Kant and the third critique An esthetics in conflict?

Abstract

The article aims to dismantle an old dispute in the third Critique between an aesthetics and a philosophy of art. Such a dispute would show Kant's aesthetics as an aesthetics in conflict. Like a two-faced Janus, the philosopher from Konigsberg will present in the last Critique a Critique of the faculty of aesthetic judgment that goes back and forth between a philosophical aesthetics and a metaphysics of art, and that will end up becoming a propaedeutic for the philosophies of art of Romanticism. Based on Derrida's critique of the Kantian colossal -a comment that would allow us to conjecture the presence in the first part of the third Critique of a forgotten sublime art-, we hypothesize the possibility of an unfinished and obscure architecture of the Critique of the faculty of aesthetic judgment, where the bastard condition of the sublime would evidence a question not deduced transcendentally, but experienced by our faculties of knowing, that is, a suprasensible shock determined by a sort of principle of counter-finality. Thus, the problem of the sublime, whose expression of the colossal is far from qualifying as a case of the world of art, would reveal the Kant of the third Critique imprisoned in an apparently irresolvable conflict between reason and feeling.