Subsuming ‘determining’ under ‘reflecting’: Kant’s power of judgment, reconsidered

ABSTRACT

Kant’s distinction between the determining and reflecting power of judgment in the third Critique is not well understood in the literature. A mainstream view unifies these by making determination the telos of all acts of judgment (Longuenesse [1998]. Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press). On this view, all reflection is primarily in the business of producing empirical concepts for cognition, and thus has what I call a determinative ideal. I argue that this view fails to take seriously the independence and autonomy of the ‘power of judgment’ [Urteilskraft] as a higher cognitive faculty in its own right with its own a priori principle. Instead of seeing merely reflecting judgments as failed or incomplete acts of judgment, I argue that these are in fact paradigmatic of the activity of the power of judgment. More precisely, the reflecting power of judgment just is the power of judgment. Accordingly, reflecting judgment takes precedence over determining judgment; while the former operates according to a law that it gives itself, the latter requires another higher cognitive faculty to provide its principle. On my view, reflecting judgment should be understood as the capacity for purposive subsumption—most clearly seen in the activity of mere reflection.

KEYWORDS:

• Kant
• judgment
• reflection
• subsumption
• Longuenesse
• faculty psychology

Acknowledgments

Versions of this article were presented at the United Kingdom Kant Society (University of Bristol, August 2019), North American Kant Society (DePaul University, October 2019), and APA Pacific (April 2021). I am grateful to these audiences for their questions and discussion. I am especially thankful to G. Anthony Bruno, Emily Carson, Rosalind Chaplin, George di Giovanni, Keren Gorodeisky, and William Clare Roberts for reading multiple drafts of the paper and providing invaluable feedback. Thanks also to the anonymous referees from this journal for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 English translations of Kant are from the Cambridge Editions of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Kant’s works are cited according to the Akademie Ausgabe pagination (volume number: page number) with the appropriate abbreviation (listed below in the reference section)—with the exception of KrV for which I provide the standard A/B pagination.

2 I lean heavily on such passages throughout the paper. Kant wrote two introductions to the third Critique, though only the second one was published. Given my purposes, I find Kant’s articulation of certain points in the so-called First Introduction [FI] often more helpful and precise. This is not to suggest that the published Introduction is inadequate. Moreover, there is no sense among commentators that these are at odds with each other. Still, when possible, I cite a comparable or parallel passage from the published Introduction to try to maintain continuity.

3 See also Zammito, for whom Kant’s account of reflecting judgment indicates a decidedly ‘cognitive turn’ (1992, 151–177).

4 I should note at the outset that the vast majority of commentators who discuss these issues subscribe to something like the determinative ideal. For example, Ginsborg maintains that the third Critique is ‘explicitly concerned with the issue [of the formation of] empirical concepts’ (2015, 84). Similarly, Zuckert holds that Kant’s primary aim in KU is to provide a necessary ‘supplement to his epistemology’ in KrV (2007, 1). I focus on Longuenesse here because she takes up this issue in the most direct way. For most others, the idea that reflecting judgment is subordinate to determining judgment is either implicit or merely gestured at.

5 For an excellent and thorough study of these terms (especially Vermögen) and their context in Eighteenth century German philosophy, see chapter 1 of Falduto (2014).

6 Kant employs the term ‘understanding’ both in the broad sense (denoting the higher cognitive faculty in general) and in the narrow sense (referring to one of its sub-faculties) (KrV A130–131/B169, cf. A69/B94, A126; Anth 7:196; FI 20:201; LM 28:240; LA 25:537, 773).

7 While Baumgarten recognises a faculty of judgment [facultas diiudicandi], he characterises it as the capacity to ‘perceive the perfections and imperfections of things’ (M §606). He distinguishes between its sensible and intelligible use, depending on whether one represents the harmony or disharmony of things indistinctly or distinctly; the former he calls ‘taste’, the latter ‘criticism’ (M §607). This strictly evaluative capacity, which does not lie strictly with the higher or lower faculty of cognition, does not bear any direct relation to Kant’s new power of judgment. Moreover, we know that Kant objects to the idea that there could be rules for taste, which is to say, that aesthetics could be a science (KrV A21/B35-36).

