Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy
Matthew Wester
The Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy contains Arendt’s lecture notes for a course that she taught on Kant’s Critique of Judgment in the fall semester of 1970 at the New School for Social Research. Arendt had lectured on Kant’s critical philosophy throughout the 1960s. However, her previous engagement with Kant had been with his moral and political thought, and not with his aesthetic theory. The main claim that Arendt presents us with in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy is that Kant’s most important contributions to political philosophy and political theory are not to be found in his political writings—such as “Toward Perpetual Peace” and The Metaphysics of Morals. Instead, Kant’s most important political insights are to be found in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, a text devoted to aesthetics and teleology. The large interpretive claim underlying Arendt’s Lectures is that Kant did not sufficiently understand the political nature of the insights that he instead developed in social and aesthetic terms.
The primary reason for the importance of Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy is not Arendt’s heterodox Kantianism (to which I will return briefly in the following section); it is historical. The material developed in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy was to serve as the basis of the third volume of The Life of the Mind. Arendt’s death in 1975 meant that Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy is the only glimpse of the material that would have concluded and completed The Life of the Mind. In this chapter, my purpose is to offer an outline of the Lectures and to sketch a current scholarly assessment of them. In so doing, I shall be sure to introduce Arendt’s most important claims in Lectures and to indicate the degree to which this short work fits in with Arendt’s other, more well-known writings on political judgment.
Before turning to the content of Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, it is important to situate the Lectures among Arendt’s other writings. By the time that Arendt delivered the Lectures in late 1970, judgment was hardly a new theme of her thinking. She had been interested in developing a model of political judgment since the late 1950s. Her reasons are simple and easy to understand, even if her attempts to outline the details of her model of political judgment are more challenging. One of the foundations of Arendt’s thought is that the political is a discrete and autonomous realm of human life. Arendt was skeptical of the ability of philosophy to adequately theorize the meaning and significance of the political because she believed that politics and philosophy corresponded to radically different facets of the human experience. In an interview with Günter Gaus, she stated that “there is a vital tension between philosophy and politics. That is, between man as a thinking being and man as an acting being.”1 Philosophy failed to understand the meaning and significance of the political because it considered human beings in terms of universally distributed faculties. Arendt believed that philosophy would be correct in its assessment of the political only if “there were one or two men, or only identical men.”2
As a result, Arendt thought, political philosophy applied external standards to politics. Two such standards are truth and goodness. Arendt’s earliest writings about political judgment express wariness of philosophy’s tendency to reduce political speech and action to its truth-content or moral value.3 Such a reduction, Arendt worried, missed crucial dimensions of politics—such as, for instance, the performativity of political speech and action (an important theme of “The Crisis in Culture”). Arendt turned to Kant’s third Critique in order to discover an account of the faculty of judgment that was properly political. This, of course, raises the following question: If Arendt wanted to offer an account of political judgment that was not beholden to other realms of human experience, why turn to Kant’s aesthetics? Isn’t her turn to Kant simply the application of another external standard to politics and political judgment? In my view, any examination of Arendt’s writings on judgment must confront and answer these questions.
Arendt’s answer to these questions was that the Critique of Judgment contained a “nonwritten political philosophy.”4 By “nonwritten,” Arendt meant that the Critique of Judgment contained political insights worthy of the political philosophy that Kant never wrote. Her political interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Judgment that appeared in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy was sketched by Arendt in late 1957 in notebook XXII of her Denktagebuch. 5 Two of the essays from Between Past and Future (“The Crisis in Culture” and “Truth and Politics”) also included brief discussions of political judgment that drew on the Critique of Judgment. Arendt discussed Kant’s Critique of Judgment in the context of her acceptance of the Lessing Prize, the script of which may be found in Men in Dark Times.
Despite her nearly fifteen-year preoccupation with the question of political judgment, Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy stands out for the simple and important reason that Lectures is the only text Arendt devoted solely to the exposition of political judgment. With the exception of the fragments found in Denktagebuch XXII, all of Arendt’s other writings on judgment are indirect and brief. In “Truth and Politics,” for instance, Arendt drew on Kant’s Critique of Judgment in order to describe an alternative, political mode of validity that could characterize political judgment without reducing political speech to its truth-value and all the while preserving the crucial relationship between political discourse and factual truths.6 In similar fashion, “The Crisis in Culture” included a succinct discussion of important elements of Kant’s discussion of aesthetic judgment from the Critique of Judgment. What all of Arendt’s writings on judgment from the 1950s and 1960s have in common is that they do not present an account of the faculty of judgment per se. Rather, they indicate that Arendt had recognized the importance of the faculty of judgment to her own theoretical project but had not yet turned to an exposition of this faculty in its entirety. The significance of Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy is that it represents Arendt’s only attempt to discuss the faculty of judgment on its own terms. However, Arendt’s Lectures are unfinished, and she did not intend them to be published.
