Kant Arendt Compte Rendu

Arendt, Kant, and the Politics of Common Sense
Author(s): Andrew Norris

Source: Polity, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Winter, 1996), pp. 165-191
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Arendt, Kant, and the
Politics of Common Sense
Andrew Norris
University of California at Berkeley
Hannah Arendt is best known for her argument that political action is
a form of revelatory praxis. Such action would not be possible with-
out the non-objective judgments of a multiplicity of spectators. The
Arendtian theory of political action therefore requires a theory of
impartial but non-objective judgment. In an attempt to develop such a
theory, Arendt at the end of her life turned to Kant's Critique of Judg-
ment. However, Kant's aesthetic, reflective judgment is too formalistic
to be successfully appropriated for the political realm. In the absence
of a theoretical explanation of common reason, Arendt's categorical
distinctions between politics and philosophy, the public and the
private, and judgment and cognition remain unsubstantiated, with the
result that her theory of political action is itself undermined.
Andrew Norris teaches modern and contemporary political philosophy

in the Department of Rhetoric at Berkeley and in the Department of
Philosophy at the California State University at Hayward. His article
"Locke Reading the Law of Nature: Lockean Hermeneutics and
Political Judgment" will appear in the forthcoming 1650-1850: Ideas,
Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era. He is currently
writing a book on the fate of Aristotelian phronesis in modern
theories of autonomy.
Common sense, which had once been the one by which all other
senses, with their intimately private sensations, were fitted into the
common world, just as vision fitted man into the visual world, now
became an inner faculty without any world relationship. ... What
men now have in common is not the world but the structure of their
minds, and this they cannot have in common, strictly speaking;
their faculty of reasoning can only happen to be the same in
everybody.
-Arendt
Polity Volume
Polity XXIX,
Volume Number
XXIX, Number 2 2 Winter 1996
Winter 1996
166 Arendt, Kant, and the Politics of Common Sense
We assume a common sense as the necessary condition of the uni-

versal communicability of our knowledge, which is presupposed in
every logic and every principle of knowledge that is not one of
skepticism.
-Kant
Throughout her work, Hannah Arendt argues that political spe

action are misunderstood if they are seen as debased versions of Pla
truth and virtue. One of the central features of this effort has been her
presentation of the political realm as one in which opinion and judgment
as such are capable of achieving impartiality without relying upon either
the unity of the will or the coercion of cognition. At the end of her life,
Arendt turned to Kant's Critique of Judgment for a model of how this
inherently public opinion might be conceived. In spite of Kant's own
hostility toward rhetoric, his discussion of aesthetic, reflective judgment
offers an account of how political speech and opinion might achieve
impartiality in a form other than that of objectivity. Arendt's suspicion
of the concept of objectivity can be traced to the influence of her teacher
Heidegger, whose Being and Time offers a fundamental critique of the
subject/object dichotomy. Heidegger argues that both subjectivity and
objectivity are derivative of a more fundamental Gestalt which he calls
"Being-in-the-World." On Arendt's even more polemical account, the
demand for objectivity is not just a philosophical error, but the capstone
of the Platonic attack upon rhetoric, opinion, and politics. If the politics
of opinion is not to be seen as a corrupt version of scientific inquiry,
judgment must be established as a non-epistemic mode of disinterested
evaluation that allows for a plurality of perspectives.
This requirement is hardly peculiar to Arendt. Modern political theory
in general requires an account of how political judgments can achieve a
nonobjective impartiality. We all know that political judgment, like
aesthetic judgment, is different from the expression of personal pleasure
in that it can be reasonable or unreasonable. We demonstrate this convic-
tion in the intensity and duration of our arguments over political mat-
ters. But we also recognize that definitive answers are not here forthcom-
ing. Indeed, this is one of the features of political life that theorists since
Aristotle have most prized: the multiplicity of voices and perspectives
that it embraces. The difficulty is formulating a theoretical model of
political judgment that will allow for some judgments to be recognized as
being superior to others without collapsing this plurality into identity.
How can a judgment be reasonable if it does not produce the only correct
answer? If it is not, that is, objectively or universally or necessarily true
that this is a valid and impartial judgment, in what does its validity and
impartiality consist?
Andrew Norris 167
In his third Critique, Kant argues that our judgments of beauty are
underwritten by a peculiar kind of common sense, one that is inherently
public. On his action, such judgments rise above the individual's partia
view-but in doing so they nonetheless remain non-coercive, and only
"woo" the opinions of others. This is in many ways an explicitly political
picture of aesthetic life, and it is not surprising that Arendt, who set
such store on the distinction between the public and the private, shoul
have sought to appropriate its model of judgment for her own politica
theory. Her use of Kant in this regard receives its fullest treatment in her
posthumously published Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy. These
lectures have been accorded a mixed reception. The most enthusiastic
response has been that of Dana Villa, who argues that Arendt's appro-
priation of Kant's sensus communis aestheticus allows her to temper th
Nietzschean aestheticism of the theory of political action she develops in
The Human Condition.' This reading, however, has proven to be un-
acceptable to many, from adherents of Kant to those of Nietzsche and
Aristotle. Patrick Riley and Robert Dorstal among others have criticize
Arendt for being unfaithful to Kant, and for producing what they regard
as an inferior theory of political judgment to that of the Critique of Prac-
tical Reason, The Metaphysical Elements of Justice, and the late essay
on politics and culture.2 A number of other commentators, of whom the
most prominent is Ronald Beiner, have been more circumspect in their
praise of Kant's political thought, but have concurred that Arendt is
wrong to turn to his third Critique for a model of political judgment
These critics think Arendt would be better served by Aristotle, Shaftes-
bury, or Gadamer.3 More radical readers of Arendt such as Bonnie
Honig have protested against both of these evaluations that Arendt her
1. Dana Villa, "Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of
Political Action," Political Theory, 20 (1992): 274ff. Compare Martin Jay, "'The
Aesthetic Ideology' as Ideology: Or What Does it Mean to Aestheticize Politics?" in Force
Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York: Routledge, 1993),
pp. 82-83.
2. Patrick Riley, "Hannah Arendt on Kant, Truth, and Politics," in Essays on Kant's
Political Philosophy, ed. Howard Williams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992),
pp. 305ff; Riley, Kant's Political Philosophy (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983),
particularly chapters four and seven; and Robert Dorstal, "Judging Human Action:
Arendt's Appropriation of Kant," The Review of Metaphysics, 17 (1984): 725ff.
3. Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
Richard Bernstein argues that Arendt does not finally decide between the Kantian account
of judgment as contemplation and the Aristotelian account of judgment as the active exer-
cise of phronesis, with the result that there is a "flagrant contradiction" at the heart of her
work. See Bernstein, Philosophical Profiles (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia
Press, 1986), pp. 221 and 234-37.
self misconstrues Nietzsche's aestheticism, and that the introduction of

either Kant or Aristotle seriously undermines the non-subjective Arendt-
ian theory of political action.4
In the essay that follows I argue that Kantians such as Dorstal and
Riley do not appreciate the extreme limitations of Kant's own political
philosophy, in particular its inability to meet legitimate Arendtian
demands for plurality. As numerous critics of traditional liberalism have
argued, a deontological politics of justice effaces the differences in per-
spective and background that both constitute us as diverse people and
create the conditions for an inter-subjective politics of deliberation.5
Kant in his political theory is himself unable to acknowledge this plural-
ity in perspective in part, I argue, because he models his theory of polit-
ical judgment after his theory of epistemological judgment. However, I
do not conclude from this that Arendt would do well to turn to Nietzsche.
Honig's defense of a Nietzschean Arendt fails to appreciate the central
significance to Arendt's work of common sense: The Origins of Totali-
tarianism concludes by identifying the threat posed by totalitarianism
with the erasure of this sense; and The Human Condition's dramatur-
gical theory of the vita activa requires a community of spectators whose
judgments and stories allow for the appearance of the public person. Nor
do I conclude that Arendt would be wise to add to the already considera-
ble Aristotelian facets of her thought, as her conception of the onto-
logical function of political rhetoric and opinion require a Kantian-style
appeal to the transcendental. Nonetheless, Kant's own conception of
reflective judgment is inappropriate for Arendt's purposes, as it cannot
be said to grow out of the historical, worldly encounters it makes possi-
ble. Arendt's political theory hence requires a supplementary account of
the autopoesis of the transcendental.
I. The Central Role of Common Sense

in Arendtian Political Theory
Arendt is best known for her celebration of political action, a phenome-

non that she argues has been systematically misunderstood and eluded in
4. Bonnie Honig, "The Politics of Agonism: A Critical Response to 'Beyond Good an

Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of Political Action,' by Dana Villa
Political Theory, 21 (1993): 529.
5. Such criticisms have regularly focused on the neo-Kantianism of Rawls's Theory
Justice. See, for instance, Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cam
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals
and Communitarians (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992).
Anderw Norris 169
the Western tradition of political philosophy since Plato. Her most

important book, The Human Condition, sets out a series of categorical
distinctions among action [praxis], work [poiesis], and labor [ponein]
that she argues define the human condition. As Paul Ricouer has sug-
gested, while these are not "categories in the Kantian sense, i.e.,
a-historical structures of the mind," they nevertheless retain for Arendt a
flexible "teleological" status.6 This tripartite distinction entails further
controversial differentiations between the public and the private and
between rulership and freedom. Arendt argues that the Periclean polls
achieved an exemplary harmony among these modes of life. There, on
her somewhat idealized account, we find a rigid distinction between the
private and public realms. In the former, laborers such as women and
slaves are ruled over by the heads of their households. In the latter, these
men as citizens share an agonistic public life. Mediating between the two
are the workers: the builders, artisans, artists, and so forth. While they
work in the strictly private sphere, unlike laborers they are not tied to the
perpetuation of the life process, and instead produce objects that are not
consumed in their use. Indeed, they make possible what Arendt calls the
"world." By taking the citizenry out of the debased and debasing realm
of nature, the workers provide a realm in which political action and its
remembrance are possible.'
The questionable accuracy of Arendt's account of the Greek experi-
ence has led some critics to reject her fundamental distinction between
the public and the private. Sheldon Wolin, for instance, argues that her
discussion of Greek isonomia or political equality is distorted because it
willfully ignores the economic (and hence on Arendt's account "pri-
vate") basis and significance of such political categories.8 While such
arguments establish that Arendt's position is less historically accurate
than she suggests, they are hardly conclusive. If they were, Arendt's
6. Paul Ricouer, "Action, Story and History: On Re-reading The Human Condition, "
Salmagundi, 60 (Summer 1983): 61ff. As we shall see, these terms and concepts might better
be described, with Heidegger, as "existentials" rather than categories.
7. It is important to note that Arendt's "world" is not merely an aggregation of things
within which action can occur. Though enduring objects are necessary if we are to establish
and maintain a home for ourselves, no such home would be possible if it did not include
action. Here as elsewhere Arendt reveals the influence of Heidegger and Jaspers. Compare
Heidegger's discussion of the ontologico-existential concept of worldhood in Being and
Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp.
91-95; and Arendt's characterization of the symbiosis of "Existenz" and communication
with Jaspers in "What is Existenz Philosophy?" Partisan Review, 8 (Winter 1946): 52-53.
8. Sheldon Wolin, "Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political," Salmagundi, 60
(Summer 1983): 6-8.
work from the start would be an exercise in nostalgia for the Greeks, and
not an articulation of political/ontological categories. Arendt is frankly
unconcerned with historical accuracy, a nonchalance she also displays in
her discussion of the history of philosophy. While this may be exasperat-
ing, it should not distract readers from her true project, that of under-
standing the nature and importance of political action.
Political action consists of public speech and deed in a condition of
plurality. Because it is essentially concerned with public appearance,
politics is the realm of doxa, of opinion. In contrast to technical or
administrative concerns-which Arendt believes are in principle capable
of resolution by definitive knowledge-political matters are by nature
perspectival and rhetorical. The distinction she draws between knowl-
edge and necessity on the one hand and opinion and contingency on the
other is similar to that established by Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics.
The difference is that Aristotle follows Plato in placing opinion on a con-
tinuum with knowledge, where it can only appear as an inferior, less reli-
able version of techne or episteme.9 It is true that in the Rhetoric Aris-
totle attempts to establish the validity of rhetoric and opinion. But
because he fails to radically distinguish them from philosophy and
knowledge he must still see them as inferior and dependent. As he writes
in the Rhetoric itself, "The true and the approximately true are decided
by the same faculty" (1355). Arendt's more Nietzschean, perspectival
doxa is not an inferior apprehension of being. According to her, in the
Greek polis,
doxa was the formulation in speech of what dokei moi, that is, of
what appears to me. This doxa had as its topic not what Aristotle
calls the eikos, the probable, the many verisimilia . .. but compre-
hended the world as it opens itself up to me.'1
In the polis all phenomena are first and foremost that which appear to
others. The plurality entailed by this conception of opinion and perspec-
tive is irreducible to a unified "true" vision of reality. Indeed, in con-
scious opposition to the Western tradition of political philosophy, Arendt
argues that the transitory political realm of opinion is of greater existen-
tial value than either contemplation or labor, each of which is ruled by
necessity. Philosophical wonder and scientific analysis both deal with
what "does not even admit of being otherwise";" while labor responds
9. See for instance Plato, Meno, 96d ff.

10. Arendt, "Philosophy and Politics," Social Research, 57 (Spring 1990): 80.
11. Nichomachean Ethics, 1139b20; and compare 1141a25.
Andrew Norris 171
to the exigencies imposed upon us by our physical life.12 Political action

in contrast allows for freedom, which Arendt defines as the ability to
reveal oneself in public, in the discussion and enactment of the affairs of
the polis.
Save for sporadic and short-lived experiments with participatory
democracy, politics as Arendt defines it has been replaced by technical
administration.13 The modem assumption that politics is essentially con-
cerned with economics has encouraged this, as it implies that statistical
knowledge is both more "real" and more "political" than interpersonal
deliberation. This development in turn has been anticipated by the ten-
dency of philosophers to describe actions in terms of work or fabrica-
tion, a category error that Arendt traces back, again, to Plato.'4 On her
account, Plato responded to the Athenians' condemnation of Socrates
with the theoretical attempt to make politics safe for philosophers. In
Plato's view, expertise is as possible in politics as it is in the other arts.
Hence there is no more call for general deliberation in politics than there
is in plumbing. Indeed, political action has no inherent value; it is only
another form of becoming; and becoming in general is only the produc-
tion of being.15 The proposed rule of the philosopher-kings thus treats
the polity as a product of fabrication according to a rule, standard, or
blueprint.16 It is a means to a higher-and, by definition, apolitical-
12. Notwithstanding his identification of the human being as a laboring animal, Marx in
the third volume of Capital explicitly accepts this dichotomy of freedom and "actual
material production." He differs from Arendt in that politics for him is concerned with the
latter and not the former. See The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed., ed. Robert Tucker (New
York: Norton, 1978), p. 441.
13. See Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), pp. 265-66 for a partial list of
these exceptions.
14. When Patrick Riley argues that Arendt would reduce the Kantian reflective judge to
Shelley's legislating poet, he forgets the depth of her commitment to this category distinc-
tion between poiesis and praxis. See Riley, "Hannah Arendt on Kant, Truth, and Politics,"
p. 310. Arendt adopts this category distinction from Heidegger. See part one of Dana
Villa's Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1995). While it is ultimately Aristotelian, many argue that Aristotle himself does not
consistently maintain it. See, for instance, Reiner Schurmann, Heidegger on Being and
Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). But
compare Ethics, 1140b6 (where the distinction is made) with 1094a (where Aristotle seems
to efface his own distinction) and 1144a5 (where this seeming contradiction is at least argu-
ably resolved).
15. Philebus, 54.
16. Arendt is adamant that "the whole concept of rule and being ruled ... was felt [in
the Periclean polis] to be prepolitical and to belong to the private rather than the public
sphere" (Arendt, The Human Condition [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1958], p. 228).
end, such as the life of Platonic or Aristotelian philosophers, the salva-

