QuestionsIs beauty in the eye of the beholder?The enlarged mentality: judging the beautiful is thinking in the place of everyone else
Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?Subjective yet universal

The enlarged mentality: judging the beautiful is thinking in the place of everyone else

The enlarged mentality; judging with Kant; the sensus communis

Hannah Arendt 1906 · 1975Political philosopher born in Germany, exiled to the United States: she covers the Eichmann trial and speaks of the 'banality of evil', born of a lack of thought.
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What it claims

Judging the beautiful is a subjective act that nevertheless claims to hold for all: it addresses a common world, and the agreement it asks for is sought by persuading, not by proving.

Why

To judge the beautiful is to think in the place of others: one cannot prove the judgment, only seek their agreement.

The same idea through history
Immanuel Kant1790In the Critique of Judgment (§ 40), Kant defines taste as a kind of common sense and gives three maxims of thought, the second of which is to think by putting oneself in the place of everyone else. This is the text Arendt comments on.Friedrich Schiller1795Schiller also makes the beautiful a place where man addresses what all have in common, but through the double nature of man more than through the exchange of standpoints.
Hannah Arendt1970The version presented here. Arendt makes Kant's "enlarged mentality" the heart of judgment, and judgment a political faculty: that of thinking in public, taking others into account. The lectures were published after her death, in 1982.
In short

"The enlarged mentality: judging the beautiful is thinking in the place of everyone else" is an argument by Hannah Arendt (Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (lectures of 1970, published 1982), reading Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 40, 1970) on the question "Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?" (answer: subjective yet universal). Its claim: Judging the beautiful is a subjective act that nevertheless claims to hold for all: it addresses a common world, and the agreement it asks for is sought by persuading, not by proving. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P6). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (lectures of 1970, published 1982), reading Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 40
Valid with an implicit premise

When I say of a painting that it is beautiful, I am not saying only that it pleases me, and I do not claim to prove it like a theorem. For Arendt, rereading Kant's Critique of Judgment, what makes such a judgment valid is the way it is formed: by thinking in the place of others, not only by consulting my inclinations. Kant calls it "enlarged" thought. Arendt calls it the enlarged mentality: an imagination that visits other standpoints. The more of them I can make present in my mind, the more valid my judgment. The beautiful is neither a private matter nor an imposed truth: it is a matter of the common world, where one can only seek the agreement of others.

P1The judgment of taste is that of a faculty which, in its reflection, takes account in thought of the way all other men represent things. It does so by putting itself in the place of any other man, abstracting from the limitations which contingently attach to its own judgment.
P2This is done by comparing our judgment not with the actual judgments of others, but with their possible ones. The second maxim of common human understanding is: to put ourselves in thought in the place of everyone else. Kant calls it the maxim of enlarged thought.
P3For Arendt, this enlarged thought is a work of imagination, not of compassion or of counting opinions: I make the standpoints of absent people exist in me. The more of them I can make exist, the more valid my judgment.
P4Taste is the faculty of judging of that which makes our feeling in a given representation universally communicable, without the mediation of a concept.
P5The validity thus obtained is neither objective (it compels no one by a proof) nor private. Arendt calls it "exemplary": it holds for those who judge in the same world, and can only solicit the agreement of others, never impose it.
P6 · implicit premiseA judgment formed by thinking in the place of others, which addresses them without concept or proof, is neither a mere private taste nor knowledge of a property of the object: it is the kind of validity that suits the judgment about the beautiful.
So judging the beautiful is a subjective act that nevertheless claims to hold for all: it addresses a common world, and the agreement it asks for is sought by persuading, not by proving.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P6, the computer finds a case where a judgment is formed by thinking of others, is communicable without a concept, has "exemplary" validity, and yet remains a mere preference: nothing says that this form of validity is that of beauty.
Without the hidden premise P6, the first five premises describe how one judges and what kind of validity one obtains. One must add that this validity is the one that suits the beautiful. This is the point on which Arendt follows Kant, and which her critics dispute: can the enlarged mentality really leave its own limits?
Analogy. A translator choosing a word hesitates among several readers: one who does not know the text, one who loves it, one in a hurry. He has no rule to decide, but he does not write at random either: he looks for the word these readers could accept. Arendt says the judgment of taste works in this way.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Pierre Bourdieu 1979 · attacks premise 2

Bourdieu holds that Kant's analysis of the judgment of taste is the universalisation of the dispositions of a particular social and economic condition. The "others" one thinks of while judging are those of one's own background, who received the same education. The enlarged mentality would then be an in-group that takes itself for humanity.

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1979, after the author's death (1975).
The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: Arendt dies in 1975, four years before Distinction. Her reading insists, more than Kant's, on the real plurality of standpoints and on the fact that I must represent those which are not mine, which answers in part. It remains to be seen whether one can represent standpoints one has never occupied.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Arendt: judging well means making room for standpoints that are not one's own. Bourdieu: these standpoints are those of one background and the enlarged mentality hides it. The basic disagreement remains: can imagination leave its social condition?
H
Hans-Georg Gadamer 1960 · attacks the conclusion

Gadamer reproaches Kant with having emptied the "common sense" of its content: in the humanist tradition (Vico, Shaftesbury) it meant the sense of the community, of the common good. In Kant it becomes a subjective principle of taste. Aesthetics then becomes a matter of pleasure with no claim to say what is true, and judgment about art loses what the experience of art teaches us.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Arendt in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: Arendt did not answer Gadamer on this point. On the contrary, reading Kant she insists on the political and communal dimension of common sense, which agrees with Gadamer's criticism on one point: she does not reduce it to a private pleasure. The disagreement remains about the place of truth in the experience of art.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Gadamer: Kant cut taste off from truth and from community. Arendt: the judgment of taste is the model of a judgment addressed to a community. The basic disagreement remains: does beauty call for a judgment of truth, or for a shared judgment?
Voltaire 1764 · attacks premise 1

Voltaire tells how a tragedy that a philosopher found beautiful was played in England in a perfect translation: it made all the spectators yawn. If one compares one's judgment with those of others, there is no agreement to find: which "others" must one think of?

a defender replies
see the argument
Immanuel Kant defender of the argument · 1790 · Kant, the objection foreseen
Kant specifies that the judgment of taste does not say that everyone will agree with us, but that he ought to. The demand does not come from an observed agreement: a factual disagreement therefore does not refute it.
The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: this answer shifts the question. Voltaire shows factual disagreements; Kant says the demand does not depend on agreement. It remains to be seen what justifies the demand, and this is where Kant speaks of an "idea" of common sense, which Arendt takes up as an imagination of the standpoint of everyone.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Voltaire: actual judgments differ from one country to another. Kant and Arendt: the judgment of taste does not assert an actual agreement, it demands it by turning to others. The basic disagreement remains: does what is demanded have authority if it cannot be obtained?