La metafora, la libertà: Kant, Derrida e il tono della filosofia

In 1796 Kant published Of an Overlordly Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy, a short essay devoted to the defense of the spirit of the Aufklärung against its “inspired” enemies, the Platonist Christians who vainly seek for a binding norm of ethical life in the hidden and private treasures of their “presentiments”. What the “inspired” enemies of Aufklärung do not pay attention to is the clear voice of the law, which binds much more than any “private” and “oracular” revelation about morality and truth. What their “inspiration” add to the philosophical discourse is a free use of bildliche Ausdrücke and metaphors, in a quantity that has never been seen before in theoretical writings of metaphysics. As Derrida noticed in his paper On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy (presented in year 1980 at the Cerisy-la-Salle conference) the question at stake in Kant’s essay is whether the voice of the law is differentiable with absolute certainty and through the opening of an unbridgeable distance from the “private” and “oracular” revelations of the “inspired” or the two forms of “revelation” can intermingle.