Lara Ostaric

The essay traces closely Schelling’s criticism of Kant’s postulates, to wit, that Kant cannot consistently hold that theoretical reason’s cognition of the Unconditioned from the practical perspective (i.e., the assent of theoretical reason to the postulates) is possible while having the same conception of ‘weak’ theoretical reason to which the same cognition from the theoretical perspective remains closed. Schelling’s solution is a demand to realize the Absolute, i.e., the Unconditioned that grounds the unity of the realm of freedom and the realm of nature, solely through one’s own _action_. By the latter Schelling does not understand a moral action but the action of a ‘creative reason’. Critical philosophy conceived thusly, to wit, in its complete form, would be able to “deduce from the essence of reason” both systems: dogmatism (the Unconditioned as the object of theoretical knowledge) and criticism (the Unconditioned as the object of infinite realization in moral practice).

In this article, I give a short précis of my recently published book, The Critique of Judgment and the Unity of Kant’s Critical System, and I also respond to the arguments of my critics, Andrija Šoć, Monika Jovanović, Ted Kinnaman, and Luigi Filieri. In response to Šoć, I take the opportunity to clarify the difference between the realism I argue is in the representations of reflective judgment (“moral image realism”) and the realism in our assent to moral Glaube (“rational necessitation realism”). In response to Jovanović, I endorse her claim that my approach to Kant’s aesthetics relates to contemporary notions of aesthetic cognitivism and further elaborate on how Kant’s text can support this view. In response to Kinnaman, I remind the reader that my book sufficiently acknowledges that a contingent fit between nature and our cognitive faculties must be at the core of the reflective judgment’s principle of purposiveness. I also emphasize that my notion of reflective judgment’s “schema analogues,” although subjective because they respond to the need of reason, are also at the same time objective and in some respect about the world. In response to Filieri, I contend that, for Kant, our representations of the progress of human history presuppose both autonomous human agency and something that surpasses it yet cooperates with its final aims. Thus, the progress of human history is both about “the aim of freedom” and “the aim of nature.”

In his Critique of Teleological Judgment, Kant addresses an apparent ‘contradiction’ concerning organic formations: organisms are governed by universal mechanical laws yet are end-directed, that is, they exhibit purposiveness. Mechanical, or ‘real’, causality pertains to nature, or the world. ‘Ideal’ causality pertains to the mind. Kant resolves the antinomy with the idea of the ‘supersensible, on which we must base nature as phenomenon’, and in which both types of causalities originate.Schelling, I contend, follows closely Kant’s formulation of the antinomy. His aim, however, is to show that we can have an empirical cognition of these objects, as well to offer what Kant calls a scientific ‘explanation’ and not a mere ‘elucidation’ of their constitution and function. Showing this will entail an ontological extension of Kant’s own solution to the antinomial conflict, namely, a unity of mechanical and teleological causes by the principle of life, the ‘world-soul’, which has a constitutive and not a regulative status and which permeates both inorganic and organic nature. This unity is possible only insofar as both inorganic and organic nature exhibit the prior unity of mind and world in the Absolute.

Basile and Lyssy’s volume is a collection of eleven essays published in honor of Günter Zöller and dedicated to the conceptions of system and freedom in Kant and Fichte, which have been central to Zöller’s research. The editors rightly emphasize that systematicity in Kant is related to metaphysics as a disposition of reason. For Kant, reason is teleological, namely, directed toward its final end, the realization of the highest good in the world. This is why Kant’s theoretical philosophy—his transcendental idealism as a metaphysical doctrine— makes room for the possibility of freedom, while his practical philosophy shows freedom’s reality and the need of theoretical reason to cohere with the demands of practical... Read More.

In this book, Lara Ostaric argues that Kant’s seminal Critique of Judgment is properly understood as completing his Critical system. The two seemingly disparate halves of the text are unified under this larger project insofar as both aesthetic and teleological judgment indirectly exhibit the final end of reason, the Ideas of the highest good and the postulates, as if obtaining in nature. She relates Kant’s discussion of aesthetic and teleological judgment to important yet under-explored concepts in his philosophy, and helps the reader to recognize the relevance of his aesthetics and teleology for our understanding of fine arts and genius, the possibility of pure judgments of ugliness, Kant’s philosophy of history, his philosophy of religion, and his conception of autonomy. Ostaric’s novel and thoroughly integrative presentation of Kant’s system will be of interest not only to Kant scholars but also to those working in religious studies, art history, political theory, and intellectual history.

