《康德政治哲学讲稿》读后感10篇
《康德政治哲学讲稿》是一本由[美]汉娜·阿伦特著作，世纪文景/上海人民出版社出版的平装图书，本书定价：36.00元，页数：274，特精心从网络上整理的一些读者的读后感，希望对大家能有帮助。
《康德政治哲学讲稿》读后感(一)：对于这本书的评论
这本讲稿——经过罗纳德•贝纳尔富有技巧的精心编排和介绍——大胆、有创造力、富有责任感……阿伦特将一般或者说扩展了的审美判断看作康德政治哲学的一条线索，这一极富创造性的主张，让她能够在审美和实践之间找到一座桥梁，而这对于研究康德的其他人来说，仍然是未知之域。
——Patrick Riley，Political Theory
这本被悉心编制的精辟小书，非常有价值地补充了阿伦特的作品，贝纳尔对阿伦特的解读，非常富有才华地阐明了阿伦特思想的一个侧面，且阅读起来赏心悦目。
——James T. Knauer, International Studies in Philosophy
《康德政治哲学讲稿》读后感(二)：我们全部的尊严就在于思想
夏一璞/文
思考，是哲学的应有之义，是哲学家的本能，是他的生活方式，更是他神圣的使命。然而，在常人看来，把思考拔高到普世的高度，试图让每一个人都成为思考着的人，或许恰恰反映出哲学的起源地，希腊东方主义骨子里带的“哲学家的傲慢”：惟有哲学家的求真才为属人的意旨赋予了深沉而广袤的严肃性。从个体角度考虑，是成为具有思考能力的精英，或是安于做一个因无思而致庸常的平民，都是个人的选择问题；即使是哲学家，也不应该为了实现“己欲立而立人，己欲达而达人”的理想来消解个体自由。而这里的“自由”特指以赛亚·伯林在1958年的《两种自由概念》中提到的“免于（意志）强制和（行为）干涉”的“消极自由”。
伯林这一观点有着深厚的自由主义传统，自康德始而一脉相承，在战后意义尤为重大。在一个尚未从极权统治的创伤和威胁中痊愈的时代里，公共空间不断挤压私人领域，若要防止国家力量对个人意志的支配和取代，有效地捍卫康德穷极一生孜孜以求的私人自由的神圣尊严，必须以消极自由理念作为政治自由和社会自由制度的基础。
然而，与伯林同时代的，同为犹太人后裔，同样是英语世界顶尖的思想家汉娜·阿伦特却对此有所质疑：被看作最有效抵抗专制主义的“消极自由”给予了人们“不思考”的权利，可恰恰是这些因为“无思”而平庸的人们，与“有思考”的作恶者合谋，共同构成了专制主义的链条。这一结合是如此的契合与精妙，以至于元首振臂一呼，庸碌者就会应者云集，犯下滔天罪行而不自知。有意思的是，汉娜·阿伦特拆解这一精巧链条的武器，依旧来源于康德。
伯林曾经说过一句非常有名的话，“一位教授在他宁静的书房里孕育出来的哲学观念，可能毁灭一个文明。海涅认为康德的巨著《纯粹理性批判》，是一把处决了欧洲‘自然神论’的宝剑”。而在汉娜·阿伦特看来，三大批判最后一篇《判断力批判》是一把处决“平庸之恶”，对抗极权专制的宝剑。这把宝剑锋利的剑刃便是建立在自我确证基础上的独立判断。这一观点自1958年的成名作《人的境况》中初现踪影，在那本写于1962年，引发诸多争议，同时也将阿伦特推向学术明星之路的《耶路撒冷的艾希曼：关于恶之平庸的报道》里逐渐成型，却遗憾地随着她的溘然长逝而中断在《心智生活》的第三篇“判断”之中。随着阿伦特遗作的陆续整理出版，她如何通过重塑康德政治哲学中“判断”的意蕴来建构阿伦特式政治哲学的脉络逐渐清晰。
黑格尔说“哲学就是哲学史”，太阳底下无新事，哲学中出现的任何新问题，都能在哲学史上找到它的起始与回声。聪明的思想家绝不会干出“抛却自家无尽藏，沿门托钵效贫儿”的蠢事。系出德国的阿伦特有着得天独厚的哲学底蕴，过尽千帆，那个静静矗立在德国哲学历史群山之中最低调却又最伟岸的思想高峰——康德——翩然而现。但即使阿伦特将她政治哲学的核心：以判断为基础的政治性思索极大程度地诉诸于康德的《判断力批判》，罗纳德·贝纳尔还是敏锐地捕捉到阿伦特与康德的根本不同，即康德强调私人领域中独立判断的自律性，而阿伦特着眼于公共领域中人与人之间交往、商谈而产生的他律性伦理。所以，贝纳尔及时地提醒读者，试图通过阅读阿伦特的《康德政治哲学讲稿》来了解康德政治哲学，哪怕仅仅是了解《判断力批判》都是不可能的，结果只能带来阅读者自身的迷惘混乱和对康德政治哲学的误解。这看似一个悖论，却无处不在各种哲学著作中出现。对此，贝纳尔的解释是，“大思想家的典型特征是，他们往往会根据自己萦萦于怀的那些动机和关切来借用和重塑他们阅读过的一切”，因此“阿伦特根据自己的智识关怀而对康德文本所进行的有意识地摘选和再造，恰恰展示出阿伦特本人作为大思想家的胆识与气魄”。
这一胆识与气魄产生的契机要追溯到1960年代，汉娜·阿伦特接受《纽约客》杂志邀请，以记者身份参与审判纳粹战犯阿道夫·艾希曼。阿伦特曾说过，思想本身，来源于鲜活的经验事件，也必须始终依附于这些经验事件、将这些经验事件作为定位方向的唯一路径。战后审判战犯的经验事件在常人看来是法律和正义的彰显，而思想家阿伦特却看到了她哲学中的一种重要概念——平庸之恶。在阿伦特的描述中，艾希曼既不是动机邪恶，处心积虑的大奸大恶之人，也并非易遭人诓骗的愚蠢之徒，他的问题仅仅在于毫无思想地服从，而这种服从，在政治上，就是支持，构成了极权主义屠戮民众不可或缺的一环。这一发现验证了阿伦特早期对极权主义的洞见：“极权主义意识形态的目标不是改变外部世界，或者社会的革命性演变，而是改变人性……和羞耻性”，从而让有思想的人成为多余，无思想的人扮演麻木不仁的帮凶。
至此，阿伦特看到了战后流行的多元论自由主义思想背后潜藏的危机，一旦人们默许了无思想的自由，当整个社会都缺乏批判性的思考时，当有思想支配之下的“根本之恶”驾驭着无思想而衍生出的“平庸之恶”时，自由主义最珍视的自由，立刻岌岌可危。因此，在此意义上说，抛却不愿思考的惰性与克服思考不能，在理解的基础上下判断，进行政治性的思索成为必须。但对于如何让这种围绕着判断而展开的政治性思索成为可能，阿伦特并未刻意去谈，或者说在她的未竟之书中，有待后人去完善。
屠杀与审判这些经验事件引发了阿伦特对“根本之恶”以外的“平庸之恶”的思考，而思考与判断恰恰是消解“恶”的终极手段；只有遏制私人领域中个人选择“无思”的自由，才能真正捍卫公共领域中人类整体的自由和私人领域中个体的尊严。恶、判断和自由的逻辑链条也体现了阿伦特作为德系思想家对形而上学天然的亲近。
思考，是人与生俱来的能力，“哲学之思”绝非哲学家的专利与傲慢；思考，是每个人的权利，也是他最高贵的品格。“人只不过是一根苇草，是自然界最脆弱的东西；但他是一根能思想的苇草。……他知道自己要死亡，以及宇宙对他所具有的优势，而宇宙对此却是一无所知。因而，我们全部的尊严就在于思想。”帕斯卡尔如是说，阿伦特如是说，康德如是说，当哲学家抛却傲慢，亲切地期望人类思考时，我们又有什么理由不去思考呢？
《康德政治哲学讲稿》读后感(三)：Ronald Beiner: Foreword to LKPP in Chinese edtion
嗯。。。觉得前言里有些概念翻的有点不一般，所以向贝纳老师要了英文版，贴在这里，以飨有兴趣的童鞋。
Foreword to the Chinese Edition
When I first conceived the idea of bringing out an edition of Hannah Arendt’s Kant Lectures in their entirety (Mary McCarthy had published a highly abbreviated version in Volume Two of The Life of the Mind), one could hardly have imagined the impact it would have on the world of Arendt studies. As is widely accepted among students of Arendt’s political thought, publication of the Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy gave crucial impetus to a whole new generation of Arendt scholarship. I had been tipped off by Richard Bernstein that Mary McCarthy (Arendt’s literary executor) was not sympathetic to the idea of publishing a full edition of the Kant Lectures: her view (shared with Arendt’s favourite publisher, William Jovanovich) was that the lectures weren’t sufficiently polished, and that their publication wouldn’t redound to Arendt’s credit or enhance her reputation. But I persevered in my belief in the philosophical importance of the lectures, and managed to win over McCarthy. In retrospect, it seems that my view was clearly the right one. The Kant Lectures not only spawned a very large and interesting critical literature, but it also generated wide interest in philosophical milieux outside the world of anglophone philosophy, reflected in a multitude of foreign-language editions of the Lectures (including, now, this Chinese edition). All of this, I’m happy to say, is far more of a vindication than I could reasonably have hoped for.
