The Entanglement of Sensibility and Rationality

On Habermas's Aesthetic Politics

Abstract

The relationship between the Sensibility and Rationality is a consistent thread in Habermas’s exploration of aesthetic political issues. In the 1960s, he examined the literary public sphere through aesthetic common sense to interrogate democratic systems. Engaging Adorno and Benjamin’s theories, he reconciled sensibility and rationality via mimesis and metaphor, culminating in 1980s communicative rationality. This framework situates Kant’s ‘I think’ within ‘language games’, positioning language as absolute mediator between subject and object cognition. In the paradigm of communicative rationality, aesthetics is categorized into types of discourse, and aesthetic common sense is misused as logical common sense, while the sensuous community presumed by aesthetic universality is replaced by a conceptual community. Transitioning from linguistic modality to embodied perception modality, the exploration of sensual communication and the unmediated aesthetic community thus becomes an aesthetic path to break through Habermas’s discourse of political.