I limiti dell’umano. Osservazioni su Kant e l’intuizione intellettuale

Kant’s inquiry about the possibility of the intellectual intuition for human beings constitutes a good opportunity of explaining the functioning and the boundaries of human faculties, both cognitive and appetitive. By comparing the human intellect to a hypothetical divine intellect, Kant ascertains the impossibility for man to broaden his knowledge by means of an intellectual or archetypal intuition, which may be ascribed only to God. He therefore rules out the hypothesis of a contact between human and divine mind and redefines against every fanatic, mystic or dogmatic conception the space of human knowledge, characterised not only by insuperable boundaries, but also by indisputable rights. The paradigm, the idea provided by the work hypothesis of a divine intellect serves also as an interpretative key of human action and morality, whose specific feature is to be found in a striving for consistency with the categorical imperative. This striving can anyway never be positive about its own results, thus characterising the kind of freedom peculiar to human beings, which once again rests on the convergence of empirical finitude and rational universality.