Critique of Judgement (Bernard Translation)

notion of what it is suited for. In the first case, the aesthetic judgment is applied; in the second, the teleological judgment A way of looking at things in terms of their purpose, goal, or design (from the Greek word telos, meaning "end" or "purpose"). is applied. It thus appears that the Critique of Judgement has two main divisions: it treats first the philosophy of taste—the Beautiful and the Sublime in nature—and secondly, the teleology of how nature works. It is an interesting literary parallel that St. Augustine suggests (Confessions iv. 15) that he had written a book, On the Beautiful and the Fitting original: De Pulchro et Apto, in which these seemingly different topics were combined; he wrote that "the beautiful is that which is so in itself; the fitting, however, is what is appropriate because it is adapted to something else" original: "pulchrum esse, quod per se ipsum ; aptum, autem, quod ad aliquid accommodatum deceret". A beautiful object has no purpose outside of itself and the observer; however, a useful object serves further ends. Both, however, may be brought under the higher category of things that the Judgment considers purposive.

We have here, then, first a basis for a philosophy of taste that exists from the start original: "a priori", and Kant works out its details with great care. He borrowed little from the writings of his predecessors, but instead followed a path of his own, as was always his method. He quotes with approval from Edmund Burke’s Treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful, which was available to him in a German translation; however, he is careful to remark that Burke’s work has value as psychology, not as philosophy. He may have also read Francis Hutcheson’s Inquiry, which had also been translated into German, and he was a complete master of David Hume’s opinions. Of other writers on Beauty, he only names Batteux and Lessing.