I’m grateful for the opportunity offered by this new Chinese edition to restate what I take to be the most salient themes of Arendt’s interpretation of “judging” as a crucial human capacity. To appreciate fully what Arendt was trying to achieve in her final account of judging, I think we need to situate it within the larger enterprise of her political philosophy as a whole; once we do that, we see that the conception of judgment articulated in the Kant Lectures coheres very powerfully with the core of her political philosophy. In my Interpretive Essay included in this volume, I explain why I believe that there is an important shift between what Arendt is concerned with in her published writings of the 1960s dealing with judgment and what she is concerned with in the Kant Lectures (and what she would have been concerned with in Judging, had she lived to write it). In fact, one could say that the notion of judgment tried out in essays like "The Crisis in Culture" and "Truth and Politics" gets "trumped" by the idea of judgment in the Kant Lectures precisely because the latter completes her core political philosophy in a way that the earlier conception didn't.
o what is this "core political philosophy,” and how does "judging" complete it？ The key work here, of course, is her theoretical masterpiece, The Human Condition. For Hannah Arendt, as I understand her, the main business of human life is to triumph over our mortality, in the sense that we do things in the world that prove that we are not mere transients in the world, shuffling onto the stage and then in short order shuffling off of the stage. We need to find ways of feeling that we belong in the world, that we have some kind of stable presence in it. Part of the job here is done by "work" as the construction of a durable, tangible shared world that anchors us in something non-transient. But ultimately, the crucial business of "immortalizing" ourselves is done by "action" as the performance of memorable words and memorable deeds. Yet these words and deeds are memorable only if they can be rendered memorable through "storytelling" -- that is, through some form of historical judgment. "Judging" constitutes the culmination of "the life of the mind" precisely because it redeems this meaning-generating function of action.
A crucial thrust of the argument of The Human Condition is that modernity is characterized by an ever-accelerating tendency to subjectivize human experience, with the consequence that human beings are deprived of their deepest needs. Our prime need as human beings is to be drawn out of ourselves, and to be inserted in a public world of shared experience, shared vocabulary, shared spectacles; for it is mutual involvement in the enacted stories that unfold in our public world that confers meaning upon an existence that might otherwise reduce to senseless drudgery or banality. Life in the modern epoch, by contrast, is radically privatizing, for the whole pressure of our civilization directs our energies as individuals into satisfying the productive imperatives of modern society and securing our material existence within the realm of private or domestic consumption. When our energies are displaced toward private concerns, our experience of a public universe of discourse and activity tends to get squeezed out, with the consequence that we become deprived of the most humanizing aspects of human life. This accounts for Arendt’s mainly critical stance towards liberalism as a political philosophy (with its resolute emphasis on the safeguarding of a protected space of individual decision and choice of ends), for liberalism, seen through this Arendtian prism, functions more or less as a theoretical legitimation of the horizons that define life in a characteristically modern society.
It is not hard to see why the basic project of Hannah Arendt’s Kant Lectures is central to her fundamental endeavour to vindicate the idea of publicity, or of an intersubjective experience of life, in the face of the subjectivizing pressures of modernity. Even the brief sketch just given should make it readily apparent why Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” would have such powerful appeal for Arendt, for the question Kant addresses there bears directly upon her central concerns: how to secure a publicly available realm of shared appearances and intersubjective judgments against the threat of subjectivization. Now, it might occur to us that there is a rather more straightforward antidote to the peril of subjectivism – namely, a philosophy that asserts an objectively shared structure of human needs, human desires, human interests: that is to say, a theory of objective human nature. But Arendt persuaded herself that an appeal to any fixed conception of human purposes having its foundation in nature posed an unacceptable limitation on the scope of human freedom. Again, this explains why she was so drawn to Kant: his transcendental inquiry into the grounds of our intersubjective experience of beauty and the sublime promises to redeem a shared realm of worldly appearances, and to do so without resorting to any foundational appeal to an objective ground in human nature in order to refute subjectivism. If one is unaware of the theoretical context laid out in The Human Condition, one is bound to be absolutely puzzled as to why Arendt is so insistent (on the face of it, contrary to Kant’s own text) that the Critique of Judgment, and only the Critique of Judgment, is of immediate relevance to the leading questions of political philosophy.
