A ovelha não foge porque o lobo não é belo, mas porque é seu inimigo natural: os fracassos de Kant e as fronteiras entre o estético e o metafísico-religioso

Abstract

We believe that Kant was wrong in his attempt to deduce the principle of universality of what is produced in simple judgment, whose paradigm is pure aesthetic judgment of the beautiful. That is, Kant is not able to prove with a transcendental argument the right to presuppose a priori a “common sense” (sensus communis) and thereby the possibility of an intersubjective, non-objective validity. But, it seems that Kant‟s failure is more enlightening than his “achievement”. The kind of principle that he was really searching for, as a matter of fact, has a long history. We find quite instructive indications in the psychology of the perfect animal developed by St. Thomas Aquinas (for instance, in the Summa Theologica I, q.78, a.4 and in the Disputed Questions on the Soul q. XIII). However, these indications need to be adjusted in view of Aquinas‟s vast and complex philosophy. Some characteristics of the Thomist approach can be helpful to understand why sensus communis could not be deduced by an idealist proof, based on the objectivity of knowledge, but rather only by a “realist proof”, which starts from the observed complexity of natural and psychic phenomena, both in humans as well as in other animals.