Practical Judgment As Reflective Judgment in Georg Simmel.

This communication addresses the topic of practical judgments (a concept from moral philosophy that has been adapted into social theory) with reference to Kant's Third Critique — the Kritik der Urteilskraft — and its reception by Georg Simmel. Focusing particularly on reflective judgments, I aim to first reconstruct what I consider the central question of the Kritik der Urteilskraft, namely the possibility of empirical knowledge, insofar as it involves reflection on contingent individual cases. This reflection is capable of attributing meaning and significance to these cases within the systematic framework of a legal order. Although Kant primarily focuses on judgments of taste and teleological judgments, I aim to demonstrate that these judgments concern the particular way in which humans comprehend nature in its specific and contingent manifestations. The challenge posed by this cognition lies in the fact that such a legal order is neither predetermined by any cognitive faculties nor can it be derived from the given. Subsequently, I aim to demonstrate how the findings of the Third Critique can influence social theory, particularly the formation of practical judgments in seemingly chaotic, "labyrinthine" contexts of orientation. In these contexts, an infinite variety of empirical forms—which cannot be subsumed under particular empirical laws or universal moral imperatives—configure moral judgment as a dramatic problem of orientation in the world. At this point, I will refer to Simmel with a twofold aim: first, to illustrate the circumstances—both individual and collective—in which moral judgments become problematic; and second, to highlight elements of Simmel's social philosophy that suggest the formation of a reflexive understanding of moral judgments in complex contexts, with the potential to develop into a general theory of orientation.