Das unendliche Urteil der Aufklärung: veranschaulicht am kantischen Raum-Zeit-Modell

This paper argues that Kant’s transcendental idealism provides a systematic foundation for the idea of Enlightenment through the logical form of infinite judgment. Focusing on its employment in the Transcendental Aesthetic, I reconstruct Kant’s proof of transcendental idealism and respond to the so-called neglected alternative, according to which space and time could be both forms of intuition and properties of things in themselves. The paper shows that this alternative rests on a misunderstanding of the universal validity of judgments about space and time. Such judgments are valid universally precisely because they express the limits of human cognition. The infinity of space and time must therefore be interpreted as the result of a self-limiting judgment, one that affirms its own conditionedness and, in doing so, excludes the thing in itself from its formally boundless domain. On this basis, I conclude by reconsidering Kantian Enlightenment as a form of self-critical universalism, modelled after the Transcendental Aesthetic: a set of claims that secure their legitimacy by expressing the limiting conditions of their validity.