Ethical, aesthetic, socio-political background and aspects of Kant’s philosophy

Abstract

The ethical and aesthetic aspects of Kant’s philosophy had a huge impact on the socio-cultural circles of writers and artists, and turned out to be more accessible both to philosophers and to all fans of philosophy. Social and political issues have always worried people more than theoretical aspects. Kant raises the question of eternal peace, refutes the existing evidence of God, explores the origin of the moral law, its ontological basis and offers its solution. It was an era of social and scientific revolutions: the social one broke the structures of feudalism, opening new horizons for cultural and political transformations; the scientific one made a paradigm shift. The methodological revolution of Bacon and Descartes led to the emergence of fundamentally new approaches, for example, induction. The Galileo-Newton scientific revolution shaped a new universalism. Kant’s philosophy organically complemented all these processes. His postulates of practical reason embody transcendental ideas in objective reality, which the will helps to find corresponding objects. The revolutionary impact exerted by the Critique of Practical Reason, according to Kant’s followers, was much stronger than the ideas of the Great French Revolution. Kant explored the aesthetic ability of man in the Critique of Judgment, considering it as the ability of the soul to unite the faculties of knowledge and desire.