What Does Marc Richir Understand in “The Beautiful” by Immanuel Kant?

Abstract

Comparing understanding of the beautiful by Kant and Richir the article is con­centrated on decay of modern phenomenology (and modern philosophical rea­soning in general) as transforming understanding into rhetoric. Discussing ori­gins of thought, discovered in the beautiful, and its particularities in correlation with feeling (emotion) Richir breaks phenomenological instruments – transforms notions of epoche, reduction, pure consciousness, phenomenon into something uncertain, spreading them also on understanding of thought and providing thus uncertainty of its understanding and understanding as such. Discussing thought he proposes only verbal practice, disguised its emptiness by special manners
(besides uncertainty it is a reproduction of metaphors, attachment of rhetoric to paraphrases of thinkers, mixture of understanding with understanding of un­derstanding, pseudo-questions). Damaging understanding as such this rhetoric does not give any other understanding – remains within the limits of ordinary understanding of consciousness as cognitive, mixture of thought and cognitivity and interpretation of the beautiful as knowledge. As opposed to Richir the article demonstrates a possibility of the other – productive – rhetoric which prepares a method for resisting the depicted crisis of understanding. Deviating from strict notions, denoted thought, to their uncertain use Kant prepares understanding of the beautiful as non-cognitive emotional experience and esthetical thought as a mean for such an experience – its non-cognitive expression. Thus Kant pre­pares rhetorically an understanding of irreducible difference among structures of consciousness.