1.1 The Power of Judgment

The idea that judgment is a power of the mind that constitutes an important subject of philosophical study in its own right has not, on the whole, remained live since Kant’s work. But it has found one great champion in Hannah Arendt. Arendt planned Judging – which, save for its title page, she did not live to write – to be the third and final part of her work The Life of the Mind. In the Postscriptum to its first volume, Thinking, Arendt writes: “I shall conclude the second volume with an analysis of the faculty of judgment, and here the chief difficulty will be the curious scarcity of sources providing authoritative testimony. Not till Kant’s Critique of Judgment did this faculty become a major topic of a major thinker.”Footnote ¹¹ Arendt thus credits Kant with bringing the topic to life in the first place. But the scarcity of texts that Arendt mentions has persisted. If Kant is interested in judgment as a particular human capacity – or with judgment as a particular kind of act, not merely product of but expressive of that capacity – then this has not yet been inherited from him.Footnote ¹²

What stands in the way? Kant’s stake in judgment as such might be suspected of issuing from an antiquated and unappealing “faculty psychology.” Or judgment as such might simply not seem to be a fit candidate for philosophical scrutiny.Footnote ¹³ Thus while one might concede the point in studying moral judgments (which would mean studying morality), or empirical judgments (so doing epistemology), or political or religious or aesthetic judgments (so working in the areas to which these respectively belong), one might not see any sense in trying to study judgment, or the “power” of judgment, simpliciter. There is nothing there to study – so it might well seem. Even if one puts aside the notion of judgment generally, as a power or dimension of the mind (a Kraft), in considering, say, moral judgment or empirical cognitive judgment it is likely to be an Urteil, a product or instance of judgment – judgment as an entity (whether epistemological, or mental, or something else) – and not a capacity for moral or empirical judgment that will seem to merit or to repay philosophical investigation. Or rather, the latter has been occluded by the former: as though the way for philosophy to study judgment as power of the mind is simply by studying judgments and their logical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic conditions as contents and as utterances. As though the capacity for judgment itself could be, at best, a subject for psychology, not philosophy.

Yet the notion of judgment as a capacity or power plays a prominent and significant role in our ordinary lives. We credit some people with having good judgment, and are wary of the poor judgment of others. Sometimes the evaluative modifier is dropped: we say of someone that she has judgment or that she lacks it. Attributing (good) judgment to someone is not the same as taking her to be a good reasoner, or to have a solid grasp of some body of knowledge or some set of facts. We don’t say admiringly of someone that she has reason, or even that she has good reason, or good understanding. We might say that she is reasonable, or that she has an understanding (of people, of sailboats, of jazz); but then, I think, what we mean is (at least in part) what we mean in saying that she has judgment. We mean, that is, that she is adept at judging something to be a reason, and adept at judging its weight and significance. (For it’s one thing to be a sharp reasoner and another to know, or to be good at knowing, what counts as a reason at all in a given case.) We mean that she’s a good judge of people, sailboats, or jazz. (For it’s one thing to have knowledge of some set of facts, but another to know what fact – what piece of knowledge – is relevant at all in a given case. Knowing what counts as a reason or a relevant fact requires judgment.) To be a good reasoner, furthermore, is not necessarily to be good at knowing what merits reasoning, or when reasoning is, or is not, what is wanted; and, similarly, one might have a mastery of a field of knowledge without being adept at seeing when knowledge is, or is not, to the point. Perceiving when reasoning, or knowledge, is to the point, and when it is not, belongs to the domain of judgment.

To possess (good) judgment is to be discerning. That is, to praise someone’s judgment is not just to appreciate her ability to render true judgments; it is to appreciate her ability to render acute, perceptive, keen, or insightful judgments. And to have judgment – that is, good judgment – is to know when and how to render judgment in the first place: it is to know what is worth, or what bears, judgment. In this light, judgment emerges as a fundamental mode of the mind, a condition of its discerning employment in any (or almost any) form. But there is another sense in which judgment is fundamental: for it is a mode that we identify with the spirit of a (particular) mind. This is crystallized in the fact that a person’s judgment (but not, say, her reason or her understanding) is open to our trust, confidence, or faith. I may find that I trust someone’s judgment, or I may put my trust in it; my trust in it may be shattered, or become a problem.Footnote ¹⁴

And what is there for philosophy to say about any of this? I’d like, in the first place, simply to propose that Kant thought philosophy had something to say about it. The Critique of Judgment is directed to the power of judgment in the rich sense that we recognize it to have in our ordinary lives. Moreover, Kant’s interest in the power of judgment in its rich and ordinary sense is not a novelty of that work. The third Critique may reflect some changes in Kant’s thinking about the power of judgment, but in treating judgment as fundamental to human thinking it is continuous with the critical project in general, and with the first Critique in particular. As the editors of the Cambridge edition put it, the Critique of Pure Reason is characterized by an “insistence on the primacy of judgment in human thought.”Footnote ¹⁵ This sort of claim is likely to be cashed out in terms of a primacy of judgments (Urteile), in line with the tendency I’ve mentioned, and – to be fair – as the initial unfolding of Kant’s text itself encourages.Footnote ¹⁶ But the first Critique also acknowledges the “primary” role of the power of judgment, in its rich and ordinary sense.

Focusing on the ordinary notion of judgment as a power of the mind opens up a fresh perspective on the relation of the third Critique to the first. I am sympathetic to a view that has increasingly been gaining traction, namely that Kant’s aesthetic account, and his account of the judgment of taste in particular, makes an important contribution to his account of cognition (his epistemology).Footnote ¹⁷ On my reading, however, this contribution does not consist of developing the “deep structure” of cognition, for example by further articulating the schematism or the synthesis that it involves.Footnote ¹⁸ Rather, the third Critique develops Kant’s account of cognition by broadening it beyond the confines proper to the Critique of Pure Reason: by considering judgment as a power exercised by individuals living in a shared world, and, in particular, by taking seriously the fact that our cognitive relation to the world is not just one of making true or correct judgments, but also of judging aptly, where this capacity is expressive or disclosive of an individual mind. (Here it is worth remembering that “cognition” and its variants, which in English sound technical or jargon-like, translate perfectly ordinary German words for “knowledge.”Footnote ¹⁹)