8 Recent commentators have shown that Kant begins to develop a theory of Urteilskraft in his unpublished anthropology lectures in the 1770s (McAndrew 2014; Sánchez Rodríguez 2012). I cite some of these passages in what follows.

9 ‘ … the understanding in general can be represented as a capacity to judge’ [der Verstand überhaupt als sein Vermögen zu urteilen vorgestellt werden kann] (KrV A69/B94).

10 Vermögen zu urteilen itself gets translated as both ‘capacity’ and ‘faculty’. Longuenesse prefers ‘capacity to judge’—suggesting that this better captures the idea of an ‘unactualised potentiality’ (1998, 7). However, in their Cambridge translation of KrV, Guyer & Wood translate it as ‘faculty for judging’ (including at A81/B107) in order to keep the connection with the Latin facultas, used by Baumgarten. Regrettably, Guyer & Wood also—on more than one occasion—translate Urteilskraft as the ‘faculty of judgment’ (KrV A295-6/B352). See also Guyer’s translation of Refl 2133 (16:247).

11 ‘A power [Kraft] should not be confounded with a mere faculty [Vermögen]: for a faculty is only a possibility of doing something: on the other hand, since a power is a source of alteration, an endeavor to do something must be encountered within a power’.

12 For now, it is worth noting that Longuenesse opens her book, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, by explicitly stating that the title does not refer to Urteilskraft (1998, 8). Indeed, the book focuses almost exclusively on the Vermögen zu urteilen, with very little to say about the Kraft of which it is partly composed. This points to a more general neglect of the power of judgment in her work, which we will see more clearly in §3. In subsequent work, she reiterates her claim that Urteilskraft is the actualisation of the Vermögen zu urteilen, while also adding the rather cryptic comment that: ‘for that matter, so are the two other components of the understanding [in the broad sense]’, referring to the understanding (in the narrow sense) and reason (2005, 142). Boyle (2020) suggests that Longuenesse conflates the capacity/power distinction with the power/act distinction—failing to delineate between those conditions that enable the power to perform its operations, on the one hand, and the products of this operation, on the other (132fn21).

13 While Kant cites Wolff and Baumgarten sympathetically on this matter in some of his metaphysics lectures, he also argues against their idea that a power is that which contains the ground of the actuality of an act, contending instead that it is the ‘connection’ [nexus] or ‘relation’ between ground and its consequence (LM 28:25–27, 261; 29:771). Thus it is not clear that Kant simply adopts the framework of Wolff and Baumgarten regarding the distinction between a faculty and a power. Heßbrüggen-Walter claims that Kant was in fact more influenced by Crusius with respect to these notions (2004, 127–142). More problematically, though, such a reading seems to count the power of judgment twice—first as potentiality, then as actuality. Recall that Kant sees all three higher cognitive faculties (understanding in the narrow sense, the power of judgment, and reason) as making up the Vermögen zu urteilen. Yet, in taking Urteilskraft to be the actualisation of this capacity, Longuenesse effectively singles out one component of the capacity as the thing which makes it actual. It is unclear what the difference would be between the power of judgment qua capacity and the power of judgment as actualising force. One might think that Kant would have been better off holding that the capacity to judge consists only in understanding and reason, reserving the power of judgment for the role of actualising it.

14 Kant parenthetically glosses the term ‘universal’ as a rule, principle, or law. He also mentions concepts in FI (20:211). We can take all these notions to be universals in the sense relevant for the definition of the power of judgment—i.e., as things under which particulars can be subsumed.

15 In addition to this newfound distinction within the power of judgment, there is a further innovation—namely, the power of judgment (like the other two higher cognitive faculties) is now governed by a principle, which he describes as the presupposition that nature is purposive for our cognitive faculties. Commentators have struggled to understand the precise formulation of this principle, in part due to Kant’s many characterisations of the notion of purposiveness throughout the text, as well as the range of philosophical problems to which he poses it as a solution. Common to many interpretations, however, is the idea that nature admits of being carved up into a hierarchy of empirical concepts by us. I will discuss this issue in the final section of this paper, ultimately suggesting that this cannot be an exhaustive description of the principle.

