Arendt on Kant's Critique of Judgment

Sensus communis as a foundation for men as political beings: Arendt’s reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment
Annelies Degryse Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
Philosophy Social Criticism 2011 37(3): 345

Arendt's late reading of Kant proposes a connection between aesthetics and politics that, among other innovations, offers a new way to think about judgment through a connection between the individual and group reflection. Annelies Degryse of Leuven University breaks down this conception of judgment into two constituent parts and connects it to Kant's "community sense."

Picking up on the argument by Ronald Beiner that Arendt "detranscendentalizes" Kant, Degryse describes how this move to a plurality of spectators can be understood as an "empricalizing" Kant. She helpfully highlights two moments of judgment in Arendt. First, a person perceives through imagination, a specific faculty that moves from a physical to a mental instance. Second, in reflection, one achieves a distance from the original representation that further distances oneself from it. Indeed, here Arendt speaks of the "proper distance, the remoteness or uninvolvedness or disinterestedness, that is requisite for approbation and disapprobation, for evaluating something at its proper worth" (Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 1992: 67). Judgment proper occurs in this second step, where one takes a stand on one's first impression in terms of a value assertion.

The first moment of judgment occurs within the mind of the individual. It does not even necessarily need to take the form of words but could occur entirely at the private level. In the second moment though, one needs recourse to language as an instrument of communication. Arendt says that Kant's reference to sensus communis should thus best be translated as "community sense" rather than "common sense." Degryse emphasizes the "common" here as the key to moving to judgment through language. It allows us to go beyond our own limited mode of thinking. In other words, language knows more than any individual person, and in framing a judgment one takes this greater knowledge into account. This is one way to understand what Arendt means by thinking with "an enlarged mentality." Degryse links the use of language in judgments to Arendt's "detranscendentalization" of Kant: "Arendt stresses, with Kant, that we can lose our faculty of enlarged thinking without communication and interaction with one another. (353)" Judgment for Kant is only a faculty of the mind but for Arendt it depends on actual interaction with others.

Degryse sees Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy as explicitly developing the role of spectators that was already implicit in the Human Condition. After all, speech and action need to be received by someone. Drawing on another aspect of Kant's terminology to make this connection, Arendt emphasizes that taste, not genius, constitutes the public realm. The genius can start something new, but in order to communicate it, this novelty must be described in terms that others can perceive. Interestingly, for Arendt, even the genius must himself have at least some access to taste to get his point across. Shifting to the political realm, Degryse notes that Arendt provides the example of the French Revolution: she sees its true impact in the many public responses to the event rather than the acts of the event itself. (One thinks here of the publications of Burke in the England, Paine in the U.S., and Schiller and Hegel in Germany, among many others.)

As a contrast, Degryse says that the philosopher risks losing touch and supporting tyranny because, as per Plato's famous parable of the cave, he does not want to return to the realm of shadows and captivity with others after having ascended alone to the realm of truth. Spectators, always plural, can never lose touch in this way.

In Germany, the Romantics and Idealists worshiped the genius. Even today, taste is often considered a relic of subjectivism. Even though Arendt returns to Kant's aesthetics in a manner reminiscent of the great Idealists Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, one key contribution of Degryse's article is that it shows how Arendt moves in the direction of plurality rather than the self-positing subject.

-Jeff Champlin