Feeling and Uses of Reason: For an Aesthetic Interpretation of Kant’s Essay "What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?"

Abstract

This paper shows how Kant’s essay What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking? outlines some characteristics of a critical aesthetic which clearly defines the Critique of Judgement. Kant wrote this essay due to Jacobi’s polemic against the presumed Spinozism of Lessing’s philosophy. The purpose of this article is to verify that Kant’s notion of “feeling” alludes to a possible order in the experience we sense or perceive. From this perspective, feeling represents the subjective principle of imagination which makes us feel the complexity and richness of experience, capable of being understood under a possible interpretative order, that is, not necessary and subject to eventual transformations.