The Southern Journal of Philosophy (1991) Volume XXX, Supplement

UNITY OF ORGANISM, UNITY OF THOUGHT, AND THE UNITY OF THE CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT Richard E. Aquila The University of Tennessee - Knoxville

I. I am going to focus on Kant's claim, in 76-7 of the

Critique of Judgment, that reflection on an essential feature of human mentality, its intellectually discursive character, provides the ground for insight into the possibility of repre-senting portions of nature, perhaps even nature as a whole, as systems of the sort that Kant calls "organic," that is, as "natural purposes." I propose a perspective on Kant's reso-lution of this problem that may also help to clarify the over-all unity of the Critique. l

In general terms, Kant's resolution of the problem seems to have two parts. One of them concerns what we must do, on account of the discursive character of our understanding; the other concerns what we can do on account of that charac-ter. First, the discursive character of our understanding re-quires us to regard the objects in question as products-or as things whose inner workings are products (I won't repeat the qualification throughout)-of a mental causality, that is, of a certain sort of Vorstellung. Second, this same character of our understanding enables us to represent those objects as the product of a particular sort of mental causality, name-ly, of one that moves, as it were, from the holistic form of a thing to the particular manner of interaction of its parts. This second point, in turn, involves a representation by con-trast: What we are representing is a kind of movement, with regard to wholes and parts, that would be the opposite of the kind essential to acts of discursive mentality. It is precisely because the movement in question can be characterized pure-ly relatively, in terms of this contrast, that we are enabled, by the very character of our own mentality, to represent ob-jects as natural purposes (77.407-8).2

But it is not clear just how the specific character of discursive mentality is supposed to be relevant to a resolution of the problem. In these sections of the Critique, at least three distinct problematics seem to be in question:

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those of contingency and necessity, of the whole-part rela-tion, and of the relation between universality and particu-larity, or between concepts and objects. The relationship between these problematics is frequently not wholly appre-ciated, because of a failure to appreciate the relationship be-tween the points that I first mentioned-the one concerning how we must, the other how we are enabled to, represent natural purposes. In particular, there is a tendency to fail to appreciate that the only reason we must represent certain objects as the effects of a certain sort of Vorstellung is that, in representing those objects as wholes that stand to their parts in the way that natural purposes must, we need to represent them as if they are themselves a certain sort of Vorstellung: in particular, as if they are themselves thoughts of a non-discursive, or a purely intuitive, sort.

Most recently, Werner Pluhar has defended this conclu-sion. In representing nature as a natural purpose: [N]ature in itself would simply be the intellectual (supersensible) intuition of this intuitive understanding, just as our world of experience simply is the experience that consists of our empirical intuition as structured in harmony with our categories .... [T]he purposive form that would be neces-sitated by this intellectual intuition would simply be that intuition .... the world in itself would be the completely determinate form which that intel-lectual intuition is.3

As Kant himself puts it: When we judge of a natural purpose, we adduce a teleological basis when we attribute to the concept of an object-just as if that concept were in nature (not in us)-a causality concerning [the production of] an object ... (61.360 [my emphasis])

But there is a point of importance that remains hidden in all this. If reflection on the specific character of discursive representation is to be relevant to our ability to represent uni-fied wholes of the special kind that natural purposes are sup-posed to be, then discursive representations themselves must be unified wholes of a special kind, namely, wholes whose unitary structure is determined precisely by the contrary of the movement supposed to be in question in the case of natural purposes. In other words, it cannot just be that the objects to which we apply discursive representations are uni-fied wholes determined by such a movement. The represen-tations themselves must be such wholes. If they were not, then it would not be relevant to the problem of representing natural purposes that we represent them as if their inner workings were the products of an operation moving in the contrary direction from that of discursive mentality. That we may, or even must, so represent natural purposes would be

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relevant only if the represented "movements" in question were represented precisely as movements within wholes of a certain sort.