1.2 Judgment in the Critique of Pure Reason

From the vantage point of the Critique of Judgment, as we saw, the cognitive faculty with which the Critique of Pure Reason is mainly concerned is the understanding. “We can trace all acts of the understanding back to judgments, so that the understanding in general can be represented as a capacity to judge [Vermögen zu urteilen],” Kant remarks, adding that the understanding is “a capacity to think [Vermögen zu denken]” (A69/B94).Footnote ²⁰ He later says that the capacity to judge and the capacity to think are one and the same (A80/B106). Notice the formulation of Kant’s remarks about the understanding: the understanding may be represented as a capacity to judge or to think, not as the capacity to judge (think). This leaves room for the idea that reason too may be a capacity to judge (think). Elsewhere, Kant indeed relates theoretical reason to judgment in much the same way. In a pre-critical essay, Kant declares that “the understanding and reason, i.e., the capacity to cognize distinctly and the one [viz., capacity] for syllogistic reasoning, are not different fundamental abilities [Grundfähigkeiten]. Both consist in the capacity to judge [Vermögen zu urteilen].”Footnote ²¹ And if the Critique of Pure Reason’s commitment to “the primacy of judgment in human thought” expresses the “recognition that judgment is the fundamental form of all cognitive acts,”Footnote ²² this presumably includes the cognitive acts of theoretical reason. Kant may extend the point to practical reason as well. In the Critique of Practical Reason’s Typic of the Pure Practical Power of Judgment, Kant says that “the use of moral concepts” is a matter of “the power of judgment.”Footnote ²³

Part of what Kant means, in saying that the understanding is a capacity to judge, is that concepts are employed in judgments, so that the application of a concept means the formation of a judgment.Footnote ²⁴ But, as I’ve suggested, there is more at stake. The understanding as such is the seat of (transcendental or empirical) concepts or “rules.”Footnote ²⁵ The employment of the understanding is the activity of judging. (“The power of judgment has the greatest value. The good and bad use of the understanding rests on the power of judgment.”Footnote ²⁶) That is, the understanding may be represented as a “capacity to judge” because in its activity the understanding is judgment. The power of judgment is, in other words, another side of the faculty of understanding; it is that faculty considered from the point of view of its activity. This is the deeper point in the thought that the understanding makes use of concepts by judging through them (A68/B93). Thus the “acts” (Handlungen) of the understanding are, properly speaking, acts of the power of judgment; and perhaps something similar can be said about the acts of reason. Then judgment is a (if not the) central mode of activity of the mind.

Urteilskraft is Kant’s name for judgment proper, that power of the mind considered in itself. In the body of the Critique of Pure Reason it is first mentioned in the Analytic of Principles, where the transcendental analytic shifts its focus from the pure concepts of the understanding to their employment in the activity of judging.Footnote ²⁷ The Analytic of Principles opens with the following declaration: “General logic is constructed on a ground plan that coincides precisely with the division of the higher faculties of cognition. These are: understanding, the power of judgment [Urteilskraft], and reason” (A130/B169). As Béatrice Longuenesse has noted, the relationship between a Vermögen zu urteilen and Urteilskraft is illuminated by the distinction that Kant draws in his Lectures on Metaphysics between Vermögen and Kraft.Footnote ²⁸ Following Alexander Baumgarten, Kant casts Vermögen (which translates the Latin facultas) as “the possibility of acting, or tendency to act, that is proper to a substance” and Kraft (which translates the Latin vis, or force) as the actualization of that possibility.Footnote ²⁹

Drawing on this distinction, Longuenesse submits that “the” Vermögen zu urteilen “can be considered as a possibility or potentiality of forming judgments,” while the Urteilskraft of the Analytic of Principles and of the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft) “is the actualization of the Vermögen zu urteilen under sensory stimulation” or “in relation to sensory perceptions.”Footnote ³¹

The suggestion is illuminating, although the construal I would offer of the “actualization” in which judgment consists returns it to a more ordinary register. Urteilskraft is a power of individual subjects (human beings) viewed in the context of their lives in the world and among one another. It is essentially responsive to the sensible world. Its conditions will not emerge, that is, unless we remember that the “actualization” of the potentiality of judging “under sensory stimulation” is a matter of the subject’s bringing judgment to bear on the sensible given. The point finds expression in the Critique of Pure Reason through its argument that judgment (Urteilskraft), by its very nature, must be – or, better, is – exercised.

The declaration containing the first mention (in the body of the text) of Urteilskraft, which I quoted a moment ago, launches Kant’s prefatory remarks to the Analytic of Principles. These are followed by the short Introduction, entitled “On the Transcendental Power of Judgment in General.” It begins thus:

There are (at least) two arguments here. They are related but need to be teased apart. The first, corresponding with Kant’s setup, is tethered to general logic and its rules. General logic, or “merely formal logic” (A131/B170), is logic that “considers only the logical form in the relations of cognitions to one another, i.e., the form of thinking in general” (A55/B80). The passage indicates that general logic contains rules for judgment, namely “formal rules for all use of the understanding” (such as the principle of non-contradiction). As the “absolutely necessary rules of thinking, without which no use whatsoever of the understanding takes place” (A52/B76), they articulate conditions of thinking, which is to say of judging (since, as Kant said, thinking and judging are one and the same). Now if general logic sought to show or indicate in some general way how its rules ought to be applied, it would have to do so through a further rule. The application of this further rule would require the use of judgment, just because the application of rules is the remit of judgment (“the power of judgment is the faculty of subsuming under rules, i.e., of distinguishing whether something does or does not come under a given rule”). Since the rules of general logic are conditions of all judging, they are presupposed by any act of judging. As an act of judging, then, the application of the would-be further rule for the application of the rules of general logic would presuppose the capacity to apply the rules of general logic. In other words, the application of the would-be further rule for the general logic rules would presuppose just the capacity that it, the would-be further rule, was supposed to guide. Thus, general logic cannot provide rules determining the application of its rules. (Strictly speaking, it cannot provide nonredundant rules for its rules; the redundant rule for applying modus ponens, namely “apply modus ponens,” is obviously unhelpful. In what follows the qualifier “nonredundant” is left implicit.) Or, more accurately, there cannot be rules determining the application of the rules of general logic: they could be provided neither by general logic nor by anything else. It is thus particularly important to notice that as Kant is using the terms, Vorschrift and Regel are not interchangeable. Reading both as “rule,” and so reading Kant’s claim in the second sentence to be that general logic cannot provide rules for judgment, muddles the argument.Footnote ³² After all, in the very next sentence Kant explains that the arrival at (“formal”) rules for judgment is the business of general logic. The point in Kant’s second sentence is not that general logic cannot provide rules, but that it cannot provide rules for the application of its rules.

