Hannah Arendt’s Aesthetic Politics
Jim Josefson, Professor of Political Science at Bridgewater College, presents his new book, Hannah Arendt’s Aesthetic Politics: Freedom and the Beautiful (Palgrave, 2019). According to Josefson, Arendt’s aesthetic politics addresses our current crisis of public reason, a situation in which our demand for a moral and rational politics has made it hard for us to move, to change our positions, to visit places and perspectives that are not our own and to embrace reality. Josefson argues that Arendt’s addresses this crisis by recognizing what moves us, our passion for beauty, our love of the world, and the moment when we transcend from perceiving and knowing to delighting and wondering. The resulting public sphere is no longer an empty and exposed space encompassed by legal boundaries; instead, a common thing, a res publica, creates public space, which is just whatever an individual is able to aesthetically see and then make a public concern. In this talk, Josefson will explicate this aesthetic capacity (the freedom of the beautiful), trace it to the influence of Karl Jaspers’s innovative phenomenological reading of Kant, and discuss how it challenges alternative readings of Arendt’s theory of judgment. 