from the body to the body politic

8/7/2019 From the Body to the Body Politic

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From the Body to the Body Politic

Kant and Arendt on the Sensus Communis

“The person who perceives is not spread out before himself as a consciousness must be; he has historical

density, he takes up a perceptual tradition and is faced with a present.”

- Merleau-Ponty

C.J. SentellDecember 2006

It behooves us to remember that Kant’s critical project was meant, above all, to explore the

conditions of possibility for our experience and knowledge of the world. Thus, even if Kant

slips up, so to speak, and actually makes properly philosophical claims from time to time in

his critical texts, he intended his three critiques to be doing something proto-philosophical,

something before philosophy proper. As is well-known, Kant divided these experiences

between pure (theoretical) reason, pure practical (moral) reason, and the power of judgment.

This latter project, the Critique of Judgment (1790), establishes the necessary grounds for the

possibility of judgment apropos taste, in the case of aesthetic judgment, and purposiveness, in

the case of teleological judgment. Moreover, and in ways that Kant himself seems to be still

working out in this late text, the Critique of Judgment was to perform a unifying function

with regard to his overall critical project.1 This transcendental project aimed to elucidate the

necessary features and presuppositions always already at work in our cognitive faculties, and

in this way to establish a universal topography of human mental life. All this is to say that

the intention of Kant’s critical project was not meant to extrapolate a specific, content-filled

philosophical theory. In other words, he was not constructing a substantive epistemology, or

moral theory, or aesthetic theory of judgment. Rather, and again, Kant was elaborating the

necessary conditions for the possibility of such theories, which is the proto-philosophical

intention of Kantian transcendental critique.

Hannah Arendt follows this Kantian structure in many ways. In The Life of the Mind

(1979) Arendt follows Kant by characterizing mental life in terms of Thinking, Willing, and

Judging, and divides the work accordingly. The final section, which was intended to address

the faculty of judgment, was given in lecture form at the New School in 1970 and left

uncompleted at the time of her death in 1975. Her lectures and notes for this section,

however, have been collected and published as Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy

(1992). In these lectures Arendt develops a claim she made as early as 1960, in her essay

1 Cf. Kant, “Preface to the First Edition” and “Introduction” to the Critique of Judgment



2

“The Crisis in Culture”, that “the first part of Kant’s Critique of Judgment …contains perhaps

the greatest and most original aspect of Kant’s political philosophy,” an argument she

supports textually from both his critical and his non-critical political writings, as well as

through detailed biographical and historical analysis.2

Arendt observes that “Kant was

disturbed by the alleged arbitrariness and subjectivity of de gustibus non disputandum est

(which, no doubt, is entirely true for private idiosyncrasies), [and] this arbitrariness offended

his political and not his aesthetic sense.”3 In other words, the notion that judgment could

only be grounded relative to each individual’s taste – and thus not open to contestation – is

what led Kant to search for a criterion by which judgment could be grounded universally, and

that this was not simply an aesthetic problem, but a political one as well.

One central means by which Kant overcomes this problem of individual idiosyncrasy,

and thereby achieves a universal grounding of aesthetic judgment, is through his conception

of the sensus communis, which Arendt, in turn, uses as the basis of her development of a

Kantian political philosophy. Arendt is able to derive a latent political philosophy from

Kant’s transcendental considerations of aesthetic judgment precisely because both concern

appearances qua appearances. The political, for Arendt, is that part of human affairs that

occurs in, and is concerned with, the realm of appearances. She says that the “common

element connecting art and politics is that they are both phenomena of the public world.

What mediates the conflict between the artist and the man of action is the cultura animi, that

is, a mind so trained and cultivated that it can be trusted to tend and take care of a world of

appearances whose criterion is beauty”.4

Moreover judgment, for both Kant and Arendt, is

judgment of the particular. Aesthetic and political judgment, therefore, are judgments

concerning the particular that occurs within the realm of appearances. The model of judge

that Arendt develops from Kant’s Critique of Judgment is formulated from the perspective of

the spectator, or from the distanced observer whose judgments aim at disclosing the

significance or meaning of particular events. This spectator aims for a certain objectivity

through the reflective suspension of interestedness, and judges with a claim for universal

agreement so as to attain a meaning for the whole of disparate appearances. In short, the

spectator’s knowledge is historical and their judgments are hermeneutic.

2

Arendt, “Crisis in culture” in Between Past and Future, pg. 2163 Ibid., pg. 2184 Ibid., pg. 215



3

In this essay I explore Kant’s formulation of the sensus communis as a necessary

condition for the possibility of judgments, and Arendt’s subsequent development of that

concept into the foundation for a common political world. Throughout this examination, I

will read Arendt’s development of the sensus communis as a substantive development of

Kant’s transcendental conception. The sensus communis, for Kant, is the concept or idea of

the conglomeration of the material senses, which, by unifying the manifold of the sensuously

given, provides the common ground for the communicability of judgments of taste.