Apart from the direct bearing of this on Kant's attempt to explain our ability to comprehend natural purposes, this point will be useful in clarifying the overall unity of the third Critique. On a certain level of generality, there may seem to be no problem of unity. In both parts of the Critique Kant focuses on principles that bear on what may reasonably be called a "reflecting" rather than a "determining" power of judgment. That is, he focuses on principles that bear on our capacity for reflecting on intuitions, with respeCt to the pos-sibility, suitable for the contexts in question, of subsumption under universals. By contrast, determining judgment may be regarded as the capacity for employing whatever universals may be employed in various contexts, without concern for which is most suitable. In the two parts of the Critique, then, Kant may be regarded as dealing with questions that bear on the problem of cognitive "suitability." In the first he deals with questions posed by the existence of an especially high level of suitability, namely, one so high that it is reflected in a pleasure that, in the apprehension of certain objects, seems to function as a subsuming universal in its own right. In the second part, Kant then deals with an apparent limitation, offered by certain objects, to our attempts at subsumption under suitable universals: an apparent limitation whose recognition presupposes some reference to powers of compre-hension exceeding our own. But problems arise when we examine the details of the specific "powers of judgment" supposed to ground the very possibility of such judgments in the first place.

In the case of judgments of taste, but not at all clearly for those of natural purpose, Kant's analysis focuses on functions regarded as directly active within particular representations, with respect to the possibility of subsumption under universals. In that case, the interplay between an element of "particularity," given in intuition as a task for the under-standing, on the one hand, and the cognitive functions required for "movement" to the universal, on the other hand, contributes to an explanation of the judgments in question only because it is an interplay internal to single instances of intuitional-cum-conceptual representation. In the "First Intro-duction," this orientation toward structure within single acts of actual or possible subsumption is especially pronounced. Kant says, for example, that aesthetic judgment involves

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[a] relation between [imagination and understanding] ... insofar as one of these powers furthers or hinders the other in one and the same presentation. ("FI" VIII.223 [my gloss and emphasis]).4 I shall indicate briefly at the end why I think the same point is crucial to the published work itself.

At least on the surface, the problem that provides the frame-work for Kant's treatment of natural purposes seems to be a different sort of problem. With respect to the natural objects of our cognitive activities, it is a problem whose solution requires attention to unified structures within single "intui-tions," that is, within particular natural objects. But it is at least on the surface unclear what its relevance could be to the need for structure internal to the very acts of discursive mentality as such.5 Again, apart from the fact that attention to the latter seems needed to support Kant's claim that a single "power" of judgment is at work in both cases, I shall try to show how such an approach can deal with the fact that judgments of natural purpose concern a special kind of whole, namely, one in which the behavior of the parts is determined by the whole itself (and yet also by a mental act).

II. Why exactly should it be necessary, or even helpful, with

respect to our ability to represent objects as natural purposes, to represent their inner workings as the product of a specif-ically non-discursive sort of mentality? To precisely what about such objects would this particular way of representing them be relevant? We should begin by being clear that such a mode of reflection would not be relevant if our task were simply that of representing certain natural objects as satis-fying the following conditions: first, that their internal organization, and the functioning of their parts, is somehow constantly regulated in such a way as to maintain the whole in its state of natural integrity and flourishing; second, that the functioning of the parts in question would, say on a micro-level of description (and given knowledge of antecedent conditions), nonetheless be governed by purely mechanical laws valid-apart from their inclusion in systems of that sort-anywhere in the universe.

Such objects would of course bevery special. They would be wholly natural objects, hence objects within which every happening is necessitated in conformity with causal laws, valid throughout nature, regardless of the kind of object within which such happenings are located. On the other hand, the internal functioning of those objects would be such 142

that it inevitably adjusts itself to whatever is needed in order to maintain the integrity of those object as wholes, even though the laws say nothing, as it were, about the needs of such objects. Perhaps it would be necessary to represent, or at least for us to represent, the behavior of such objects as dependent upon some sort of mental activity in their regard. It would still be unclear why we should suppose that the ac-tivity in question needs to be an instance of non-discursive activity in particular. Given the complexity of the systems in question, any relevant mental activity must be activity on the part of a being far more intelligent than ourselves. In addition, it would have to be activity on the part of a being who, unlike ourselves, has control over the behavior of such systems, as well as over the behavior of natural objects generally. That would require a fantastic level of intelligence and power. But the question remains why we should need to suppose that it requires an instance of non-discursive intellect.

