Lebensgefuehl and Geistesgefuehl in Kant's Critique of Judgment

It might come as something of a surprise for today's readers to learn that of the three critical investigations undertaken by Immanuel Kant during the 1780s it was the Critique of Judgment that would have the broadest readership and the largest impact in Kant's own lifetime. Virtually all of the leading lights of German idealism and Romanticism"”Schelling, Schiller, Schlegel, Hölderlin, and Hegel, to name but a few"”found inspiration in Kant's account of the power of judgment. Kant's earlier investigation into the extent and limits of knowledge in his Critique of Pure Reason had, by contrast, left many readers cold. As Goethe famously put his response to it: "I found pleasure in the portal, but I dared not set foot in the labyrinth itself; sometimes my gift for poetry got in my way, sometimes common sense." And as for Kant's subsequent effort to think through the tran- scendental grounds for moral action, this too left many unconvinced. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant had to convince readers that while we would never be able to sensibly discover freedom amid the mechanical workings of everyday life, we still needed to understand the force of its power for directing human choice. G. W. F. Hegel was particularly cool to Kant's account, asking how an experience drained of positive content in this way might still encourage moral behavior. For, in Hegel's view, "this contradiction, which remains insuperable in the system and destroys it, becomes a real inconsistency when this absolute emptiness is supposed to give itself content as practical reason and to expand itself in the form of duties. Theoretical reason lets the intellect give it the manifold which it has only to regulate; it makes no claim to an autonomous dignity, no claim to beget the Son out of itself."