I Reflective Judgment and the Problem of Reason’s Unity

In Kant scholarship, the Critique of JudgmentFootnote ¹ is traditionally approached as a disunified work that contains two essentially unrelated parts: the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and the Critique of Teleological Judgment. According to this view, analyzing the book’s two parts as two separate projects is helpful for understanding better Kant’s major contributions to aesthetics and to the philosophy of biology, respectively.Footnote ² The literature that promotes the approach that stresses the unity of the work remains sparse. Among those who raise the question of the unitary structure of the work are some who see it as an artificially imposed theory which ultimately stunts its potential.Footnote ³ However, others consider the “systematic approach” promising primarily for answering the question of the possibility of empirical cognition. According to this view, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and the Critique of Teleological Judgment do not stand in a contingent relation to each other because aesthetic and teleological judgments share a common principle: namely, the principle of taste is in fact the logical principle of nature’s purposiveness.Footnote ⁴ For the proponents of this position, this assimilation is justified by Kant’s account of reflective judgment, the primary function of which is empirical conceptualization. This interpretation of reflective judgment has motivated a number of recent publications on the relation between aesthetics and empirical cognition of nature in Kant’s Critical philosophy.Footnote ⁵

Unlike these recent “systematic approaches,” that of the present monograph takes as its anchor point Kant’s claim that the Critique of Judgment “bring[s] [his] entire critical enterprise to an end” (ZEKU, 5: 170). Kant’s Critical system does not culminate in empirical cognition of the natural world but, rather, in reason’s “highest” or “final end” (KrV, A840/B868), or what Kant calls “the entire vocation of human beings” (KrV, A840/B868), namely, morality.Footnote ⁶ This entails the realization of our moral ends in the world. According to Kant, we are beings of both freedom and nature. Thus, even though we are self-determining, that is, capable of determining our will in accordance with the moral law, we are also creatures of nature and sensibility. As creatures of both freedom and sensibility, we know what ought to be done but it is not always the case that we formulate proper moral intentions. Moreover, our moral ends are to be realized in this world, which is governed by mechanical laws and principles unlike our own rational principles. Hence, the natural world is not necessarily cooperative with our rational ends. Although, there is an “incalculable gulf” (unübersehbare Kluft) (ZEKU, 5: 176) between the domains of nature and freedom, “the latter should have an influence on the former, namely the concept of freedom should make the end that is imposed by its laws real in the sensible world” (ZEKU, 5: 176).

Some discussions have already been advanced on the issue of the relation between the third Critique and morality, which interpret the problem of the “gulf” that needs to be bridged as “not that between the noumenal and phenomenal causality but between feeling and freedom – that is, between the arbitrary realm of sensation and the law-governed autonomy of reason.”Footnote ⁷ According to this view, given the changes in Kant’s moral psychology and epistemology, the central focus of his later writings (starting with the third Critique but extending itself to his Religion and the Metaphysics of Morals) becomes the striving for the harmony between the human being as the natural being and the human being as the rational being, between inclinations and the moral demands of rationality. On this interpretation of the “gulf,” the connection between nature and freedom, between theoretical and practical reason respectively, is grounded primarily on human psychology.Footnote ⁸ According to this psychological argument for the unity of the disparate realms of theory and practice, the first moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful, where Kant discusses the quality of the feeling in a pure judgment of taste, matters the most. Unlike the pleasure for both the agreeable and the good, aesthetic pleasure is “disinterested and free” (KU, §5, 5: 210) because it is not “imposed upon us” (KU, §5, 5: 210) by any factors external to aesthetic contemplation itself. Proponents of the psychological argument draw an analogy between the “disinterested and free” (KU, §5, 5: 210) pleasure in the beautiful and the state of an individual with a virtuous disposition. The state of the latter is analogous to the former because it is a state not necessitated by any factors external to the will itself. I call this approach “psychological” because it relies on the introspection of one’s inner states, whether those that pertain to the quality of the pleasure in the beautiful or those that pertain to a virtuous individual and her relation to her inclinations.

