Le Signe Historique

This essay studies the links between transcendental philosophy and experience through the concept of the “historical sign”. This concept applies to an historical event, which, in itself, allows one to “pass” from historical experience to the supra-rational realm of Progress. As the indicator of Humanity’s moral disposition, the sign corroborates the Idea of progress. The historical sign identified by Kant is “the way the spectator thinks, expressed at the time of the French Revolution. However, Kant concurrently uses the vocabulary of disinterestedness, peculiar to the judgment of taste, as well as the vocabulary of enthusiasm, more appropriate to the sublime. This equivocacy casts a doubt on the status of the sign attributed to this way of thinking and on the manner in which it is possible to pass from the empirical to the transcendental.