The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts HANNAH ARENDT’S THEORY OF DELIBERATIVE JUDGMENT A Dissertation in Philosophy by Joshua A. Miller © 2010 Joshua A. Miller Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2010 The dissertation of Joshua A. Miller was reviewed and approved* by the following: John Christman Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Science Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee Shannon Sullivan Professor of Philosophy, Women's Studies, and African and African American Studies Head of the Department of Philosophy Dennis J. Schmidt Liberal Arts Research Professor of Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and German Stephen H. Browne Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences *Signatures are on file with the Graduate School. ii Abstract In this dissertation, I investigate the role of judgment in the work of Hannah Arendt, focusing on her reading of Kant and Augustine and her account of deliberation in democratic theory. In an attempt to fill the lacuna left by her unfinished work, The Life of the Mind, I argue that Arendt’s appropriation of the Kantian sensus communis entails a theory of ethical and political judgment centered in the community rather than the subject. Taking my cue from her comment that the goal of philosophy is to teach us how to “think without banisters,” I defend Arendt’s view that the faculty of thinking cannot practically constrain the faculty of willing, and that the categorical imperative is inadequate to challenge of the explosive unforeseeability that Arendt attributes to action. Thus Arendt’s account of judging cannot be equated with reasoning over consequences or intentions. Because Arendt rejects Kant’s attempts to circumscribe action under a moral law and his nascent account of historical progress developed under the rubric of teleological judgment, her account of aesthetic judgments also departs significantly from that of Kant. To spell out this departure, I analyze Arendt's dissertation on Augustine, in which I show that Arendt sought a theory of judging as amor mundi that depends on the phenomenological circumscription of communities of interpretation and response. I expand this account with a reading of Augustine’s struggle to negotiate with the Donatist schismatics, which I use to develop the parallels between Arendt’s account of judgment and contemporary democratic theories of deliberation and public reason. Table of Contents Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................................... vi Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 1 I. The Vita Activa and the Vita Contemplativa ............................................................................. 4 II. Misjudging Arendt ................................................................................................................... 11 III. Love and Saint Augustine ........................................................................................................ 15 Chapter 1 ..................................................................................................................................................... 22 From Metaphysics to Metaphor ............................................................................................................. 22 I. Truth and Lying in Politics ....................................................................................................... 22 II. “Officialese is my language”: Euphemism in Eichmann .......................................................... 27 III. Thinking as Withdrawal ........................................................................................................... 33 IV. Pluralism and the Coercive Character of Truth ....................................................................... 37 V. From Representation to Meaning ........................................................................................... 40 VI. The Limits of Meaning ............................................................................................................. 45 Chapter 2 ..................................................................................................................................................... 47 Freedom and the Will ............................................................................................................................. 47 I. Two Concepts of Freedom: Privation and Capacity ................................................................ 47 II. The Meaning of Freedom: Willing ........................................................................................... 53 III. The Displacement of Freedom: Providence ............................................................................ 58 IV. The Discovery of Freedom: Revolution ................................................................................... 62 V. The Destruction of Freedom: Violence ................................................................................... 68 VI. The Limits of Freedom: Misery ................................................................................................ 72 Chapter 3 ..................................................................................................................................................... 74 The Actor Theory of Judgment ............................................................................................................... 74 I. Revolution, Insurrection, and Antipolitics ............................................................................... 74 II. The rule of No Man: Bureaucracy and Proceduralism ............................................................ 80 iv III. Speech or Deeds: Habermas’s Challenge ................................................................................ 88 IV. Lex and Nomos: Arendt against Practical Reason ................................................................... 95 Chapter 4 ................................................................................................................................................... 103 The Spectator Theory of Judgment ....................................................................................................... 103 I. The Impartial Spectator ......................................................................................................... 103 II. Arendt’s Aesthetics and the Sensus Communis .................................................................... 109 III. Sociability and Purposiveness ............................................................................................... 115 IV. Kant as Spectator of the French Revolution .......................................................................... 118 Chapter 5 ................................................................................................................................................... 126 Saint Augustine and Love of the World ................................................................................................ 126 I. Augustine’s Theory of Judging............................................................................................... 126 II. From Solitude to Solidarity .................................................................................................... 130 III. Judging and the Love of the World ....................................................................................... 140 Chapter 6 ................................................................................................................................................... 144 The Problem with Charity ..................................................................................................................... 144 I. Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments ....................................................................... 145 II. The Politics of Forgiveness .................................................................................................... 149 III. The Duty to Forgive ............................................................................................................... 157 IV. When not to Forgive: Lessons from the Donatists ................................................................ 163 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................. 173 Taming the Desert ............................................................................................................................. 173 How Judging Allows Us to Persist at the Impasse of Freedom ......................................................... 179 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................................. 181 Notes ......................................................................................................................................................... 194 v Acknowledgements Writing is difficult for me. Without readers, it would be impossible. I have been fortunate to have two great scholars and generous advisors as readers: Charles Scott offered critical appraisals of the work in its beginnings as an uncertain proposal, and