Was bedeutet die französische Revolution heute? Die Bemerkungen über Kants Interpretation von signum rememorativum
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12775/szhf.2017.034Keywords
The French Revolution, politics, enthusiasm, public sphere, judgment, Immanuel Kant, Stanisława Przybyszewska, the legtimations crisis of the liberal democracyAbstract
This article is an attempt to explicate the notion of political enthusiasm through which Immanuel Kant expressed his attitude to the French Revolution and to show the consequences of his interpretation for contemporary debates on the heritage of this founding event. The first section contains a brief reconstruction of major interpretative lines, which describe today the importance of the French Revolution for contemporary democracy. The next sections (2, 3, 4, 5, 6) clarify the ambiguous attitude of Kant to the French Revolution, which from the moral perspective was unequivocally condemned by him, and from the aesthetic and political perspective – evaluated very favorably. The main concept is here a category of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm as a purely rational affect, as a collectively experienced, irrational euphoria, functions in the Kant’s deliberations an important heuristic function, because it allows him to justify the positive meaning of the revolution, which at the level of empirical facts turned out to be an escalation of violence. The key to understanding this ambivalence is the category of publicity (Publizität) and the specific understanding of the concept of politics. The last section will show the consequences that stem from his position for contemporary debates on the legitimation crisis of liberal democracy.
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