Gemeinschaft als Denkform. Wie man Kant mit Fink, Nancy und Esposito sozialphilosophisch wendet

Abstract

Community as a Form of Thinking. How One Turns Kant Towards Social Philosophy with Fink, Nancy, and Esposito - In the times of nihilism, it is necessary to recall, with Roberto Esposito, the fact that, strictly speaking, in philosophy and its history, there is no other subject than community, insofar as everything that becomes the subject of philosophy can only become so because of the fact that there is community. That communality is a form of thinking or that the latter is constitutively communal, is another way of expressing what Emmanuel Levinas once put in the more succinct phrase that in consciousness one is always in two, even if one is alone. In order to explain the implications of this, I draw a line in my essay from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (specifically, its “positive” definition of being as “merely the position of a thing” [B 626], which receives much less attention than its negative aspect emphasized in the same passage, according to which being is not a real predicate) to the readings of Kant by Eugen Fink, Jean-Luc Nancy, and the aforementioned Roberto Esposito, in order to arrive at an understanding of being as an exposition of the disposition of things in us, i.e., as community.

Keywords

• social philosophy
• community
• immanuel kant
• categorical imperative
• co-existence