While one can find textual support in Kant’s third Critique for such an interpretation, I contend that it is not central to it.Footnote ⁹ The approach to the “gulf” between theoretical and practical reason summarized above focuses on what Kant calls in the third Critique the “ultimate end of nature” (der letzte Zweck der Natur) (KU, §83, 5: 429). By the latter Kant understands the development of culture, more specifically, the “culture of discipline” (Zucht) (KU, §83, 5: 432), meaning the development of arts and sciences that leads to a cultivation of human sensibility that is amenable to the demands of morality. But nature does not have an ultimate end and, thus, it does not constitute a teleological system until human beings give it one by setting the “final end” (Endzweck) (KU, §83, 5: 431), the unconditioned end of reason, which is the highest good.

I shall argue that Kant’s conception of the highest good and moral GlaubeFootnote ¹⁰ is key to understanding Kant’s solution to the problem of the causal efficacy of reason in the third Critique, the problem of the infinite separation between moral agency and the world in which its actions take place. Reason in its practical domain, just as in its theoretical domain, requires the absolute totality of conditions for a given conditioned. Thus, we do not merely strive toward a realization of different, unrelated conceptions of the good. Instead, we strive for a realization of the highest good as the final or unconditioned end of reason, a world where happiness would be distributed in proportion with one’s worthiness of being happy. Because of the disparate realms of freedom and nature, the connection between happiness and morality is contingent: there is no guarantee that even if one acts morally one will be justly rewarded for one’s moral deeds and there is no guarantee even that one will be able to persist in one’s moral disposition due to one’s constant temptations to choose nonmoral maxims. But because reason commands us to strive toward the realization of the highest good in the world and it is a basic supposition of rational willing to will those ends for which we have reason to believe that their realization is possible, we are justified in assuming both the existence of the supreme being that would assist us in our realization of the highest good and the immortal soul that would make possible the endless progress toward this end.

Thus, although from the theoretical perspective it is impossible for reason to cognize that which is necessary for it to think and even posit, namely the unconditioned,Footnote ¹¹ this becomes possible from the “practical perspective” (KpV, 5: 105), the truth of the moral law and the necessary ends of practical reason. This is only possible because theoretical reason can recognize the ends of practical reason as its own. That is to say that although the legislation of human reason has two objects with two separate systems, namely, nature and freedom, these two parts are ultimately united in one single system grounded in one final end, morality. This is what I call the problem of reason’s unity.Footnote ¹²

Moreover, the unity of reason, which makes possible the determination of the unconditioned from a “practical perspective” (KpV, 5: 105), reveals reason’s genuinely cognitive, constitutive, and not merely regulative function regarding the unconditioned, as is commonly argued in the literature. Therefore, this book shall approach the question of whether we are free not as a mere belief that regulatively guides our actions, “as if” we were free, nor shall this book approach the representations of moral Glaube as necessary illusions aimed at directing our will in a desired way, or as responses to our psychological need to feel that our actions have bearing on moral outcomes. Instead, this book will point to Kant’s argument for the “objective reality” (KpV, 5: 3) of the Idea of absolute freedom, that is, that freedom “is real” (KpV, 5: 4) and is “a fact” (KpV, 5: 6), as well as the objective reality of the Ideas of God and the soul, albeit, “from a practical point of view” (FM, 20: 305). This book shall emphasize that although reason’s determination is the one of a real and given object, this determination, given the limitation of our discursive understanding, is not theoretical and, hence, cannot result in theoretical cognition of this object. Instead, it constitutes “a pure cognition practically” (KpV, 5: 134). The claims of reason’s “practical cognition” have universality and necessity like the claims of its theoretical cognition.

