Rudolf A. Makkreel
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason stresses the limits of what our finite intellect can understand directly about our experience of nature. This raises the question of what role the more indirect process of interpretation can have in his overall system. In his writings on religion and theodicy, Kant explicitly considers the task of interpreting the meaning of things that transcend our ordinary experience. However, sometimes he also speaks figuratively of interpreting the whole of nature as a text. Interpretations of the first kind go beyond what is knowable in order to consider what it is rational to believe about God; those of the second kind are still about knowledge and merely attempt to systematize our experience of nature.
After examining these two senses of interpretation to be found in Kant’s writings, a third sense can also be explicated on the basis of his reflections on how human judgment deals with the situatedness of the cognitive subject. Because religious interpretation is approached from the perspective of morality, it will be considered in relation to Critique of Practical Reason. Systematic interpretation falls within the province of theoretical reason and will be considered in relation to Critique of Pure Reason. The third sense of interpretation still to be developed will be oriented by Critique of the Power of Judgment.
When it comes to interpreting religious texts, Kant makes it very clear that they must be read in such a way that they remain consistent with what our own practical reason teaches us. Any religious teaching that fails the universalizability test of the categorical imperative would have to be rejected for violating our autonomy. For as long as we strive to do good out of fear of violating a divine commandment, we submit to what Kant calls the heteronomy of choice.
Kant was not the first Enlightenment thinker to locate the value of Christianity in its moral teachings. However, while others like J. S. Semler had explained away extra-moral biblical claims as accretions of contemporary ways of thinking, Kant still attempts to make sense of them for the way they can inspire us to aim at the highest good. We do not need divine instruction to know what our moral duties are, but we do need divine inspiration to not give up hope that moral progress is possible in a world that is filled with evil and suffering.
In his 1791 essay “On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy,” Kant distinguishes between theodicies that account for the counter-purposiveness of suffering and conflict in the world by justifying (rechtfertigen) it from the transcendent perspective of God and those that come to terms with this counter-purposiveness by interpreting (auslegen) what divine providence might mean from a this-worldly perspective.
Kant argues that theodicies using the justificatory approach would need to demonstrate “the world-author’s moral wisdom in this sensible world” on the basis of “cognition of the supersensible (intelligible) world” (Kant 1998, 8: 264). Unfortunately, we human beings do not possess that kind of cognition; thus, the explanative force aimed at by justificatory theodicies cannot be attained. Therefore, Kant declares that “all theodicy should really be the interpretation (Auslegung) of nature insofar as God manifests his will through it” (Kant 1998, 8: 264). Interpretive theodicies consider manifestations of God’s will in this world without relying on speculative claims about a transcendent intelligible world.
According to Kant, every human “interpretation of the declared will of a legislator is either doctrinal or authentic” (Kant 1998, 8: 264). Doctrinal interpretations consider the world as the perceivable work of God and aim to “extract from it God’s final aim” (Kant 1998, 8: 264). But there is no way we can derive purposes from a world that is cognized in the mechanistic terms of the natural sciences.
Authentic interpretations are preferable because they approach God not through how his works might be perceived, but through how he speaks to us through the voice of practical reason. In this way, God can be thought of as the source of an “authoritative dictum or pronouncement (Machtspruch)” (Kant 1998, 8: 264) whose power can be felt directly. But to avoid heteronomy, Kant goes on to claim that to the extent that we conceive God rationally as a moral and wise Being, it is “through our reason itself that God becomes the interpreter of his will as announced in his creation” (Kant 1998, 8: 264). It is through our own practical reason that the divine will can be interpreted authentically. This enables us to become active participants in the process of giving voice to the ideal of the kingdom of ends. The prototype for this can be found in legal or juridical hermeneutics, where authentic interpretation allows the authorship of a legislator to be passed on from generation to generation. In traditional philological criticism, authenticity demands evidence for something really being an original source, but in Kant's juridically informed philosophical critique, authenticity involves having an appropriate relation to an original source. This authenticating relation gives interpretation the function of legitimating the results of exegesis.
Authentic interpretations dispense with authoritative intermediaries, whether these be scientists and their ability to discern design in nature as the work of God or the clergy when it comes to interpreting the voice of God as it is believed to be recorded in biblical texts. In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant turns to the exegesis of sacred texts and shows how institutionalized religions produce doctrinal interpretations. Churches have claimed the authority to address counter-purposiveness in human history through the teachings and sanctions enforced by their power structures. However, as free human beings, each of us has the obligation, according to Kant, to strive for our own authentic interpretation of what sacred texts can teach us about our life and human history. This should be a heartfelt interpretation that accords with our moral reason without having to appeal to an institutional intermediary.
