Hannah Arendt’s Kantian Socrates: Moral and Political Judging

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.

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 & 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.

Hannah Arendt liked to present herself in the image of a thinker who had jettisoned the grand metaphysical ambitions of the Western philosophical tradition. In this, Arendt anticipated later “anti-foundationalist” themes in what came to be called post-modernist theory. Arendt even went so far as to resist the notion that she was a philosopher at all. In my view this self-understanding was way off the mark. Juxtaposing her idea of “judging” in the posthumously-published Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy with a classic conception of judgment from the Western philosophy canon – namely Aristotle’s key notion of “phronesis,” practical wisdom – demonstrates that Arendt easily matches the metaphysical ambitions of the philosophy tradition. For a thinker like Arendt, chucking off philosophy turns out to be easier said than done. In fact, properly appreciating the judging idea in the Kant Lectures conducts us into the very centre of Arendt’s political philosophy.

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.