The problematic of the highest good and the postulates (briefly described above) serve only as a background to the central issue of the third Critique. The aim of this book is to show how the third Critique advances Kant’s argument for the postulates and moral Glaube that he develops in the first and the second Critique. While in the first and the second Critique the possibility of our progress toward the highest good and the objective reality of the Ideas of the postulates are what we intellectually “conceive” (KU, §88, 5: 455) on moral grounds, in the third Critique, they are what we must be able to perceive by means of reflective judgment (both in its aesthetic and teleological applications). For Kant, “perception” is a sensation of which we are conscious and in The Postulates of Empirical Thinking in General, he relates perception to the actuality (Wirklichkeit) of things.Footnote ¹³ When I claim that for Kant it is not sufficient that we intellectually conceive but that we must be able to perceive our progress toward the final end of reason, I am clearly using Kant’s conception of perception in a modified sense. My intention is not to claim that either the final end of reason or the objects of the Ideas of the postulates are entities given as appearances for us to perceive. The point of contrast between “intellectually conceiving” vs. “perceiving” is to emphasize that Kant’s aim in the third Critique is to argue that these Ideas of reason receive a reality even though this reality is merely the one “sufficient for the reflecting power of judgment” (KU, General Remark on the Teleology, 5: 479). In other words, although on moral grounds we can intellectually cognize that we are free and are justified in conceiving of the world as cooperative with our moral ends, in the third Critique, by means of reflective judgment, we represent nature as if rational and as if furthering the highest good. Because by the time of the third Critique Kant emphasizes even more strongly human finitude – that is, the fact that we are not merely intellectual beings but also sentient and receptive beings to whom things are given – for the Kant of the third Critique it is not sufficient that the object of the Idea of the highest good (together with its necessary conditions) is something that is normatively necessary for us to conceive intellectually. In the third Critique, the object of the Idea of the highest good as the final end of nature is something that must be given to us in sensibility.

I shall argue in this book that reflective judgment (both aesthetic and teleological) creates a schema-analogueFootnote ¹⁴ of the Ideas of the postulates and the highest good, an “image” that indirectly or analogically exhibits these Ideas as if obtaining in nature. In the first Critique, Kant defines a “schema” as a rule of synthesis of the transcendental imagination in accordance with a concept of the understanding so that in this synthesis the imagination renders the rule of this concept sensible in a form of time determination.Footnote ¹⁵ In the third Critique, Kant refers to “schemata” as “direct […] presentations of the concept” in sensible intuition (KU, §59, 5: 352). Because reason’s Ideas of the highest good and the postulates cannot have their objects given in empirical reality, I shall contend that objects of beauty, the feeling of pleasure in the free harmony of the faculties, our representations of organisms as “natural ends” and of nature as a system of ends, and even Kant’s teleological conception of human history, all serve as their indirect exhibitions, that is, their schema-analogues.Footnote ¹⁶ These schema-analogues are the products of reason’s poiesis, its creation or production, which is a hallmark of its finitude.

To call representations and the feeling made possible by reflective judgment (in its teleological and aesthetic reflection,respectively) an image or a schema of the Ideas of reason does not amount to the claim that they are illusions, or mere “fictions”Footnote ¹⁷ of reason. Reflective judgments (whether aesthetic or teleological) are our responses to concrete features in empirical reality and they entail, as universally valid judgments, a certain form of cognition:

