The JournalAESTHETIC

of Value Inquiry
36: 369382, 2002.
VALUE AND THE PRIMACY OF THE PRACTICAL
2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

369

Aesthetic Value and the Primacy of the Practical in Kants

Philosophy
JANE KNELLER
Department of Philosophy, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA

More and more in recent years, Kants philosophy as a whole is being interpreted through the lens of his practical philosophy. This development in many
respects has been a much needed pendant to what might be called second wave
Kantianism in the United States, when mid-twentieth-century analytic philosophers began a serious re-evaluation of the first Critique for developments
in the history of modern theories of knowledge and metaphysics. The turn
toward interpretive strategies that give priority to the practical philosophy,
due in large part to John Rawls, has allowed scholars to put the theory of knowledge in context, and has provided the motivation and basis for further important developments in contemporary theories of moral constructivism and
Kantian-type ethics. While the contribution to ethical and political theory that
the interpreters have made has been enormous, the tendency to read Kant as
first and foremost a moral thinker is misleading, and exclusive emphasis on
practical reasoning in Kants thought may in fact lead scholars away from
much that is fascinating and philosophically innovative in his theory of value.
In particular, Kants account of aesthetic value is easily ignored or subordinated by the recent stress on the primacy of the practical in his system.
1. The Primacy of the Practical: Methodological
In an essay entitled Kant, Fichte and the Radical Primacy of the Practical,
Karl Ameriks suggests three ways of understanding the primacy attributed to
Kants account of practical reason by various interpreters. He argues that pure
practical reason may be understood as primary for Kant in the sense of having special significance because it is the sole source of revelation to us of what
is of unconditional interest and value, the moral will, and that it may also be
primary in the sense of revealing, through the postulates of pure practical
reason, a positive and relatively filled in version of our ultimate destiny,
even as he goes on to reject a third possible sense of primacy, namely, what
he calls a methodological primacy that attributes to practical reason the
ability to set the fundamental conditions of philosophical argument. 1 Some

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of the strongest arguments that Kants philosophical argument and method

must be seen as fundamentally practical and hence that practical reason is
methodologically primary in Amerikss sense have come in recent years from
the camp of neo-Kantian constructivists following more or less in the footsteps of Rawls. Of the many important contributions, Onora ONeill in particular has argued most strenuously that Kants entire philosophy must be
understood as procedurally practical to its core. She argues that since Kant
has repudiated Cartesian introspective procedures, he must launch his entire
philosophy in a novel way:
Where does Kant start? If he cant begin by vindicating philosophical
method, where can he begin? The motto offers the clue that we must see
the enterprise as practical: It is a task, not a body of opinions, and moreover a task that has to be shared. The first move must then presumably be
to recruit those others who will form the task force.2
ONeill argues later that the central point that Kant makes with these analogies is that reasons authority must (since it receives no antecedent or transcendent vindication) be seen as a practical and collective task, like that of
constituting political authority.3 Furthermore, Critique of reason is possible only if we think of critique as recursive and reason as constructed rather
than imposed.4
The method of reason is essentially practical, the exercise of autonomous
agency, and its autonomy is also its vindication, according to ONeill. The
Copernican revolution is not itself a method but a preliminary trial. It is a
hypothesis that leads to an assembling of materials available for use in the
actual tasks of reason. The real unveiling of methodology only comes later,
after the preliminary assemblage of materials:
At the beginning we had no material to discipline; now a hypothesis about
how we might embark on the tasks of reason has supplied some material,
but has not shown how this material is to be combined into the edifice of
knowledge. It has, however, provided a vantage point for a reflexive task,
which could not be undertaken initially, but only retrospectively, reflectively, toward the end.5
Because the Doctrine of Elements of the Critique of Pure Reason inventories
materials but does not provide a determinate account of their integrated deployment she argues, in the end, maxims to regulate the use of these capacities in thinking and acting must be adopted and the supreme principle of
reason is identified with that of practical reason: the requirement that any
fundamental principles of thought and action we deploy be ones that it is not
impossible for all to follow. . . . Here we begin to understand why Kant held