The situation is very different, once we remember that what is in question is not simply an object satisfying the two conditions so far stated, but rather an object in which the holistic form of that very object itself-and not a distinct instance of mental activity of any sort-is the element responsible for that object's internal functioning. Thus a natural purpose must be represented as "relat[ing] to itself in such a way that it is both cause and effect of itself" (65.372; my emphasis). Similarly: [I]n judging things whose concept as natural purposes does undoubtedly have a basis (i.e., in judging organized beings), we must always presuppose some original organization that itself uses mechanism, either to produce other organized forms or to develop the thing's own organized form into new shapes (though these shapes too always result from the purpose and conform to it). (80.418 [my emphasis]) It is the thing's own organization that constitutes the active factor in question, not some distinct mental action.6

Kant seems to make it clear that any appeal to the efficacy of mental activity, in connection with our representation of organic structures in nature, must go hand in hand with the representation of certain natural beings as themselves, through their own holistic forms, productive activities with respect to their internal functioning. Two things are required for the idea of such an object: First, the possibility of its parts (as concerns both their existence and their form) must depend on their relation to the whole. For since the thing itself

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is a purpose, it is covered [befaBt] by a concept or idea that must determine a priori everything that the thing is to contain [my emphasis].

But, Kant immediately adds, "if we think of a thing as possible only in that way, then it is merely a work of art. For it is then the product of a rational cause distinct from the matter of the thing" (65.373). Accordingly: A second requirement must be met if a thing that is a product of nature is yet to have, within itself and its inner possibility, reference to purposes, i.e., if it is to be possible only as a natural purpose, without the causality of concepts, which rational beings outside it have. This second requirement is that the parts of the thing combine into the unity of a whole because they are reciprocally cause and effect of their form .. _ . Only if a product meets that condition [as well], and only because of this, will it be both an organized and a self-organizing being, which therefore can be called a natural purpose. (65.373-4)

There are two points, and our question concerns the rela-tion between them. One is that it is necessary to represent the internal functioning of a natural purpose as determined by the structure of the object itself. The other is that it is necessary to represent the internal functioning of a natural purpose as determined by a "concept or idea." To some com-mentators this indicates confusion: [A]lthough Kant has clearly pointed out that organisms are peculiar in that they produce themselves, he is nevertheless still in the grip of the design-designer analogy to the extent that he believes that we cannot understand organisms unless we regard them as if they were products of a designing mind.7

What we should be led to conclude instead is that, if the representation of an object as a natural purpose requires representing any sort of mental activity at all, as efficacious with respect to its internal functioning, then this could only be because the representation of an object as a natural purpose requires representing it as if itself an instance of mental activity of that sort. That is, natural purposes must be represented as if they. are themselves thoughts on the part of a being whose capacity for thought is constituted by a movement in the opposite direction from the movement constitutive of discursive mental activity.s

This implies that, just by virtue of their supposed difference from acts of discursive intellect, and independent-ly of the problem of natural purposes, acts of non-discursive intellect must be represented as structured wholes in their own right. Furthermore, since Kant's appeal to the possibil-ity of non-discursive intellect in its turn depends upon a contrast with that of discursive mental activity, it is equally

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integral to Kant's analysis that acts of discursive intellect are in their own right as well-and not simply, for example, in the sense that their objects are-structured wholes of a certain sort too (albeit of a radically different sort). In effect, in other words, representing objects as natural purposes can only be, at least for beings whose intellect is discursive, representing them as like, but in a certain way also unlike, the very acts of discursive intellect through which they are apprehended.

Something like this conclusion would seem to be suggested by another point on which Kant insists with regard to natural purposes, namely, that everything that is represented as part of a natural purpose must be represented, at least by US,9 as somehow serving the "purpose" of that being as a whole: "In such a product nothing is gratuitious, purposeless, or to be attributed to a blind natural mechanism" (66.376); we must represent "nothing in an organized being as unpurposive if it is preserved in the being's propagation" (80.420).

Why should we suppose this? It would make sense in the light of the suggestion that natural purposes must be represented as if they are themselves a kind of thought, the identity of which consists in their being wholes of a certain sort in the first place. For it is not clear what sense it would make to suppose-or at least to suppose on a Kantian view of thought-that something is in some thought but does not actually enter (either as "form" or "matter") as part of the structural constitution of that thought. But suppose that we represent a natural purpose not as a thought, but merely as the product of a thought distinct from itself. Then what could preclude our supposing that some things in that product might have a purely mechanical significance, that is, might not actually function as part of its structural constitution? For a reason best known to itself, the productive agent in question may have simply chosen to place a typewriter in the stomach of every whale.

