Fazekas Hannah Arendt’s Unwritten Chapter on Judging

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-11-137573-1
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Reihe: ISSN

Hannah Arendt’s claim that she brings Immanuel Kant’s unwritten political philosophy to fruition is controversial. For one, it is inconsistent with Kant’s thought, as he separates aesthetic and political judgments. Moreover, Arendt’s appropriation of reflective judgment conflicts with her sharp distinction between the public and private realms. Whereas reflective judgment is a reflective ability, political judgment is a public ability.

This book justifies Arendt’s claim that reflective judgment has political potential – while remaining consistent with Kant’s aesthetics and Arendt’s politics. By developing an Arendtian phenomenology of privacy, I offer a new reading of her public-private distinction. I uncover non-privacy as the space of withdrawal where the life of the mind unfolds.

What is more, I show that reflective activities constitute the necessary but not sufficient conditions for the emergence of the public realm. Reflective judgment is one of these activities. For Arendt attributes to enlarged mentality the public communicability of political judgments. Enlarged mentality thus gives persons the ability to insert themselves into the world. Therefore, Arendt is right to locate political potential in reflective judgment.

Zielgruppe

Scholars of Arendt, political philosophy, Kant, aesthetics

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fazekas, Samantha

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Sozialphilosophie, Politische Philosophie

Leseproben

Introduction

Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Catona

Könnt’ ich Magie von meinem Pfad entfernen, Die Zaubersprüche ganz und gar verlernen, Stünd’ ich Natur vor Dir, ein Mann allein, Da wär’s Mühe wert ein Mensch zu sein.1

Hannah Arendt is known for her brilliant contributions to political philosophy and political theory. The Origins of Totalitarianism offers a comprehensive and groundbreaking study of totalitarian regimes. Her report on the Eichmann trial develops a novel conception of evil, which she coins ‘the banality of evil.’2 Arendt’s account of the vita activa (active life) in The Human Condition breathes new life into the concept of action (praxis) by setting it as the “political activity par excellence” (Arendt 1958, 9). Even her unfinished work, The Life of the Mind, can be regarded as an innovative account of the vita contemplativa (contemplative life), which she intended to be the counterpart to the vita activa.

Hannah Arendt is also known for sparking considerable controversy. Her characterization of Adolf Eichmann as a Hanswurst (buffoon) (Arendt 2024, 124), and her accusation of the Jewish councils in their complicity in the Holocaust, caused outrage – to say the least. She was not only criticized and alienated by intellectual communities and Jewish organizations (Elon 2006, vii), but she was also ostracized by her own friends. Arendt’s exclusion of social issues from politics is widely criticized,3 and her commitment to this strict division leads her to draw shocking conclusions. For example, one of her most concerning conclusions is that desegregation in American schools is not a political concern (Arendt 2003e, 202).

The aim of this book is to justify one of Arendt’s brilliant and controversial claims. I wish to defend her highly contested claim that she brings Immanuel Kant’s “nonwritten political philosophy” (Arendt 1992, 19) to fruition. In her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, she declares that Kant’s Critique of Judgment contains “a political philosophy” that “he never wrote” (Arendt 1992, 31). Arendt thus takes it upon herself to sketch “what Kant’s political philosophy would have been like had he found the time and strength to express it adequately” (Arendt 1992, 19). She intends to develop his unwritten political philosophy by turning to aesthetic reflective judgment.4 For Kant, reflective judgment is an aesthetic judgment regarding the beautiful (5:231). Arendt believes it has political potential because she maintains an analogy between judging aesthetically and politically, that is, ‘between beautiful and ugly, right and wrong’ (Arendt 2003d, 160).

The analogy she draws between judging aesthetically and politically is that it entails falling back on our own capacity for autonomous discrimination. For Kant, the task of reflective judgment is to create its own rule by which to judge the aesthetic quality of a particular object (5:179). For Arendt, the task of political judgment is to create its own rule by which to judge a particular worldly event. Whereas reflective judgment proceeds without universal rules for cognition (5:217), political judgment kicks in when pre-existing standards and norms have collapsed.

What sparked Arendt’s interest in political judgment were the historical and political events that shaped her time: the rise of totalitarian regimes, the 1930 refugee crisis, the Holocaust, and the Eichmann trial. As she claims, these events “clearly exploded our categories of political thought and our standards for moral judgment” (Arendt 1994, 311). Since the reigning standards and norms no longer suffice to discriminate between right and wrong, the only recourse is to fall back on one’s own capacity to judge. By maintaining an analogy between reflective and political judgment, Arendt thus believes to uncover the hidden political potential in Kant’s Critique of Judgment.

