11 - Kant's Parergonal Politics: The Sensus Communis and the Problem of Political Action

Summary

In Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, Hannah Arendt advances a number of convincing arguments for why Kant's discussion of aesthetic judgment provides the basis for a kind of political reason. However, once we begin to read the third Critique as offering a theory of political community, I contend we find that Kant's emphasis on judgment would reduce political agency to the role of the spectator, and thereby exclude creative activity from this model of communal interaction. Using Arendt's reading as a starting point will lead us through Kant's discussion of taste and genius to demonstrate how productive action only emerges as the activity of the creative artist. The upshot of this focus on the interaction of genius and taste is that if we want to find in Kant's “common sense” (Gemeinsinn or sensus communis)—which Kant defines as the effect arising from the free play of our cognitive powers that is always presupposed in judgments of taste2—a model for an interactive political reason, we must also reckon with the implications.