Jim Josefson has written a well-argued and compelling book that synthesizes an immense amount of Hannah Arendt’s work to present a comprehensive account of her thought that should be of interest to philosophers, political theorists, and phenomenologists of various stripes. If I might put the basic claim of the book simply and compactly, I would say that Josefson prioritizes the “freedom of the beautiful” as a central animating category for Arendt’s project. I can say right away that I am deeply sympathetic to such an approach. I might be even more direct and bold and say that in its formal qualities, I am largely in agreement with Josefson. I think he gets at the formal mechanics of how the various elements of Arendt’s thought should hang together, and I think his reading indeed offers the many benefits he outlines throughout his book.

With that said, though, I nonetheless had a peculiar experience reading Josefson’s book: it was as if someone had drawn up the right plans for an architectural project but that their reasons for drafting those plans were different than mine. What I want to do in this response is to make clear why this feeling of the experience of difference is significant for how we ought to understand Arendt’s work. To be even more explicit, my claim will be that Josefson’s approach—to get at the heart of Arendt’s innermost concerns—requires a sort of axial turn, where the formal properties of the account stay the same, but where it is inflected and oriented in a crucially different way.

Early on Josefson declares that “the aim of this book is to reveal the revolutionary nature of . . . [the] move [from philosophy to phenomenology] and the conditions for its possibility, nothing more nor less than the conditions for the possibility of human freedom” (7). This is brought to fruition, in my estimation, in the third chapter, on the beautiful, with the preceding chapters setting the ground and the following chapters filling in the details. For this reason, my remarks will revolve chiefly around this third chapter.

Josefson uses Karl Jaspers’s notion of the Encompassing (Das Umgreifende)1 to make clearer Arendt’s complex, phenomenological notion of world. One way in which Josefson articulates this use is as follows:

For the return to the world (aka repetition) and the tangible worldly reality of experience is a return to Being in the sense of Jasper’s Encompassing rather than a return to any “home” that involves crossing a border between alien territories. This return . . . cannot be expressed except in terms that tend to sound (hopefully, only at first) absurd. The return is not a return to any specific thing but a kind of constant returning to the phenomena. It makes manifest something indeterminate (reality, freedom, goodness, a principle) only by making manifest something determinate, the ineffable particular and concrete thing or deed (88–89).

For Arendt, as for Jaspers, there is something that cannot be captured merely in the relationship between subject and object and so cannot be given as a totality or whole. For Jaspers and for Arendt, there are plural ways or modes in which subject and object are given, and the Encompassing in such a case cannot ever be reduced simply to any single means of givenness. By my lights, this element of plurality is the central locus of comparison between Arendt and Jaspers. I take it that Josefson agrees (see especially his comments on 93ff.).

Where do the differences between Jaspers and Arendt lie then? Here’s how Josefson broaches the subject: “From Arendt’s perspective, Jaspers’s formulation maintains the last vestige of Platonic metaphysics, the deprecation of the world as mere semblance, for Jaspers writes as if the truth of Being is offstage while Being merely makes continual appearances from out of the clown-car of the Encompassing” (93). Josefson qualifies this statement almost immediately, however, and notes that: “I am not convinced this is a big difference so much as evidence of Arendt’s ability to come up with language that is slightly more adept at moving outside of our epistemological discourse to one that is better at valuing, and thereby saving, the phenomena” (93).

This is the point at which I want to press on Josefson’s account. By my lights, there is an important difference between Jaspers and Arendt and it has much more to do with what they take to be the significance of a formal account about how things are given rather than with anything having to do with Being, phenomena, or anything else in such a—I am tempted to say—philosophical (or epistemological) dimension. Here is how Arendt frames the issue in a 1954 lecture delivered to the American Political Science Association titled “Concern with Politics in Recent European Thought.”2 First, she praises Jaspers for the way in which he prioritizes plurality in this context, noting that:

Jaspers, as far as I know, is the only philosopher who ever protested against solitude, to whom solitude appears “pernicious,” and who even wants to examine “every thought, every experience, every subject” as to “what they signify for communication. Are they of a kind that may help or of a kind that will prevent communication?” Philosophy here becomes the mediator between many truths, not because it holds the one truth valid for all men, but because only in reasoned communication can what each man believes in his isolation from all others become humanly and actually true.3

As we can see here, Jaspers’s thought, with its stress on multiplicity, hardly struck Arendt as any sort of Platonism. Arendt instead locates the “problem” with Jaspers’s thought elsewhere. She notes that “it seems rather obvious that ‘communication’—the term as well as the underlying experience—has its root not in the public political sphere, but in the personal encounter of I and Thou.”4 For this reason, Jaspers’s philosophy evinces the same limitations that have “plagued political philosophy throughout its history,” namely that “it lies in the nature of philosophy to deal with man in the singular, whereas politics could not even be conceived of if men did not exist in the plural.”5

What’s missing from Jaspers’s account ought to be understood in both ethical and ontological terms, and I think this is also the inflection that is missing from Josefson’s own account: the plurality of human beings. This dimension is—I think—implied in both Arendt’s account and Josefson’s, but Arendt makes it much more central. Again, I don’t think Josefson’s account argues against these claims (quite the contrary), but it does seem to me to miss some opportunities to think more deeply about this ethical dimension.

To get at what I am getting at, let me cite a few moments from Josefson’s account (I am not particularly interested to discuss Jaspers here). When thinking about how to explain or elaborate the freedom of the beautiful, Josefson makes formulations of the following sort:

Appearances . . . must be given over to the only powers capable of sustaining them, of conferring immortality, and yet these mental powers place them in the greatest danger, abstracting them into representations of unity that are dead and cannot appear (97).

Horror involves the same sort of attention to appearance as delight, attention to what cannot be subsumed under any merely sensual experience, logical parsing, or ideological preconception such that appearance is preserved and prepared for the free capacities of the mind or action (99).

Wonder is the crucial comportment that Arendt thought might allow human beings to move beyond delight or horror and “grasp the realm of human affairs and human deeds,” to more fully appreciate political action “as it is,” for it moves the mind from a comportment concerned with the fuller revelation of Being toward the judgment and thinking that can give future meaning to the ineffable (100).

Such passages and others culminate in Josefson’s suggestion that his reading “points to an alternative model of Arendtian politics, literarity, something very similar [to] Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics, in which politics involves an ability to read and write appearances such that political realities become newly sensible” (101). Elsewhere, Josefson will summarize his claims as the idea that Arendt’s most basic impasse is that “we do not [presently] love the world and the human freedom we find there” (113). Continuing, he elaborates that, “we are, sadly, not pleased by our freedom. The problem, therefore, must be to figure out how it is that we are pleased, and furthermore, how we can be pleased with that pleasure” (113). He notes that this is ultimately “not an epistemological or aesthetic problem of figuring out what we should be pleased about” (113). What kind of problem is it then? According to Josefson, “it is a phenomenological problem of understanding how pleasure in freedom may be possible” (113). And what sort of pleasure is this? It is not a pleasure that “simply satisfies a desire or tickles a fancy,” it must rather be “something like a pleasure in the beautiful (or displeasure in the horrid) . . . Arendt’s freedom of the beautiful” (113). Earlier, Josefson had noted that on such a view, “politics becomes . . . less about the ability to judge the validity of claims on the state and more about the cultivation of taste and the capacities of wonder, delight, and horror that make it possible to read and recognize such manifestations” (101).

There is much here with which I agree. For example, like Josefson, I also think Arendt is proposing a distinctly different view of politics, but I worry that the way in which Josefson frames things does not capture enough of the ultimate significance of this difference, casting Arendt’s alternative in terms that I would still view as too reliant on individual mental powers and too bound up with questions of epistemology (no matter how intersubjectively or complexly these might be conceived). Terms such as “read,” “recognize,” “problem of understanding,” and “figure out” all seem to me to imply procedures that don’t capture Arendt’s deepest impulses, nor procedures that jive with Josefson’s own prioritization of the beautiful (or the horrible). To do that, we need to invoke a fundamentally ethical frame, and such a frame is really about ontology and plurality (which, of course, is not divorced from phenomenology but is importantly distinguishable).