The second argument drops the tether to general logic and its rules. It is reflected in the conclusion drawn within the passage: “And so it turns out that although the understanding is capable of being instructed and of being equipped with rules, the power of judgment is, rather, a special talent that cannot be taught at all, but only exercised. That is why it is also what is specific to so-called mother-wit, for the lack of which no school can compensate.” At this point, Kant is talking about the power of judgment quite generally and about rules beyond those peculiar to general logic. In fact, as we will shortly see, the rules with which he seems now to be concerned are, paradigmatically, empirical rules and the rules characterizing empirical concepts. Again, there are several things going on in this conclusion – several conclusions, in fact – and they need to be teased apart. Kant’s first conclusion is that the power of judgment (as such, or wholesale) cannot be taught. This follows from the first argument about general logic, which may be why Kant does not spell it out. To teach something is to provide rules for it, Kant assumes. As we just saw, the rules of general logic cannot be taught, because they are conditions of judgment and so the possibility of their acquisition would presuppose their possession. If the conditions of something (here, judgment) cannot be taught, then it (judgment) cannot be taught. In a parallel passage in the Anthropology (where Kant makes explicit his assumption that teaching something is giving rules for it), Kant makes the case independently of the argument about general logic.

Imagine that an individual lacked the power of judgment altogether. He might nevertheless know rules, even many of them (according to Kant). Suppose that we wanted to provide him with rules for applying one of the rules he possesses, for, in other words, distinguishing whether or not something falls under it. Lacking the power of judgment, the pupil would not be able to apply the proffered rules, would not, that is, be able to judge how to apply the proffered rules, and so would need to be given yet further rules to settle how the initially proffered lot are to be applied. And so on, ad infinitum.Footnote ³⁴

If one has the power of judgment at all, then it is possible, at least in principle, to develop it. Kant elaborates the point with some care a bit further on in the Analytic of Principles. There is one way in which judgment can be “sharpened,” namely through examples (A134/B173). You become a better diagnostician of thyroid disease, judge of philosophical work, and sorter of apples by encountering and assessing many, and (presumably) varied, endocrinological patients, philosophical works, and apples. As it turns out, this is the only way to improve one’s judgment. Judgment can only be improved by experience with specific cases, or, in other words, through practice. A sharpened power of judgment is simply a mature, practiced one. This is what Kant means when he says, and repeats in the Anthropology, that judgment can only be exercised: it can only be improved by being exercised. Or rather, as I now want to suggest, this is part of what he means. The other part of what he means by that slogan is in fact the nerve of the whole passage.

All of the arguments entwined within our Analytic of Principles passage hinge upon one fundamental premise: that there cannot be rules that determine or effect their own application automatically, as it were, or without the subject’s having to judge how they ought to be applied. There can be no self-determining or self-applying rules. This means that to apply a rule or, in Kant’s terms, to judge is necessarily to use one’s power of judgment – to exercise it. To judge is ipso facto to exercise one’s own judgment.Footnote ³⁵ There is no evading the need to exercise judgment in any act of judging or thinking.

Following on the remark with which the Analytic of Principles passage as I have quoted it so far ends, the remark that “no school can compensate” for the lack of the power of judgment, Kant writes:

Plainly this continues the broader argument about the power of judgment, rather than the one concerning judgment in relation to general logic. Pathological, juridical, or political rules are not rules of general logic, which “abstracts from all content of cognition,” and the point could hardly be that general logic cannot tell a doctor, judge, or statesman how to apply them: of course it can’t; nobody was in danger of thinking that it could, just as no one would imagine that what we now call formal or deductive logic might do so.Footnote ³⁶ In fact, as the examples indicate, Kant has his eye specifically on judgment about empirical matters. And he is elaborating or expanding on the conclusions previously drawn. Now he is thinking about the person whose power of judgment is poor or dull, rather than the individual somehow lacking the power of judgment altogether (which must, of course, be a limit case; such a being would be incapable of thinking, and by Kant’s lights could hardly be recognized as a person). The shift allows Kant himself to appeal to examples “in concreto.” If one gives someone with deficient judgment a rule to guide her judgment, she will have to exercise her judgment in using it, and if, as we’re assuming, her judgment is deficient, she may well apply the proffered rule badly.Footnote ³⁷ (In this person, the “natural gift” of judgment is “absent” in the sense that she lacks the gift for (good) judgment, or her judgment is not particularly gifted. If she lacked the power of judgment altogether, there would be no question of “misuse” here: she could neither use nor misuse any proffered rule.) The point holds equally in the case of someone whose judgment is simply inexperienced or immature (concerning the topic at issue, as with someone who has seen only a few competition-level dives, or in a more general way, as with the young). In short, no rules could take the place of good judgment.

And that’s because no rules could supplant judgment. Let us suppose that a juridical judge needs to decide whether a particular sentence for a crime is fair. In Kant’s terms, her task is to decide whether it falls under the concept or rule “fair sentence.” She might be given, or draw upon, rules for this rule. For example: the sentence for a juvenile should show leniency reflecting the youth of the perpetrator; the sentence for a violent crime should take into account the likelihood that the perpetrator will continue to pose a danger to others. These might indeed be helpful rules for applying the rule.Footnote ³⁸ To apply the guiding rules she will have to judge whether the crime is a violent one (for example). For this she might draw upon further rules. But no rule could settle for her how she is to judge, or free her from having to use her judgment: she must exercise her judgment. And she will be more or less adept at doing so. Nothing could take over the burden of judgment. In the end – and shifting now to the first person, for reasons that will emerge – whether or not I am following directions, I have to judge; it is up to me to render judgment. No teacher can judge for me, and no directions could take over my responsibility for my judgment.

