Since Paul Guyer published Kant and the Claims of Taste almost fifty years ago, interest in Kant’s third Critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgment (CJ), has only increased. This work continues to be the source of scholarly activity on the part of Kant experts as well as a source of inspiration for philosophers from various subfields. Rightly so. Kant claims that his book will ‘bring the entire critical enterprise to an end’, and that it will bridge the ‘incalculable gulf’ between nature and freedom. It is about the beautiful, the sublime, biology, and the highest good. It seems that in this century, on average, at least one book a year on Kant’s third Critique has been published by a major press, along with numerous journal articles devoted to pointing out difficulties in Kant’s text and numerous others to solving these difficulties. This is in addition to work that seeks to show how the third Critique has something to offer contemporary theories of aesthetics, normativity, and epistemology. At this point, one might think, all of the positions have been taken. But this is not the case. Ido Geiger’s Kant and the Claims of the Empirical World proposes a new and compelling interpretation of Kant’s third Critique.

In Kant and the Claims of the Empirical World, Geiger aims to show the significance of the CJ for Kant’s larger critical project. He argues that Kant’s overarching aim in the CJ is to complete the transcendental account of empirical experience, only begun in Kant’s first Critique, the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR). According to Geiger, for Kant, not only are there transcendental conditions for our experience of objects in general, as the first Critique demonstrates, but there are also transcendental conditions for our experience of empirical particulars, that is, our experience of the empirical world in all of its fine-grained richness and particularity.

Geiger makes his case by arguing that what Kant calls the a priori principle of the reflective power of judgment, which states that nature is purposive for our cognitive faculties, and for which Kant provides a ‘deduction’ in the CJ, should be understood to be the transcendental condition for our experience of nature in all of its empirical particularity and detail. Geiger writes: ‘our ability to experience, make claims about and offer explanations of the empirical world makes transcendental claims upon us’ (p. 8) and it is Kant’s aim in the third Critique to provide a deduction for these claims.

Geiger provides a strong defense of this unified view of the third Critique. As I see it, he is arguing that in this work as a whole Kant provides a transcendental account of our rich experience of the empirical world. And indeed, this captures what we would expect of a Critique of the Power of Judgment; an account of a pure form of judgment by which we can have a fine-grained, nuanced, cognitive relation to the world. That is to say, an account of good judgment. In presenting his argument, Geiger comes up with several original interpretations of key topics in the book. Many of these made me see familiar passages in a new way.

Geiger argues that we should see the two divisions of the CJ – the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment and the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment – as corresponding respectively to the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Logic in the first Critique. Each section of the CJ therefore provides a different transcendental condition for the possibility of our particular empirical experience of nature. This novel approach to the CJ allows Geiger to interpret the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment as what completes the deduction of the transcendental principle of reflection that, in Geiger’s view, Kant only begins in the Introduction to the book. It does this by establishing the transcendental status of the principle of the conceptual purposiveness of nature. According to Geiger, Kant takes it to be a basic fact that we describe certain particular phenomena as self-organizing and thus that teleological judgment is a necessary component of our judging. Given, however, the discursive nature of our cognition, that is, the fact that that we make determinative judgments of objects and have cognition of them only through general concepts, then, in order to make teleological judgments of the particulars we experience, we must presuppose the conceptual purposiveness of nature as a whole. We can only do this by thinking of nature holistically and presupposing that it is a comprehensive system of conceptual determinations. In other words, we must judge nature as something that is conceptually purposive for our cognition, and we do this by having a teleological conception of nature as a whole (p. 86). This argument thus constitutes what Geiger takes to be the ‘transcendental logic’ of the CJ.

Geiger then interprets the first section of the CJ, the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment, as a ‘transcendental aesthetic’ of empirical perception, that is, as what provides the aesthetic, sensible, conditions of a particular empirical experience. He argues for the, admittedly controversial, claim that the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment is aesthetic not because it concerns the feeling of pleasure, but because it contends with the spatial conditions of empirical experience. These spatial conditions are the conditions that enable us to delineate a natural object from the manifold of intuition and come up with natural forms that ‘allow for a first non-conceptual sorting of natural objects, which underwrites our grasp of natural kinds’ (p. 147). Our pleasurable response to certain spatial forms of natural objects thus ‘affords a first glimpse of where the causal joints of nature are located’ (p. 14).

