From Ethics to Aesthetics: On an Aesthetic Sense in Kant’s Philosophy of Religion

Autor(en)

Daniel Kuran

Abstrakt

In this essay, I take my starting point from Kant’s Religionsschrift (1793) and the related essay “The End of All Things” (1794). In both texts, Kant takes ethics as his primary starting point and develops a specific view of religion under the auspices of practical philosophy. Inevitably, however, aesthetically relevant
categories appear, as Kant had previously developed them in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790): the two basic motifs of aesthetic judgment, the beautiful and the sublime, and the activity of imagination (as a productive faculty of cognition) that is no longer conceptually regulated. The purpose of this contribution is to show that while the ideal of a purely rational religion can never be fully reconciled with the course of historical religions, Kant applies aesthetic categories in approaching this ideal. In other words, Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment contains potentialities for an understanding of religion that he hints at – without pursuing them further – in his writing on religion, which remains more oriented towards his practical philosophy. This unusual reconstruction of Kant’s ethically coded philosophy of religion from the standpoint of aesthetics reveals how lines of connection between aesthetics and religion can be seen in Kant’s work. These lines of connection can be further pondered with Kant and beyond Kant. In a spectacular shift from ethics to aesthetics, the authors of the Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism (1796/97) – among them Hölderlin –determine the highest act of reason to be an aesthetic act. This means entrusting aesthetics with a greater significance of its own, which is able to illuminate a dimension of religion that eludes both a theoretical and a practical approach.

Organisation(en)

Forschungszentrum Religion and Transformation, Institut für Systematische Theologie und Ethik

Journal

Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics

Band

14

Seiten

128-140

Anzahl der Seiten

13

Publikationsdatum

2022

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

603101 Ästhetik, 603118 Religionsphilosophie, 603206 Fundamentaltheologie

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Philosophy

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/from-ethics-to-aesthetics-on-an-aesthetic-sense-in-kants-philosophy-of-religion(ece65e24-df72-4cac-8c40-bde9bf631c51).html