Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy

There just wasn't enough material left by Arendt on what was supposed to the third part of her lecture trilogy, Thinking, Willing, and Judging to make a book. This should be appended to "The Life of the Mind (Combined 2 Volumes in 1)" which contains the first two parts. It is unfortunate that this section on Judging is so fragmentary and disjointed, because in a way the first two part of the trilogy set up the problem for which Judging was to be the solution. One can find much of what one would have hoped to find here in Hannah Arendt's "Responsibility and Judgement," a collection of late lectures, addresses, and essays, from when she was teaching at The New School For Social Research. The volume is edited by current New Schooler, Jerome Kohn, whose introduction is also edifying. The third piece of the Judging puzzle is contained the late Reiner Schürmann's essay in "The Public Realm: Essays on Discursive Types in Political Philosophy." (Schürmann was brought to The New School by Arendt and Hans Jonas - the school's last direct carriers of the post WWII European philosophical torch - to carry on in their tradition.)How was Kant's Critique of Judgement supposed to provide the key to moral dilemmas of post-modernity? The other key element of this philosophical puzzle and referred to by Arendt and Schürmann is Aristotle's concept of "phronesis," or, as Wikipedia puts it, "practical wisdom." And if one looks up phronesis in Wikipedia, it contains a section on its importance in Heidegger's thinking, which brings one full circle to the discussions of Heidegger in the first two parts of Arendt's intended trilogy and Schürmann's book, "Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy." This is a big enough topic for an excellent dissertation, but here I can only give the slightest sketch of where this is all heading: Arendt is famous for her comment that now we are in a reality where we must "think without bannisters," i.e., without absolute truths, without "certainty." This is fine if we are just having some abstract philosophical discussion about how many angels fit on the head of a pin, but not when it comes to action and questions about what is the "right" action to take in a specific circumstance.The "bannisters" were the formerly believed in absolutes, whether they be Kant's moral law within us or Plato's notion of justice. Nietzsche and post-modernity have destroyed the "certainty" supporting these and any analogous such notions, such that you have to be a dogmatist to continue to advocate for their certainty anymore: you believe in them because they are certain, and they are certain because you believe in them. Basta! And anyone sufficiently well versed in Nietzsche and post-modernistic discourse will be able to push anyone who argues for the certainty of moral principles to this conclusion.So what is moral philosophy to do? Armed with Aristotle's "Phronesis" and Kant's idea that we can and do legitimately make universal judgements about singulars (i.e., "That rose is beautiful.") by appeal to an "enlarged consciousness" or, again to cite Wikipedia for expediency's sake (Critique of Judgment entry): "the judgment that something is beautiful or sublime is made with the belief that other people ought to agree with this judgment — even though it is known that many will not. The force of this "ought" comes from a reference to a sensus communis — a community of taste," Arendt and Schürmann (with heavy reliance on Heidegger) attempt to build a moral philosophy without bannisters. But just exactly what that looks like on the nitty-gritty, granular level is left tantalizingly hazy. What seems more clear than their actual answer is what they were trying to achieve: (my humble but long pondered guess) there are cases - be they genocides or individual cases or cruelty and murder - that we want say, straight out and without any reservations or allowances for mitigating contingencies of the specifics of this particular situation, are WRONG. And we do make such judgments. But given the impossibility of the certitude of any moral principles, what gives us the right to do so? From a philosophical perspective, what are we leaning on (considering that there no longer are any bannisters) when we make such judgements?These thinkers borrow some aspects of Heidegger's interpretation of phronesis as the correct way to orient oneself towards one's actions and the actions of others, given our inescapable embeddedness in specific circumstances, and since for Heidegger such action is disclosive of Being, phronesis becomes a form of thought that deliberates about the disclosing of Being (as opposed to techne which is thinking that tries to shape Being to fit our preconceptions of what it should be, and thus leads to its "oblivion"). This yields them a kind of thinking-about-action that is rooted in contextualized action but also discloses that which really is. They then take Kant's notion of sensus communis as that which we are referencing when we make a universal judgement about a particular (which is really the only kind of object of judgement we can ever face given our inescapable embeddedness in the particularities of the world), and meld these into a notion of a "Being-revealing, community-consensus-referencing, contextualized-universal thinking that yields legitimately binding judgments about particularities, including the determinate actions of individuals and groups."There! Does it fly? I don't know, but I was disappointed to read this book and find no missing link in the argument that would help me understand it any better.

clearly setting out her arguments, and meanwhile setting this reader straight on Kantian sublime and aesthetic, this was good reading delight and learning session - it seems this book had been unavailable for a time - in any case, it's really good reading and useful.

The scraps that are gathered together for this book make clear that political science has always been a guide to outsmarting people who are expecting to be guided by something higher than self-interest, but creative subjectivity never soaks up enough rogue credibility to cow everybody into making proper sacrifices for the common welfare. Now in 2017, people are not likely to think of Kant is a thinker for whom global concerns had not been smeared with oil, as in the first episode in the novel OIL! by Upton Sinclair, in which a ribbon of concrete with uncertain shoulders has only inches to spare for cars passing each other going in opposite directions. Dad would mutter "Damn fool!' when too much of the road was hogged, and I quote:maybe it was a drunken man,or just a woman (p. 3).Clumping people into those who had more dedication to the flow they needed to travel within and those to be weeded out and burned on the day of judgment was always playing the game of life once more. But Kant was upset that people:play the game of life once more,not under the same conditions,but under any conditions of ourearthly world and not those ofsome fairyland. (p. 25, quoting Kant on Theodicee in 1791).The death that comes when the third part of a trilogy seeks to realize the causes of confusion in lifetimes that have never been lived before over political questions that will never establish TRUST in any fundamental point of view has become3 a pattern that deserves recognition as the honest author's intellectual suicide ritual. Close encounters of A HAUNTING KIND ARE LIKE SEEING A GHOST.

A classical book on Kant's hard way to politics.

I once lamented that Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm were so popular since it overshadowed the many other works that proved he was a brilliant writer outside the speculative genre too. And I would say the same of Arendt's work on the Origins of Totalitarianism because it overshadows the authors greatest contribution to political philosophy: to wit, her lectures on Kant. If I were to recommend any of her books to a friend, it would be this one. I say that having read most of them already.