The Life of the Mind (75 page)

Authors: Hannah Arendt

Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Philosophy, #Psychology, #Politics

BOOK: The Life of the Mind

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Taste as a Kind of
Sensus Communis.

The term is changed. The one, common sense, meant a sense like our other sensesâthe same for everybody in his very privacy. By using the Latin term, Kant indicates that he means something different: He means an extra senseâlike an extra mental capability (the German:
Menschenverstand)âwhich
fits us into a community. The "common understanding of men ... is the very least to be expected from anyone claiming the name of man."...

The
sensus communis
is the specifically human sense because communication, i.e., speech, depends on it.... "The only general symptom of insanity is the loss of the
sensus communis
and the logical stubbornness in insisting on one's own
(sensus privatus)....
"

Under the
sensus communis
we must include the idea of a sense
common to all,
i.e. of a faculty of judgment which, in its reflection, takes account
(a priori)
of the mode of representation of all other men in thought, in order, as it were, to compare its judgment with the collective reason of humanity.... This is done by comparing our judgment with the possible rather than the actual judgment of others, and by putting ourselves in the place of any other man, by abstracting from the limitations which contingently attach to our own judgment.... Now this operation of reflection seems perhaps too artificial to be attributed to the faculty called
common sense,
but it only appears so when expressed in abstract formulae. In itself there is nothing more natural than to abstract from charm or emotion if we are seeking a judgment that is to serve as a universal rule.

After this follow the maxims of this
sensus communis:
To think for oneself (the maxim of enlightenment); to put ourselves in thought in the place of everyone else (the maxim of the enlarged mentality); and the maxim of consistency (to be in agreement with oneself,
mit sich selbst einstimmig denken).

These are not matters of cognition; truth compels you, you do not need any "maxims." Maxims apply and are needed only for matter of opinions and in judgments. And just as in moral matters your maxim of conduct testifies to the quality of your Will, so the maxims of judgment testify to your "turn of thought" (
Denkungsart
) in the worldly matters which are ruled by the community sense.

However small may be the area or the degree to which a mans natural gifts reach, yet it indicates a man of
enlarged thought
if he disregards the subjective private conditions of his own judgment, by which so many others are confined, and reflects upon it from a
general standpoint
(which he can only determine by placing himself at the standpoint of others).

...Taste is this "community sense" (
gemeinschaftlicher Sinn)
and sense means here "the effect of a reflection upon the mind." This reflection affects me as though it were a sensation.... "We could even define taste as the faculty of judging of that which makes generally communicable, without the mediation of a concept, our feeling [like sensation] in a given representation [not perception]."

If we could assume that the mere general communicability of a feeling must carry in itself an interest for us with it ... we should be able to explain why the feeling in the judgment of taste comes to be imputed to everyone, so to speak, as a duty.

...The validity of these judgments never [has] the validity of cognitive or scientific propositions, which are not judgments, properly speaking. (If you say, the sky is blue or two and two are four, you do not "judge"; you say what is, compelled by the evidence either of your senses or your mind.) In this way, you can never compel anybody to agree with your judgmentsâthis is beautiful, this is wrong (Kanthowever does not believe that moral judgments are the product of reflection and imagination, hence they are not judgments strictly speaking)âyou can only "woo, court" the agreement of everybody else. And in this persuasive activity you actually appeal to the "community sense."...The less idiosyncratic your taste is the better can it be communicated; communicability again is the touchstone. Impartiality in Kant is called "disinterestedness," the disinterested delight in the Beautiful....If, therefore, #41 [in the
Critique of Judgment]
speaks of an "Interest in the Beautiful," it actually speaks of having an "interest" in disinterestedness.... Because we can call something beautiful, we have a "
pleasure in its existence
" and that is "wherein all interest consists." (In one of his reflections in the notebooks, Kant remarks that the Beautiful teaches us to love without self-interest
[ohne Eigen-nutz].)
And the peculiar characteristic of this interest is that it "interests only in society."

...Kant stresses that at least one of our mental faculties, the faculty of judgment, presupposes the presence of others. And not just what we terminologically call judgment; bound up with it is ... our whole soul apparatus, so to speak.... By communicating your feelings, your pleasures and disinterested delights, you tell your
choices
and you choose your company. "I'd rather be wrong with Plato than right with the Pythagoreans" [Cicero].

