Being ‘out in the Territory,’ or Belonging through Hope

It is a novel interpretation of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment centered around the notion of hope.Contrary to philosophical commentaries focused exclusively on either aesthetics or teleology, Sweet suggests reading all parts of the text as internally unified under Kant's famous third question at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason, namely the question 'what I may hope for?' Previous scholarly attempts on the third Critique have not thematized how the notion of hope constitutes the guiding thread of the text itself.The problem of bridging the gulf between freedom and nature is, according to Sweet, the problem of overcoming the indifference of nature to humanity through hope.The new vision of nature Kant proposes -a nature hospitable, fit or amenable, to what is distinctively human -is given from the perspective of hope.In what follows, I will reconstruct Sweet's argument, going through the chapters of the book.Afterwards, I will raise a few objections, and I will conclude with a general comment on the scholarly import of the work.Chapters 1 and 2 present the core of Sweet's interpretation.The starting point is Kant's faculty of reason, whose nature is to always seek the ultimate condition for every given condition, and, therefore, an internally unified whole or totality of everything under its purview.This is the desire of rational intelligibility (towards a rational whole of natural order) of theoretical reason, but also of moral intelligibility (towards a totality of coordinated human ends) of practical reason.Such objective cannot be satisfied from within reason itself, because it always meets an exteriority that cannot be annexed under its purview: nature.Our faculties cannot produce an appearance of the totality theoretical reason strives for, nor can practical reason produce the moral world where the highest good -natural good of happiness caused by virtue -obtains.However, the latter case is destructive for morality itself: if the highest good is impossible, then it is irrational to be moral.This is the juncture where the notion of hope enters the picture: hope is the human answer to the predicament of the frustration of reason by the exteriority of nature.We hope that nature can be such that it will not annul our moral vocation.Thus, the object of hope is the possibility of satisfying reason in a new conception of a nature amenable to the demands of morality.Kant creates the space required for this new conception of nature through the technical notion of the territory, Sweet claims, which appears in Kant's geographical and geopolitical metaphors.Sweet eloquently reconstructs Kant's metaphor: the faculties of understanding and reason constitute domains of legislative authority erected upon a territory of objects, just like two distant cities erected as domains of administration and jurisdiction upon some land, or soil, connecting and separating them.The open territory separating nature, the domain where understanding legislates, and freedom, the domain where reason legislates, is the mediating space where reflective judgment operates without legislation.In the notion of reflection, Kant introduces a distinctive mental activity that constitutes an attempt to make intelligible, or interpret, a set of objects, like beautiful things or living beings, which cannot be annexed into a domain, but are rather encountered in the open territory.Regarding beautiful things in particular, Kant describes a consciousness, through the feeling of pleasure, of the harmony or attunement between how the world is and our mental capacity to access it.However, Sweet notes, this harmony or attunement is not the identity between mind and world of traditional metaphysics.Instead, it is a consciousness of belonging to a larger whole -the domains of nature, freedom, and the territory -beyond the legislative purview of the human mind, through the feeling of the non-predetermined fittingness of the world to the mind.In other words,