O problema da “sensificação” das ideias e a doutrina kantiana da “beleza como símbolo da moralidade”

Abstract

With his Critique of Judgment, Kant aimed to establish a connection between the two facultiesof- mind addressed in the first two Critiques – i.e., the Understanding, concerning the sensibly knowable, and Reason, concerning the domain of the intelligible, of freedom – completing, thus, the so-called critical system of Reason. However, to establish this bridge over the “incalculable gulf fixed between the domain of the concept of nature […] and the domain of the concept of freedom, as the supersensible” [KU, AA 05: 175] is not as easy as, at first glance, it may seem: it is because each of these faculties has its own foundation that it is not legitimate for us to establish a direct link between the sensitive and the intelligible. Thus, even when Kant postulates “beauty as a symbol of morality” [KU, AA 05: 351], and when he puts the development of moral ideas as propaedeutic for the grounding of taste [cf. KU, AA 05: 356] one cannot – unlike many interpreters and commentators – link Ethics and Aesthetics if not at a transcendental level. However, it is problematic that, if, on the one hand, this is precisely one of the tasks proposed by the third Critique – i.e., to close the architecture of the criticaltranscendental system of Reason through a new transcendental a priori legislative faculty (the Judgment), which is placed alongside the other autonomous faculties of knowledge that contain a priori principles -; on the other hand, it is precisely this a priori groundwork of judgment-oftaste - a subject so important to Kant's argumentation and what makes it possible to establish, at last, the intended bridge between sensible and supersensible, i.e., between nature and freedom (and this without breaking with transcendental argumentation) - which seems overlooked by those few who were willing to investigate the Kantian problem of “sensification” of ideas. In the study proposed here, I intend to show how the groundwork of the apriority of judgmentsof- taste may be essential in order to think, legitimately, the Beautiful in a Moral perspective