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that the Categorical Imperative was the supreme principle not just of practical but of all reasoning.6
ONeill proposes interpreting Kants critical philosophy as a generalized
version of the social contract theory for all aspects of human experience and
valuing. In her dramatic reconstruction of Kants philosophy, the critical edifice is seen as a sort of all-encompassing contract drawn up by rational individuals who take the Categorical Imperative as their sole procedural principle.
This is a bold interpretive move, and, not surprisingly, it suggests some unusual results. The analogy to social contract theory, in which social and moral
values only first become possible upon agreement of the parties to the terms
of contract, raises questions of whether or not it must follow for ONeill that
the values of all rationality, expressed generally by the terms of the rational
contract as autonomy in thought and action, but including cognitive and aesthetic value, must likewise wait upon the contract itself. It suggests that all
value is socially constructed, including even the truth value of the categories
and principles inventoried in the first Critique, insofar as reason itself is only
vindicated later through the constructive act. This is not a view easily pinned
on Kant.
In general, it is an extremely peculiar feature of this reading of the priority
of practical reason that it relegates the Copernican turn in the theory of knowledge to the status of mere hypothesis, and the results of the Deduction and
Principles to an inventory of materials for knowledge, rather than a relatively
free-standing account of empirical knowledge. The subordination of Kants
theory of cognition to the theory of practical reason also seems to pull the rug
out from under Kants stance that he had to deny knowledge to make room
for faith, including autonomous freedom. The denial of knowledge is not a
repudiation or subordination of cognition, but an explicit claim that the method
and purposes of a theory of cognition are in an important sense external to
those of human moral practice. A prior and independent account of the conditions of the possibility of cognition, most of which take place in us without
our explicit awareness, is the locus from which Kant discovers a space outside or beyond those conditions where practical reason might operate. To
interpret the work of the Transcendental Analytic as mere hypothesis and
inventory on the way to an account in which knowledge is defined as reflexive social practice eliminates the self-standing account of empirical knowledge, and with it the stance from which to deny that knowledge. It is hard to
square ONeills claims for the methodological primacy of practical reason
with Kants stated need to establish separate domains for the various applications of reason.7
Finally, for Kant, vindicating reason not only requires a methodological
distinction between principles of thought and knowledge on the one side, and
of action and morality on the other, but the introduction of a third faculty,
feeling, along with its own principle of judgment.8 Far from identifying theory

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and practice under a single principle, Kant reiterates their separation, and then
seeks to show how they can possibly be reunited in the human subject through
the mediation of a reflective concept of purpose and its human manifestation
in a universally communicable feeling.9 Because ONeill sees the problem for
reason as that of uniting thought and action under a single principle, she tends
to neglect Kants explicit statement of his overall aim: that of finding a mediating principle to negotiate and harmonize, but not to subsume, the two capacities of reason.
ONeills interpretation is motivated by a commitment to Enlightenment
political values and especially to the value of non-coercive public discourse.10 She assumes that critique of reason is only possible if we think of
critique as recursive and reason as constructed rather than imposed.11 She
repeatedly poses the following dilemma. Reason must be the product of a never
passive constructive enterprise carried out in accordance with the generalized
Categorical Imperative, or it is tyranny. On this account, if rationality is not
actively constructed by us, it is imposed on us. There is no alternative. But
for Kant, at any rate, this is a false dilemma.
Christine Korsgaard has also interpreted Kants overall account of rationality in terms of a kind of rationalist constructivism, the spirit of which she
traces to his humanism. She argues that, for Kant, the source of all value is
ultimately humanity itself, or, to be more precise, humanity insofar as it is
capable of full rational autonomy. Like ONeill, she too sees practical reason
as the fundamental source of all values, and like ONeill, she believes choices,
to be truly human, can only be determined by practical reason and not inclination and pleasures. In Korsgaards words:
In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant claims that good is a rational
concept. This means that if ends are to be good, they must be determined
by reason, not merely inclination or pleasantness. . . . Behind the assumption that if every rational being could acknowledge something to be good
. . . then it is indeed good . . . is the idea that it is rational beings who determine what is good; rational nature confers value on the objects of its choices
and is itself the source of all value.12
Korsgaard then argues that rational nature for Kant must be understood as
fundamentally practical. Theoretical knowledge is limited to the mechanism
and not the ends of nature, while speculation about final causes is also banished from the realm of knowledge. Thus Korsgaard argues, theoretical reflection is not the source, or ultimate justification, of human values. For this
reason, she says, Kants rationalism, unlike Aristotles, values agency over
contemplation, and Morality replaces metaphysics as the highest expression
of our rational nature.13

