Keywords:
Arendt, Kant, Exemplarity, Autonomy, Judgment, Imagination, Action, Political Aesthetics.
Hannah Arendt dismissed Kant’s deontological notion of autonomy as politically inefficacious and turned instead to the account of reflective judgment in his aesthetic philosophy to ground a conception of autonomy compatible with the political practice of ‘thinking from other perspectives.’ For some commentators, Arendt’s turn to Kantian aesthetics is a misstep because it seems to jettison moral principles from politics. For others, it yields a laudably radical democratic vision of judgment in which norms are discovered through public dialogue itself. Between these views, however, lies a middle path. Arendt does suggest an account of autonomy based on perspective-taking that is capable of grounding ‘general’ (allgemeine) claims of beauty and rightness: the ability to tell beautiful from ugly and right from wrong depends, she says, on the exemplary persons and events whose ‘company we choose to keep.’ In my paper, I use this underexplored aspect of Arendt’s turn to judgment as a starting point for developing the core elements of an exemplarist conception of political autonomy compatible with a pluralistic understanding of sociality to show how responsibility for the world we share with others is possible through a congenial relationship with exemplars we reflectively endorse for ourselves.
I proceed in the following four steps. In the first section, I provide textual evidence for promoting exemplarity to the center both of Arendt’s reading of Kant and her thought as a whole. If acting and judging are ‘the most political’ of human capacities, as she says, then exemplarity is the medium that properly unites them. The second and third sections deal with the core elements of exemplarist political autonomy as I understand it, namely, mimesis and sensus communis. Drawing upon recent interpretations of Kant’s aesthetics that I take to be sympathetic with the direction of Arendt’s (e.g., Gammon, Matherne), I argue that the interplay between these two elements works itself into a notion of taste (formerly conscience) understood as the selection of exemplary company. I then address, in the fourth section, the problem of arbitrariness that this picture invites: why not choose to keep company with a Bluebeard or Hitler? I argue that insofar as such choices are accomplished through judgment, they will be properly guided by normatively elevated versions of the reciprocally supporting axes of judgment itself: the exemplarity of examples (objective axis), personhood of persons (subjective axis), and worldliness of the world (intersubjective axis). It is on the basis of these axes that our choices of examples as a private plurality of action-inspiring company will tend toward those that disclose and affirm the worldhood of the world and the personhood of persons. I present this structure by analogy with that of Kantian moral judgment and, in so doing, endeavor to realize Arendt’s own intention of promoting judgment ‘in its own modus operandi,’ where it is the imagination, not reason, that plays the fundamental role.