It seems to me that any careful reader of Arendt’s Kant Lectures will be forced to confront a great bundle of puzzles and paradoxes in trying to figure out just what she’s up to in this highly unusual set of lectures. The first and most obvious puzzle is this: if Arendt’s basic project is to seize upon Kant’s aesthetics as a way of vindicating the notion of a public realm of appearances, which is central to her own political philosophy, why does she take so long (not until the tenth of thirteen lectures, in fact) to commence a systematic encounter with the argument of the third Critique？ Why does she devote so much time and space in the lectures to discussing pre-critical texts that have little relation to Kant’s mature philosophy, as well as more directly political texts that, by her own account, fail to add up to an authentic Kantian political philosophy？ If her aim is to reconstruct a novel political philosophy on the basis of Kantian aesthetics, why doesn’t she proceed directly to the Critique of Judgment itself？ The answer, I would suggest, is that all the themes aired in the long prelude (comprising Lectures 1 to 10) to Arendt’s account of the Critique of Judgment – that all these themes have not very much to do with Kant’s intellectual concerns but have everything to do with Arendt’s intellectual concerns. For Kant, of course, our status as rational (that is, moral) beings is the ground for human dignity. Morality, too, is the Kantian answer to the arrogance of philosophers that their quest for truth is what exclusively confers cosmic seriousness upon human purposes.
Arendt rejects this core of Kantian philosophy, and therefore she draws upon marginal texts in the Kantian oeuvre in order to support her own conceptions of human dignity and meaningful purpose in human life. For Arendt, human dignity presupposes our implication in a shared public adventure that yields meaningful stories, historical narratives that give point to the cares and commitments of actors on the stage of human affairs (see Kant Lectures, p. 56, on Machiavelli’s Florentine Stories – “the last book that is written in this spirit”). These stories are situated in the polis, in the political community as a shared space of narrative action. For Arendt, political philosophy as Plato defined it – namely, as flight from the opinions of the cave – necessarily involves alienation from the polis, and therefore represents a mortal threat to this vision of human dignity. Throughout her work (including these lectures), Arendt remains obsessively preoccupied with the legacy of Platonically-defined philosophy, since for her the whole philosophic tradition means a debunking of the polis as a site of meaningful stories, and therewith, as the privileged basis for human dignity. In a profound sense, the centre of the Kant Lectures is Arendt’s citation of Pascal, who in § 331 of the Pensées presents the polis as a lunatic asylum, toward which the philosopher must preserve a stance of deliberate alienation (Kant Lectures, pp. 21-22). Kant, as I mentioned above, had his own response to Plato, which consisted in a modest demotion of the whole cognitive enterprise, and a colossal elevation of the cosmic significance of the morality of ordinary moral agents. Arendt, because she rejects Kant’s own challenge to Plato, places a great deal more weight on the philosophical outcome of the Critique of Judgment than Kant himself would ever have wished to place upon it.
Arendt is clearly mistaken when she states in Lecture 10 that Kantian political philosophy must be reconstructed from the third Critique because his real political philosophy remained unwritten (Kant Lectures, p. 61: “Since Kant did not write his political philosophy, the best way to find out what he thought about this matter is to turn to his ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’”). Kant is of course a classic exponent of the liberalism that Arendt repudiates on account of its deliberately narrow and deliberately unambitious conception of the public sphere, and correspondingly, the exalter moral primacy it gives to the inviolable private sphere. Contrary to what Arendt suggests, Kant’s politics are thoroughly shaped by his moral vision. For Kant, the ground of human dignity is our capacity for morally-motivated conduct within the private sphere. Politics is decisively governed by the imperative to respect this capacity for moral choice by according individuals the maximum private liberty compatible with the liberty of other individuals. It seems astounding that Arendt could read Kant’s Rechtslehre (Doctrine of Right) and yet fail to see that it offers an integral political philosophy that is authentically Kantian. It seems to me incontestable that the reason why Arendt fails to see this is because the political philosophy articulated in the Rechtslehre is not the political philosophy that Arendt wants Kant to give her.
lato represents one major threat to this Arendtian vision of human dignity as grounded in the particular stories that human agents enact in the shared space of appearances; another major threat is modern historicism, which threatens to subsume the particular within a universal narrative of the march of progress. This is why Arendt, in the Kant Lectures, is equally obsessed with various versions of the philosophy of history, which is a major theme of Kant’s political texts (a theme in his work that seems very strongly to anticipate the philosophy of history enterprise pursued by Hegel and Marx in the nineteenth century). Again, it is easy to see why the Critique of Judgment would be received by Arendt as a kind of epiphany, and why this work would have vastly more appeal for her relative to Kant’s conventionally political writings. For what one gets in the Critique of Judgment is the doctrine that there is no science of the beautiful, that reflective judgment means attending to the unique qualities of the particular, to the particular qua particular, rather than simply subsuming particulars under some universal formula. Or as Arendt would put it, judgment involves attending to the particular as an end in itself – that is, as a singular locus of meaning that isn’t reducible to universal causes or universal consequences (see Kant Lectures, p. 56). When the Polish ship-workers hoisted Lech Walesa over the fence of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, this was a miraculous moment, quite apart from the fact that it expressed factors that could be given a sociological explanation, or the fact that it contributed to the end of communism within the space of one decade. To judge this singular deed means appreciating it as a wondrous event, reflecting on it in such a way that the judging spectator can derive disinterested pleasure from the reflection. Again, following Kant’s idea of reflective judgment, this involves attending to the particular as a unique happening, irreducible to universals that would situate the wondrous event within a larger vision of the historical process. Again, to acknowledge that Kant already had a political philosophy would be to acknowledge that he was thoroughly implicated in the modern enterprise of a philosophy of history, and for Arendt this would mean having to forfeit Kant’s real contribution as a political philosopher, which consisted in his proto-Arendtian appreciation of the particular qua particular. Arendt’s solution was to insist that the latter composed Kant’s “unwritten” political philosophy (that is, his anticipation of her political philosophy).
