The World as Will and Idea, Vol. II — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp

In the " Critique of ^Esthetical Judgment " the observation first of all forces itself upon us that Kant retains the method which is peculiar to his whole philosophy, and which I have considered at length above — I mean the method of starting from abstract knowledge in order to establish knowledge of perception, so that the former serves him, so to speak, as a camera obscura in which to receive and survey the latter. As in the ,: Critique of Pure Eeason" the forms of judgment are supposed to unfold to him the knowledge of our whole world of perception, so in this " Critique of ^Esthetical Judgment " he does not start from the beautiful itself, from the perceptible and immediately beautiful, but from the judgment of the beautiful, the so-called, and very badly so-called, judgment of taste. This is his problem. His attention is especially aroused by the circumstance that such a judgment is clearly the expression of something that takes place in the subject, but yet is just as universally valid as if it concerned a quality of the object. It is this that struck him, not the beautiful itself. He starts always merely from the assertions of others, from the judgment of the beautful, not from the beautiful itself. It is therefore as if he knew it simply from hearsay, not directly. A blind man of high understanding could almost in the same way make up a theory of colours from very accurate reports which he had heard concerning them. And really we can only venture to regard Kant's philosophemes concerning the beautiful as

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in almost the same position. Then we shall find that his theory is very ingenious indeed, that here and there telling and true observations are made ; but his real solution of the problem is so very insufficient, remains so far below the dignity of the subject, that it can never occur to us to accept it as objective truth.

Therefore I consider myself relieved from the necessity of refuting it ; and here also I refer to the positive part of my work.

With regard to the form of his whole book, it is to be observed that it originated in the idea of finding in the teleological conception the key to the problem of the beautiful. This inspiration is deduced, which is always a matter of no difficulty, as we have learnt from Kant's successors. Thus there now arises the strange combination of the knowledge of the beautiful with that of the teleology of natural bodies in one faculty of knowledge called judgment, and the treatment of these two heterogeneous subjects in one book. With these three powers of knowledge, reason, judgment, and understanding, a variety of symmetrical-architectonic amusements are afterwards undertaken, the general inclination to which shows itself in many ways in this book ; for example, in the forcible adaptation of the whole of it to the pattern of the " Critique of Pure Eeason," and very specially in the antinomy of the aesthetical judgment, which is dragged in by the hair. One might also extract a charge of great inconsistency from the fact that after it has been incessantly repeated in the " Critique of Pure Reason " that the understanding is the faculty of judgment, and after the forms of its judgment have been made the foundation-stone of all philosophy, a quite special faculty of judgment now appears, which is completely different from the former. For the rest, what I call the faculty of judgment, the capacity for translating knowledge of perception into abstract knowledge, and again of applying the latter correctly to the i'ormer, is explained in the positive part of my work.

By far the best part of the " Critique of ^Esthetical Judg156 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.