16 In anthropology lectures from the 1770s, Kant describes comparison as the act of ‘holding our representations together’ [Vorstellungen zusammen zu halten]—and goes on to define the power of judgment as a faculty of comparison [Vergleichung] (FA 25:515).

17 For more on Kant’s account of logical reflection and its role in the formation of concepts, see Newton 2015.

18 Other passages where Kant uses these different terms include: FI 20:223–225, 229–232, 244; KU 5:179, 190–192, 194, 239, 244, 249, 253, 267.

19 Gorodeisky (2021) treats the varieties of reflection across Kant’s Critical philosophy (including the practical philosophy) in her forthcoming entry to The Cambridge Kant Lexicon.

20 This includes debate about the historical question of precisely when Kant arrived at his notion of reflecting judgment. Since the distinction between determining and reflecting judgment appears for the first time in KU, one might think that Kant initially conceived of the power of judgment only as determining, coming to possess a notion of it as reflecting later on. For example, Kaag claims that ‘In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant seems to have envisioned only determinate judgment’, and that Kant ‘comes to recognise’ reflecting judgment by the time he writes KU—'developing an alternative to the determinate judgments of the Critique of Pure Reason’ (2014, 39; emphasis his). Similarly, Teufel claims that in KU ‘Kant now discerns a new cognitive capacity within the power of judgement at large’ (2012, 302). Yet when Kant writes his famous 1787 letter to Reinhold describing his plans to write KU, he does not mention his ‘discovery’ of reflecting judgment. However, among the ‘systematic’ reasons that made him see such a critique was necessary is the recognition that the fundamental faculty of feeling pleasure and displeasure has its own a priori legislative principle, just like the faculties of cognition and desire—a principle provided by the power of judgment (Corr 10:514–515). On my view, what Kant discovered was not reflecting judgment as such, but rather the autonomy of reflecting judgment (a notion I discuss in more detail in §4). What appears in KrV as a subordinate mode of the power of judgment is elevated in KU as the power of judgment sans phrase. Additionally, the mainstream view that I consider in the next section provides compelling reasons to see an early version of reflecting judgment in KrV. Despite going on to reject this view, I concur on this point—as I explain in what follows.

21 Guyer does qualify his view by noting that when the given universal is a pure category (e.g., causality) requiring intermediate concepts (e.g., a specific empirical-causal law) for its application, reflective judgment ‘may be needed to find those concepts and thus complete the task assigned to determinant judgment’ (2005, 12). Still, for the most part, Guyer thinks that judgment is ‘either determinant or reflective but not both’ (2005, 12).

22 Similarly, Allison observes that the text suggests that these capacities share ‘a common concern of connecting universals to particulars, which they attempt to do in diametrically opposed ways’—though this turns out not to be his considered view, as the next section will reveal (2001, 17–18).

23 Longuenesse speaks of a ‘profound accord between the first and third Critique in respect of their conception of judgment’, despite the reflective aspect being ‘somewhat obscured’ due to the former’s ‘determinative focus’ (1998, 197). Likewise, Allison writes: ‘Notwithstanding the lack of an explicit formulation of this distinction in the first Critique  … the contrast that Kant draws in the Introductions to the third Critique [does not mark] a major change in his conception of judgment’ (2001, 17).

24 Longuenesse also sees reflection as essential aspect of our acquiring the pure categories. However, I will not discuss this aspect of her position here because it is both controversial and not directly related to my concerns.

25 To carry forward a point made earlier: Since Makkreel does not see logical reflection as an instance of reflecting judgment, he rejects the idea—which I happen to share with Longuenesse—that reflecting judgment is already present in all acts of determining judgment. It is reflection, he thinks, that precedes and contributes to determining judgment, whereas reflecting judgment only ever follows determining judgments. Nonetheless, we both agree that Longuenesse is wrong to see aesthetic judgment as ‘a deficient version’ of reflecting judgment (2006, 224).

