“Where do the concepts inner and outer come from? And where do such concepts as right, duty, freedom, on the one hand, and attraction, repulsion, space occupation, on the other originate?” (Förster, 2000) Is there a relation between these two sets of concepts? In other words, is there a transition between, as Kant puts, “the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me”?

Almost all of the Pre-Socratic philosophers began to speculate from the level of phusis or kosmos and define the ethical, artistic and political concepts according to the dynamics and principles of the whole (ta panta). This was an attempt to explain the place and role of microcosmic human existence within a macrocosmic picture. Heraclitus, for example, did not use the categories of logic but “tended to describe the same thing now as a god, now as a form of matter, now as a rule of behaviour or principle which was nevertheless a physical constituent of things”. Logos is the principle that sustains the relation between the divine (natural) law and human life and secures the continuity of the orientation of nomos and ethos in the cosmic law. It is both the cosmic force of balance that motivates life and the aesthetic principle that regulates the judgment we make on that motivation.

This paper is founded on an elaborate reading of Kant’s Opus Postumum in order both to explore the essential motivation that drove Kant to write a last comprehensive magnum opus (after having completed his critical philosophy) and, by doing so, to show the essential link between his aesthetics and the idea of Übergang, the title of this last work. For this work contains not only his dynamical theory of matter defining motion as preliminary to the notions of space and time, and the advanced version of his philosophy of natural science, but also his arguments for the phenomenal validity of the metaphysical foundations (or the essential unity of the theoretical and practical reason), his teachings on the aesthetic human faculties of judgment and Anschauung (sense-intuition), and the discernment of the transcendental philosophy from Platonic idealism carrying it to a cosmological level, i.e. Kant’s  insertion of the concept of cosmotheoros. Since the process of transition is an aesthetic process based on human senses, intuitions and judgments, the argument will follow that in order to explicate Übergang, we need to reconcile cosmology, as the oldest branch of philosophy dealing with the interactions between the cosmic forces and the ways they affect human life, with aesthetics, as the youngest branch of philosophy dealing with how we sense, intuit and judge the form and motion of matter. Therefore, in the last analysis, Übergang becomes rather a cosmologic-aesthetic principle similar to the Heraclitean logos. Another building block of the paper is the fruitful comparison between the Kantian sublime and Nietzschean Dionysian, which are going to be construed as the aesthetic theories on human understanding representing the transition from nature to art. For they are not only conceptual – aesthetic but also dynamic – cosmological theories due to their reference both to nature and to human nature. As Greek tragedy was born from the spirit of the Dionysian aesthetics, Nature is apprehended and represented through the creation of the Sublime ideas, and logos as transition is the determinant and creator of both phusis and ethos; the human being and his concepts of understanding are the products of the ways of apprehension and conceptualisation of the cosmic forces.