A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, and Consciousness: Kant Part five Arendt’s analysis of Kant’s Political Philosophy.

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Hannah Arendt in her work entitled “Kant’s Political Philosophy” makes two important observations against the background of the reflections below:

“Kant is never interested in the past: what interests him is the future of the species. Man is driven from Paradise not because of sin and not by an avenging God but by nature, which releases him from her womb and then drives him from the Garden, the “safe and harmless state of childhood”.that is the beginning of History: its process is progress, and the product of this process is sometimes called “culture”, sometimes “freedom”(p8)

The first observation is that Kant in 1770 began the formation of his Critical Philosophy by his discovery of the role of the faculties of the mind in posing and answering of many philosophical questions throughout the ages. In particular, it is important to note what Arendt failed to, namely the discovery of the role of the categorical understanding in the tripartite structure of sensibility, understanding, and reason. It was these faculties working with a priori principles and ideas that provided Kant with a sufficiently nuanced theory of mind that could sustain the very different laws of Science, Morality, Politics, and Aesthetics.

The second observation of Arendt relates to Kant’s discovery of the apriori principle lying behind the use of Judgment. The statesman, this so-called Phronimos (great-souled man), amongst other things, Arendt argues, is a man of sound judgment which in Aristotelian and Kantian terms would amount to possessing a unique capacity to say something universal and necessary about particular political phenomena. It is not clear, however, whether Arendt would share this view because for her Judgment is different from the understanding and reason and is rooted in the changing particulars of sensibility. It is true that in some particular situations this great-souled man, in unique political circumstances, will suspend the use of his judgment and become an inquiring student until he achieves a sufficient understanding of the situation. But once he has achieved an understanding of the particulars his task is to reason about the phenomena and relate them to the Laws that constitute the structure of the polis. It is his task, in other words, to uphold the Law that has been formed by understanding and complex reasoning processes. In monitoring the events of the society he will not regard the law hypothetically and be prepared to abandon it if breaking the law becomes widespread in society. For the statesman, it is the Law that determines whether a particular event such as one citizen murdering another is right or wrong. Murdering does not become a norm merely because it has become a fact, or a truth, that people murder each other. Politics must shape social phenomena. It is also important to note that Politics is not a purely theoretical activity. It clearly occurs in the realm of practical reason which in turn regulates our actions or “deeds”(what Kant calls moral actions) and it has two aspects: technical/ instrumental and categorical.

For Aristotle, the key term of his analysis is areté or virtue which encompasses both instrumental and categorical reasoning in accordance with principles that guide us to do the right thing in the right way at the right time. This requires in its turn a stable and organized soul. A statesman, for Aristotle, is a wise man who understands himself and his world and is able to reason theoretically and practically (instrumentally and categorically) about the nature and telos of man and his community. When we question the statesman about his activity we should, therefore, bear in mind that he is only concerned with so-called aporetic (difficult to answer) questions that require all the faculties of his mind working in harmony with his power of judgment. Arendt prefers to focus on this power of judgment and her argument for this focus is based on a claim that Kant never provided or intended to provide a political philosophy. This is a curious statement given the fact that Kant, in what he wrote, has influenced both Political Philosophy and Politics in the twentieth century. Both Aristotle and Kant agreed upon a close relationship between ethics and politics insofar as the use of understanding, reason, and judgment were concerned. The two most important political innovations to follow from Kant’s political and ethical position were, firstly, the application of primarily moral theory to the political status of the citizen to confer upon him certain human rights, and secondly the application of ethical theory to the behaviour of nations to confer upon them the duty of refraining from war and maintaining a status quo of peace. Arendt in these lectures seems to have omitted to mention, for example, that the United Nations was a Kantian idea formed in the late 1700s. This Post-World-War institution would be devoted to the Kantian political idea of peace, a teleological idea.

Arendt discusses in her lectures what she regards as a classical Greek dilemma of a conflict between a life of contemplation (bios theoretikos) and the political life (bios politikos) which appears to be referring to both Aristotle and Kant. Her characterization of these two forms of life, however, does not fit with the commitments to understanding and reason for either of these philosophers. Both philosophers would claim that universality and necessity of theoretical and practical reasoning have similar logical characteristics and the laws of both the realm of our beliefs(theoretical) and actions(practical) would be determinative of the judgments we make about the everchanging fluctuating world of sensible particulars. Arendt elaborates upon her interpretation of Aristotle via a quote by Pascal:

“They(Plato and Aristotle) were honest men, like others, laughing with their friends, and when they wanted to divert themselves they wrote, “The Laws” or “The Politics” to amuse themselves. That part of their life was the least philosophic and the least serious. The most philosophic was to live simply and quietly. If they wrote on Politics it was as if laying down the rules for a lunatic asylum: if they presented the appearance of speaking of great matters it was because they knew that the madmen to whom they were speaking thought they were kings or emperors.”(Blaise Pascal Penses no 331)

Pascal, we know was a mathematician who eventually thought that all forms of knowledge-seeking were forms of concupiscence. Influenced by St Augustine he also thought:

“We do not believe the whole of philosophy to be worth one hour’s effort” (II, 566)

The above quote, therefore might not accurately capture the spirit of Aristotle and Plato’s reflections on Politics, but it may point us to the reason why Kant referred to life in society as being “melancholically haphazard” and why he believed that the process of progress proceeded so slowly. We are, for Kant, as was the case for Plato and Aristotle, essentially rational beings capable of formulating the laws we ought to live by: and yet probably all three philosophers agreed on the fact that the results were so often sad and depressing. Plato’s Republic was a philosophical construction burdened by a depressing prophecy, namely that everything created by man is doomed to destruction especially his cities unless they were ruled by Philosophers or Philosophical Laws. Given these facts, it is highly unlikely that Pascal or Arendt were right to insist that the Platonic and Aristotelian projects were designed to amuse. It is more likely that they were constructed in a Kantian spirit of melancholy: a spirit in which one regretted that what typically happens politically ought not to have happened. Given also the fact that the Republic was published partly in honour of the life and death of his teacher Socrates who continued doing Philosophy in his cell with his friends up to the moment of his death, it is not likely that Plato would have shared Pascal’s or Arendt’s skepticism. It was clear that insofar as Socrates was concerned Philosophy was the only response to life and death that made any sense.

Philosophy, for Kant, was certainly a reasonable response to life in a society inhabited by unsocial sociable beings whose antagonism destroyed or failed to preserve or create the moral atmosphere required for us to progress to the next stage of civilization. Kant defined Philosophical activity in terms of four questions all of which would have been accepted by Aristotle and all of which raise the question of the value of our life positively (neither dogmatically nor skeptically). The four questions are: “What can I know?” What ought I to do?” “What can I hope for?” and “What is man?”. Of these four questions, the middle two are central questions in more senses than one. It is these two questions that form the core of Aristotelian and Kantian moral, political, and religious philosophy.

Arendt sees Judgment to be primarily concerned with sensible particulars and naturally, therefore, focuses upon the aesthetic judgment in which the major task appears to consist in conceptualizing the particular in terms of our feelings. When we make an aesthetic judgment, argues Kant, we may be speaking in a universal voice but we are speaking about our feelings and sensations(sensibility). Here there is a clear difference from the making of scientific and moral judgments where the understanding and reason are the prime movers of our mental processes and states. Neither for Aristotle nor for Kant could it be conceivable that the Political and ethical judgments a statesman makes could be grounded on aesthetic sensibility and ever-fluctuating feelings. Kant has the following to say in his characterization of aesthetic judgment in his work on the Critique of Judgment:

“That which is partly subjective in the representation of an object, i.e. what constitutes its reference to the Subject, not to the object, is its aesthetic quality.”(Critique of Judgment P. 29)

Moreover, the aesthetic judgment is grounded in the feelings of pleasure and displeasure which are “incapable of becoming an element of cognition”(P.29). Were political and ethical judgments to be grounded in sensibility they would not then be fully cognitive. We should also note in this context that we use our understanding and reason “in response to” our passive melancholic attitude toward our society. Melancholia is a state of displeasure as is antagonism which in its turn is a more disruptive feeling because it can easily give rise to a Hobbesian Political state in which the sword of coercion or violence is used to defend the social covenant designed to provide everyone with a commodious form of life. We recall here the Hobbesian remark that without the sword our covenants are mere words. Statesmen, of course, hope for a more positive form of respect for the laws of society but are simultaneously aware of the tendencies toward antagonism often accompanied by the tendency to make oneself the one special exception to the universality and necessity of the law. The motive for this is often a principle of self-love that cannot be universalized. In such a situation coercion appears to be a reasonable response. Kant’s ethical theory claims, however, that this instrumental form of regulation is not fully ethical and this testifies to the important claim that morality is the prime mover of statesmen: a morality that is moreover not motivated by feeling and the imagination which are subjective. Morality is also about what we “must do”, our duty, and the universal voice here is one that must be obeyed if one is to maintain one’s rationality. Self-understanding is also an important component of moral judgment, and in understanding ourselves we use words and not swords in our conversations and covenants with ourselves. The telos of morality is for Kant, as it was for Aristotle, a construction of bios theoretikos: the Kantian Kingdom of Ends is merely a theoretical possibility of the end of a long practical process involving unsociability, antagonism, and self-love. The Kantian statesman moved primarily by morality will then only pass laws that can stand the tests of universality and necessity.