tion of souls, or the private lives of the subjects of the state. This sub-
sumption of the political has become more obvious and more dangerous
with the rise of the modern philosophy of the will:
Only the modern age's conviction that man can know only what he
makes, that his allegedly higher capacities depend upon making
and that he is primarily homo faber and not animal rationale,
brought forth the much older implications of violence inherent in
all interpretations of the realm of human affairs as a sphere of
making. 17
Though in the end a eugenicist, Plato's Statesman is distinguished from

modern figures who hearken back to him-such as Machiavelli's Founder
and Rousseau's Legislator-in that his production is mimetically related
to the unchanging Forms, and not to the will of the prince or the popu-
lace. The breaking of this tie has ushered in the series of disastrous revo-
lutionary attempts to re-make society that are so characteristic of modern
politics. 18
Arendt argues against this for a radically non-instrumental conception
of action, one that eschews the demand for a unitary truth in favor of a
perspectival plurality. According to her, action in public does not emerge
from the private life, or the private self, though they are necessary condi-
tions of political life. On the contrary, there is a radical disjunction be-
tween the private self and the public person. The deeds that constitute
this public person are not expressions of the private self: "nobody is the
author or producer of his own life story." Instead it is the various inter-
pretations of the spectators that define the "story" that is enacted.19
Their judgments are a constitutive part of this story, and therefore of the
public person of whom it speaks. This story is the object of the "immor-
tality" that political action can grant. Of this immortality, Arendt
writes, "Without this transcendence into a potential earthly immortality,
no politics, strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm, is
possible."20 Arendtian political action thus requires a community of
17. The Human Condition, p. 228.

18. See Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969).
19. The Human Condition, p. 184. For a fuller account this non-subjective account of
action, in which "identity is the product of action" rather than its source, see Bonnie
Honig, "Arendt, Identity, and Difference," Political Theory, 16 (1988): 77-98. Honig cor-
rectly, to my mind, attacks Suzanne Jacobitti's effort to derive from Arendt's work a
coherent theory of the self as author of its deeds. Compare Jacobitti, "Hannah Arendt and
the Will," in the same issue of Political Theory, pp. 53-76.
Andrew Norris 173
judgment. "Only where things can be seen by many in a variety of

aspects without changing their identity, so that those who are gathered
around them know they see sameness in utter diversity, can worldly real-
ity truly and reliably appear."21 The faculty that makes possible the
"worldly reality" of action is common sense; it is common sense that
keeps our doxa from collapsing into "subjective fantasy and arbitrari-
ness."22 Common sense thus allows for impartiality, the sine qua non of
good political judgment.23 Following her insistence that doxa properly
understood is qualitatively distinct from episteme and techne, this judg-
ment will be non-cognitive. For Arendt, judgment is not a matter of sci-
ence or knowledge, but of revelation.24 Judgment is what allows action
to occur; like the world, it must be present if the public actor is to reveal
herself.

22. "Philosophy and Politics," p. 80. Arendt here describes the function of doxa with
the same language that she uses to describe common sense, indicating their essential unity.
23. Arendt's other criteria of good judgment would probably best be gleaned from a sys-
tematic consideration of her own judgments, as she provides, to my knowledge, no
extended discussion of what such criteria might be. Lawrence Biskowski has argued con-
vincingly and well that Arendt believes good judgment, like good action, is dedicated to
"care for the world" (Biskowski, "Practical Foundations for Political Judgment: Arendt
on Action and World," The Journal of Politics, 55 [November 1993], 885). However,
though Biskowski claims that this "provides substantive moral and practical content to the
theory of judgment" (p. 885), he is unable to be more specific concerning what is enjoined
of us. One can only assume that this content will be essentially prohibitive in character.
Moreover, given the central role played by common sense in the revelation of the world, it
is circular at best to attempt to define the judgments of that sense in terms of the world it
makes possible.
24. In his recent book on political judgment, Peter Steinberger complains of Arendt's
work that "it is unclear in what precise sense we should understand and accept the claim
that judgment (for Arendt) . . . can provide a basis for anything like knowledge or
wisdom" (The Concept of Political Judgment [Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993], p. 75). But if, as Steinberger's phrasing suggests, the wisdom of good judgment is
associated with knowledge, this is simply a claim that Arendt doesn't make. Indeed, Stein-
berger begins his discussion of Arendt by implicitly acknowledging that this is the case. He
notes that, for her, "thought" is unlike cognition and logical reasoning in that it is con-
cerned with "meaning" and not "truth" (p. 64); this will likewise be true of judgment,
which he notes is "thought in the service of political action" (p. 65). But three pages later,
his readers find Steinberger attributing to Arendt a theory of "knowledge-in-judgment" (p.
68). Steinberger's own philosophical commitment to the view that political judgment
requires a philosophical justification thus seems to have led him-without his being aware
of it-to misunderstand Arendt's own very different position. Ronald Beiner provides a
concise and cogent criticism of Steinberger's refusal to acknowledge the possibility that
judgment-in the form of either Aristotelian phronesis or Kantian Urteilskraft-might be
radically freed from the governance of rules, in his review of The Concept of Political
Judgment in Political Theory, 22 (1994): 688-92.
This may become clearer if we consider Arendt's discussion of action

in "What is Freedom?" In this seminal essay she compares political
action as praxis to dance, distinguishing both from forms of poiesis such
as the plastic arts. The basis for this distinction is that both action and
dance require plurality in the form of an audience, whereas the produc-
tion of a tangible artwork can be pursued in solitude. There is a very real
sense in which a dance performance is not a performance at all unless an
audience is in attendance. Morever, not just any heap of people will
make an audience. For the dancer's performance to reveal her artistry
and excellence, the audience must be capable of perceiving such excel-
lence and artistry; and this requires that they be capable of judging her
performance from their various perspectives. Without their ability to
recognize her revelation of herself, no such revelation can occur. Simi-
larly, Arendt argues, if we are to have freedom, we must have political
action. And if we are to have political action we must have a community
capable of judging that action, and making possible its revelation of the
actor and the human freedom she embodies.25
What Arendt finds distinctive about totalitarianism is the nature of its
assault upon the possibility of such revelation, which consists of the sup-
pression of the judgments of common sense. In sharp disagreement with
political theorists like Leo Strauss who find in totalitarianism only an
egregious form of tyranny, Arendt argues that its political structure and
even its ontological consequences are radically different. Where tyranny
is the rule of one, totalitarianism is the rule of no-one, of ideology.
Where tyranny leaves the nature of the private sphere untouched (though
it may violently circumscribe it), totalitarianism destroys it. Most impor-
tantly, where tyranny does not disturb the sensus communis, totalitarian-
ism's ideological thinking and the breakdown of political structures that
allow for action in concert cripple common sense. This amounts to a loss
of plurality, the basic condition for action.26 Both theoretically and prac-
tically, Arendtian political action and the non-cognitive judgments of
common sense stand and fall together.27
25. Arendt, "What is Freedom?" Between Past andFuture (New York: Penguin, 1968).
26. Totalitarianism, pp. 352-91.
27. These connections between Arendt's non-instrumental theory of action, her treat-
ment of judgment, and her analysis of totalitarianism have not been sufficiently noted by
even her most enthusiastic readers. Bonnie Honig, for instance, insists upon Nietzsche's
agonistic individualism because she fears that "Arendt's action in concert risks sliding into
mass behavior" ("The Politics of Agonism," p. 532). But Arendt argues that political
action requires common sense in order to resist massness: "totalitarian movements are
mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals" (Totalitarianism, p. 323; and see pp.
Andrew Norris 175
Though totalitarianism thus poses a unique threat to the common

sense that Arendt associates with politics and freedom, the effort to dis-
tinguish publicity and impartiality from private bias is also of decisive
importance to a liberal political culture such as ours which attempts to
base political authority upon the consent of the governed. Arendt is in
generally deeply scornful of liberalism. That it puts politics in the service
of "society" and hence of the demands of private life is indicative, she
suggests, of the difficulty it will have conceptualizing a public judgment,
one that represents more than an aggregation of private interests. In this
regard it is no surprise that the classical contract theorists all concur that
the independence and diversity of individual judgment is the problem
that politics in the guise of the contract is primarily intended to solve.
And each of them has been accused of adopting, in the end, the Hobbes-
ian solution of arbitrarily selecting one biased judgment to serve as the
rule of law governing relations within the discordant society of judges.28
This vision of society as irredeemably private and fractured may be more
accurate (and appropriate for us) than Arendt's. It may be, that is, that
impartiality is, in the end, only what we agree upon in the course of a
Rorty-styled conversation. But it may also be that we can have such con-
versation only because we have a prior experience of impartiality.
II. Cognitive Judgments and the Denial of

