Of this kind are most of those by which we pretend to extol the divine wisdom by ascribing to it designs in the works of creation and preservation which are really meant to do honour to the private wisdom of the reasoner.

112 We thus see that in most speculative things of pure Reason, as regards dogmatic assertions, the philosophical schools have commonly tried all possible solutions of a given question. To explain the purposiveness of nature men have tried either lifeless matter or a lifeless God, or again, living matter or a living God. It only remains for us, if the need should arise, to abandon all these objective assertions and to examine critically our judgement merely in reference to our cognitive faculties, in order to supply to their principle a validity which, if not dogmatic, shall at least be that of a maxim sufficient for the sure employment of Reason.

113 [That is, the wider concept serves as a universal, under which the particular may be brought; cognition from principles, in Kant’s phrase, is the process of knowing the particular in the universal by means of concepts.]

114 [This distinction will be familiar to the student of the Critique of Pure Reason. See Dialectic, bk. i., Of the Concepts of Pure Reason.]

115 [Second Edition.]

116 [This principle, that for our intellect, the conception of an organised body is impossible except by the aid of the Idea of design, is frequently insisted on by Kant. Professor Wallace points out (Kant, p. 110) that as far back as 1755, in his General Physiogony and Theory of the Heavens, Kant classed the origin of animals and plants with the secrets of Providence and the mystical number 666 “as one of the topics on which ingenuity and thought are occasionally wasted.”]