I have been focusing on the argument concerning the power of judgment generally in the Analytic of Principles passage as we have seen it unfold so far. After talking about the role of examples in sharpening judgment, Kant brings us back to the argument tethered to general logic: “But now although general logic can give no directions [Vorschriften] to the power of judgment, it is entirely different with transcendental” logic (A135/B174). With this step, Kant is directly broaching the topic signaled in the Introduction’s title, the “transcendental” power of judgment. The very ideas of transcendental logic and of transcendental powers of the mind are of course Kant’s innovations, and as such they need, as he recognizes, to be explained and justified. Kant’s earlier mention of general logic, the basic idea of which he can assume to be familiar to his audience, was really meant to prepare the contrast he is now drawing. The point of the contrast, it emerges, is that transcendental logic provides “rules” for which “it can at the same time indicate a priori the case to which the rules ought to be applied” (A135/B175). Given what I have been saying so far, this is troubling. It sounds very much as though Kant is saying that transcendental logic provides judgment with self-determining or self-applying rules, hence denying precisely the claim I have been calling the nerve of his argument, the claim that there can be no such thing. I will contend that Kant is not (cannot be) denying that claim. I begin by articulating the significance of the nerve of Kant’s argument. What is at stake in the idea that judgment is necessarily exercised in any act of judging?

1.3 Exercising Judgment

The nerve of Kant’s argument is, to repeat, that there is no such thing as an act of applying a rule that is not an act of judgment, or that there can be no such thing as a self-determining or self-applying rule. It’s worth noting that this might seem hardly to require saying. That, indeed, is why Kant’s claim about transcendental logic is liable to seem counterintuitive or paradoxical, even before we know quite what it is supposed to mean. I am calling it the nerve of Kant’s argument because it appears as that argument’s deepest premise – something that the argument takes to be self-evident. However, many of Kant’s readers take him to argue that even the rules constituting ordinary empirical concepts are, ultimately, self-determining. In fact, the very passage that we have been looking at from the Analytic of Principles has been interpreted as making that case. The nerve of Kant’s argument thus turns out very much to bear saying.

An instance of the interpretation I have in mind is to be found in an influential essay by David Bell. The argument that Bell understands Kant to propound in the Analytic of Principles passage – and that Bell endorses in its own right – is the following.

If an act of judgment requires a prior act of judgment, an infinite regress (of acts of judgment requiring prior acts of judgment) threatens, which would mean the incoherence or impossibility of judgment. If judgment is to be coherent or possible, then something must block such a regress or stop it from arising. That is: every act of judgment must be, or be grounded in, an act of judgment that does not require a prior act of judgment, an “immediate” or “spontaneous” act of judgment. Or rather, this primitive act is, strictly speaking, only something like judgment, but not judgment proper, for since it is supposed to ground the possibility of judgment in a regress-blocking way it cannot itself be, or be the result of, judgment.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is, Bell says, “an awareness of ‘intrinsic,’ ‘intransitive,’ or ‘immediate’ significance or sense.”Footnote ⁴¹ In sum:

Bell finds Ludwig Wittgenstein to record the same thought in his later work, and specifically in what are probably the most frequently cited passages of his Philosophical Investigations. The idea that the coherence or possibility of judgment depends on our being able to judge (or rather “judge”) “immediately” or “spontaneously” is, Bell writes,

Citing Kant’s reference to “a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever” (A78/B103, in Kemp Smith’s translation), Bell proposes that “the blindness that Kant refers to is precisely that which is invoked by Wittgenstein: a state or act is ‘blind’ in so far as it remains necessarily inaccessible to prior rational and objective justification.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus for Bell it is not only Wittgenstein but also Kant who would force us to the “disturbing conclusion” that our rational and cognitive capacities terminate, at bottom, in “inescapable blindness.”

Henry Allison interprets Kant’s Analytic of Principles passage along similar lines, although without involving Wittgenstein.

Or, in slightly greater detail:

On pain of infinite regress, judgment is or depends on “immediate” acts of “seeing” or “feeling” the applicability of rules, that is, acts of “seeing” or “feeling” the applicability of rules that do not themselves appeal to or depend on rules.Footnote ⁴⁷

It is with respect to the relevance of Kant’s aesthetics to the first Critique’s Analytic of Principles argument that Bell and Allison part ways. As Bell construes it, Kantian aesthetic experience is itself a preconceptual awareness of “unity” and hence fits the profile of the regress-blocking act that must underlie an instance of judging.Footnote ⁴⁸ Aesthetic experience “models” or provides an “analogy” for the basis of judgment or thought, so that the heart of Kant’s aesthetics bears directly on a prima facie separate issue that is crucial for his theory of cognition.Footnote ⁴⁹ Allison, by contrast, resists reading Kant’s aesthetics as purporting to solve an epistemological problem. There are connections between Kant’s aesthetics and his epistemology or his account of cognition, in Allison’s view, but they are much more indirect.Footnote ⁵⁰

Bell and Allison thus share an interpretation of Kant on which he argues that judgment is (must be) grounded on acts of applying rules, “feeling” their applicability, that are not themselves acts of judging and that do not depend on further acts of applying rules or acts of judging or feeling their applicability. As I have argued, however, the nerve of Kant’s argument is precisely that there can be no such act. It is an object of fantasy. There is no getting around the need to exercise judgment in the application of rules or concepts. Otherwise put: for Bell and Allison, the point of Kant’s argument is that judgment would be impossible unless there were self-determining rules. What I am proposing Kant’s argument to show is that the notion of self-determining rules is itself impossible.

There is value in appealing to Wittgenstein, as Bell does, in thinking about Kant’s argument. But Wittgenstein does not, in my view, propound the kind of argument that Bell attributes to him. In fact, and like Kant, Wittgenstein contests just such an argument, and he does it, moreover, in the very passages to which Bell appeals. The specter of a regress of rules does indeed play an important role in the Investigations. In focusing on rules, Wittgenstein, again like Kant, has in mind more than just our practices of following explicit rules. For both Kant and Wittgenstein, rule-following bears on the meanings of words or of the concepts they express, however mundane these may be. The meanings of words or concepts seem to be, or to be like, rules; that is, their use seems to be rule-governed (since there are correct and incorrect ways to use them). At a certain point in Wittgenstein’s Investigations, a question is felt to arise: How do we know how to use a word, so to follow a rule? For that matter, what makes it the case that this counts as following a particular rule, but not that? Something must fix the content of the rule; otherwise nothing would count as following it either correctly or incorrectly. One is likely to light on “interpretation” as supplying the wanted something: what the rule involves, and what following it correctly depends on, is determined by the correct interpretation of it. But then the questions arise anew for the posited interpretation. What determines its meaning, and how do we know what that is? If we reach again for the notion of interpretation, we face an infinite regress of interpretations. Any interpretation of a rule is itself subject to interpretation, and so “every interpretation hangs in the air together with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support.”Footnote ⁵¹ What are we to conclude? We might conclude that if a ruinous skepticism about meaning is to be avoided, something must stop the looming regress: so that what grounds a rule is a way of grasping it that requires no interpretation because it is self-interpreting. This conclusion finds expression in the remark that “there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which, from case to case of application, is exhibited in what we call ‘following the rule’ and ‘going against it’.”Footnote ⁵² Readers like Bell suppose that Wittgenstein offers the remark in order to endorse it, and understand his talk of “agreement” or “attunement” (Übereinstimmung) in “form of life,” in “language,” or in “judgments” to refer to the ways in which the capacity to perform these immediate graspings of rules, or of proceeding “blindly,” is shared by us and ensures that we line up with one another.Footnote ⁵³ But while the Investigations seeks to make such conclusions feel inevitable, it does so in the name of uncovering and disarming their appeal.

