Among the earliest and most persistent objections to Kant’s Critical philosophy are those that denounce its stark dualisms and lack of unity. Most significant among these Kantian dualisms is the dualism between the practical and the theoretical aspects of the Critical philosophy. Kant apparently felt the force of the objection that his Critical philosophy lacked unity: one major stated aim of the Critique of the Power of Judgement (hereafter CPJ) is to bridge the ‘incalculable gulf’ between nature and freedom, the domains of theoretical and practical philosophy, respectively (5: 175-6).

In this impressively wide-ranging book, Lara Ostaric tackles this issue of unity head-on. Her central insight is as follows: in order to see nature aright theoretically, one must see it aright practically. The unity of Kant’s Critical system is not due to some higher third principle, nor primarily via reflective judgement or a general principle of purposiveness, but this unity is brought about by subordinating theoretical judgement to practical cognition, in what Ostaric terms ‘moral image realism’. This means that we are to see nature as indirectly exhibiting practical postulates. Ostaric eschews Kant’s own notion of a symbol for such indirect exhibition, describing the relation between nature and the practical postulate as one of a ‘schema-analogue’.

Ostaric’s interpretation of the unity of Kant’s Critical system is at once an interpretation of the unity of the Critique of Judgement. Her interpretation of the CPJ is novel among recent interpretations in its construal of that unity as grounded in the practical. While other interpretations look to reflective judgement or the principle of purposiveness as that which unifies the two parts (aesthetic and teleological) of the CPJ, Ostaric insists that such unity is secured through the way that each kind of judgement – aesthetic and teleological – indirectly exhibits the objects of practical philosophy. In this review, I will offer a summary of the book before offering some evaluative comments and challenges.

Following a brief summarizing introduction, this book is divided into three major parts, each comprising three chapters. Part I focuses on Kant’s pre-1790 practical philosophy and sets the stage for the innovations and developments in the CPJ. Within Part I, Chapters 1 and 2 tie together Kant’s notions of practical cognition and the objective reality of moral freedom in order to offer a realist interpretation of Kant’s moral Glaube. Ostaric argues (convincingly, in my view) against anti-realist or purely instrumentalist readings of moral Glaube. She contends that Kant’s moral Glaube is assent to claims that are objective and genuinely cognitive; such claims involve practical, rather than theoretical, objects and matters of fact.

Chapter 3 tackles Kant’s perplexing claim in §88 of the CPJ that the practical postulates (here, the final end of the world) must have ‘objective theoretical reality’ (5: 453). This crucial chapter sets the stage for the project of the book by defining ‘moral image realism’ and motivating this interpretation philosophically. For Ostaric’s Kant, we must be able to represent nature as aiming at the highest good, in such a way that theoretical and practical philosophy are in harmony. Ostaric closes Chapter 3 by arguing that ‘the object of the idea of the highest good as the final end of nature must be given to us in sensibility’ (p. 98). Kantians will balk, but Ostaric is careful to explain what she means: reflective judgement must represent nature as a purposively ordered whole as a ‘schema analogue’ of the highest good. In other words, nature, in its presumed purposiveness, indirectly exhibits to us the postulate of the highest good. Thus reflective judgement plays a dual role, insofar as the principles of reflective judgement are requisite for our judgement of nature, but also in a practical sense, since the representations of reflective judgement (for instance, of a natural end) serve as schema-analogues for ideas that are practically necessary.

Part II applies the framework of ‘moral image realism’, introduced in Chapter 3, to the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgement. In Chapter 4, she argues for a novel interpretation of the claim that beauty is a symbol of morality; namely, beauty symbolically presents the idea of the highest good, thereby presenting nature to us as aiming at our own moral destiny. Ostaric follows this in Chapter 5 with an argument that aesthetic judgement cannot be understood in isolation from morality, highlighting the ‘feeling of life’ and the role of the productive imagination in free play. She argues that the imagination indirectly exhibits the idea of the soul. Chapter 6 examines certain kinds of aesthetic failures, most prominently the ugly, partly in order to address a potential challenge to moral image realism, that judgements of the ugly would indicate a contra-purposiveness in nature.

In Part III Ostaric turns to nature’s systematicity and teleological judgement. Chapter 7 draws on the Appendix to the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason as well as the unpublished and published introductions to the CPJ. Ostaric here addresses the systematicity of nature and its relation to practical reason, contending that reason’s need for the unconditioned is a need of reason as such, particular neither to the theoretical nor practical standpoints. Ostaric argues that reason’s practical ends are presupposed in the investigation of nature. Chapter 8 identifies the reciprocal causality of a natural end as a schema-analogue of freedom, Relatedly, the intuitive understanding described in §77 of the CPJ is to be interpreted as securing not just the (possible) unity of mechanistic and teleological judgements, but also the coherence of the theoretical and practical representations of nature. Finally, the book culminates in a compelling chapter dealing with historical progress and its relation to the ultimate and final ends of nature. She offers a nuanced interpretation, arguing that Kant’s presentation of history is a schema-analogue of God’s providence, while avoiding the claim that Kant offers a moral history, which would run afoul of his own Critical strictures.

