Kant’s taste as proto-political deliberative rationality

There is a connection between the exercise of Kant’s judgement of the beautiful and the deliberative rationality required in well-functioning democracies. The judgment of taste offers a space in which individuals can cultivate the dispositions needed for deliberation: thinking for oneself and adopting the standpoint of others on the assumption that some degree of agreement should be presupposed, even if consensus cannot be reached in practice. The judgment of taste fosters the capacity to ‘go visiting’ other perspectives, encouraging individuals to ‘enlarge their mentalities’ by situating their judgments in relation to a plurality of other viewpoints. Through this, taste supports the formation of proto-political deliberative rationality in a practical way. This argument offers an original contribution to the old debates about the political significance of Kant’s Third Critique and a novel pragmatic framing of aesthetic agency as heuristically valuable. This claim gains force amid contemporary scepticism about democratic prospects and the twin crises of political legitimacy and the diminishing capacity for collective action.