The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment

by John H. Zammito

In this philosophically sophisticated and historically significant work, John H. Zammito reconstructs Kant's composition of The Critique of Judgment and reveals that it underwent three major transformations before publication. He shows that Kant not only made his "cognitive" turn, expanding the project from a "Critique of Taste" to a Critique of Judgment but he also made an "ethical" turn. This "ethical" turn was provoked by controversies in German philosophical and religious culture, in particular the writings of Johann Herder and the Sturm und Drang movement in art and science, as well as the related pantheism controversy. Such topicality made the Third Critique pivotal in creating a "Kantian" movement in the 1790s, leading directly to German Idealism and Romanticism.

The austerity and grandeur of Kant's philosophical writings sometimes make it hard to recognize them as the products of a historical individual situated in the particular constellation of his time and society. Here Kant emerges as a concrete historical figure struggling to preserve the achievements of cosmopolitan Aufkl-rung against challenges in natural science, religion, and politics in the late 1780s. More specifically Zammito suggests that Kant's Third Critique was animated throughout by a fierce personal rivalry with Herder and by a strong commitment to traditional Christian ideas of God and human moral freedom.

"A work of extraordinary erudition. Zammito's study is both comprehensive and novel, connecting Kant's work with the aesthetic and religious controversies of the late eighteenth century. He seems to have read everything. I know of no comparable historical study of Kant's Third Critique."-Arnulf Zweig, translator and editor of Kant's ;IPhilosophical Correspondence, 1759-1799;X

"An intricate, subtle, and exciting explanation of how Kant's thinking developed and adjusted to new challenges over the decade from the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason to the appearance of the Critique of Judgment. "—John W. Burbidge, Review of Metaphysics

"There has been for a long time a serious gap in English commentary on Kant's Critique of Judgment ; Zammito's book finally fills it. All students and scholars of Kant will want to consult it."—Frederick Beiser, Times Literary Supplement

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction

490 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1992

Reviews

[Enrique · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book refutes some prejudices about the motives behind Kant's magnificent research. (shared by prominent Kant readers like Jaspers, Cassirer, and even Hannah Arendt)

Herder and the first Hamman, the storm und Drang, (a Hamman interpretation of) Spinoza, Kant have an axe to grind, and is better not to mess around with Kant.

The concepts that he used (reflexive judgment and purposiveness) are already present in German idealism (Wolffian school), but Kant has the remarkable ability to extend the precision of clear concepts.

There is also a good deal about the critique of judgment vs the English theory of the sublime. The real discovery of Kant is the reflexive judgments. This opens the door to German idealism intellectual intuitions.

Kant didn't know English so his quotes are influenced by Hamman and Mendelsohn translations of Addison.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an exceptional historical accounting of Kant's Critique of Judgment, containing a close reading of the text, the philosophical questions it sought to answer, and the historical context in which it was written. Zammito shows how the Critique of Judgment fits into Kant's philosophical project as well as how Kant carves out a niche for the concept of beauty that is neither dependent upon the good nor the true, as an outward manifestation of perfection, as the rationalists would have it nor merely a matter of taste and custom as the empiricists would claim. An accessible book for anyone interested in Kant scholarship or merely the understanding of Kant's work.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the middle section of this well written, very detailed discussion of Kant in the context of the late eighteenth century. I had imagined Kant as an advocate of a non-mechanistic way of viewing people. It seems that Kant was struggling with the difficulty putting our inclination to view organisms as purposive in the mechanistic world view he had adopted from Newton.