Practical Reason: Kantian Innovation

Immanuel Kant introduced the third faculty of reason.  The following quoted passages are from the article "Kant’s Aesthetics" by Douglas Burnham (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP))

The basic, explicit purpose of Kant’s Critique of Judgment is to investigate whether the ‘power’ (also translated as ‘faculty’ – and we will use the latter here) of judgment provides itself with a priori principle. In earlier work, Kant had pretty much assumed that judgment was simply a name for the combined operation of other, more fundamental, mental faculties. Now, Kant has been led to speculate that the operation of judgment might be organized and directed by a fundamental a priori principle that is unique to it. The third Critique sets out to explore the validity and implications of such a hypothesis.

In the third Critique, Kant’s account of judgment begins with the definition of judgment as the subsumption of a particular under a universal (Introduction IV). If, in general, the faculty of understanding is that which supplies concepts (universals), and reason is that which draws inferences (constructs syllogisms, for example), then judgment ‘mediates’ between the understanding and reason by allowing individual acts of subsumption to occur (cf. e.g. Introduction III). This leads Kant to a further distinction between determinate and reflective judgments (Introduction IV). In the former, the concept is sufficient to determine the particular – meaning that the concept contains sufficient information for the identification of any particular instance of it. In such a case, judgment’s work is fairly straightforward (and Kant felt he had dealt adequately with such judgments in the Critique of Pure Reason). Thus the latter (where the judgment has to proceed without a concept, sometimes in order to form a new concept) forms the greater philosophical problem here. How could a judgment take place without a prior concept? How are new concepts formed? And are there judgments that neither begin nor end with determinate concepts? This explains why a book about judgment should have so much to say about aesthetics: Kant takes aesthetic judgments to be a particularly interesting form of reflective judgments. (Douglas Burnham, "Kant’s Aesthetics", Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP), paras. 11-12).

From notes:

• Understanding concerns necessity.
• What [Kant] calls reason describes free will because free will is the capacity of the human being to act morally in the interest of duty despite all else.
• Kant moved Aristotelian categories into the human mind: space, time, causality are all in the human mind.
• He created the bridge in thought between understanding and the real with the notion of aesthetic judgment: every human being can recognize beauty.”
• The recognition of beauty is human virtue in the form of power. It is located in the body in the sense of taste. He called this reflective judgment.
• There is no concept for reflective judgment.
• Reflective judgment is not universal and can be seen as the commodity of the human being.
• Hannah Arendt, after World War II, revived interest in Kant’s Third Critique On Reason: by proportional analogy, a person can understand how to make a choice that is beautiful rather than ugly.
• Kant named the faculty of thought that is most electric.
• A zone opens in Paris that was like the zone that opened in Athens (literacy), but in a capacity of aesthetics (reason/science).
• Modernity – Virno – multitude – experience of judgment, making an ethical decision – Kant diremption (individuals separated from their own experiences – the failure of own experience – the sublime is simply overwhelmed).
• Problem: when we moved into the city with electracy, local, individual, experience was erased.
• Idea that we are cut-off; all maxims have been cut-off.
• The authority, now, is a scientific view of the world.