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Calling our attention to the activity of judging as formative of the public realm, Arendt
emphasizes what aesthetic theory calls practices of reception. But she seems to discount the
potentially transformative and generative contribution of the object of judgment itself, as well as
the creative activity of the artist, actor, or maker. By contrast with Arendt, Kant emphasizes not
only the spectators but the role of the artist and the formative power of creative imagination, the
ability to present objects in new, unfamiliar ways—what he calls “genius.” In his discussion of
“aesthetic ideas” Kant describes the imagination as “very mighty when it creates, as it were,
another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it” (CJ, §49, p. 182). Indeed, “we may
even restructure experience,” adds Kant, “[and] in this process we feel our freedom from the law
of association (which attaches to the empirical [i.e., reproductive]) use of the imagination; for
although it is under that law that nature lends us material, yet we can process that material into
something quite different, namely, into something that surpasses nature” (ibid, emphasis added).
This faculty of presentation “prompts so much thought, but to which no determinate thought
whatsoever, i.e., no [determinate] concept, can be adequate, so that no language can express it
completely and allow us to grasp it” (ibid). Such aesthetic presentations “strive toward
something that lies beyond the bounds of experience” (hence they are called “aesthetic ideas”
and are the counterpart of “rational ideas”), but they are presentations nonetheless. The faculty of
presentation at work in the exhibition of aesthetic ideas, Kant writes, “expands the concept itself
in an unlimited way” (CJ, §49). The imagination can work on or order material in such a way
that we are able to create out of it non-causal associations and even a new nature. If concepts
themselves are not so much excluded as expanded in an indefinite way, this has important
consequences for how we think about our own political (Arendt) or aesthetic (Kant) activity.
We might ask whether this concept-transforming activity of the imagination is confined
to the activity of genius. Although Kant inclines to cast taste as the faculty that “clips its
Convention