Arendt (LFPK:16-17) – as "críticas" de Kant

[…] não estou querendo dizer que Kant  , pelo breve tempo de vida que lhe restava, falhou em escrever a “quarta Crítica”, mas, antes, que a terceira Crítica, a Crítica do juízo — que, diferentemente da Crítica da razão prática, foi escrita espontaneamente e não, como a Crítica da razão prática, em resposta a observações críticas, questões e provocações — é na realidade o livro que, de um outro modo, viria a fazer falta no grande trabalho de Kant.

Concluído o ofício crítico, havia, de seu próprio ponto de vista, duas questões pendentes — questões que o tinham incomodado durante toda a vida, e cujo trabalho interrompera a fim de primeiro esclarecer o que havia chamado de “escândalo da razão”: o fato de que a “razão se contradiz a si mesma” [1] ou de que o pensamento transcende os limites do que podemos conhecer e, então, vê-se enredado em suas próprias antinomias. Sabemos, pelo próprio testemunho de Kant, que o ponto decisivo em sua vida foi a descoberta (em 1770) das faculdades cognitivas do espírito humano e de suas limitações, descoberta que levou mais de dez anos para ser elaborada e publicada como a Crítica da razão pura. Também sabemos, por suas cartas, o quanto significou esse imenso trabalho de tantos anos para seus outros planos e ideias. Acerca desse “tópico principal”, Kant escreve que ele impediu e obstruiu, como “um dique”, a apreciação de todas as outras investigações que esperava terminar e publicar; que fora como uma “pedra em seu caminho”, e que só poderia prosseguir após sua remoção. [2] E quando retornou às preocupações do período pré-crítico, algo nelas havia mudado à luz do que ele agora sabia; mas não se haviam tornado irreconhecíveis, nem poderíamos afirmar que tivessem perdido sua urgência para ele.

[17] A mais importante mudança pode ser assim indicada. Antes do evento de 1770, Kant pretendera escrever, para rápida publicação, a Metafísica dos costumes — um trabalho que, na realidade, escreveu e publicou apenas trinta anos depois. Mas naquela data anterior o livro havia sido anunciado sob o título de Crítica do gosto moral  . [3] Quando Kant finalmente voltou-se para a terceira Crítica, ainda a chamou, a princípio, de Crítica do gosto. Assim, duas coisas aconteceram: por trás do gosto, um tópico favorito de todo o século XVIII, Kant descobriu uma faculdade humana inteiramente nova, isto é, o juízo; mas, ao mesmo tempo, subtraiu as proposições morais da competência dessa nova faculdade. Em outras palavras: agora, algo além do gosto irá decidir acerca do belo e do feio; mas a questão do certo e do errado não será decidida nem pelo gosto nem pelo juízo, mas somente pela razão.

Another way of raising objections to my choice of topic, a somewhat indelicate but by no means entirely unjustified way, is to point out that all of the essays that are usually chosen-and that I too have chosen—date from Kant’s last   years and that the decrease of his mental faculties, which finally led into senile imbecility, is a matter of fact. To counteract this argument, I have asked you to read the very early Observations on the Feeling if the Beautiful and Sublime. To anticipate my own opinion   on this matter, which I hope to justify to you in the course of this term: if one knows Kant’s work and takes its biographical circumstances into account, it is rather tempting to turn the argument around and to say that Kant became aware of the political as distinguished from the social, as part and parcel of man’s condition in the world, rather late in life, when he no longer had either the strength or the time to work out his own philosophy on this particular matter. ‘By this I do not   mean to say that Kant, because of the shortness of his life, failed to write the “fourth Critique” but rather that the third Critique, the Critique if judgment-which in distinction from the Critique of Practical Reason was written spontaneously and not, like the Critique of Practical Reason, in answer to critical observations, questions, and provocations-actually should have become the book that otherwise is missing in Kant’s great work.

After he had finished the critical business, there were, from his own viewpoint, two questions left, questions that had bothered him all his life and that he had interrupted work on in order first to clear up what he called the “scandal of reason”: the fact that “reason contradicts itself” or that thinking transcends the limitations of what we can know and then gets caught in its [10] own antinomies. We know from Kant’s own testimony that the turning point in his life was his discovery (in 1770) of the human mind’s cognitive faculties and their limitations, a discovery that took him more than ten years to elaborate and to publish as the Critique of Pure Reason. We also know from his letters what this immense labor of so many years signified for his other plans and ideas. He writes, of this “main subject,” that it kept back and obstructed like “a dam” all the other matters he had hoped to finish and publish; that it was like “a stone on his way,” on which he could proceed only after its removal. And when he returned to his concerns of the precritical period, they had, of course, changed somewhat in the light of what he now knew; but they had not changed beyond recognition, nor could we say that they had lost their urgency for him.

The most important change can be indicated in the following way. Prior to the event of 1770, he had intended to write, and soon publish, the Metaphysics cf Morals, a work that in fact he wrote and published only thirty years later. But, at this early date, the book was announced under the title Critique of Moral Taste. When Kant finally turned to the third Critique, he still called it, to begin with, the Critique of Taste. Thus two things happened : behind taste, a favorite topic of the whole eighteenth century, Kant had discovered an entirely new human faculty, namely, judgment; but, at the same time, he withdrew moral propositions from the competence of this new faculty. In other words: it is now more than taste that will decide about the beautiful and the ugly; but the question of right and wrong is to be decided by neither taste nor judgment but by reason alone.