Critique of Judgment
Kant's Critique of Judgement ('critique' in the sense of analytic discernment rather than of criticism, and 'judgement' as the ability to judge) is divided into two interrelated sections. The first dealt with 'Aesthetic Judgement', and was devoted to the ability to make individual judgements about the beautiful in art and nature—that is, judgements of taste (a second part of this dealt with judgements about the sublime). The second section was devoted to 'Teleological Judgement', or the discernment of final causes or the purposiveness in things.
In the 'Aesthetic Judgement', Kant addressed the following problem. In using the term 'beautiful' in speaking of natural or human objects, it is commonly assumed that beauty is a property or characteristic of the thing itself—and that, by extension, others should be able to confirm our judgement. What, then, is the nature of the perception of such properties of things? Are such aesthetic pleasures purely subjective or are they intersubjective, or even universal? Kant argued that the judgement of taste—that is, the ability to make judgements of taste—was universal, in contrast to judgements about what was merely agreed upon by individuals: 'gathering votes and asking other people what kind of sensation they are having', he argued, cannot account for the fact that judgements of taste are universal.
In trying to understand why judgements of taste should be universal, Kant argued roughly as follows. The feelings involved in all judgements of taste are connected to two things: theoretical knowledge, knowledge of how things are, and morality, knowledge of how things ought to be. Nature had a final cause or purposiveness which can be discerned through the faculty of aesthetic thinking, which goes beyond all (rational) concepts by creating intuitions about nature that transcend what is immediately perceptible. As with nature, so with art: judging works of art, Kant argued, is equivalent to judging the purposiveness of nature; in both cases, we judge in terms of beauty, whether natural or artistic.
Closely tied to aesthetic judgement is Kant's concept of genius, which was a measure of the quality of an artwork, and a sign of the degree of its purposiveness: genius as a great capacity for aesthetic thinking. Works of fine art are judged on the basis of how much genius they manifest. Nature is judged, as a whole, as a system of purposes; on the basis of how its purposiveness is manifested in its appearances. Kant's interest in the aesthetic and in understanding what is at stake in judgements of taste in the beauty of works of art is thus essentially an interest in understanding how the knowledge and appreciation of art reflects, or is an analogue of, our appreciation of the purposiveness of nature. In this he may be as much allied with the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century as he was with the classical rationalists of the Enlightenment, for the Critique of Judgement suggested analogies between the genius-artist and the source of the purposiveness of the universe (the world being the artefact of a divine Artificer). At the same time, Kant was interested in understanding the sublime, and in understanding the Baroque as a great project of the imagination—the project that Winckelmann earlier shunned in his writings in favour of an idealist classicism. What distinguished Kant from Winckelmann with regard to notions of taste and beauty was his willingness to explore beyond the boundaries and canons of classical good taste. He argued (against classical rationalism) that what is beautiful is not merely the material image of some singular inner truth or rational essence in nature, but is related to a freedom of the imagination that constitutes the defining characteristic of humanity as a finite creature capable of thinking the infinite. For Kant, an aesthetics of the well-wrought would always be far removed from true genius.
Kant's Critique of Judgement appeared over two decades after Winckelmann's death. Although an earlier perspective on these issues was published by Kant in the same year as Winckelmann's History (1764), it is unclear whether Winckelmann was aware of Kant's work. From the later perspective of the Critique, a Winckelmannian classical rationalism would have certainly seemed very much out of step with the new philosophy of aesthetics that had already been pioneered by Baumgarten at the time that Winckelmann's own writing was beginning, in the middle of the century. It would have seemed to hark back to the old hierarchized notions of sensate knowledge as inferior to the ideals of rationality—ideas that could only have been compatible with an ideology grounded in a singular ideal of beauty.