The most essential difference between the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and the Critique of Teleological Judgment is the kind of purposiveness they each treat. Both take up the faculty of judgment and its constitutive principle of purposiveness; however, the purpose that constitutes the purposiveness of each half of the text is different. The purposiveness of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment is a subjective purposiveness, which takes the human subject as its purpose; the purposiveness of the Critique of Teleological Judgment is an objective purposiveness, which focuses on the purpose of objects either in themselves, or with respect to other objects. In the former, what we find out in the territory is judged insofar as it is related to us intimately, to our faculties and also our freedom. In the latter, what we find out in the territory remains exterior to us, and we relate to it in its exteriority, that is, scientifically; it remains objective for us. In teleology, we discover the possibilities we have for conceiving of nature in accord with ends, in individual objects as well as at a systematic level.

Chapter 5 treats Kant’s notions of genius and aesthetic ideas. It argues that his discussion of genius forms a kind of deduction for the possibility of producing and then judging objects that exceed our own capacities. In this, it focuses on Kant’s descriptions of spirit as what nature gives both to the genius and thereby also to the work of beautiful art, thus allowing it to enliven our minds. This playful enlivening through spirit is what makes it possible for the human mind to present, in art, what otherwise exceeds it, namely aesthetic ideas. Here, we find that human beings belong to a nature that is much more expansive than the one ruled by the understanding in the first Critique; nature here is the source of spirit and liveliness. The chapter concludes by highlighting Kant’s repeated observations that nature is expressing itself through genius, and links this to the communicability that underlies the judgment of taste more generally.

The Introduction to Kant on Freedom, Nature, and Judgment: The Territory of the Third Critique argues that the question that orients and unifies the Critique of Judgment is: For what may I hope? This question is fundamentally about the unity of the system of freedom and nature. What the Critique of Judgment develops is a third, independent, and mediating sphere of human experience that at once completes and expands the critical system. It accomplishes this through judgments of reflection that both pattern themselves after as well as refer us to life, understood as a causal unity of freedom and nature. The Introduction lays out the basic argument of the text, as well as situates the manuscript within the larger history of the reception of the third Critique in German Romanticism and Idealism, and later the neo-Kantians.

This chapter argues that the interpretative master key of the third Critique key can be located in the related concepts of hope and territory. It develops reason’s demand for the unconditioned along with the requirement for its self-consistency as the driving force behind the need for hope. What we hope for is that our free, rational activity will be efficacious in the natural order, and contribute to bringing about a rational world order as demanded by reason. The chapter then turns to consider what hope itself is, as simultaneously theoretical and practical. It moves next to how hope is answered in Kant’s philosophy by way of judgments that we make “out in the territory.” The territory, I argue, completes Kant’s system insofar as it both underlies as well as serves as a transitional sphere between freedom and nature. Lastly, I consider how the system that Kant envisions here, along with our encounters out in the territory, may work to recast Kant’s Copernican turn and give human beings a sense of belonging to a larger, more cosmic nature than previously articulated in Kant’s writings.

Chapter 7 argues that Kant introduces a new conception of the relation of the systems of freedom and nature as reciprocal. Here, under the auspices of what he calls an “ethicotheology,” he describes these two systems as sharing an identical final end, and therefore also being conjoined by that very end. Such a description of this relation is only possible if we view the relation of the two systems from out in the territory. This reflective standpoint further judges freedom as a fact in nature, and opens up the possibility of us being convinced of the existence of God as the author of a nature that now, ineluctably, appears to us as meaningful. In this, nature is something we have a sense of as belonging to us.

This chapter examines the significance of the two principal features of the faculty of judgment: its characteristic activity of reflection and its constitutive principle of purposiveness. It directly engages the metaphysical resonances of Kant’s text insofar as it seeks a supersensible substratum to nature. Through an analysis of objective purposiveness, it argues that what appears to us out in the territory appears to us in its possibility. In this, what appears to us is the very ground of appearance itself, which is seen to be a kind of fundamental ordering to all appearance. It further argues that the pleasure of subjective purposiveness yields a more expansive, cosmic sense of human beings’ belonging to or being fit for the world. The things that are out there in the world are, in their structure, not only ordered, but ordered for us. Lastly, this chapter suggests that our relation to this ordering is interpretative, thus opening a future for metaphysical inquiry that is rooted not in speculation, but in reflection.

For what may we hope? The thesis of this book is that the third Critique is oriented by the problem of hope. Hope is born of the interests of reason, but these interests can only be met in a sphere of human experience not subject to or born of the demands of reason. Whatever speaks to the interests of hope must do so disinterestedly. What we hope for is that our wills can be efficacious, that the good we do is not in vain but can have real effects in the world. This, though, depends on something that is not subject to our wills, namely how things actually are. Will the world conform? Will nature yield? The stakes of our interest in this are high: Both reason’s, self-consistency and the risk of existential despair are on the line. Kant’s concern for these seems to grow as his career progresses; the third Critique is his most systematic treatment of the maintenance of hope in what can sometimes seem a banal or cruel world.

Chapter 4 argues that the sensus communis forms the keystone of Kant’s critical system. Kant develops his idea of the sensus communis as a response to the quid juris of the judgment of taste – by what right may I claim that this is beautiful? As a judgment made out in the territory, without a law, a judgment of taste is always in question. Kant’s development of the sensus communis is shown to rely on two senses of its historical usage, epistemological and social. Both of these uses of the term are developed in response to skepticism. Kant’s own use of the term, which refers to a sense that we can communicate with all other human beings, discloses to us that all human beings share a way of having the world, and, too, that we share a world in common. It thus grounds the universal character of both cognition and moral life.

Chapter 6 turns to the Critique of Teleological Judgment. It traces Kant’s remarkable line of argumentation from our encounters with living beings (organisms) to culture. Our encounters with living beings justify the use of teleology as a principle to organize our mechanistic inquiries into science. It further allows for us to judge nature, as a whole, as a system. This system, as we come to see, is oriented not only by human life, but specifically by the work nature can do to discharge human beings from its order. This chapter argues that if beautiful things remind us we belong in the world, there is a dialectical reversal in teleology suggesting that we do not belong to the natural order. This comes out in Kant’s discussions of culture and of the sublime, which are ways nature appears to discharge us from its influence. Nature thus supports our moral vocation by releasing us from its influence over us.

Chapter 3 examines Kant’s account of the Ideal of Beauty. Contrary to most interpretations, it takes Kant at his word that the Ideal forms the measure of the judgment of taste in providing the original pattern that all other beautiful things follow. It further argues that the content of what Kant describes in the Ideal is nothing other than life. Life, for Kant, is the unthinkable causal union between force and matter, freedom and nature. All judgments of taste, then, refer us to such a unity, and thus to an outside of the critical system. Nevertheless, in suggesting the possibility of such a union, the beautiful is able to serve as a transition and likely ground of the two domains of freedom and nature.