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PARTISAN REVIEW
the archives of antiquity is that they did not rebel against antiquity
when they discovered that the final and certainly profoundly Roman
answer of 'ancient prudence' was that salvation always comes from the
past, that the ancestors were
majors,
the 'greater ones' by definition.
I suspect that more than conservatism is at stake. For theorists of the act,
of freedom, always had a way of terminating their freedom with their own
visions of society. Since for Arendt the capacity of beginning is rooted in the
human capacity for renewal, it requires no end point. Terminus is not free–
dom but death. In this sense, freedom as a system is a doomsday called
utopia. That's why judgment becomes so important for her; it makes tran–
scendence of will possible without a denial of reason. The esthetic sense is
not an accoutrement but a necessary faculty that tells people that what is
perfect to one person or one ruler may be imperfect to another person or
ruler and downright ugly to yet a third person and a third ruler. Arendt
locates the source of democratic survival in the pluralism of judgment.
What has consistently infuriated neo-Platonists and Marxists alike
about the Kantian view of esthetic judgment is its distinction between
beauty and taste on one hand and applicability and moral purpose on the
other. Arendt states the Kantian argument quite bluntly:
If you say, 'What a beautiful rose!' you don't arrive at this judgment
by first saying, all roses are beautiful, this flower is a rose, hence it is
beautiful. The other kind, dealt with in
the second part,
is the impos–
sibility to derive any particular product of nature from general
causes....Mechanical in Kant's terminology means natural causes; its
opposite is 'technical' by which he means artificial.
Judgment thus is concerned with that "enlargement of mind" that derives
from evaluating "something fabricated with a purpose." But far from sup–
porting an elitist vision of esthetics or culture, she draws the opposite, and
populist, conclusion. Taste is a community sense
(gemeinschciftlicher Sinn),
and
hence, while not all people are geniuses, all people are capable of rendering
judgment. What is so terribly important about this populist vision ofjudgment
as both autonomous from thinking and willing is that it provides the solution
to the problem of democracy and also that basis of unity amongst the
polis.
Arendt still leaves us with a problem: the contradiction between the
idea of progress as the law of the human species and the idea of human dig–
nity as an inalienable aspect of individual human beings. This presumably
