Crisi della cultura e valorizzazione del Giudizio estetico-politico in Hannah Arendt
Abstract
In this article I take into examination Hannah Arendt’s original and influential “appropriation” of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, providing both a reconstruction and a critical interpretation of it. In the first section I basically contextualize Arendt’s interest in this topic by showing that it is connected to her more general concern with the wider and more comprehensive question of the crisis of Western civilization. Then, in the second and third sections of my article, I offer an overview of Arendt’s conception of the crisis in culture and politics in the present age, and explain how this gradually led her to develop an original interpretation of Kant’s concept of Aesthetic Judgment in terms of a new and somehow unprecedented (i.e. unthought, never conceived of before) form of Political Judgment. The fourth section is dedicated to a brief excursus on Kant’s own treatment of the concept of Urteilskraft in some of his main works (first and third Critiques, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View) and some of his letters, in order to show that this concept for Kant has a broader and more complex meaning than one is sometimes used to think. Finally, in the fifth section I first focus on a few problematic aspects of Arendt’s “creative”, i.e. sometimes philologically inadequate, use of Kant’s concept of Aesthetic Judgment understood as a kind of Political Judgment, but then add that from a strictly philosophical point of view this interpretation has proved to be a very stimulating and enriching one, as testified by the fact that in the last decades it has produced a veritable Wirkungsgeschichte and has helped to develop the so-called “Paradigm of Judgment” in ethics and political philosophy.
Published
Issue
Section
License
All products on this site are released with a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 IT) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/it/ With this license, Authors retain copyright and publishing rights without restrictions, but allow any user to share, copy, distribute, transmit, adapt and make commercial use of the work without needing to provide additional permission, provided appropriate attribution is made to the original author or source. By using this license, all Philosophical Readings’s articles meet all funder and institutional requirements for being considered Open Access. Philosophical Readings does not charge an article processing or submission fee.