For Kant, the a priori principle of nature’s purposivenessFootnote ¹⁹ is a means of theoretical cognition of nature even though this cognition could never amount to cognition of the objects of nature (i.e., it is not “dogmatic” or pertaining to “dogmata,” a body of synthetic a priori propositions derived from concepts). Although Kant (in his efforts to distinguish his aesthetic theory from those of the rationalists) refers to aesthetic judgments as aconceptual, they presuppose, like other judgments, a subsumption of a particular under a universal. Thus, insofar as aesthetic judgments are universally valid and entail some agreement with the object (i.e., “this x is beautiful” is either true or false of the object), by means of them we determine the object in some sense and hence aesthetic judgments are in service of a narrow notion of cognition.Footnote ²⁰ The same could be said of teleological judgments. There are some objects in the empirical world that we, given the kind of beings we are, make intelligible to ourselves by representing them as a cause and effect of themselves, that is, as “natural ends.” This also leaves open the possibility that another type of intellect could cognize those objects differently, namely, purely mechanically. But teleological judgments are universally valid and objective because they determine the object in some way, that is, by representing organisms as “natural ends” we are able to investigate properties and functions of organic formations. Finally, reflective judgment’s representation of nature as a systematic whole does not determine nature as it is in itself. And yet, the representation of nature as a systematic whole is in some sense objective insofar as it is a condition of finding a unity among different particular empirical laws, a condition for a discovery of empirical laws, and a condition for a generation of empirical concepts, all of which is necessary for a scientific progress.

My aim in this book, however, is to show that reflective judgments do not merely satisfy reason’s minimal ends, that is, they do not merely make possible the determination of some forms and objects in nature, but they also serve reason’s final ends. On a meta-aesthetic and a meta-teleological level, they generate schema-analogues of the Idea of the highest good together with the conditions of its realization and thereby they facilitate “practical cognition” (KU, General Remark on the Teleology, 5: 475). Put differently, our assent in moral Glaube is rationally necessitated by the truth of the moral law and it presupposes a genuine commitment to truth. With reflective judgment, the objects practical reason demands that we conceive as real are represented as if obtaining in nature. Because representations of reflective judgments are normatively necessary in the epistemic sense and also serve as a schema for the Ideas whose objects are normatively necessary in the practical sense, I refer to the role Kant assigns to reflective judgment in his moral teleology as “moral image realism” (MIR).Footnote ²¹

Last but not least, Kant’s conception of reason’s unity is the one in which the theoretical and practical representations of nature “must cohere” (müssen zusammenhängen) (KU, §78, 5: 412). Kant never brings into question the infinite separation between nature and freedom but instead shows the possibility of the structural interdependence of theoretical and practical arguments for the unconditioned so that the theoretical exploration of reason cannot proceed without having as its horizon reason’s own practical interest, that is, its basic orientation toward the good. Thus, even though my approach to the third Critique may be helpful for explaining why this work strongly influenced Kant’s immediate successors,Footnote ²² Kant’s project of reason’s unity in the third Critique should be distinguished sharply from the ambitious project of reason’s unity sought by them, that is, the unity based on theoretical knowledge of some third unifying principle. It is, therefore, useful to reiterate that for Kant reflective judgment’s principle of nature’s purposiveness remains always subjectively necessary given our limited cognitive capacities and it is this principle that grounds a merely contingent agreement of nature with the ends of reason. This contingent agreement of nature and freedom contributes to the view of the world in which the noumenal realm, the realm of freedom, is seen as harmoniously coexisting and cohering with the phenomenal realm, the realm of nature which can further only strengthen moral Glaube and our hope in progress toward the highest good.Footnote ²³

II Overview

Each chapter that follows can be read separately from the rest of the volume because each aims to contribute to the current debate on that chapter’s particular issue. However, the chapters at the same time clearly advance the narrative organized around three main parts of the book.

I The Highest Good and the Postulates

Because I take the problem of the highest good to be central to the systematic concerns of the third Critique, this book must address what Kant has accomplished with respect to this issue prior to his third Critique in order to make clear how the third Critique advances the problematic of the highest good and reason’s unity.

