Doing Aesthetics with Arendt

Doing Ae hetics wi Arendt

Cecilia Sjรถholm

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be seen in a number of ways. Things, not only things in the material sense of objects but also “things”—that is, problems, concepts, and phenomena—can be scrutinized from a variety of positions and perspectives. The title of this book refers to an aesthetics after Hannah Arendt. She never wrote on aesthetics. But she engaged in problems of art and aesthetic theory—reflecting on sensibility, judgment, and works of art in a manner that is both radical and consistent.

The purpose of Doing Aesthetics with Arendt: How to See Things is double: first, to trace a coherent line in Arendt’s considerations of art and aesthetics in and through the scattered remarks on aesthetic experience and works of art in her published works, notes, and letters, and second, to make her thoughts relevant for us today. This includes a reflection on how her aesthetics may inform and alter our attitude toward philosophical questioning, for instance, on the political, agency, freedom, the law, prejudice, and so on. Together, these purposes form an overall question: If Arendt had produced an aesthetic theory, what would it have looked like? The question is inspired by Arendt herself. She knew well that Kant’s Critique of Judgment was not a book on politics, yet she decided to read it as Kant’s unfinished “politics.” I have made use of that gesture. I know well that Arendt’s reading of Kant was not an aesthetics. Yet I have decided to read it as an unfinished aesthetic theory. Such a reading may appear idiosyncratic.

But it follows suggestions present in Arendt’s own work.

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The research on Arendt’s work is extensive, particularly in the field of political and social philosophy. There is less written on Arendt and aesthetics, and a comprehensive study on this issue is lacking altogether. Attention has been given to Arendt and literature, which focuses on her correspondence with authors (e.g., Benjamin, Broch, Johnson, and McCarthy). 1 Arendt’s importance for the arts has been noticed with regard to her notion of public space.2 The role of the spectator has been considered, in particular in relation to Greek drama.3 Arendt’s aesthetic interests have been noted in the field of political philosophy,4 not least with regard to judgment5 and the role of political imagination.6 However, Arendt’s interest in the senses and aesthetic sensibility is underresearched, not least with regard to their prepolitical implications; her political ontology rests on a notion of plurality that cannot be conceived in the abstract. The political is seen, heard, felt, and apprehended through a sensible form of being, producing judgment and imagination as functions of sensibility. Aesthetic sensibility, therefore, underlies all forms of political reflection, producing possibilities as well as constraints. The role of the work of art for Arendt’s ideas has also been neglected, although it may contribute not only to Arendt scholarship but also to theories of art in general and to political philosophy. These are the main contributions to what we may construe as an Arendtian aesthetics.

Where, one might ask, is the work of art in her writings? Disregarding a few paragraphs on Homo faber in The Human Condition, all in all there is very little description of visual objects in Arendt’s work. Questions of aesthetics, however, cannot be reduced to art. We experience aesthetic phenomena in our everyday lives, in nature, in the sciences, and so on.

Following Kant, we may talk about all those phenomena that appeal to our judgment as belonging to the field of aesthetic inquiry. Judgment intrinsically belongs to the field of aesthetics. We experience aesthetic phenomena as beautiful, ugly, pleasurable, or sublime. It is certain that works of art offer good examples of how to frame aesthetic inquiries.

Arendt was an avid reader, and she discusses literature with great enthusiasm. She mentions other forms of art less often. It would appear, then, as if she has nothing to say about visual art, cinema, or music. As one reads her reflections on art and aesthetics, however, it becomes clear that, for her, any kind of categorization of forms of art and any kind of specificity that one may want to give to various forms of aesthetic experience are less interesting than their common features. Arendt’s aesthetics has wider

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significance than an exploration of works of a certain medium. She is concerned with the way in which aesthetics teaches us how to see things—not in terms of holding an opinion but rather in terms of how we become concerned and engaged with the world.