This book is a powerful and singular contribution to our understanding of Kant’s CPJ and his Critical philosophy more generally. Scholarship on Kant’s third Critique tends toward the narrow: interpreters focus on either aesthetics or teleology, or reflective judgement and lawfulness more generally, or sometimes its fascinating Appendix, the Methodology of the Critique of the Power of Teleological Judgement. When scholars address unity, such discussions tend to focus on the unity of the book, rather than the unity of the Critical philosophy more generally. Ostaric’s monograph is thus a welcome addition, with a helpful focus. She offers us a framework to make sense of Kant’s own claim in the introductions that he is offering something to unify theoretical and practical philosophy, however tenuously. This framework is attentive to the primacy of the practical and makes sense of the parallel ways that the supersensible shows up throughout the CPJ, particularly in the resolutions to both antinomies. As Ostaric suggests in the conclusion, her perspective on the CPJ explains its central importance in the post-Kantian philosophical era. It suggests (implicitly) why German Idealists and Romantics embraced and developed its themes of unity, genius, art, historical progress, the organic, and the supersensible.

Given the novelty and importance of the framework that Ostaric is employing, it would have been helpful for its justification, motivations, status, and features to be a greater explicit focus of the book. The relative paucity of the explanation and motivations for ‘moral image realism’ and the notion of a ‘schema-analogue’ make the central claims of the book more difficult to discern and thereby more difficult to accept. After a slim introduction of these notions in Chapter 3 (in addition to a brief one in the introduction) Ostaric then immediately turns to apply it to aesthetic judgement. The reader would benefit from a more thorough discussion of the status of the claim that something is a schema-analogue and what exactly gives rise to this claim (is it a psychological need? a boon to our practical lives? a principle of reflective judgement?). But one is left to discern these things primarily through their application to various aspects of aesthetic and teleological judgement. I turn now to some more specific elements of the book.

One factor that complicates the book is that Ostaric appeals to multiple concepts of practical philosophy, rather than giving a more streamlined account in terms of freedom. For instance, Chapter 5 contends that the free play of the imagination is a schema-analogue of the soul, which is itself the ‘supersensible ground of freedom’. But freedom is the more pervasive, unifying, textually foregrounded idea. Thus, here and elsewhere in the book, it is not always clear what these multiple points of connection to the practical philosophy (to the soul, the highest good, God’s providence) add to Ostaric’s interpretation. Furthermore, in Chapter 3, Ostaric argues for a reading of the Methodology of the Teleological Power of Judgement and Kant’s discussion of the final end that heavily privileges both a moral community and the highest good, in accord with the focus of Kant’s subsequent writings in moral philosophy, such as the Metaphysics of Morals and Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Ostaric identifies the final end, which Kant glosses as ‘the human being under the moral law’, with the highest good (§86, 5: 445). However, the CPJ tends to focus more on the moral individual and on freedom. While these elements of Kant’s practical philosophy clearly go hand-in-hand, freedom seems to be the crucial concept here, only secondarily a communal highest good. Consider the following crucial passage:

Here (and elsewhere) Kant prioritizes freedom as that which anchors these moral ideas in nature.

Ostaric’s application of this framework of ‘moral image realism’ is more compelling (to this reader, at least) when she does foreground freedom, for instance, in Chapter 8. This chapter interprets the Antinomy of Teleological Judgement as a conflict between ‘the analytic procedure of the understanding and … the synthetic procedure of reason’ (p. 228). The latter represents nature as ultimately governed by freedom. Ostaric presents this as ‘absolute freedom’, or the freedom or practical causality of a divine artificer and connects the unity of these perspectives to the intuitive understanding. While some (myself included) may prefer to interpret these appeals to the divine in §§75-78 as fully distinct and merely heuristic, Ostaric’s account warrants careful scholarly attention.

I conclude by considering a particularly instructive portion of the book. Ostaric suggests in Chapter 7 that reason’s theoretical and practical needs are not to be distinguished. Therefore, the need to see nature as a lawfully ordered whole is not meaningfully distinct from the need to see it as the product of a mind. One might object that if reflective judgement is directed to construct a system of nature that fulfils these needs, then it appears we might be problematically ‘stacking the deck’, so to speak, on a number of readings that emphasize the merely regulative status and heuristic role of the principles of judgement. In other words, we should not be pleased at nature’s ‘fit’ to our moral and rational vocations, if we have intentionally constructed the system of nature according to our moral and rational vocations. But Ostaric’s moral image realism emphasizes rather the way that various sensible realities (beauty, genius, organism, history) exhibit indirectly to us reason’s moral objects, in a way that is excessive for our ordinary system of theoretical cognition. These moral objects are not arbitrary posits, but they are rather grounded in practical cognition, they guide theoretical cognition of nature, and they are also affirmed in these various indirect exhibitions. This is a masterful and insightful big-picture take on Kant’s Critical system, and I look forward to seeing thoughtful responses and challenges to this important work.