Mysteries of feelling versus horizons of reflection : on the "Supersensible substratum" of experience and the (public) use of reason

Setting Aristotle against the Plato who became the father of enthusiasm, Kant reminded those yearning for an emotional knowledge of the supersensible—“ the philosophy of feeling, which leads us directly to the heart of the matter!” (RPT 8:395)—that philosophy is prosaic work through concepts, and that there is no knowledge of the super-sensible, since only “an intellectual intuition would grasp and present the object immediately, and all at once” (RPT 8:389), and for us this is really inconceivable. A superior “vision” of reality is not possible; if it were, it would not be communicable anyway, or even be philosophy—though, in the final analysis, “despotism over the reason of the people (and even over one’s own reason), by fettering it to a blind belief, is given out as philosophy” (RPT 8:394 note). If, instead, the intention of the partisans of feeling, of inspiration, of common sense, and of tradition is, as they declare, to make men “wise and honest” (RPT 8:405), then all that is needed is the moral law and the respect that it elicits in the mind when it is represented in its purity and unconditioned validity. It does not require metaphysical crutches or sublime visions and, as a practical imperative, it brings with it hope, rationally articulated in moral faith; in other words, a purely ethical practical determination of the concept of the super-sensible. A theoretical determination of this concept is impossible and would in any case only be harmful; Kant called it a “mystery” on numerous occasions, but actually there is only the illusion of something secret and inexplicable. The only real mystery is freedom. The mystical impulse of the new Platonists must have appeared to Kant, then, not only as an example of enthusiasm, of misapprehension, and of deplorable disregard of the value and work of reason, but also as the most erroneous attempt at a response—based on having mistaken subjective principles of reflection for a super-sensible faculty of the somehow objective determination of ultimate reality—to legitimate demands of reason. Bringing such positions back to the limits of the two rational legislations of nature and freedom was the first step, then, in correctly reopening the discussion of the value and utility of, but also of the risks of aesthetic or teleological representations of, the super-sensible basis of experience