5 - The role of aesthetics in the radicalization of democracy

Summary

The history of the world cannot pass a last judgment. It is made out of judged judgments.

Jean-François Lyotard

The work of Jürgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt is representative of some of the ways in which political theory in the aftermath of the Enlightenment remains linked to an “orthodox” interpretation of Kant's notion of reflective judgment. As far as Habermas is concerned, the theory of communicative action is meant to complete the Enlightenment project that Kant left unfinished, in part by invoking the ideal of a consensus or a convergence of opinions as the foundation of a peaceable state. In arguments that are meant to align this theoretical stance with a social and political progressivism, Habermas suggests in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity that the possibility of “progress” was closed when the leading opponents of foundationalist metaphysics – Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, and Derrida – chose to avoid the problem of reflective judgment in favor of a critique of subject-centered reason. Arendt's notion of judgment can be traced even more directly than Habermas's to Kant's aesthetic theory; the notion of “enlarged thinking” reflects her interpretation of the universality that is central to Kant's attempted resolution of the antinomy of taste. In both instances, appeal to notions said to be implicit in the theory of reflective judgment offers a source of hope in the face of the conditions diagnosed by Horkheimer and Adorno as fundamentally destructive of the modern Enlightenment and, indeed, of all forms of rationality in the West.