1790: The End of Truth in the Interpretation of Complex Contexts

: The paper argues that the standard pro-and anti-Kantian reception of the Critique of Judgment has largely misconstrued the relationship between Part I and Part II of the book by failing to recognize that the former is primarily providing a series of stepping-stones laying the groundwork for the elaboration of reflective-teleological reasoning in Part II. Instead of its dominant reading as foremost relevant to the study of biological nature, the paper distils from the reflective-teleological judgment a universal principle by which we typically interpret any complex set of particulars. As such, the reflective-teleological judgment of 1790 is shown to have done away with interpretive truth , replaced by Kant with the more modest claim of intelligibility.


Introduction
Over the last 230 years, many a reader of Kant's Critique of Judgment must have wondered why in a book dealing with judgments the word 'truth' is mentioned only marginally.And where it is touched on it is hardly of consequence for the Critique's central concern. 1 Still, in the conceptual architectonics of the two earlier Critiques reasoning with concepts occupied centre stage in Kant's analyses.Thus, formal reason was separated from pure reasoning by virtue of their different genesis, the former operating with stipulated or constructed concepts, the latter derived from appearances via abstractive distillation.In this way, formal strings, such as x = y 3 , can be neatly distinguished from such pure or purified concepts as time, space, or E = mc 2 .Likewise, such empirical concepts as gold are uniquely characterized by the double wobbliness of their conceptual boundaries never being fully determinable and their semantic analysis never being complete 2 (CPR A728/B756).In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant sums up moral concepts as entirely different constructs as components of a modest metaphysic which cannot be derived from, but can only be imposed on, reality by social agreement under the principle of the categorial imperative, to "organize empirical presentations of sense according to an a priori principle."3Which leaves his treatment in the third Critique of merely aesthetic judgments based on feelings to be dismissed as non-cognitive and, beyond them, his all-important, reflective-teleological judgments, based on the principle of an as-if causality which we tend to apply to the cognition of works of art and other complexities.It is here that the Kant reception since the end of the eighteenth century has failed to recognize Kant's revolutionary invention of a form of reasoning which we cannot but apply whenever we are confronted by opaque contexts demanding interpretation.
The standard reception of the Critique of Judgment suffers from having drawn too strong a distinction between the two parts of the book.Instead, it makes a lot more sense to view the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment" of Part I as a set of necessary stepping-stones for the "Critique of Teleological Judgment" in Part II.Kant himself concedes that his treatment of "the power of judgment" in Part I does not have "all the lucidity that is rightly demanded."Which, however, he believes he has "in fact attained in the second part of this work"4 (CJ Preface to the First Edition).As the paper will argue, what has gone wrong in the assessment of the Critique as a coherent whole is a misreading of Kant's notion of nature, conceived as the "the sum of objects of the senses" and the "totality of appearances," which include human culture as its highest form of development (CJ §61; CPR A114; CJ §83).In this sense, Kant's separation of the aesthetic judgment based on mere feelings, together with the relegation of embellishments to what is inessential and the sublime as overtaxing our capacity to judge, from cognitive judgments establishes Part I of the Critique as a necessary clearing of the ground on which he was able to construct his last critical, and perhaps most important, concept, the reflective-teleological judgment.
The revolutionary characteristic of this innovative form of reasoning is that it does away with truth-claims in favour of the reduced assertability of intelligibility.Accordingly, we can make a case for Kant's interpretive reason, that is, reflective-teleological judgment formation, functioning as a critique of determining reason as it appears in the employment of formal, pure, and empirical judgments both in deductive and inductive contexts.Neither formal, nor pure, nor even empirical concepts are regarded here as sufficient for the kinds of judgments we routinely perform in the interpretation of culture, history, economics, politics, and above all in personal, human interaction.Rather, the paper contends, we cannot but negotiate such complexities by way of the kind of reasoning which Kant identified as reflective-teleological. Contrary to judgments making truth-claims, their interpretive-projective statements are heuristic, open-ended, and indeterministic in the service of intelligibility rather than of truth. 5What Kant foregrounds in such cases is thinking in terms of parts and wholes, systematicity, means-ends relations, and understanding as a social process.Methodologically, the paper is committed to a phenomenological, intentional act description as eidetic, intersubjective generalization.Which means revisiting Kant through Husserlian eyes.

