The Ideal of God as Reflective  Ratio Essendi  Kant’s Aesthetic Reflective Judgment: A New Perspective on the Relationship Between Aesthetic Judgment, Rational Ideas and Religion

The paper proposes that the idea of God is an implicit transcendental ratio essendi of the subjective foundation of the pure aesthetic reflective judgment’s claims to universal communicability. This suggestion is based on the relation Kant asserts between reflective aesthetic judgment and moral judgments in the Critique of Judgment . In turn, this study demonstrates that the relation between pure aesthetic and moral judgments explains key ambiguities in Kant’s claims concerning the subjective ground of the universal communicability of the former. In contrast to the body of literature on this relation, this study focuses on the underexplored connection between it and the reflective principle of purposiveness without purpose ( Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck ). Part I explains and defends the thesis that a rational idea must be posited as a transcendental ratio essendi of aesthetic judgment due to the fundament role of reflective judgment and its principle of purposiveness without purpose in harmonizing the supersensible noumenal realm with the sensible phenomenal realm. Part II argues that the idea of God is the only idea of reason that may serve as the ratio essendi of aesthetic judgment. This I demonstrate my thesis by thoroughly analyzing Kant’s postulate of God in the Analytic of the Critique of Practical Reason , his characterization of the transcendental idea of God in the Prolegomena , and his characterization of the ideal of God in the Critique of Pure Reason . Part III concludes by considering how this aesthetic use partially agrees and partially disagrees with Paul Guyer’s claims about the relation between morality and aesthetics in Kant’s critical system.