Understanding Kant’s Ethics: From the Antinomy of Practical Reason to a Comparison with Kierkegaard’s Spheres of Existence
The paper discusses Kant’s view concerning the nature of human existence. Its point of departure is Kant’s “Antinomy of practical reason,” where Kant confronts between the metaphysical and empirical aspects of human existence. Kant’s discussion of this issue continues in “Critique of the aesthetical judgment,” where he considers the aesthetic experience as a synthesis between these two aspects of human existence. At the end, the paper compares between Kant’s view and Kierkegaard’s idea of the different spheres of human existence for clarifying Kant’s existential view, which is implied in his texts but does not appear as an explicit thesis in his writings.