Following Kant, Arendt takes the sensus communis and transforms it into a thick, substantive

concept that is constitutive of the public sphere and, more importantly, tradition. Arendt’s

spectator becomes the guardian and propagator of common sense by rendering judgments

concerning the political world of action, which then go on to form the substantive basis of

tradition. The problem, however, is that Arendt holds that the twentieth century has

witnessed a profound breakdown of tradition and common sense. My claim, however, is that

this view stems from a conflation of two important facets of Kant’s formulation of the sensus

communis. My argument will turn on the claim that laying directly behind Kant’s sense of

sensus communis are the material senses and the body that houses them. In this way, there is

a material precondition for the transcendental question. The material senses – literally, our

contact with the world – are the necessary conditions for the sensus communis, which, in

turn, form the precondition for judgments of taste and communicability. Arendt neglects this

distinction, which, I argue, results in a confusion of the precise ways in which tradition and

common sense have been shattered by the political events of the twentieth century. In short,

my reading aims to moderate and modify Arendt’s claim of a break in common sense or

tradition by highlighting the way in which Kant’s notion of the sensus communis provides a

continuous link between the body and the body politic.

For Kant, to properly make a judgment of taste we refer the given presentation not to the

understanding, which gives rise to cognition, but to the imagination in conjunction with the

understanding, which gives rise to a feeling of pleasure or displeasure.5 This feeling of

pleasure is the basis of aesthetic judgment, and is distinguished from the merely agreeable,

which is that which gratifies us, and the good, which is that which we esteem or endorse.6

A

judgment of taste, moreover, is reflective: the gesture of referring the given presentation to

5 Kant, Critique of Judgment , pg. 446 Ibid., pg. 52



4

the imagination provides a certain distance through which one can reflect on that

presentation. In this way a judgment of taste is “merely contemplative, i.e., it is a judgment

that is indifferent to the existence of the object: it [considers] the character of the object only

by holding it up to our feeling of pleasure and displeasure”.7

Thus, the reflective or

contemplative nature of judgments of taste is based on the feeling aroused in referencing the

presentation to the imagination, which in turn provides the space for reflection. This feeling,

importantly, is also non-conceptual: “Nor is this contemplation, as such, directed to

concepts, for a judgment of taste is not a cognitive judgment (whether theoretical or

practical) and hence is neither based on concepts, nor directed to them as purposes”.8 Non-

cognitive judgments, in Kantian terms, are contrasted with determinate, cognitive judgments.

Determinate judgments subsume the particular under the previously known universal

concept. By contrast, reflective judgments concern the particular qua particular,

disassociated from any universal, and actually discover or create the universal under which

that particular is subsumed.

After explicating the quality of a judgment of taste as reflective and non-cognitive,

Kant claims that, in order to make a pure judgment of taste, one must suspend all interest in

the object, empirical or otherwise.9 Moreover, by abstracting from the particular subjective

conditions, one is able to ascribe this judgment validity to every similar judging subject.

Kant writes,

For if someone likes something and is conscious that he himself does so without any

interest, then he cannot help judging that it must contain a basis for being liked [that

holds] for everyone. He must believe that he is justified in requiring a similar liking

from everyone because he cannot discover, underlying this liking, any private

conditions, on which only he might be dependent, so that he must regard it as based

on what he can presuppose in everyone else as well….10

Thus, a judgment of taste is one in which all interest in the object is suspended and thereby

allows one to ascribe that judgment a certain universal validity. Put another way, the

common capacity for taste, or making judgments of taste, is only possible once all the

subjective conditions that comprise the actual presentation of the senses are suspended and

7 Ibid., pg. 51

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid., pg. 4610 Ibid., pg. 54



5

the lone presentation is abstracted from its original milieu. This abstraction forms the basis

of the “subjective universality” of Kantian judgments of taste, which are judgments that

properly concern the beautiful.11 The beautiful for Kant, however, is not a quality adhering

in an object; it is, rather, the universal liking presupposed in actually making a judgment.

Without this implied universality, pure judgments of taste would be impossible because taste

simply would have a different basis for everyone. He says that

…nothing is postulated in a judgment of taste except such a universal voice about a

liking unmediated by concepts. Hence all that is postulated is the possibility of a

judgment that is aesthetic and yet can be considered valid for everyone. The

judgment of taste itself does not postulate everyone’s agreement…; it merely

requires this agreement from everyone, as an instance of the rule, an instance

regarding which it expects confirmation not from the concepts but from the

agreement with others. Hence the universal voice is only an idea.12

Thus, for Kant, beauty does not lie in the object, but rather just is the universal character of

the judgment presupposed in making the judgment. A judgment of taste is the universal

voice speaking through the judge. The implication of this universal voice, then, is that there

are others with whom our judgments can find agreement. When it comes to judgments of

taste, and judgment in general, there cannot be a universe of one. In this way, judgment

implies a community of other judges; judgment in a solipsistic world would be senseless.

Arendt follows Kant in claiming that there are two mental operations at work in

judgment, namely, imagination and reflection.13

T he imagination, by making present that

which is absent, allows the object given to the outer senses to become an object for the inner

senses. As Kant outlines in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, the inner

senses are discriminatory by nature; their function is not guided so much by an object, but

results rather in an immediate response of pleasure or displeasure.14 By re-presenting the

object to the inner sense, the imagination provides the necessary condition for reflection. As

for Kant, Arendt claims that the conjunction of these two operations creates the possibility

for the disinterestedness that is the sine qua non of sound judgment. The imagination re-

presents objects that were once close at hand, providing the necessary distantiation for

11

Ibid., pg. 5812

Ibid., pg. 6013 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, pg. 6814 Cf. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, § 15-21, 24, and 28



6

reflection. Arendt says that “by making what one’s external senses perceived into an object

for one’s inner sense, one compresses and condenses the manifold of the sensually given,”

thereby putting the judge in a “position to ‘see’ by the eyes of the mind, i.e., to see the whole

that gives meaning to the particulars”.15

By definition, only at a distance can one reflect on a

thing or event; one cannot reflect on the immediately given object or event. In this way, for

Arendt, judgment properly concerns the past, whether it be the immediate or distant past.

