Jan-Paul Sandmann

Political theorists today seldom consider whether the experience of autonomous art might help sustain the values on which liberal societies depend. This paper turns to the novelist Thomas Mann to examine this possibility. For Mann, the ambiguity and estranging quality of art fosters habits of openness and critical distance that liberal societies ought to value and protect. Some commentators acknowledge the appeal of this view but argue that Mann’s attempt to develop a broader anthropological ideal on the basis of art overstates what aesthetic experience can achieve in public life. While Mann’s cultural outlook may not amount to a systematic political theory, I show how it gestures toward an alternative way of nurturing liberal civic dispositions. Even pessimistic forms of cultural criticism, by exposing when and why art fails to reveal the heterogeneity and inner conflicts of human experience, can serve as a resource within liberal life.

There remains something pertinent and gripping about Susan Sontag’s critique of illness metaphors and her broader effort to work toward a more humane and dignified view of suffering. Yet her call to liberate culture – and in particular art – from metaphor can seem perplexing. Not only does such liberation appear difficult to achieve within a medium like art, which seems inescapably figurative, but Sontag expressly highlights the value of metaphors, regarding their estranging effect not as a risk but as something from which societies might learn. Nor does Sontag express unqualified confidence in how the dis- passionate ethos of modern medicine might correct a metaphor-laden discourse, ap- proaching its scientized culture instead with a degree of skepticism. In exposing these tensions, I aim to show that Sontag is not naively seeking to free us from metaphor. Rather, she invites us to ask how figurative expression might offer something of value to public life. Her critique of metaphor leads us toward the further question of art’s role in society – an issue that has faded somewhat from contemporary political thinking.

On the standard interpretation, if a person holds cyclical preferences, the person is prone to acting irrationally. I provide a different interpretation, tying cyclical preferences not to irrationality, but to indecision. According to this alternative understanding – coined the indecision interpretation – top cycles in a person’s preferences can be associated with a difficulty in justifying one’s choice. If an agent’s justificatory impasse persists despite attempts to resolve the cycle, the agent can be deemed undecided. The indecision interpretation is compatible with the standard interpretation of such cycles as instances of irrationality. Yet indecision corresponds to a first-person, non-instrumental perspective on the problem, whereas irrationality usually corresponds to a third-person, instrumental perspective. Due to these differences, interpreting cycles in terms of indecision offers a novel conceptual perspective, pertinent both for explanatory purposes and for the aim of normative theorizing.