Walking the Path of Taste: On the Kantian Roots of José Vasconcelos's Aesthetics.

This article examines 20th-century Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos's responses to whether aesthetic judgments can bind communities and drive political, social, and cultural change, situating his thought within a Kantian aesthetic-political tradition. It traces this tradition from Immanuel Kant’s idea that aesthetic judgments presuppose a shared community of judges, through Friedrich Schiller’s and Hannah Arendt’s expansions on aesthetics as a vehicle for political unity and social cohesion, to Vasconcelos’s unique application of these ideas in early 20th-century Mexico. Vasconcelos adopted Kantian aesthetics to propose and implement educational and cultural reforms aimed at unifying Mexico’s diverse population through shared aesthetic experiences, emphasizing beauty and taste as normative forces that transcend reason and force. The article highlights Vasconcelos’s original contribution in translating Kantian aesthetic theory into concrete political practice, while also noting ongoing questions about the relationship between his aesthetic philosophy and his racial theories.