The following is the only argument that Kant offers on behalf of the claim that no part of a natural purpose is without purpose with respect to that being as a whole: [T]he possibility of such a product is to be based on an idea [Idee]. But an idea is an absolute unity of presentation ... once we take such an effect as a whole beyond the blind mechanism of nature and refer it to a supersensible basis as determining it, then we must also judge this effect wholly in terms of that principle. (66.377) What could be the logic in this, unless we are to regard a natural purpose as itself the very idea upon which its own internal structure is "based"? In fact it is worth noting that,

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in the context of this argument, the characterization of an Idee seems to be rather different from that in the earlier Critique's. In those works, an Idee would seem to be a representation that at most represents some special sort of whole, or at least the regulative possibility of some special sort of whole. What is crucial here, by contrast, is precisely the notion of an idea as a special sort of whole.

III. It is in 76 and 77 that Kant finally informs us that it

is only reflection upon a particular feature of discursive intellect, and upon the latter's difference with respect to non-discursive intellect, "that makes the concept of a natural pur-pose possible for us" (77.405). In the first of these sections, however-and by way of what Kant himself calls a kind of "digression" (nur episodisch [76.401])-Kant devotes his attention to what we must clearly understand as a second, although obviously not unrelated, comparison between such intellects. This earlier reflection concerns the distinction between possibility and actuality in the world as represented by discursive intellect. The entire distinction, Kant main-tains, "has its basis in the subject"; it is merely a function of a particular feature of discursive intellect, namely, of its requirement of "two quite heterogeneous components, under-standing to provide concepts, and sensible intuition to pro-vide objects corresponding to these" (76.401). Not needing in this way to "proceed from" universal to particular, the pos-sibility / actuality distinction would have no place in the world of non-discursive intellect.

Obviously, a certain overcoming of the distinction is relevant to the problem of natural purposes. Certain a priori structures of human understanding require us to take all natural happenings as the upshot of laws that necessitate them, as it were "mechanically," given the occurrence of various other happenings preceding their occurrence. There is nothing in this requirement to suggest that a particular variety of object might possibly exist, such that the events occurring within the various parts of that object are both necessary according to laws that relate them to other events in the whole of nature and yet also necessary with respect to that object itself as a whole, that is, necessary at least for the latter's integrity and flourishing. From our point of view, then, it is simply a possibility, or a purely "contingent" matter, relative to the requirements of mechanical causality, that the laws of "mechanism" that in fact obtain should lead

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to the production of such objects (74.396, 75.398). But if we had a faculty of non-discursive intellect, it would be different. For then "we would find no distinction between natural mechanism and the technic of nature, i.e., connection in it in terms of purposes" (76.404). So at least in this respect, we may represent natural purposes by representing them as things of a sort that would be represented by a non-discursive intellect.

It is important to see that this is not Kant's solution to the problem at hand, or at least not the whole of it. It is at most a "digression" illustrating the general method of solution. A non-discursive intellect would be one for which things are given as actual through merely representing them. Therefore, the world as so represented would be one in which everything in it is represented as necessary. But this does' nothing to distinguish among particular grounds of explanation within such worlds. Specifically, it does nothing to help describe a world in which a sufficient ground lies in the holistic form of certain objects. So the reflection in question cannot resolve our whole problem.

It is in 77 that Kant turns more specifically to the problem of parts and wholes. But the text leaves it unclear just what in the distinction between discursive and non-discursive mentality is supposed to be relevant to this problem. In any case, the intended upshot is clear: While discursive intellect "proceed[s] from the analytically universal to the particular (i.e., from concepts to the empirical intuition that is given)," a non-discursive intellect is "intuitive, and hence proceeds from the synthetically universal (the intuition of a whole as a whole) to the particular, i.e., from the whole to the parts" (77.407). By contrast with the latter, discursive intellect must proceed from parts to wholes.

Now since 77 had begun, like the "digressive" section preceding it, with reference to the relationship between concepts and their instances, or between acts of intellect and their objects, one might suppose that Kant has simply conflated two different relationships.1 For certainly, if no more is now intended by the notion of an intuitive intellect-which unlike ours "does not (by means of concepts) proceed from the universal to the particular and thus to the individ-ual" (77.406)-than the distinction already drawn by Kant in 76, then some sort of conflation seems indeed to be in question. In particular, suppose that Kant simply has in mind, as in the preceding section, a difference in the relationship between certain sorts of thoughts and their objects. Then it would remain unclear how what he has in mind could possibly be relevant to the case at hand.