Judgment, as she emphasizes throughout her lectures on Kant, is the retrospective judgment

of the spectator rather than the prospective judgment of the actor. 16

For both Kant and Arendt, judgment properly concerns the particular qua particular;

judgments are, in a word, singular.17 The universal validity of such a singular judgment,

moreover, is made evident by and in the exemplary judgment. Kant says that “we think of

the beautiful as having a necessary reference to liking…[And] as a necessity that is thought

in an aesthetic judgment, it can only be called exemplary, i.e., a necessity of the assent of

everyone to a judgment that is regarded as an example of a universal rule that we are unable

to state”.18 Here again we see the necessity of assent posited by judgments of taste. There is

no deliberating or convincing others that one’s judgment is valid; by simply making the

judgment, one posits that there are grounds such that everyone ought to assent with the

judgment. Importantly, and in contrast to Arendt’s bifurcation between actor and spectator,

Kant allows for the power of judgment to be potentially available to each person.

That is why we regard some products of taste as exemplary. This does not mean that

taste can be acquired by imitating someone else’s. For taste must be an ability one

has oneself; and although someone who imitates a model may manifest skill insofar

as he succeeds in this, he manifests taste only insofar as he can judge that model

himself. From this, however, it follows that the highest model, the archetype of taste,

is a mere idea, an idea which everyone must generate within himself…19

In this way, the validity of judgments of taste is grounded within the universal play of the

human faculties, a capacity which is specific to, and which must emanate from, each

15 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, pg. 6816

An interesting tension within Arendt’s corpus is that she seems to have two distinct theories of judgment,

namely, one developed in terms of the actor, which is based on an Aristotelian conception of phronesis, and

other in terms of the spectator, which is based on a Kantian conception of judgment. Whether these two

theories are in tension or complementary is of some debate in the literature. Cf. Bernstein (1986), pg. 233,

Beiner (1999), pg. 93, D’Entrèves (1994), Ch. 3, and Villa (1999), Ch. 417

Kant, Critique of Judgment , pg. 5918 Ibid., pg. 8519 Ibid., pg. 79



7

individual. And just as the universal voice that creates the possibility for judgment is merely

an idea, here again, we see that for Kant the highest archetype of taste, which is embodied in

the exemplary judgment, is merely an idea as well.

Arendt takes Kant’s notion of the judge, a position available to everyone (with taste),

and develops it in terms of a specific type of judge, namely, the spectator. Arendt is

concerned to delineate the position of one who stands outside the arena of action so as to

make sound judgments about the events that emanate from that action.20 Within her

substantive theory of judgment, then, Arendt sketches the roles individuals can occupy within

the polis in terms of the actor and the spectator, the latter of which is always already a type of

actor as well. These two roles function as the skeletons of her citizenry. She says:

And this critic and spectator sits in every actor and fabricator; without this critical,

judging faculty the doer or maker would be so isolated from the spectator that he

would not ever be perceived….Spectators exist only in the plural. The spectator is

not involved in the act, but he is always involved with the fellow spectators. He does

not share the faculty of genius, originality, with the maker or the faculty of novelty

with the actor; the faculty they have in common is the faculty of judgment. 21

By claiming that all actors are also a type of spectators, and all spectators are also a type of

actors, Arendt obviates the obvious criticism that she draws too sharp of a distinction

between the two. We are always already both, though her distinction does function to

preserve the intuition that some individuals in the polis are by nature more actors, while

others are clearly more spectators. But the important point is that judgment is the faculty

common to all in the political realm.

Arendt’s spectator, furthermore, is not simply a judge of the beautiful. She

transforms Kant’s notion of the judge of taste into a substantive critical judge of history and

culture. In this role, the spectator has the advantage in that “he sees the play as a whole,

while each of the actors knows only his part, or, if he should judge from the perspective of

acting, only the part of the whole that concerns him. The actor is partial by definition”.22

She

goes on to say that

20

This concern is consistent with her life-long preoccupation with the relation of the philosopher to the

world of politics, or the viva contemplativa to the viva activa. Cf. Arendt, The Human Condition and The

Life of the Mind.21 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, pg. 6322 Ibid., pg. 68-9



8

…only the spectator occupies a position that enables him to see the whole; the actor,

because he is part of the play, must enact his part – he is partial by definition. The

spectator is impartial by definition – no part is assigned to him. Hence, withdrawal

from direct involvement to a standpoint outside the game is a condition sine qua non

of all judgment….For the actor, the decisive question is thus how he appears to

others; the actor is dependent on the opinion of the spectator…23

This type of comparative analysis, where one entity is given and thereby presupposes another

– its conceptual contrary – runs throughout both Kant’s and Arendt’s analysis of judgment.

Just as judgment in Kant presupposes others with whom our judgments can be validated, the

actor in Arendt is dependent upon the spectator to give meaning to their actions; just as the

very concept of judgment presupposes a community of judges, the very concept of the actor

and the spectacle they produce presupposes a spectator.

