a social critique of the judgment of taste

What is less important is what the data actually is or what it represents. For Kant, it is the form which this data takes that is most important.

It is ‘sensation’ which provides the data for the faculty of imagination. By ‘transcendental’, he means ‘a priori’, or needed for experience. For Kant, aesthetics is not the preserve of art but actually relates to the Greek work meaning ‘sensation’ (the opposite being ‘anaesthetic’ – without sensation). The first part of the Critique of Pure Reason has the title ‘The Transcendental Aesthetic’. On the other, those within the Romantic tradition sought a return to the realm of the emotions and individual experience. On the one hand, writers in the Age of Enlightenment acted as the founders of modern day science and rationality. Kant lived in a time that saw a division between the close fit that had until existed between the God and the world the body and the spirit king and country. The father of modern aesthetics, however, was Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). By stressing the important role examples play in legitimating the faculty of judgment, Kant’s deduction of aesthetic judgment leaves open the possibility for reading the third Critique as a powerful political enterprise, and it is precisely this opening that Arendt exploits in her work by claiming that these writings constitute a genuine political philosophy.Aesthetics can be traced back to classical philosophy both Plato and Aristotle were concerned with art as the carrier of truth and knowledge. In fact, the sociality of judgment is precisely what exemplary validity serves to legitimate in Kant’s deduction of aesthetic judgment. While this is undoubtedly the case in certain instances, Arendt’s primary interest in the social nature of judgment is not among them. By overlooking the importance of exemplarity in Kant’s final Critique, many interpreters of Arendt assume that she took exceptional liberties with her analysis of Kant’s thought. Following Arendt’s lead, in this paper I argue that the third Critique is distinguished from the rest of Kant’s writings precisely by the manner in which it uses exemplarity to demonstrate the legitimacy of judgments of taste.

A social critique of the judgment of taste