Plurality in Kantian Political Theory
In the third Critique, Kant attributes the experience of impartiality to

aesthetic judgment, which he argues is inherently public. As we shall see,
it is this theoretical model of public judgment that Arendt seeks to
apropriate for politics. Aesthetic judgment is not, however, the only
model of impartiality to be found in Kant's work. Kant draws a sharp
distinction between the disinterested aesthetic judgment and the impar-
tial political judgment. The former is a variety of reflective judgment
which rests upon the sensus communis aestheticus. Very different is the
decision of the Kantian sovereign, which is guided by the a priori stan-
dard of the social contract. While all people make aesthetic judgments,
316-17 and 475). Indeed, by neglecting common sense Honig leaves no clue why Arendt
would not concur with Nietzsche's own explicit repudiation of the Kantian account of
aesthetic judgment as disinterested, impersonal, and universal in scope (The Genealogy of
Morals [New York: Vintage, 1967], pp. 103-04).
28. See, for instance, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Knowledge and Politics (New York:
The Free Press, 1975), particularly the second chapter.
only the sovereign is authorized by Kant to make political judgments; his

judgments therefore disavow the plurality that is constitutive of the
aesthetic and-on Arendt's account-the political. Before turning to
Arendt's appropriation of Kant's aesthetic judgment, it will prove help-
ful to first consider the limitations of Kant's own model of political judg-
ment. There are two reasons for this. First, it will help us appreciate why
Arendt turned to Kant's aesthetic and not his political theory when she
wanted to develop a theory of political judgment. And, second, because
Kant's work in this area is indicative of common problems in the philoso-
phy of judgment, it will help us to appreciate the significance of Arendt's
effort.
A central text for any understanding of Kant's approach to political
judgment is "On the Common Saying: 'This May be True in Theory, But
it does not Apply in Practice.' " In this essay from 1792, Kant sets out to
defend the claims of theory in regard to morals, politics, and inter-
national relations from the attacks of prudentially minded men of the
world. The second section of the essay, that devoted to politics, is ex-
plicitly written in opposition to Hobbes. There is an irony in this, as the
theory of political right that Kant advances is essentially Hobbesian in its
absolutism. This is most immediately the result of Kant's efforts to meet
the demands of both equality and judgment. Human freedom is defined
in a liberal fashion as our common ability to actively define our own
good; in contrast, political equality is defined juristically as the citizen-
ry's equality "as subjects before the law." The one exception to this is
the "single person (in either the physical or the moral sense of the word),
the head of state." This political fount of justice (which Kant identifies
with universal mutual coercion) must, in Kant's view, be singular if it is
not to cancel itself out:
For if [the head of state] could be coerced, he would not be the

head of state, and the hierarchy of subordination would ascend
infinitely. But if there were two persons exempt from coercion,
neither would be subject to coercive laws, and neither could do to
the other anything contrary to right, which is impossible.29
He goes on to derive the subjects' inability to resist their sovereign from

this same reasoning:
The people, under an existing civil constitution, has no longer any

right to judge, how the constitution should be administered. For if
29. "On the Common Saying: 'This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in
Practice,' " Kant: Political Writings, 2d ed., ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1991), p. 75.
Andrew Norris 177
we suppose that it does have this right to judge and that it disagrees
with the judgment of the actual head of state, who is to decide
which side is right? Neither can act as judge in his own cause. There
would have to be another head above the head of state to mediate
between the latter and the people, which is self-contradictory.30
This formulation of the problem of political judgment is anticipated in

the so-called "third man argument" of Plato's Parmenides and in
Hobbes's attempt to delineate sovereignty. But it is most immediately
inspired by Kant's own earlier reflections on the general dilemma of
judgment in the epistemological context of the Critique of Pure Reason.
In the Transcendental Analytic, Kant identifies judgment as "the faculty
of subsuming under rules," and writes that, as such,
general logic contains, and can contain, no rules for judgment ....
If it sought to give general instructions how we are to subsume
under these rules, that is, to distinguish whether something does or
does not come under them, that could only be by means of another
rule. This in turn, for the very reason it is a rule, again demands
guidance from judgment.31
As in the passages cited from "Theory" above, the introduction of a

third term brings with it the threat of an infinite regress. The rule that
guides the application of the first rule will in turn require a rule for its
own application, and so on ad infinitum. While the situation is different
in the sphere of a priori transcendental philosophy, which can specify a
priori the instance to which the rule is to be applied, in general logic this
threatened infinite regress can only be halted by identifying judgment
with something above and beyond any given set of rules: the activity of
their application. Kant appeals to another sphere altogether, one that, by
definition, lies beyond the scope of the understanding [Verstand] even as
it makes that faculty's cognitive work possible. As the rules in question
are the work of the understanding, Kant's turn to judgment as activity
has the effect of distinguishing the faculty of judgment from that of the
understanding, or, in other words, establishing the non-cognitive nature
of judgment even in its cognitive function.
This step is required if judgment is not to collapse into skepticism.
This can be seen if we compare the passage from the Analytic with one of
30. "Theory," p. 81.

31. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (New York: Mac-
millan, 1929), p. 177.
Montaigne's characterizations of the skeptical dilemma from the Apol-

ogy for Raymond Sebond:
Just as we say in religious disputes that we must have a judge not

allied to either sect, free from prejudice and attachment (which is
not possible among Christians), so the same rule applies here...
To judge the impressions which we receive from things, we should
need a judicatory instrument; to verify that instrument, we need
demonstration; to verify that demonstration, we need an instru-
ment . . . and here we are proceeding backward without any possi-
ble stopping place.32
The parallel between the two passages is almost exact; and it has not, to
my knowledge, been noted by other commentators. Montaigne's sugges-
tion here that the problem of knowledge can be seen as a peculiarly polit-
ical problem is echoed by Kant in the second and third sections of the
second introduction to Critique of Judgment. Here he establishes that of
the three faculties, the understanding [ Verstand], reason [ Vernunft], and
judgment [Urteilskraft], only judgment lacks a "realm" over which it
might "prescribe laws." This does not deprive judgment of all authority,
however. Instead it confers upon it a power and freedom that is not cap-
tured by the model of legislation or sovereignty. This differentiation is
part of what attracts Arendt, who is so insistent that politics is a sphere
of action, and not of rule.
Montaigne does not make the distinction between judgment and cog-
nition, and instead subsumes instrument, demonstration, and their rela-
tion under knowledge-and consequently concludes that knowledge is
not possible. Kant, in contrast, sees that cognition can never explain its
own operation. As long as the relationship within judgment between par-
ticular and rule is considered in epistemological terms, a skeptical regress
is inevitable. The application of rules outside the province of transcen-
dental logic cannot itself be explained or articulated as a function of the
rules or concepts of the cognitive faculty, and instead indicates the non-
rule-governed domain of "practice." Hence judgment, the "so-called
mother-wit" is "a peculiar talent which can be practiced only, and can-
not be taught." In an uncharacteristically blunt aside, Kant identifies the
lack of this talent as "what is ordinarily called stupidity," noting that,
"for such a failing there is no remedy." The "application" of rules is "a
32. Michel de Montaigne, In Defense of Raymond Sebond (New York: Frederick Ungar,
1965), pp. 117-18.
Andrew Norris 179
natural gift" that can only be sharpened by means of "examples and

