To choose one’s company: Arendt, Kant, and the Political Sixth Sense
| Author | Jonathan P Schwartz |
| Published date | 01 January 2019 |
| Date | 01 January 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1474885115613700 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Political Theory
2019, Vol. 18(1) 108–127
!The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885115613700
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Article
To choose one’s company:
Arendt, Kant, and the
Political Sixth Sense
Jonathan P Schwartz
University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Abstract
This essay explores the phenomenon of common sense through a contextual analysis of
Hannah Arendt’s political application of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. I begin by tracing the
development of Arendt’s thinking on judgment and common sense during the 1950s
which led her to turn to the third Critique. I then consider the justification of her move
by examining the philosophical context and political applications of the third Critique,
arguing that within it Kant made an original and profound discovery: that the phenom-
enon of common sense contains a hidden faculty that may anchor moral and political
judgments. I conclude by arguing that Arendt was on firmer ground than is often
thought in adapting Kantian common sense to politics, a fact that may afford new
possibilities for the practice of moral and political thought.
Keywords
Arendt, Kant, Heidegger, common sense, judgment
Introduction
In this essay, I am interested in gaining clarity into the phenomenon of common
sense. Traditionally associated with the virtue Aristotle called ‘‘prudence,’’ it has
historically denoted a kind of worldly wisdom cultivated through natural insight,
practical experience, and humanistic education. Though its colloquial status might
lead us to believe its meaning is vacuous, the notion of common sense has been
widely used in numerous languages both past and present, and nearly always con-
veys a similar phenomenon, historically taken seriously by philosophers and states-
men alike. Yet, two and half millennia after Aristotle the principles of common
sense continue to remain largely mysterious. The judgment it denotes suggests that
Corresponding author:
Jonathan P Schwartz, Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy, Department of Political Science, University
of Wisconsin-Madison, 409 North Hall, 1050 Bascom Mall, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
Email: jschwartz8@wisc.edu
its principles are not merely arbitrary and private, but if that is so what could be its
criteria? What in the idea of common sense provides a basis for asserting that one
individual’s judgment is superior to another’s? In this essay, I will argue that in her
theory of judgment Hannah Arendt, through a circuitous route leading from
Heidegger’s existentialist interpretation of Aristotelian phron
esis to Kantian aes-
thetics, provided arguably the best answer we have to this question.
This answer, however, is anchored in an initially strange proposition: that Kant
should have applied the Critique of Judgment to moral and political questions.
Given Kant’s architectonic philosophy, this is a provocative suggestion. It is per-
haps all the more surprising, then, that the idea has received a remarkable amount
of interest, an interest which in fact appears to be substantially increasing in recent
years.
1
Yet, despite this robust current literature, the need for further research and
analysis is far from exhausted. With a few exceptions, such as to a certain extent
Annelies Degryse’s piece, the centrality of the problem of common sense to
Arendt’s work on judgment has not been sufficiently appreciated and explored.
This, I will argue in the following, means that the central concern of her work on
judgment is then largely missed. Secondly, the literature has generally adopting a
textualist and analytic approach, focusing on a few key essays, and as a result,
I believe there is potentially more concreteness and depth of understanding avail-
able by taking a more contextualist approach. Thus, in what follows I propose to
place both Arendt and Kant within their respective ideological contexts, both of
which were heavily focused on the puzzle of common sense. Such an approach can
offer a number of insights. First, it shows that the possibility of applying Kantian
aesthetics to political and moral questions is much less surprising than it might
appear; indeed, the idea was almost certainly not lost on Kant himself. Secondly,
it arguably resolves a longstanding aporia in accounts of practical reason, to wit,
the unique validity of the principle of common sense. Finally, it shows the way in
which Arendt understood her account of judgment to be her fundamental response
to what she saw as the erosion of common sense in the Modern era.
The argument of this essay centres on an examination of the striking conjunc-
tion of Kant’s and Arendt’s concerns over the nature of judgment and common
sense. Examining Arendt’s concerns first, I argue that her early attempts to theorise
judgment led her to recognise a practical aporia in previous accounts of practical
reason. She discovered that Kant offered a solution to that aporia in his aesthetics,
a solution that could be applied to practical reason despite Kant’s own resistance to
the idea. In order to validate Arendt’s position, I examine the philosophical context
and argument of Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, explaining the unique form
of common sense-based validity it articulated. I argue that in his concept of
enlarged mentality, Kant made a novel and profound discovery: that hidden
within the prosaic phenomenon of common sense existed a faculty capable of
transcending our personal interests and taking in the perspectives of other
judges, and it is to this faculty we appeal when we make moral or political judg-
ments. In the last portion of the essay, I consider past criticism of Arendt’s use of
Kant, arguing that Kant scholarship increasingly supports her perspective.
Schwartz 109
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