In Kant scholarship the significance of the beauty of nature for Kant’s aesthetics has been traditionally favored over the beauty of art. By focusing on Kant’s characterization of genius as a gift of nature, my aim is to show that, in contrast to the already existing interpretations of this issue in Kant literature, the works of art as the works of genius can indeed serve as ‘signs’ that nature and the world as a whole is hospitable to the realization of our moral ends, or is morally purposive. My claim that for Kant not only the beauty of nature but also the works of art as the works of genius serve as signs of world’s moral purposiveness, or of—in Dieter Henrich’s words—the “moral image of the world,” calls for a reevaluation of the role of art in Kant’s moral teleology and, consequently, for a reevaluation of the place of art in Kant’s aesthetics.

In secondary literature, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is most commonly discussed within the context of Kant’s epistemology and the transcendental deduction, which was swiftly identified by the generation of young Kantians as a skeptical problem, i.e., the need to demonstrate that our a priori conditions of knowledge indeed determine their object. In this paper I argue that the central concern that motivates Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is better understood within the context of the question of unity of theoretical and practical reason with which Schelling was familiar from his study of Kant’s third Critique. But unlike Kant, for whom the occurrences of beauty and organisms in the world exhibit a contingent harmony of nature with the demands of our rationality, Schelling demands a necessary correspondence between reason and nature. Schelling anchors the necessary correspondence between the self and nature in the claim that nature is not a dead object of self-consciousness, but that which is at the same time a subject and its own object. He takes the latter to be the essential characteristic of 'life'. Nature must not be conceived as a dead mechanism, but as a living organization and as an “analogue of reason” because to be one’s own subject and object defines both the spontaneity of self-consciousness and the spontaneity of self-determination. Thus, nature that is no longer represented mechanically, but as an “analogue of reason,” is nature that is necessarily amenable with both the minimal (i.e., cognitive) and final ends of our rationality (i.e., freedom).

Kant’s notion of moral Glaube, i. e., a rational assent to the existence of objects of the Ideas of God and the soul’s immortality, can be approached from both an antirealist and a realist perspective. According to the former, moral Glaube is speculative reason’s “presupposition” (Voraussetzung) (KpV: 122.20) of the objects of these Ideas either in order to avoid its own inner contradictions or to help one maintain one’s moral disposition. It is antirealist in spirit because the assumptions that reason makes may have nothing to do with how things are in reality. According to the latter, moral Glaube is an assent that takes for its ground reason’s determination of a real and given object. This determination, given the limitation of our discursive understanding, is not theoretical and, hence, cannot result in theoretical cognition of this object. Instead, Kant calls it “practical cognition” (das praktische reine Vernunfterkenntnis) (KU: 470.8-9). In this essay, I argue that if we pay closer attention to Kant’s neglected notion of “practical cognition” and of reflective judgment in the third Critique, additional evidence becomes available for why Kant should be understood as a realist with respect to moral Glaube and why the antirealist interpretations do not adequately capture Kant’s view. I identify two forms of realism with respect to Kant’s notion of moral Glaube, “rational necessitation realism” (RNR) and “moral image realism” (MIR). The former emphasizes rational necessity of a normative, not merely prudential, sort and knowledge-like quality of moral Glaube. The latter, while consistent with the former, emphasizes the coherence between the conditions of objective reality that must be met by the claims of theoretical reason (science) and those of the practical.

This essay argues that, contrary to the prevailing view according to which reflection in Kant's aesthetic judgment is interpreted as ‘the logical actus of the understanding’, we should pay closer attention to Kant's own formulation of aesthetic reflection as ‘an action of the power of imagination’. Put differently, I contend in this essay that the rule that governs and orders the manifold in aesthetic judgment is imagination's own achievement, the achievement of the productive synthesis of the ‘fictive power’, entirely independent of the understanding. While this view does not entail that the faculty of the understanding is not necessary in aesthetic reflection, a stronger emphasis on the role of imagination in aesthetic reflection allows us to realize that its schematizing and interpretive activity, while consistent with, goes well beyond the discursive demands of the understanding insofar as it intimates the supersensible ground of freedom that manifests itself as ‘the feeling of life’. Therefore, I show in this essay that the imagination's unique interpretive power has a special role in completing Kant's critical system by facilitating the connection of the sensible to the supersensible, which further helps us appreciate imagination's practical as opposed to merely cognitive significance.

The following essay has three main objectives. (1) By arguing that the connection between Schelling’s reception of Plato and Kant’s conception of genius is relevant for Schelling’s early development, I show that Schelling’s early Idealism brings to the general problem that plagues German Idealists, i.e., the search for an unconditioned principle that unites theoretical and practical reason, the solution that is genuinely his own. This original solution consists in Schelling’s conception of “creative reason [schöpfersiche Vernunft].” Because the scholarship on German Idealism has thus far been focused predominantly on the analysis of self-consciousness, Schelling’s conception of creative reason remained neglected. (2) I show that the theme of an absolutely free creative subjectivity is shared by many of Schelling’s early works and, hence, I argue that the early development of his Idealism can be interpreted as a beginning of a philosophical system or as a “proto-system” of what is later to become The System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). (3) I evaluate Schelling’s speculative extension of Kant’s notion of creative subjectivity and argue that, when compared to Kant’s notion of genius, Schelling’s ‘absolute I’ should be considered a regress rather than a progress.