The figurative use of interpretation in relation to theoretical reason is found most explicitly in Kant’s Reflections on Metaphysics, where he warns that ideas of reason should not be used dogmatically to speculate about the intelligible world, but regulatively to systematize our experience of the phenomenal world: “for nature is our task, the text of our interpretation” (Kant 1928, 18: 274). This idea is also briefly explored in the Opus postumum, where Kant considers the systematization of fundamental forces and laws of nature. He extends the notion of “doctrinal interpretation” to deal with the systematization of fundamental forces and the notion of “authentic interpretation” to characterize the systematization of the laws of nature. The appeal to natural forces such as attraction and repulsion is considered doctrinal because it still retains a hypothetical element. Kant aims at an authentic rational interpretation of nature based purely on the laws of nature.
We can relate this interpretive function of ideas of reason back to Critique of Pure Reason in order to supplement Kant’s figurative language there of spelling out appearances by means of the forms of intuition and reading them as experience by means of concepts of the understanding. In the Dialectic, Kant introduces ideas of reason by comparing them to how Plato conceived of his Ideas or Forms. Plato is claimed to have been wrong to view ideas as the archetypes of things in themselves, yet he “noted very well that our power of cognition feels a far higher need than that of merely spelling out appearances according to a synthetic unity in order to be able to read them as experience, and that our reason naturally exalts itself to cognitions that go much further (viel weiter)” (Kant 1997, A314/B370–371). The manifold of intuition that is spelled out temporally in consciousness and read as experience of objective events by concepts of the understanding makes piecemeal sense of the world. What the ideas of reason can do is to integrate our various experiences and give them a systematic unity. If ideas of reason are used not to constitute intelligible objects, but to regulatively organize our experience of phenomenal objects holistically, then they can be viewed as rules of interpretation, just as concepts of the understanding are rules of reading.
So far we have related the theme of interpretation in Kant to matters of justificatory exegesis concerning religious texts and to the theoretical problem of systematization. Religious interpretation can at best authenticate belief in what transcends human cognition, and rational interpretations systematically organize what we already know. There is, however, a kind of interpretation that has the potential to expand the scope of our thinking and enrich our cognition. This will be called reflective interpretation and is implicit in a new kind of judgment introduced in Critique of the Power of Judgment.
In the Introduction of the third Critique, judgment is defined as the faculty for thinking the particular as contained under the universal. If we already have a universal concept that can be applied to a particular, then judgment can be called determinant (bestimmend). But if only the particular is given, for which the universal needs to be found, then judgment is merely reflective (reflectirend) (Kant 2000, 5: 179). The first Critique applies determinant judgment. A priori categories such as the substance–attribute and cause–effect relations allow us to order our experience in terms of universal laws modeled on mechanistic physics. But since there are many features of our experience that are not fully explained on the basis of such laws, reflective judgment may proceed inductively and seek to find new uniformities. In his Lectures on Logic, Kant asserts that induction tests whether “what belongs to many things of a genus belongs to the remaining ones too” (Kant 1992, 626). However, Kant also points out that reflective judgment is just as capable of inquiring whether the partial similarity of things in the same genus can be extended to total similarity. Here, we infer not from some to all, but from parts to whole “according to the principle of specification” based on analogy. By relying on either induction or specification by analogy, reflective judgment has the power, “not to determine the object, but only the mode of reflection concerning it, in order to attain its cognition” (Kant 1992, 626). Reflective judgment does not cognitively explain the nature of things, but it allows us to think about them heuristically to prepare for new cognition.
So far reflective judgment has only been defined as an empirical method. But in the Introductions to Critique of the Power of Judgment, reflective judgment is considered in terms of a transcendental principle that specifies the appropriate contexts for thinking of things. In the first Introduction, this is discussed in terms of classifying “the whole of nature according to its empirical differences” (Kant 2000, 20: 215). In the second Introduction, Kant distinguishes the kinds of context within which we can apply concepts to objects. This differentiation of context is needed to make room for aesthetic as well as scientific judgments.
Judgments of taste cannot be justified by any of our available concepts, and that is why they have not attained the measure of consensus that is often found in scientific inquiry. When I judge a flower to be beautiful, I am making a reflective judgment that is in search of a new universal. The predicate “beauty” does not by itself fulfill this function, for it is not a concept that determines or explains the nature of the flower. Beauty is not an objective property of the flower considered as part of the domain of nature as defined in the first Critique. Instead, beauty is a relational property that frames the object by means of the subjective attitude of the spectator. The pleasurable context in which the spectator places something considered to be beautiful is not merely a private one, but one that is sharable with other human beings. Kant calls this intersubjective context an experiential “territory” instead of a legislative “domain” (see Kant 2000, 5: 174–177). Reflective judgment serves to reclassify things by finding an appropriate context for appreciating them over and above the way the sciences can make determinant judgments about them.
This way of conceiving the determinant–reflective judgment distinction allows us to compare it to Wilhelm Dilthey’s hermeneutical distinction between explanation and understanding. Determinant judgments function within a well-defined legislative domain to explain things. Reflective judgments serve to specify the appropriate territorial context to prepare us to understand the meaning of things.
