Edenic Animality, Feeding, Loving, and Dying: Corporal Biological Needs as Natural Historical Community by Kant

The author wants to emphasize the role of the Kantian concept of genesis, still not sufficiently and attentively explored by scholars, who tackled it from the aesthetical perspective as in the case of Gilles Deleuze (L'idée de genèse dans l'esthétique de Kant, in «Revue d'esthétique» n.16, pp. 113-136). Differently from Deleuze, in the paper the author investigates the historical-anthropological interpretation of the Old- Testamentarian word “genesis”. Kant describes the passage of the human being from edenic naturalness to the acknowledgment of herself and of the other as an end, thus offering us the description of the process of formation of the historical-natural community. By following the biblical “tale”, Kant begins from the fundamental corporal biological needs of human beings (nutrition and sexual drive), describing then their relationship with death and with the hope in the future so to finally get to the historical being understood as a free communitarian being. The analysis of nutrition and sexual drive, etc. wants to show a new side in Kant’s reflection about physiological and pragmatic anthropology. Food, love, fear and hope are the indispensable passages for the formation of the ethical and social life. Kant thus intertwines the genetic-natural reflection with the educational purpose of pragmatic anthropology. Acting in community is regulated by the concept of end (Zweck/ Zweckmaessigkeit) but the ethical-social finality of the human being is the result of a long process of elaboration and education of human instincts and needs.