Dossier Kant on Sentiments: Between Morality and Aesthetics

The concept of “sentiment” plays a fundamental role in the context of Kant’s philosophy, notwithstanding the clear centrality of reason in the transcendental enterprise. The dossier of the Journal Con-Textos Kantianos dedicated to the topic Kant on Sentiments: Between Morality and Aesthetics aims to make a genuine new contribution to the debate surrounding the renaissance of Kant studies in the last few decades dedicated to the “other” Kant, i.e. the one focusing on sensibility, sentiments and feelings. To this end, in the present dossier entitled “Kant on Sentiments: Between Morality and Aesthetics” we collected studies that focussed on the role played by the concept of sentiment both in the context of Kant’s philosophy overall and in the one of its legacy – from Kant’s time up to nowadays. A specific goal of the dossier is that of overcoming the gap of thinking of sentiments in a separate way, which does not consider the closeness of the ethical and aesthetic realms. Based on these considerations, five studies have been selected. In the first contribution, Leandro Rocha focuses on the “feeling on life” in Kant, addressing it as a feeling that transcends mere physiological response and intertwines with the aesthetic, ethical, and teleological domains in Kant’s work. The second and the third essays deal more specifically with moral aspects of Kant’s reflections on the sentiments and feelings. In particular, in the second essay of the collection, Vojtěch Kolomý addresses the topic of moral contentment, by shedding light on how the virtuous persons do not do their duty with disgust, since they rather experience a special contentment while acting morally; in the third one, instead, Àlex Mumbrú Mora deals with the systematic significance of the concept of gratitude, by providing a comprehensive analysis of the systematic significance of it in Kant’s practical philosophy, and arguing that this sentiment fosters moral progress by recognizing both beneficiary and benefactor as ends in themselves. The fourth essay collected in the dossier moves from practical philosophy to Kant’s third Critique and his theory of taste. In this study, Manuel Sánchez Rodríguez argues that Kant breaks with the tradition of aesthetics and with a concept inherently tied to it, namely, that of good taste or correct taste, by proposing that the principles of taste should not be understood as prescriptive rules but, rather, as second-order principles that do not concern how we ought to judge in each case, but rather what properly constitutes the specific possibility of taste as such. In the fifth and concluding essay of the dossier, a much neglected in the context of Kant’s scholarship, and though extremely controversial and noteworthy feeling, is taken into account: the feeling of certainty. In his study, Lorenzo Mileti Nardo explores Kant’s account of certainty, examining whether – and to what extent – it can be interpreted as a feeling of the human soul in his philosophy, and argues that, for Kant, certainty can be understood as a feeling only if it is properly framed within his epistemology of assent. From this, it follows that certainty must be understood in two distinct but related ways: as the expression of the highest epistemic status of our beliefs and as the feeling of conviction that accompanies the act of truth-acceptance. In sum, the essays collected in this dossier testify of the great exegetical work that is still to be done in the context of the analysis of the “other Kant”, i.e. not the one of “reason”, but rather the one of sensibility, sentiments, and feelings. The five essays here presented exemplarily testify of this challenge.