The Critique of Truth in Kant's Critique of Judgment
Looking at Kant's conceptual architecture as it is presented in the three Critiques, we cannot but notice a peculiar, chiastic relationship in his critical concepts between their subject-predicate relations and the speech community in which they operate.Leaving aside Kant's transcendental reasoning as one of his major methodological tools, in formal reasoning, as in x = y 3 , the subject-predicate relation is deductively secured, while the input by the community is limited to the right to reject its "dictatorial authority" and to vetoing participation.This, on the grounds that reasoning must always rest on "the agreement of free citizens" (CPR A738f./B766).In pure reasoning, as in the abstraction of the a priori generality of time and space from the temporality and spatiality of experiences, the subject-predicate relation is fully determined, while the community is involved as the necessary medium in which such concepts are instantiated.In the remainder of Kant's critical concepts, the subject-predicate gradually weakens, whereas the role of the community significantly increases.In all empirical forms of reasoning, both the boundaries and the analysis of concepts change under the auspices of the community over time, resulting in gradual semantic drift.This relation shifts even further towards the input of the community in moral reasoning, where what is predicated as acceptable and unacceptable is fully determined by community agreement.A similar dependency relationship exists in Kant's non-cognitive, merely aesthetic judgments which are circumscribed by taste and merely individual likes or dislikes and where truth-claims are no longer applicable.Finally, in cognitive, reflective-teleological judgments, appropriate for the interpretation of all complex and opaque empirical contexts, the subject-predicate relations are characterized 5. Horst Ruthrof, The Roots of Hermeneutics, passim.by meaning negotiation within the cultural community, such that truth-claims give way to interpretive assertions in the service of intelligibility.
The decisive step Kant takes in interpretive reasoning in the third Critique beyond its precursors is that the former lacks not only the "genuinely universal validity" of deduction (CPR A196/B241), but even the merely "comparative universality" which can be "obtained through induction" (CPR A25/B40).And while in induction Kant had already discovered a "fictitious" ingredient (CPR A196/ B241), in the Critique of Judgment he takes an important additional step, which is to argue for the necessity of an artistic component in the act of the interpretation of complex contexts.As reflective projection, this procedure becomes the central thrust of the third Critique, combining as it does Part I and Part II, progressing from an analysis of the limitations of merely aesthetic responses based on feelings and such limiting cases as ornaments and the sublime to genuine, cognitive judging in art appreciation and the complexities of nature, including human culture.As such, the reflective-teleological judgment is regarded in this paper as Kant's most advanced, as well as most useful, critical concept, a reading which declares the Critique of Judgment the final crowing of Kant's critical business.

The components of the reflective-teleological judgment
What makes reflective-teleological judgment the pinnacle of Kant's conceptual architecture is that it marks the revolutionary moment in the history of philosophy when deterministic truth-claims are weakened to the assertability of intelligibility as more appropriate to acts of interpretation.Kant's interpretive-projective approach is his answer to the problematic of rendering perplexing contexts of phenomena meaningful.What then does this procedure consist in and in what way is it tailor-made for the interpretation of human complexities?In the Critique of Judgment, Kant conceives of interpretation as a compelling human response to "a need of the understanding" (CJ Intro V), a response that kicks in whenever our sense making routines prove inadequate to the task, that is, whenever the opacity of sets of "objects exceeds the capacity of the understanding" (CJ §76).The important consequence of this situation in Kant's view is that when we fail to find such contexts meaningful in themselves, humans have the capacity to invent a solution which declares them so via reflective-projective reasoning.Here, our reason returns to itself in order to provide a "principle" which is lacking in the appearances before us (CJ Preface).He calls this a "subjective" principle, whereby Kant's subjectivity, however, has nothing to do with anything personal or private.For whenever Kant wishes to refer to the latter, he identifies the merely private as such, as he does in §40 of the third Critique, where he singles out subjektive Privatbedingungen.On this point, Gadamer has committed a major interpretive sin by advertently confusing Kant's species subjectivity with subjectivism. 6s to contextual opacity, the bridge that Kant builds between our overtaxed understanding and our "never-passive reason" is the reflective-teleological judgment (CJ §40), the conceptual climax of the third Critique.The source for this form of reasoning is identified as Kunstverstand, that is, the way we cognitively process works of art (CJ §85).For it is "in products of art" that "we can become aware of the causality of reason with respect to objects" (CJ FI IX).So, Kant declared the kind of purposiveness which we can discover in art a general principle for the transformation of opaque aggregates of particulars into meaningful wholes.How does this transformation work?As the term tells us, it consists of two constituents, reflection responsible for searching and sorting and teleological projection for a synthesizing interpretation.Reflection is to view puzzling aggregates of phenomena under an interpretive hunch, such that their individual specificity gives way to a unity.The non-Aristotelian teleological component can then be conceived as indeterministic, heuristic subsumption.Viewed as a mechanism, reflective-teleological reasoning is the combination of a bottom-up search and an always provisional top-down solution, the former raising a complex question, the latter providing a tentative answer. 7stematizing means and ends as wholes When we wish to make sense of baffling phenomena, one way recommended by Kant is their logical unification under a "higher guidance" (CJ §81), such as a "teleological system" or "organizing whole" (CJ §82).Only on such a premise "is it possible to order experience in a systematic fashion" (CJ FI IV).In this way, we "presuppose an idea of whole, according to a certain principle, and prior to the determination of the parts."As a result, "the whole becomes a system" (CJ FI XII).Without this presupposition "no empirical unity of these experiences could be established" (CJ FI II).Another way Kant argues for systemic interpretation is via a propensity of human cognition, when he writes that it is "the power of judgment" itself that likewise "presupposes a system" (CJ FI Vn4).This second argument rests on the anthropic thesis that humans are interconnected of necessity as part of nature.Not only are we bound to cognize "experience as an empirical system" (CJ FI XI; my emphasis), nature itself "as the sum of all objects of experience, comprises a system," including ourselves.Kant views this "thoroughgoing" interconnection as a transcendental law "which the understanding itself furnishes a priori" (CJ FI IV).