In her third lecture, Arendt claims that Kant knows that his philosophy will not assist in solving the problem of how to create good citizens. She points out in this context that it was Aristotle who maintained that a “good man can be a good citizen only in a good state”. This is an interesting quote which Kant qualifies with the claim that the laws of a state can compel a bad man to live a good life in the state. The laws, of course, have to be good laws. Kant, however, does emphasize the power of good laws passed in accordance with the moral law and suggests that such political activity mitigates the otherwise melancholic lives we lead in our imperfect societies. The power of the statesman when it is wielded in the spirit of morality is a formidable cognitive and rational power when it is wielded in the spirit of universality and necessity. It is, of course true, that there is a sense in which the statesman has to spend part of his life contemplating in the realm of bios theoretikos simply because the state of affairs he wishes ultimately to bring about is only theoretically possible, an ideal effect of an ideal cause that resides in a harmonious mind. At issue in this discussion is the role of the understanding in the creation of something which is merely a theoretical possibility in the sphere of influence of bios theoretikos:

“Human understanding cannot avoid the necessity of drawing a distinction between the possibility and the actuality of things. The reason for this lies in our own selves and the nature of our cognitive faculties. For were it not that two entirely heterogeneous factors, understanding for conceptions and sensuous intuitions for the corresponding objects are required for the exercise of these faculties, there would be no such distinction between the possible and the actual. This means that, if our understanding were intuitive it would have no objects except such as are actual. Conceptions which are merely directed to the possibility of an object, and sensuous intuitions which give us something and yet do not thereby let us cognize it as an object, would both cease to exist.”(Critique of Teleological Judgment p 56)

Concentration on the relation of Judgment to the intuitions of sensibility, therefore, move us away from the conceptualising of the possibilities which in turn remains as part of the activities of the tribunal of Reason:

“Reason is a faculty of principles, and the unconditioned is the ultimate goal at which it aims. Understanding, on the other hand, is at its disposal, but always only under a certain condition that must be given. But without conceptions of understanding, to which objective reality must be given, reason can pass no objective(synthetical) judgment whatever. As theoretical reason, it is absolutely devoid of any constitutive principles of its own. Its principles, on the contrary, are merely regulative. It will be readily perceived that once reason advances beyond the pursuit of understanding it becomes transcendent. It displays itself in ideas that have certainly a foundation as regulative principles–but not in objectively valid conceptions. Understanding, however, is unable to keep pace with it and yet requisite in order to give validity in respect of Objects, restricts the validity of these ideas to the judging Subject, though to the Subject in a comprehensive sense, as inclusive of all who belong to the human race.”(P.55)

The statesman, then, for Kant, is a principled man who uses the categories of the understanding in a principled way(e.g. the principles of causality, the principles of freedom, the principles of justice). Both Kant and Aristotle, contrary to the suggestions of Arendt, would have understood the harmony of the mind of a statesman that uses his rationality both theoretically and practically to construct and pass laws: the harmony of a mind that understands both truth and the good. Aristotle clearly demonstrated his awareness of the difference of reasoning about the world theoretically and understanding the world practically:

“Anaxagoras and Thales were wise, but not understanding men. They were not interested in what is good for men(anthropina agatha)” Nichomachean Ethics 1140 a 25-30 1141 b 4-8)

Arendt in her work “The Promise of Politics” refers to the common prejudices of the Greeks during the time of Plato (that the philosophically wise man(Sophos) would not necessarily know what is good for the Polis) and maintains rather surprisingly that this prejudice was shared by Aristotle. The Sophos, Arendt claims does not possess phronesis which is the insight required to run the Polis. She acknowledges that this position was not shared by Plato but fails to acknowledge the resemblance between Platonic and Aristotelian Political Philosophy. For Aristotle, of course, there are many meanings of “The Good” but there is certainly no denying that in the realm of the practical sciences (which he was the first to classify) there is the universality and necessity of judgment that Kant refers to in his formulation of the moral law.