26 I have focused here on theoretical/cognitive judgments, where the understanding is legislative and affords us cognition of nature, since this is the relevant faculty for Longuenesse. Yet one should expect that what I say here equally applies to practical/moral judgments, where it is the faculty of reason that tells us how to use our freedom. This is important for my discussion of the heteronomy of determining judgment in the next two sections, where what is salient is that another faculty gives the rule to the power of judgment.

27 The uniquely reflecting nature of the power of judgment has not gone entirely unnoticed. Most recently, Teufel (2012) has argued that the power of judgment which undergoes critique in 1790 is the reflecting power of judgment alone. However, despite our convergence on this view, we diverge in many other respects—though I cannot deal directly with these here. In addition to seeing reflecting judgment as a relatively late addition to Kant’s theory of judgment (see my footnote 20), Teufel also contends that it always acts ‘in the service of conceptual cognition’, which it has ‘the aim of enabling’ (323). This leads me to think that his view fares no better than Longuenesse’s, ultimately committing him likewise to a determinative ideal. Still, his paper is helpfully shifts us away from the mainstream view. Nuzzo does not provide an argument for this, though she does affirm that ‘the Urteilskraft that occupies the third Critique can only be the reflective faculty of judgment’, even going on to describe it as ‘an autonomous cognitive faculty’ (2005, 166). See also Macmillan (1912, 39–59).

28 Kant also discusses subsumption in the case of the inferences of reason—specifically, in the minor premise, where the power of judgment subsumes the condition of a possible judgment under a universal rule (i.e., the major premise) (KrV A330/B386; cf. A300/B357).

29 It is also worth noting that in the unpublished introduction to KU, as well as both logic and metaphysics lectures from the early 1790s, Kant continues to define the power of judgment in general as a faculty of ‘subsumption’ (FI 20:201; LL 28:703; LM 28:693).

30 Despite Kant’s employment of the concept of subsumption throughout KU, commentators generally refer to it only when discussing KrV and determining judgment. For example, the entry on ‘subsumption’ in A Kant Dictionary only cites KrV, leaving the false impression that it is only a relevant notion for judgment in the cognitive context (Caygill 2000, 381). Some commentators have even gone so far as to conflate determination and subsumption (Allison 2001, 5). While the former is an instance of the latter, they are not coexistensive for Kant. One notable exception is Bacin, whose recent entry on ‘subsumption’ in the Kant-Lexicon acknowledges that in KU—specifically, in the judgment of taste—a ‘non-logical’ [nicht-logische] subsumption takes place (2015, 2213–2214).

31 cf. Remark in section 38: subsuming not the imagination under the understanding, but our representation of an object under the ‘relation’ of the imagination and understanding (KU 5:290). See also a passage from the metaphysics lectures, where Kant describes the activity of the ‘merely reflecting’ power of judgment as follows: ‘We subsume merely under our faculty of concepts’ (LM 28:675–676).

32 In one unpublished note, Kant distinguishes between ‘inferences of the understanding’ and ‘inferences of the power of judgment’ (Refl 3200, 16:709). The former always proceed from the universal to the particular, and never from the particular to the universal, Kant says, ‘because they are supposed to provide determining judgments’; the latter, by contrast, go from the particular to the universal and are ‘thus kinds of reflecting judgment’ (Refl 3200, 16:709). See also Refl 3282 (16:757), the only other unpublished note where Kant explicitly discusses the distinction between determining and reflecting judgment.

33 Ginsborg has been criticised for assimilating the norms of aesthetic judgment to those governing cognition—in large part due to her preoccupation with showing the insights the former provides for the latter (Gorodeisky 2011, 421fn28). Similarly, Zuckert describes the principle of purposiveness ultimately as that which ‘governs, justifies, and makes possible our aspirations to empirical knowledge, from its most basic form—our ability to formulate any empirical concepts—to its most sophisticated form—a complete, systematic science of empirical laws’ (2007, 12; cf. 42–43).