Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

This talk introduces and investigates the concept of a “symbolic rationality” as an affectively-informed mode of cognition modeled on Kant’s conception of reflective judgment and his famous senses communis in his Critique of Judgment. This is a mode of judgment that includes reference to our feelings but in a surprisingly social or intersubjective ‘voice.’ The notion of an externally mediated but ‘genuinely’ individual symbolic rationality is meant to help us think about how we collectively work on, with, or through the excesses to and remains of our various distinct shared worlds: the worlds of ordinary common sense, commodity culture, and scientism. The paper argues that it is to works of art that we must look in order to encounter a cultural form systematically committed to making cultural contradictions palpable to a given ‘public,’ and even that what it is to be an arts ‘public’ is to become newly alive to those contradictions.