For both Kant and Arendt, the crucial upshot to the common features of the cognitive

powers involves their universal communicability. Kant claims that in the “free play of the

faculties,” in the conjunctive play of the imagination and the understanding, we find the

subjective conditions necessary for the universal validity of judgments.24 In other words, the

universal character of the presentation, a character based in and on the fact that all humans

have an identical (or at least sufficiently similar) presentational capacity, is the basis upon

which the pleasure that gives rise to judgments of taste is founded. It is this capacity, this

“attunement” of the faculties, which allows a cognition to be universally communicated;

without this attunement, cognitions would not be communicable.25

This attunement, again, is

identified only through a feeling, rather than through a concept, and constitutes the content of

what is universally communicable.26

Again, in a cognitive judgment there is a determinate

objective principle that subsumes the particular under a universal concept, which in turn

bestows the judgment unconditional necessity. In a non-cognitive judgment, however, there

must exist some such principle, or else the idea of necessity would not occur to us at all.

Kant finds this principle, and says it “could only be regarded as a common sense”.27

So it is

this feeling , which arises out of the “mutual quickening of the two mental powers with a view

23

Ibid., pg. 5524

Kant, Critique of Judgment , pg. 6225

Ibid., pg. 8826 Ibid.27 Ibid., pg. 87



9

to cognition,” that is the basis of the universal communicability of judgments.28 Thus the

universal attunement of the faculties gives rise to the universal communicability of judgment,

and that communicability, in turn, presupposes a common sense.

Kant distinguishes his notion of common sense from “common understanding,”

which he claims has been traditionally referred to as the sensus communis. The common

understanding, or what traditionally has been called sensus communis, “judges not by feeling

but always by concepts, even though these concepts are usually only principles conceived

obscurely”.29 The common human understanding is that “which is merely man’s sound ([but]

not yet cultivated) understanding, [and] is regarded as the very least that we are entitled to

expect from anyone who lays claim to the name of human being…”. 30 Thus, for Kant, the

sensus communis (i.e. the “common understanding”) as it has been traditionally conceived is

based in concepts, albeit vaguely, and thus cannot properly ground non-conceptual judgments

of taste. Digressing into this distinction, and recognizing that such a discussion does not

properly belong to the critique of judgment, Kant goes on to outline the maxims of common

understanding, including thinking for oneself, thinking from the standpoint of others, and

thinking consistently.31 At the end of this discussion, Kant suggests that his sense of the

sensus communis can be thought of as a sensus communis aestheticus, while that of the

“common understanding” can be thought of as a sensus communis logicus. 32

Kant claims that taste, however, “can be called a sensus communis more legitimately

than can sound understanding, and that the aesthetic power of judgment deserves to be called

a shared sense more than does the intellectual one”.33

The common sense Kant has in mind is

“the effect arising from the free play of our cognitive powers,” and only by presupposing

such a common sense can judgments of taste be made.34

The Kantian sensus communis is,

then, the conceptual formulation of the conglomeration of the senses, or of the

epiphenomenal or supervenient effect of all five senses working together to provide the mind

with its aesthetic intuitions, the total effect of which is then abstracted from the senses which

constitute it. Kant goes on to extrapolate his sense of common sense:

28 Ibid., pg. 88

29 Ibid., pg. 87

30 Ibid., pg. 160

31 Ibid., pg. 160-1

32 Ibid., pg. 162

33 Ibid.34 Ibid., pg. 87



10

Instead, we must take sensus communis to mean the idea of a sense shared , i.e. a

power to judge that in reflecting takes account (a priori), in our thought, of everyone

else’s way of presenting, in order as it were to compare our own judgment with

human reason in general and thus escape the illusion that arises from the ease of

mistaking subjective and private conditions for objective ones...35

So the Kantian sensus communis is the idea, or abstract formulation of a “sense shared” that

functions so as to allow us compare our presentation of the world to the possible presentation

of others. And in the very act of offering up our judgments to compare with those of other

potential judges, the sensus communis is already at work. Kant’s conception of the sensus

communis is, in this way, both the ground upon which judgment begins and is operative

within judgment; it both implies others with whom you share in judgment and the similarity

of presentational powers that allows for the ability to communicate about those judgments.

For Arendt, the most important aspect of the sensus communis as articulated by Kant

is the space it creates for communication. But Arendt goes further than Kant’s analysis –

indeed by making it substantive – because Kant claims that the sensus communis merely

allows for the ability to communicate, while Arendt claims that it “is the specifically human

sense because communication, i.e., speech, depends on it.”36 In other words, while Kant

posits the sensus communis as the ground upon which merely the ability to communicate

arises, Arendt claims that it in fact gives rise to communication itself, i.e., the ability fully

realized.37

Common sense in its “very special Kantian meaning,” she continues, “is what

judgment appeals to in everyone, and it is this possible appeal that gives judgments their

special validity. The it-pleases-or-displeases-me, which as a feeling seems so utterly private

and non-communicative, is actually rooted in this community sense and is therefore open to

communication once it has been transformed by reflection, which takes all others and their

feelings into account”.38 But at precisely this moment of her analysis, Arendt conflates

Kant’s distinction between the sensus communis aestheticus and the sensus communis

logicus. She attributes to the maxims that Kant allots to the common understanding, or the

sensus communis logicus, to be maxims operative in the sensus communis aestheticus, or the

sensus communis in Kant’s general sense. Evidence of this conflation, more specifically, is

35

Ibid., pg. 16036

Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, pg. 7037

This would, moreover, seem to require a further step in which the details of the actualization of this

ability are articulated, i.e., a fully developed theory of language. But that is a subject for another essay.38 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, pg. 72



11

that she takes the maxim to think from the standpoint of everyone else to be a central tenet of

the sensus communis.39

Kant clearly says that that belongs to the common understanding,

and not to his sense of the sensus communis. Arendt’s failure to maintain this distinction will

become important later when I turn to examine Arendt’s characterization of the break in

common sense.