The kind of systematicity accomplished in this way by itself, however, remains an empty logic of relations in need of specification.Here, Kant introduces the principle of the interdependence of parts and wholes as means and ends, whereby "the concept of ends" as "purposiveness" is regarded as "a concept of reason" in the sense that it "attributes to reason the ground of the possible existence of an object" (CJ FI IX).At the same time, "where ends are thought as the sources of the possibility of certain things, means have also to be supposed" (CJ §78).From this basis Kant asks, what do aggregates of empirical particulars look like from the perspective of a "system of ends" (CJ §67), and "how does a whole become an end?" Kant's precision answer is, "if it is regarded as the ground of a causality" (CJ FI IX; my emphasis).After all, ends are not "given to us by the object" (CJ §75).Nor is their existence provable; rather, they are "read into" the object of inquiry (CJ §61).Ends are always "posited" (CJ FI V).And yet, although ends are not given in objective reality (CJ §75), and are no more than a mere "idea" (CJ §71), they are indispensable for cognition (CJ §68).And since interpretation is required for the cognition of opaque contexts, it can be called a construction via "reason" within an ever-changing "system of ends" (CJ §82).As such, the imposition of purposiveness is always the exercise of a "heuristic principle" (CJ §78).When it is applied in interpretation, it appears in two forms, extrinsically where it serves "the advantageousness of a thing for other things" (CJ §63) and/or "where one thing in nature subserves another as means to an end" (CJ §82); it functions intrinsically as the contribution a part is making to a whole.In this sense, all interpretation is a positing by the "creative understanding (schaffender Verstand)" of "a causality according to ends" (CJ §82).Finally, Kant characterizes the parts that we view as making up a whole as presupposed by the whole as an end.The "synthetic unity" of wholes introduced in the first Critique is specified in the Critique of Judgment in the sense that when we posit a "whole" which, by transcendental necessity, "contains the source of the possibility of the nexus of the parts" (CPR A326/ B383; CJ §77).For even to speak of a part "emphatically presupposes the idea of a whole" (CJ §77).So, if we wish to interpret a text purposefully, we cannot but "presuppose an idea of whole, according to a certain principle, and prior to the determination of the parts."And "it is only in this way that the whole becomes a system" (CJ FI XII).All of which demonstrates that Gadamer was quite wrong when he attributed the analysis of part-whole relations primarily to the Romantics. 8What the Romantics failed to retain of Kant's insights is the methodological advance he had made in identifying the limits of interpretation logically dictated 8. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 167; see, however, Ruthrof, The Roots of Hermeneutics, 5f.  by its heuristic and indeterministic character (CJ § §21f.; 62; 67; FI V, VI).What is likewise revolutionary here is Kant's finding that all interpretation employs the causality of as-if.
Kant's as-if causality as a nexus of architectonic thinking Towards the end of the Critique of Pure Reason, the notion of "architectonic" was defined as "the art of constructing systems," as distinct from thinking as "a mere rhapsody."Instead, reasoning ought to provide a "unity of the manifold modes of knowledge under one idea" (CPR A832/B860).This line of reflection is resumed in the Critique of Judgment, where Kant differentiates amongst various forms of causality, empirical, objective, mechanistic, and intentional.He calls a causality empirical if it "never strays from the sensible world" (CJ §71), objective if it is used for the collection of "many particular experiences" under an umbrella of means and ends (CJ Intro VIII), merely mechanistic if it refers to "the connection of the manifold without any concept underlying the specific character of this connection" (FI VII), and intentional if it relies on the assumption of a design will (CJ §75).The latter form of causality is viewed by Kant as an as-if causality in contexts where it serves the interpretation of complex constellations of parts (CJ Intro IV; §61).He also refers to this kind of causal nexus as a "causality of architectonic thinking" (CJ §71).Here we realize once more how closely Kant's reflective-teleological reasoning is related to the arts.