Thus to talk about Arendt’s account of the faculty of judgment is difficult for two reasons. First, the writings about judgment that Arendt published during her lifetime are only peripherally concerned with judgment. Second, her attempt to turn to the faculty of judgment wholesale with the projected third volume of The Life of the Mind 7 was cut short by her death in 1975. This has left commentators with the overwhelming task of reconstructing what Arendt might have said or would have said from various essays she wrote and Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy.
* * *
I have mentioned that Arendt’s interest in uncovering a hidden political philosophy from Kant’s Critique of Judgment did not start with Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. The beginnings of Arendt’s unique reading of Kant’s third Critique are found in Denktagebuch XXII, dated August 1957. In a letter to Jaspers dated August 29, 1957, Arendt wrote: “I’m reading the Kritik der Urteilskraft with increasing fascination. There, and not in the Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft, is where Kant’s real political philosophy is hidden.”8 In the same letter to Jaspers, she noted her indebtedness to his exegesis on Kant’s critical philosophy in The Great Philosophers (Arendt had edited the English translation of this text), writing, “I’ve always loved this book most of Kant’s critiques, but it has never spoken to me as powerfully as it does now that I have read your Kant chapter.”9 Arendt would continue to develop and deploy her reading of the Critique of Judgment throughout the 1960s. In approaching Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, it is important that we recognize it as the culmination of Arendt’s engagement with the third Critique, and not its beginning.
However, even if Arendt’s interest in Kant’s so-called hidden political philosophy did not begin with the material found in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, the Lectures nonetheless contains important differences from her other writings on judgment. Arendt’s writings on political judgment show considerable development from their beginnings in her notebooks to their conclusion in her Lectures. It is not my purpose in this chapter to discuss the reasons for these developments, but I will offer a provisional sketch of the most important similarities and differences between judgment as it appears in Denktagebuch, Between Past and Future, Men in Dark Times, and Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy.
All of Arendt’s writings on judgment are unanimous in their insistence that one portion of Kant’s Critique of Judgment—the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment”10 —contained a powerful model of political judgment. Arendt believed that Kant’s aesthetic judgments of taste were political because the validity that characterized these judgments relied upon an appeal to others. In the third Critique, Kant described this appeal by way of terms such as enlarged mentality and common sense, both of which entailed “thinking from the perspective of others.” Arendt was attracted to Kant’s account of reflective judgment for three important reasons. First, in the third Critique, Kant insisted that judgment was autonomous in relation to understanding and reason. Reflective judgments, in Kant’s view, were judgments that were not made in service of the search for truth or the pursuit of goodness. Arendt found the autonomy of judgment in the third Critique attractive because it was a natural complement to her own conviction that politics needed to be understood as autonomous in relation to epistemological and moral categories. Second, reflective judgments of taste—as Kant described them—were not determining judgments. Reflective judgments were judgments that did not simply place an object under a category; instead, reflective judgments made claims about particular objects in such a way that the particularity of those objects was preserved. No two flowers, Kant thought, were beautiful in the same way, despite the fact that we tend to apply the same predicate to both. Arendt found this aspect of Kant’s aesthetics compelling and attractive because of her conviction that human speech and action disclosed something unique about the speaker or actor. Third, and finally, reflective judgments, as Kant construed them, were a fundamentally social phenomenon that corresponded to our existence as members of some community.11
Arendt recognized the social nature of aesthetic judgments of taste. In Lectures (and in her other writings on political judgment) Arendt claimed that the “subjective universality” (subjektiv allgemeine Gültigkeit) that characterized aesthetic judgments of taste was made possible by the presence of other individuals.12 Taking on the appeal to something other than the self that Kant described in terms of enlarged mentality, common sense, and exemplary validity, Arendt argued that the faculty of judgment was inherently political because of the degree to which it required the presence of other individuals to function. To use Arendt’s terms, because the faculty of judgment relied on the presence of others, it corresponded to human plurality, and because it corresponded to human plurality, it was actually political. In Arendt’s view, Kant had mistakenly elaborated fundamentally political insights in social terms. In Lectures, Arendt suggests to us that Kant’s belief that reflective judgments were limited to aesthetics and teleology was a result of the fact that Kant lived not in a community with a robust public sphere but in a (sometimes) benevolent dictatorship under Prussian monarchs. She wrote that Kant’s emphasis on the reading public in the Critique of Judgment and other writings was a result of the fact that “there could be no truly public realm other than this reading and writing public.”13
However, there are important differences among Arendt’s writings on Kant’s third Critique. The divergences between “The Crisis in Culture,” “Truth and Politics,” and “Thoughts on Lessing” and Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy are so significant that they have led some commentators to suggest that Arendt actually offered two distinct models of political judgment.14 In her earlier writings on political judgment, Arendt used Kant’s Critique of Judgment in order to describe a model of judgment that was tailored to the proper evaluation of political action and speech. In essays such as “Truth and Politics” and “The Crisis in Culture,” Arendt was more concerned with distinguishing political judgment from moral and epistemological judgment than she was in offering a fully worked out theoretical account of the faculty of judgment per se. When one turns from these earlier writings on judgment to her Lectures, one finds Arendt emphasizing that political judgment is the prerogative of the disinterested and uninvolved spectator. The figure of the spectator is absent from her earlier writings on judgment.