Both Kant and Aristotle agree that practical reasoning applied to man’s moral and political affairs is about “action”, (or “deeds” if one wishes to use the Kantian term). Areté is a form of excellence which can be used to describe the man with “excellent”(stable and organised) character: can i.e. be used to describe the man who does the right thing at the right time in the right way. The belief system of such a man is of course to some extent organised by what he believes to be true, but the primary aim of the principles of organisation are aimed at universalising his maxims of action. For Aristotle it is obvious that virtue will be the ultimate aim of the virtuous man and given the fact that man is by nature a political animal his political maxims will play a large part in whether he leads a flourishing life or not and this, in turn, will depend upon whether in Kant’s terms his moral personality has been nurtured by a moral education via the praise-blame system of the polis or the state. Eventually, this education will result in man understanding that there are goods in themselves: that the virtuous man acts virtuously not just because this will lead instrumentally to a flourishing life but because the action will, in Kant’s language possess the appropriate form of universality and necessity. The flourishing life, for Aristotle, is the life of bios theoretikos, the contemplative life. Contemplation in the world of action involves the belief system of the agent and Aristotle names such mental activity, deliberation. The practically wise man is wise because he has a tendency to deliberate well. Aristotle uses the term proairesis for the process of deliberation and the decision arrived at through this process. Jonathan Lear in his work “Aristotle: the desire to understand” characterises proairesis thus:

“A deliberation begins with a wish for a certain end. The wish itself is both a desire and a piece of consciousness. The wish motivates a deliberation in which the agent reasons back from the desired goal to the steps necessary to achieve it. The deliberation is both conscious reasoning and a manifestation of the desire for the end. It is also a transmitter of desire for the wished-for goal to the means. The last step in the deliberation is a deliberated decision to act in a certain way. The decision is at once a desire and a state of consciousness. Indeed it is essentially a self-conscious state: for the awareness that I have decided to act in a certain way constitutes the deliberated decision. This entire process is at once a manifestation of practical mind and a manifestation of desire..Thus Aristotle can speak of desiring mind. Practical wisdom is just what the desiring mind of a virtuous person exhibits: he wishes for the best goals and reasons well how to achieve them.”(P.174)

More formally, Kant characterises the above situation analytically, focusing on the maxim and whether or not it is universalisable and necessary, but otherwise there is very little in the above account Kant would disagree with. The major question for Kant would be whether the practical lawmaker is merely focusing on the morality of the law(their universality and necessity) or whether the lawmaker is like the artisan, driven by the principles of Aristotelian productive science in an attempt to technologically create a polis that is merely a technological product of the lawmakers laws. Neither Aristotle nor Kant would seem to believe this to be the case. Aristotle retreats back to the world of contemplation in which the idea of the Good is the navigational star of reasoning.

Practical Science for Aristotle includes both Ethics and Politics whereas the Productive sciences include Rhetoric and Poetics and here we might be tempted to see in Aristotle the Platonic suspicion of the artist and his way of thinking about matters of state. The idea of beauty is definitely demoted in the Aristotelian political system and does not lead the ambiguous life it leads in Plato’s Republic( being used as it was to educate the warrior-rulers to understand the idea of the Good–simultaneously artists are excluded from the Callipolis because they use imitations of imitations of reality to convey their messages)

Kant is probably clearer in his distinction between the significance for ethical politics of the instrumental reasoning of the hypothetical imperative(which he illustrates with the example of the shopkeeper not shortchanging strangers and children for the “wrong reason”) and the categorical imperative(not shortchanging any customer because it is universally wrong and unnecessary) which is a good in itself that treats oneself and others as ends in themselves: a state of affairs that will eventually lead to a kingdom of ends in a far distant future. The Kantian moral man is clearly a contemplative man and insofar as the Kantian statesman is also a contemplative man they will both dwell equally in the realms of bios theoretikos and bios politikos without contradiction or ambiguity.

The role of knowledge and the belief system in relation to the action is, however, a matter for further clarification because as Socrates clearly saw, that when the desire to do something is not a mere wish but rather a genuine will to act, then acting incontinently is problematic. If there is an action performed where the agent acts against the belief that is internal to the intention to act then we call this phenomenon a change of mind rather than an incontinent act and will not accept the characterisation that the agent thought the action both was and was not good. Aristotle in his reflections on this matter agreed that someone drunk with desire or anger, (and not in control of one’s thought), is to some degree in a state of ignorance about what they are doing. His treatment of this issue involved claiming that logic applied to action and that the structure of this logic was syllogistic. In this structure, the major premise is a universal premise, e.g.

