The Nature of the Subject: "Judgment" and the Law of Specification in Kant's "Critique of Judgment"

Abstract

KANT'S Critique of Judgment is not about objects?beautiful or other wise?but about the judging subject. I would like to make two points about the reflexive relation between nature and the subject ?that is, the judging subject?based on paragraphs six and seven of Section V from the Introduction to the Critique of Judgment. The first point concerns Kant's use of the term Urteil, or and related terms. The sec ond point concerns the law of specification, and what Kant calls the gl?ck licher Zufall, or fortunate coincidence, between nature and the subject. One way to investigate the relation between nature and the subject is to look closely at the term since judgment is the activity that brings nature and the subject together. As someone from one of the philo logical disciplines, I tend to answer the question, What is judgment? by asking, What does the word 'judgment' mean? ?more precisely, what might we learn by examining the German word Urteilskraft? I'm not suggesting that German words have a mystical quality that makes Kant's meaning clear to anyone who reads the German original. But there does seem to me to be a danger in the increasingly common practice of reading texts only in translation, or in summaries of translations. The word Urteilskraft, or judgment, is itself very important. It marks the transition between Kant's first two Critiques of the human faculties, namely the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason, and the third Critique, that of Judgment. It is important to understand all we can about the difference between reason and judgment ?beginning with the words themselves. The philological inquiry that follows examines how Kant's words are bound up with Kant's argument; and for such a project, we must briefly return to the German. The word Urteil has the same legal connotations as the English word judgment; and I am not the first to remark that an entire juridical vocabulary is here employed by Kant: words like law, domain,