There is a lot in the preceding paragraph, so let me pull on the invocation of the horrid or the horrible. Earlier, Josefson notes that “with enough experience we can learn to see the horror. Nietzsche was right. Auschwitz can help us see Selma. Emmett Till can help us see Rosa Parks. Indeed, ‘how much blood and horror lies at the basis of “all good things”’!” (101). This formulation more than any other causes my discomfort with how Josefson frames Arendt’s project. Is it the case that Arendt would support seeing these various events and figures in such instrumental terms? Is her claim merely the (by my lights) moralistic suggestion that there is a lot of blood and horror behind so-called civilization? Of course, Arendt would not deny this (this is another aspect of her inheritance of Walter Benjamin, who also famously noted that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”).

But this does not seem to me to be the focus or impetus behind Arendt’s work. Let me quote Arendt again from the aforementioned “Concern with Politics” lecture. There she notes that in the “refusal to own up to the experience of horror and take it seriously, the philosophers have inherited the traditional refusal to grant the realm of human affairs that thaumadzein, that wonder at what is as it is, which . . . is at the beginning of all philosophy.”6 Arendt elaborates, noting that any viable or authentic political philosophy of the future must thereby “directly grasp the realm of human affairs and human deeds” (emphasis mine).7 What’s most central for Arendt is not thereby wonder or beauty or freedom (or the interpenetration between these, although these are of course important), but rather humans: it is human plurality that underwrites everything in her work. Humans are not remarkable because of any instrumental reason (i.e., it is through a focus on a human being reveals beauty or agency or freedom or whatever else), but rather humans are—every human is—remarkable in and of themselves; human plurality is its own end. Of course, everything else that it makes possible is also notable, but it is human plurality as an ontological and ethical fact in itself that Western philosophy has failed to reflect on properly.

Josefson himself undertakes a remarkable approach when he aims to give a unifying account of Arendt’s multifaceted work, suggesting that it is all oriented around the beautiful and “love of the world” (see 104–13). This is of course true, but what stands behind all of this is a fundamentally ethical orientation: it is human plurality that makes the world beautiful and lovable (and also horrible and horrendous). What ultimately animates Arendt’s variegated work is an ethical interest in the political significance of the ontological and phenomenological fact of human plurality; neither the beautiful nor any of these associated issues is an end in itself, rather humans are the end, human plurality the unchanging source of everything, for better and for worse. And it is a consideration of the ethical significance of human plurality that animates all of her work, and none more prominently than her pathbreaking research into genocide, the crime which most forcefully attacks the very ontological grounds of human plurality.8 To be clear, as I suggested in the beginning, this is less an indictment of Josefson’s excellent book and more a desire to make explicit exactly what animates the complex formal machinery that he reconstructs on Arendt’s behalf.

I mention all of this only then to raise very basic questions about the telos of the book, which culminates in a reflection on PCP (the Public Conversation Project) as a sort of Arendtian model where, “if we can focus on the reality of . . . beauty instead of what might be in each other’s heads, then we don’t have to fight” (277). But does this really capture what happens in a lot of the contexts that Arendt was most interested in (genocide, mass violence, totalitarianism, ideology, propaganda)? How do we square Josefson’s insistence on the prioritization of PCP and related projects and ideals with Arendt’s own discussions of ideology and propaganda in Origins of Totalitarianism and the way in which certain regimes (and thereby certain individuals) avoid being human altogether (by refusing the perspective of a human being)? Or, even more forcefully, how then do we situate Arendt’s own imagined, concluding words to Eichmann in her Eichmann book? Here they are:

And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.9

Only because we ourselves are born—Arendt will say—do we have the ability to initiate something new. Can the postulated “aesthetic moment” therefore also constitute a moment of birth—blocking escapist tendencies and allowing for the appreciation of the domain of human affairs? The concept of natality appears, of course, in Professor James S. Josefson’s book and, compiling it with the Copenhagen speech of Arendt, as we will see, it can be related to the issue of nudity (and thus the lack of a mask).