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By supposition, any act of non-discursive intellect, with respect to some kind of object, ipso facto produces all possible instances of that kind. By the same token, it determines every detail as to the workings of their parts. Similarly for a non-discursive thought with respect to a whole world. By that very act the world itself, down to its last detail, is deter-mined in existence. But what does this have to do with the case of natural purposes? A natural purpose is supposed to be a thing that does not, as a whole, merely consist in certain relations among its parts. Instead, we must regard its own holistic form as in some way dictating, as it were, with re-spect to those parts, and to that extent as being "prior" to them. Nothing like this has so far been suggested. All that has been suggested is that whatever "determines" the non-discursive thought of a certain whole ipso facto determines all the details of its internal functioning. This carries no sug-gestion as to the requisite priority of a whole itself with respect to its parts.

We can avoid this problem by returning to the suggestion that natural purposes be represented as if they are them-selves acts of a certain kind of intellect. For suppose we do regard them as thoughts on the part of a non-discursive intellect. Then it would follow that we must regard them as wholes that determine their own parts. For non-discursive thoughts ipso facto determine everything about their object. And now we are supposing that certain natural objects are such thoughts. In that case, those very objects would deter-mine all the details about themselves, which is how we are supposed to represent a natural purpose.

But if this is the solution to the problem of our ability to represent natural purposes, then it must be possible for us to represent, at least problematically, the possibility not sim-ply of an object whose constitution is determined by the very thought of that sort of object, but also the possibility of a thought that in some way determines its own constitution. Until we are able to represent that possibility-and to repre-sent it precisely by means of an at least problematic contrast with our own powers of thought-then the proposed solution is no solution at all. In short, we need to return to the sug-gestion that every thought is itself a whole of some sort in the first place. In the case of discursive thought, this must of course be a whole of a sort that is constituted by means of a special kind of "proceeding" from intuitively given "ma-terial" for any such possible whole, to the actual whole in question. Only if that is so, could non-discursive thoughts, and from there by comparison natural purposes, then be

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represented as wholes in which the movement in question is just the reverse.

IV. It is clear what structuring "form" Kant has in mind as

constitutive with respect to the structure of discursive thought, namely, what he calls the "pure forms of under-standing," or the "categories." But we are now required to regard these forms in a special way, namely, as capable of operating upon a manifold of material in order to produce an actual instance of thought from that material. Thus we are required to think of the forms in question in a way that many readers of Kant are not inclined to do. More naturally, we may think of the "forms of understanding" only with re-spect to structural features of the manifold of possible ob-jects, or of possible appearances, in principle thinkable by means of those forms. In a figurative sense, then, those ob-jects or appearances might be said to constitute the "mate-rial" of our thoughts. But what we now need is a non-fig-urative sense.

I have elsewhere argued that already in the first Critique-even if only implicitly and with at least occasional confu-sion-precisely such a structure may be regarded as consti-tutive of predicative acts. Specifically, any instance of "sub-sumption" of an appearance under concepts may be regarded as an actual forming of a thought out of a body of "material" ingredient within an intuitional state, namely, out of a body of imaginative material-that is, of imaginative anticipa-tions and retentions-concerning the at least possible course of appearances proceeding from and leading up to a given one. Furthermore, by virtue of its ingredience within an ac-tual intuition, the body of imaginative material in question must be regarded as making a representational contribution to that intuition. That is, it must be regarded as having a representational correlate within the phenomenal field itself. The best way to describe this correlate, in turn, is as an imaginatively structured and pre-delineated field of possibil-ities within which the given appearance is apprehended.

It follows from this that any act of predication proper must be regarded as exercising its formative function precisely up-on such a pre-delineated, and pre-predicatively structured, phenomenal field. In other words, any act of conceptualizing a given appearance as a particular kind of object-and there-by embedding it, in terms of a whole conceptual scheme, within a manifold of causal necessities to which it is

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subject-is in every case a formation that "moves," as it were (although not necessarily temporally) from a pre-delineated manifold of possibilities for such representation to the actual representation of the object in question. In other words, it is only precisely out of that pre-delineated structure-as a piece, as we might call it, of pre-conceptually given "nature" or "proto-nature" -that any actual piece of nature is in any instance represented. Thus on this view, the conceptual rep-resentation of any piece of nature proper, hence of any natural object, is formed out of a manifold of more primitive representational material which functions in experience by contributing to the pre-delineation of a field of possibilities for any actual functioning within that piece of nature. As I have suggested elsewhere, we may then regard the relationship between this pre-delineated structure of proto-nature, and the law-governed structure of nature proper, as what Kant calls the "transcendental affinity" of appearances with respect to the operations of our understanding.

