Aesthetic judgment as model of phronesis

Albrecht Wellmer’s critic to Hannah Arendt

Abstract

The intuition of the German thinker Hannah Arendt about Kant’s conception of “aesthetic judgment” provides us an incomparable model to understand the human action and interaction in its multiple fields, particularly in political life. Arendt says that the best way to find out what Kant thought about political philosophy consists in the return to his Critic of Aesthetic Judgment, where having discussed the production of art related to the taste that judges them and decides about them, facing an analogous problem. According to the arendtiant viewpoint it will be consider the critic that makes Albrecht Wellmer, specifying the dispute between a “subjective” conception and a “discursive” conception of the faculty of judgment. This is to perceive that Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment still keeps relations and shades that could help us to go out from those comparisons and rethink the human capacity of judgment in all its extent and depth, penetrating into its consequences for a redefinition of the being of thinking and the irreducible qualities of human praxis.