Measuring, Judging and the Good Life: Aquinas and Kant

This paper examines St. Thomas Aquinas’s and Immanuel Kant’s notions of measurement and judgment, particularly measuring and judging beauty, to demonstrate their respective conclusions about the highest achievement of man. For St. Thomas’s view, I draw from a variety of St. Thomas’s writings as well as rely on Peter Redpath’s research into St. Thomas’s understanding of measuring and judging. For Kant’s view, I focus on Kant’s perspective as written in The Critique of Judgement. In this paper, I argue that by examining the way both St. Thomas and Kant measure and judge beauty, we can see that, for Kant, man’s highest achievement is to live the moral life, while for St. Thomas, man’s highest achievement is to know the good and God. Interestingly, for both philosophers, their conclusions about man’s highest achievements wind through their understanding of beauty and the way beauty is measured and judged.