Hannah Arendt, The Third Critique and Aspects of Contemporary Political Philosophy

277 Pages·2017·1.26 MB·English

DOCTORAL THESIS
The Fate of Judgement
Hannah Arendt, The Third Critique and Aspects of Contemporary Political Philosophy
Horner, Christopher
Award date:
2012
Awarding institution:
University of Roehampton
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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.

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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.)

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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.
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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
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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. For there is much in Arendt’s thinking that is authentically radical.
Unsystematic as she is, she nevertheless pursues certain themes with remarkable
consistency. Apart from her critique of liberalism, which she came to see as working to
obliterate the promise of the revolutionary enlightenment, she retained a fascination for
what she called natality, the capacity to bring about the absolutely new in human affairs.
Arendt is interested in the unprecedented. This is the radical, even utopian, spirit in her
work and it relates to her interest in revolutions. The capacity to initiate the absolutely
new requires a kind of leap that can only be prepared by a kind of imaginative move that

2 This also helps to explain the difficulty in locating an Arendtian magnum opus: there is no one text that epitomises her
thought. The attempt to do this, to identify say, The Origins of Totalitarianism or The Life of the Mind as her ‘key’ work does
a kind of violence to the processive quality of her thought. This is nearly as misleading as the related tendency to find a
misleadingly simple label for her work as a whole.
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exceeds law, rule or precept, and this is her understanding of the political meaning of
reflective judgment.

Arendt’s discussion of judgment is not unproblematic, to be sure. Yet the very
difficulties she finds herself in are illuminating. In wrestling with the cluster of ideas that
she takes from Kant (especially the ideas of ‘Taste’ and sensus communis) she begins to
expose some of the central problems of political modernity, especially the character of
the political subject or citizen. Far from a simple politicisation of Kant’s notion of
aesthetic judgment, we find that it was implicitly political all along. The question of what
to make of reflective judgment opens out into a wider question of the way in which we
might think, judge and act politically in the future. I argue that any response that would
seek to be adequate must think of the disclosive quality of political judgment as occurring
in a context of dissensus and struggle, rather than a supposedly undivided and exclusive
sensus communis.
2
The first chapter opens with the trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann. I begin
with this because I take it that this was a pivotal moment in Arendt’s development3.
Arendt’s presence at the trial and her subsequent book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on
The Banality of Evil (1963) seems to be the place in which her previous thinking on
history, totalitarianism and the human condition meet the question of what it is to think
and judge, to bring about the advent of the new in a way that remains responsible to the
past. Her physical presence in that courtroom, alongside her contemporary, the accused,4
places her as someone striving to think about the history that had brought them both to
a courtroom in Jerusalem in 1960. I take the opportunity in this chapter to sketch some
of that history and to compare her thinking alongside that of some contemporaries of a

3 Of course it was a lot more than that –for Israel, for the way the Nazi genocide would be understood, etc.
4 They were both born in 1906.
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very different type to Eichmann. Arendt always held that narrative and the consideration
of real historical examples was central to gaining a sense of the meaning of the ‘dark
times’ she wrote about; and in this and subsequent chapters I present some individuals
who are, in various ways, exemplary.

In the second chapter I try to show what it was about Kant’s Critique of Judgment
that Arendt found so inspiring. In a close reading of the text I endeavour to show what it
was about reflective judgment that Arendt went on to apply to her thinking about
politics. I also seek to show that certain problems (aporias, perhaps) in Kant’s text were
central to the way in which he conceived the operation of reflective judgment, and that
these recur in Arendt. She applies in a modulated way what he has to say about
judgment, ‘common human understanding’ and the sensus communis, but this imports into
her work, like a virus, the problem of Taste. Such difficulties are not merely contingent
or easily transcended. They go to the heart of political thinking in modernity, and run like
a thread through Arendt’s meditations on culture, consumerism and education. I
conclude the chapter with a consideration of her ‘Understanding and Politics’, a text that
displays many of Arendt’s central concerns about thinking, truth and politics as they were
on the eve of her engagement with the problem of Eichmann.

In chapter three I turn to the major works Arendt produced before and
immediately after the Eichmann trial, beginning with The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). I
take this to be a key text. In The Origins of Totalitarianism we see Arendt producing a
strange, hybrid text, a kind of ‘analytical narrative’ approach to the writing of history and
the history of ideas (for Arendt the two are inseparable). Arendt is thinking carefully
about narrative and history, and there is a decisive rejection of any kind of determinism
in the understanding of how the modern age took on the character that it did. As a
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