To interpret, then, is to "have recourse to a subjective principle, namely art, or causality according to ideas, in order to introduce it, on an analogy, as the basis of nature -an expedient that in fact proves successful in many cases" (CJ §72).However, proceeding interpretively on the analogy of the "causality of ideas" as in art does not mean that anything goes.To start off with we must adhere to empirical evidence, avoiding readings that are "willkürlich" (arbitrary), "vermessen" (presumptuous), "unerweislich" (lacking evidence), and "schwärmerisch" (ecstatic) 9 (CJ § §68; 78).Still, because of "the contingency which we find in everything we imagine to be possible only as an end," we are inclined to view relations amongst parts of a whole in an artistic manner as unified by a merely imaginable "causality" (CJ §80).As a result, opaque contexts are rendered "explicable and intelligible" for us on the grounds of the "assumption on our part of a fundamental causality according to ends," that is, Kant's as-if causality (CJ §10).Elsewhere, Kant refers to such a "causality according to ends" as a "creative understanding," irrespective of intentional design (CJ §82).9. Graham Bird, "Introduction" to "The Critique of the Power of Judgment," in A Companion to Kant, ed.Graham Bird (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 399-407, 405.Thus, human understanding reveals itself not simply as a neutral mechanism of cognition, but as a set of creative acts driven by a need to understand, intellectual interest, and a dislike of ignorance (CJ §42).At the heart of Kant's as-if causality, then, is a reasoning response to reduce phenomenal chaos to systemic analysis based on the difference between the empirical causality of ordinary apprehension and the as-if causality linking the reflection on particulars as parts with of a stipulated whole.As a multi-faceted process, Kant's creative as-if causality is termed a "special kind of causality" in that it is repeatedly distinguished from the causality of a mere objective or "blind mechanism"10 (CJ §61).And since the proto-hermeneutic stipulation of a whole always "precedes the possibility of the parts," it is rightly "called an end, if it is regarded as the ground of a causality" (CJ FI IX).This merely cognitive picture is further complicated by Kant when he adds the principle of the broadened horizon involving the sensus communis (Gemeinsinn) in our reflective-teleological judgment (CJ §40).

The hermeneutic circularity of interpretation
In interpretation, each new cognitive emphasis affects all its parts.By viewing particulars and wholes "now as effect, now as cause" our as-if causality cannot but produce a certain hermeneutic circularity, called the hermeneutic circle by Friedrich Ast in 1808.But it was Kant's heuristic concept of interpretation which first turned the target of investigation into a self-generating object as "cause and effect of itself" (CJ §64).Interpretation in the reflective-teleological sense occupies the opposite end in Kant's system of critical concepts if compared to formal reasoning, a contrast that is mirrored in the relation between the certitude of determinant judgments of the latter with the indeterminacy of the former.The proto-hermeneutical circularity of interpretive-projective reasoning manifests itself in the Critique of Judgment in at least six ways: (1) as reciprocity amongst particulars (CJ §65), ( 2) as a consequence of every part "being reciprocally purpose and means" (CJ §66), (3) as circularity arising from positing ends "as the sources of the possibility of certain things" (CJ §78), (4) in that "every part is thought as owing its presence to the agency of all remaining parts and also as existing for the sake of the others and of the whole" (CJ §65), (5) in the guidance of our constructions by empirical "contingency," such that when "ends are thought as the sources of the possibility of certain things, means have also to be supposed" (CJ § §80; 78), and (6) in the fact that as soon as we posit our interpretation as preceding "the possibility of the parts," it is "a mere idea and is called an 'end', if it is regarded as the ground of a causality" (CJ FI IX).Such is the circularity of Kant's reflective-teleological, interpretive recursivity, a perspective which was to be influentially resumed and elaborated by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time. 11

Indeterminacy
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguishes our "knowledge of the discursive type," which typically employs erörternde Begriffe (discursive concepts) of exposition, from knowledge based on the determining concepts of explanation.What matters in this distinction is that "real explanation would be that which makes clear not only the concept but also its objective reality" by containing "a clear property by which the defined object can always be known with certainty and which makes the explained concept serviceable in application" (CPR A242n).In the Critique of Judgment, this distinction is succinctly sharpened by the formula "explanation means derivation" (CJ §78).Which is to say that Erklärung is always derived from "given laws," whereas Erörterung merely "elucidates" and as such belongs to the language of interpretation (CJ §77).While the former entails a high degree of certitude, the latter cannot but admit to a certain degree of indeterminacy.
