Preface and Introduction: Judgement between Nature and Freedom

The critique of pure reason, that is, of our faculty of judging according to a priori principles, would be incomplete if the critique of the power of judgement, which as a faculty of cognition also makes claim to such principles, were not treated as a special part of it.

Between the realm of the concept of nature, as the sensible, and the realm of the concept of freedom, as the supersensible, there is fixed an immeasurable gulf, so that no transition from the first to the second is possible — just as if they were so many different worlds, the first of which can have no influence on the second. And yet the second is meant to have an influence on the first: the concept of freedom is meant to actualise in the world of sense the end proposed by its laws. Nature must therefore be capable of being thought in such a way that the lawfulness of its form at least harmonises with the possibility of the ends to be effected in it according to the laws of freedom.

The first Critique dealt with understanding and nature; the second with reason and freedom. The third looks for a bridge between them in the power of judgement, and in the feeling of pleasure and displeasure.

Judgement in general is the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, then the judgement which subsumes the particular under it is determining. But if only the particular is given, for which the universal is to be found, then the judgement is merely reflecting.

The reflecting judgement needs a principle which it cannot borrow from experience. This principle is the purposiveness of nature: that nature, in its endless variety of particular laws, is so ordered as if an understanding had arranged it for the sake of our faculty of cognition. When we find such an order — when nature fits our understanding — we feel pleasure.

This purposiveness can be represented in two ways. Subjectively, as the harmony of the form of an object with our cognitive faculties, felt as pleasure — this is aesthetic judgement, the judgement of taste. Objectively, as the fitness of an object to an end, as in living things — this is teleological judgement.