At the end of Lecture 1, Arendt rightly observes that whereas the pre-critical Kant had conflated moral philosophy and aesthetics, the post-critical Kant distinguished sharply between them. It is certainly true that for the mature Kant, morality is situated firmly in the province of reason, not in that of taste, and that here, Kant is proceeding in deliberate opposition to the fusion of taste and morality found in the English moral sense philosophers, such as Shaftesbury. (Here one should consult Hans-Georg Gadamer: in Part I of Truth and Method, he argues that Kant’s repudiation of the moral sense tradition had eventually fatal consequences for the history of the human sciences; whereas the traditional view had been that acquiring social or political knowledge required immersion in a comprehensive civic culture, Kant’s compartmentalization of knowledge, morality, and aesthetics established the view that one could attain knowledge of society in abstraction from moral insights, and possess moral consciousness in abstraction from taste.) From the fact that Kant had once thought in a different way about the relation between morality and taste, Arendt draws the surprising conclusion that Kant’s aesthetics offer more promise than his moral philosophy of furnishing what she calls, in the Postｓｃｒｉｐｔum to Thinking, “a halfway plausible theory of ethics” – as if the Critique of Judgment could remain untouched by the compartmentalization of faculties that characterizes the critical philosophy as a whole. Presumably, what she has in mind here is that the basic concepts elaborated in §§ 39-41 of the third Critique – communicability, enlarged mentality, common sense, imagination, disinterestedness – promise to do better justice to the intersubjective fabric of moral life than the narrow moral vision of Kantian practical reason: that is, his conception of the moral subject, abstracted from the larger pattern of social life, confronting imperatives of duty that have been absolutely purified of non-deontological considerations.
Clearly, Arendt is of the opinion that Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason fails to provide a plausible account of ethics; and I can certainly see why the basic categories of the third Critique would seem appealing, relative to the truncated horizons of Kant’s moral philosophy. But I think that what she wants to draw from the third Critique is misleading, for two (related) reasons. First, she doesn’t fully appreciate how both Kant’s account of practical reason and his account of aesthetic judgment are shaped by the same supreme moral ideal, that of autonomy, and that this places constraints upon how much he can allow relations of community to enter into the formation of judgments. Secondly, she doesn’t fully appreciate that all her favourite concepts from the third Critique (common sense, enlarged mentality, and so on) are transcendental categories: they don’t connect judgments of taste to any empirical sociability (taste, as Kant construes it, is no more dependent on social relations than practical reason is). Rather, these concepts merely specify conditions of intersubjective validity that are presumed when an individual subject presumes to judge something beautiful by reflecting on it without necessarily consulting the opinions or experiences of other judging individuals. We can see this mistake, for instance, in Lecture 13, where Arendt writes: “One judges always as a member of a community, guided by one’s community sense, one’s sensus communis. But in the last analysis, one is a member of a world community by the sheer fact of being human.” What this passage suggests is membership in a variety of human communities that could be schematized as a set of expanding concentric circles, of which membership in humanity as a whole forms the largest circle. But this is not at all what Kant has in mind. In the Critique of Judgment he is concerned with what abstract human faculties render it possible for a transcendental subject to posit valid judgments of taste; and for this purpose, the only relevant community is the community of all human beings who possess the universal faculties that allow one to apprehend and reflect on the formal properties of, say, a beautiful crystal. The third Critique, no less than the second Critique, is based on the purification of the a priori from the a posteriori. In the same lecture (Lecture 13), Arendt appeals to § 41’s affirmation of sociability as a natural property of human beings. But Kant himself goes on to say: “This interest, indirectly attached to the beautiful by the inclination towards society, and, consequently, empirical, is, however, of no importance for us here. For that to which we have alone to look is what can have a bearing a priori, even though indirect, upon the judgment of taste.” The Critique of Judgment as a work of transcendental philosophy is concerned exclusively with the question of the possible validity of our judgments, and to this validity, empirical sociability contributes nothing.
Hannah Arendt, one might say, wants to do for Kant’s aesthetics what John Rawls did for Kant’s moral philosophy: to de-transcendentalize it, and to draw from it a political philosophy. Arendt pursues her strategy of de-transcendentalizing Kant’s aesthetic philosophy partly by playing up the continuity between the third Critique’s theme of communicability and the theme of sociability as found in some of the pre-critical writings. Now it is indeed true that the basic intention of the third Critique is to defeat the claims of subjectivity, and in that sense the book is a celebration of human sociability. But Kant is very far from wanting to rest the exercise of aesthetic judgment upon a social basis, and he wants to avoid resting it upon a social basis for the very same reason that he wants to avoid resting practical reason on a social basis: namely, because he thinks that to do so, in both cases, would be to do grave damage to human autonomy. This is expressed most clearly in § 32 of the Critique of Judgment, where Kant writes: “Every judgment which is to show the taste of the individual, is required to be an independent judgment of the individual himself. There must be no need of groping about among other people’s judgments…. To make the judgment of others the determining ground of one’s own would be heteronomy.” The illustration Kant offers of this necessary autonomy of taste is that of the “youthful poet [who] refuses to allow himself to be dissuaded from the conviction that his poem is beautiful, either by the judgment of the public or of his friends.”
Here, in fact, the analogy between Arendt and Rawls may help us to appreciate the deep underlying affinities – which Arendt doesn’t fully own up to – between the structure of Kant’s moral thinking and the structure of his philosophy of aesthetic judgment. Let us start by recalling that the Kantian political philosophy elaborated by Rawls in A Theory of Justice doesn’t involve an actual community of rational agents getting together to deliberate about the basic institutions of a just society; rather, the original position postulated by Rawls involves an experiment of moral reflection engaged in by one representative rational agent. This individual, who imagines himself or herself subject to a veil of ignorance, tries to think about social justice as if one’s theory of justice were the outcome of an impartial consensus (therefore such an individual exemplifies the disinterested “enlarged mentality” that Kant conceptualizes in the third Critique); but the resulting theory of justice is nonetheless the product of a singular individual’s process of reasoning, not the product of a social process. To express this in Habermasian terms, the process of moral reflection that yields Rawls’s hypothetical social contract is monological, not dialogical. But Kant’s aesthetics, too, are monological, and for the same reason. Just as Kant would regard it as heteronomous to submit practical reason to the verdict of an actual dialogical community, so Kant would regard it as equally heteronomous to have questions of taste decided by dialogue within a society. The judgments that an individual may pronounce concerning the aesthetic qualities of a poem or sculpture may be blind or wrong-headed, but at least they will be genuine attempts to exercise taste, as opposed to a heteronomous forfeiture of judgment where one merely defers to the opinions of one’s friends or neighbours.
This, I think, raises difficult questions about whether Kant’s aesthetics offer a suitable model for thinking about political judgment, where one certainly does require actual dialogue between real (rather than hypothetical) interlocutors in communities shaped by a large range of “heteronomous” facts (such as existing traditions, shared vocabulary, forms of rhetoric specific to those communities, and so on). But this is a set of questions that Arendt didn’t pursue; her exclusive concern in the Kant Lectures was to begin thinking about “judging” as a distinct department of the life of the mind that might help to redeem the idea of human dignity, which she perceived as imperiled in ways discussed earlier.
