Without the legacy of Plato, Descartes or Machiavelli, expressions such as “Platonic love”, “Cartesian mind” or “Machiavellian plan” would not exist. Without the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, some words would not be what they are.
Kant's is one of the names that commands the most respect when studying philosophy. His language doesn't make it easy. But I would venture to say that without his work words like
a priori
, imperative or sublime would not be so common in our vocabulary.
I remember that in a philosophy exam at COU (now high school) they asked us to explain the theory of judgments of the
Critique of Pure Reason
. On the way out, someone asked me how it had gone, to which I responded that
it was fine a priori
. In reality he had not come out of the challenge so successfully. He had alluded to the difference between
analytical and synthetic judgments
, but not to their
a priori
and
a posteriori
modality . It was paradoxical: it was clear that he did not have a good command of Kant's theory of judgments, but at the same time he knew perfectly well what it meant for something to be
a priori
.
If you want to support the production of quality journalism, subscribe.
Subscribe
For the philosopher from Königsberg,
a priori
means independent of experience, which is why I believed that the exam had gone well. At that time he had not yet compared the notes and verified that he had not answered everything he should have. I finally passed that exam, but that day I understood that if I wanted to do things well I had to apply myself more.
So I did it. For the next exam I realized that I had to study harder, since at that time philosophy was choking me. What I did not know is that becoming aware of an obligation or an imperative is precisely the axis of the ethics defended in the
Critique of Practical Reason
. An imperative is a verbal tense that does not allow discussion, just like the Kantian categorical imperative, which calls for action in a very particular way. His mandate requires doing things in accordance with the universal moral law and, furthermore, knowing why they should be done that way. From then on my philosophy exams improved significantly, although they did not border on the sublime.
Sublime is, of these three, the word that we use the least in a properly Kantian sense, although the fact that he analyzed it in such detail in his
Critique of Judgment
has surely helped to spread its use. When we describe a landscape, a piece of music or a work of art as “sublime”, we are indicating that it is an exceptional aesthetic experience. But Kant delves into an ambiguity that he had already formulated previously. In a sublime experience, he points out, one is faced with an overwhelming sensation in which attraction and fear merge. The sublime is an exposure to the borderline that generates a great shock, that is why we do not know whether to stay there or flee fearfully.
“Sublime” is certainly not a philosophically clear word, since Kant relates it to analytical and conceptual meticulousness. But deep down, no word is. That is why philosophy dwells so much on its nooks and crannies. Words seek to name life, and if life is dynamic, why shouldn't our words be too?
Life is subtle, it is shown while it is hidden, hence our language has to move mainly in a world of metaphors and evocations. Only when words are able to combine the audacity of wanting to say with the humility of learning to remain silent, are they words of life. So the words of philosophy are vulnerable; that is also his condition. If philosophical reason is always confronted with its own limits, as Kant pointed out, it is because doing philosophy means, in essence, exploring the dimensions of that finitude.
_