In this sense then-and on a level of analysis more funda-mental than that on which one is able to talk about our faculty of judgment as "proceeding" from particular objects to "universals" for subsumption-we might say that any act of judgmental representation necessarily proceeds from the "par-ticular" to the universal. At the same time, we can also see how this sort of "proceeding" has something to do with the relationship between an actual piece of nature and what is contained within that piece as parts in a whole (or at least as sub-functionings within some larger context of function-ing). It is not simply a question of a purely logical movement from a manifold of particulars, in principle subsumable under concepts, to a concept itself as figuratively "containing" them.

That at least would be the structure of any act of judgmental representation of the discursive sort. As Kant tells us, the idea of an act of non-discursive intellect can then only be formed in contrast with this, namely, as an act in which the "movement" in question is in the opposite direction. We of course are unable to conceive what such a mental action would be like, hence what corresponding objects would be like for such an intellect, except in the sense that we are able to represent such things in those purely contrastive terms.

This puts me in a position, finally, to return to my sugges-tion regarding the overarching unity of the third Critique. My suggestion is simply that Kant's solution to the problem of representation in both cases-that is, his solution to a problem regarding what may seem at first to be judgmental "subsumptions" that fail to conform to his own theory of

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judgment-rests on reflection on the very structure of the subsumptive act itself, as a movement from pre-conceptually available manifolds of particular content to the structure of the conceptual act proper. As I have suggested, on its most fundamental level, this reflection on the very structure of the judgmental act involves reflection on a structure literally internal to that act. And I have indicated how we might elaborate this with respect to the problem of representing natural purposes. I shall conclude by indicating what I take to be the comparison with the case of judgments of taste.

In the case of judgments regarding objects as natural purposes, we are concerned with a special kind of holistic structure. The very possibility of representing such struc-tures, to whatever extent we can do so, needed explaining. A crucial role was then played in this explanation by the fact that any act of discursive mentality is a structured whole in its own right. Within this whole, intellectual form operates upon a manifold of imaginative material. In addition, and just for that reason, that manifold must be regarded as making its contribution to that whole. In the case of the rep-resentation of natural purposes, I have tried to indicate what that contribution involves. In the case of the representation of (free) beauty, a parallel point can now be made.

The key to the parallel lies in Kant's repeated claims that, in the representation of beauty in objects, it is not simply that we are caused, by special features internal to the state of apprehending those objects, to take a certain sort of plea sure in that very apprehension. Rather, our own state of plea-sure actually serves as a kind of "predicate" in it: "The strange and different" fact is that in a judgment of taste "what is to be connected with the presentation of the object is not an empirical concept but a feeling of pleasure (hence no concept at all), though, just as if it were a predicate [my emphasis] connected with the cognition of the object ... is nevertheless to be required of everyone" (VII.191). Indeed, Kant says (36.288) that in a judgment of a taste a plea-surable feeling serves "in the place of a predicate (statt Pradikats)," and that such judgments add an actual feeling "as a predicate" (als Pradikat hinzutun) to intuitions. And he speaks (37.289) of the "predicate of pleasure" (ihr Pradikat des Wohlgefallens) in a judgment of taste. There are also other places where Kant says that a feeling of pleasure is at least as if a predicate in judgments of taste.!1 Connected with all this is of course also Kant's emphasis on (free) beauty as, or at least as if, a characteristic ascribed to objects (or to apprehended forms) in judgments of taste12-

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an ascription which Kant himself equates with those judg-ments' demand for universality and necessity.13

These claims are often taken with less seriousness than seems to me appropriate. In any case, what I want to suggest is that Kant's solution to the problem of judgments of taste is this: On account of a special harmony between imagina-tion and understanding in an intuitional state-that is, on account of some set of imaginative material in an intuitional state being especially suitable for formation into an act of conception in it-that material actually becomes a feeling of pleasure. This is compatible-although I won't pursue the details-with both of two somewhat different definitions that Kant offers of pleasure in general. 14

