What Hannah Arendt Has Contributed to a Philosophy of Judgment

Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2000

ABSTRACT The question of judgment has become one of the central problems in recent social, political and ethical thought. This paper explores Hannah Arendt’s decisive contribution to this debate by attempting to reconstruct analytically two distinctive perspectives on judgment from the corpus of her writings. By exploring her relation to Aristotelian and Kantian sources, and by uncovering debts and parallels to key thinkers such as Benjamin and Heidegger, it is argued that Arendt’s work pinpoints the key antinomy within political judgment itself, that between the viewpoints of the political actor and the political spectator. The paper concludes by highlighting some lacunae and difficulties in the development of Arendt’s account, difficulties that set challenges for those theorists (such as Seyla Benhabib and Alessandro Ferrara) who wish to appropriate and extend Arendt’s contribution into the field of contemporary critical theory.

Colloquy: text, theory, critique, 2017

Readers of Hannah Arendt's political theory have always found it difficult to integrate her writings on political judgment into her political theory as a whole. This is primarily because Arendt's judging subject seems to be at odds with the way that she frames the acting subject. In response to this problem, this article identifies an implicit Kantianism within Arendt's political theory, which can be employed in understanding the role of political judgement and its relation to action in Arendt. I suggest that, in order to ground the judgement of the actor, Arendt appeals to a version of Kantian reflective judgement, as it appears in Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgement. I then argue that although Arendt attempts to distance herself from the Kantian transcendental, she also seems to lean on theoretical formulations that correlate to the sublime feeling in the spectator, also found in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Finally, I relate these two ways of judging to the notion of power as Arendt discusses it in The Human Condition. I suggest that it is through power that political judgment appears in the world, as the clash between the reflective judgment of the actor and the philosophical judgment of the spectator.

The central claim in this essay is that Hannah Arendt advanced two different concepts of judgment: The first is moral and it is her Socratic reinterpretation of Kant’s «categorical imperative»; the second is political and it represents her So- cratic adaptation of Kant’s «enlarged mentality». I show that Arendt’s concepts of judgment runs on two different trains of thought throughout her work. One train branches out of her characterization of Adolf Eichmann as a thoughtless being, and it mostly consists of both her exploration of the possible relation between think- ing and morality and her quest for an autonomous source of morality. In this first case, Arendt reframes Kant’s categorical imperative in Socratic terms by revealing a principle of non-imperative self-respect. The second train of thought is less con- tingent; it stems out of Arendt’s realization that recovering plurality and the world in-between men would require more than just the phenomenological recovery of political action, it requires the recovery of the public and equi-vocal manifestation of thought. In this other case, Arendt suggests a reevaluation of the Socratic phroni- mos by way of the Kantian notions of sensus communis and enlarged mentality. The result is her concept of Judging.

Within the current political context, it seems uncontroversial to assert that public discourse about matters of shared concern is generally regarded as toxic and not as an inviting opportunity for citizens. Generally speaking, participation in public discourse and in the public space is not something we seek out, unless perhaps, it is from behind the privacy of our electronic devices. Hannah Arendt's thought provides some of the best resources for rethinking these concepts. This essay, then, seeks to accomplish two tasks at once. First, I utilize Arendt's thought as a vehicle for attempting to rethink public discourse as perhaps the political problem confronting contemporary citizens. Second, it will be this very rethinking of public discourse that allows me to wade into a more specific debate within Arendt scholarship about the role of judgment in her thought.

This article considers the relevance of Hannah Arendt's writing on responsibility and judgment for legal academics. It begins by providing a sunnnary of Arendt's report on the Eichmann trial, focusing in particular on the gradual shift in her thinking from theorising evil as radical to something that is banal. Following this, I connect Arendt's thinking on judgment with her writing on plurality and what it means to keep company with oneself. I contend that Arendt's most important contribution to moral thinking was the disenchantment of evil from its religious legacy. Finally, I consider the continued relevance of Arendt's warning about the risks mass technological society poses for the capacity of human beings to think and make reflective judgments. These uniquely human characteristics need to be protected, if we are to guard against the rise of inverted totalitarianism and the reduction of human beings to homo oeconomicus.

Philosophy and Social Criticism (http://psc.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/05/29/0191453715587974.abstract)

Hannah Arendt's conceptualization of political judgment has been a source of much scholarly investigation and debate in recent decades. Underlying the debate is the assumption that at least in her early writings, Arendt had an actor's theory of judgment. In this article I challenge this common assumption. As I attempt to demonstrate, it relies on a misunderstanding, not only of Arendt’s conception of judgment, but also of her conception of agents in the public realm. Once we discard the assumption of an actor's theory of judgment, I argue, some important issues in Arendt's theory of judgment are resolved, enabling us to perceive it as a unified, rather than self-contradictory, theory of judgment.

2020

The plan of this thesis is, first, to interpret Arendt's critique of the modern age. Next, this paper outlines Arendt's reconceptualization of Kant's theory of judgment as the basis for a novel model of the public sphere in light of the conditions of modernity. Finally, this paper explores Arendt's poetics as a means of activating the faculty of judgment in order to reconcile with the modern world. In order to address the political crises of modernity, Arendt develops a political aesthetic alive to the role of narrative and culture in reconstituting political communities. I argue that Hannah Arendt develops a novel political theory that is responsive to our global political context. v