Sensus Communis—Reason, Rhetoric, and Race in Kant.

In part to shed indirect light on the rhetorical dimensions of current socio- and cultural-political polemics, and on current versions of the rationalist-irrationalist polarity, I examine Kant's critique of both rationalism and irrationalism in "What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?" and related texts through the Critique of Judgment. I show that Kant insightfully produces there an undecidability of the nature-culture and the philosophy/rhetoric oppositions, an undecidability that in turn challenges aspects of his own conception of the critical enterprise. I show then how Kant's development of aesthetic judgment as sensus communis in the Critique of Judgment extends his thinking about this undecidability. Considering the limits of Kant's own adherence to the maxim of the sensus communis —"putting oneself in the place of every other"—I proceed to reexamine his racist race-theory, and to argue that this theory helps him avoid confronting the problems raised by his insights into the inseparability of the nonetheless mutually opposed terms, nature-and-culture and philosophy-and-rhetoric. I suggest here that his insistence on this ideological race theory is significantly overdetermined—his investment in it intensified—by the degree to which it papers over problems with his system to which his own thinking has given rise. Finally, I suggest that it would be useful, in the current situation of widespread manipulation and disavowal of rhetorical means within cultural-political polemics, to confront and acknowledge head-on the undecidabilities Kant exposes but then evades, undecidabilities that emerge in his double critique of rationalism and irrationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]