Libertad estética y libertad práctica. La Crítica del discernimiento y su incidencia en el concepto kantiano de «libertad moral»

Abstract

The problem of how liberty can coherently be conceived is deeply anchored in Kant's critical works and strictly relates with each other epistemology, ethics, aesthetics and the teleological interpretation of nature. This article gives an outline of the different conceptions of liberty developed by Kant and investigates them in the light of how to think the relation between liberty and legality (legality is taken in a broad sense). Having sketched the concepts of transcendental liberty, psychological liberty, freewill, moral liberty and, which is the same for Kant, practical freedom in the sense of the autonomy of a reasonable being, the significance of aesthetic freedom is analysed in a more detailed way. In this context, an investigation of three different functions of imagination reveals the importance of imaginative freedom for each type of symbolisation and its deep connection with our practice of the use and understanding of signs as a whole. In so far as, in an aesthetic attitude, the perspective of the empirical and logical judgement can be dismissed to a certain extent and non-propositional constructional processes prevail within the perception, the aesthetic freedom lays the foundation for new perspectives, new relations between concepts and new ways of understanding. This aesthetic freedom requires an openness which can be set into a relation with the ethical concept of tolerance.