Consider Wittgenstein’s remark about following a rule “blindly” that Bell approvingly cites. Bell has plucked it out of its setting. Investigations §219 reads in full:

Wittgenstein is calling rule-following blind, but not in full voice.Footnote ⁵⁴ Rather, he is voicing a way in which the very notion of a rule “strikes” him, or is apt to strike him (in certain moments or moods), and which crystallizes in that phrase. It is a signature gesture. Wittgenstein voices how something (here, rule-following) strikes him, in order to invite us to see whether we too find that we are so struck, whether the inclination he voices is one that we can find in ourselves. A rule seems to have a sort of inexorable power. It is not up to me to decide what counts as following it; I must simply submit to its decrees, extending as they do to cover all possibilities; there is nothing left for me but blind obedience.Footnote ⁵⁵ If I am so struck, Wittgenstein suggests, I too will find myself turning to certain “symbolic” or “mythological” expressions, for example casting rule-following as “blind.” (“My symbolical expression was really a mythological description of the use of a rule.”Footnote ⁵⁶)

Why does Wittgenstein bother with this sort of thing? After all, the Investigations suggests some straightforward ways in which the “solution” that Wittgenstein and Kant are read as offering, to the “problem” that the regress argument is understood to raise, is no solution at all. The notion of something that is not an act of judgment but functions exactly like an act of judgment, or of an interpretation that it not itself subject to interpretation, is mysterious, indeed paradoxical. Worse, it is empty. For it is identified entirely in terms of the role that it is supposed to play in stopping the regress. Allowing of no separate explanation or elaboration, it cannot itself bear the explanatory weight for which it is invoked. It is just the sort of thing that Wittgenstein calls an idle wheel.Footnote ⁵⁷ Merely stipulating that it is a “feeling” does not help. Nor, for that matter, does it succeed at warding off the regress. How does one know, or what makes it the case, that the “feeling” one has is the feeling of the applicability of this rule (plus), and not that of another (quus)? Here, of course, there is no appealing to a rule, since this would return us to the original looming regress: the whole point of the stipulated act is that it is supposed to neither need nor allow of determination by a rule. Another feeling? Then the regress reappears.Footnote ⁵⁸

Such considerations might seem impressive and decisive, real meat-and-potatoes philosophical work, but in Wittgenstein’s hands they are preliminaries at best. That is, Wittgenstein does not imagine that they have the power simply to dissolve the apparent regress argument, revealing it to be a red herring, or an empty philosophical construction, that poses no genuine danger to our ordinary practices (in which we carry on anyway without experiencing any sense of missing foundations) – although he is often so read. To put it another way, Wittgenstein recognizes that the person who finds that the regress must be blocked has not simply neglected to anticipate such obvious difficulties. To that person, the conclusion is a hard one that forces itself upon us as the only alternative to an unacceptable skepticism, despite its disconcerting weirdness (Bell calls it “disturbing”). From her point of view, to rest content with these straightforward objections is to blithely fail, or willfully refuse, to face the situation.Footnote ⁵⁹

Wittgenstein wants to take this point of view seriously, which means taking seriously the problem it finds to be gripping. But as with many things people find themselves gripped by, taking it seriously does not necessarily mean taking it at face value. It may mean taking seriously what it is for. Doing so begins by tracing the point of view back to a pivotal moment: the moment in which it seems that something “must” be the case – here: something must fix the meaning of a rule, or else it is unfixed and founders. Wittgenstein asks us to consider whether this moment draws its force from hidden, or half-hidden, sources it encodes. This would mean that uncovering those sources, so making it possible to acknowledge them as sources, is meaningful philosophical work. The sources that Wittgenstein’s procedures propose to lay bare turn out to be anxieties and disappointments about our places in the world and our lives with others, or what we might call the human condition. Anxieties and disappointments that cannot be dispelled as soon as they are named are apt to produce fears and fantasies of evasion. They may be intellectualized: distorted into theoretical or abstract concerns. The burden of Wittgenstein’s reflections is to bring to light such paths of flight, and to show that philosophy in one guise may serve as deflective intellectualization (while what is needed to meet it is philosophy in another guise).

It is of the greatest importance, for the reading of Wittgenstein I am advancing, that the wishes to evade the ordinary conditions of our lives with which he is concerned are not exotica confined to a disciplinary or institutional hothouse. That is, those wishes are not only responsive to our ordinary lives; they are also natural responses to our ordinary lives, and to that extent are a natural part, or possibility, of them. In order to feel their pull, one needs, in principle, only to be human.Footnote ⁶⁰ (Being susceptible to their pull, and so to philosophy (in both of its guises), might thus be said to be a mark of the human condition.) This means that the questions Wittgenstein would have us ask about the would-be regress argument of the Investigations are these: What is it about the conditions of our lives in judgment – or, better, our vision of those conditions – that it is natural to wish to cover over or deny? What anxiety does the would-be argument intellectualize? What is the truth that is being distorted in being intellectualized, the distortion of which is the very point of intellectualization?