actual practice."33
In his political philosophy this same dynamic is at play-indeed, Kant
begins "Theory and Practice" with a rehearsal of the Transcendental
Analytic's discussion of judgment.34 The sovereign must be single and
unchallenged if he is to function as such, and break off the regress of
legitimation. In doing so, the sovereign becomes the only being capable
of political action.35 Kant reconciles this monopoly with his republican
principles by his use of the a priori standard of the social contract. The
use of this heuristic allows the sovereign to evade difference and dis-
satisfaction:
The legislator may indeed err in judging whether or not the mea-
sures he adopts are prudent, but not in deciding whether or not the
law harmonizes with the principle of right. . . . For so long as it is
not self-contradictory to say that an entire people could agree to
such a law, however painful it might seem, then the law is in har-
mony with right.36
The striking abstractness of this standard, with its appeal to the law of
non-contradiction, is the result of Kant's pairing the model of judgment
derived from the Analytic to a Rousseauian commitment to unanimity:
the citizenry "must agree unanimously to the law of public justice, or
else a legal contention would arise between those who agree and those
who disagree, and it would require yet another legal principle to resolve
it. 37
33. Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 177-79.

34. "Theory," p. 61. There are slight differences. In the account presented in "Theory,"
"practices" themselves embody rules as a variety of techne. But the two are still aligned by
means of an "act of judgment" that is not itself explained in terms of rules or Kantian
principles.
35. Though Arendt does not make the argument concerning judgment that I am advanc-
ing here, she does argue that "Kant could conceive of action only as acts of the powers-
that-be . . . that is, governmental acts" (Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed.
Ronald Beiner [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982], p. 60).
36. "Theory," pp. 80-81.
37. "Theory," pp. 78-79. This unanimous will is not that of the populace as a whole, but
only of the citizenry. In an ironic confirmation of Arendt's contention that philosophers
have confounded the categorical distinctions between action, work, and labor, Kant argues
that-be . . . that is, governmental acts" (Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed.
Ronald Beiner [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982], p. 60).
physical Elements of Justice this distinction is presented as one between "active" and
"passive" citizenship. This argument fails to satisfy even Kant himself. See "Theory," p.
78, footnote; and The Metaphysical Elements of Justice, p. 79.
Kant avoids the infinite regress of the rules' applications by transform-

ing the act of political judgment into one of will. Such a voluntarist
account of politics must in the end deny plurality for identity. On the one
hand, for the regress to be broken there must be a single determining act;
on the other, it is in the nature of the will that it cannot allow for com-
promise, but must retain its unity to retain its identity. If freedom is to
take the form of autonomy, or self-legislation, as both Kant and
Rousseau insist it must, it is necessary to first constitute a unified subject
that can legislate for itself. Hence, their model for political community
requires the unification of the populace into one body politic: sover-
eignty is indivisible. Particular interests are not discussed and compro-
mised, but instead difference as such is eliminated, as in Rousseau's
famous moral calculation. "There is," Rousseau writes,
often a great difference between the will of all and the general will;
the general will studies only the common interest while the will of
all studies private interest, and is indeed no more than the sum of
individual desires. But if we take away from these same wills, the
pluses and minuses which cancel each other out, the balance which
remains is the general will.38
Kant follows Rousseau in this, and ends by advocating an anti-rhetor-

ical, "republican" politics in which the populace has no right to judge or
resist a tyrant.
III. Arendt's Attempted Appropriation of

Kant's Aesthetic Judgment
Both Kant and Rousseau are unable to imagine a community that does
not rest upon a prior unity. Though each follows his own particular path
to this conclusion, the position itself is common to the Platonic tradition
as a whole. Jean-Luc Nancy puts this Arendtian point well in his preface
to The Inoperative Community:
The tradition has folded and closed the thinking of being-in-

common within the thinking of an essence of community .... Such
a thinking-the thinking of community as essence-is in effect the
closure of the political. Such a thinking constitutes closure because
it assigns to community a common being, whereas community is a
38. The Social Contract, pp. 72-73.
Andrew Norris 181
matter of... existence inasmuch as it is in common, but without

letting itself be absorbed into a common substance.39
In Arendt's thought it is the world and its common sense that make com-
munity in this second sense possible. As she writes in The Human
Condition,
The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and

yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. What makes
mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people in-
volved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world be-
tween them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate
them and to separate them.40
Arendt is drawn to Kant's aesthetic theory because its conceptualization

of the sensus communis offers a model of community that allows for
both this relation and this distinction; one, that is, that relies upon
neither the coercion of cognition or the unity of the will. On the basis of
this community sense, Arendt attempts to construct an alternative to the
political philosophy propounded in the Metaphysical Elements of Jus-
tice. In drawing this out she relies most heavily upon the first half of the
Critique of Judgment. While she uses texts such as "What is Enlighten-
ment?" and "Perpetual Peace," she endeavors to disentangle their treat-
ment of publicity from that of governmental power or the philosophy of
history. She then grafts this material onto the conception of the "en-
larged mentality" found in Kant's critique of aesthetic taste, arguing that
there is a reciprocal relationship between worldly conditions of plurality
and the common sense of Kant's aesthetics.
Common sense plays a central role in Kant's critique of aesthetic judg-
ment. Here, as in the first Critique, he defines "Judgment in general" as
"the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the universal."
But he goes on to distinguish two different ways this subsumption can
take place:
If the universal (the rule, principal, or law) is given, then the judg-
ment which subsumes the particular under it is determinant. This is
so even where such a judgment is transcendental.... If, however,
only the particular is given and the universal has to be found for it,
then the judgment is simply reflective.
39. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: The University of

Minneapolis Press, 1991), p. xxxviii.
40. The Human Condition, pp. 52-53, emphasis added.
It follows from Kant's definition of judgment that "the reflective judg-

ment which is compelled to ascend from the particular in nature to the
universal, stands ... in need of a principle."41 In the judgment of taste,
this principle will be the sensus communis aestheticus, the free play of the
imagination and the understanding. Legislated by neither the faculty of
the will (as in moral judgments) nor that of the understanding (as in epis-
temic judgments) the aesthetic judgment is not determined by a concept
but made possible by the common sense of mankind.42
Kant discusses this common sense at two points in the third Critique:
in the final three sections of the fourth moment of the Analytic of the
Beautiful, which sets out to demonstrate that judgments of taste possess
a necessity that is not grounded upon concepts; and almost immediately
after setting forth his Deduction of Judgments of Taste in the misnamed
Analytic of the Sublime. The earlier discussion is considerably more
straightforward. Here Kant presents common sense [Gemeinsinn] as the
"condition of the necessity advanced by a judgment of taste," that is,
the subjective principle or rule which "determines what pleases or dis-
pleases." Kant immediately distinguishes the common sense he has in
mind-the sensus communis aestheticus-from
common understanding [gemeinen Verstande], which is also some-

times called common sense (sensus communis): for the judgment of
the latter is not one by feeling, but always one by concepts, though
usually only in the shape of obscurely represented principles.
In contrast, true common sense "is not taken to mean some external
sense, but the effect arising from the free play of our powers of cogni-
tion."43 Common sense, that is, is an affect, a feeling caused by the har-
monious play between our understanding and our imagination. It is a
kind of pleasure that, while involving the cognitive faculties, is not itself
the result of any cognitive process, such as would be involved in discus-
sion, disputation, or education.
41. Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarenton,
1989), 18. Emphasis in original.
42. In her attempt to make Arendt more Kantian, Seyla Benhabib appears to forget this
essential distinction between moral and reflective judgment; hence she avers that "intrinsic
to Kant's model of 'reflective judgment' may be a conception of rationality and inter-
subjective validity that would allow us to retain a principled universalist moral standpoint
while acknowledging the role of contextual moral judgment in human affairs" ("Judgment
and the Moral Foundations of Politics in Arendt's Thought," Political Theory, 16 [Febru-
ary 1988]: 41). The phenomenology of moral judgment that she goes on to offer is interest-
ing, but it does not, by definition, make use of Kant's reflective judgment.
43. Critique of Judgment, pp. 82-83.
Andrew Norris 183
Judgments made on the basis of this rule are "public" [publicke], as

