To Think Representatively: Arendt on Judgment and the Imagination

the Journal of Philosophical Ideas, 2017

The power of imagination (Die Einbildungskraft), or in short imagination, has a unique and prior position in Arendt’s theory of judgment, which has been long overlooked. This first aim of this paper is to argue for the priority and necessity of imagination in Arendt’s theory of judgment by reconstructing her descriptions and arguments mainly from her interpretation of Kantian philosophy. The second aim is to shed light on the implications of the priority of imagination in respect of judgment. In the conclusion, I will point out some problems of Arendt’s theory of judgment with the resources provided in Kant’s philosophy.

Political Theory, vol 22, no. 10, 2005

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.

Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften, 2005

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.

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.

Works of Philosophy and Their Reception. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2024., 2024

The originality of Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy resides in her conviction that the elements of an original political philosophy inhabit Kant's third Critique. And just as judgment is reconsidered here in relation to politics, Arendt also suggests that in many senses, politics and aesthetics are inextricably linked. In my contribution here, I argue that Arendt encourages us to think about imagination not only as a mental capacity separate from external reality, but rather as something like a pure a priori faculty fundamental to human thought and action whose creative powers are exercised in a variety of domains.

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.