This book offers a new reading of Arendt’s interpretation of reflective judgment. The novelty of my account is that it situates reflective judgment squarely within her political thought – without compromising the integrity of Kant’s aesthetics or Arendt’s conception of politics. My reading thus sets itself apart from two prevailing views in the secondary literature. One prevailing view is that Arendt’s declaration that she brings Kant’s unwritten political philosophy to fruition is inconsistent with Kant’s thought. On the face of it, her claim is factually incorrect because Kant wrote political texts, such as Toward A Perpetual Peace and “The Doctrine of Right” in The Metaphysics of Morals. This leads Ronald Beiner to conclude:

Arendt is clearly dead wrong when she states in Lecture 10 that Kantian political philosophy must be reconstructed from the third Critique because his real political philosophy remained unwritten (Beiner 2001, 193).

While Arendt was well aware of Kant’s political writings,5 it does not diminish the philosophical groundlessness of her claim. What questions the validity of her claim is that Kant’s aesthetics does not lend itself to his conception of politics. This is the case because aesthetic judgments do not lead into political judgments. For Kant, they are distinct because they are formed on different cognitive grounds.6 Maintaining an analogy between aesthetic and political judgment therefore does not hold. To bring clarity to Arendt’s claim, Beiner suggests that Arendt should have argued that reflective judgment contains Kant’s “anticipation of her political philosophy” (Beiner 2001, 95).

However, many commentators have taken issue with Arendt’s insistence that reflective judgment is a “political ability” (Arendt 2001, 20) that “fits us into a community” (Arendt 1992, 70). It seems as though Arendt deviates from Kant because she intimates that shaping judgments of taste involves publicly discussing them with others. In contrast, Kant limits shaping judgments of taste to a theoretical process, which simply involves imagining the possible perspectives of others. To mention only a few of her critics, Richard Bernstein argues that Arendt “radically departs from Kant” (Bernstein 1986, 232?–?233). Robert Dostal contends that “[s]he violates not only the letter but the spirit of Kant’s philosophy” (Dostal 1984, 727). George Kateb holds that “[s]he enlists Kant in her project, but the project is most un-Kantian, anti-Kantian” (Kateb 2001, 121).

Another prevailing view in the secondary literature is that appealing to reflective judgment is inconsistent with Arendt’s own political thought. For example, Bernard Flynn (1988), Christopher Lasch (1983), Andrew Norris (1996), and Matthew Weidenfeld (2012) observe that the formality of reflective judgment does not square with the public nature of political judgment. Weidenfeld remarks that Arendt “retains Kant’s thought that judgment is a reflective and intellectual capacity,” which “makes it difficult for her to conceptualize judgment as a practice” (Weidenfeld 2012, 261).7 Thus, according to Arendt’s own thought, the analogy she draws between aesthetic and political judgments does not hold. This leads Norris to the conclusion that “Kant’s own conception of reflective judgment is inappropriate for Arendt’s purposes, as it cannot be said to grow out of the historical, worldly encounters it makes possible” (Norris 1996, 168).

In contrast, I wish to show that Arendt was right to locate political potential in reflective judgment. I neither wish to claim that she writes a political treatise that Kant did not write himself, nor that aesthetic judgments lead into Kant’s conception of political judgments. Instead, I wish to argue that reflective judgment lends itself as a model for Arendt’s conception of political judgment – while remaining as consistent with Kant’s aesthetics and Arendt’s conception of politics as possible.

In order to make my case, I will employ Arendt’s own method, namely, what Seyla Benhabib calls Arendt’s “phenomenological essentialism” (Benhabib 2003, 123). Although Arendt never claimed to devise a systematic philosophical or political theory, it has been acknowledged that she operates with a quasi-phenomenological method.8 Even Arendt reluctantly admitted herself that she was “sort of a phenomenologist, but ach, not in Hegel’s way – or Husserl’s” (Young-Bruehl 2004, 405). Arendt’s methodology somewhat resembles a phenomenological one, only insofar as she seeks to understand worldly phenomena by describing them. And in doing so, she places them in their respective categories, which include but are not limited to: public; private; social; moral; political; pre-political; unpolitical; anti-political; visibility; invisibility; light; darkness; worldly; unworldly; human; inhuman; material; immaterial; solitude; isolation; spatial...

Über Autor(innen)

Samantha Fazekas, Trinitiy College Dublin, Ireland.