Finally, the larger the scope of men to whom you could communicate, the greater the worth of the object:

Although the pleasure which everyone has in such an object is inconsiderable [that is, so long as he does not share it] and in itself without any marked interest, yet the idea of its general communicability increases its worth in an almost infinite degree.

At this point, the
Critique of Judgment
joins effortlessly Kant's deliberation about a united mankind, living in eternal peace....If

everyone expects and requires from everyone else this reference to general communication [of pleasure, of disinterested delight, then we have reached a point where it is as though there existed] an original compact dictated by mankind itself.

...It is by virtue of this idea of mankind, present in every single man, that men are human, and they can be called civilized or humane to the extent that this idea becomes the principle of their actions as well as their judgments. It is at this point that actor and spectator become united; the maxim of the actor and the maxim, the "standard," according to which the spectator judges the spectacle of the world become one. The, as it were, categorical imperative for action could read as follows: Always act on the maxim through which this original compact can be actualized into a general law.

In conclusion, I shall try to clear up some of the difficulties: The chief difficulty in judgment is that it is "the faculty of thinking the particular"; but to
think
means to generalize, hence it is the faculty of mysteriously combining the particular and the general. This is relatively easy if the general is givenâas a rule, a principle, a lawâso that the judgment merely subsumes the particular under it. The difficulty becomes great "if only the particular be given for which the general has to be found." For the standard cannot be borrowed from experience and cannot be derived from outside. I cannot judge one particular by another particular; in order to determine its worth I need a
tertium quid
or a
tertium comparationis,
something related to the two particulars and yet distinct from both. In Kant we find actually two altogether different solutions of this difficulty:

As a real
tertium comparationis
two ideas appear in Kant on which you must reflect in order to arrive at judgments: This is
either,
in the political writings and, occasionally, also in the
Critique of Judgment,
the idea of an original compact of mankind as a whole and derived from this idea the notion of humanity, of what actually constitutes the humanness of human beings, living and dying in this world, on this earth that is a globe, which they inhabit in common, share in common, in the succession of generations. In the
Critique of Judgment
you also find the idea of purposiveness: Every object, says Kant, as a particular, needing and containing the ground of its actuality in itself, has a purpose. The only objects that seem purposeless are aesthetic objects, on one side, and men, on the other. You cannot ask
quem ad finemâ
for what purpose?âsince they are good for nothing. But ... purposeless art objects as well as the seemingly purposeless variety of nature have the "purpose" of pleasing men, making them feel at home in the world. This can never be proved; but Purposiveness is an idea to regulate your reflections in your reflective judgments.

Or
Kant's second and I think by far more valuable solution is the following. It is
exemplary validity.
("Examples are the go-cart of judgments.") Let us see what that is: Every particular object, for instance a table, has a corresponding concept by which we recognize the table as a table. This you can conceive of as a Platonic "idea" or Kantian schema, that is, you have before the eyes of your mind a schematic or merely
formal table shape
to which every table somehow must conform. Or: if you proceed conversely from the many tables which you have seen in your life, strip off them all secondary qualities and the remainder is a table in general, containing the minimum properties common to all tables.
The abstract table.
You have one more possibility left, and this enters into judgments which are not cognitions: You may meet or think of some table which you judge to be the best possible table and take this table as the example of how tables actually should
heâthe exemplary table.
(Example from
eximere,
to single out some particular.) This is and remains a particular which in its very particularity reveals the generality which otherwise could not be defined. Courage is like Achilles. Etc.

We were talking here about the partiality of the actor who, because he is involved, never sees the meaning of the whole.... The same is not true for the beautiful or for any deed in itself. The beautiful is, in Kantian terms, an end in itself because all its possible meaning is contained within itself, without reference to others, without linkage, as it were, to other beautiful things. In Kant himself, there is this contradiction: Infinite Progress is the law of the human species; at the same time man's dignity demands that he is seen, every single one ... in his particularity, reflecting as such, but without any comparison and independent of time, mankind in general. In other words the very idea of progressâif it is more than a mere change of circumstances and an improvement of the world-contradicts Kant's notion of man's dignity.

Index / Thinking

absent-mindedness,
[>]