Abstract
In this essay I explore the phenomenon of without a in Kant's account of aesthetic judgments. I begin by considering what Kant means by purposiveness in general, and then I analyze the specific without a that belongs to aesthetic judgments. I analyze the purposiveness without a purpose of the beautiful first in terms of space and then in terms of time. The essay concludes with a consideration of how purposiveness without a purpose makes beauty resistant to thought.
Highlights
In this essay I explore the phenomenon of “purposiveness without a purpose” in Kant’s account of aesthetic judgments
After considering aesthetic judgments in terms of their quality and their quantity, and before considering them in terms of their modality—all of which we might have suspected— Kant suddenly turns his attention to "the relation of purposes that is taken into consideration in them" (§10, 219/64).i The analysis of purposiveness seems to arise from nowhere, and its strangeness is only augmented when we discover that what really interests Kant is a very particular kind of purposiveness, which he calls "purposiveness without a purpose [Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck]."
I will first analyze purposiveness in general as Kant explains it in the third Critique, and I’ll consider the purposiveness without a purpose that Kant associates with aesthetic judgments
Summary
The general transcendental character of purposiveness in Kant’s philosophy must be understood first before we can understand the particular form of purposiveness that Kant assigns to aesthetic judgments. Purposiveness is a sign that an object was created by a rational agency following the pattern provided by a rational concept This rational concept is the transcendental ground of the object, the condition of its possibility in terms of both its existence and its form (§10, 220/65). In this way the effect comes before, and in a certain sense determines, the cause in an aesthetic judgment This occurs because the thought of purposiveness makes use of the presentation of the object not as an occasion for the projective synthesis of cognition, but rather for the regressive reversal of reflection
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