Abstract

The paper focuses on the “phenomenological” project of Immanuel Kant, since the Dissertation he wrote in 1770 until the “Critique of the Faculty of Judgement” published in 1790. A mere epistemological tool in the beginning, the theory of the sensibility, which constitutes the very kern of this project, becomes in the last “Critique” the centre of Kant’s reflection by putting into relation the faculties of sensibility and imagination in order to found the judgement of taste. The power and the limits of each faculty, revealed in “the free play” of the feeling of beauty and sublime are described insisting on the changing status of imagination, faculty which presents sensibility to intellect. Both singular and universal, the subjective principle of the judgement of taste opens a new way of reconsidering the appearing things and the ego’s relation with other humans not as objective, but as subjective and aesthetical - a perspective which announces the phenomenological project of the XXth century