I would only like to add that it is this phenomenon of natality—here, in contrast to the author of Hannah Arendt’s Aesthetic Politics—that I consider to be the motif that unites the entire intellectual oeuvre of the American intellectual.1

Arendt confesses in her speech that receiving the award triggered an identity crisis for her, because “the Arendt I felt like at the time” could not imagine herself as the winner of such a prestigious award. This meant that she would have to speak as the holder of an international award and basically come to terms with the fact that she had become someone like that. This triggered a personal identity crisis for her, the overcoming of which can also help our identity crises at the individual and collective level. What so it helped the philosopher?

This is easy to miss, considering that Arendt gives us a very obvious answer. As I have already mentioned, it is the mask through which her individual voice can be heard. Arendt confesses: “Once I have finished using and abusing my individual right to speak through the mask, everything will fall into place.” The prize-winning mask does not threaten her identity, since she can exchange it for any other social role. This means that she can play different roles without being inauthentic. The mask is not a lie or affectation, neither for the audience nor for herself. And every time she takes it off, the separation between that particular role and her identity will simply “fall into place.”2 Analogously, a person can try on various masks that the “great game of the world” gives him, but “he can even go through this game in his ‘naked’ because, although recognizable, but indefinable ‘I.’”3 Such a representation, as Josefson notes, reveals the newborn.

This newborn is “naked” and defenseless. If someone does not take care of it, it will die. This means, in this example, that whatever is new in Arendt’s speech will be revealed in its completely specific and abundant phenomenal quality, will be forgotten if someone does not protect it: it will not perceive that ineffable “something” in its irreducible, perspectival quality of that which can be saved. In essence, this newcomer Arendt is naked. We can recognize her voice, we know that it is her, but we cannot define her. Similarly, a human being appears in his nakedness at the moment of birth. For Arendt, and for us, this has a special meaning. In The Human Condition we read:

“The new beginning that comes into the world with a new birth can have significance in the world only because the newcomer is capable of initiating something himself, i.e. acting. The element of action in the sense of initiative—establishing the initium—is contained in all human activity, which means that activity is undertaken by beings who have come into the world through birth and are conditioned by it.”4

Arendt thus introduces the concept of birth into her theory of action as a way of finding oneself in the world (Natalität). Philosophy has rarely dealt with this issue and Arendt is undoubtedly one of the honorable exceptions here. Regardless of the establishment of this beginning, whether it was fully natural or subject to (or will be) decree,5 she gives birth a special dimension and character. She starts from the observation that with the birth of a child not only some other history begins, but also a new one. In addition, however, she makes a clear gesture of connecting the beginning of human life with the self-knowledge of the acting subject, conscious of his ability and act of will to “initiate something new.” An example of such an action is, of course, the delivery of a thanksgiving speech. Moreover, the eschatological brilliance of the biblical promise—“A child is born to us”—can be extended to every human birth expressing the hope that something completely new will break the chain of eternal return. The joy, curiosity, and emotion that accompany the birth of a child imply “expectation of something unexpected.” And this unlimited hope of novelty has the power to break the linearity of time, the power of the past over the future.

As we can see, for Arendt the beauty of existence is manifested above all in birth—the American thinker devotes a lot of attention to the phenomenon of natality. The above issues are also taken up in the context of the issue that interests us in the essay “The Future of Human Nature: Are We Heading for Liberal Eugenics?” The argument I have presented in favor of the thesis about the aesthetic moment that birth can constitute also gains its justification in the argumentation made by the German philosopher.

If the fundamental issue in the aesthetic moment for the author of Hannah Arendt’s Aesthetic Politics is freedom, it is precisely the phenomenon of birth—here in agreement with Habermas—that makes it possible in the most basic, ontological sense.