Kant famously refers to freedom as “the keystone of the whole structure of a system of pure reason” (KpV, 5: 3–4) to which “all other concepts (those of God and immortality) […] attach themselves […] and by means of it get stability and objective reality” (KpV, 5: 4). The book thus opens with my discussion in Chapter 1 of Kant’s postulate of the objective reality of freedom via his controversial notion of the moral law as a “fact of reason.” I argue that Kant does not offer a theoretical proof (Beweis) of the normative primacy of the moral law and, hence, sees no place for a deduction of its validity. Instead, his efforts are aimed at “showing” (dartun) (KpV, 5: 3, 42), that is, pointing to a concrete example in our experience, that the moral law is binding for us. However, this “showing” cannot stand on its own insofar as it presupposes an interpretive theoretical framework which consists in drawing an analogy between theoretical and practical reason and which relies on the truth of transcendental idealism. I refer to this special strategy of Kant’s justification as his justification from a “practical point of view” (in praktischer Absicht) (FM, 20: 305). From this follows our cognition of the objective reality of freedom which should not be understood as a theoretical inference from one piece of theoretical knowledge to another of some existent empirical thing. Instead, the objective reality of freedom should be understood as a form of practical cognition.

Once the objective reality of freedom is established in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 clarifies the content of Kant’s Idea of the highest good in order to show how Kant’s attempt to conform our desire for happiness to the demands of pure practical reason leads to moral Glaube and the other two postulates, namely, of God’s existence and the soul’s immortality. I will show that Kant’s conception of moral Glaube can be approached from both an anti-realist and a realist perspective. According to the former, moral Glaube is speculative reason’s “presupposition” (Voraussetzung) (KpV, 5: 122) of the objects of these Ideas, in order to either avoid its own inner contradictions or to help one maintain one’s moral disposition. It is anti-realist in spirit because the assumptions that reason makes may have nothing to do with how things are in reality. However, I contend that if we pay closer attention to Kant’s neglected notion of “practical cognition” additional evidence becomes available for supporting an understanding of Kant as a realist with respect to moral Glaube and for explaining why the anti-realist interpretations do not adequately capture Kant’s view.

Chapter 3 turns to Kant’s conception of the highest good in the third Critique which takes the form of an ethical community that is to be realized in the world. Although Kant’s conception of the highest good in the third Critique becomes immanent, I show that it remains transcendent in part. But the novelty in Kant’s conception of the highest good in the third Critique is not limited to its form, namely, that of an ethical community in the world. In the third Critique, Kant refers to the conception of the highest good that he presented in the second Critique as having a “subjectively practical reality” (KU, §88, 5: 453), a reality the highest good has insofar as it is a necessary object for us. However, the highest good must also have an “objective theoretical reality” (KU, §88, 5: 453), namely, the final end must be the end of nature, the world. I argue in this chapter that it is the role of reflective judgment to represent nature as analogous to reason, that is, as aiming toward the realization of the final end of reason, the highest good in the world, so that it is no longer sufficient that we intellectually “conceive” (KU, §88, 5: 455) its possibility but that we are able to perceive it as furthered by nature. In this way, the highest good and the Idea of God as the object of moral Glaube receive a special kind of realism, which I will refer to as “moral image realism” (MIR).

II Aesthetic Judgment and the “Moral Image”

While the aim of Part I is to situate the project of the third Critique more generally, that is, within the context of the problem of the unity of reason and the Idea of the highest good, in Part II I show how for Kant aesthetic experience more specifically serves the function of representing the highest good as the final end of nature.

