Aesthetic Community: Recognition as an Other Sense of Sensus Communis

Abstract

In her last published work, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, Hannah Arendt extrapolates from what she takes to be the socializing aptitude of Kantian aesthetic judgment and implicitly revives a long-dormant project of Western philosophy: the ideal of the aesthetic state.1 In the act of imagining a politics for Kant, Arendt evokes the Greek faith in making political order out of aesthetic judgment: the ethical artifice of the polis. Within the specifically Aristotelian tradition that Arendt works so productively, there is no invidious hierarchy of aesthetic and political values. This admittedly partial view of the Greek polis nevertheless shows aesthetic and political values to be determinable within a context of human choice making constrained by social recognition. Such was the spirit of Greek republicanism itself, a spirit that I will argue contemporary aesthetics is bound to reckon with again in its pursuit of ethical and political goods.