CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT
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loginHegel famously claimed, if the student transcripts of his lectures on the history of philosophy are to be believed, that ‘Kant spoke the first rational word concerning the beautiful’ and had thus made a fundamental, and indeed epochal, contribution to what it was now customary to call ‘aesthetics’. But in fact the Critique of Judgement, to which he was specifically alluding, is both more and less than what we would commonly understand by the term aesthetics. And in certain crucial respects the enormous influence which this work in particular exercised upon the first generation of German idealist thinkers who succeeded Kant, and upon nearly all of the most important artistic and literary figures of the period as well, lay almost as much in his philosophical treatment of organic nature as in his interpretation of the realm of aesthetic experience. In order to understand the eventual conjunction or coordination of these apparently rather distinct areas of interest and concern in Kant’s mature thought, it is helpful to recall in outline something of the development of his philosophy before the publication of the first edition of the Critique of Judgement in 1790.
