In this book, Lara Ostaric argues that Kant’s seminal Critique of Judgment is properly understood as completing his Critical system. The two seemingly disparate halves of the text are unified under this larger project insofar as both aesthetic and teleological judgment indirectly exhibit the final end of reason, the Ideas of the highest good and the postulates, as if obtaining in nature. She relates Kant’s discussion of aesthetic and teleological judgment to important yet under-explored concepts in his philosophy, and helps the reader to recognize the relevance of his aesthetics and teleology for our understanding of fine arts and genius, the possibility of pure judgments of ugliness, Kant’s philosophy of history, his philosophy of religion, and his conception of autonomy. Ostaric’s novel and thoroughly integrative presentation of Kant’s system will be of interest not only to Kant scholars but also to those working in religious studies, art history, political theory, and intellectual history.

In this chapter, I argue that Kant does not offer a theoretical proof 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” the objective reality of morality in one’s actual experience. 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.” 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 but as a form of practical cognition.

The aim of this chapter is to show how objects of beauty in the world indirectly exhibit the supersensible “without,” that is, the Idea of the highest good. This I take is the meaning of Kant’s claim that beauty is a “symbol of morality.” The fact that the experience of beauty serves as a sign that the world may be hospitable for the realization of the highest good can have a merely psychological significance, namely, that of maintaining the existent moral disposition. Yet, the significance of this sign can move beyond its merely psychological effects insofar as it reinforces the view that the final end must be the end of nature. The experience of beauty renders the Idea of the highest good objectively real in a special way, which adds the cognitive dimension to aesthetic experience that is best explained in proximity to Kant’s notion of practical cognition.

This chapter demonstrates that fundamental to the free harmony of the faculties is reflection understood as “an action of the power of imagination” and not as “the logical actus of the understanding.” 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 gives us license for an indirect or analogical exhibition of the “supersensible substrate” 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.

This chapter clarifies how for Kant conforming our desire for happiness to the demands of morality leads to moral Glaube and the postulates of God’s existence and the soul’s immortality. I 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” 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, if closer attention is paid 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.

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,” 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 is comprised of two parts: a moral-psychological argument for strengthening moral Glaube and the argument that emphasizes the objective reality (albeit from a “practical point of view”) of our representation of human history as progressing. While the former argument reinforces our existing moral disposition, the latter reinforces reason’s unity.

In this book, Lara Ostaric argues that Kant’s seminal Critique of Judgment is properly understood as completing his Critical system. The two seemingly disparate halves of the text are unified under this larger project insofar as both aesthetic and teleological judgment indirectly exhibit the final end of reason, the Ideas of the highest good and the postulates, as if obtaining in nature. She relates Kant’s discussion of aesthetic and teleological judgment to important yet under-explored concepts in his philosophy, and helps the reader to recognize the relevance of his aesthetics and teleology for our understanding of fine arts and genius, the possibility of pure judgments of ugliness, Kant’s philosophy of history, his philosophy of religion, and his conception of autonomy. Ostaric’s novel and thoroughly integrative presentation of Kant’s system will be of interest not only to Kant scholars but also to those working in religious studies, art history, political theory, and intellectual history.

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 the notion of reflective judgment’s principle of nature’s purposiveness, this chapter demonstrates 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. While for some commentators reason’s need for the unconditioned is exclusively a reflection of its practical need, I argue that that the notion of the metaphysical ground of the unity of nature is a necessary notion for reason in both its theoretical and practical functions and, moreover, that reason’s practical ends are presupposed in every theoretical investigation of nature.

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. Kant refers to his earlier conception of the highest good as having a reality only insofar as it is a necessary object for us. However, in the third Critique, the highest good must be also the end of nature. I argue in this chapter that it is the role of reflective judgment to represent nature as aiming toward the realization of the highest good in the world, so that it is no longer sufficient that we intellectually “conceive” its possibility but that we can also 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).