But Arendt further augments Kant’s notion of the sensus communis of being merely a

“sense shared” by claiming that it is actually an extra sense, that it is the “highest, sixth sense

that fits our five senses into a common world and enables us to orient ourselves in it”. 40

Arendt claims Kant’s use of the Latin nomenclature indicates a shift of emphasis away from

the sensus communis being merely a sense like our other senses, trapped within the “reefs of

solipsism” (to borrow a phrase from Sartre), and now means “an extra sense – like an extra

mental capacity – that fits us into a community.”41

And not only does the sensus communis

fit us into community, the judgments that arise out of this extra sense actually create the

common world; judgment, in this way, is constitutive of the public sphere. She says that “the

condition sine qua non for the existence of beautiful objects is communicability; the

judgment of the spectator creates the space without which no such objects could appear at all.

The public realm is constituted by the critics and spectators, not by the actors or the

makers.”42 Just as judging in a solipsistic world would be senseless, communicating in a

solipsistic world would be meaningless: judging and communicating necessarily imply others

with whom these activities can take place, and for Arendt these very activities actually

constitute the public realm.

This is precisely why judgment, grounded in the sensus communis, is the most

political of our faculties, namely, because it rests on the most common, shared features of

mankind – our eyes, ears, noses, tongues, and skins – which together give us a common

world and allow us to communicate about that world. When you sense the same world, when

this community of senses can be extended and presupposed of those around you – i.e. when

the presentation and re-presentation of the phenomenal world can be taken as roughly the

same for everyone with the same sensing apparatus – you are able to communicate about it.

In this way, the presumption of a commonality of experience is a precondition for

39

Ibid., pg. 7140

Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations”, in Responsibility and Judgment , pg. 16641 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, pg. 7042 Ibid., pg. 67



12

communication, for language. This common space of appearances is the space of the

political, where judgment reigns as the most important faculty of the mind.

So, the sensus communis that Kant claims as the precondition for judgments of taste

is neither conceptual (i.e. it does not function by or with concepts) nor based in the outer

senses (i.e. Kantian intuition).43 On the one hand, that the sensus communis Kant actually

develops as a necessary condition for the possibility of judgment is itself non-conceptual is

clear: judgments are based on the reflective presentation, or re-presentation, of form given to

the outer senses and the feelings (not concepts) that arise therewith; it is the sensus communis

aestheticus, not logicus.44 On the other hand, that it is not based in the senses is a more a

curious claim, which, moreover, seems to be in tension with the criterion of present-ability

inherent in the previous claim, namely, that what is given in our presentational powers

constitutes the content of what is reflectively considered, or what is re-imaged as, the object

of judgment. If objects are able to be presented, then that ability must find facilitation

through some medium in order for its potential to become actual, i.e., in order for the ability

inherent in the object to be presentable, as such, to become the form registered within the

presentational faculties of the mind. Kant acknowledges this medium as the empirical sense

organs, the human sensory apparatus of touch, vision, hearing, smelling, and tasting, but

disregards them as irrelevant to his transcendental investigation.45

At once conflating and prescinding these material senses, Kant gets the sensus

communis as the conceptual structure which allows for the universal subjective validity and

the communicability of judgments. The rub, however, lies in the role these organs play in

grounding the transcendental nature of judgment. In other words, the tension lies in the

specific way in which the empirical sense organs provide the necessary conditions for the

transcendental grounding of judgment. But this tension disappears once we remember that

Kant is after the transcendental conditions for judgment, not the empirical ones.

Transcendental conditions are by their very nature conceptual conditions, that is, they are

ideas or ideals that are presupposed in order to account for certain faculties, such as

judgment, whose existence is not in dispute. Transcendental conditions are neither the raw

43

Cf. Kant, Critique of Judgment , pg. 89 and 157-944

That said, however, the idea of the sensus communis that Kant formulates in the Analytic of the Beautiful

is itself conceptual; it is the concept of a “sense shared,” a concept the Kant constantly characterizes as

“merely an idea” which functions “as if” it were a shared sense. The strange thing about this is simply that

it is the conceptual articulation of an utterly non-conceptual mental function.45 Kant, Critique of Judgment , pg. 47-8



13

sense data of the world given to the empirical senses, nor are they descriptions of the

necessary metaphysical nature of the world outside of the function they perform in

transcendental analysis. Rather, transcendental structures are the creative conceptual

constructs that we assume in order to explain the actuality of certain features of our mental

lives or the world, the existence of which is uncontested.

