The Racial Power of Judgment

This essay sets out to show that (1) the seemingly contradictory claims in the first part of Kant’s Critique of Judgment on aesthetics as well as the relation between Kant’s aesthetic and the Third Critique’s second part on the teleology of nature turn out to be completely coherent if we look at them through the lens of Charles W. Mills’s The Racial Contract. The essay argues that Kant’s Third Critique is not only implicitly based on a differentiation between truly human beings as opposed to subhuman human beings; much rather, said differentiation is explicitly elaborated on in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The essay then (2) shows that the racial differentiations around which Kant’s Third Critique revolves cannot be restricted to Kantian aesthetics. Much rather, Kant’s conceptualization of the disinterested subject of aesthetic experience as a distinctively civilized being structures Western aesthetic theories to this very day. This is why the essay then (3) proceeds to show why it is not enough to acknowledge the exclusions of Kant’s aesthetic and to grant everybody access to the kind of aesthetic civilization towards autonomy that Kant restricted to a few white gentlemen of taste. Much rather, the autonomous, detached, and disinterested subject that is at the center of Kant’s aesthetic needs to be thoroughly questioned in favor of a heteronomous, relational subject. In conclusion (4), I argue that the transformation of the autonomous subject into a vulnerable and dependent being also raises doubts as to the plausibility of Mills’s Black Radical Liberalism that revolves around a subject whose Kantian autonomy Mills hardly ever questions.