Two Faces of Politics

This paper aims to define political life as transcendentally ideal and empirically real by proposing an unorthodox reading of Kant’s aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime in the light of Schmitt’s concept of the political. Kant’s aesthetics of the beautiful suggests that the first face of politics is an aesthetic idea giving political significance to sensible experience through symbolic representation by analogy. Meanwhile, Kant’s aesthetics of the sublime indicates another face of politics as the sublime experience of inevitable enmity. The former permits politics to remain objectively undefined, thereby enabling limitless experiences of the political, while the latter points to the specifically political distinction between friends and enemies founded on Kant’s aesthetics of the sublime. The paper argues that Kant’s aesthetics suggests a twofold foundation for political life, presenting a political antinomy between politics as boundless experience and as antagonistic struggle.