Marco Russo

L’articolo commenta una interpretazione dell’antropologia pragmatica di Kant fatta da Angelo Cicatello. Tale interpretazione collega antropologia e metafisica, mostrando che un’antropologia meramente antropocentrica, schiacciata sulla storia empirica e sul potere dell’uomo, è tanto fallace quanto l’antropologia fisiologica già respinta da Kant. La chiave del collegamento è fornita dal concetto di mondo, da intendersi in senso cosmico come idea di totalità e sistema dei fini cui l’uomo si obbliga, andando oltre se stesso. Il mio commento segue questa tesi alla luce del problema dello Übergang tra sensibile e sovrasensibile, trattato da Cicatello in altri testi. Il commento mette in evidenza che tale passaggio è impraticabile, resta solo teorico finché non si approfondisce il concetto kantiano di mondo. E mostra che la dialettica cosmologica esposta nella Critica della ragione pura è ancora l’autentico fondamento per comprendere tale concetto, anche in senso morale e antropologico.

The article offers a brief presentation of the aesthesiological theory developed by Helmuth Plessner, one of the fathers of German philosophical anthropology of the twentieth century. It is an ambitious project that seeks to link the Kantian systematic approach with a hermeneutical phenomenology of the senses. Alongside an illustration of the key concepts, we highlight the points of greatest interest for the aesthetic discourse, in particular the comparison between sound and image, the topic of schematism and the intrinsic connection between culture and embodiment. They are precisely the points that make aesthetics an essential component of the anthropology of eccentricity proposed by the philosopher.

In spite of current interpretations, this essay investigates the intimate link between cosmology and anthropology in Kant’s thought. Drawing the most incisive consequences both of the copernican revolution and Colombo’s discovery, Kant’s cosmological anthropology reveals to be the modern uneasy mundana sapientia, and let us thoroughly understand the pregnant meaning of the historiographic topos “man and world”. World – not God, Being or Truth, and even not Reality – assert itself as the most important reference point to comprehend human condition, although the world-concept became far more problematic than in the past In cosmological perspective world is neither exclusively nature nor exclusively ideal guidance, but pragmatic-cosmopolitan world, i.e. a pervasive “in-between position”, which causes a constitutive imbalance we have permanent to cop with. So is open the way leading to contemporary philosophical anthropology

The essay puts the concept of the world at the center of the Kantian foundation of cosmopolitanism. Since this concept is deeply analyzed in the critic of the cosmological idea, we analyze this criticism and highlight the logic of the idea of the world, which is based on concepts of relationship, dependence and series, but, at the same time, has an antinomic nature. The cosmological logic is also fundamental to the other meanings of the world, including the cosmopolitan one. This logic is not just a conceptual analysis, but is rooted in the physical and psychic constitution of human existence, which opens up to the Whole, feels and thinks about an unlimited dimension around itself, but always from a determined and limited position. Reconsidering cosmological logic, on the analytical and existential level, can be a way of strengthening the philosophical foundations of cosmopolitanism.