Spirit: bridge between transcendental philosophy and the Kantian formation ideal

Abstract

The present article examines how, in Immanuel Kant’s critical project, the notion of spirit is introduced in relation to a formative ideal of human nature. This ideal enables, in turn, the articulation of reason through its various uses, making it a capital element within Kantian thought. Criticism shows the human being as endowed with a reason limited in its scope and incapable of knowing the object of the ideas that represent its greatest desires, which, nevertheless, are insatiable. Here it is presented how, with the incorporation of the concept of spirit in the third critique, Kant establishes a bridge between speculative limits and the aspiration to form autonomous human beings: citizens of the world. Spirit, as a life-giving principle, keeps the faculties in motion by generating aesthetic ideas and thought, reproducing truths proper to a community that are symbolically expressed. This turns it into a formative principle that aspires to the preservation and transmission of knowledge that transcends the realm of possible knowledge, and which Kant recovers in his later work: in his lessons of Pedagogy and Anthropology. This article shows that spirit is a fundamental concept within Kant’s work, as it enables the articulation of reason through the formation of the human being.