Crisi della cultura e valorizzazione del Giudizio estetico-politico in Hannah Arendt

In this article I take into examination Hannah Arendt\u2019s original and influential \u201cappropriation\u201d of Immanuel Kant\u2019s Critique of the Power of Judgment, providing both a reconstruction and a critical interpretation of it. In the first section I basically contextualize Arendt\u2019s interest in this topic by showing that it is connected to her more general concern with the wider and more comprehensive question of the crisis of Western civilization. Then, in the second and third sections of my article, I offer an overview of Arendt\u2019s conception of the crisis in culture and politics in the present age, and explain how this gradually led her to develop an original interpretation of Kant\u2019s concept of Aesthetic Judgment in terms of a new and somehow unprecedented (i.e. unthought, never conceived of before) form of Political Judgment. The fourth section is dedicated to a brief excursus on Kant\u2019s own treatment of the concept of Urteilskraft in some of his main works (first and third Critiques, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View) and some of his letters, in order to show that this concept for Kant has a broader and more complex meaning than one is sometimes used to think. Finally, in the fifth section I first focus on a few problematic aspects of Arendt\u2019s \u201ccreative\u201d, i.e. sometimes philologically inadequate, use of Kant\u2019s concept of Aesthetic Judgment understood as a kind of Political Judgment, but then add that from a strictly philosophical point of view this interpretation has proved to be a very stimulating and enriching one, as testified by the fact that in the last decades it has produced a veritable Wirkungsgeschichte and has helped to develop the so-called \u201cParadigm of Judgment\u201d in ethics and political philosophy