In his writings on our philosophical representations of human history Kant offers both epistemic and moral justification for the use of teleological principles. Following his epistemic justification, in order to make human history intelligible to ourselves we must represent the individual events in human history under the Idea of “nature’s aim.” By the latter Kant understands the formation of civil society to be based on the principle of right within which the “ultimate end of nature,” the formation of culture and the cultivation of human sensibility that is amenable to the demands of morality, would be possible. Kant’s moral justification is comprised of two parts: a moral-psychological argument for strengthening moral Glaube and the argument that emphasizes the objective reality (albeit from a “practical point of view”) of our representation of human history as progressing. While the former argument reinforces our existing moral disposition, the latter reinforces reason’s unity.

The novelty in Kant’s conception of the highest good in the third Critique is not limited to its form, namely, that of an ethical community. Kant refers to his earlier conception of the highest good as having a reality only insofar as it is a necessary object for us. However, in the third Critique, the highest good must be also the end of nature. I argue in this chapter that it is the role of reflective judgment to represent nature as aiming toward the realization of the highest good in the world, so that it is no longer sufficient that we intellectually “conceive” its possibility but that we can also perceive it as furthered by nature. In this way, the highest good and the Idea of God as the object of moral Glaube receive a special kind of realism, which I will refer to as “moral image realism” (MIR).