‘A schematism of analogy with which we cannot dispense’. Kant on indirect representation in politics

In this article the importance of the representational character of politics is illustrated on the basis of the philosophy of Kant. The vanishing of the noumenal in post-modern thinking seems to imply fundamental changes in the sensitive response–aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime–to politics. In the Kantian paradigm the meaning of our affective response to the violence of (human) nature is ruled by a moral perspective of practical reason. Although the representation of practical reason in the empirical is only possible in an indirect way by means of a schematism of analogy, the corresponding–subjectively teleological–aesthetic feelings both of harmony in the beautiful and of resistance in the sublime do symbolize in a reflective judgement the morally determined character and the objectively conceived teleology of nature in the system of rights of a single state as well as of the cosmopolitan world order.

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