The crucial point is then this: that as a body of imaginative material literally in an intuition, as material available for at least possible conceptual forming-and not merely as a set of imaginative associations, say, externally connected with some intuition-the imaginative material in question must have a counterpart in the phenomenal field itself. In this case, however, the imaginative material is also a pleasure. Thus Kant's solution lies in his showing, on the basis of reflection on the very structure of the act of dis-cursive representation itself, how a pleasure can function in representation, not simply as an external accompaniment to the apprehension of an object, but precisely as a "determin-ing" (or at least a quasi-determining) factor in that appre-hension, hence precisely as (or as if) an element correspond-ing to a predicate ascribed to the object. The predicate (or quasi-predicate) in question is then, according to Kant's solu-tion, what we call "beauty" in an object.15

If this general approach is sound, then it is in a sense wrong to see the third Critique as belatedly correcting the first's neglect of an entire "power of judgment." Or at least, one may be inclined to think that such neglect occurs in the following sense: the first Critique seems only to deal with the "determining" power of judgment, as the capacity for sub-suming particulars under concepts; the third then belatedly recognizes an autonomous power of judgment, which Kant now calls "reflecting" judgment. This is true to a certain ex-tent. But our approach puts us in a position to see that Kant's analyses of the problems regarding the types of judg-ment in question may in fact turn on an additional reflection on the very structure of determining judgment itself, namely, on its structure as a kind of movement from imaginatively represented "particulars" to intellectually structured predica-tive acts as special kinds of "wholes." What is in question

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is then not so much an advance to a neglected faculty of judgment, as recognition of the fact that the very structure of the faculty of judgment grounds the possibility of judg-ments in which the predicate is no longer, in the sense ap-parently formerly required by Kant himself, a determinate "concept. "

NOTES

1 That is, the unity of a work that, while supposedly devoted to a single "power of judgment," has been described as a "baroque combination" of two quite distinct problems of judgment: Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2nd ed., tr. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), vol. I, "Appendix: Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy," p. 531 (Payne has 'queer' for Schopenhauer's 'barocke'). For some additional references to commentators who see a difficulty in connecting aesthetic and teleological judgment, see Klaus Dusing, Die Teleologie in Kants Welt-begriff, Kant-Studien Ergiinzungshefte 96 (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1968), p. 52, n. 3. Cf. also Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 60ff.

2 Throughout, references beginning with Roman or arabic numbers are to sections of the (published) "Introduction" and body, respectively, of the Critique of Judgment. Except where noted, translations are those of Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987). Numbers following the section number refer to pages in either volume V or (for the "First Introduction" ["FI"]) XX of the Akademie-Ausgabe; these pages are indicated in the margins of the Pluhar translation. Except where the contrary is indicated, bracketed English within quoted text is Pluhar's insertion.

3 Werner S. Pluhar, "Introduction" to his translation of the Critique of Judgment, pp. xcii, xcv.

4 Cf. "FI" VIII.224 (the two powers in question are in harmonious play "when, in the given presentation, the imagination's ability to apprehend, and the understanding's ability to exhibit, further each other") and IX.233 ("all that judgment can do, as a separate cognitive power, is to consider the relation, prior to any concept, in which two powers-imagination and understanding-are in a presentation . .. "); emphases mine.

5 The problem that Kant emphasizes, at least in the published intro-duction, with respect to judgments of natural purpose, seems to be a problem that arises in regard to a very different sort of "movement" to the "universal." It seems to be a problem encountered primarily in the context of the effort to "subsume" particular under more general natural laws (or particular under more general natural kinds), rather than particulars under universals in the first place (cf. IV. 179ft). It is a problem encountered, that is, in the course of our attempt to achieve a maximal systematization within sets of judgments in regard to perceivable objects. At least in the published introduction, Kant in fact entitles the "general principle" of reflecting judgment "the law of the specification of nature in terms of its empirical laws" (V.186). Just for this reason, it is difficult to see how we might hope to establish any substantive parallel between his analysis of judgments of natural purpose and that, in terms of the faculties involved in subsumption under concepts, central to his treatment of judgments of taste. But it is such a parallel that we ought to expect, if it is indeed a single "faculty" at work in both cases.

6 In this context, Kant is speaking specifically to the question of the

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evolution of organic beings, but I don't think that this should effect the point I am making. Cf. also "FI" IX. 236: "the whole should be the cause that makes possible the causality of the parts."

