Dialectic, paradox. Goldmann’s Kant

The essay develops the ‘tragic’ reading of Kant proposed by Lucien Goldmann. Tragedy is the sense of human finiteness and contradiction, which emerges precisely from the theoretical and practical necessity of the totality as dialectical unity of opposites. This necessary but unattainable totality, real only in distance and absence, links Kant to Pascal and outlines a dialectic of paradox that I propose to understand not as an immature phase of the ontological Hegel-Marxian dialectic, but rather as an alternative dialectic, capable of better describing the human condition. For this reason, in the final part of the essay I suggest a line of research that, through Goldmann’s link between Kant and Pascal, reconstructs a problematic humanism, that is, a tradition of thought that adheres to the essential ambiguity of existence and therefore differs from the secularist and progressive interpretations of modern humanism.