Abstract
Sensus Communis, which had been turned into an important concept in the pedigree of Western aesthetics since the publication of Critique of Judgment, together with "taste" and "judgment", became the important conceptual instruments for investigating aesthetic problems. In the twentieth century, the famous German-American political thinker Hannah Arendt has changed the problematic of the concept, and transformed it into an instrument for ethic-political analysis so as to analyze the event of Eichmann; meanwhile, the French sociologist of world fame Pierre Bourdieu as well as the British cultural critic Terry Eagleton argued that the concept had totally been a lie of the bourgeois or the middle class, as a result of which the concept was interpreted into an instrument for social critique. As far as the contemporary scholar Jacques Rancière has put the concept in Arendt's sense into Bourdieu's problematic, which means culture politics, the third way of interpreting sensus communis emerged. The three different ways of interpretation have contributed to a new dimension of the concept, namely, the political dimension, and as a result, the concept has been completely deprived of the original context of pure aesthetics.
First Page
26
Last Page
35
Recommended Citation
Li, Sanda. 2018. "Aesthetics as Politics: Three Contemporary Interpretations of Kant's "Sensus Communis"." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 38, (2): pp.26-35. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol38/iss2/4