A reader who comes to the Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy without having read any of Arendt’s other books, and who reads the book hoping to find out what Kant’s political philosophy is about, is likely to end up quite puzzled and confused. If one reads it to get an exposition of the Critique of Judgment, one will probably come away with a rather misleading picture of Kant’s aesthetics. But if one reads the book – as one should – as a crucial development of Arendt’s own philosophical project, as an exploration of a set of political and intellectual preoccupations that really owe more to Jaspers than to Kant, then the book turns out to be a richly illuminating expression of Arendtian thought. It is in fact Arendt’s attempt to address the intellectual concerns that are at the very centre of her thought-world, and it expresses her determination to secure human dignity against a dual assault: the ancient Platonic disdain for the opinions of the cave, and the modern historicist tendency to reduce the particular stories enacted by human agents to a universal drama of historical progress. One might say that what typically characterizes major thinkers is that everything they read gets shaped and appropriated by their own dominant driving concerns; and in precisely this sense, the vigour with which Kant’s texts get appropriated by Arendt and reshaped according to her own preoccupations shows her to be a major thinker in her own right.
I began by suggesting that the central thrust of Arendt’s political philosophy was a root-and-branch critique of political individualism, and correspondingly, a robust defense of the joys of collective action. But of course, Arendt herself did not devote her life to the life of action: her vocation was that of a solitary thinker and observer: someone whose purpose in life was to watch what was going on and to reflect on what it meant. I assume that what she was trying to do in the Kant Lectures was to give some account of her own experience as a detached spectator rather than as an involved actor. This may help explain why bit was specifically Kant’s philosophy of judgment to which she appealed in trying to conceptualize this experience, rather than other possible sources of a theory of judgment: Aristotle’s doctrine of phronesis, Burke’s discussion of prudence, various other eighteenth-century accounts of taste, and so on. Kant, more than any of these other theoretical sources, is specifically concerned with how one addresses oneself to an ideal community of fellow judges – without forfeiting or qualifying one’s own ultimate responsibility for the exercise of judgment. This issue of Kant’s individualism connects up with the problems associated with Arendt’s proposal to translate Kant’s allgemein as “general” rather than “universal”: for Kant’s aesthetics no less than for his moral philosophy, the appeal to a universal community is intended to supply a foundation for the independence of the individual judging subject in his or her autonomy. I don’t think Arendt appreciated how Kant’s universalism goes hand in hand with his individualism; and her attempt to de-transcendentalize Kant (therefore transposing his “universal” community of judgment into a merely “general” community of judgment) tends to muddle this issue.
This is the problem: how to transcend subjectivism, while emphasizing that individuals must take responsibility for their judgments without deferring to the authority of groups or communities. Hence, while Arendt was resolutely anti-individualistic in her political philosophy (and therefore she ought to have been much more critical of Kant’s political philosophy than she actually was in her Kant Lectures), she was also resolutely anti-communitarian in her own praxis as a theoretical spectator and critic; and this, I surmise, was what gave the third Critique its appeal for her. Throughout her career as a theorist, she steadfastly opposed any group-based political ideologies – indeed, she opposed ideologies of any deｓｃｒｉｐｔion, whether ideologies of the Left or ideologies of the Right or (one might say) ideologies of the Centre. And this, too, is crucial to Arendt’s concern with conceptualizing the power of human judgment, for this is what judgment means: to size up the unique particular that stands before one, rather than trying to subsume it under some universal scheme of interpretation or pre-given set of categories. As someone who reflects on politics rather than practices it, the task of the observer of human affairs is to pass judgment on the discrete particulars that present themselves on the public stage without bowing to the demands of group ideologies or deferring to the verdict passed by others in society. And again, this is what Arendt sought ceaselessly to do throughout her career as a spectator of the human drama: to pass judgment in her own name, as someone who thought for herself, without submitting to the pressure of conformity exercised by any group or collectivity. Answering to the authentic demands of the power of judgment requires no less: namely, preserving one’s undiminished independence of judgment.
Hence what was of concern to Arendt in the last phase of her work was what one might call the “existential stance” of the theorist as a detached critical observer, as opposed to the existential stance of the actors who enact “words and deeds” in the practical realm. In order to be a theorist who reflects critically on the “doings” of an engaged citizenry, one really needs to stand on one’s own and to judge things for oneself (albeit in the context of a reflective dialogue with others who are trying to do the same thing); whereas in the realm of political practice, one needs to join with others in taking initiatives and deliberating about a suitable joint course of action. Hence the attraction, for Arendt, of Kant’s model of the person of taste who passes judgment on what the artistic genius creates (see Kant Lectures, p. 62: the subordination of genius to taste = the subordination of the actor to the spectator); hence the attraction, as well, of the Kantian emphasis on the theme of Selbstdenken, of thinking things through for oneself (Critique of Judgment, §40, and Kant Lectures, pp. 25, 32, 43). This I think goes a long way towards explaining why Arendt was drawn so powerfully to the third Critique, and why it seemed to her to articulate better than any other work her own experience as an independent observer of human affairs. The image of the judging critic that she draws from Kant is undeniably a powerful and attractive one, and as a theorist, I can certainly identify with the notion of Selbstdenken as an ideal to be aspired to by those whose vocation it is to try to discern a meaning in human affairs. But I think it is still proper for us to ask whether relying so exclusively on Kant as a theoretical source didn’t skew Arendt’s account of the faculty of judgment. In particular, it’s appropriate to raise critical questions about how her account unnecessarily privileges the judgment exercised by retrospective spectators over the judgment exercised by practical agents. Reflective judgment – the capacity for making reasonable judgments, without reliance upon already available rules or algorithms, and aiming at intersubjective validity – is in fact a universal feature of human experience. Contrary to what Arendt suggests, reflective judgment is not restricted to the Kantian domain of judgments of taste, nor is it restricted, as Arendt would have it, to the historian’s task of retrospectively conferring meaning on what actors do. Rather, it pervades the whole fabric of human experience, including the efforts by engaged political actors to deliberate in common and to reach decisions collectively; the retrospective observer holds no monopoly here. In this respect, the Kant Lectures (as opposed to her earlier writings on the theme of judgment) were mistaken in restricting the capacity of reflective judgment to only one side (the spectator’s side) of Arendt’s distinction between the doers who act and the critic who watches and reflects.