opposed to the merely "private judgments" [Privaturteile] of the "taste
of sense" [Sinnengeschmack].44 In contrast to, say, Locke's efforts to
show how private judgments can come together to form a public author-
ity, Kant is unequivocal here that the judgments of the private realm
stand in stark contrast to those of the public. Though argumentation and
discussion of any kind quickly run dry when we are discussing our imme-
diate sensual pleasures, we find the beautiful to exert a claim that others
ought to answer; and it is on the basis of this expectation that Kant calls
these judgments public. Private judgments that reflect the taste of sense
are not a priori, and can only be shown by experience to be shared by
others. They are also "pathological," in that they are not free, but rather
governed by the (concepts of the) given individual's sensations, interests,
and partialities-concepts that play no role in true judgments of taste.
True judgments of taste are subjective because they are not determined
by concepts, as objects of knowledge are. But they are necessary because
they are a priori, and not just contingent responses to the circumstances
of an individual's inclinations.
The resulting picture of a free, public, and phenomenal judgment
bears certain obvious affinities to Arendt's understanding of the polit-
ical. Arendt notes this as early as 1961's "The Crisis in Culture." But
here she conflates the Kantian account with Aristotelian phronesis.45 In
the Lectures she does not make this mistake, and emphasizes that what
she is concerned with is the common sense of the "spectator," and not
the wisdom of the practicing statesman.46 In developing this notion she
all but identifies three disparate elements of the Kantian philosophy: the
"communicability" of the judgment of taste; the "sociability" that lies
at the end of the history of culture in the third Critique and the "Conjec-
tural Beginning of Human History"; and the "publicity" that Kant calls
44. Critique of Judgment, p. 54.

45. "The Crisis in Culture," Between Past and Future, pp. 220-21.
46. It is this change that leads Ronald Beiner to suggest that Arendt "offers not one but
two theories of judgment," one in which "judgment is considered from the point of view of
the vita activa" and one "beginning in 1970" that emphasizes "spectatorship and [the]
retrospective judgment of historians and storytellers" (Ronald Beiner, "Interpretive
Essay," Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, p. 91). While it is true that Arendt placed
less and less emphasis upon the ontological primacy of the political (particularly, if under-
standably, in The Life of the Mind), Beiner's suggestion that one can date a shift in her
thinking to anything as precise as 1970 is misleading. As early as "Truth and Politics"
(originally published in the February 25, 1967 edition of The New Yorker [Vol. XLIII]),
Arendt argues that "the faculty of judgment" and "impartiality" arise from historical
retrospection ("Truth and Politics," Between Past and Future, pp. 262-63).
for in "What is Enlightenment?"47 This argument represents the cul-

mination of a major facet of Arendt's thought: the attempt to develop a
model of common sense that will allow for both plurality and im-
partiality.
Arendt carefully qualifies the claims she makes in the realm of Kant
scholarship. At times in the Lectures she frankly acknowledges that her
reading of Kant is inconsistent with Kant's own understanding of his
political philosophy; at others she maintains that her interpretation is
true to the "spirit" if not the "letter" of Kant's own writings.48 How-
ever, this does not imply that the accuracy of her account of Kant is
entirely beside the point. Arendt wants to avail herself of certain aspects
of Kant's work, in particular the claim to a non-objective mode of judg-
ment that nonetheless rises above interest and partiality. Without this,
her rigid distinction between private selves and public persons collapses,
and with it the categorical distinction between the philosophical and the
political. The polis as the site of history will remain the shamble of inept
and ignorant opinion that Plato claimed it was. Kant's aesthetic theory
provides an account of such inherently public judgment; but, as critics
more concerned with art than politics have noted repeatedly, it can do so
because it is an extremely formalistic theory.49 Arendt embraces it as
eagerly as she does in part because she fails to recognize this.
Kant's dictum-found in the Anthropology-that "Company is indis-
pensable for the thinker" is, she says, "a key to the first part of the Cri-
tique of Judgment. "50 This notion suggests to her that the historical con-
ditions of publicity might undergird Kant's transcendental sensus com-
munis. Indeed, she repeatedly refers to such publicity as a "criterion" of
impartial reflective judgments. In the Lectures she refers to the "test" of
free and open examination that she maintains is necessary for thought;
she alludes to publicity as a "testing that arises from contact with other
people's thinking"; she writes that "Publicness is already the criterion of
47. This identification is implicit throughout the Lectures in the very similar language
Arendt uses to describe communicability and publicity; it is expressed most directly in the
last lecture, where she attributes both communicability and sociability to the presence of
others-that is, to a public community.
48. See Lectures, pp. 19-20, where Arendt acknowledges that Kant's tripartite project-
the determination of what I should do, what I can hope for, and what I can know-does
not allow for the expression of concern for plurality, and subsequently of care for "the
world"; and p. 33, where she suggests that, while her reading goes "beyond Kant's self-
interpretation," it still remains "within Kant's spirit."
49. A common and seemingly telling objection is that Kant's emphasis on the form of
the aesthetic object does not allow one to distinguish between the experience of beholding
wallpaper and that of beholding a Poussin.
50. Lectures, p. 10. She refers to this notion throughout the Lectures.
Andrew Norris 185
rightness in his moral philosophy," which suggests that it will now fulfill
a similar role in his aesthetic philosophy; and she argues that "the
criterion of communicability or publicness" is what determines which
pleasures are noble and which are base.51 However, this interpretation of
the relation between common sense and publicity finds no support in
Kant. It is true that "What is Enlightenment?" argues that freedom of
the press for "scholars" is a prerequisite of cultural and intellectual pro-
gress. But in that essay Kant also explicitly acknowledges that
this is not the case for the lone thinker.52 And, as Arendt herself acknowl-
edges, the transcendental deductions of the Critique of Pure Reason do
not present publicity or sociability as one of the a priori conditions of
thought.
More significant is Arendt's misunderstanding of "universal com-
municability" [die allgemeine Mitteilbarkeit] as it is involved in common
sense. In the Lectures she argues that "The less idiosyncratic one's taste
is, the better it can be communicated; communicability ... is the touch-
stone." "One can communicate only if one is able to think from the
other person's standpoint."53 This is plainly false insofar as it implies
that impartial judgments are somehow more easily communicated than
those that are pigheaded or willful. Moreover, it demonstrates that
Arendt fundamentally misconstrues what Kant means by "communica-
bility" when he discusses it in the context of pure judgments of taste-
the only judgments, that is, that manifest the impartiality that Arendt
seeks. In his Commentary on Kant's Critique of Judgment, H. W.
Cassirer sheds light upon Kant's intentions here. "It is rather unfor-
tunate," Cassirer writes,
that the German expressions "Mitteilbarkeit" (communicability)

and "Mitteilungsfahigkeit" (capacity for being communicated)...
suggest that one individual should be capable of letting another
know precisely what his state of mind is. ... Kant does not really
mean this. All he means is that the feelings of the two persons are
identical in character.54
51. Lectures, pp. 40, 42, 49 (emphasis added), and 69 respectively.