In the first Critique, Kant had already introduced the concept of indeterminacy as an inevitable feature of interpretation, such when the merely "regulative principle" presupposes a "systematic unity," it can do so only "in an indeterminate manner" (CPR A693/B721).Yet it is in the Critique of Judgment that indeterminacy comes forcefully to the fore.Already in the Introduction, indeterminacy robs the "heterogeneity" and "multiplicity" of "the empirical field" of determination (CJ Intro VI).Likewise, whenever we invoke the reflective-teleological judgment "artistically" for "a purposive and systematic ordering" we are relying on a "universal but nonetheless indeterminate principle" (CJ FI V).Much the same applies to "the free play of our cognitive faculties," which of necessity imposes indeterminate purposiveness on complex contexts.We can also add here the kind of indeterminacy that flows from Kant's schematization, which always involves diverse levels of abstraction (CPR A137ff./B176ff.;CJ FI V).In short, in the use of reflective-teleological judgment, "our reason must always remain an open question" 12 (CJ §78).But perhaps the most persuasive source of hermeneutic indeterminacy is that in our judgments of complex contexts we cannot but "presuppose" the "indeterminate norm of a communal sense" (unbestimmte Norm eines Gemeinsinns) (CJ §22).
When we look at the reflective-teleological judgment from the perspective of its subject-predicate relations, we cannot but notice that it "combines the lowest degree of determinacy with the highest degree of community interaction under Kant's rule of the broadened horizon." 13Although such judgments are indeterminate, they are indispensable in the interpretation of all complex and opaque scenarios.This is why the weakening of any truth-claims in reflective-teleological reasoning to the assertion of assertable intelligibility is by no means a defect.Rather, Kant's final critical concept enriches his conceptual architectonic by adding indeterminacy to problem solving whenever "it admits of solution in an endless variety of ways" (CJ §62), in the service not so much of truth but understanding (Begreifen) as intelligibility (cf.CPR B367; CJ §61; Preface; Intro V).

The absence of truth in reflective-teleological reasoning
Throughout the three Critiques, Kant is reluctant to let go of the time-honoured convention of truth-claims.In the end, indeterminacy proves to be an inexorable concession demanded by reason.Kant's struggle with truth is neatly encapsulated in §73 of the Critique of Judgment, where he feels compelled to abandon truthclaims in the reflective-teleological interpretation of the complexity of nature.He singles out three prominent philosophical positions on the question of the purposiveness of nature: idealism, realism, and theism.First, Kant dismisses any truth claims made by idealism representing nature as if it were art.Second, he rejects the position arguing its idealism as "final causes."Here, Kant distinguishes the arguments of Epicurus from those of Spinoza.The former are said to fail because they merely substitute "blind chance" for "intentionality" which, says Kant, explains nothing.Likewise, Spinoza's theory of "subsistence" as "unconditional necessity" of "all purposiveness" is rejected on the grounds that its "ontological unity" presumes to be produced by a "cause possessed of intelligence."As such, Spinoza's idealism of purposive "inherence" cannot provide an explanation of contingency (Zweckverknüpfung) without the unargued for stipulation of an "Urwesen" which, once more, is rebuffed as a case of "blind necessity." Next, Kant dismisses any realism of natural ends because it is bound to assume "causes operating intentionally" by themselves, a causality of Ursachen.Yet, so Kant, the very possibility of "living matter" is a self-contradiction resulting from viciously circular reasoning.After all, matter is defined as lifelessness (Leblosigkeit), that is inertia.To this day, the natural sciences are struggling to bridge this gap.Lastly, Kant takes on theism as yet another way of trying to provide a rational explanation of the purposiveness of nature out of the purposive unity (Zweckeinheit) of matter.But here, the stipulation of a "supreme intelligence as the cause of the world" is 13.Ruthrof, The Roots of Hermeneutics, 53.barred, he writes, by the "limit of our cognitive faculties" (Schranken unserer Erkenntnisvermögen).As a result, all such determining judgments about complex contexts have to be weakened to the more modest claim of reflective-projective reasoning in the service of intelligibility rather than truth.
None of the other references to truth in the third Critique are relevant to Kant's reflective-teleological judgment.In §28, truth is restricted to our recognition of experiencing "delight" (Wohlgefallen); in §40, Kant speaks of a "sense of truth" amongst other senses; in §47, he refers sarcastically to "new truths" offered by impostors (Gaukler); §51 distinguishes between "sensuous truth' and "sensuous semblance"; while §60 identifies "truth" as an "indispensable condition of fine art."None of these cases addresses the core issue of truth in interpretive reasoning about complex and opaque contexts.However, in his General Remark on Teleology, allows for yet another approach to the judgment of nature, namely via moral reasoning. 14Here, the stipulation of a supreme intelligence as creator of the universe is discussed as a necessary consequence of moral thinking culminating in the demand for a summum bonum which, however, cannot be justified on the grounds of human reasoning.For here, "philosophy in its theoretical capacity must of its own accord resign all its claims in the face of an impartial critique."And so, moral reasoning, as a metaphysical procedure, cannot argue for truth in this respect, but only provide "conviction" (CJ General Remark on Teleology).