In the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Kant refers to the supersensible as that in which “the theoretical faculty is combined with the practical, in a mutual and unknown way, to form a unity” and which is “related to something in the subject and outside of it” (KU, §59, 5: 353). Thus, with respect to the problem of reason’s unity, Kant distinguishes between, what I will call, the “supersensible within” and the “supersensible without.”Footnote ²⁴ The aim of Chapter 4 is to show how aesthetic judgment for Kant tells us something about the world, namely, how objects of beauty (whether exceptional works of art or the beauty of nature) in the world indirectly exhibit (darstellen) the supersensible “without,” that is, the Idea of the highest good. This I take is the meaning of Kant’s claim in §59 of the Critique of Judgment that beauty is a “symbol of morality” (KU, §59, 5: 351). The fact that the experience of beauty serves as a sign, a nod from nature, that the world may be hospitable for the realization of the highest good can have a merely psychological significance: with time and continuous experience of hindrances to the ends of practical reason the binding force of the moral law will lose its strength, whereas the experience of beauty can help maintain the existent moral disposition. But the aim of this chapter is to show that the significance of this sign can move beyond its merely psychological effects: it helps reinforce the view that the highest good must have an “objective theoretical reality” (KU, §88, 5: 453) and not merely a “subjectively practical reality” (KU, §88, 5: 453). Put differently, the experience of beauty reinforces the view that the final end must be the end of nature, of the world. The experience of beauty aids in forming, what I call in Chapter 3, “moral image realism” (MIR), which adds the cognitive dimension to aesthetic experience that is best explained in proximity to Kant’s notion of practical cognition.

While Chapter 4 focuses on the role of the aesthetic object for providing an indirect exhibition of the supersensible, Chapter 5 focuses on the experiencing subject, that is, on the feeling of pure aesthetic pleasure and its logical ground, the free harmony of the faculties, in their role of relating the sensible to the supersensible (EEKU, 20: 244). Contrary to the existing Kant literature, I show that in order to understand the logic of the free harmony of the faculties we must pay closer attention to Kant’s formulation of reflection in aesthetic judgment as “an action of the power of imagination” (V-Met/Dohna, 28: 675–76) and not as “the logical actus of the understanding” (V-Lo/Jäsche, 9: 94). I shall argue that the imagination, following its own law, provides, as it were, a schema of a universal that goes over and above the formal conditions of the possibility of empirical cognition while still being consistent with the latter. The free harmony of the faculties in which neither faculty is determining nor determined by the other, that is, in which both faculties stand in reciprocal causal relation, gives us license for an indirect or analogical exhibition of the “supersensible substrate” (KU, §59, 5: 353) of freedom, or what I call is the supersensible “within,” that is, the soul. Pure aesthetic pleasure, therefore, helps us close the gap between our phenomenal and our supersensible nature insofar as it intimates a unifying supersensible ground of our phenomenal nature, of our different inclinations and their anticipated satisfactions.

Chapter 6 explores the possibility of a pure aesthetic judgment of ugliness in Kant’s aesthetics. This issue is important for Kant’s moral teleology because if for Kant, the beauty of both nature and art can tell us something about the world, namely, that it may be hospitable for the realization of our highest ends, that is, morality, then the occurrences of ugliness in nature and art suggest the contrary. I argue that Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment in the third Critique, a conception according to which aesthetic judgment has its own a priori principle, left open the possibility for a pure aesthetic judgment of ugliness. This judgment however could not arise in response to a quality in the object of nature, but instead could only be limited to works of art. More specifically, the origin of ugliness as a pure aesthetic category for Kant is epistemic, that is, in the failure of the artist’s power of judgment, a failure of the artist to find the appropriate form or concept for the manifold content of her imagination. In the third Critique, Kant calls these works of art “original nonsense” (KU, §46, 5: 308). Once the possibility of pure judgments of ugliness is limited to works of art and the artist’s failure of judgment, then they cannot represent a threat to Kant’s more general project of moral teleology in the third Critique.

III Teleological Judgment and the “Moral Image”

While in Part II I demonstrate how aesthetic judgment connects freedom and nature at the level of our sensibility, by means of the “feeling of life [Lebensgefühl]” (KU, §1, 5: 204), in Part III, I show how teleological judgment for Kant connects freedom and nature at the level of our cognition of nature and life (natural organisms as “natural ends”).

