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Article Excerpt
The goal of humanity cannot tie in its end but only in its highest exemplars. (1)--Friedrich Nietzsche
1. Introduction
In the autumn of 1970, Hannah Arendt delivered a series of thirteen lectures on Immanuel Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft at the New School for Social Research in New York City. During these lectures, Arendt argued that Kant's writings on judgment contain the groundwork for a political philosophy that was never fully articulated, but which may very well represent Kant's most incisive contribution to political thought. It is widely assumed that these lectures comprise the raw material for what would have become, had it not been for her death in December of 1975, the third and concluding volume of Arendt's The Life of the Mind. (2) The material presented in these lectures would have augmented the two completed volumes, Thinking and Willing, by comprising a third volume that was to have been called, simply, Judging. Mary McCarthy, editor of the posthumous writings, recounts in her "Postface" to The Life of the Mind, that following Arendt's death, which occurred less than a week after completing the final draft of Willing, "a sheet of paper was found in her typewriter, blank except for the heading 'Judging' and two epigraphs." (3)
These few lines constitute the only actual text we have of Judging and thus any adequate understanding of the unwritten volume, as well as any comprehensive study of The Life of the Mind--particularly because, as Ronald Beiner has emphasized, the extant sections of The Life of the Mind conclude at something of a theoretical impasse (4)--must remain a matter of considerable conjecture.
Nevertheless, I begin with Arendt's lectures on judgment because these writings conclude with a discussion of Kant's notion of "exemplary validity." (5) Since the few notes of Arendt's that we have regarding her volume on judgment emphasize the role of exemplarity in the Kritik der Urteilskraft, it is not unreasonable to assume that, had she been able to complete this text, it would have highlighted the importance of exemplarity in Kant's analysis of aesthetic judgment. Following Arendt's lead, in this paper I argue that the third Kritik is distinguished from the rest of Kant's writings precisely by the manner in which it uses exemplarity to demonstrate the legitimacy of judgments of taste. This reading of Kant is unconventional, but I believe that if we approach Kant's work from the vantage of exemplarity, Arendt's controversial interpretation of Kant becomes more plausible. By overlooking the importance of exemplarity in Kant's final Kritik, many interpreters of Arendt assume that she took exceptional liberties with her analysis of Kant's thought. While this is undoubtedly the case in certain instances, which I will discuss below, Arendt's primary interest in the social nature of judgment is not among them. In fact, as I will argue, the sociality of judgment is precisely what exemplary validity serves to legitimate in Kant's deduction of aesthetic judgment. By stressing the important role examples play in legitimating the faculty of judgment, Kant's deduction of aesthetic judgment leaves open the possibility for reading the third Kritik as a powerful political enterprise, and it is precisely this opening that Arendt exploits in her work by claiming that these writings constitute a genuine political philosophy.
2. Politics in Crisis
Arendt's engagement with Kant forms an integral part of her broader interest in what we may refer to as the crisis of politics, something she described in her 1953 essay "Understanding and Politics" as the "ruin of our categories of thought and standards of judgment." (6) While the catalyst for Arendt's reflection on this subject was the rise of twentieth-century totalitarianism, the manifestation of totalitarian politics was not the cause of the crisis in political judgment, but merely exposed the latent fragility of Western political authority, the foundation of which had long since eroded. Arendt points out that at least as far back as the eighteenth century, it was already evident to Montesquieu that only a frail scaffolding of customs and traditions "prevented a spectacular moral and spiritual breakdown of occidental culture." (7) Cultural and religious traditions that had served as common reference points for public deliberation had been deprived of their authority, leaving in their wake a legitimacy vacuum that, in the case of political deliberation, had not been adequately filled by being brought before the "tribunal of reason."
