Imperative

Abstract

The paper focuses on Kant’s formulation of the categorical imperative and on some of the paradoxes that different commentators have detected in it. It attempts to respond to these paradoxes by way of a reading of Kant that shifts the fundamental stakes of the formulation of the categorical imperative. It reads this formulation not as a criterion or test of morality, but as the inscription or formula of its paradoxical ontological (non)status. The impossibility of the moral dimension appearing in empirical reality as one positive entity among others is thus read as an ontological crack in empirical reality itself, that is to say, as its “real”. From this perspective, the split between what ought to be and what is appears as inherent to what is – as inherent to Being (as not consistent).