《康德政治哲学讲稿》读后感(四)：公共政治的阀门
暮年的汉娜•阿伦特抱病为几个学生讲授康德和他的《判断力批判》。未久，相濡以沫的丈夫布吕歇尔去世。她的学生们都记得，“她颤抖着回到课堂上，努力控制自己不去吸烟。”这堂课仍在陆陆续续地上，5年后，阿伦特也辞世，留下未竟的《心智生活》和这份授课讲稿。
谁都能体会到，阿伦特哪里只是为了讲讲康德。
而且，没有材料表明阿伦特曾经皓首穷经式地研读过康德；相反，当日的学生、后来这批讲稿的整理人罗纳德•贝纳尔倒是承认，阿伦特的主要材料是她的老师雅斯贝尔斯在《大哲学家》中描绘的那个康德。显然，阿伦特讲康德，是借他人酒杯浇心中块垒。康德在《判断力批判》中思索的问题一定有什么地方触动到了晚年奋力撰写《心智生活》的阿伦特。
一切无妨从“判断”说起。判断不是一种演绎或者归纳的分析，从来没有人会说，因为这是一朵花，花是美的，所以，“这朵花真漂亮！”判断处理的从来都是现实世界的具体事物，是真切的一草一木。所以，康德有言，判断力“只能被实践而不能被教授”，它不是一个可以用黑板写给学生看的数学公式。同时，康德相信，人之所以为人，背后是有一些共通的心性特征的，当我们抛开个人具体处境的纠葛后，往往能在审美判断上达成一种“无目的的合目的”。这是康德美学的一个大致。
显然，阿伦特对康德的解读从一开始就不是奔着美学的路子去的。正因为判断力本身就关切着具体的现实，所以判断往往需要在现实语境中通过人与人的交往才能真正达成。这当中就包括请教他人、换位思考、交换意见、甚至是说服他人接受自己的观点。这层意思，和哈贝马斯的理念已经很接近了，也直抵阿伦特生平极为看重的“精神的扩展”，它关系到我们的精神世界如何容纳和接受那些新的东西，而不是在旧有的范畴里打转。在阿伦特的名作《极权主义的起源》中，她就念念不忘地要厘清极权主义与其他种种政治概念的关系，并且明确证明，这是一个20世纪的新现象，绝非任何旧亡灵的附体。从这个角度来说，阿伦特对康德的解读是打上自己烙印的。
也正是因为现实交往的存在，“想象”才作为一个特殊的概念被单独提出。因为没有人能代别人而活，所谓对他人的理解无一不是通过想象来完成的。想象奠定的基础，使得“自我并不只是沉浸于自身当中并把自身视为整个世界，而是把自己当作一名世界公民。”“世界公民”这个词，大概最能描摹出阿伦特之所以在晚年倾心康德哲学的缘由。她借用康德的哲学体系，想要构建的却是一种具有公共性的政治生活，是一种所有人都能得以参与其中的政治生活。如果说，极权主义的政治最喜欢用一些空洞的逻辑蛊惑来摧毁政治的公共性，那么，判断力和想象力所代表的这种现实性和共通感很可能就是遏制极权主义的两道阀门。
阿伦特辞世很多年了，这份讲稿经由学生的整理，经由中国学者的翻译，可以说得到了很好的流传与保护。但是，现实公共政治中的那两道在阿伦特看来格外关键的阀门如何得到保护，我们还没法给她一个满意的答案。
《康德政治哲学讲稿》读后感(五)：第一财经日报：对人之意义的追寻----专访贝纳尔教授（Ronald Beiner）
采访，翻译：姚颖（小知儿）
康德对阿伦特影响至深。
1970年，阿伦特受邀在美国社会研究新学院讲学，《康德政治哲学讲稿》主体即为当时备课稿的整理。讲稿中所呈现的内容，被认为是阿伦特晚年最重要的作品《心智生活》未能完成的第三卷“判断”的预备。系统思考人类的精神活动，是《心智生活》的主旨。《康德政治哲学讲稿》汇编了阿伦特关于判断问题的核心文献，并对她在这一问题上的思考方向作出了解读。
《康德政治哲学讲稿》通篇演绎的是一个关键词：“判断”。阿伦特认为，自由体现在对公共世界里上演的事件进行“判断”，自由不是封闭的，是开放的，有参与，有判断，才有自由。阿伦特在本书中对“判断”的论述，标志着阿伦特的政治哲学走向成熟，是她核心政治哲学的完成。
“《康德政治哲学讲稿》不是对既往伟大思想的诠释，而是关系到阿伦特的整个理论创造（不论她的这一理论创造是否成功），它对了解阿伦特思想是不可或缺的。”复旦大学国际关系与公共事务学院教授洪涛说。
罗纳德·贝纳尔编著的《康德政治哲学讲稿》，对阿伦特研究领域产生了重大的影响，其中译本已于去年在中国大陆出版。《第一财经日报》日前在多伦多采访了贝纳尔教授，他的回应将为读者理解阿伦特思想提供一种更加清晰与专业的理论视角。
针对过去的判断
第一财经日报：在阿伦特看来,政治判断为何？
贝纳尔：判断是人们力求于普遍之中为特殊定位的能力。我们会去判断艺术作品的高雅抑或低俗，美妙抑或丑陋；去判断个人行为明智抑或愚蠢，道德抑或不道德；去判断公共政策周详抑或偏颇，可行抑或徒劳。我们时常需要做出判断，一个人是否能够过一种一般意义上的好生活，端赖于他在每个关键时刻所做的判断是否正确。纵观汉娜·阿伦特的政治思想，她的政治判断理论主要是一种针对历史、针对过去的判断，从这种回溯性判断中，我们可以择取或探寻到过去对当下的意义。我认为，判断作为一种人类基本能力的哲学之思应当远不止对过去的判断，一个身处现实生活中的个体，无可避免地要对周遭的一切做出判断，因此，阿伦特对判断的思考，从广度上说，稍显不足。
日报：你对政治判断问题有过颇为精深的研究，为何以阿伦特的判断理论作为研究对象？
贝纳尔：还在麦吉尔大学的时候，我对阿伦特的政治思想产生了兴趣。当时读了《人的境况》这本书，“惊为天人”。接着我读了她的《文化的危机》，同样受启发颇深，康德思想与审美判断可以被视为阿伦特思想中非常重要的议题，她的判断理论与很多其他思想家对判断的思考暗合，比如伽达默尔、卡维尔、维特根斯坦等等，我对他们的思想同样很感兴趣，在我看来，迄今为止仍然有很多人致力于康德作品的研究与出版，多多少少可以证明我对判断问题的关注没有错，阿伦特在人生的最后阶段致力于对人之判断能力的研究，将判断能力作为其理论研究的重点，即便她没有完成写作便与世长辞，她的判断理论仍然为我们后世的研究提供了非常重要的理论资源。