In Kant’s Aesthetic Epistemology, Fiona Hughes argues that aesthetic judgment is exemplary of the subjective activity of judgment, the harmony of imagination and understanding, necessary for any cognition in general . Unlike ordinary empirical judgment, aesthetic judgment phenomenologically reveals to us the synthesizing activity of the power of judgment that remains concealed by the cognitive aim of ordinary empirical judgments . According to Hughes, aesthetic judgment is exemplary for cognition because, in aesthetic experience, the fit between mind and world, or how a subject has a point of access to an external world of objects, is not merely inferred but experienced . From here follows Hughes’ provocative claim that Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment in the third Critique completes the general transcendental project of establishing the possibility of a priori synthetic judgments . Thus, in contrast to the dominant “impositionalist” interpretation of Kant’s critical project, according to which our knowledge ultimately amounts to the content of our own mind, Hughes places aesthetic judgment at the center of Kant’s

In this paper I argue that if one is to do justice to reason's unity in Kant, then one must acknowledge that reason's practical ends are presupposed in every theoretical investigation of nature. Thus, contrary to some other commentators, I contend that the notion of the metaphysical ground of the unity of nature should not be attributed to the “dynamics of reason” and its “own practical purposes.” Instead, the metaphysical ground of the unity of nature is in fact an indispensable and necessary notion for reason in both its theoretical and practical functions, but this need of reason to presuppose such a notion can only find its adequate proof in the practical. By offering a synopsis of Kant's accounts of nature's systematicity in the Transcendental Ideal of the Critique of Pure Reason (Part I), the Appendix to the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason (Part II), and in the Critique of Judgment (Part III), I identify in each section Kant's theoretical and practical arguments for reason's presupposition of the “unconditioned,” demonstrate their structural interdependence, and show a general continuity in Kant's position on this issue throughout his critical system.

In this paper I argue that, on Kant's view, the work of genius serves as a sensible exhibition of the Idea of the highest good. In other words, the work of genius serves as a special sign that the world is hospitable to our moral ends and that the realization of our moral vocation in such a world may indeed be possible. In the first part of the paper, I demonstrate that the purpose of the highest good is not to strengthen our motivation to accept the moral law as binding for us but, rather, to strengthen our motivation to persist in our already existent moral dispositions. In the second part, I show that the works of genius exhibit the Idea of the highest good and, consequently, strengthen our hope in its realization. Drawing on the results of the second part, the third part of the paper demonstrates that beauty, of both art and nature, symbolizes morality in a more substantive sense than that suggested by Henry Allison's “formalistic” interpretation. Since, on my view, fine art in Kant serves as a sensible representation of an undetermined conceptual content, or the Idea of the highest good, the fourth part of the paper addresses the vexed question of whether Kant's account of fine art already anticipates the cognitive role later attributed to it by the German Idealists

In this essay, I argue that a genius's creation consists of a special unity of free human activity and nature, whereby ‘nature’ signifies not just another aspect of, but rather something that transcends, creative subjectivity. This interpretation of a genius's creative process throws a new light on a special normative status of a genius's rule, i.e. its originality and exemplarity. With respect to the former, I demonstrate that because the organizing principle of the works of genius remains inscrutable to our limited human understanding, a work of genius appears to the observer's limited cognitive capacities as undetermined and, hence, as contingent and original. With respect to the latter, I show how a genius must evolve within the context of her own tradition and how this ‘humbleness’ of a genius still allows for a multiplicity of co-existent schools or genres with their own distinct standards of excellence. http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1369415411000343

This book is the first collection of essays on Schelling in English that systematically explores the historical development of his philosophy. It addresses all four periods of Schelling's thought: his Transcendental Philosophy and Philosophy of Nature, his System of Identity [Identitätsphilosophie], his System of Freedom, and his Positive Philosophy. The essays examine the constellation of philosophical ideas that motivated the formation of Schelling's thought, as well as those later ones for which his philosophy laid the foundation. They therefore relate Schelling's philosophy to a broad range of systematic issues that are of importance to us today: metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, our modern conceptions of individual autonomy, philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, political philosophy, and theology. The result is a new interpretation of Schelling's place in the history of German Idealism as an inventive and productive thinker