19 - Reading the Appendix to Kant's Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment

Summary

Nature in its purposive forms speaks figuratively to us, says Kant; the interpretation of its cipher yields us the phenomenon of freedom in ourselves.

F. W. J. von Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism

The subject of this article is the second part of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment, concerning teleological judgment. The aim is to show through a close reading of the appendix the role of reflective teleological judgments in promoting the connection or transition (Übergang) between the theoretical and the practical principles of reason as a single faculty. Such a reading implies that the text of the appendix is a consistent and coherent part of Kant's exposition in the third Critique. That the third Critique deals with this connection in its different configurations is what Kant states in both introductions, the definitive and the discarded, to the Critique of the Power of Judgment (5:176–79 and 20:193–208). Within the scope of the critical examination of reflective judgment in its teleological function, the connection between practical and pure reason discovers itself in a manner that shows that a transcendental meaning, rather than transcendent, must be attributed to the concepts examined in the second Critique concerning practical reason, namely, those of a highest good, of a deity, of the immortality of the soul, and of freedom.