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Since Korsgaards account of Kants subordination of the contemplative

side of human nature to the practical dovetails with ONeills view that practical reason unites all aspects of reason under a single principle of practical
reason, a response to Korsgaards arguments against contemplation also raises
questions for ONeill. Korsgaard outlines two Kantian arguments against
contemplation as the source of value. The first she takes from the Critique of
Judgment, section 86 On Ethicotheology, in which Kant states that
it is not by reference to mans cognitive power (theoretical reason) that the
existence of everything else in the world first gets its value, i.e., it is not
[because] (say) there is someone to contemplate the world. For if all this
contemplation offered to mans presentation nothing but things without a
final purpose, then the fact that the world is cognized cannot make its existence valuable; only if we presupposed that the world has a final purpose,
could its contemplation itself have a value by reference to that purpose.14
Korsgaard reads this as follows: while speculative reason hopes vainly to
discover or prove that this ideal of reason is already realized in the world,
practical reason or morality is the attempt to impose this ideal on action
and on the world insofar as action shapes the world.15 She summarizes concisely the argument against contemplation as a source of value in the following manner: The world must have a final purpose in order to be worth
contemplating, so contemplation cannot be that final purpose.16
This is a good summary of Kants point, but it does not follow from the
claim that contemplation cannot be the final purpose of the world that it also
cannot be a source of value. Contemplation, like moral judgment, is an activity. Final purposes or ends are objects of desire. It may well be that the highest end or final purpose of humanity is essentially moral without it following
that our method of creating or producing it be essentially practical. In fact, in
this section of the Critique of Teleological Judgment Kant is speaking entirely about the way in which even the most ordinary mind meditates about
the existence of things. The citation Korsgaard uses occurs in a context in
which Kant is concerned to explain teleological reflection upon the universe,
and to argue, as Korsgaard rightly points out, that a moral component is part
of this reflection. The reflection itself, however, does not rest on determinant
principles of judgment, either cognitive or moral, but on a principle of reflective judgment that, as Kant has already argued, is independent of both:
The effect [at which we are to aim] according to the concept of freedom is
the final purpose which (or the appearance of which in the world of sense)
ought to exist; and we [must] presuppose the condition under which it is
possible [to achieve] this final purpose in nature (in the nature of the sub-

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JANE KNELLER

ject as a being of sense, namely, as a human being). It is judgment that

presupposes this condition a priori, and without regard to the practical,
[so that] this power provides us with the concept that mediates between the
concepts of nature and the concept of freedom: the concept of a purposiveness
of nature, which makes possible the transition from pure theoretical to pure
practical lawfulness, from lawfulness in terms of nature to the final purpose set by the concept of freedom. For it is through this concept [of the
purposiveness of nature] that we cognize the possibility of [achieving] the
final purpose, which can be actualized only in nature and in accordance
with its laws.17
Korsgaard argues that Kant rejects contemplation as a source of value, but in
fact all he really rejects is the claim to know anything through contemplation,
in the very limited sense of knowledge characterized by him in the first half
of the Critique of Pure Reason. She claims that for Kant...teleological thinking
is not knowledge, and such grounding as it has lies in practical religious faith
and so in ethics.18 But as we have seen, this is simply not true for Kant. Teleological thinking is grounded in a concept of reason that is neither theoretical
nor practical, but that belongs nonetheless to the system of the faculties of
the mind a priori. It is grounded in reflective judgment. Korsgaard then goes
on to conclude that we cannot, through theoretical thinking, participate in
the final purpose of the world. We can only do this in practice.19 Here she
presents her own version of the false dichotomy offered by ONeill: either
we think theoretically, or we act according to the principles of practical reason. There is no other alternative. Kants account of the relatively independent mediating activity of reflection on both thinking and acting is simply
ignored.20
Korsgaards second argument for the devaluation of contemplative activity in Kant is taken from the Critique of Practical Reason. Kant claims that
intellectual pleasures are no different in kind from physical pleasures since
the possibility of both rests on feeling, and feeling, being a mere passive susceptibility to causes, is firmly divorced from autonomy.21 It is certainly undeniable that Kant tends to belittle the contribution of feeling to rationality,
but it ought to be noted immediately that such belittlement will apply equally
to all sorts of feeling, including not only pleasures of the sense and intellect,
but also to the satisfaction we take in the moral realm. That type of feeling is
one that Kant certainly wants neither to deny nor belittle.
More important, however, is that Kants tendency to associate pleasure
always with the contingent a posteriori changes with the advent of the theory
of reflective judgment. In the third Critique, Kants claim is that the feeling
of pleasure and displeasure is only the subjects receptivity to a [certain]
state.22 Pleasure in itself is only receptivity, indeed, but always a reception
of a certain state of mental activity. Thus, for Kant pleasures are not all cre-