Justifications for the Generalization of Reflective-Teleological Reasoning as a Universal Interpretive Principle
Whereas many Kant specialists have engaged with Part II of the Critique of Judgment on the assumption that it is meant to deal primarily with nature in a narrow sense, 15 there are good reasons for taking a broader view, according to which we can abstract a general interpretive principle informing Kant's reflective-teleological judgment.The most persuasive reasons in this respect are entailed in his numerous definitions of nature as "the sum of objects of the senses" (CJ §61), or "the complex of all sensible objects" (CJ Intro II), Kant's "Weltwesen" (CJ Preface) accessible to us via "empirical," that is, "contingent" concepts (CJ Intro II).Kant's broad concept of nature thus covers "the complex of objects of all possible experience, taken as no more than mere phenomena" (CJ Intro II), that is, "appearances," which include culture as "the ultimate end which we have cause to attribute to nature in respect of the human race" (CJ §83).Thus, 'nature' refers to appearances as "the sum of phenomena" (CJ Preface); "the sum of objects of outer sense" (CJ §70); "the whole of nature, namely the world" (CJ §78); "things capable of being objects of experience"; "the world as the sum of all objects of experience" (CJ §79); the "totality of appearances" and "aggregate of appearances" (CPR A114); as well as the "order and regularity in the appearances" (CPR A125).The distillation of Kant's projective, heuristic, as-if and indeterministic character of interpretation from reflective teleology, then, appears justified in terms of the deliberate comprehensiveness by which nature is described in the Critique of Judgment.
The definitional justification of distilling a general, procedural mechanism from Kant's reflective-teleological procedure is further strengthened by its epistemological intent as displaying the "peculiarity of our (human) understanding" (CJ §77).An important feature here is that whenever we are baffled by complex contingencies, interpretation is invoked to find "an intelligible order."Which applies to anything that is "infinitely multiform and ill-adapted to our power of apprehension" (CP Intro V).As such, Kant's final critical concept of reflective-teleological judgment has the distinction of uniquely dealing with the most complex contexts of human interaction in history, politics, culture, the arts, and personal relations.On the scales of the ubiquity and usefulness of judgments, then, Kant's interpretive-projective procedure must rank very highly amongst his earlier critical concepts.The abstraction of a general principle governing all interpretation of complex contexts then appears justified also on the grounds of reflective-teleological reasoning offering a genuine advance over previously available tools.
In terms of its genesis, perhaps the obvious usefulness of Kant's primary interpretive tool is not so surprising if we recall that it is derived from art and other cognitive judgments.In the Critique of Judgment, interpretation is consistently associated with an artistic manner of investigation (CJ Intro IV; VIII; FI II; V; § §65; 71; 72; 74; 90).And whenever we employ the reflective-teleological dialectic we do so for "a purposive and systematic ordering."In doing so, our "reflective power of judgment" interprets "not schematically, but technically; not merely mechanically" but rather "artistically" (CJ FI V).As such, Kant's artistic use of reflective-teleological reasoning forges "a causal connection according to a rational concept, that of end, which, if regarded as a series, would involve regressive as well as progressive dependency."And it is "in art" that "we readily find examples of a nexus of this kind" (CJ §65).Furthermore, the discovery in interpretation of a "self-propagating formative power" (sich fortpflanzende bildende Kraft) is as much in the interpreter's mind as it may have been the actual cause of the artistic product itself (CJ §65).Here, Kant's critique of authorial primacy proves relevant, according to which even Plato, "this illustrious philosopher," can be interpreted better "than he has understood himself."This is so because he may not have "sufficiently determined his concept" or if "he has sometimes spoken, or even thought, in opposition to his own intention" 16 (CPR A314/B370).
Also, part and parcel of this new way of approaching perplexing aggregates of particulars is Kant's second "maxim" of the Critique of Judgment, according to which he urges us to advance from "Selbstdenken," that is, "to think for oneself" to communally informed judgments, known as his expanded horizon (CJ §40).Lastly, Kant's consistent emphasis on freeing reason from authority via the Horatian slogan "dare to know" (sapere aude) and his motto of the Enlightenment, that "everything must submit to Kritik," in the first footnote of the Critique of Pure Reason, all buttress reflective-teleological judgments as general, legitimate tools of inquiry.As such, and given its broad range of applicability, it makes sense to regard Kant's reflective-teleological judgment as the pinnacle of his Critiques.Which is not, however, the way it was received in the following two centuries.