日报：你认为在当今社会，政治判断的重要性何在？
贝纳尔：显而易见，没有好的判断，就没有好的政治生活；没有好的政治生活，我们将陷于危机之中。当然，对身处现实生活当中的政治人来说（这里的政治人并不专指掌握政治权力的人，而是指所有生活在政治共同体当中积极追求良好政治生活的公民），关于政治判断的理论或者对判断行为的理论反思是否有助于践行其政治判断仍然是个问题，但是，如果判断力被视为一种重要的人之能力，那么对它重要性的研究当然也是非常重要的，这种重要并不依赖于它是否可以被付诸实践，人之为人从某种程度上来说，就在于我们会不断反思“何为”与“为何”的问题吧。
旁观者的意义
日报：阿伦特不仅仅是一个哲学家（事实上她从不承认自己是一个哲学家），同时也对现实生活中的政治问题给予颇多关注，她的政治判断理论在现实政治共同体的有效性怎样体现？
贝纳尔：阿伦特判断理论所依托的是一种旁观者的判断，她认为诗人与历史编纂者是典型的旁观者，但我们大可将旁观者的身份扩展到媒体人、知识分子乃至所有并不参与“行动”的公民。任何时候，你翻开一份报纸，或者打开电视关注一条新闻，去发现、去评价、去判断这个现实世界所发生的事情，你都扮演着阿伦特意义上的“旁观者”，并且对你自己以及你所在的世界产生了意义，这就是它的有效性。
日报：这种反思性的判断怎样影响行动？
贝纳尔：在阿伦特看来，反思性的判断达成了对人之行动的救赎。当然这里面牵涉到阿伦特整个政治理论的概念体系。简单来说我们举个例子，如果二战的获胜方是纳粹德国，那么，纳粹给犹太人带来的那场人神共愤的屠杀可能就会通过意识形态的控制强行从历史记忆中抹去，我们不会有面对那场浩劫的反思，从而生活在一个纳粹统治的与现在完全不同的世界中，我们不会像现在这样可以拥有自由去崇敬那段为人之尊严而战的历史，去反思那场揭露人性黑暗的灾难，而这种对过去的判断不仅是对那些经历苦难与伤痛者的救赎，同样也是对我们自己的救赎。
日报：阿伦特的《耶路撒冷的艾希曼》是其所有著作中争议最大的一部，直到今天这部著作仍然受到很多人的批判，有些人认为阿伦特将艾希曼的恶行归咎于“无思”之失完全是一种来自于知识分子的谬误，将人划分为有思之人与无思之人恰恰体现了知识分子阶层愚蠢的傲慢，阿伦特的观察无论是对艾希曼本人还是对犹太组织都与事实不符，您怎样看？
贝纳尔：是的，《耶路撒冷的艾希曼》确实是争议非常大的一部作品，我们不能说阿伦特对艾希曼的描述是完全正确的，即便阿伦特极富洞见地认为艾希曼的罪行源于“平庸之恶”，也不能将这种“平庸之恶”概化为所有纳粹党人作恶的根由。我认为，阿伦特并不是为了讨论艾希曼或者纳粹本身而写这本书的，她的目的在于揭露现代社会通过使生活其中的个体感受到自身的无意义，从而完成对人之为人的道德责任的消解，个体不再具有自主性，从而不具有道德或者公民责任。我想阿伦特的这个现代性批判的价值并不会因为其知识分子的傲慢而褪色。
反思现代社会的立足点
日报：你认为阿伦特政治之思的核心是什么？
贝纳尔：阿伦特思想的核心内容是一种对人的意义的追寻，个体作为转瞬即逝的生命载体怎样在对抗必然性的过程中获得永恒。当然，如果我们以整个宇宙作为参照，任何人、事、物都将化为乌有，对于阿伦特来说，更重要的是，我们是否可以通过言说与行动，通过事件与故事建造起一个“永恒”的世界，在这个世界里，人们可以找到向死而生的意义。至少在阿伦特看来，古希腊的政治生活完成了这样的救赎，这也应当是我们反思现代社会的立足点。
日报：在阿伦特的概念体系中有很多重要的议题，政治与哲学、真理与意见、事件与过程等等，就像你说的，阿伦特对古希腊的政治生活颇为推崇，但是在她的批评者看来，正是她的这种诉诸古希腊的理论建构，使得她思想看上去过于审美化而对现实生活无所适从。你怎么看这个问题？
贝纳尔：我认为，我们当然不能回到古希腊政治。如果阿伦特鼓励或者希望我们回到古希腊的话，那是没有意义的。但是，至少在西方的传统之中，常常会出现古今之辨，我们会依托古典的哲学文本来重塑古代世界，从而穿梭于古今之间做出对当下的评判。卢梭就是一个很好的例子，他的思考方式对我们产生了极大的影响，你可以说这是一种对古希腊的乡愿，但仅仅有这种感情上的期盼是不会有任何实际作用的。阿伦特并没有止步于这种乡愿，她的思想实验深刻揭露了现代社会的种种弊端，这一点才是真正值得后人推崇的，否则也不会有那么多人依然阅读她了。
日报：阿伦特是一个充满争议又极富洞见的原创思想家，你认为她的理论对当今学术界以及现实世界的重要性何在？
贝纳尔：我认为，在现代英语学术世界，尤其是北美地区，罗尔斯、阿伦特、哈贝马斯、福柯是最重要的四个政治哲学家。列奥·施特劳斯可能是第五。阿伦特生前的影响远不及她去世之后。对阿伦特的追捧不仅仅存在于西方学术界，在其他文化传统中，人们对她的思想同样有强烈的兴趣，她的康德讲稿已经有了近10种语言的译本，最近又在俄国和波兰翻译出版，土耳其语的译本也将很快刊行。谈到她对现实世界的影响，我想最有关联的可能是1989年以来在东欧社会发生的一系列变革。阿伦特对布拉格的异见知识分子产生了一定的影响。对此我做过专门的讲座。这些知识分子收藏了很多关于阿伦特的禁书。当然，我们无法清晰地判断她的思想对布拉格社会运动的实际影响如何，我只能说她的思想给当时处于变革社会之中的智识阶层带来了极大的震撼。
罗纳德·贝纳尔（RONALD BEINER）阿伦特研究专家、多伦多大学政治学教授，加拿大皇家学会会员。贝纳尔的研究领域是政治判断，著名政治学、哲学、伦理学以及诠释学研究者。
《康德政治哲学讲稿》读后感(六)：南方都市报：“续写”汉娜·阿伦特未竟之作 专家整理出阿伦特阐释康德的讲稿
来源：南方都市报
记者：李昶伟
