Abstract

Hobbes' Leviathan, Locke's Essay, Shaftesbury's Characteristics, and Hume's Treatise comprise a textual trajectory in which the common sense of enlightened community emerges from the margins of society to dominate the modern state. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, aiming to systematize empiricism, makes explicit hidden aesthetic premises of common sense by recursion to the transcendental idea of systematic experience. Inadequacies in that model of experience, nonetheless, motivate its revision in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. ;The Third Critique turns its attention from experience to the genres of discourse mediating experience. Judgment proceeds with nature as it does with art, by demanding unity from the work, a unity available only by recourse to transcendental ideas. Critique knows its idea of systematic experience to be mediated, obtained by maintaining the propriety of judgment's several genres. ;Enlightened community adopts Kant's revaluation of art, for through its semblance as techne that community secularizes and appropriates the function of a creator-god in the guise of the aesthetic idea. Yet it refuses to grant epistemic significance to judgment as critique demands, retaining a pre-discursive model of immediate experience. ;An aesthetic state ensues when--in Schiller's philosophical writing, for example--the experience of art's aesthetic ideas exceeds the proper limits established for aesthetic judgment. Transgressing the boundaries of their mediate state, aesthetic ideas instance themselves as empirical concepts which are taken as constitutive of the human's being. Whereas critique leaves the question of that being open to unending reflection on the idea, enlightened community defines the human by those empirical concepts improperly derived from aesthetic experience. Such empirical concepts assume the force of practical imperatives. ;The success of National Socialism, for example, requires the deployment of aesthetic ideas in the political genre accomplished by their transformation into an empirical concept of the human, the achievement of which appears as a moral obligation. In such moments, common sense becomes transcendent, and the aesthetic state of enlightened community transforms the interrogative mode of the human's being into a conceptual program