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ated equal: they are to be distinguished in terms of the conditions which give
rise to them, and the important new contribution of the Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment is to introduce and argue for pleasures of reflection whose conditions are universal and a priori. Such pleasures are the result of the conditions that hold a priori of a form of contemplation, albeit not an intellectual
one but of aesthetic reflective judgment. The argument from passivity does
not in the end constitute an argument against the pleasures of contemplation
as a source of value, since some pleasures are conditioned only by states of
judgment that are universal and a priori.
In part, Korsgaards arguments against contemplative reason as a source
of value rest on a conflation of Kants account of theoretical reason and speculative metaphysics with contemplation. Kant, however, has a more fine-tuned
account of activities of reason. Theoretical reason needs to include speculation upon the unconditioned, and this need, for Kant, should for the most
part be sublimated to practical reason. But Kants account of contemplative thought, or reflective judgment, is a different sort of thinking altogether
whose function is not to subordinate theoretical to practical reason, but to
negotiate the difference between them.
Korsgaard and ONeills reading of Kants overall theory are in many respects inspired, and stand in their own right as important Kantian reconstructions. Still, based on the arguments just presented, any account that locates
the source of all value and defines rationality itself primarily in terms of practical reason fails to do justice to one of Kants greatest insights, that reason is
a system of the interplay of both thinking and acting. A fully developed critique of reason must therefore provide an account of the interface of theoretical and practical reason.23 The third Critique, where Kant argues that this
interface just is the mediation of reflective judgment, must be taken seriously.
Whatever else reflective judgment is, it is not of itself practical or constructive. It is contemplative, where this always presupposes a reflective principle
of purposiveness without regard to the practical.
2. The Primacy of Practical Reason: Metaphysical
To argue that practical reason is not primary or prior in the sense of being the
origin or justificatory source of all value is not to suggest that there is no sense
in which practical reason and agency are primary. In his comparative study
of Kant and Fichte, Ameriks argues that the values of practical reason are
primary in the sense of having somehow more significance for human beings
than either cognitive or aesthetic or other values.24
Ameriks suggests that pure practical reason in Kants philosophy has a
kind of preeminence because it discloses the basic sources and goals of what
is valuable, and he argues that the moral law for Kant is

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the most significant object of our attention in the sense that it alone reveals
what is of unconditional interest and value, the moral will. Although Kant
recognized that mere theoretical and prudential activities also have considerable positive value, he insists that by themselves they are rooted in
secondary interests that have nothing like the incomparable worth of morality.25
The language of revelation and disclosure is important here. Amerikss understanding of the primacy of practical reason depends on a metaphysical interpretation of transcendental idealism that is the polar opposite of ONeills
constructivism. For him, the Copernican turn and its denial of knowledge to
make room for faith is not the end of metaphysics but simply its redirection
from the theoretical to the practical realm. The transcendental idealist account
of nature is the methodological condition of our discovery, as moral agents,
of a new practical metaphysics. It provides our ticket out of determined nature to another realm:
[T]he spatiotemporal laws covering all the ordinary appearances of our life
need not constrain our inner or noumenal reality, and so, rather than having to give up morality in the face of a law-governed nature, we can and
should accept morality as the guide to a nonspatiotemporal realm that exists and is more fundamental than nature.26
He continues to argue that transcendental idealism has thus provided for the
only escape from nature. On this reading, our noumenal being is revealed
to us as a result of the denial of knowledge, in a sort of critical reversal of
the fall from grace. The topology of this new moral landscape is further disclosed by practical reason via the postulates of God, freedom and immortality.27
Ameriks is correct in pointing to the fact that Kantian practical reason depends on his account of the limitations of theoretical reason, and hence, in
the overall structure of his philosophy, cannot be methodologically or logically prior. Yet Amerikss unrepentant metaphysical account of the practical
leaves Kant open to severe criticism that Kant himself wanted very much to
evade. It portrays human beings as hopelessly divided against themselves and,
if not at war with their own physicality, then at least seriously alienated from
their own basic nature as beings of need.28 Kant was painfully aware of this
potential problem in Chapter III of the second Critique, when he assumes that
the moral law must have an effect on the will of human beings through some
subjective path, a sensuous impulse. Here Kant allows for such a feeling, albeit a rather tortured one caused by the frustration by reason of sensuous inclination:

