Guilherme Bruno

If we accept the Socratic edict that the examined life is the only worth living, we find no examination can exclude that mortal fate of human life. If we define a philosophical problem as, in Hans Jonas’ words, “the collision between a comprehensive view (be it hypothesis or belief) and a particular fact which will not fit into it”, we see there can be no greater problem for materialism or organicism than the corpse. That living things die is a problem for a view on which only a figment of the imagination differentiates organic from inorganic matter, as for a view on which life is rational and eternal. For any systematic view, the body is a constant reminder of an acceptable answer to the question 'what is being'. This is because the body that can die is the ultimate explanatory task for any principled answer to this question.

What conditions the possibility of existentially valuable experience? Against nihilism, the threat that philosophical cognition undermines the very idea of purposiveness, German idealism posits that we are unconditionally conditioned by life, construed as the infinite purposive activity of reason. I reconstruct Schelling’s critique of this project as defending the idea that death conditions or puts into question our rational activity. Scholars tend to read the idealists as rejecting Kant’s idea of an unknowable thing in itself by grounding philosophy on a knowable first principle and tend to situate Schelling as a phase between or a late attack on Fichte and Hegel. Part I gives a systematic account missing on the former, arguing that idealism is an instance of immortalism, which holds that life is the unconditioned condition of rational activity, while death is unconditionally conditioned. Part II gives a historical account missing on the latter, arguing that Schelling is an early and continual critic of idealism on behalf of mortalism, which holds that death unconditionally conditions rational activity. My first argument modifies typical readings of German idealism, revealing a deep connection between its rejection Kant’s idea and its refusal to let death put us into question. My second complicates typical readings of Schelling, casting his mortalism as rehabilitating the idea that something radically outstrips rational activity while representing a regulative ideal. Although Schelling’s mortalism anticipates Heidegger’s, they differ: Schelling aligns death with the goal of systematic knowing, Heidegger with taking over one’s history as care. But Schelling overcomes immortalism, enabling Heidegger’s idea of death. Part III shows this idea is structurally analogous to Kant’s idea of the thing in itself. Immortalism’s failure leaves unsolved two antinomies I argue are formally identical and only solvable by thinking these ideas as boundary concepts the thought of which is necessary for the unity, respectively, of finite being and finite understanding. By reconstructing the role of death in Schelling’s internal critique of German idealism, then, my thesis also brings into closer contact Kant’s transcendental and Heidegger’s existential projects.

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant diagnoses an antinomy of taste: either determinate concepts exhaust judgments of taste or they do not. That is to say, judgments of taste are either objective and public or subjective and private. On the objectivity thesis, aesthetic value is predicable of objects. But determining the concepts that would make a judgment of taste objective is a vexing matter. Who can say which concepts these would be? To what authority does one appeal? On the subjectivity thesis, aesthetic value is not predicable of objects. But this threatens judgments of taste with a sort of relativism. Can we not firmly assert the aesthetic value of any object? Have we no authority to make criticisms of taste? Following John McDowell’s “Aesthetic Value, Objectivity and the Fabric of the World”, I will hold that aesthetic value is neither objective nor subjective, but rather intersubjective. But, contra McDowell, I will argue that the validity that intersubjective aesthetic value bestows on judgments of taste must assume an indeterminate absolute conception of reality, of the world as it is in itself. Only such a conceptual resource can in turn make intelligible the notion of a shared or common sense according to which a judgment of taste can be universally valid, that is, valid for all subjects. Finally, I will consider an objection to common sense in matters of taste.