So the Kantian sensus communis is an abstract, transcendental structure that allows

for the possibility of universally communicable judgments, while Arendt’s notion is much

more robust in that it actually creates the common space of appearances. There is indeed a

difference between creating the possibility for and de facto creation, between conditions and

conditioning , and this is the difference between the Kantian and the Arendtian conceptions of

the sensus communis. In contrast to Kant, the Arendtian sensus communis has an empirical

function which, ipso facto, comprises the medium that is the public sphere, the material space

of political action and judgment. For Arendt, the sensus communis not only provides the

necessary conceptual grounds for judgment vis-à-vis its transcendental function, but actually

constitutes the common world vis-à-vis its empirical function. Accordingly, Arendt’s “extra

sense” is actually tied quite tightly to the human sensing apparatus. Taste is metonymous for

judgment because this “community sense…affects me as though it were a sensation, and

precisely one of taste, the discriminatory, choosing sense.”46 Her common sense “discloses

to us the nature of the world insofar as it is a common world; we owe to it the fact that our

strictly private and ‘subjective’ five senses and their sensory data can adjust themselves to a

nonsubjective and ‘objective’ world which we have in common and share with others.

Judging is one, if not the most, important activity in which this sharing-the-world-with-others

comes to pass.”47

In this way, Arendt claims that “the nonsubjective element in the

nonobjective senses is intersubjectivity.”48 In other words, the objectivity given through our

subjective senses is grounded in the discursive space of communicability that is judgment.

Kant’s transcendental analysis of the sensus communis thus provides a possible nexus

between our ourselves and others, a link sitting precisely at the possibility of communion

among human beings. This link functions through a common experience of the world

through our senses, which in turn gives rise to the ability to communicate about that world, to

make judgments about it. This is the sensus communis as a meta-sense, so to speak, and

46

Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, pg. 7147 Arendt, “Crisis in Culture” in Between Past and Future, pg. 21848 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, pg. 67



14

allows the world to present itself as a unity across and between bodies. So, contrary to

rumors otherwise, Kant is far from abnegating a role for the body in judgment in particular,

and being a body-denying philosopher in general. It is precisely the body that lies at the root

of the supposition of a common sense. Without a body, and without sense organs that put that

body in contact with the world, there would be no sensus communis. In this way, there is a

physical, corporeal basis underlying Kant’s sensus communis. This universal (human) body is

the primary presupposition of judgment broadly construed. This body is no doubt empirical,

and thus does not properly belong to transcendental analysis, but without this body no such

analysis could ever get under way. In this way, there is a material pre-condition to asking the

transcendental question. Or, to put it another way, if one were to ask the transcendental

question of the transcendental philosopher – or what are the conditions of possibility for even

asking the transcendental question – the answer necessarily involves the material, empirical

body of that philosopher. Thus, the body, and specifically the human body, is the basis, and

indeed the universal basis, upon which all judgment rests. Judgment, for Kant, allows for the

possibility of a common world, and it does this through our bodies. Our bodies gives us the

common world, the world in-between our bodies. In this way, the world would not exist, as

such, without the human body.

Arendt picks up the Kantian sensus communisand provides a substantive

philosophical account of judgment (rather than a transcendental account) in this space of

appearances, which for her is coextensive with the space of the political. The result is a

sensus communis that constitutes tradition, and the mode through which this occurs is the

exemplary judgment. By tradition, here, I mean simply the thread of continuity that joins

judgment to subsequent judgment, and judgment to prior common sense. So, as we have

seen, exemplary judgments stand as particular instantiations of the universal rule that cannot

be stated. Only the judgments themselves – and not the rule they exemplify – are available

for communication. Exemplification is always done for others, and through this

exemplification the embodied common sense of judgment creates, constitutes, and reinforces

the common sense from whence it came. By offering one’s exemplary judgment for the

consideration of others, and in Arendt’s case other spectators, the judgment makes a claim to

universal assent based in the operative functions of common sense. This judgment then

augments and becomes a part of that common sense by virtue of being an instantiation of the

rule which it exemplifies. Thus the actual communication of such judgments about this

common world, the world lying “in-between” bodies, form the tradition in which we move, a



15

tradition without which culture and history would be unmoored from sense and meaning.49

To make a judgment is to actively employ common sense, and to communicate that judgment

is to submit it to the ongoing development of that sense. Judgments, in this way, are both

based in common sense and augment that common sense through the constant unfolding of

new judgments. This reliance on and augmentation of common sense is tradition. And

tradition in this sense is the absolutely necessary ground upon which all thinking and judging

proceed. Without tradition, there is no thinking and there is no judging; there is just the

frictionless spinning in a void of a soundless dialogue of me with myself, and me with the

opinion of the merely hypothetical other.

In this way, the capacity of taste and the capacity of judgment are conservative

functions that bind humanity together against the dissolving forces of progress and time.

These functions preserve that which came before in the face of that which is and is to come.

The continuity that taste and judgment provide is the continuity of tradition that, again,

without which our lives would lose meaning and value. The spectator-judge of Arendt’s

political theory provides this continuity by offering up interpretive judgments as to the

meaning of the whole that individuals participate in only by means of their parts. These

judgments, moreover, are always made for the sake of the world, rather than for the sake of

individuals in the world. The Arendtian spectator, then, is a type of culture critic that works

to inject meaning where this is none, and to formulate opinions in the realm of developing

appearances. In commenting on Lessing, Arendt notes that

Criticism, in Lessing’s sense, is always taking sides for world’s sake, understanding

and judging everything in terms of its position in the world at any given time. Such a

mentality can never give rise to a definite world view which, once adopted, is

immune to further experiences in the world because it has hitched itself firmly to one

possible perspective.50

This type of criticism is clearly linked in Arendt’s mind to the critical judgments that the

spectator makes within the realm of appearances and that constitute the public sphere. Just as

the actors act for the sake of the spectator – without which action would be meaningless – the

spectator judges the spectacle for the sake of the community of judges with whom their

judgments find resonance. This type of judgment, importantly, is always in process; it is

never ending and constantly in revision. The meaning of the whole is not a meaning that can