Contextual historiography, in the work of such authors as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Herder, in addition to having brought to light the plurality of the world's cultural and political systems, also emphasized the contingent nature of these systems. For this reason, Arendt turns to Montesquieu to find a scholar keenly aware of the impending crisis in judgment, for it was through an historical understanding of human society--an historical perspective not yet enamored of the notion of human progress that so efficiently reigned plurality back in--that questions about the relativity of cultural meaning and its value were first broached. When Johann Herder asserts that each nation attains its own political and cultural preferences according to an internal, and for this no less justified, system of values, he is well on the way to saying, along with Nietzsche nearly a century later, that all values are contingent. Indeed, it was in the shadow of this threat, in the shadow not only of the possibility, but of the mounting plausibility, that value judgments are subjective and not sanctioned by transcendent criteria, that Kant set about writing the Kritik der Urteilskraft. For Arendt, the main objective of the third Kritik was not to establish a catalogue of principles for gauging the legitimate use of taste, but to wrestle with the fact that the habits and protocols of taste that had policed the frontiers of good judgment until the eighteenth century had begun to fail precisely because the tribunal of reason--which had recently replaced the discredited traditions of pre-modern science and epistemology--had failed to serve as an equally viable proxy for cultural and religious traditions. If Arendt is accurate in her assessment that Kant was the first major thinker to seriously tackle the problem of judgment, it is in part because prior to the Enlightenment the shared cultural standards for making judgments remained intact. Once room for doubting these received standards appeared, the significance of judgment as a mental capacity came to the fore. To quote Beiner, "it is precisely when the yardstick of judgment disappears that the faculty of judgment comes into its own." (8)
One can begin to see, then, how the crisis of judgment that Arendt explores in the extreme politics of the twentieth century draws upon issues raised by historians and aestheticians of the eighteenth century insofar as these fields of inquiry were among the first to consider the prospect that values, and the judgments they engender, are inherently pluralistic. In fact, the contingency of values would come to support the implication that even reason itself might be a function of cultural and historical conditions. What culture and politics share, something that philosophy does not, is a concern with, but also a mandate to ground their legitimacy in, a public and abundantly pluralistic world. The truths of politics are of a different order from that of the truths of epistemology or ontology, and the difference lies in the intersubjectivity of its judgments. As Arendt puts it in "The Crisis in Culture,"
Culture and politics, then, belong together because it is not knowledge or truth which is at stake, but rather judgment and decision, the judicious exchange of opinion about the sphere of public life and the common world, and the decision what manner of action is to be taken in it, as well as how it is to look henceforth, what kinds of things are to appear in it. (9)
One should not construe from this passage, or from others like it, that Arendt is suggesting that because judgment is not grounded in conceptual analysis and does not pursue truth, it is therefore arbitrary and beyond the ken of intellectual critique. Rather, she is suggesting, along the same lines as Kant, that if philosophy is going to understand judgment, it must do so by relinquishing the notion that the legitimacy of judgment is a function of transcendental principles. Judgment, and in this I am referring to Kantian reflective judgment, does not have access to pre-given categories or rules. Rather, judgments must devise their own set of rules in the very process of implementing them. James Clarke, speaking of the application of political judgments, has captured the point this way: "Politics complicates the task of judging immeasurably because it too has no pre-determinate 'object'. In other words, to judge politically is not to judge an object but to call forth the problem of judgment itself." (10) And consequently, for Arendt, when Kant sat down to formulate a theory of judgment, he unwittingly called forth the axial problem of politics. While both the first and second Kritik establish the limits of judgment within their respective areas of analysis--theoretical judgment in the case of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft and practical judgment in the case of the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft--both are strictly determinative insofar as they are subsumptive and therefore have no need to draft a law for their own guidance. In the Kritik der Urteilskraft, however, it is aesthetic judgment that is under consideration, and in this case judgment is reflective--a judgment that must propose to itself, in each unique encounter, its own principle of subsumption. (11) According to Arendt, it is Kant's willingness to consider a form of legitimacy that lies beyond the threshold of transcendental principles, and the potential implications for human freedom implied in making judgments in the absence of a supplied law, that makes his treatment of judgment politically germane.
Although Arendt clearly overstates the case when she asserts that Kant has no political philosophy other than what is woven throughout the lines of the Kritik der Urteilskraft, and while I agree on the surface with the numerous commentators who have identified important instances where Arendt misattributes ideas to Kant, (12) it is nevertheless apparent to me that Arendt's writings on judgment disclose a genuine aspect of Kant's work that warrants attention. Moreover, Arendt herself candidly acknowledges in the Lectures that her reading of Kant is idiosyncratic, keeping, as she says, "within Kant's spirit" while intentionally "going beyond" Kant's own presentation. (13) But, above all, Arendt's writings on Kant are important because they recognize the extent to which Kant's theory of aesthetics is wedded to the tremendous difficulty of drawing reflective judgment into the framework of a philosophical system, and that this difficulty is bound not merely to a philosophical problem concerning thought, but to a political problem centered on judgment.
3. The Presence of Others
As I mentioned above, the problem of judgment surfaces when the implicit customs and mores that silently guide judgment within a community are made explicit, and thereby contestable, through a serious encounter with cultural and political difference....
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