The 19th Century Relapse into Induction
Since induction is a form of reasoning by which we proceed from empirical premises to empirical truth-claims, it cannot do the job of Kant's proto-hermeneutic procedure which advances only the weaker claim of rendering opaque contexts intelligible.However, the leading authorities on interpretation theory in the 19th century, Friedrich Ast, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Wilhelm Dilthey were unable in their writings to build on Kant's revolutionary innovation of letting go of truth-claims in complex judgments.Although all three thinkers adopted Kant's fundamental insight into the reciprocity of relations between particulars and wholes in interpretation (CJ FI XII; Intro V; § §65; 67; 68; 77), they failed to sever the verification cord between what is empirically observed and what is interpretively projected.Instead, they consolidated hermeneutic inquiry as inductive reconstruction.
16. Otto-Friedrich Bollnow, "What Does It Mean to Understand a Writer Better than He Did Himself?" Philosophy Today 23, 1 (1979), 16-28.In his Grundlinien der Grammatik, Hermeneutik, und Kritik (1808), Friedrich Ast appears to follow Kant in conceiving interpretation as combining particulars with a reconstructed whole.Yet, instead of viewing reconstruction as a historically situated, rational imposition, as it is in Kant, Ast's interpretation introduced a radically different accent: the act of interpretation is now guided by the notion of a reified Geist (spirit).Ast takes the directionality of interpretive claims from the higher authority of an early 19th century conception of spirit as "undivided being" on the assumption that "the more I progress in my conception of the particular," the easier it will be to "recognize the spirit [as] the idea of the whole." 17Thus, Ast's famous formulation of the hermeneutic circle reveals an inductive methodology that has been idealistically transformed into a strange form of deduction in which Geist functions as a unifying force by which particulars become meaningful as a whole.Ast's interpretive truth-claims anchored in a dubious notion of Geist draws a sharp line between Kant's proto-hermeneutics and the beginning of modern hermeneutics as incommensurate methodologies.
Schleiermacher's inductive hermeneutics of the sense differs decisively from Ast's position in that any "hermeneutics of the spirit" is "beyond the scope of hermeneutics altogether."Instead, Schleiermacher opts for a method with a double focus on empirical, comparative analysis and "divinatory" interpretation. 18Its task is seen as understanding an "utterance at first as well and then better than [did] its author 19 (cf.Kant CPR A314/BB377).After all, an author "has even here no other data then we do."Again, like Kant, Schleiermacher recognizes that interpretation "is always provisional." 20As "understanding," interpretation is viewed as an "art," driven as it is by a "hermeneutic Kunstgefühl."Unfortunately, like Ast, Schleiermacher's hermeneutics lets go of reflective-teleological reasoning by viewing interpretation as a form of induction.On the one hand, Schleiermacher continues to be committed to Kant's "general image-schematism," which is not easily reconciled with an inductive approach, on the other hand, yet, as we read in his Dialectic of 1811, "there is everywhere as much approximation to knowledge that is really known as the procedure of the process of induction." 21By referring to his method as inductive rather than reflective-teleological, Schleiermacher's hermeneutics displays a tension between interpretation conceived as provisional approximation and the certitude of making truth-claims.The latter has recently been confirmed, for example, by Schleiermacher's influential but now discredited assertion that Plato's criticism of written philosophy is apocryphal. 22t the heart of Wilhelm Dilthey's hermeneutics we find the notion of Verstehen, conceived as a grasping of "the interconnectedness of lived experience in the human-historical world."As such, "understanding returns from the sensorily given in human history to that which never appears to the senses but nevertheless works itself out and expresses itself externally."Interpreting is to discover the "the nexus of lived experience" revealed in human "expression," by which "humanity is present for us as an object of the human sciences." 23The central methodological tool for this goal is the inductive reconstruction of the "the totality of the psychic life" recreated as a "triumph of re-experiencing."The manifestations of what makes us humans, such as pictures, statues, plays, philosophical systems, religious writings, and legal books, Dilthey inquiry calls for a method of "inductive inference" providing "higher forms of understanding" on the basis of "gathering" of "what is given in a work or a life."As a result, we are able to comprehend "the overall connectedness or unity of a work or person -a life-relationship" by generalizing to a "knowledge of life" via "a procedure equivalent to induction."Thus, the method of induction covers both the analysis of details and the "synthetic reconstruction of the whole, again on the basis of induction, and with constant awareness of general truths." 24o be fair to Dilthey, he was aware of the fundamental tension between his humanistic goals and his quasi-scientific methodology, as is revealed in his concept of "indeterminate intuition," the "process of determining determinate-indeterminate particulars," and his phrasing of "the connectedness of life from the determinate-indeterminate meaning of its parts." 