Geiger defends his view by highlighting passages where Kant does indeed seem to argue that the object of aesthetic judgment is the ‘shape’ of objects (p. 150) and by pointing out that Kant frequently gives as examples of pure judgments of taste natural kinds, such as ‘the rose’ and ‘the tulip’. I found this discussion to be eye-opening and persuasive. On Geiger’s interpretation, Kant’s discussion of our capacity to form a ‘normal idea’, a kind of composite or schema of an object, is what makes possible our conceptual grasp of a species. Just as in the first Critique where Kant argues that there are transcendental schemata that are time determinations of an inner sense, so in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant argues that there are empirical schemata of outer sense that are spatial (p. 159). It is in this way that Kant articulates the transcendental conditions of a particular experience of the external world. Thus, although aesthetic judgments are not in themselves conceptual, nor are they cognitions, by delineating the manifold given in intuition into objects, they ground every cognitive judgment through a preconceptual sorting of objects.

In the Conclusion, Geiger highlights the central contribution of his book. This is that Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment should be understood to be providing us with a distinctive form of empiricism, one in which we form empirical concepts by a kind of transcendentally grounded preconceptual sorting of objects according to their observable similarities governed by the principle of judgment; the principle of purposiveness. As I understand it, this principle frames our empirical engagement with nature as what is systematically ordered, so that we can further investigate it in all of its rich detail. This frame, however, merely guides our investigation and leaves it open for adjustments. Indeed, according to Geiger, this is how it should be. Empirical knowledge is always open to revision.

Here, however, one might ask, what guides this sorting process if it is not concepts that we already possess? Geiger’s answer, which I find convincing, is that what guides this process is not a concept we already possess, but rather a responsibility and a rational commitment to test and revise our observations. Geiger therefore emphasizes the importance of Kant’s account of the sensus communis, which he takes to involve the claim that it is a necessary condition of cognition that we each carve up the sensible world into natural kinds in ‘the same manner’ (p. 190) as we expect of others.

There are many more original ideas in the book, including an incisive new account of the antinomy of reflective judgment, that I do not have the space to discuss here. I will conclude with some further thoughts about Geiger’s account.

Geiger notes in his Introduction that while there are two principal problems addressed in the CJ – (1) the problem of bridging the gap between our theoretical and practical worldviews, and (2) the problem of the transcendental conditions of a particular empirical experience and knowledge of nature – only the second problem is the focus of his book. This leads one to wonder what has been left unaccounted for and how central is the problem of particular empirical experience compared with the problem of the relationship between freedom and nature. I think Geiger could have done more to address this question.

In fact, I think Geiger’s way of showing how Kant solves problem (2) concerning our particular empirical experience, can also be fruitfully used to address problem (1), the gap between the theoretical and practical worldviews. Indeed, practical reason also requires judgment and is engaged with our experience of particulars – here it is the experience of our own particular desires. Just as we require a principle of the systematic ordering of concepts of natural objects in order to engage with the richness and detail of nature so that we can make empirical judgments about it and sort it into natural kinds, so do we also require a principle of reflective judgment for the systematic ordering of our duties, given our particular desires. And, I would argue, these principles are the same. Geiger’s account of the principle of reflection allows us to see how the very same reflection that is involved in sorting out what is, by providing a systematic frame through which we can make empirical judgments, can also be used in sorting out what we ought to do according of a systematic ordering of duties. In fact, in my view, a principle of judgment is required to judge our possible actions with regard to a comprehensive and hierarchically ordered system of duties, and thereby to resolve conflicts in our obligations, and help us to see what we ought to do.Footnote ¹

This is one example of possible future work on Kant’s CJ that will certainly be inspired by the many insights in Kant and the Claims of the Empirical World; a book that demonstrates the continuing rewards the third Critique has to offer.