49 Arendt, “Thoughts on Lessing” in Men in Dark Times, pg. 7-850 Ibid.



16

be stated definitively, once and for all, because the whole is in motion. In this way, the

spectator represents the world – both in the sense of re-presenting the world through their

judgment and representing the world, standing for the world, in its place, so to speak – and

they must do so in the midst of a world ongoing.51

Through the spectator, then, Arendt transforms the Kantian notion of sensus

communis into a hermeneutic faculty that derives the meaning for the whole of human affairs

from a perspective unavailable to the actors that perform the drama of human history. Just as

Kantian judgment cannot operate without the reflective or re-presentative capacity of the

mind through imagination, Arendtian judgment cannot occur without temporal distance from

the event and disinterested meditation upon it. “Only when something irrevocable has

happened,” she says, “can we even try to trace its history backward. The event illuminates its

own past; it can never be deduced from it.”52

The meaning that the judge derives from the

past begins with the event, and is traced back through that which came before so as to glean

meaning from the seemingly meaningless occurrence of the event in simultaneous time. At

the conclusion of the “Thinking” section of The Life of the Mind , Arendt directly compares

her judge to the historian.53 This historian – or “the one who inquires in order to tell how is

was” – is charged with a unique task in light of modern tradition:

If judgment is our faculty for dealing with the past, the historian is the inquiring man

who by relating it sits in judgment over it. If that is so, we may reclaim our human

dignity, win it back, as it were, from the pseudo-divinity named History of the

modern age, without denying history’s importance but denying its right to being the

ultimate judge.54

Thus the task of rescuing history is a task that must work against the History that marches

inexorably along its predetermined path of progress, a path that was the hallmark of Hegel’s

thinking on the subject, and must work instead to understand the meaning of the whole in

spite of contingency and uncertainty and the ongoing determination of meaning in motion.

The problem for Arendt, however, is that the common sense upon which all judgment

is based has been radically challenged by the events of the twentieth century.55 More

specifically, the rise of totalitarianism has actually shattered the common sense that once

51

Ibid., pg. 6-7 and Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, pg. 75-652

Arendt, “Understanding and politics” in Essays in Understanding , pg. 31953

Arendt, The Life of the Mind , pg. 216 and Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, pg. 554 Arendt, The Life of the Mind , pg. 21655 Cf. Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age”, in Between Past and Future, pg. 26



17

allowed us to make judgments of right and wrong, beautiful and ugly. “Totalitarian

phenomena,” she says, "which can no longer be understood in terms of common sense…are

only the most spectacular instances of the breakdown of our common inherited wisdom.” 56

In other words, the common stock of judgments that constituted common sense, that

constituted the tradition of Occidental political life, was in fact ruptured by the overwhelming

and unprecedented violence of totalitarianism. Arendt goes on to say that the “originality of

totalitarianism is horrible, not because some new ‘idea’ came into the world, but because its

very actions constitute a break with all our traditions; they have clearly exploded our

categories of political thought and our standards for moral judgment.”57 So it is the actions

of totalitarianism, and the violence done to bodies under its aegis, that shatters our common

sense and traditional ways of formulating judgments. If we are to follow Arendt here, we

must understand the body of common sense to be broken, its continuity to have been

disrupted, such that we are unable to find a source from which to draw conclusions, or at

least the beginnings to conclusions, to the most pressing social and political questions of our

time.

For Arendt, this meant that her task as a spectator and historian of totalitarianism had

no common sensical standards to guide it, and that it had to rebuild this body of judgments

from scratch. According to Arendt, the traditional modes of assessment that guided judgment

and interpretation in the past were no longer available to her, nor are they available to us in

our contemporary tasks of judging. But i t is at precisely this point in Arendt’s

characterization of the break in common sense and tradition that her conflation of Kant’s

distinction between the sensus communis aestheticus and the sensus communis logicus – or,

more simply, that between the common sense and the common understanding – comes into

problematic relief. By conflating these Arendt misses how the sensus communis aestheticus

is the ground upon which the sensus communis logicus is built; it glosses over the absolutely

basic role the senses (the aestheticus aspect) play in forming the sensus communis more

generally, which becomes the possibility-creating condition of judgment. Without the

experience of a common world, and the ability to communicate that arises out of that

experience, no common understanding could be formed. So it is the common understanding

that, for Arendt, undergoes a radical break with in the twentieth century, not the Kantian

notion of sensus communis. She says that, through this break,

56 Arendt, “Understanding and politics” in Essays in Understanding , pg. 31457 Ibid., pg. 310



18

What is envisaged here is more than a loss of the capacity for political action, which

is the central condition of tyranny, and more than growth of meaninglessness and loss

of common sense (and common sense is only that part of our mind and that portion of

inherited wisdom which all men have in common in any given civilization); it is the

loss of the quest for meaning and need for understanding.”58

Here again we get Arendt’s equation of common sense and tradition, which is always

culturally specific. But the real upshot of this radical break in our common sense and

tradition is that it has produced a culture wherein the quest for meaning and understanding

has been abandoned. She asks: “Yet has not the task of understanding become hopeless if it

is true that we are confronted with something which has destroyed our categories of thought

and our standards of judgment?”59 The violence of twentieth-century tyranny was, in short,

so incomprehensible, so beyond our capacity for understanding, that it functioned to atrophy

the further search for meaning and understanding that was, heretofore, so central to

Occidental tradition.

