ABSTRACT
Almost everywhere in the architectonic of the system of Kant’s transcendental idealism one finds the transcendent. Kant’s critical philosophy establishes key relationships with the unrepresentable: in epistemology (the noumena), in ontology (the thing in itself), in ethics (noumenal freedom) and in aesthetics (the mathematically conceived sublime). Moreover, this inaccessible space of the unrepresentable allows for the theoretical promotion of a legitimate primacy of the ethical – even in the least obvious instance, aesthetics, the experience of the sublime is said to lead to, or to be conducive to, moral behaviour – and the promise, connected to it, of the preservation of religion. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant sets up the conditions for what seemed to be this, his great spiritual wish: not a tolerated – because disguised – atheism but rather a truly rational faith in God consistent with the tenets of his transcendental system.