“Since action is the political virtue par excellence, it is birth, not mortality, that can be the central category of political, as distinct from metaphysical, thought.”6

Arendt, I believe, by situating the political in the biological act of birth,7 points to the way in which we can move freely in the world, think without supports, throw off the shackles. She emphasizes resistance to the “dictatorship of the elderly,” which is equivalent to enjoying freedom as the spontaneity with which we can use and abuse masks in society and exchange them. Finally, she accepts the freedom to move around the world in one’s “nakedness.” This means that people will judge her, but this is not a threat, because all these judgments will be wrong in the sense that they can never see who she really is. The limits of human knowledge can therefore be accepted because they are also a precondition for human freedom. From this position of nakedness, Arendt can accept the judgments of the public and the plurality of her own identity, thereby establishing an antidote to our own crises, both personal and political. This can also be seen as the need for a kind of non-canonical life that is an emanation of human freedom:

“Whether synchronically or in the course of development, the human subject proves capable—and must be allowed—of operating simultaneously on several different planes without being ordered to complete unification, and of balancing different affiliations without being forced to choose any one of them unequivocally as dominant, which would supposedly define his ‘true self.’ Therefore, this non-integral identity, […] which so many—from the Inquisition to modern nationalism and other ideologies, as well as fundamentalist communities—perceive as something deviated, illegitimate, illogical, and even immoral, should be recognized as part of the fundamental human right to freedom.”8

In summary, Professor Josefson’s book allows us to: (1) understand Arendt’s influence on the field of politics based on the explication of the aesthetic; (2) distinguish the interpretation of the author of the monograph from the standard readings of Arendt’s philosophy accepted by the main theories of public discourse; and (3) connect Arendt’s aesthetic moment with the moment of birth. It is worth emphasizing that the author of the monograph goes much further and considers this concept to be a radically new model of republicanism and an alternative to political-liberal, deliberative, and agonistic models of public reason. However, critically referring to the discussed work of Josefson, I would like to emphasize that I did not find in it an answer to the question that has long been troubling me: can the turn in Arendt’s politics demonstrated mean that she was disappointed with politics at the end of her days? Could her interest in aesthetics be an expression of the searching that accompanies her thoughts at the end of her life, not so much within the strictly political, aesthetic space, but—going a step further, we could say—the mystical one?

Or maybe in an even more universal sense we can also ask whether Arendt can become a representative of research conducted by a person at the end of life, research aimed at the inevitable contact with transcendence, which is forced by the specter of approaching death? For Arendt, however, it will mean searching for a conception of the natality (against Heideggerian mortality) that will allow one to be reborn in the sense of negating both the biopolitical resonances of the natal and the sense that life (work) is the highest good.

Knowing Arendt’s biography, one could assume that she had already been led to such disappointment by the loss of Heidegger’s brilliant mind in the meanders of life.9 First, she lost trust in philosophy, throwing herself into action. Later, having returned to the privacy of the human mind, she read the phenomenon of human activity anew. No longer in a metaphysical sense, but in an aesthetic one. Moreover, Heidegger’s example shows that a person with a brilliant mind is not protected from mistakes in everyday life; on the contrary—due to his detachment from life, he can make even more of these mistakes. That is why Arendt turns to the ideal of a thinker/philosopher, but more in the Aristotelian sense. This ideal is someone who does not lack practical knowledge (phronesis) and the ability to make the right life choices (krinein). In a word—he is characterized by unity in thought and action, a tense chord between the external and the internal. The unwritten final volume of The Life of the Mind, as a detailed analysis of Arendt’s texts on the theory of judgment may indicate, was intended to be precisely a demonstration of such unity in man—the unity between the Nietzschean artist and the Kantian judge.