Stanley Cavell traces the notion of a private language, through which the Investigations develops the rule-following reflections, to anxieties and disappointments with ordinary expression that coalesce around the conditions of making oneself, or one’s meaning, known.Footnote ⁶¹ The fantasy or fear of a private language is motivated by – is imagined to protect me from – the fact that I (must) make myself known, that I might be misunderstood, or that I might be understood all too well. The fantasy of a private language is a fantasy of necessary inexpressiveness, which “would solve,” or rather is imagined to solve,

The suggestion is that the fantasy of necessary inexpressiveness corresponds to a fear of necessary expressiveness, a sense that expressiveness would mean total exposure: that “what I express is beyond my control.”Footnote ⁶³ But of course necessary expressiveness can just as easily become an object of fantasy, something desired. Then what necessary expressiveness promises is that I might be transparent, that I do not need to make myself known (even to myself) – there is nothing that I need do. And then the notion of a private language will be colored by a fear or horror of necessary inexpressiveness, of a world “in which I am not merely unknown, but in which I am powerless to make myself known.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Both the fantasy and the fear of a private language express a wish to cut myself out of the picture.Footnote ⁶⁵ Cavell makes a similar suggestion in connection with Wittgenstein’s rule-following reflections. Appreciating his point depends on noting that he returns those reflections to their original starting point in the Investigations, an imagined scene of encounter with another person whom I am trying to teach a rule.Footnote ⁶⁶ (In interpretations of the Bell variety, this dimension disappears.) What is at stake is therefore not (just) the intelligibility of one’s own rule-following, but the possibility of communication and attunement with others. I am to imagine that my pupil has not cottoned on despite my best efforts, and that I have run out of justifications that I can produce for following the rule the right way, my way. “I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned.” On Bell’s reading, what justifies me is the regress-stopping act that grounds – is the bedrock of – my judgment. Cavell’s take is this:

Here the wish to leave myself out expresses the desire for protection from the fact that it is up to me to judge when my justifications have run out, and what their running out means, and how to respond to the other, and where we then are. And, of course, the fact that it is up to the other to do so as well.Footnote ⁶⁸ Consider, again, the vision of a rule as intractably subjugating, commanding blind obedience. It might appear straightforwardly fearsome. But my sense is that it is more compelling as an object of fantasy, something desired (the fearsomeness functioning as a cover for its attractiveness). “I can do nothing but submit” means that I am relieved of responsibility, and that can be a relief, the lifting of what I experience as a burden.Footnote ⁶⁹

The “solution” of cutting myself out in any of these ways costs more than it is worth: as though the way to save myself were to eliminate myself. It must also be profoundly disappointing, in the first place because the attempt to cut myself out will obviously be impossible, paradoxical; but also because the fantasies offer only imaginary, not real, protection from the ordinary facts that motivated them: that it is not in my power to ensure that I am understood, or that I am not understood; that my expressiveness is neither totally up to me nor totally out of my hands; that attunement must be found; and that it is up to each of us to judge what its apparent absence means.

The idea that there must be acts of applying rules that are not themselves acts of judging but that make judging possible, the idea at work in Bell and Allison, is just what Wittgenstein, properly understood, wants us to feel the pull of and yet find profoundly disappointing. As I said, I agree with Bell that Wittgenstein’s thought bears instructively on Kant’s treatment of judgment, although I envision a rather different bearing. The regress that Bell and Allison read Kant as forestalling would, in fact, only arise, or threaten to arise, if Kant were committed to a certain premise, namely that in order to apply a rule judgment always needs another rule. But Kant makes no indication that he accepts that premise; just the contrary.Footnote ⁷⁰ Yet I would urge that interpreters of the Bell and Allison stripe are not simply misreading Kant or making some sort of simple error. They find that there must be a rule determining the application of a rule, and it is this “must” that produces the dilemma: either judgment is impossible or incoherent, or there is a regress-blocking act. This “must” is very like the one that Wittgenstein brings to light and traces to its sources. Here we come up against a fundamental difference between Kant and Wittgenstein. For Wittgenstein, it is crucial to show that, and how, it would be natural to feel that there must be something that fixes the meaning of rules. Kant says nothing of the kind. In my view, however, appreciating the nerve of the Analytic of Principles passage, that there can be no self-determining or self-applying rules, so that (as I’m putting it) judgment is essentially exercised, depends on being able to feel the pull of the idea that it repudiates. And the idea it repudiates draws its power from anxieties that it distorts about the exercising of judgment, anxieties that are rooted in the ordinary.

My proposal, then, is this. The idea that my judgment is, or is grounded in, an act that lies beyond justification and reason expresses a fantasy of evading the conditions of judgment: that the justification of my judgment hinges on my willingness and ability to justify it, and on my judging when my justifications have come to an end and what position that puts me in with others. More generally, it bespeaks a desire to cut the subject (me) out. A consequence of (or, better, another way of putting) the fact that judgment must be exercised is that I must judge for myself. Here this is not a piece of advice or counsel against unthinkingly following convention – the “Sapere aude!” of the “Enlightenment” essay.Footnote ⁷¹ What it conveys besides is the expressive or first-personal nature of judgment: my judgment is inevitably expressive of me, whether or not I wish to be revealed.Footnote ⁷² The fact that is being avoided here is a fact that Kant is bringing to our attention, namely that my judgment is mine, that it is expressive of me. The reading of the Bell/Allison variety seeks to convert this fact into a metaphysical and epistemological problem, in supposed response to which it postulates a mysterious act that obscures this fact or denies it. I am suggesting that this may be the point: the conversion gives a kind of shelter to anxiety about the expressiveness of judgment that Kant exposes.

Suppose someone tells me that a situation calls for the exercise of judgment: “You’re going to have to use your (own) judgment”; “That’s a (your) judgment call.” My determination of something is called for; I am to assess, hence characterize, some situation or state of affairs; I need to make some decision, or to arrive at some view of the matter at hand. It may be that the situation leaves something undetermined that it is up to me to determine. It is my opportunity, or my burden, and my responsibility. It may be that the case that I have to decide is unclear. But it needn’t be unclear; it may be indeterminate, or simply as yet undetermined. Or it may be something that no one can determine for me. It is in this spirit that the Critique of Pure Reason persistently calls on the reader to subject the work to her judgment, not merely its particular findings but also its methodology.Footnote ⁷³ I may need to engage in an imaginative consideration of something, finding my own way in thinking about it and following – perhaps testing, perhaps discovering – my own convictions and relying on my own sensibility. But Kant’s idea is that even when this is not the case, judging is determining something, and it requires, or expresses, the exercising of judgment. Judgment is exercised in every act of judging. “Judgment must be (is) exercised” is a logical or (borrowing Wittgenstein’s term) grammatical remark. The point is that the exercising of judgment is essential to judging. And every act of thinking is an act of judging.

