Spirit

Abstract

Arendt’s debt to Jaspers for her non-metaphysical Kant can be seen in her Kant Lectures claim that imagination and spirit are the common roots of all human capacities. In this chapter, Josefson defends the plausibility of this reading by demonstrating how it is very close to the “two aspect” interpretation developed by Henry Allison. Allison explains that Kant’s transcendental concepts are actually “epistemic conditions” for normative claims about knowledge, morality, and aesthetics rather than metaphysical claims about ontology. The tenability of this reading, then, suggests that Arendt’s appropriation of Kant is revolutionary rather than either wrong or idiosyncratic. Josefson, further, explains how Kant’s spirit is the faculty that makes the freedom of the beautiful possible, and he shows the ambivalence in Arendt’s account between a democratic spirit that attends to particularity and an elitist spirit that is the faculty of genius.