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At the end of reasons comes persuasion.
— Wittgenstein
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There never has been any ‘aestheticization’ of politics in the modern age because
politics is aesthetic in principle.
— Jacques Rancière
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A central question raised by Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy is
the relationship between aesthetic judgment and political judgment. In this otherwise elusive,
posthumous text, Arendt tenaciously held that Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment in the third
Critique provides a model for political judgment: both forms of judgment concern appearances
qua appearances and make an appeal to universality while eschewing truth criteria and the
subsumption under rules that characterize cognitive and logical judgments (e.g., the syllogism:
All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Socrates is mortal).
In Arendt’s account, political claims, like aesthetic claims, are examples of what Kant
calls “reflective judgment,” in which, by contrast with a “determinate judgment,” the rule is not
given. “If you say, ‘What a beautiful rose!’ you do not arrive at this judgment by first saying,
‘All roses are beautiful, this flower is a rose, hence this rose is beautiful’” (LKPP, 13-14), writes
Arendt.
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What confronts you in a reflective judgment, then, is not the general category “rose” but
the particular, this rose. That this rose is beautiful is not given in the universal nature of roses.
There is nothing necessary about the beauty of this rose. The claim about beauty is not grounded
in a property of the object, which could be objectively ascertained (as is the case with cognitive
judgments). Such a claim belongs to the structure of feeling rather than concepts. “[B]eauty is
not a property of the flower itself” (CJ, §32, p. 145), writes Kant, but only an expression of the
pleasure felt by the judging subject in the reflective mode of apprehending it.
Arendt’s insistence that political judgments cannot be truth claims has puzzled her
otherwise sympathetic readers. Most famous among them is Jürgen Habermas, who more or less
accuses Arendt of aestheticizing politics, that is, of identifying this realm with opinions that
Convention