Everything sweet ought to be tasted

The minor premise is descriptive of a sensible particular

This fruit is sweet.

According to Aristotle, whoever truly believes these statements categorically ought to strive to taste the fruit. For Aristotle, then, judgment and action are necessarily (logically)connected. The kind of judgment involved here is an action directed judgment: the major premise contains both an action and an ought qualifier indicating that the statement is grammatically in the imperative mood. The incontinent man drunk with desire or anger is described by Aristotle in the Nichomachean ethics thus:

“For even men under the influence of these passions utter scientific proofs and verses of Empedocles, and those who have just begun to learn can string together words but do not yet know: for it has to become part of themselves, and that takes time, so that we must suppose that the use of language by man in an incontinent state means no more than its utterance by actions on the stage(NE VII 3 1147A 19-24)

Arendt in her work “The Promise of Politics” claims incorrectly(if one takes into consideration Aristotle’s own system of classification) that Aristotle’s Rhetoric belongs to his political writings no less than his ethics. Rhetoric is a work about the passions and emotions and the technological means to persuade citizens to either believe something or adopt a particular course of action. This is why the Rhetoric falls under the genre of the productive sciences. Arendt points out Plato’s opposition to Rhetoric grounded in opinion(doxa) where the point of the utterances is merely a means of coercing the masses into believing something or carrying out some action. This is also true of Aristotle. Rhetoric may have been needed in the Athenian agora where, as we graphically saw in the fact of the fate of Socrates the agonal spirit prevailed and violence lay simmering beneath the surface of everyday events.

The kind of universality and necessity in ethics and politics for Aristotle was not of the kind that we find in the Geometry that mathematicians encounter in the demonstration of the Pythagorean theorem. The truth in ethics and politics is “lived” in the world of action. Syllogistic demonstration of the kind we find in practical reasoning about action is also a demonstration of the state of one’s soul which is evaluated not in terms of the categories of theoretical knowledge(the principles of a theoretical knowledge such as geometry) but in terms of practical principles(practical contradictions and practical insufficiencies) measurable in terms of the principle of “The Good”.

There is, that is, a fundamental difference between learning the proofs of geometry by practicing its proofs and learning what is good by doing the good. In ethics, a student can be mistaken and when they are, what the student lacks is self-knowledge incorporating an awareness of who they are. Jonathan Lear characterizes this form of awareness interestingly in the following manner:-

“In ethical reflection, a person develops from being a person capable of doing the right thing in the right circumstances to being a person who has a conscious understanding of who he is and what he is doing. Reflection on one’s character and the ensuing self-acceptance or self-criticism may be an activity which is at once motivated by the virtues, an expression of the virtues and a manifestation of human freedom.”(P. 186)

Aristotle in his ethical discussions reflects on the idea of choice rather than freedom but the difference between Aristotle and Kant in this discussion may be irrelevant. Both philosophers are not Platonically claiming that ethical forms of consciousness are independent of desire: seeking to suppress or repress our passions(dragging them about like slaves). Both Kant and Aristotle are claiming rather that we are dealing with a rationality that incorporates the desire or passion to understand ourselves and our world. Involved in this process of understanding is a widening or deepening of our understanding of the issue of the dignity of being human which, animals, Aristotle argues, are not capable of because they are unable to hold universal major premises in their mind. This reasoning follows from the definition of animals as being incapable of discourse.

Both Aristotle and Kant saw Logic to be normative, i.e. empirically we encounter people contradicting themselves but this phenomenon does not invalidate the law of noncontradiction which, on the contrary, is used to judge the contradiction to be not just false but meaningless. Similarly, in the process of moving from the premises of a sound argument to its conclusion, if one accepts the premises, then one ought(necessarily) to accept the conclusion. The conclusion, that is, is necessarily true. Kant supplemented Aristotelian logic with the principle of sufficient reason because of his definition of reason in terms of principles and the search for the totality of conditions one is seeking to describe/explain. Logic is also, for Kant a search for the unconditioned(that truth which founds other truths) but he does not thereby assume there either is or is not one founding necessary truth. Kant does not take a position on this because, he claims, we have no aerial perspective of our system of truths. We cannot therefore assert with Parmenides that “Everything is one”. Hopefully, like Socrates, we can claim that we know such truths although with Heraclitus we seem to know, for example, that the road up and the road down is the same. Perhaps we can know in the light of Kant’s philosophy that we know the road is the same independently of experience(a priori). We should recall here that Heraclitus uses the term “Logos” as does Aristotle to explain what a syllogism is:

“discourse( a logos) in which certain things being stated something other than what is posited follows of necessity from this being so”(Prior Analytics 1 1 24B 18-20)

The theory of syllogism that Aristotle presents, of course, is metaphysical or metalogical, because the truths being discussed are truths about logic and are part of what Jonathan Lear calls the desire to understand “the broad structure of reality”. This structure is composed firstly, of man thinking in accordance with principles and, secondly, of the world constituted of principles or “forms”. Logos is about both kinds of principles or forms. Amongst these principles are those that explain why the physical world looks and behaves in the ways that it does as well as principles or forms governing our actions, e.g. moral principles, principles of justice. For both Aristotle and Kant, Logic governs both forms of discourse and reveals something of the broad structure of reality as well as the mind that desires to understand this reality.

Arendt’s fifth lecture on Kant’s Politics concerns the disappearance of what she previously referred to as the tension between politics (bios politikos) and Philosophy (bios theoretikos). There is no longer any need to write the rules for the lunatic asylum, she claims paradoxically. She attributes the disappearance of this need to the Philosophy of Kant but it is not clear how she wants to relate this claim to her claim that Kant did not set out to write anything one could call political philosophy. Many commentators disagree with Arendt on this latter claim. One commentator Otfried Höffe adopts a more critical approach:

“To the educated, Kant is known as the author of a critique of reason who tears down traditional metaphysics to create a new edifice on its ruins. They acknowledge his moral philosophy and perhaps his theory of art but not his philosophy of law and of government……Kant’s treatise on “Perpetual Peace” might play a prominent role in contemporary peace debates, but it is not fully acknowledged as an attempt to provide a foundation for a comprehensive philosophy of right and law that is linked to a doctrine of political prudence and a philosophy of history(Kant’s Cosmopolitan Theory of Law and Peace”, Introduction xv)

The above seems to agree with Arendt about the reconstructive effect of Kant’s critical philosophy. In this process of reconstruction Höffe points to 4 Kantian innovations:

“1. Kant is the first thinker and to date the only great thinker to have elevated the concept of peace to the status of a functional concept of philosophy.

2. He links this concept to the political innovation of his time, a Republic devoted to human rights.

3. He extends it with a Cosmopolitan perspective by adding the right of nations and Cosmopolitan law.

4. Finally, Plato’s notion of Philosopher-king’s receives a Republican bent with the concept of “kingly people”. Kings are not a separate elite, the philosophers, but rather the people themselves, insofar as they rule “themselves according to the laws of equality”

What the above fails to record is the close juxtaposition of morality and law in Kant’s theorising. Höffe also fails to acknowledge the Kantian prediction of the need for a United Nations to regulate international law and keep peace in the world. The role of the influence of Aristotle on Kant is also omitted in Höffe’s analysis. Höffe’s conclusive judgment does however run counter to Arendt’s position:

“Therefore, if one focuses on the central purpose of the legitimation of right and state on the basis of apriori concepts then Kant ranks among the classical thinkers of legal and political theory.” (Introduction xvi)

The systematic intent of reason’s search for both the unconditioned and the totality of conditions of phenomena indicate that Kant would have sought to integrate the areas of discourse of Political Philosophy, Law, History, and Morality by acknowledging principles in common including the more abstract principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason used in a critical spirit.

Arendt points out in her sixth lecture that Socrates, in the course of leading the “examined life” was using the principle of contradiction operationally without being aware of its articulation as a principle when he subjected prejudices and ungrounded opinions(what he called “windeggs”) to a test of internal consistency in a person’s mind. An attitude he expressed in the words:

“It is better to be at odds with multitudes than, being one, to be at odds with yourself, namely to contradict yourself.”(Arendt Kant’s Politics p37)

Arendt further claims that:

“According to Plato, he did this by the act of krinein, of sorting and separating and distinguishing(techné diakritiké). According to Plato(but not according to Socrates) the result is “the purification of the soul from conceits that stand in the way of knowledge” (Arendt P. 37)

