Abstract

Abstract: The paper analyzes the influence that the existential poetics unfolded by the thought of J.-J. Rousseau exerts in the formation of Kant’s practical normativity, in the whole of its moral dimension, legal-political and anthropological sides, with special attention to the materials offered by the Vorlesungen über Anthropologie. The article breaks down in three mean parts. The first deals with the genesis of the topic of "character of man" in Kant's Anthropology, which we interpret as a result of the discovery of a paradoxical character of human nature, besieged by the demands of their physical, cultural and moral dispositions, on which the work of Rousseau focuses. Secondly, I tackle the role that fiction develops in the two authors as the source of civil commonwealth, paying special attention to the “state of nature” as a rational criterion for the historical and political progress of the human species. Finally, we underline the presence in both Rousseau and Kant of strategies of rational resistance against political upheavals that the autonomous development of social life can bring about. Thus, the main conclusion of the article focuses on the necessary guidance of reason and distributive justice in order to control social life, without touch off the suffocation of the space where men interact and recognize each other.

Keywords: reason, consciousness, fiction, distributive justice, Rousseau, Kant.