Two Divergent Appropriations of Kant’s “Critique of Judgement”: Some Remarks on Arendt and Gadamer

This article discusses two interpretations of the Critique of Judgment. My aim is to show that, although Arendt and Gadamer had many things in common, both biographically and philosophically, they came to diverging conclusions about the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Kant’s third Critique. For Gadamer, the Kantian characterization of aesthetic judgment (like genius) as not being rule-bound seems to mean that Kant is excluding social and political virtues from consideration. Arendt, in contrast, stresses the fact that, for Kant, taste and common sense require impartiality and communicability, hence an enlarged mentality encompassing orientation in a public realm. I argue that this difference can be explained, to some extent, by the fact that both made only very selective reference to Kant’s third Critique, without giving an account of it as a whole.