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For all inclination and every sensuous impulse is based on feeling, and the
negative effect on feeling (through the check on the inclinations) is itself
feeling. Consequently, we can see a priori that the moral law as a ground
of determination of the will, by thwarting all our inclinations, must produce a feeling which can be called pain. Here we have the first and perhaps the only case wherein we can determine from a priori concepts the
relation of a cognition (here a cognition of pure practical reason) to the
feeling of pleasure or displeasure.29
Assuming the plausibility of this argument, it is still not much of an answer
to the criticism that a bifurcated account of reason leads Kant inevitably to a
notion of moral being that is essentially alienated from its natural self. Humiliation, even when re-christened as a feeling for the majesty of duty, as Kant
himself puts it, has nothing to do with the enjoyment of life.30 Even with
the addition of moral feeling, the doctrine of the primacy of the practical interpreted as resting on a metaphysical escape from nature leaves us with a
disintegrated picture of human nature.
It is surely to avoid that portrait that Kant, already at the end of the second
Critique, begins to move toward the theoretical incorporation of other sorts
of case[s] wherein we can determine from a priori concepts the relation of a
cognition to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure.31 By the time he writes
the third Critique, Kant has had a change of heart. What he had declared impossible in the first Critique and unlikely in the second, became the focus of
the entire first half of the third: the possibility of pleasures, not humiliations,
based on conditions that were universal and a priori. Reflection gives rise in
aesthetic judgment to a feeling whose universal validity depends upon its
independence from practical and theoretical determination. Since aesthetic
reflection itself involves the conditions of cognition in general, imagination
and understanding in free play, the resulting feelings have a pedigree every
bit as pure as that of the humbled feeling of respect for the moral law. Some
reflective feelings, like the feeling of the sublime, involve the faculty of pure
practical reason and our recognition of our moral autonomy in the face of
purposeless nature. But others, and indeed the paradigm case of aesthetic feeling, namely our feelings for the beautiful, depend entirely on conditions of
cognition in general. Such feelings not only are independent of practical reason, but their very right to claim universal validity depends on this independence.32
3. The Mediated Primacy of Practical Reason
Let us return now to the problem of alienation raised by the metaphysical
readings of the priority of practical reason, and Kants initial attempt to bring

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practical reason back into the realm of nature.33 Kant went on to address the
issue of the causal efficacy of the moral in the Dialectic of Pure Practical
Reason, by introducing the conception of the highest good as the necessary
objective of practical reason. The moral law, Kant argues, demands that we
strive to produce, in nature, a state in which happiness [is] in exact proportion to morality.34 But if we are incapable of so doing, then the moral law
itself must be fantastic, directed toward imaginary ends, and consequently
inherently false.35 The famous solution to this problem of the potentially
debilitating moral alienation from our natural selves was the postulates of
practical reason, immortality and God. It is a springboard for this leap of reason, which in effect involves breaching the boundaries of theoretical reason
for the sake of practice, that Kant explicitly argues for the primacy of practical reason. Having looked at several interpretations of Kants doctrine, let us
examine his own account.
Unfortunately, Kants own statement of the primacy of practical reason turns
out to be far from clear. Its placement in the second Critique is clearly strategic, if not ad hoc. To preserve the practical rationality of the doctrine of the
highest good, and the need for a more integrated account of morality that
motivates it, Kant takes up a precarious position. He allows reason to suspend the Copernican turn in order to make the bald metaphysical claims of
the postulates, for the sake of practice.36 To prepare the ground for this uncritical move, he argues that under certain circumstances speculative reason
ought to
take up these principles [of practical reason] and seek to integrate them,
even though they transcend it, with its own concepts, as a foreign possession handed over to it. . . . It must assume them indeed as something offered from the outside and not grown in its own soil, and it must seek to
compare and connect them with everything which it has in its power as
speculative reason. It must remember that they are not its own insights but
extensions of its use in some other respect, viz., the practical; that this is
not in the least opposed to its interest, which lies in the restriction of speculative folly.37
The interests of practical reason, where they are inextricably bound to it, trump
the interests of theoretical reason, but only because the interests of practical
reason are not at all opposed to the interests of theoretical reason. They are
just different from them, and Kant says: It is not a question of which must
yield, for one does not necessarily conflict with the other.38 The subordination that Kant speaks of here is surprisingly ambivalent. For although he claims
that, if the speculative and the practical were arranged merely side by side
(co-ordinated), a conflict would arise, his argument for the need to give pref-