We have become so used to considering Arendt as a political thinker that we have forgotten the aesthetic aspects of her philosophy. We also have become so used to reading her lectures on Kant through a political lens that we have forgotten their aesthetic implications. Going through her notebooks, however, we find reflections on aesthetics and sensibility that were never fully elaborated in her published work. There is an aesthetics hidden in Arendt’s writings. It can be seen in conjunction with the phenomenology of thought in The Life of the Mind. Heterogeneous and differentiated, thought takes on a multiplicity of forms and functions—one of which is that of art. In lecture notes, notebooks, and letters, and in The Life of the Mind, Arendt elaborates the question of appearance in conjunction with aesthetic sensibility, exploring the sentient aspects of plurality and the contextual nature of human perception.

There are four features in her general inquiries into the particular nature of art and aesthetics that stand out. They are produced out of certain presumptions, which have to do with an ontology of plurality and a valorization of all human activity with regard to plurality. The first general feature has to do with a way of appearing: the most distinctive feature of art is that it belongs to public space. Works of art do not appear as isolated phenomena; they are inserted in a great variety of appearances. Second, the work of art is characterized through a quality of permanence. Art conditions human life through simple endurance—it precedes and follows singular generations. Permanence also lends it a quality of resistance against capitalist forces of commodification. Third, action is conditioned by a quality in our sensible apprehension of the world that we talk about in terms of “realness.” Art, in general, does not appear as “real” but contributes to judgment of what is. Narrative helps weave the web that we experience as real. The weight given to narrative stands out along with the capacity to weave a world. Narrative cannot be dissociated from aesthetic sensibility; it structures perception. Fourth, the question is not what art is but what it does. Art holds an important symbolic position intrinsically intertwined with agency. In The Life of the Mind, Arendt’s critique of Heidegger’s philosophy of Being makes a point of this: Heidegger is not only being

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uninterested in action; he fails to account for creativity and art. But art’s agency is conceived in alternate ways. There is a tension between the way the work of art is considered in The Human Condition and in articles such as “The Crisis in Culture” and “Culture and Politics” and the comments in her lesser known notebooks, which read more with The Life of the Mind, her last published great work. In the earlier published works, the question of art is an auxiliary to the theory of action.

The first chapter of this book expounds on the first dimension of Arendt’s aesthetics, what it means that art belongs to public space. The stress on public space offers a challenge to the metaphysical tradition of aesthetics in that it brackets the question of Being, focusing entirely on appearance.

Plurality does not merely imply that things can be seen in a number of ways in the sense that it advocates a kind of anthropological perspectivism. Plurality has ontological status, and the theory of sense-perception derives from that ontology, undoing the need to identify viewpoints from particular subjects, however different they may be. Things appear because the manifold is given—this means that any attack on the manifold is an attack on perception. What Arendt calls the public sphere is a fundament to appearances of aesthetic as well as political significance. The public sphere manifests freedom as a function of plurality. The possibilities of public space also were explored in the avant-garde art of the 1960s and 1970s, a fact that made Arendt’s aesthetics resonate with the contemporary art scene, though perhaps unwittingly.

The second dimension of an Arendtian aesthetics, the power of an object of art to remain, will be discussed in the second chapter. Works of art coexist with human life. When objects are ruined, so are the lives of people. This is a totalitarian and colonial move; totalitarianism as well as colonialism targeted not only human expressions of culture but also aesthetic and cultural objects. Arendt took an active part in attempting to restore the cultural treasures of the German Jewish communities after the war. The experience made it quite clear that the extinction of cultural objects is intrinsically linked to the persecution of a people. Through this fact, we must learn to understand how cultural objects and artifacts condition not only our culture but also our lives. Art is a thought-thing, the value of which extends well beyond its material duration. For this reason, Arendt also became wary of the distorting influence of capitalism.

