The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  Abundance and originality of ideas are less necessary to beauty than the accordance of the imagination in its freedom with the conformity to law of the understanding [which is called taste]. For all the abundance of the former produces ... in lawless freedom nothing but nonsense; on the other hand, the judgment is the faculty by which it is adjusted to the understanding.

  Taste, like the judgment in general, is the discipline (or training) of genius; it clips its wings ... gives guidance, brings clearness and order ... into the thoughts [of genius], it makes the ideas susceptible of being permanently and generally assented to, and capable of being followed by others, and of an ever progressing culture. If, then, in the conflict of these two properties in a product something must be sacrificed, it should be rather on the side of genius—without which nothing for judgment to judge would exist.

  But Kant says explicitly that "for beautiful art... imagination, intellect, spirit, and taste are required" and adds in a note that "the three former faculties are united by means of the fourth," that is, by taste—i.e., by judgment. Spirit, moreover, a special faculty apart from reason, intellect, and imagination, enables the genius to find an expression for the ideas "by means of which the subjective state of mind brought about by them ... can be communicated to others." Spirit, in other words, namely, that which inspires the genius and only him and which "no science can teach and no industry can learn," consists in expressing "the ineffable element in the state of mind [Gemütszustand]" which certain representations arouse in all of us but for which we have no words and could therefore, without the help of genius, not communicate them to each other; it is the proper task of genius to make this state of mind "generally communicable." The faculty that guides this communicability is taste, and taste or judgment is not the privilege of genius. 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 the spectators and not by the actors or the makers. 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 even be perceived. Or to put it another way, still in Kantian terms: The very originality of the artist (or the very novelty of the actor) depends on his making himself understood by those who are not artists (or actors). And while you can speak of genius in the singular because of his originality, you can never speak ... in the same way of the spectator: spectators exist only in the plural. The spectator is not involved in the act, but he is always involved with his fellow-spectators. He does not share the faculty of genius, originality, with the maker, or the faculty of novelty with the actor; the faculty that they have in common is the faculty of judgment.

  As far as making is concerned, this insight is at least as old as Latin (as distinguished from Greek) antiquity. We find it expressed for the first time in Cicero's On the Orator:

  For everybody discriminates [diiudicare], distinguishes between right and wrong in matters of art and proportion by some silent sense without any knowledge of art and proportion: and while they can do this in the case of pictures and statues [and] in other such works for whose understanding nature has given them less equipment, they display this discrimination much more in judging the rhythms and pronunciations of words, since these are rooted [infixa] in common senses and of such things nature has willed that no one should be altogether unable to sense and experience them [expertus].

  And he goes on to notice that it is truly marvellous and remarkable

  how little difference there is between the learned and the ignorant in judging while there is the greatest difference in making.

  Kant quite in the same vein remarks in his Anthropology that insanity consists in having lost this common sense which enables us to judge as spectators; and the opposite of it is a sensus privatus, a private sense which he also calls: "logical Eigensinn," implying that our logical faculty, the faculty which enables us to draw conclusions from premises, could indeed function without communication—except that then, namely, if insanity has caused the loss of common sense, it would lead to insane results precisely because it has separated itself from that experience which can be valid and validated only by the presence of others.

  The most surprising aspect of this business is that common sense, the faculty of judgment and of discriminating between right and wrong, should be based on the sense of taste. Of our five senses, three give us clearly objects of the external world and therefore are easily communicable. Sight, hearing, touching deal directly and, as it were, objectively, with objects; smell and taste give inner sensations which are entirely private and incommunicable; what I taste and what I smell cannot be expressed in words at all. They seem to be the private senses by definition. Moreover, the three objective senses have in common that they are capable of representation—to have something present which is absent; I can recall a building, a melody, the touch of velvet. This faculty is called in Kant: Imagination—of which neither taste nor smell are capable. On the other hand, they are quite clearly the discriminatory senses: You can withhold judgment from what you see and, though less easily, you can withhold judgment from what you hear or touch. But in the matters of taste or smell, the it-pleases or displeases me is immediate and overwhelming. And pleasure or displeasure again are entirely private. Why then should taste—not only with Kant but since Gracian—be elevated to and become the vehicle of the mental faculty of judgment? And judgment in turn, that is, judgment that is not simply cognitive and residing on the senses which give us the objects which we have in common with all living things that have the same sensual equipment, but judgment between right and wrong, why should it be based on this private sense? Is it not true that about matters of taste we can so little communicate that we cannot even dispute about them—de gustibus non disputandum est?