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erence to practical rather than theoretical needs is based on a worry that, without a hierarchy of interests, either side might get the upper hand:
the first [speculative reason] would close its borders and admit into its domain nothing from the latter [practical reason], while [practical reason]
would extend its boundaries over everything and, when its needs required,
would seek to comprehend [speculative reason] within them. Nor could we
reverse the order and expect practical reason to submit to speculative reason.39
The point here seems to be that giving certain interests of practical reason primacy is legitimate to the extent that it maintains a reasonable balance and
harmony between the two, including keeping practical reason itself under
control. This is a far cry from the primacy that many commentators, including ONeill and Korsgaard, and even Ameriks, seem to want to attribute to
Kant. Moreover, it suggests that Kant is already moving in the direction of a
theory of mediation that he would soon suggest in the Critique of Judgment.
The discussion in the second Critique of the primacy of practical reason
was meant to prepare the way for the postulates, but Kants arguments for the
latter are notoriously problematic. How could Kant suspend the entire critical apparatus for the sake of bringing back theological metaphysics?40 Even
if he could get away with that on practical grounds, does the introduction of
supernatural aids really solve the problem of how we can rationally hope to
bring about the highest good in nature, as the moral law commands that we
do?41 If the primacy of practical reason was introduced as a doctrine in order
to make sense of the arguments for the postulates and they fail, of what systematic use is the primacy claim?
Again, the third Critique, and Kants account of the independence of aesthetic value, are crucial to the final position. There is indeed a sense in which
for Kant practical reason is primary, but it has to do neither with the claim
that all values are ultimately constructed by us, nor with the need for a practical procedure that serves as guide for all such construction. Neither does the
primacy have to do with discovering the source of all value in an inner world
transcending nature. Indeed, just the opposite seems true. What appears to be
motivating the primacy claim in the second Critique is the need to link morality in its pure rational form to the fact of our finitude and embodiment. Kant
was keenly aware in the second Critique that his moral theory needed both
feeling and hope if it was to provide a plausible account of how morality could
possibly be implemented in nature. Humiliation, God and immortality were
not enough.
Many sections of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment may be read as an
account of how purely aesthetic valuing can serve the purposes of moral judg-

