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DOCTORAL THESIS the Fate of Judgement Hannah Arendt, The DOCTORAL THESIS The Fate of Judgement Hannah Arendt, The Third Critique and Aspects of Contemporary Political Philosophy Horner, Christopher Award date: 2012 General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 01. Oct. 2021 The Fate of Judgement Hannah Arendt, The Third Critique and Aspects of Contemporary Political Philosophy By Christopher Horner, BA, MPhil A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD Department of Humanities Roehampton University University of Surrey 2011 1 Abstract In this work I examine the role of judgment in the writings of Hannah Arendt. I argue that consideration of this concept helps to shed light on her important contribution to political philosophy, and in particular on the often overlooked radical aspects of her work. Judgment lies at the heart of a cluster of characteristically ‘Arendtian’ themes: those of natality, plurality, narrative and the relation between political action, thought and disclosure, as well as her notions of political public space and its relation to past and future. I argue that in adapting Kant’s conception of judgment as presented in his Critique of Judgment, Arendt also inherits a problematic pair of ideas associated with it: ‘Taste’ and sensus communis. These concepts, I suggest, raise questions of authority, exclusion and participation that were already politically coded in Kant. Examining the part they came to play in Arendt’s thought helps us to see a significant problematic for a political thought that would aspire to be critical and radical. Specifically, it exposes two closely interlinked questions: that of the limits of the political (its character and distinctiveness) and that of the political subjects themselves (the notion of proper and improper political subjects). I conclude that an engagement with the role of reflective judgment in Arendt is an illuminating and important way to understand both the radical current in Arendt’s thought and the challenge faced by any radical political thought at the opening of the twenty-first century. 2 Acknowledgements Many people deserve thanks for the assistance they have given me while I have been working on this project. Howard Caygill first got me thinking about Hannah Arendt and judgment, and he gave valuable advice and encouragement in the early stages. Eric Jacobson sustained and supported me at a crucial time and provided me with the essential stimulus and discipline to get the work completed. Jonathan Ree read and commented on large parts of the work and gave invaluable advice and encouragement. Zachary Leader read through the entire draft and helped me to improve the text in more ways than I can count. Much of the work was done in the British Library, and I owe thanks to the staff there for their help. All remaining imperfections are entirely my responsibility, of course. My work on the thesis has been aided by the discussions I have had with friends and colleagues, including Emrys Westacott, Martin Butler, Andrew Bowie, Norman Crowther, Alison Ainley, Neil Gascoigne and Hanka Dilley. Lastly, and above all, I want to thank Djuna Thurley, to whom this work is dedicated with love and gratitude. 3 The Fate of Judgment Hannah Arendt, The Third Critique and Aspects of Contemporary Political Philosophy Introduction (p. 5.) 1. Judgment in Jerusalem (p. 18.) 2. ‘Common Sense’ and the Visibility of Judgment (p. 51.) 3. The Burden of Our Time: The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition and On Revolution. (p. 125.) 4. Judgment, Amor Mundi, and The Lost Promise of the Enlightenment (p. 191.) 5. Thinking, Willing and Judging (p. 214.) 6. Proper and Improper Subjects: Hannah Arendt and the Emergence of Judgment (p. 229.) Bibliography (p. 263.) 4 Introduction 1 This is a study of the role of judgment in the work of Hannah Arendt. The aim is to shed light on the concept through a close study of the ways in which it was developed and deployed by Arendt in some of her key texts. Judgment lies at the heart of her work, and investigating its place in her writings is a way into what is most valuable about her thought. Although the place of judgment in Arendt’s work has been considered before, this study differs from other discussions in a number of significant ways.1 I try to show that judgment, and reflective judgment in particular, provides a unique vantage point for understanding the meaning and significance of the cluster of key ideas Arendt works with: natality, plurality, narrative, thinking etc; reflective judgment is revealed as the key central concept that allows us to connect Arendt’s concern with the spatial (public space, borders, boundaries etc) to her thinking about past and future. So judgment is revealed as a kind of ‘nodal point’ in her work. Arendt inherits the concept of ‘reflective judgment’ from Kant, adapting it to her own purposes and using it in ways that go well beyond its presentation in the Critique of Judgment. As we shall see, there are some difficulties with her use of the term, and with the way it is connected to ideas about ‘taste’ and common sense, and some of these difficulties can be traced back to Kant’s original presentation. To put it briefly, while 1 The most notable recent contribution is probably Judgment, Imagination and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt ed. Beiner and Nedelsky, 2001. But many of the main commentaries on Arendt deal with it at some length. 5 reflective judgment seems oriented to the future, to creation and the radically new in human affairs, ‘taste’ can look like a conservative concept. ‘Taste’ signifies a restraint on the inventio of judgment, dividing individuals and groups into those with it and those without it: the refined and the unrefined, the elite and the mass or mob. ‘Taste’, like ‘common sense’, is not innocent of ideology. Seeing quite why judgment and common sense turn out to be so difficult for her to use helps to clarify something quite characteristic of her thought. It is that Arendt seems to present (at least) two personae: one ‘conservative’ and the other ‘radical’. I argue that it is her use of reflective judgment that is truly valuable and radical, but that her struggle with the ambiguous inheritance of taste and sensus communis is itself instructive. In the view I am arguing for here, reflective judgment is a name for the way in which Arendt conceives us to be disclosing ourselves to others in a creative manner that allows the advent of the genuinely new beyond the nihilism of the Twentieth Century, in a public realm that is also a dimension of meaning. Apart from the interesting things Arendt has to say about the advent and crisis of political modernity, she has an importantly fresh conception of the way in which judgment can preserve, renew and transform our public political space. Arendt views herself as a kind of phenomenologist, and for her that which is true is not that which is hidden but that which appears. The public sphere is the place in which we preserve our sense of the reality of others, and where, in a way that is essentially adult, we take responsibility for our shared world (and for changing that world). The exercise of reflective judgment, involving as it does the use of imagination and the acknowledgement of the presence of others, is thus at the heart of politics, and indeed of the possibility of a meaningful public life together. The problem here is the relation between this conception of politics / judgment and the private, social and economic areas of life. Arendt is famous for her insistence on a sharp dividing line 6 between the public political space and everything else. While I do not subscribe to any such pronounced division, I try to show why she might have a point in insisting on the distinctive nature of political life, before suggesting ways in which we might conceive of the relation between the various zones or spheres of life. There is something elusive, protean and hard to categorise about Arendt’s writing. This is not surprising. Arendt’s tendency to present different personae in her work makes it hard to ‘place’ her politically and philosophically. I suggest that this is because in reading her, we are reading someone who is constantly thinking rather than seeking to present the reader with a finished set of conclusions. In this she is, it seems to me, authentically Socratic2. To read Arendt is to follow her ‘thought trains’ in order to see where they go. The effect may sometimes be to confuse the reader as to Arendt’s intent, but is, at its frequent best, remarkably thought provoking. She tends to keep pushing on, in a perpetual questioning of all that stands. She is a critical thinker. Given all this, it is remarkable how often she is identified as some kind of liberal or conservative.
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