  ***

  ...We mentioned that taste and smell are the most private of the senses, that is, those senses where not an object but a sensation is sensed, where this sensation is not object-bound and cannot be recollected. You may recognize the smell of a rose or the taste of a dish if you sense it again, but you cannot have it present as you can have present any sight you ever saw or any melody you heard....At the same time, we saw why taste rather than any of the other senses, became the vehicle for judgment; only taste and smell are discriminatory in their very nature and only these senses relate to the particular qua particular: all objects given to the objective senses share their properties with other objects; they are not unique. Moreover, the it-pleases or displeases me is overwhelmingly present in taste and smell. It is immediate, nonmediated by any thought or reflection.... And the it-pleases or displeases is almost identical with an it-agrees or disagrees with me. The point of the matter is: I am directly affected. For this very reason, there can be no dispute about right or wrong here.... No argument can persuade me to like oysters if I do not like them. In other words, the disturbing thing about matters of taste is that they are not communicable.

  The solution of these riddles can be indicated by the names of two other faculties—imagination and common sense. 1) Imagination ... transforms an object into something with which I do not have to be directly confronted but which in some sense I have internalized, so that I now can be affected by it as though it were given to me by a nonobjective sense. Kant says: 'That is beautiful which pleases in the mere act of judging it." That is: It is not important whether or not it pleases in perception; what pleases merely in perception is gratifying but not beautiful. It pleases in representation: The imagination has prepared it so that I now can reflect on it: "the operation of reflection." Only what touches, affects, you in representation, when you can no longer be affected by immediate presence—uninvolved as the spectator is uninvolved in the actual doings during the French Revolution—can then be judged to be right or wrong, important or irrelevant, beautiful or ugly or something in-between. You
then call it judgment and no longer taste because, though it still affects you like a matter of taste, you have now, by means of representation, established the proper distance, the remoteness or unin-volvedness or disinterestedness requisite for approbation and disapprobation, or for evaluating something at its proper worth. By removing the object, you have established the condition for impartiality.

  And 2) common sense: Kant was very early aware that there was something non-subjective in what seems to be the most private and subjective sense; this awareness is expressed as follows: There is the fact that matters of taste, "the beautiful, interests only in society. ...A man abandoned by himself on a desert island would adorn neither his hut nor his person.... [Man] is not contented with an object if he cannot feel satisfaction in it in common with others," whereas we despise ourselves when we cheat at play, but are ashamed only when we get caught. Or: "In matters of taste we must renounce ourselves in favor of others" or in order to please others (Wir müssen uns gleichsam anderen zu gefallen entsagen). Finally, and most radically: In Taste egoism is overcome," we are considerate in the original meaning of the word. We must overcome our special subjective conditions for the sake of others. In other words, the non-subjective element in the non-objective senses is intersubjectivity. (You must be alone in order to think; you need company to enjoy a meal.)

  Judgment, and especially judgments of taste, always reflect upon others and ... take their possible judgments into account. This is necessary because I am human and cannot live outside the company of men.... The basic other-directedness of judgment and taste seems to stand in the greatest possible opposition to the very nature, the absolutely idiosyncratic nature of the sense itself. Hence, we may be tempted to conclude that the faculty of judgment is wrongly derived from this sense. Kant, being very aware of all the implications of this derivation, remains convinced that it is a correct one. And the most plausible phenomenon in his favor is his observation, entirely correct, that the true opposite to the Beautiful is not the Ugly but "that which excites disgust." And do not forget that Kant originally planned to write a Critique of Moral Taste....

  ...The operation of the imagination: you judge objects that are no longer present ... and no longer affect you directly. Yet while the object is removed from your outward senses, it now becomes an object for your inward senses. When you represent something to you that is absent, you close as it were those senses by which objects in their objectivity are given to you. The sense of taste is a sense in which it is as though you sense yourself, like an inner sense.... This operation of imagination prepares the object for "the operation of reflection." And this operation of reflection is the actual activity of judging something.

  ...By closing your eyes you become an impartial, not directly affected, spectator of visible things. The blind poet. Also: By making what your external senses perceived an object for your inner sense, you compress and condense the manifold of the sensually given, you are in a position to "see" by the eyes of your mind, i.e., to see the whole that gives meaning to particulars....