This quote appears to be more relevant to the systematic philosophizing of Aristotle than the philosophizing of Socrates who we know turned his back on philosophical investigations of the physical world. It is certainly true that the Socratic method of elenchus was a rational means of responding to the rhetoric of the agora and good material for the dialogues one could hear competing for attention at the Olympic Games. Socrates in a sense was certainly more sceptically critical than Aristotle, because his questioning had a specific goal of demonstrating that those who thought they knew something which upon examination proved to be “windeggs” needed to “examine” their opinions more closely. Aristotle, having learned valuable lessons from both Socrates and Plato was more positively critical and felt the need to develop a systematic philosophical position from which knowledge of the world and ourselves could be defended in terms of logical principles he specifically formulated. Elenchus, for example, was transformed in Aristotle by a holistic view of Philosophy which included the metalogical method of the syllogism that was clearly operating in accordance with the principle of non-contradiction(formalised as a principle of logic in Aristotle’s “Analytics”) and the principle of sufficient reason(embodied in his 4 causes or 4 types of explanations). It is worthwhile to consider the fact that insofar as Kant is relevant to this discussion his philosophy was considered “destructive” by Moses Mendelssohn because it laid waste to most of the metaphysics of the Middle Ages. Recall in this context what Socrates was attempting to do to the “windeggs” of the so-called wise men of Athens. Arendt comments on this fact in the following way:

“But Kant himself did not see the clearly destructive side of his enterprise. He did not understand that he had actually dismantled the whole machinery that had lasted, though often under attack, for centuries deep into the modern age. He thought, quite in line with the spirit of his time that the “loss affects only the monopoly of the schools, but by no means the interest of men” who will finally be rid of the “subtle ineffectual distinctions” that in any case have never succeeded in reaching the public mind or in exercising the slightest influence on its convictions”. I am reading to you from the two prefaces to the “Critique of Pure Reason” what are addressed to what Kant calls “the reading public”(P. 34)

The positive aspect of Kant’s critical philosophy is, of course, its emphasis on the Enlightenment message of freedom from the servitude of dogmatism and skepticism: its emphasis on the law of freedom that governs both action and belief in the society at large. Kant is often accused, though not by Arendt, of reducing rationality to the level of individual thinking, but this is misleading because Kant was very clear about the function of Reason to unite the community in its discourse about the world and themselves. Kant, we ought to remember, also insists that the activity of the understanding, namely the conceptualisation of the intuitions of sensibility in accordance with the categories of the understanding is primarily in the interests of communicating possible experience. Whether the communication occurs in the name of bios politikos or bios theoretikos is as immaterial for Kant as it was for Aristotle because the medium of communication is thought and thought has the same constitutive structure, obeys the same principles, whatever the context of its use.

Arendt, as we mentioned above, emphasises the “dismantling” of a long-standing system of thought in relation to Kant’s philosophy: a process which she also believes was completed by the French Revolution. How one conceptualises the Kantian contribution of the Enlightenment and its relation to the modern era is obviously no easy task but Kant must have believed, given his respect for the rationalism of both Plato and Aristotle, that he was in some sense continuing the tradition of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. He did, it is true, see himself as perhaps dismantling some of the more extreme analytical tendencies of the scholastic tradition which if anything in its turn, succeeded in dismantling much of the ethical and political core of Aristotelian Philosophy. In this sense his dismantling was as much a process of restoration as was an example of dismantling.

What happened immediately after Kant with the advent of the philosophy of Hegel and the ultra-practical utilitarianism of Marx who wished to dismantle most of the past history of theorising and thinking is, of course, a testament to the strength and weakness of the tradition Kant thought he was perpetuating(if one wishes to use centuries as one’s standard of measurement). Kant, when speaking of the progress of moral thinking thought in terms of a period of one hundred thousand years and one must wonder whether this frame of reference will eventually overshadow the dismantling activity of Hegel, Marx, and much Modern Analytical Philosophy that manifests itself on either side of the divide that runs between Continental and Analytical Philosophy. Arendt’s work straddles that divide.

Both the French and Russian Revolutions aimed at dismantling the influence of an economically dominant class and perhaps in this process they swept away more of the traditions of civilisation than they intended. Perhaps no one can say for sure when the frame of reference is centuries rather than millennia. Kant’s comment on the French Revolution is by now well known:

“This event(the Revolution) consists neither in momentous deeds nor misdeeds committed by men whereby what was great among men was made small and what was small was made great, nor in ancient splendid political structures which vanish as if by magic while others come forth in their place as if from the depths of the earth. No, nothing of the sort. It is simply the mode of thinking of the spectators which reveals itself publicly in this game of great transformations, and manifest such a general yet disinterested sympathy for the players on one side against those on the other, even at the risk that this partiality could become very disadvantageous. Owing to its generality, this mode of thinking demonstrates a character of the human race at large in its predisposition, a character which not only permits people to hope for progress toward the better but is already itself progress insofar as its capacity is sufficient for the present.”(“The Contest of the faculties, I Kant, Part 2 sections 6 and 7)

