On missing elements in Kant's metaphysics: Beauty and Life

This paper deals with elements that are missing from Kant’s initial presentation of the critical philosophy in the Critique of Pure Reason. The elements I am concerned with here are beauty and organism. Kant did treat both in the two major parts of the Critique of Judgment. I begin this paper by briefly delineating the chief features of the critical philosophy to show what it cannot cover. In the two principal parts of this paper, I then go on to first consider Kant’s paradoxical treatment of beauty or more specifically, his effort to demonstrate that when treated critically in a judgment of taste, the subjective feeling of beauty is nevertheless universal and necessary. These are claims, I argue, that cannot be equally accepted. I then turn to his treatment of organism. This, by Kant’s own admission, cannot be revealed through the mechanist approach the critical philosophy adopted from early modern thought. Kant replaces the mechanist approach with a teleological one, discussed in the second part of this paper. In the end, both discussions point to the supersensible.