To say that a rose is beautiful is to attest to the fact that I find a reflective pleasure in observing it. This pleasure is not to be reduced to a private liking, for I am only entitled to say that the rose is beautiful if my pleasure is sharable or communicable. But what is communicated through aesthetic pleasure is not determined by concepts. The universality that is posited by the aesthetic judgment does not claim that all roses are beautiful, but only that this particular rose produces a pleasure that is potentially universal. This is because the pleasure is more than sensuous and involves a harmony of the cognitive faculties that can resonate for all human beings. What a reflective judgment provides is not more first-order cognition about things in the world, but a second-order assessment about how we as humans should respond to them.
Kant himself formulates this in terms of indeterminate cognition. He defines aesthetic pleasure as a feeling of enlivenment that provides a sense of purposiveness without a determinate purpose. This means that beauty can inspire us to think “aesthetic ideas” that lead to more thoughts than can be expressed by the determinate concepts that are currently available to us. Although the pleasurableness of beholding beauty does not amount to a determinate cognition, it can be purposive for “cognition in general” because the condition for its appreciation involves an enlivened feeling of the very harmony that is necessary for human beings to attain cognition as such. It is a harmony of the imagination and understanding in which the former is not the handmaiden of the latter as in the first Critique. In the third Critique, Kant allows the imagination to suggest content to the understanding that provides the material for new concepts. In the first half on aesthetics, it is artistic genius that imagines aesthetic ideas that are then expressed in new concepts able to illuminate human life. In the second half on teleology, mechanical explanations of natural phenomena based on external causation are supplemented with a new understanding of organic life as involving an immanent purposiveness that is self-organizing.
In the first Critique, interpretation of nature as a whole uses ideas of reason to determine whether the various empirical laws of nature can be integrated into a coherent system. But ideas of reason differ from concepts of the understanding in that they have conceptual form but no intuitive content. Because rational ideas are abstract, they do not have the explanative force of concepts of the understanding and can only project a regulative interpretive order.
Aesthetic ideas can be considered counterparts of rational ideas in that they too lack the balance of content and form that the understanding demands. But aesthetic ideas are incongruous counterparts because they provide a richness of intuitive content for which there is no ready conceptual form. This richness can inspire the artist to specify already available concepts to create new forms that are adapted to content rather than imposed on content. This would be in accordance with what is referred to in the First Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment as a process of specification by reflective judgment. Reflective specification produces an artistic and tectonic ordering in contrast to the rather mechanistic and architectonic classification that characterizes the scientifically geared Critique of Pure Reason. Whereas systematic interpretation based on rational ideas is hypo-thetical, reflective interpretation based on the specification of aesthetic ideas is hypo-typical. What Kant calls “hypotyposis” in Critique of the Power of Judgment replaces abstract conceptual relations with quasi-intuitive symbolic relations. The best-known example of such a hypotypical interpretation is the claim that beauty is a “symbol of morality” Kant 2000, 5: 351). The feeling aroused by beauty is not itself moral, yet according to Kant the “true interpretation (Auslegung)” of beauty in nature shows aesthetic feeling to be “akin to moral feeling” (Kant 2000, 5: 301). Beauty can serve as a symbol of morality in so far as it encourages us to discern formal relations in this world that can provide a reflective analogue for the sphere of moral reason. Such analogues are indirect but they can add specificity to relations that would otherwise remain abstract.
Reflective specification also applies to the second half of Critique of the Power of Judgment, which deals with teleological order. Whereas aesthetic purposiveness is constitutive in that it enlivens our own consciousness, teleological purposiveness is regulative in being applied to those spheres of nature that manifest signs of biological life. The mechanical laws of physics are unable to determinantly explain how organisms preserve and reproduce themselves. Here, reflective judgment can be used to show that if no explanation based on universal laws is forthcoming, we can at least specify organisms as local systems that display functional regularities. We can describe organisms as self-organizing systems while admitting that this is an interpretive way of making sense of how they function. The immanent purposiveness that Kant attributes to living organisms has to be understood as a product of a judgment that is regulative as well as reflective. It is regulative because the idea of purposive agency involves a hypothetical extension of the concept of causality beyond its original mechanistic use. It is reflective because it restricts the validity of the claim to “us (human beings in general)” (Kant 2000, 5: 462). The determinant use of the categories of the understanding in the first Critique is valid for all finite rational beings just as the determination of our duties in the second Critique makes the categorical imperative legislative for all autonomous creatures. When Kant applies reflective judgment in the third Critique, he is proposing the option of legislating to ourselves as human beings. Reflective judgment draws on “an a priori principle … by means of which it prescribes a law, not to nature (as autonomy), but to itself (as heautonomy) …” (Kant 2000, 5: 185). The reflective legislative power of judgment is not objective and does not derive from an abstract intellectual self (autos) but from a situated self (heauton) who also has feelings and attitudes. Reflective judgment is interpretive by adopting a subjective but disinterested attitude to the world that serves to bring out what is humanly valuable. Whereas determinant judgment is externally directed by the framework of what is already known, reflective judgment can be called self-orienting in searching for what else is worth knowing.