I mean that Arendt, by the end, had become as disappointed in philosophy as she had become disappointed in politics. This is why I deeply agree with James Josefson here and thank him for this inspiring lecture on Arendt’s work—she tried to find her own Moment of Beauty, which appreciates and engages both worlds in equal measure—the world we share with others while living on earth and the world available only to us—in which we protect and shape ourselves in an internal dialogue (including the fight with ourself and our weaknesses before they come to light).10

The interpretation of the American philosopher emphasizes beauty as the basic category of Arendt’s political theory. I fundamentally agree with this reading of her thought, which places freedom on the side of beauty, not of the mind, but with the reservation that this slight shift in emphasis can only result from a disinterested love (agape) for our fragile, temporal world, and therefore the concept of Amor mundi, which is so important for Arendt after witnessing and escaping death from the scythe during the horror of the Holocaust.

Toward the end of Jim Josefson’s book, Hannah Arendt’s Aesthetic Politics: Freedom and the Beautiful, the author describes the experience of participants in a reflective structured dialogue, an exercise they engaged in as part of the Public Conversations Project. In the dialogue, he writes:

Identities were not defended, threatened, liquidated, advanced, or recognized because they were made to appear as experiences, personal stories, and family histories. Once revealed as simply part of the world they did not have to be true or moral, as they do in the darkness of the soul. They could, instead, be beautiful. And once seen as beautiful, a moment in which that beauty is as self-evident as it is unsayable, a curious freedom to move appeared. The more the world was made to appear in its complexity, not as an empty space that required courage to enter, but a space already filled with themselves and other wondrous and strange things, the public dialogue no longer required an “element of daydreaming or wishful thinking.” (271)

It is a lyrical moment, bathed in the afterglow of real conversation with committed conversation partners about things that matter. Significantly, the pleasure cannot be dismissed as a worldly version of the oceanic feeling that irritated Freud so much; that would just be more wishful thinking. Instead, the experience has been earned by earnest participation in dialogue, and the book’s argument for an Arendtian, aesthetic, phenomenological politics has, for its part, been focused on earning the right to include this description as a culminating moment. Things are in motion here. We readers are moved by the description of the experience; the participants are enjoying a freedom to shift from the positions they began with; they are encountering the beauty of their interlocutors, which is to say, in Kantian terms, that underlying their awareness of this beauty is a feeling of pleasure in the harmony and free play within themselves, that is, the play of imagination and understanding. How have we been brought to this point?

Josefson is an engaging writer and the reader is drawn in as he describes Arendt at the podium in Copenhagen in 1975, about to receive the Sonning Prize and engaged in a remarkable performance of self-examination. Beginning here, at a public lecture delivered close to the end of Arendt’s life, is an elegant conceit, allowing what follows to range back through her life’s work (the argument draws upon all the major works from Love and Saint Augustine and Rahel Varnhagen to The Life of the Mind) and interpret it as an opus that harbors an abiding concern with appearances and our judgment of them. Indeed, as Josefson argues, her Copernican turn came with the insistence that being and appearing coincide, in which case our study of the phenomena no longer aims at knowledge of the truth and therefore is no longer tied to the traditional phenomenological requirement that it yield access to eidetic structures. (Not all would agree that it can still be called phenomenology without the transcendental move, but that argument doesn’t have to happen here.) In this case, we are freed for aesthetic engagement with the world, and what this means and what it can entail is the substance of Josefson’s book.

The entailment is worked out in several strands—time, the beautiful, judgment, spirit (as Kant understood it), the public thing—no one of which captures the whole argument. The strand I found most interesting, and continue to find most interesting and puzzling, is the beautiful or, more specifically, the freedom of the beautiful. In what way does Josefson’s work on the freedom of the beautiful prepare us for the account of the reflective structured dialogue and all that it promises?