But in a comparison of ours with Lessing’s time, Arendt switches images from the

broken body of common sense to a broken world. She says that what is wrong is the world:

namely, that thing that arises between people and in which everything that individuals

carry with them innately can become visible and audible. In the two hundred years

that separate us from Lessing’s lifetime, much has changed in this respect, but little

has changed for the better. The ‘pillars of the best-known truths (to stay with his

metaphor), which at that time were shaken, today lie shattered; we need neither

criticism nor wise men to shake them any more. We need only look around to see

that we are standing in the midst of a veritable rubble heap of such pillars.”60

Whether it is the broken body of common sense or the broken world from which that

common sense arises, it is important to realize the operative distinction here, namely, that the

shattering of tradition and common sense was the loss of a body of coherent exemplars or

standards or guides to judgment, not the ability to judge, per se.61

That ability remains, and it

remains the task of the spectator, judge, or critic to rebuild and reconstitute that body of

common sense.

58 Ibid., pg, 316-7

59 Ibid., pg. 313

60 Arendt, “Thoughts on Lessing” in Men in Dark Times, pg. 1061 D’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt , pg. 105



19

Which brings us back to Kant’s bodies. For Kant’s sensus communis to undergo such

a break, a literal breaking of bodies would have to occur; the material, empirical senses from

which the sensus communis is constructed would have to undergo significant alteration and

rearrangement for that common sense to be “broken”. But, even if this were possible, once

broken the sensus communis would immediately begin to reassemble and reconstitute itself

on the basis of the commonality of experience inherent in the new schema. In short, Kant’s

bodies remain: the bodies that form the material precondition to the sensus communis, which,

in turn, form the transcendental precondition for judgment, endure. Common sense, too,

remains, transcendentally speaking. Put another way, judgments continue to be made by

those who continue the quest for meaning and understanding (though perhaps this group is

witnessing a significant nadir in its membership), and the sensus communis, as Kant says, is a

necessary condition for making any judgment whatsoever. Thus, the sensus communis

continues to exist, though obviously changed and augmented by the conditions that preceded

it. And if Kant’s bodies remain intact, with the apparatus that joins them and produces a

common world, then so too does the body politic.

Bodies, in this way, function as the means by which common sense and tradition are

continuous. Tradition is inscribed in our bodies. Or, conversely, tradition is that which

arises from our bodies in contact with a common world; the continuity of understanding that

common sense provides begins in a common sensing of the world. What can rupture the

conceptual coherence are the material ruptures that occur in fact. So, in a sense, if bodies

have been broken, then tradition too has been broken. The rupture in tradition of which

Arendt speaks, therefore, was a rupture accomplished in and through bodies. And though

that rupture was certainly real, bodies remain. In other words, though the body politic was

ruptured, along with all its tradition and substantive, common sensical bases for judgment,

the bodies on which it is founded remains. Though the edifice is shaken, the ground remains.

In this way, we can certainly say that tradition was ruptured by the events of twentieth-

century totalitarianism, but that it is not ruptured in ongoing project of interpretation and

judgment. Tradition is re-constituted by the ever-present presentation of the world through

the bodies that remain. Common sense is always already being re-built by the living,

breathing, sensing body. The experiences of totalitarianism were inscribed in bodies past by

violence, and are also inscribed by another specie of violence in bodies present, the content

of which is precisely the sensus communis. So even though we can speak of a rupture in

tradition, of a breakdown of common sense, ours is now a common sense augmented with the



20

judgment that events can sometimes so supercede and overcome and shatter the traditional

frameworks of common understanding that we must begin again, from where we are.

The notion that tradition and common sense has somehow broken down, or that the

pillars of the best known truths lay shattered beneath our feet is an old notion indeed. Which

is to say that its trope is used in a variety of circumstances to describe a myriad of times and

places and changes. But, the question of its truth aside, it does capture a certain intuition that

times are changing, that history is in motion, and that what was once sufficient for an

explanation or a starting point for understanding no longer suffices. But the literalness with

which we take this description of our condition must be carefully moderated. All of the

discontinuities of history, all the radical revolutions of thought and the upheavals of

everyday practice, are actually inscribed into the very history from which they depart. The

whole is comprised of nothing but continuities, discontinuities included. They are all a part

of tradition, and, in this sense, the totalitarianism of the twentieth-century is not radically

outside our tradition, but part and parcel of, and in fact constitutive of, the Occidental

tradition of political life. We are not immune to its effects, nor are we in any special way set

apart from this tradition. In fact, we are the effects of totalitarianisms past and present, and

we continue to make judgments in light of, or perhaps in the shadow of, those very effects.

Tradition and corporeal existence are inextricably linked; the body gives rise to the body

politic. Tradition does not exist outside of our bodies, floating in the ether of culture.

Rather, the sensus communis that arises out of our bodies – and constitutes the tradition

within which we live and think – is continuously being remade in the image of, and for the

sake of, the world.

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from the body to the body politic

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