The Second Copernican Turn of Kant's Philosophy

Abstract

What is at issue in this article is the thorny question of the relationship between reason and enjoyment such as it can be elaborated from the perspective of Kant’s philosophy being considered to be the very epitome of “pure reason”. According to the central thesis advanced in this essay, the revolution in the way of thinking inaugurated by the famous Kantian “Copernican turn” in philosophy, which consists in the recognition of thought’s affection by a thing that at one and the same time belongs to thought as it makes it think, and evades its grasp, requires for its completion an additional, “second” Copernican turn. With the second Copernican turn, accomplished only in the Critique of Judgement, Kant takes up the “transcendental difference” between appearance and the thing-in-itself, introduced in the first Critique, and advances the problem of thought’s affection beyond the result of the first Critique. The author argues that in order to tackle the ontological status of the thing itself, which functions, in objective reality, as an element that is excluded from it, further conditions are required than those provided by the critique of speculative reason. The making visible, in objective reality, of the material traces of this presence of the absence, implies a reflection upon the presence of the ideas of reason in empirical reality, a reflection capable of attributing to empirically given contingent particularities the status of the cases of the ideas of reason. At stake in these cases is the peculiar way that reason’s ideas manifest their presence in the world, and, consequently, the possibility of conceiving a new kind of the universal that can only be effected through the reflecting power of judgement. In affirming the existence of the cases of the Idea, i.e., the existence of the universal within the given objective reality, the reflecting power of judgement endows thought with an orientation, thus rendering the re-constitution of this reality possible.