Anyway, the sheer pleasure I take in art is only part of its fascination for me. I am also intrigued by the connections between aesthetic judgment, or taste, and moral and political judgment (for me these latter two are closely aligned: like John Dewey, I divide up judgments into private and public ones, and the latter are political). Hannah Arendt makes a move that never ceases to shock me, first because it's so radical as a way to think about Kantian thought, but second because it's so familiar: it's a classical move. (I want to specify "Roman," because the automatic connection might appear to be a Greek one, since "to kalon" means "good, noble, beautiful"; I do think it is a move associated more profoundly with Roman than Greek concerns, but that's a separate point, so I'll go with "classical.")
Arendt notes in her lecture series "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy" that Kant analyzed aesthetic experience in terms of judgment -- and only aesthetics, as opposed to morality, because "it seems to him that only in this field [aesthetics] do we judge without having general rules which are either demonstrably true or self-evident to go by." Then the kicker, in the next sentence: "If therefore I shall now use his results for the field of morality, I assume that the field of human intercourse and conduct and the phenomena we confront in it are somehow of the same nature."
How does Arendt justify her application of Kant's work on taste to moral judgment? Because she believes the fundamental element of the human condition is plurality. You are not I, I am not you, I am not the person down the hall, but we co-exist. And only in the case of aesthetic judgment, she points out, did Kant "consider men in the plural, as living in a community." It follows that it will be worthwhile to reflect on the experience of why we find a particular painting beautiful, because it turns out that this kind of judgment is a common-sense one, in that it occurs not strictly within the self alone, but in the imagined company of others, starting with the internal conversations we hold with ourselves. So with moral judgment. The people who refused to go along with the Nazis explained their choice as deriving not from any sense of moral law, but from their sense of intense internal disharmony at the prospect of giving in and going along. They had the ingrained habit of living with themselves, that is, they had the habit of judging and testing their judgments within themselves (and perhaps some friends or family members). When they found they faced acting in a way that they couldn't account for in the common-sense company of themselves, they had to resist.
The promise that her writing holds out is reflected, for me, in the best writing about paintings (and perhaps music, though I don't know that field at all). This writing draws my attention to the way the world (even in the form of abstract drips or blotches) presents itself to me, how I experience what I call "harmony" and "balance" and "inconcinnity" and "chaos." The experience of close looking drives me into myself and also to the person next to me in the gallery, whose reactions I'm curious about. It focuses me on the grain of the everyday, and from time to time, I feel deep down in my gut that I am seeing the everyday in a different way than before -- because of that Sanraedam, that Motherwell, that Bronzino. Am I better? No. More thoughtful? Yes. More open to the lived experience of the world? Yes. Alive to the judgment of others experiencing the same? Yes. More attuned to injustice? Well...perhaps.
Obviously the habit of aesthetic judgment as Arendt describes it isn't the whole picture (no pun intended). Hang out with a bunch of artists or art historians, it's no moral utopia. But I think of her reference to Cicero's comment that at the end of the day, put Protagoras against Plato, and he would rather be wrong with Plato, the question is, whom we wish to be together with: "our decisions about right and wrong will depend upon our choice of company." The problem is what to do with those people who'd rather have a beer with George W. -- or these days, a glass of milk with Rick Santorum.
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