Although Kant’s view according to which our theoretical representation of nature “coheres” with our representation of nature from the perspective of our practical needs culminates with the third Critique and his notion of reflective judgment’s principle of nature’s purposiveness, Chapter 7 shows that the origins of this view can already be discerned in Kant’s discussion of nature’s systematicity in the first Critique, namely, in his discussion of the rationalist notion of the Transcendental Ideal and his account of nature as a unified system of laws in the Appendix to the Dialectic. For some Kant commentators the Analytic of the first Critique with its Appendix is sufficient to account for the unity of nature and empirical knowledge. For these authors, reason’s need for the unconditioned has been viewed exclusively as a reflection of its practical need. For other Kant commentators, the unconditioned has a transcendental status (is necessary, and not optional, for the possibility of experiencing nature as a unified system) but the function of this concept is merely normative and does not entail a real object. In response to the former view, I show in this chapter that that the notion of the metaphysical ground of the unity of nature is in fact an indispensable and a necessary notion for reason in both its theoretical and practical functions, but this need of reason to presuppose such a notion can only find its satisfaction in the latter. In response to the latter view, I contend that if one is to do justice to reason’s unity in Kant, then when occupying a theoretical “standpoint” one should not be severing oneself from the practical “standpoint” and vice versa. Instead, one must acknowledge that reason’s practical ends are presupposed in every theoretical investigation of nature.

In Chapter 8, I demonstrate that with reflective judgment’s Idea of an organism as a “natural end” the realm of the theoretical (nature) and the realm of the practical (freedom) are represented as harmoniously cohering with each other thereby giving us a special reassurance of reason’s causal efficacy in nature. Reflective judgment accomplishes this in two distinct ways that should be distinguished from each other. First, in order to make organic formations intelligible, we must represent the rule of their organization as reciprocal causality, a rule according to which organisms are “the cause and effect of their form” (KU, §65, 5: 373). I contend that this rule of reciprocal causality serves as a schema-analogue of reason’s Idea of absolute freedom. Second, I show that the antinomial conflict of teleological judgment is a conflict between two perspectives on nature: theoretical (scientific) in the thesis and practical in the antithesis. Therefore, the solution to the antinomy in the Idea of an intuitive understanding which unites that which for us remains forever separate, namely mechanism and teleology, does not merely offer a justification for the explanatory compatibility of mechanical and teleological explanation in our representation of a single organic formation but also leads to a view of the world according to which the theoretical and the practical representations of nature “must cohere” (müssen zusammenhängen) (KU, §78, 5: 412).

Chapter 9 approaches Kant’s short writings on history from the perspective of what I take to be the main problematic of the third Critique, namely, the problem of reason’s unity. In this chapter I demonstrate that, as with his discussion of our representation of organisms as “natural ends” in the third Critique, in his writings on our philosophical representations of human history Kant offers both epistemic and moral justification for the use of teleological principles. Following his epistemic justification, in order to make human history intelligible to ourselves we must represent the individual events in human history under the Idea of “nature’s aim.” By the latter Kant understands the formation of civil society to be based on the principle of right within which the “ultimate end of nature” (der letzte Zweck der Natur), the formation of culture and the cultivation of human sensibility that is amenable to the demands of morality, would be possible. Kant’s moral justification for the use of teleological principles in our representation of human history is comprised of two parts: (1) a moral-psychological argument for strengthening moral Glaube and (2) the argument that emphasizes the objective reality of reflective judgment’s representations (albeit from a “practical point of view”). According to the former argument, our existent moral disposition is reinforced because by representing human history as progressing we see the world as a place where our moral efforts can have an effect and where our vocation, the realization of the highest good, is possible. According to the latter argument, reflective judgment’s representation of human historical progress serves as a schema-analogue of the Idea of God’s providence, the Idea that is not merely optional or useful given some pragmatic ends but that which is absolutely necessary from the “practical point of view” given our duty to further the highest good in nature. I have referred to such imaginative representations of reflective judgment that are normatively necessary in the epistemic sense and which serve as schema-analogues of the Ideas that are normatively necessary in the practical sense as “moral image realism” (MIR).