KANT’S CRITIQUE OF CULTURE: NORMATIVITY, CONFLICT AND THE FORMATION OF THE CRITICAL SELF

This paper offers a reinterpretation of Kant’s critique of culture by focusing on the ambivalent meaning of reason’s awakening from nature, between instrumental domination and moral potential. By foregrounding this ambiguity of rationality, autonomy emerges as a fragile and educable critical capacity grounded in the constitutive non-coincidence of the individual with her cultural determinations and moral vocation. On this basis, the paper interprets Bildung as a conflictual process of formation oriented towards the formation of a critical self. The paper thus advances an immanent account of moral normativity, according to which normativity emerges through critical engagement with the present.