4 - Communication and transformation: aesthetics and politics in Habermas and Arendt

Summary

The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and its continued existence, first, upon the presence of others who have seen and heard and will remember, and, second, on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things.

Hannah Arendt

In an essay first published along with The Contest of the Faculties in 1798, Kant took up the “old question” that has widely been recognized as central to the historical self-understanding of the Enlightenment: “Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?” Kant's response to this question, and the subsequent engagement of that response (whether explicitly or implicitly) by a range of thinkers including Habermas and Arendt, is particularly important for understanding the relationship between the political ambitions of contemporary critical theory and the theory of aesthetic reflection. Kant's essay is crucial, first, because it offers a complex and decisive stance on questions that are central to the Enlightenment's vision of morality as the existence of humanity in a true “kingdom of ends,” and second, because it trades the stringent requirement of obedience to the moral law as the price of entry into that kingdom for what would seem to be the more malleable demands of reflective judgment, by asking not how we must act in order to behave in accordance with the moral law but where (and with whom) we should stand in order to move from our engagement in particular actions and events to a comprehension of the shape of history as a whole. When faced with the events of history, which do not in and of themselves demonstrate any apparent order, Kant was led to ground the progressive moral vision of the Enlightenment on principles that could most accurately be called “aesthetic.”