Abstract

I propose a unified reading of Kant's third critical work, The Critique of Judgment, as a sustained argument that "purposiveness without a purpose" is the a priori, transcendental principle of judgment, a "subjective" yet necessary condition for the practice of judging and for the possibility of experience. I argue that Kant's principle of purposiveness is a temporal-formal structure of the subject's judging activity, a structure of anticipation that unites present and past moments as "towards" the future. Such purposiveness is a necessary principle of judgment, I argue, for it enables the judging subject to unify the contingent, heterogeneous information "given" in experience not only as homogeneous but also as empirically heterogeneous. For Kant, we must be able to judge purposively without a purpose, if we are to be able to form empirical concepts or understand particulars in our experience. But purposiveness is a "merely subjective" principle, according to Kant, because it guides the subject's activity but does not and cannot characterize objects or ground objective claims. The function of purposiveness as a principle by which the judging subject can unify the heterogeneous as heterogeneous is, I argue, exhibited in the unity we attribute to organisms in teleological judgment, and instantiated most purely or clearly in the act of aesthetic appreciation. Thus for Kant, in aesthetic experience the subject reveals its nature as projectively temporal, utterly distinct from objects, governed by anticipation and history, not chronology and mechanism.