25However, Dilthey was unable to reconcile such insights with the very notion of induction.It required Husserl's invention of the eidetic procedure to furnish the tools for liberating Dilthey's hermeneutic psychologism from its inductive limitations.In spite of the progress he had made in the identification of the characteristics of the humanities, Dilthey's commitment to induction proved to have four disadvantages.First, it forgets Kant's critique of its limitations; second, given its target of clarifying the complexities of historical human existence, it makes truth-claims beyond its reach; third, induction had long been successfully employed in the natural sciences from Likewise chastising large-scale, interpretive truth-claims, Gianni Vattimo wants to install in hermeneutics a postmodern, "non-metaphysical conception of truth" as an "aesthetic and rhetorical experience."In such a "nihilistic," post-metaphysical conception, truth would not emulate the "positivistic model of scientific knowledge" and "the conformity of a proposition to how things are," but rather follow Nietzsche and Heidegger in the pursuit of a "nihilistic ontology." 29Ironically, his position on interpretive truth as an opening rather than closure is much closer to Kant's abandonment of truth in the critical concept of reflective-teleological judgment than Vattimo appears to be aware of, as revealed in his Kantian observation that "the recognition of truth as interpretation" means "that it is provisional." 30After all, the reflective-teleological judgment does its work "artistically, according to the universal but nonetheless indeterminate principle of a purposive and systematic ordering" (CJ FI V).Not unlike Ricoeur, Vattimo understands the entire metaphysical tradition as a "quest for assurance," force, and "the violence bound up with the imposition of presence." 31Once more, we must exempt Kant from this charge, for whom interpretive, reflective-teleological projections, though metaphysical in a minimal sense, are stripped of certitude and truth-claims in favour of no more than elucidation and the assertion of intelligibility (CJ § §78, 61, 76, Preface, Intro V).
In his chapter "The Kantian Pleasure System" of A Finite Thinking (2003), Jean-Luc Nancy engages directly with Kant's third Critique, even if he does so from a not so promising perspective.The central thesis here is that the Critique of Judgment reveals to us that pleasure in Kant "is repressed" even it exhibits itself as an "active principle," if not as "the sole really active and motivating principle" at the core of his critical enterprise. 32Which is to reiterate a critical gesture familiar to us from the writings of Hamann, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Derrida.Yet it is not the case, as Nancy alleges, that Kant represses pleasure; it simply is not his key topic.Rather, he relegates the merely aesthetic response of likes and dislikes to the domain on non-cognitive judgments, a necessary move in preparation for his exploration of the limits of human cognition in the interpretation of complex phenomena, the core task of the Critique.As Kant tells his readers in the Preface to the First Edition in 1790, "our cognitive faculties" are the Critique's "sole concern, to the exclusion of the feeling of pleasure and displeasure."What matters is that in their most complex application, our cognitive faculties employ Kant's reflective-teleological judgment, an intricate, critical procedure for the elucidation of which Part I of Critique of Judgment functions as prolegomenon.And this is why judgments based on feelings alone cannot be "raised to the level of concepts in order to contribute to the knowledge of objects" (CJ FI XI).Nancy's dismissive intervention, according to which "Kantian reason relinquishes or is deprived of delight," comes at too high a price. 33What is achieved here is not only a wilful distortion of what the third Critique is all about, but also the destruction of the intricate interrelation between the two parts of the book, adding to the scandalous denial in modern hermeneutics of the momentous contribution the reflective-teleological has made to interpretation theory by substituting claims to intelligibility for untenable claims to truth.
Authorial privilege having been eliminated in the Critique of Pure Reason, with reference to Plato, and truth-claims being replaced by the weaker assertion of intelligibility in the interpretation of opaque contexts in the Critique of Judgment, one might have expected that postmodernity had learned that it is a little late to still rile against the hermeneutics of truth.Not so the postmodern John Caputo in Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (1987) and a little later in More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Wo We Are (2000) when he "douses the flames of essentialism," advocating instead an "anti-essentialist open-endedness," the "irreducibility to truth" and a "relentless critique of objectivist conceptions of truth" in interpretation.In Caputo's prankster hermeneutics, the "metaphysicians and transcendentalists" have received "more contempt than contemplation" and so look very much like the strawmen of postmodernity.Had Caputo read Part II of the Critique of Judgment he could not have missed that Kant's conception of interpretation had long ago forsaken "settling on a thesis," or insisting on interpretive "truth." 34e could say, then, with and beyond Kant, that interpretation, like works of art themselves and like self-organizing biological beings, have a "self-propagating formative power" which transcends their original design, renewing themselves with each new elucidation.Which, however, does not require the reinvention of truth as Heideggerian disclosure.Instead, Kant's more sober substitution of continuing, interpretive, indeterministic intelligibility for truth, though largely unacknowledged in the literature, remains the decisive philosophical advance made in 1790.