Kant e l'idea della fine

This essay wants to analyze the different meanings in which the relationship between "end" and "time" could be interpreted in Kantian philosophy. In the phenomenic context, the end appoints a switch from a temporal series to another one, which, remaining within the continuous horizon of the time, implies a relative end in the context of a continuous un-ended succession. This concept of end in the time, that we can call phenomenic, entails the idea of an endless lenght of time which develops itself towards the future. The perspective of a future infinity opens the idea of a noumenic end, an end of the time since end of the experience horizon. This noumenic end, related to the sinthetic unit of the experience, is the idea of an absolute end which marks out a total discontinuity with everything preceding. Therefore not an endless duration in temporal terms, but a measureless duration, that is a paradoxal notion. So, given that the aporia of the discontinuity between time and eternity remains for the theoretical reason, the bridge which tries to overtake this abyss cannot be run through according to the point of view of the critical reason. Therefore, after the checkmate of the noumenic end, Kant seizes the archimedic point where the thought of the end turns to the thought of the aim: this way the idea of the end acquires a sense only if connected with the idea of an ultimate aim. Proposing himself as the creation ultimate aim, the man finds in the culture the only way in which he could have been able to emancipates himself from nature: the man as moral being is the noumenic man who exerts liberty oversensitive faculty. Nevertheless, it seems that idea of human race progress fights, owing to its intrinsic coherence with a concept of open and endless temporality, against the moral idea of a final aim, which entails the idea of perfection and completion. Here it is that the poetic notion of an end of all things as an end of the time, that is as a sense narrative close, seems to help these requirements. Infact, according to Kant, is possible, through the imaginative action, to replace the cognitive abyss of the time and eternity border instant with a symbolic space of continuity and accomplished duration, that is included in the limits where the human being is no more subject to time but producer and builder of it.