52. Kant, "What is Enlightenment?" On History, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), p. 4.
53. Lectures, pp. 73 and 74. This interpretation of Kant is seconded by Villa in "Beyond
Good and Evil," p. 296.
54. H. W. Cassirer, A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Judgment (New York: Barnes
& Noble, 1970), pp. 195-96.
As Cassirer notes, Kant himself says as much, if somewhat obscurely, in

a footnote to the "Deduction of Judgments of Taste":
In order to be justified in claiming universal agreement for an aes-

thetic judgment ... it is sufficient to assume: (1) that the subjective
conditions of this faculty are identical with all men in what con-
cerns the relation of the cognitive faculties, there brought into
action, with a view to a cognition in general. This must be true, as
otherwise men would be unable of communicating their representa-
tions or even their knowledge; (2) that the judgment ... is pure.55
The universal validity and communicability of aesthetic pleasure

expresses the harmonious "play" of the imagination and the understand-
ing-the faculties that make empirical knowledge possible. The free play
of the faculties identified by Kant as the rule-that-is-not-a-rule of the
reflective judgment is the very activity that in the Analytic of the Critique
of Pure Reason serves as the necessary supplement to the legislation of
the understanding. And, as in that discussion, the threat of skepticism
plays a central role: "we assume," Kant writes, "a common sense as the
necessary condition of the universal communicability of our knowledge,
which is presupposed in every logic and every principle of knowledge that
is not one of skepticism."56 We recall that in Kant's transcendental ideal-
ism, the harmony of these faculties does not allow us to perceive and
know pre-existing material objects. Instead this harmony is necessary for
the synthesis of the manifold that generates a phenomenal, knowable
world: the two faculties of cognition must be in relation to one another
before this synthesis begins and the imagination is put in the service of
the understanding. It is essential to Kant's refutation of Hume's skep-
ticism that the a priori precede experience in this way. That is to say,
these faculties must be non-empirical if they are to fulfill their transcen-
dental function of making empirical experience-that is, the empirical
itself-possible. While both Kant and Arendt contend that the sensus
55. Critique of Judgment, p. 147. Compare Cassirer, pp. 263-64; and Gilles Deleuze,
Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 60.
56. Critique of Judgment, p. 84. Robert Dorstal's captious evaluation of Arendt's
appropriation of Kant is vitiated by his neglect of the role of the imagination. He argues
that "The validity and communicability of ... reflective judgment . . . rests firmly and
explicitly on . . . the faculty of the understanding." If this were so, aesthetic judgment
would be determined by concepts, which Kant insists repeatedly it is not. Moreover, there
would be no need for a third Critique, as reflective judgment would have been treated in the
critique of the understanding, the Critique of Pure Reason. See Dorstal, "Judging Human
Action: Arendt's Appropriation of Kant," p. 740.
Andrew Norris 187
communis makes experience possible, the relation involved in Kant is one

between the faculties, and not, as in Arendt, one that transpires in the
plurality of the polis. If the free harmony of the faculties is to make the
cognitive work of the common understanding possible, it cannot be iden-
tified with that understanding. On the one hand, such an identification
would produce a contradiction: the relation of the imagination and the
understanding cannot at once be both free and legislated by the under-
standing. On the other hand, it would produce a vicious circularity: the
transcendental conditions of knowledge cannot themselves be the prod-
uct of the cognitive faculties (as all actual communications are). This can
be put in terms of the relation of the faculties to history. As empirical
history, like all phenomenal experience, is made possible by the synthesis
of the manifold, it must follow and not precede that synthesis.57
For Kant, then, communicability is not so much the mark of some-
thing that is able to be communicated or made public, as Arendt sug-
gests, as it is the necessary condition of communication. Indeed, as this
coincidence of feelings is not the result of the influence of objective con-
cepts, the feelings themselves will defy adequate description. This pro-
duces the enigma of a mute communicability that lies beneath both our
public and our private communications. This does not allow for a recip-
rocal relation between publicity and communicability, one that, as in
Arendt, would make publicity into a necessary precondition of com-
munication and thought.58 In a discussion of the activity of taste Arendt
asks, "How does one choose between approbation and disapprobation
[concerning our pleasures]?" She answers, "One criterion is . . . the cri-
terion of communicability or publicness.""59 But this identification will
57. This is not to deny that in section six of the second, commonly published, introduc-
tion to the third Critique Kant suggests the possibility of a pre-experiential history. But not
only is that suggestion, as it stands, incoherent, but the historicization of the faculties that
it implies is incompatible with central features of the Kantian project. Compare Yirmiyahu
Yovel's discussion of what he calls Kant's "historical antimony" in Kant and the Philoso-
phy of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
58. In her defense of this reading of Kant, Arendt repeatedly turns to section 41 of the
third Critique, "The empirical interest in the beautiful." She does so, moreover, without
alerting her reader to the context of her references. Hence, she cites Kant's assertion that
"the beautiful exists only in society" as evidence for her claim that the nonsubjective ele-
ment involved in judgments of taste is the presence of a community of spectators. But the
line in full reads: "The empirical interest in the beautiful exists only insociety." "Her silent
omission obscures the sharp distinction Kant draws between the empirical, concept-guided
appreciation of the beautiful and the disinterested judgment of taste-a distinction that is
fundamental to his aesthetic theory. Compare Lectures, p. 67, and Critique of Judgment,
pp. 154-55.
59. Lectures, p. 69.
not hold: publicity is a cultural and political ideal, one that serves to
guide political choices; communicability on the other hand is the pre-
condition of all shared knowledge, of the possibility of making some-
thing public or, on the other hand, keeping it secret. What Arendt has
done, in short, is to transform a transcendental principle into an empir-
ical criterion.
Arendt collapses this distinction when she identifies judgments of taste
with the following of the maxims that Kant proposes in section 40 of the
Analytic of the Sublime.60 It is true that Kant encourages a certain confu-
sion on this point, as his initial discussion of the sensus communis at the
beginning of section 40 defines the public sense as
a critical faculty which in its reflective act takes account (a priori)

of the mode of representation of everyone else, in order, as it were,
to weigh its judgment with the collective reason of mankind, and
thereby avoid the illusion arising from subjective and personal con-
ditions which could readily be taken for objective, an illusion that
would exert a prejudicial influence upon its judgment.
Kant seems to lose track both of this "a priori" and the "as it were,"
when he goes on to suggest that "This is accomplished by weighing the
judgment ... by putting ourselves in the place of everyone else." How-
ever, he cautions his reader against this very error when he introduces
these maxims: "While the following maxims of common human under-
standing [gemeinen Menschenverstandes] do not properly come in here
as constituent parts of the Critique of taste, they may still serve to eluci-
date its fundamental propositions." As this comes immediately after
Kant has again made the distinction, introduced in section 20, between
the "common human understanding" and the sensus communis we can
conclude that he is referring us to that distinction. This is confirmed by
the manner in which he concludes his paragraph-long discussion of the
maxims in question: "I resume the thread of the discussion interrupted
by the above digression, and I say that taste can with more justice be
called a sensus communis than can sound understanding; and that the
aesthetic, rather than the intellectual, judgment can bear the name of a
public sense." What then is this sensus communis if it is not behavior
governed by the maxim of judgment? "We might," Kant answers, "even
define taste as the faculty of estimating what makes our feeling in a given
representation universally communicable without the mediation of a
concept." 6

61. Critique of Judgment, pp. 155-53.
Andrew Norris 189
Similarly, he concludes that the perspective of the aesthetic judge is

attained "as the result of a mere abstraction from the limitations which
contingently affect our own estimate. This, in turn, is effected by so far
as possible letting go of the element of matter . . . and confining atten-
tion to the formal peculiarities of our representation or general state of
representative activity." Such an exclusion of the non-formal is identi-
fied by Kant with the abstraction from "charm and emotion." Arendt
insists that "impartiality is obtained by taking the viewpoints of others
into account."62 But on Kant's account such imaginative identification
with the views of others (guided, for Arendt, by the maxims of sound
common understanding) will not in itself allow one to make aesthetic
judgments of taste. These are made, rather, by attending to the form of
the aesthetic object. Partiality is not so much discouraged as denied the
matter it works with. Communicability tells us what has happened when
we have made an impartial aesthetic judgment. But it does not-Kant's
misleading language of "maxims" notwithstanding-provide us with a
methodology, or a norm that must be met if communication or com-
munity is to endure.
Unfortunately, Arendt is not in a position to simply forgo any appeal
to the transcendental. Her political thought is based on a set of extremely
strong claims for the ontological priority of political doxa. Common
sense, she maintains, is not, pace Aristotle, a lesser form of knowledge,
but rather a perspectival participation in the world. Our differing per-
spectives join together to make possible both political action and our
common world, and they are linked by their shared sets of concerns. Not
"objective" in a cognitive sense, they nonetheless manifest an impartial-
ity that acknowledges our intersubjectivity.63 Ronald Beiner correctly
notes that in her discussions of the "universal agreement" of aesthetic
judgment Arendt "consistently substitutes 'general' where the standard
translations have 'universal.' "64 The shift is a decisive one-one, more-
over, that though technically legitimate ("allgemein" can be translated
as "general") defines both common usage and the overarching aim of
Kant's argument. Indeed, Beiner does not himself recognize the impor-
tance of Arendt's misinterpretation. Like her, he concludes that the
maxims of common understanding delineate the judgments of the sensus
communis.65 This allows him to argue in Political Judgment that Aris-
totelian phronesis and Kantian aesthetic judgment are merely two modes

