Abstract

The concept of »power of judgment« (Urteilskraft) develops both before Kant and in Kant in conjunction with that of »taste«. Throughout this history it is understood as bearing on objects with a direct connection to the humanity of human beings: truth, value, and beauty. More precisely, the focus is the relation between the One (universality: understanding) and the Many (particularity: sensibility) with respect to these objects. The understanding of this power vacillates historically between these two extremes, so that it is sometimes placed in the neighborhood of the faculty of taste (sensibility as subjectivity and as receptivity for the particular) and sometimes in that of the understanding as the faculty of strict objectivity or universality. In the Kant of the third Critique this power comes to be conceived as an independent faculty whose function is to mediate between universality and particularity, i.e., between objectivity and subjectivity.