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With Arendt, we may argue for a notion of the work of art that resists commodification; its objecthood underscores communal values rather than fetishistic tendencies. Arendt argues in “The Crisis in Culture” that Europe and America must rediscover and restore their objects. Such remarks are completely in line with her aesthetics. The work of art holds an extraordinary place in the contemporary world, given that it conditions an open horizon in which action is made possible. It lines our finite horizon with a continuity that reaches beyond the culture of consumerism that invades both psychic and public spaces. Constitutive of a world, material and immaterial, sensible and intelligent, transcendent and immanent, the work of art appears to occupy a crucial place in Arendt’s philosophy.

The third chapter, in turn, explores the aesthetic dimension of realness, a feature of Arendtian aesthetics that has a direct political implication.

The chapter follows up on the discussion of public space and develops the theme of plurality through the notion of judgment. As already mentioned, Arendt used Kant’s Critique of Judgment to elaborate a politics that Kant himself never wrote. It is less known that in her readings of Kant she elaborated a possible aesthetics, becoming deeply involved in questions of sensibility and in reflections on the five senses. In other words, Arendt’s reading of Critique of Judgment gives hints of an aesthetics that she never completed. Here I offer an aesthetic interpretation of Arendt’s notion of judging, in which judging according to sensus communis does not mean agreeing on a common theme or solution but rather striving toward a sense of realness. Such sharing can only be achieved through a certain readiness to be impinged on with regards to sense-perception; the question of judgment is intertwined with that of how we see things.

To many, Arendt, who preceded the turn of critical theory toward psychoanalysis and poststructuralism, may appear old-fashioned, promoting a view of the world as coherent and meaningful. Arendt’s critics, such as Chantal Mouffe, have deplored a lack of antagonism in her worldview.

However, the fragmentation of the world is not a fact to belie or hide; it is a given, a factuality. It takes an extraordinary effort, on the part of individual and the community, to construct and maintain a sense of realness. Art and aesthetic judgment contribute to that effort.

The two final chapters examine Arendt’s encounter with particular works of art, looking in particular at the political implications they hold for her.

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The fourth chapter discusses Arendt’s notion of tragedy. Tragedy shows how different kinds of law shape different forms of lives. Arendt’s reading of tragedy offers a perspective on state foundation that further enhances her ideas of our political horizon as populated and embedded. Tragedy offers a key to Arendt’s understanding of exile and colonization, and her reading of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus is of particular interest here. The fifth chapter, in turn, takes up Arendt’s comments on Charlie Chaplin and discusses questions of identification and marginalization, anti-Semitism, and modernity in view of Chaplin’s cinematic art. Here, Arendt’s remarks can be considered in the light of the Frankfurt School and other philosophers working in the tradition of critical theory: anti-Semitism is a symptom that cannot be read in isolation from class struggle, racism, and colonialism.

It must be seen in conjunction, also, with a contemporary rightslessness that informs not only political but also aesthetic forms of struggle.

Some of the material in this book—for instance, the chapters on tragedy, Chaplin, and the work of art—has been published in other forms. However, even this material has been rewritten. I would like to thank the Baltic Sea Foundation for having offered support for the completion of this book, as well as Vitterhetsakademien, Wenner-Grens Stiftelse, and DAAD. The philosophy department at the Humboldt University of Berlin invited me as a visiting fellow, which allowed me to finalize this book, and my own institution, Södertörn University, granted me leave. The Hannah Arendt– Zentrum at Oldenburg University also offered help in my research.

I would not have been able to finalize this manuscript without the support of family, friends, and colleagues. I would like to extend my gratitude, in particular, to Ariella Azoulay, Ulrika Björk, Oliver Bruns, Marcia Cavalcante Schuback, Yat Friedman Rahel Jaeggi, Anders Johansson, Bernard Flynn, Johan Hartle, Christoph Menke, Fredrika Spindler, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, and Eva Ziarek. Many more would have deserved a mention here, and none are forgotten—they are all part of this book.