64. "Interpretive Essay," Lectures, p. 163, note 155.
65. "Interpretive Essay," Lectures, pp. 121-23.
of political judgment, the formal and the substantive. He goes on to fur-

ther conflate the two by arguing, with Habermas, that Arendt and Kant
exaggerate the contrast between the cognitive and the non-cognitive that
underlies the Kantian distinction between the reflective and determina-
tive judgments.66 But, as I have been arguing, without this distinction the
inherent publicity and disinterest of the former is lost. A less formal
theory of judgment simply will not meet Arendt's needs. Kant's common
sense-the free play of the faculties-is shared by all human beings. It is
neither limited to nor made possible by the disputation of a body politic.
Arendt's inability to invoke Kant's defense and explication of our public
sense leaves her with no explanation for how it is that the judgments of
common sense have public weight, least of all how they could conceiva-
bly come together to reveal and make possible the world.
IV. Conclusion
I noted above that Arendt's distinctions between work, labor, world, and
so on are not categorical in a Kantian sense. As Sandra and Lewis Hinc
man argue, they are better thought of as "existentials." These are "onto-
logical" terms and concepts developed by the early Heidegger to provi
a non-objective phenomenological classification system of being of
Dasein. They are thus a supplement to Heidegger's revision of the Kan
ian categories. Kant's twelve categories are a priori concepts that dete
mine and make possible our experience of objects. Heidegger's argumen
is that applying these categories to human experience silently effaces the
distinction between a self-reflective agent and an object. One of the cen-
tral differences that is so effaced is that, as Hinchman and Hinchman
note, the existentials, unlike the categories, can be suppressed or un
acknowledged. As modes of Dasein's possible experience, they are sub-
ject to its history.67 An object, to be an object, must be structured by th
categories of quantity, quality, and relation. But Dasein can "be" both
authentically and inauthentically. Now, it would make more sense o
Arendtian "judgment" if it, like "action," were seen as a Heideggerian
existential rather than a Kantian category. This would allow for Arendt's
insistence that judgment is a faculty that can atrophy or, under total
tarian rule, be suppressed. If we so interpret Arendt, however, we ca
only conclude, again, that her turn to Kant is illegitimate. Kant is able to
66. Political Judgment, pp. 105 and 113.

67. Sandra and Lewis Hinchman, "In Heidegger's Shadow: Hannah Arendt's Phenom
enological Humanism," The Review of Politics, 46 (April 1984): 191 and 197.
Andrew Norris 191
explain the possibility of reflective judgments that are inherently public

and impartial only on the basis of his own categorical distinctions. If
common sense and communicability expressed anything but the har-
monious play of the faculties they would be governed by concepts and
interests. Which is to say, they would at best be either moral imperatives
or acts of cognition, and at worst partial expressions of the given sub-
ject's inclinations.
In the end, Arendt's difficulty is a conceptual one. If she cannot appeal
to Kant, her own theory of common sense remains suggestive at best.
This is not a question of philosophy providing a foundation for politics,
nor of an explication of judgment and politics producing a politics of
judgment, but of our understanding what politics and judgment would
be if they were to appear. In "What is Existenz Philosophy?" Arendt
favorably compares Jaspers to Heidegger because of what Arendt argues
is Jaspers' greater recognition of the fact that it is "part of the concept of
Man that he inhabits the earth with his fellows." The "unconditioned
deed" that Jaspers calls for arises out of "extreme situations" such as
guilt, and "appears in the world through communication with others,
who as my fellows and through the appeal to our common reason guar-
anteed the universal; through activity it carries the freedom of Man into
the world. ." ."68 It is precisely this "common reason" that requires a
theoretical explication. In its absence, Arendt's bold claims for the dis-
tinctions between politics and philosophy, between the public and the
private, and between judgment and cognition are left unsubstantiated,
with the effect that her theory of political action is itself undermined.
Without any understanding of what an impartial but non-objective judg-
ment would entail, revelatory political action remains not just miracu-
lous, as Arendt always insists, but unthinkable.
68. "What is Existenz Philosophy?" pp. 51 and 53.

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Arendt, Kant, and the Politics of Common Sense

Author(s): Andrew Norris

Northeastern Political Science Association, The University of Chicago Press are

Andrew Norris teaches modern and contemporary political philosophy

We assume a common sense as the necessary condition of the uni-

Throughout her work, Hannah Arendt argues that political spe

self misconstrues Nietzsche's aestheticism, and that the introduction of

I. The Central Role of Common Sense

Arendt is best known for her celebration of political action, a phenome-

4. Bonnie Honig, "The Politics of Agonism: A Critical Response to 'Beyond Good an

the Western tradition of political philosophy since Plato. Her most

9. See for instance Plato, Meno, 96d ff.

to the exigencies imposed upon us by our physical life.12 Political action

end, such as the life of Platonic or Aristotelian philosophers, the salva-

Though in the end a eugenicist, Plato's Statesman is distinguished from

17. The Human Condition, p. 228.

judgment. "Only where things can be seen by many in a variety of

21. The Human Condition, p. 57.

This may become clearer if we consider Arendt's discussion of action

Though totalitarianism thus poses a unique threat to the common

II. Cognitive Judgments and the Denial of

In the third Critique, Kant attributes the experience of impartiality to

only the sovereign is authorized by Kant to make political judgments; his

For if [the head of state] could be coerced, he would not be the

He goes on to derive the subjects' inability to resist their sovereign from

The people, under an existing civil constitution, has no longer any

This formulation of the problem of political judgment is anticipated in

As in the passages cited from "Theory" above, the introduction of a

30. "Theory," p. 81.

Montaigne's characterizations of the skeptical dilemma from the Apol-

Just as we say in religious disputes that we must have a judge not

natural gift" that can only be sharpened by means of "examples and

33. Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 177-79.

Kant avoids the infinite regress of the rules' applications by transform-

Kant follows Rousseau in this, and ends by advocating an anti-rhetor-

III. Arendt's Attempted Appropriation of

The tradition has folded and closed the thinking of being-in-

38. The Social Contract, pp. 72-73.

matter of... existence inasmuch as it is in common, but without

The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and

Arendt is drawn to Kant's aesthetic theory because its conceptualization

39. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: The University of

It follows from Kant's definition of judgment that "the reflective judg-

common understanding [gemeinen Verstande], which is also some-

Judgments made on the basis of this rule are "public" [publicke], as

44. Critique of Judgment, p. 54.

for in "What is Enlightenment?"47 This argument represents the cul-

that the German expressions "Mitteilbarkeit" (communicability)

51. Lectures, pp. 40, 42, 49 (emphasis added), and 69 respectively.

As Cassirer notes, Kant himself says as much, if somewhat obscurely, in

In order to be justified in claiming universal agreement for an aes-

The universal validity and communicability of aesthetic pleasure

communis makes experience possible, the relation involved in Kant is one

a critical faculty which in its reflective act takes account (a priori)

60. Lectures, p. 71.

Similarly, he concludes that the perspective of the aesthetic judge is

62. Lectures, p. 42.

of political judgment, the formal and the substantive. He goes on to fur-