7 J. D. McFarland, Kant's Concept of Teleology (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1970), p. 111. McFarland does also have an independent explanation as to why a reference to non-discursive intellect is relevant to Kant's problem. However, it differs from my own. The relevance is simply that a non-discursive intellect would, unlike ourselves, be able to understand the possibility of such special structures as natural purposes, and indeed to understand how they are possible precisely without having to represent them as determined in their internal structure by something mental.

8 Cf. Klaus Diising, Die Teleologie in Kants Weltbegriff, Kant-Studien Erganziingshefte, 96 (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1968), p. 116: "This 'Idea' of the whole, which we must think as the representation of a purpose, and as ground of the particular combination of the parts, must lie within the organism itself as 'natural purpose,' not outside of it as in all technically produced works, e.g., a watch, where the Idea of the purpose lies in the watchmaker."

9 Pluhar himself suggests that "Actually, the purposive form of nature's particular might be only part of the form that the intellectual intuition is: the intuitive understanding might through the same intuition legislate, in addition, in terms of the mechanism familiar to us, or in terms of laws pertaining to both the purposive and mechanistic forms in nature ... " (p. xcv, fn. 98)

10 Cf. H. Driesch, "Kant und das Ganze," Kant-Studien, 29 (1924), 365-76. 11 Cf. 32.281; also 9.218. Cf. also "FI" VIII.224. There Kant defines

"an aesthetic judgment in general as one whose predicate can never be cognition (i.e., concept of an object ... )." A few lines earlier, however, he had suggested that the predicate of a judgment of taste could become a concept, whereas in an aesthetic judgment of sense it "cannot be a concept of an object at all." That a predicate could be other than a concept, yet also become one, is a suggestion that I take seriously. In any case, what all of this suggests is that the problem of "universal validity" simply is the problem: How is it possible for a feeling to be a predicate?

31 puts the point in similar but reversed terms: How is it possible bloB in der Beurteilung to take pleasure in something? Kant equates this with the question: "How [is it] possible for everyone to be entitled to proclaim his liking as a rule for everyone else, just as our judging of an object for the sake of cognition always [iiberhaupt] has universal rules." The solution (31.281) is that, while the "content" (In halt) peculiar to a judgment of taste is a feeling, the form remains that of objective, cognitive judgment.

12 6.211, 7.212, 8.215, 9.219, "FI" XII.249-50. 13 The former, 6.211; the latter, 9.218. 14 "FI" VIII.230-l: "Pleasure is a mental state in which a presentation

is in harmony with itself [and] which is the basis either for merely preserving this state itself ... or for producing the object of this presentation." Another definition (10.220): Pleasure is "Consciousness of a presentation's causality directed at the subject's state so as to keep him in that state ... " On the first definition we could say that a harmonious condition of one's cognitive faculties is a feeling of pleasure; on the second, only that some pleasure is a consciousness of that condition. In the section preceding the second definition-where Kant provides the "key" to his solution-he speaks both of a condition of one's faculties as "ground" of the pleasure and of the pleasure as identical with the state of "enlivenment" (Belebung) of imagination and understanding.

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What I want to propose is compatible with both definitions. The suggestion that, on account of a special harmony between imagination and understanding in an intuition, a certain body of imaginative material actually becomes a feeling of pleasure is compatible with denying that the pleasure is identical with the harmony itself of the faculties. But the suggestion is also of course compatible with the pleasure in question being a consciousness of the latter.

15 The suggestion, in other words, is that beauty is an "intentional cor-relate" of imaginative apprehension through a certain feeling. Equating apprehensible beauty with an apprehensible "purposiveness" in things, such correlation seems to be at stake in the following argument, for example:

[T]hat subjective [feature] of a presentation which cannot at all become an element of cognition is the pleasure or displeasure connected with that presentation .... Now a thing's purposiveness, insofar as it is presented in the perception of the thing, is also not a characteristic of the object itself .... Therefore, the subject [feature] of the presentation which cannot at all become an element of cognition is the purposiveness that precedes the cognition of an object .... Therefore, in this case we call the object purposive only because its presentation is directly connected with the feeling of pleasure, and this presentation itself is an aesthetic presentation of purposivness. (VII.189; perhaps therefore is too strong a translation.)

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