To be sure, Arendt always understood the importance of the spectator to Kant’s Critique of Judgment. In “The Crisis in Culture” and “Truth and Politics,” Arendt recognized that Kant’s aesthetics privileged the one who experienced works of art over the artistic genius. Kant’s account of aesthetic judgments of taste was an account that was centered squarely on the spectator, and not the artistic creator. However, in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt used a notion of spectatorship as one of the necessary conditions for the validity of political judgment that was absent from her other writings on judgment. In Lectures, Arendt appears to claim that one of the conditions for the possibility for political judgment was a degree of disinterest and noninvolvement from the activity or event being judged. Maurizio Passerin D’Entrèves writes that “[In Lec tures] judgment is located in the sphere of the vita contemplativa, it is the faculty of non-participating spectators, primarily poets and historians, who seek to understand the meaning of the past and to reconcile us to what has happened.”15 Arendt’s earlier writings on political judgment seemed to place political judgment as the prerogative of historical and political actors. However, this appears to change in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, where Arendt’s emphasis shifts from political actors to uninvolved spectators. Because Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy is fragmentary, there is unfortunately no way to know exactly how Arendt would have resolved the tension between the two models of political judgment that she appeared to offer—or even if she had the desire to do so.
* * *
In this chapter, I have introduced Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. I have tried to offer a schematic overview of what I take to be Arendt’s most important claims and to indicate the current interpretive trends in the secondary literature. I have introduced Arendt’s most important reasons for turning to Kant’s aesthetics in order to develop a model of political judgment. Arendt’s concern with offering an autonomous account of political judgment led her to reinterpret Kant in a way that downplayed purposiveness and emphasized the fact that Kant offered a model of judgment that corresponded to our existence as members of a community, and not as isolated knowers or doers. I have also tried to situate Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy among Arendt’s other writings on judgment. As I have emphasized, Arendt’s Lectures represent an important—if incomplete—indication of the development that her thought on judgment was taking at the end of her career.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Press, 1994), 2.
2 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Press, 2004), 93.
3 It is important to note that Arendt believed that truth and politics were impossible without one another. For a detailed, thoughtful consideration of the relationship between truth and politics in Arendt’s thinking, see Ronald Beiner, “Rereading ‘Truth and Politics,’” Philosophy & Social Criticism 34, nos. 1–2 (January–February 2008): 123–36.
4 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 19.
5 Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, ed. Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (München: Piper Verlag GmbH, 2002).
6 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 223–59.
7 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1977).
8 Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt—Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Köhler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 318.
9 Ibid.
10 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §1–22.
11 In the third Critique, Kant expressed this claim in the following way, “Someone abandoned on some desolate island would not, just for himself, adorn either his hut or himself; nor would he look for flowers, let alone grow them, to adorn himself with them. Only in society does it occur to him to be, not merely a human being, but one who is refined in his own way.” See 5: 297.
12 In reality, Kant did not make such a claim in the Critique of Judgment. In Kant’s view, reflection remained a transcendental affair, and not an empirical one in which some other person’s viewpoint was reflected upon. For a more detailed consideration of Arendt’s reading of enlarged mentality and common sense, see Matthew Wester, “Reading Kant Against Himself: Arendt and the Appropriation of Enlarged Mentality,” Arendt Studies 2 (Fall 2018): 193–214.
13 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 60.
14 There is no scholarly consensus as to whether Arendt presented one model of political judgment, or whether she actually offered two separate, irreducible accounts. Richard Bernstein, Ronald Beiner, and Maurizio Passerin D’Entrèves have argued that Arendt’s early texts on judgment are markedly different than Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy in that the former present political judgment as the prerogative of political actors and the latter as the prerogative of uninvolved spectators. See Maurizio Passerin D’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (New York: Routledge, 2002), 102–4; Ronald Beiner, “Interpretive Essay,” in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 92; Richard J. Bernstein, “Judging—The Actor and the Spectator,” in The Realm of Humanitas: Responses to the Writings of Hannah Arendt, ed. Reuben Garner (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1990), 235–54. Others, such as Dana Villa contend that the differences between Arendt’s writings on judgment are more superficial and that the so-called “actor model” and “spectator model” of political judgment complement one another.
15 D’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt, 103.