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ment in precisely the sort of way that Kant needed, by embodying values of
practical reason. One of them appears in section 42 of the Critique of
Aesthetical Judgment where Kant raises the possibility of an aesthetic approach to the hope held out earlier by the postulation of God and immortality.
If we were somehow to be able to sense or feel that nature had a place for
moral beings then morality would have something of the feeling of pleasure
and the hope that it needs to make following its strict law possible and even
natural:
[R]eason also has an interest in the objective reality of the ideas (for which,
in moral feeling, it brings about a direct interest), i.e., an interest that nature should at least show a trace or give a hint that it contains some basis or
other for us to assume in its products a lawful harmony with that liking of
ours which is independent of all interest (a liking we recognize a priori as
a law for everyone, that we cannot base this law on proofs). Hence reason
must take an interest in any manifestation in nature of a harmony that resembles the mentioned harmony, and hence the mind cannot meditate about
the beauty of nature without at the same time finding its interest aroused.42
But the interest is something that we can achieve only indirectly through moral
ideas. In order for the connection of nature and moral interest to occur, our
attention and our feeling must be directly connected with nature itself, apart
from any moral interest. It is only disinterested, contemplative, non-practical
appreciation of natures forms that makes possible the indirect link to morality: it is not this link [between natures beauty and moral ideas] that interests
us directly, but rather the beautys own characteristic of qualifying for such a
link, which therefore belongs to it intrinsically.43
Kants insight is simple. If we want proof that our moral nature is compatible with ourselves as embodied finite creatures, that rationality and animality
belong naturally together, and that we can therefore hope to achieve our highest
moral goals in this world, then the world must present us with at least a hint
that it is possible that our purposes have a place in it. The attempt to enact our
will in nature literally does not make sense, by itself, of how the world can
accommodate will. Disinterested contemplation of nature gives us an independent reason, however tentative, to believe that nature will accommodate
our good will. Kants solution to the problem of the gulf between nature and
morality here amounts to a suspension, not of the laws of nature, as with the
postulates, but to a suspension of morality for the sake of morality. Aesthetic
values are not fundamental conditions of the moral law, nor the source of all
value whatsoever, but they do turn out to be the source of a very special value,
hope. Hope is a value without which fulfilling our duty would be a grim and
desperate undertaking, and whose absence threatens to render morality psychologically impossible. It is also a value that has independent roots in feel-

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381

ing and contemplation. This insight is buried by overemphasizing the primacy

of practical reason in Kants philosophy. Such approaches are fundamentally
rationalist interpretations of Kant that cut away a basic empiricist strand of
Kants humanism: his insistence on the nature of the subject as a being of
sense, namely, as a human being.44
Notes
1. Karl Ameriks, Kant, Fichte, and the Radical Primacy of the Practical, Kant and the
Fate of Autonomy (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 190.
2. Onora ONeill, Constructions of Reason (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), p. 8.
3. Ibid., p. 18.
4. Ibid., p. 27.
5. Ibid., pp. 1314.
6. Ibid., pp. 1920.
7. See Ameriks, op. cit., ch. 4, pp. 187233.
8. Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), and Kant,
Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Kniglich Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1902), vol. 5, p. 198, abr. Ak 5: 198.
9. Cf. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Introduction, and Kant, First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment.
10. Cf. ONeill, Vindication of Reason, in Paul Guyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion
to Kant (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 293.
11. ONeill, Constructions of Reason, p. 27.
12. Christine Korsgaard, Aristotle and Kant on the Source of Value, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 241.
13. Ibid., 246.
14. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Ak 5: 442.
15. Korsgaard, op. cit., p. 241.
16. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Ak 5: 442.
17. Ibid., Ak 5: 195196.
18. Korsgaard, op. cit., p. 245.
19. Ibid.
20. Cf. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Ak 5:185, and Kant, First Introduction, Ak 20: 225.
21. Ibid.
22. Kant, First Introduction, Ak 20: 208. See also Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans.
Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan: 1988), Ak 5: 75.
23. See Dieter Henrich, The Unity of Subjectivity, in Richard Velkley, ed., The Unity of
Reason: Essays on Kants Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1994), pp. 1754.
24. Ameriks, op. cit., pp. 190 ff.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., p. 191.
27. Ibid., pp. 190191.
28. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Ak 5: 61.
29. Ibid., Ak 5: 7273.
30. Ibid., Ak 5: 88.

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31. Cf. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Ak 5: 160161.

32. Cf. Paul Guyer, Feeling and Freedom: Kant on Aesthetics and Morality, in Kant and
the Experience of Freedom (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993),
pp. 147, esp. pp. 4647.
33. See Richard Velkley, Freedom and the Ends of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989).
34. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Ak 5: 110.
35. Ibid., Ak 5: 114.
36. See Yirmiyahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1980), pp. 287 ff.
37. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Ak 5: 120121.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., Ak 5: 121.
40. See Yovel, op. cit., pp. 287 ff.
41. See Jane Kneller, Imaginative Freedom and the German Enlightenment, Journal of
the History of Ideas 51 (1990).
42. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Ak 5: 300.
43. Ibid., Ak 5: 302.
44. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Ak 5: 196. I would like to thank Henry Allison for
comments on my reading of section 42 of the Critique of Judgment, On the intellectual
interest in the beautiful.