The freedom of the beautiful—introduced early on, dealt with at length in the third chapter, and taken up again in the final chapter—initially gave me pause because it was not clear what it could refer to. The difficulty is with of. Is freedom a property of the beautiful? But the beautiful is not an object and, in the Arendtian/Kantian scheme of things, beauty is not even a characteristic or quality of objects. We say “This is beautiful” as if we are positing something of the object, but what we are doing is stating our own judgment in a way that anticipates—requires—the assent of others. Perhaps, instead, it is a freedom given to the subject by the beautiful, that is, occasioned in the subject by the experience of the beautiful. Perhaps beauty sets us free. But this would get the order of inference wrong since, for Arendt and Kant, it is the free play of the imagination and the understanding that is the source of the pleasure in the beautiful that is, in turn, the condition for the judgment of the beautiful. Perhaps, then, it is a matter of the freedom we experience when we experience the beautiful. But, while the pleasure we feel in the beautiful is accounted for by Kant by the free play of our faculties, we don’t experience it as such. We don’t say: “I feel a certain sort of freedom when I look at this statue.” Instead we say: “This is a beautiful statue.”

Would it be more apt, then, to speak of freedom for the beautiful? In this case, it would be a matter of the subject being prepared for and open to an experience of the world that is not focused on knowing the truth of things. (This is what Josefson has in mind under the heading of epistemology.) Approaching things aesthetically means approaching them in the attitude of disinterest, that is, without thinking of instrumental value they might have for us but also without concern for what is true or false about them. So long as knowledge is our aim, we have to work toward pinning down our perception of the object under a concept, since that is what allows us to know it and to know what it is. The faculty of the understanding provides the concepts that make knowing possible. Aesthetic experience means holding off the moment of knowing when the understanding gets the upper hand, as it were, and, in the gap that opens up in that holding-off, we are free to let imagination and understanding play freely and harmonize.

Or not.

Like Arendt, Josefson does not shy away from the thought that the experience of beauty is linked in some intimate way to the experience of ugliness and horror. It is horror that draws Josefson’s attention here; in the table where he presents Arendt’s modes of the human condition in time (94) he lists delight/horror as the modes (or do they make up a single mode?) of the (freedom of the) beautiful in the present. For Arendt, the relevant freedom is the one that allows us to establish a disinterested distance from objects, a distance across which we can observe appearances and admire them rather than trying to grasp them (95). This seems to support the interpretation of the freedom of the beautiful as freedom for the beautiful. Disinterest frees us to take our distance, which frees us from the push toward knowledge, which frees our faculties to play freely, which is the occasion for the feeling of pleasure—delight—which is the condition for judgment. This interpretation had the advantage of also helping make sense of the freedom of the beautiful as it appears in other parts of the work. It is a posture toward the world (79); it is where we intuit the ineffable (86); it is a way of engaging with appearances that is unlike labor, work, or action (94); it moves us to speak appearances into language and thereby save them (99); it involves engagement with the everyday world (104). Most pressingly, it is tied to amor mundi and points to the importance of the world as the ethical foundation of judgment (105) and, in it—in our freedom for the beautiful—“the world rises not as a resurrection but as a new birth, gathering us about it to see and hear it and then preserve it in an eternal present” (110).

But what about horror? Freeing ourselves to delight in the world means, at the same time, opening ourselves to the unprecedented and the awful. Josefson notes:

This of course means the freedom of the beautiful is somewhat of a misnomer, as it does not involve merely focusing on what is pretty, but facing up to reality no matter what it is, notably the horrible and unprecedented events of the Holocaust. The loss of freedom of the beautiful, thus, also involves a “refusal to own up to the experience of horror and take it seriously” (95).

In the subsequent pages, Josefson follows Arendt to Coleridge and Duns Scotus in pursuit of a way to understand horror as the foil and not the negation or opposite of beauty. As I understand the argument, we can lose our freedom for the beautiful by failing to cultivate taste, or by giving ourselves over to a contemplative admiring wonder (as Arendt regards Plato and Heidegger as having done), or by committing ourselves to a metaphysics that values Being beyond appearance, or in circumstances where we are struck speechless by the horror of what appears before us. This last is most relevant for Arendt, not only because of the historical moment that placed her face to face with the atrocious phenomena of the Holocaust and then with the evil of Nazism in the person of Adolf Eichmann, but also because the experiences of beauty and horror both set us in relation to our finitude. Presumably, all perception can do this, but the beautiful and the horrific transfix us in a way that keeps our focus on the appearance as appearance. The difference is that the beautiful drives us to capture the experience by uttering it in language, thereby saving the appearance, rescuing it from its drift into oblivion, while horror leaves us speechless. We want the horror to pass from the world, to never have been part of our world, because we cannot come to terms with it. And yet Arendt’s point is that we must take on the work of coming to terms with it. Josefson writes: “Otherwise, we have a ‘refusal to think the unthinkable’ that stands in the way of really understanding the situation and, especially, coming to the kind of judgments that must be delivered in a case such as Eichmann’s” (99).