The figure of the physician, juridical judge, or statesman is thus supposed to dramatize the position of the subject in any instance of judging (thinking). In some ways, the comparison might be regarded (rightly, I think) as unhappy. The physician, juridical judge, or statesman is an official or quasi-official. His judgment is often based on deliberation, and is expressed in a publically entered verdict; whereas many, if not most, of our ordinary judgments – which, for Kant, means our ordinary thinking, since thinking is judging – are not. In other ways, however, the dramatization registers something important. The official’s verdict makes a difference, has a real impact (consider the judge’s issuing of a sentence, or the physician’s diagnosis). Our ordinary judgments do not usually determine the course of things in just the same way, but Kant’s insight – one that Wittgenstein shares – is that they may be no less fateful in determining the world. We do things with our words, we make our world, not only in talking but already in thinking.Footnote ⁷⁴ (Herein lies one dimension of the significance of the recurrence of juridical notions in Kant’s treatment of judgment.Footnote ⁷⁵)

Judgment involves adopting a stance, however provisional or fleeting, on the matter at hand, however plain or trivial. Specifically, to judge is to take the measure of something (an object, a creature, a person, a state of affairs), so to determine what it is. To judge is to open oneself to the question of whether one’s judgment is fair, or does justice to the thing it determines. This is why the greatest significance of a person’s judgment may lie in what it reveals about that person’s character.Footnote ⁷⁶ (Hence the importance of the possessive: I use “my judgment, even “my own judgment.”) We speak of trusting someone’s judgment, and this means trusting that person, at least with regard to the matter at hand. In short, in determining an object the exercise of judgment also serves (or may serve) to determine a subject. Judgment is revelatory of what the subject finds to matter. Recall that Allison described the object of the regress-blocking feeling as “the subsumability of an intuition under a concept.” But registering the sheer applicability of a concept is not enough in order to come to judgment. After all, many – indefinitely many – concepts will be applicable to a given manifold of intuition. What is also required is a sense of what concept, hence what judgment, is apt here and now, and, relatedly but more generally, of what (if anything) bears judgment or even calls for judgment here and now.Footnote ⁷⁷

In her book on the trials following the Second World War, Hannah Arendt writes that “countless theories” have been invoked to explain the atrocities the trials were meant to address, theories trading on generality and emptiness. What these theories “have in common,” she remarks, is “that they make judgment superfluous and that to utter them is devoid of all risk.”Footnote ⁷⁸ As Arendt argues, however, the desire to avoid judgment is not manifested only in such acute situations of legal or political judgment. It is a feature of social life itself, at least in “the modern age.”

In a state of conformity, we lose the ability to judge. I take it that Arendt means not merely that we do not judge well, but also, and more fundamentally, that we are not capable of passing judgment at all. For the efforts of conformity are efforts to give up the risks and the responsibilities that accompany the self-expressive dimension of judgment. And yet this attempt can only be partially successful. If I let someone else be my guide – let someone else control or direct my judgment – then in one sense I am not using my own judgment; I’m failing to do so. But in a larger sense that is my way of directing my judgment. I direct it by giving it over to someone else. And that reveals the position that I am taking.Footnote ⁸⁰

1.4 From the First Critique to the Third

This is the moment to pick up a loose thread. As we saw, Kant suggests that although general logic cannot give directions to judgment, transcendental logic does. In fact, he claims that the “peculiar thing about transcendental philosophy is this: that in addition to the rule (or rather the general condition for rules), which is given in the pure concept of the understanding, it can at the same time indicate a priori the case to which the rules ought to be applied” (A135/B174–175). Does this contradict the claim I am attributing to Kant, that judgment must be exercised?

The rules of transcendental logic are the principles of pure understanding, which are based on the pure concepts of the understanding or the categories. They articulate conditions of the possibility of experience: how we must judge objects (as governed by causal laws, for example), and – the other side of the coin that is transcendental idealism – what it is for something to be an object (to be governed by causal laws, for example).Footnote ⁸¹ Through the transcendental schemata, the principles specify a priori conditions for applying the rules to instances. This is what Kant means by the claim that transcendental logic “can at the same time indicate a priori the case to which the rules ought to be applied.” Just what this comes to is a notoriously thorny matter that I cannot take up here. What is clear, however, is that it cannot entail that the principles specify how they are to apply in particular cases. The principles legislate to nature, but taking “into consideration only the conditions of the possibility of an experience in general as far as its form is concerned” (FI XX:210). The “universal laws of nature yield … an interconnection among things with respect to their genera, as things of nature in general, but not specifically, as such and such particular beings in nature” (CJ V:183). Consider, again, the principle of causality. The principle cannot tell us whether fire warms the stone, or instead cools it, or has no effect on it at all.Footnote ⁸² Nor, of course, can it tell us what to count as an instance of fire or of stone, or warming, or cooling. Whatever the sense in which transcendental logic gives directions to judgment, those directions cannot be ones that tell judgment what particular empirical judgments to render in any given case. To make these determinations, one must exercise judgment. Nothing – not transcendental rules governing objects in general – can replace the need to exercise judgment in order to actually come to judgment about particulars.

There is another way in which transcendental logic cannot circumvent the work of judgment in actually coming to judgment about particulars. The Analytic of Principles passage considers judgment as the capacity to distinguish whether or not something falls under a given rule, and, as we saw, Kant’s examples highlight the “rules” constituted by empirical concepts. This capacity presupposes the capacity to find empirical concepts for things. Something else is needed to arrive at empirical concepts for “given appearances” (FI XX:213–214). The Critique of Judgment addresses this presupposition and in this respect, among others, takes up where the Critique of Pure Reason leaves off. It introduces a new pair of terms articulating two dimensions of the power of judgment.

It is for the reflective power of judgment to discern what concept or rule to apply to a particular. As I will argue, reflective judgment is not just the power of judging what concept – or, rather, concepts – something falls under. It is also, and most importantly, the power of discerning what concept is most fitting (the need for which I mentioned toward the end of the previous section).