  The question that now arises is: What are the standards of the operation of reflection?...It [the inner sense] is called taste because, like taste, it chooses. But this choice itself is once more subject to another choice: You can approve or disapprove of the very fact of pleasing, it is subject to "approbation or disapprobation." Kant gives examples: "The joy of a needy but well-meaning man at becoming the heir of an affectionate but penurious father"; or, conversely, "a deep grief may satisfy the person experiencing it (the sorrow of a widow at the death of her excellent husband; or ... a gratification can in addition please (as in the sciences that we pursue); or a grief (e.g., hatred, envy, revenge) can moreover displease." All these approbations and disapprobations are after-thoughts; while you are doing scientific research you may be vaguely aware that you are happy doing it, but only in reflecting on it later ... will you be able to have this additional "pleasure"—of approving it. In this additional pleasure, it is no longer the object that pleases but that we judge it pleasing: If you relate this to the whole of nature or the world, you can say: We are pleased that the world of nature pleases us. The very act of approbation pleases, the very act of disapprobation displeases. Hence the question: How do you choose between approbation and disapprobation? One criterion you may guess if you consider the examples: the criterion is communicability or publicness. You will not be over-eager to announce your joy at the death of your father or your feelings of hatred and envy; you will on the other hand have no compunctions to tell that you enjoy doing scientific work and you will not hide your grief at the death of an excellent husband.

  The criterion is communicability, and the standard of deciding about it is Common Sense.

  On the Communicability of a Sensation.

  It is true that the sensation of the senses is "generally communicable because we can assume that everyone has senses like our own. But this cannot be presupposed of any single sensation." These sensations are private, also no judgment is involved: we are merely passive, we react, we are not spontaneous as we are when we at will imagine something or reflect on it.

  At the opposite pole we find moral judgments: these, according to Kant, are necessary; they are dictated by practical reason ... even if they could not [be communicated] they would remain valid.

  We have, third, judgments or pleasure in the beautiful: "this pleasure accompanies the ordinary apprehension [Auf-fassung, not perception] of an object by the imagination ... by means of a procedure of the judgment which it must also exercise on behalf of the commonest experience." Some such judgment is in every experience we have with the world. This judgment is based on "that common and sound intellect [gemeiner and gesunder Verstand] which we have to presuppose in everyone." How does this "common sense" distinguish itself from the other senses which we also have in common and which nevertheless do not guarantee agreement of sensations?

  Taste as a Kind of Sensus Communis.

  The term is changed. The one, common sense, meant a sense like our other senses—the same for everybody in his very privacy. By using the Latin term, Kant indicates that he means something different: He means an extra sense—like an extra mental capability (the German: Menschenverstand)—which fits us into a community. The "common understanding of men ... is the very least to be expected from anyone claiming the name of man."...

  The sensus communis is the specifically human sense because communication, i.e., speech, depends on it.... "The only general symptom of insanity is the loss of the sensus communis and the logical stubbornness in insisting on one's own (sensus privatus)...."

  Under the sensus communis we must include the idea of a sense common to all, i.e. of a faculty of judgment which, in its reflection, takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of all other men in thought, in order, as it were, to compare its judgment with the collective reason of humanity.... This is done by comparing our judgment with the possible rather than the actual judgment of others, and by putting ourselves in the place of any other man, by abstracting from the limitations which contingently attach to our own judgment.... Now this operation of reflection seems perhaps too artificial to be attributed to the faculty called common sense, but it only appears so when expressed in abstract formulae. In itself there is nothing more natural than to abstract from charm or emotion if we are seeking a judgment that is to serve as a universal rule.

  After this follow the maxims of this sensus communis: To think for oneself (the maxim of enlightenment); to put ourselves in thought in the place of everyone else (the maxim of the enlarged mentality); and the maxim of consistency (to be in agreement with oneself, mit sich selbst einstimmig denken).

  These are not matters of cognition; truth compels you, you do not need any "maxims." Maxims apply and are needed only for matter of opinions and in judgments. And just as in moral matters your maxim of conduct testifies to the quality of your Will, so the maxims of judgment testify to your "turn of thought" (Denkungsart) in the worldly m
atters which are ruled by the community sense.

  However small may be the area or the degree to which a mans natural gifts reach, yet it indicates a man of enlarged thought if he disregards the subjective private conditions of his own judgment, by which so many others are confined, and reflects upon it from a general standpoint (which he can only determine by placing himself at the standpoint of others).

  ...Taste is this "community sense" (gemeinschaftlicher Sinn) and sense means here "the effect of a reflection upon the mind." This reflection affects me as though it were a sensation.... "We could even define taste as the faculty of judging of that which makes generally communicable, without the mediation of a concept, our feeling [like sensation] in a given representation [not perception]."