We can train ourselves to tend to the world of appearances precisely by attending to appearances. Beauty invites us to do this; horror withdraws the invitation and pushes us away. Yet Josefson, citing Nietzsche, suggests that we can and should cultivate an eye for horror: “Auschwitz can help us see Selma. Emmett Till can help us see Rosa Parks. Indeed, ‘how much blood and horror lies at the basis of all “good things”’!” (101).

I am not convinced of the wisdom of this strategy. Is it not at least as likely that dwelling on specific spectacular horrors blinds us to horrors that present a different spectacle? Did Auschwitz help us see Ntarama? Do either of those events help us see the realities of quotidian horrors, the sort of thing Elizabeth Povinelli describes as the “crushing, if at times imperceptible harms” endured by the aboriginal communities she works with in Northern Australia?1 Perhaps we could get better at perceiving such harms by training ourselves with exposure to more and different horrors, but that risks leaving us immune to their power altogether, or driving us to despair at the state of the world we are trying to love. I have argued elsewhere, and on somewhat different grounds, that the experience of ugliness disturbs us because it suggests that the world might not want to be known.2 The present account of the experience of horror suggests that it is we who do not want to know. We would much rather turn away from the sight of horrible suffering and from the Eichmanns of the world, but it is nonetheless incumbent on us to know, understand, and judge.

Which brings us back to the reflective structured dialogue. I think that Josefson is right that the conversations of the Public Conversations Project will be at their best if we enter them free for the beautiful. We must be ready to attend to what appears and to accept the invitation to know more—not indubitable knowledge, or in-depth knowledge, or knowledge of the truth of things, but enough to know what we are trying to reconcile ourselves to. Perhaps understanding will emerge, but that is not the aim of the project, and judgment is surely to be avoided. As Josefson describes it: “Public Conversations Project dialogue has the very limited purpose of simply helping people with different religious and philosophical beliefs to live together in the same political community. It does so simply by reconciling them to the existence of difference within their community” (254). Yet there are hard cases, and neither Arendt nor Josefson would want us to look away from them. On the one hand, for example, if we have been worn down by the experience of horror perpetrated on us, on our very bodies, what will it take to free us for the fresh horror of knowing our oppressors? On the other, if we have freely enjoyed the option of turning away from horror and have not even grasped this option as a privilege, what will it take to open us to the problem of our complicity?

Arendt offers other resources for thinking about these problems, though they are never uncomplicated. Josefson takes up some of them in this book, including sensus communis and enlarged mentality, and amor mundi. I would also add the thought of joint responsibility for the world, which comes up in Arendt’s “The Crisis in Education.” What is most stirring in this reading of Arendtian politics as an aesthetic politics is the array of possibilities opened up if we could shift from civic duty or civic virtue to civic hedonism (276). Josefson writes: “It is a desire for the beautiful (or disgust at the horrible) that is the motive power in politics, as it is in the rest of life. Being true to that love (or hate) requires the kind of imagination that leads into the world rather than fantasy” (276). This comes in the culminating paragraphs of the work and I admire the insistence on including hatred and horror to the end. I also sympathize with the sensibility that adds them as alternatives, and sequesters them between parentheses, even though our efforts at reconciliation must always face both beauty and horror, and hate, like love, will not tolerate sequestration for long.

Bibliography

O’Byrne, Anne. “The Ugly Psyche: Arendt and the Right to Opacity.” Research in Phenomenology 50, no. 2 (2020): 177–98.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.