In the first Critique, Kant says, as we saw, that the power of judgment is the essence of what is colloquially known as mother-wit (Mutterwitz). Witz, now, is an important topic for Kant’s Anthropology.Footnote ⁸³ The term has been translated as “intelligence,” perhaps due to the worry that “wit” would convey to contemporary ears a capacity to engage in clever banter, and so only a part of its full but somewhat antiquated sense.Footnote ⁸⁴ I would hazard that the real issue is that wit so construed is likely to seem rather frivolous, as if it were a seasoning of sorts that imparts an amusing but unnecessary piquancy. But the humor of wit and the pleasure it affords (and takes) are rooted in its aptness and acumen. Wit can be telling, incisive, or cutting. It has to do with a sharpness of mind manifesting discernment and insight, and a quickness or readiness to make illuminating connections. In the Anthropology, Kant characterizes wit as “the capacity to think up the universal for the particular.”Footnote ⁸⁵ He thus identifies wit in just the terms in which the Critique of Judgment identifies reflective judgment. And so one might wonder whether the first Critique’s association of Urteilskraft, the power of judgment, with wit (through the trope of mother-wit) suggests – in a roundabout way and through the Anthropology – an association of the power of judgment with reflective judgment. Is the Critique of Judgment picking up the first Critique’s conception of judgment in the shape of what it calls reflective judgment? But the idea seems quickly to unravel. Kant’s characterization of judgment in the Analytic of Principles (“the power of judgment is the faculty of subsuming under rules, i.e., of distinguishing whether something does or does not come under a given rule”) corresponds to what the third Critique calls determinative judgment, rather than reflective judgment. And what the Anthropology says, more fully, is this: “Just as the capacity to figure out the particular for the universal (the rule) is judgment [Urteilskraft], so the capacity to think up the universal for the particular is wit (ingenium).”Footnote ⁸⁶ Not only does wit correspond to reflective judgment, but it is contrasted with “judgment,” which is characterized in terms corresponding to determinative judgment and to what the Analytic of Principles calls judgment.

I would like to suggest that there is nevertheless something to the roundabout associative leap. There is an interesting and important dimension of continuity between the power of judgment as that is developed in the first Critique and what the third Critique calls reflective judgment, and not only in the sense that the former turns out to presuppose the latter. It is specifically in the context of the point that judgment must be exercised that Kant speaks of it as “mother-wit.” Judgment as exercised is a responsiveness to the particular that no rule can replace (“Does this sentence take account of the perpetrator’s situation?”). Think of the ineliminable role for experience with examples in the cultivation of judgment. Judgment as exercised, judgment as mother-wit, reveals the individual’s sense of what matters. Reflective judgment, the power of judging aptness (which, when exercised, is itself more or less apt), shares these features. To judge what conceptualization of a state of affairs does it justice is also to manifest a responsiveness to particulars that no rule can replace, and that is expressive of the individual’s power of judgment and her sense of what matters. Reflective judgment, in other words, is also a matter of exercising judgment. With its exploration of reflective judgment, then, the third Critique turns to another dimension of the essential exercising of judgment. Thus the reflective power of judgment as it appears in the third Critique represents a development of the notion of the power of judgment (as necessarily exercised) that Kant elaborates in the first. I am tempted to see a hint to this effect in the association, in the First Introduction, of the reflective power of judgment with the capacity for appraisal that marks the juridical judge: “The reflective power of judgment is the one that is also called the faculty for judging [Beurteilungsvermögen] (facultas diiudicandi)” (FI XX:211). “Judgment deals with particulars, and when the thinking ego moving among generalities emerges from its withdrawal and returns to the world of particular appearances, it turns out that the mind needs a new ‘gift’ to deal with them,”Footnote ⁸⁷ Arendt writes. The “new” gift Arendt has in mind is what the third Critique calls “reflective judgment.” But the “gift” that it names is not entirely new. It names a first-personal responsiveness to given particulars that is continuous with the conception of the power of judgment as necessarily exercised that serves as the nerve of the Analytic of Principles passage from the Critique of Pure Reason.

There is a final aspect of Kant’s remarks about judgment in the Analytic of Principles that I want to touch on, and that is their invocation of the natural. Kant speaks of judgment as a “natural power” and a “natural gift,” and he seems to get to these ideas from the consideration that judgment cannot be taught or replaced by a supply of instructions. What can cause disappointment here is the impression that Kant is invoking the natural – matters of empirical psychology – in a way that is contrary to the spirit of Kantian critical philosophy. It is just this sort of naturalizing reading, incidentally, to which one is driven when one takes the regress argument in the Analytic of Principles in the way suggested by Bell and Allison, as pointing to the need for some special mental act (of immediately “feeling” significance) at the base of all judgment.Footnote ⁸⁸ Such talk of a natural power may also seem to threaten the possibility of genuine agency in judgment.

Here, too, following the trail of associations from judgment as Mutterwitz to wit is suggestive. Notice that in the Anthropology passage that we saw a moment ago, Kant glossed wit parenthetically as ingenium. Kant offers the same parenthetical gloss when he introduces the notion of genius in the third Critique (CJ V:307). Kant’s characterization of judgment in the Analytic of Principles is gently but intriguingly echoed by some aspects of his characterization of genius in the third Critique. Thus Kant argues that making a work of art depends on a preceding rule, and that the source of beautiful art must be “nature in the subject” or “genius” (CJ V:307).Footnote ⁸⁹ Genius cannot be taught (provided wholesale through instruction), and can only be cultivated through experience and consideration of examples. But now the relation of genius to nature is complex. Kant’s formulations sometimes suggest that nature operates in and through the artist (“Genius is the inborn predisposition of the mind (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art” (CJ V:307)): as if the artist were merely a conduit for nature’s doings, so that the resulting works seem not strictly to be a matter of his own agency. It can sound as if genius is not merely natural (as a trait or feature may be natural), but is itself, somehow, nature. But so far as genius is nature, it is, Kant says, the nature of the subject – that particular subject. (Kant traces the word, and so the concept, to the Latin “genius, in the sense of the particular spirit given to a person at birth, which protects and guides him” (CJ V:308).) And the role of genius does not seem to undercut the artist’s claim to authorship, in Kant’s eyes. The “author of a product that he owes to his genius” is still its author. Beautiful art may spring from the subject’s nature, but it manifests her freedom: “genius is the exemplary originality of a subject’s natural gift [Naturgabe] in the free use of his cognitive faculties” (CJ V:318; Kant’s emphasis). On Kant’s vision, as we will see, judgment is related in a similarly ambiguous, or doubled, way to nature.