Kant considered the Critique of Judgment--the third work in a philosophical trilogy--to be a treatise on the principles structuring judgments in general.  Having delineated reason in its pure and practical senses in the first two Critiques, Kant felt it necessary to outline what made possible the application of reason--the power to judge [Urteilskraft].  The Critique of Judgment, therefore, was to function as the bridge between the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason.
        Kant broke judgment down into two distinct forms: determinant and reflective judgment.  Determinant judgment was the application of an existing concept to a particular.  Reflective judgment was the judgment of a particular for which no concept existed.  As a result, judgment was thrown back upon itself and held back from completion. The Critique of Judgment is concerned with exploring reflective judgment in two intriguingly problematic domains--those of aesthetic and teleological judgment.  Most discussions of the Critique of Judgment--especially those having anything to do with aesthetic or artistic issues--make virtually no mention of what amounts to half of Kant's treatise.  One should note, however, that Kant considered both forms of judgment equally vexed and thus necessitating consideration.  In the second half of the third Critique Kant was attempting to demonstrate that judgments about the purposiveness of nature were necessary but heuristic attempts to ascribe a teleology to nature.  This ascription of teleology--which was derived necessarily from an idea of reason and not from a concept that could be in accord with nature--is what made these judgments reflective.  The discussion of the teleology of nature, therefore, was to serve as a counterpart to the discussion of art, for the former dealt with reflective judgment in a supposedly objective realm, while the latter dealt with reflective judgment in a supposedly subjective realm.
         The section of the Critique of Judgment that was to have a greater cultural impact dealt with questions of aesthetics.  According to Kant, before the art work the imagination synthesized sense data into a coherent image for which the understanding could provide no concept.  What fueled the search for a concept was the apparent purposiveness of the work of art that nonetheless served no purpose.  As a result, the understanding was put into a state of free play with the imagination.  It was in this state of free play that the mind was to become aware of its own constitutive role in the act of judgment and thus the production of knowledge.  Because of the lack of a concept to apply in the instance of art, the mind was to come to realize that in determinant judgment the mind did not achieve a correspondence with an external reality, but, rather, the mind generated the concept to which the thing had to submit.  What is disclosed in art thereby is the power and freedom of the mind.
         Kant's claims about the function of aesthetic judgment, however, extended much further.  For Kant argued that aesthetic judgment, far from being individual and idiosyncratic, was profoundly universal in nature.  In order to make this claim, Kant argued that the pleasure in art was necessarily a disinterested pleasure, oriented only towards the formal purposiveness of the art work.  The disinterested nature of aesthetic judgment allowed it to make a universal claim for validity for it appealed not to specific aspects of the art work but to a sense held in common (sensus communis).  In this way the formal properties of the art work would be isotropically linked to the form-generating properties of the mind.  In the appeal to a sensus communis, moreover, the awareness of the legislative function of the mind in constituting perceived reality was linked to an awareness of the universally shared nature of this legislative function.  The judgment employed in art could thereby serve as a propaedeutic to ethics in that aesthetic judgment was but the purely formal version of the self-application of ethical norms that was to take place in exercise of practical reason.
        Kant's Critique of Judgment is arguably one of the foundational texts of the aesthetics of Romanticism.  It had both an overt and a subterranean impact on Romanticism.  However, precise determinations of intellectual causation are difficult with Kant in that at each stage Kant's thought inspired heated debate and reformulation, all of which acquired a life of its own.  Overtly, Kant's thought was carefully considered and addressed by such writers as Schiller, Novalis, and Schlegel.  In more oblique ways, writers like Coleridge absorbed Kantian thought and served to disseminate it further so that one could plausibly argue, for instance, that there is a Kantian dimension to Wordsworth's poetry.
        It is no exaggeration to claim that Kant not only founded aesthetic modernism but also enabled Romanticism to establish an aesthetic paradigm that continued on through the twentieth century.  Kant brought the philosophical weight that was necessary to dismantle the centuries-old ideal of mimesis in European culture.  The Copernican revolution that Kant sought to bring about in philosophy was something that he also brought about in aesthetic thought.  Just as Kant excluded consideration of the thing-in-itself from epistemology, so did Kant exclude slavish fidelity to an external object from aesthetics.  No longer was mimetic accuracy an aesthetic ideal; rather, art was to connect to the generative, world-making activity of the mind.  This shift had enormous implications for art.
         Henceforth art was not to display virtuosity in a rule-bound medium.  Since the understanding was to have no concept to apply to the work of art, it was essential that it not correspond to any known instance of art.  In other words, the work of art had to be truly original, and not be characterized by the application of artistic rules.  It ideally did not fit any existing concept of art.  Art was now to be created by a genius ab ovo.  The only rule was to avoid rules and any existing, accepted forms of art.  Such notions are now seen to be commonplaces of Romanticism and can indeed be found articulated in programmatic texts such as the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.  It is in the context of the Critique of Judgment, however, that such notions of artistic autonomy and originality acquire their full philosophical import.  Accordingly, Romanticism can be seen as a repudiation of a longstanding Platonic-Christian heritage that consigned art to a peripheral status at several removes from the realm of philosophical or theological truth.  Instead, Romanticism presents art as part of an activity that is closer than anything else to the action the mind itself undertakes in the construction of the world as it is perceived.  In this way, art is more central to human self-understanding than either philosophy or theology.
         Finally, it can also be argued that Kant's work helps to make clear that Romanticism establishes an aesthetic paradigm that extends through the twentieth century.  For, in its pursuit of formal purposiveness, art in the Kantian sense was to focus on the form and the mode of presentation as opposed to mimetic fidelity.  This emphasis manifested itself initially in the prominent role irony assumed in Romanticism.  The concern with form, however, continued to be a central concern well beyond Romanticism.  Indeed, the history of art subsequent to Romanticism could be said to be the story of the liberation of form from content. There is arguably a clear trajectory from Kant to Kandinsky, Schoenberg, and Joyce.  While this increasing formalism is in a dialectical relationship with an increasing materialism in art--as is evident from Duchamp to Beuys and Hirst--the counterpart to formalism is likewise dependent upon Kantian aesthetics in its prioritization of originality and conceptuality over the very idea of art.  The Critique of Judgment is thus in many ways foundational to diverse modes of artistic production and appreciation that remain very much in effect.
 
 

Translations:
Critique of Judgement, translated by J. H. Bernard, New York: Free Press, 1986
Critique of Judgment, translated J. C. Meredith, Oxford University Press, 1997
Critique of the Power of Judgment, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge University Press, 2000
Critique of Judgment, translated by Werner S. Pluhar, New York: Hackett, 1987

Further Reading:
Burnham, Douglas, An Introduction to Kant's Critique of Judgment, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000
Guyer, Paul, Kant and the Claims of Taste, Cambridge University Press, 1997
Lyotard, Jean-François, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994
Makreel, Rudolf A., Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermenuetical Import of the Critique of Judgment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990
Menninghaus, Winfried, In Praise of Nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard, translated by Henry Pickford, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999
Zammito, John H., The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992