Kant is clearly distancing himself from the violence of the Revolution and fixating upon the attitude of the spectators who feel themselves to be shaking off the shackles of servitude and manifesting a moral predisposition which is somewhat surprising in the circumstances. Revolutions obviously, like Wars, have their uses in spite of the violence involved. There is here, however, no attempt to argue that if the end is good, then the means must also be good. Violence is for Kant categorically immoral. Kant is not in any doubt about that. The frame of reference of millennia suggests that this manifestation of individual freedom and rights might overcome all obstacles eventually. We can, of course, do what Kant could not and follow the sequence of events from the Revolution to the tyranny and warmongering of Napoleon, to the World wars, to the formation of the United Nations with its missions of Peace and Protection of Human Rights, to a Kingdom of Ends in the far distant future. The French Revolution manifested politically the moral desire for freedom in an event occurring before our disinterested eyes.

Arendt sees in Kant a clash between a principle of judging and a principle of acting but the issue may be more correctly described in terms of a clash of political and moral perspectives, a clash of prudential instrumental reasoning (used by revolutionary actors) with the categorical form of reasoning (used by the moral spectators). The instrumental politics of the French Revolution and the moral of the French Revolution are clearly different and even at odds with each other. The morality of this event seen through the eyes of disinterested spectators involves a vision of the future in which men are free to judge events in terms of their moral predispositions in a context governed by a principle of judging that is categorical. Man in this envisioned future is politically both the sovereign of this conceptualised Cosmopolitan world and its laws as well as a subject freely and willingly obeying its enlightened laws.

Arendt aestheticises Kant’s position and claims mysteriously that only the spectator is in a position to see the whole whilst the actor is constrained in his thinking in virtue of the fact that he is being forced to play a role in a play whose direction and outcome is unknown to him. The actor, moreover, according to Arendt, is dependent upon the judgment of his audience and may even be enslaved by this judgment if it is in terms of the more vulgar pleasures. Setting this fact aside, it is probably true that on the whole, the audience is in a better position to judge the direction and telos of the events of the play, but it is also true that they may never be in a position to know the value of the play the way in which a Shakespeare might. The audience, that is, might not be in a position to appreciate the fact that each scene and act has been carefully crafted to maximum moral effect. If this point is correct then it is the brilliant playwright that is the best representative of the aesthetic perspective of the bios politikos and not the audience as Arendt suggests. Perhaps a Kant sitting and watching a play by Shakespeare, may, in turn, transcend in his judgments the judgment of even a Shakespeare. Kant, that is, may have seen the political and moral events unfolding before his eyes as a series of events on a continuum stretching forward for millennia: a continuum sustained by a hope for a cosmopolitan kingdom of ends worthy of a final scene in a final act of the greatest play of all time written by the greatest playwright of all time. Such an eschatological vision is, of course not the end of History in the Hegelian sense but rather the beginning of human flourishing life as it ought to be lived, a life of dignity for all.

Even Kant is forced to appeal to the judgment of public opinion when his work does not receive the attention it deserves but he appeals not to aesthetic judgment based on the feeling of pleasure or displeasure but rather on philosophical judgment based on understanding and reasoning in which truth is set to work in accordance with cognitive principles. Kant was, of course, hoping that his work would achieve world-historical significance and perhaps in one sense it did just that but not in his lifetime and the fact that it was rapidly overwhelmed by the diametrically opposed philosophies of Hegel and Marx and Analytical Philosophy of Science, verifies the truth of Kant’s eschatological vision of a future lying millennia in the future.

Arendt’s aestheticising of Kant’s philosophy may well be in accordance with the cultural force Hegel identifies as “world spirit”. Arendt, however, does not acknowledge the intimate connection of the faculty of Judgment with the cognitive faculties of the understanding and reason, even in the context of aesthetic judgment, (the contexts of the aesthetic experience of the beautiful and the sublime). In purely aesthetic contexts the aesthetic judgment of the spectator is a relatively short term matter and probably cannot even be compared with the reliability and validity of the judgment of the Historian who views events through a looking glass that only darkly represents the meaning of events over centuries. Hegel pictures the Owl of Minerva taking off in such dark landscapes whilst Kant imagines the light of critical philosophy reaching forward one hundred thousand years.