众所周知，20世纪重要的政治哲学家、思想家汉娜·阿伦特晚年收官之作《心智生活》是一部没有写完的书。1975年12月4日阿伦特突然去世前，刚写完该书的第二卷“意志”部分，第三卷“判断”只留下一张写着标题及两句题词的稿纸，静静躺在打字机的卷筒里。在阿伦特看来，思考、意志和判断是人类心智生活中三项最基本的活动。而她的阖然长逝，使得此书思考、意志、判断三足鼎立的完美建构徒留缺憾。
顶尖阿伦特研究专家、多伦多大学政治学教授罗纳德·贝纳尔为阿伦特这部未竟之作“续写”了剩下的一卷。日前，这一部由罗纳德·贝纳尔汇编的汉娜·阿伦特《康德政治哲学讲稿》中文版由上海世纪文景出版，中文读者有机会从中知晓汉娜·阿伦特如何阐释康德，也可以了解罗纳德·贝纳尔如何解读阿伦特晚年学术体系未竟的部分。
1970年，汉娜·阿伦特受邀在美国社会研究新学院讲学，《康德政治哲学讲稿》就是阿伦特当时备课稿的整理。这本讲稿中所呈现的内容，被认为是《心智生活》没有写出来的第三卷“判断”的预备。如何摆脱生命的平庸和自由的虚无？以重建康德的政治哲学为入口，阿伦特认为：只有作出判断，只有对公共世界里上演的事件运用我们独立的判断能力，世界对我们来说才具有意义。
“事实上，本书再现了阿伦特为解决居于她思想世界中央的那些核心的智识难题而付出的殚思竭虑的卓绝努力，跃然于字里行间的是她为捍卫人类尊严、使之免遭古代与现代的双向侵害的果敢决心。”罗纳德·贝纳尔认为在这一阿伦特生前未出版的授课讲稿中，展示出阿伦特对康德美学作品和政治文论的阐释。阿伦特试图表明，《判断力批判》包含了一种极为重要且强有力的政治哲学的纲要———而这种政治哲学是康德留给政治哲学家们的最伟大的遗产。贝纳尔进而发现《心智生活》第一卷《思索》的后记中实际上已经勾勒了未来“《判断》”一书或者判断理论的雏形，由此，贝纳尔按图索骥，以讲稿为主体编纂了这本文集，以补足阿伦特关于心智生活之政治性的运思全貌，也为阿伦特自己的政治哲学画上圆满的句号。
贝纳尔的研究领域是政治判断，他在牛津取得博士学位的论文题目就是“汉娜·阿伦特对政治判断理论的贡献”。据悉，此次应中译者之邀，贝纳尔专程为中译本的出版撰写了详尽的长篇前言，以飨汉语读者。在英文版编定问世30年之后，原编者再度欣然执笔的中文版前言。贝纳尔从文本间性出发，以纵、横、深三维解读了阿伦特政治哲学的特征以及《康德讲稿》的用意和来龙去脉：纵轴上厘清了“苏格拉底-柏拉图一康德一阿伦特”的关联，横轴上剖析了阿伦特与罗尔斯等当代理论家的异同，深轴上则展开了阿伦特自身的思想脉络。
《康德政治哲学讲稿》读后感(七)：关于审美判断力的一个案例
在《判断力批判》中一个很重要的主题，就是实现从审美判断力（主要是崇高感）到纯粹实践理性（道德）的过渡，换言之，表明这两种能力之间的一种亲缘性。在阅读的过程中，我分分钟想到的是不久前与我姑父的聊天，他的经验提供了一个非常好的案例。
暑假去姑姑家，姑父非常兴奋地跟我们所有人讲，他新近被我们老家的镇政府返聘，担任一个很重要的职务（大概与房屋拆迁、颁发土地证有关）。这是一个很能产生油水的职位，因为它的工作牵涉到各方的直接利益。根据历史经验，官员很容易在这个职位上犯错，所以镇领导找不到合适的人选。领导最终决定返聘姑父，理由是，他年轻时在镇政府待过一段时间，从事的也是类似的职务，并且作风比较铁，没有犯过错误。
接下来，姑父就很骄傲地（甚至在我看来有些夸耀的成分）给我讲他年轻时的镇政府经历，讲经常有人来给他送礼，又讲他经常让我姑姑一家家地还回去，等等。他还讲了坚持公事公办的理由，这是我最感到有趣的地方。他的理由很简单也很直接，并不是什么高大上的道德情操，而是不想让别人看不起自己。他当时有一个同事，大概是管卫生检疫的，有一次被一个饭馆老板请去喝酒，饭桌上老板点头哈腰、尽说好话，但过了几天他们再碰面时（姑父当时在场），老板就全然换了一副神态，拍着那个同事的肩说，XXX，卫生执照那事你可得帮我办好，啊。同事也立刻没了之前的威风，忙不迭地说好。这件事对姑父的触动挺大，对他来说，拿人好处的直接后果就是降低了自己的尊严，而秉公办事则能获得别人的敬重。
从康德的道德哲学的角度来看，我姑父的行事动机与纯粹的道德实践是无关的，因为严格意义的道德实践不以纯粹理性以外的动机为条件。促使我姑父公正处事的，是一个典型的审美判断，更具体地说，公正处事能够唤起他内心的一种崇高感（也许用崇高这个词有过度之嫌，但我只想说明这是出于审美的），这种崇高感甚至可以从他说起往事的神气与语调中感受到。一方面，这种审美判断使他在某些时刻脱离了物质性的快感（或者说这是一种脱离了质料的、主观形式的愉悦），但另一方面，这一判断所内含的情调也并没有上升到出自纯粹理性的道德命令。审美判断的一个重要条件是，它必须是可向他者传达的（这也是阿伦特在康德著作中尤为重视的一点，即存在于人性之中的“共感”common sense），姑父的崇高感需要他人的在场，他需要在他人面前“显现”自己（这又是阿伦特将之归属于政治活动的一个本质要素）——他不仅自我显现在镇上的民众面前，也显现在此时听他讲述的我们面前，而且在后面这种情形中，通过让我们感受到他的愉悦，这对于他已经构成另一层面的愉悦了；与此相对，在康德看来，道德实践则根本不需要他人的在场，一个道德法则完全可以在一个人孤独的时候以命令的形式向自己提出，只要他是一个理性的存在者。因此我可以（冒犯性地）假设，如果可能的话，行贿者以一种巧妙的方式行贿，使受贿官员既得到好处，又不让他感到有损自己的尊严，那么姑父是否还能坚持自己的公正？
但是审美判断毕竟表现出一种向道德实践过渡的可能。姑父在公正处事的过程中不仅获得了他人的敬重，也获得了“自重”。这种自重表现出一种自由感（当然按康德的话说，还不是真正的自由），即他既（在某些时刻）摆脱了出自自然的感性方面的欲求，也摆脱了他人意志的约束（其反面就是他那个同事），而道德实践的核心正是自由，或者说人格的统一，这在很大程度上是消极性的，即理性的法则不屈从于外在的动机，也不屈从于感性的动机。