Feeling and freedom: Kant on aesthetics and morality

In the final section of the introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Kant speaks of the "great gulf' (grosse Kluft) that separates the "realm of the concept of nature" from that of "the concept of freedom." "The concept of freedom," he states, "determines nothing in regard to the theoretical cognition of nature; the concept of nature likewise [determines] nothing in regard to the practical laws of freedom." It does not seem possible to throw a bridge across this gulf; he continues, but in fact "the faculty of judgment yields the mediating concept between the concept of nature and the concept of freedom, which makes possible the transition from the purely theoretical to the purely practical, from the lawfulness of the former to the final purpose of the latter, in the concept of a purposiveness of nature." Such a mediating concept apparently must show that even though "the determining grounds of causality according to the concept of freedom (and the practical laws which it contains) are not founded in nature," "nevertheless their effect, in accord with these formal laws, should take place in the world" (CJ, Introduction IX, pp. 195-196).' Many writers have offered accounts of how the concept of the purposiveness of nature, or more broadly the formal purposiveness of both aesthetic and teleological judgment, is supposed to bridge the gulf between the causality of nature according to theoretical laws and the causality of freedom according to practical laws. But few pause to ask the question, what gulf? What problem about the relationship between the legislations of nature and freedom remains to be solved in the Critique of Judgment that was not already solved by the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason? Had not the proof of the actuality of freedom in the second Critique, building upon the proof of its logical and epistemological possibility in the third antinomy of the first Critique, already solved the problem of the relation between the causality of nature and the causality of freedom? Kant's conception of morality as well as the model of the relations between theoretical and practical reason which he had evolved by the time of the completion of the Critique of Practical Reason, which we might have conveniently called his metaphysics of morals if he had not preempted that title for his detailed description of our actual duties of justice and virtue in his last great work, comprised several key claims. Above all was Kant's conception of virtue or moral worth as a quality attaching to agents on account of their attempts to perform actions intended to comply with the moral law solely on the ground that such actions are required by the moral law, that is, from the motive of duty alone: "it is not enough to do what is right, but it must also be performed solely on the ground that it is right" (CJ, ?53, p. 327). Next, there was a claim about our knowledge of the moral law: pure practical reason alone can discover the moral law without assistance from any other faculty of cognition. Third, there was a claim about our knowledge of the actuality of freedom: although acknowledgment of the difference between phenomena and noumena, appearances and things in themselves, and recognition that the deduction of the universal applicability of the law of natural causation holds only for objects of empirical knowledge or appearances had been argued, in the solution to the third antinomy in the first Critique, to suffice for the proof of the possibility of a causality according to laws of freedom as well as laws of nature, only in the second Critique was it argued that