"We feel our freedom" imagination and judgment in the thought of Hannah Arendt

Political Theory

Volumn 33, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 158-188

  Zerilli, Linda M G ^a  

^a NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Critique of Judgment; Hannah Arendt; Political freedom; Political judgment; Rhetoric

Indexed keywords

EID: 16244380508     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591704272958     Document Type: Article

References (62)

1. For accounts of politics as an aesthetic practice, see Kennan Ferguson, The Politics of Judgment: Aesthetics, Identity, and Political Theory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999); and F. R. Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy beyond Fact and Value (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
2. For accounts of politics as an aesthetic practice, see Kennan Ferguson, The Politics of Judgment: Aesthetics, Identity, and Political Theory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999); and F. R. Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy beyond Fact and Value (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
3. The same point applies in reverse: For example, I may look at a rose and make a judgment of taste declaring it to be beautiful. But if I compare many singular roses and so arrive at the judgment, Roses in general are beautiful, then my judgment is not longer merely aesthetic but is a logical judgment based on an aesthetic one. (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar [Indianapolis, IN; Hackett, 1987], §8, 59. Hereafter cited in the text as CJ with section and page numbers.)
4. Jürgen Habermas, "Hannah Arendt's Communications Concept of Power," Hannah Arendt, Critical Essays, ed. by Lewis Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 225. For a similar argument, see Albrecht Wellmer, "Hannah Arendt on Judgment: The Unwritten Doctrine of Reason," Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt, ed. by Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedlesky (Boston: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 165-181; quotation is from p. 169.
5. Jürgen Habermas, "Hannah Arendt's Communications Concept of Power," Hannah Arendt, Critical Essays, ed. by Lewis Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 225. For a similar argument, see Albrecht Wellmer, "Hannah Arendt on Judgment: The Unwritten Doctrine of Reason," Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt, ed. by Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedlesky (Boston: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 165-181; quotation is from p. 169.
6. Ronald Beiner, "Interpretive Essay: Hannah Arendt on Judging," in Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. by Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 36.
7. See Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 72. For another defense of Arendt contra Habermas, see Lisa Jane Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
8. See Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 72. For another defense of Arendt contra Habermas, see Lisa Jane Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed. by G. H. Wright, R. Rhees, and G. E. M. Anscombe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), I, 121. Hereafter cited as RFM.
10. Beiner, "Interpretive Essay," 13.
11. Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 188-189. Benhabib finds a "normative lacuna in Arendt's thought" and the turn to the third, rather than the second, Critique to be one more "disturbing" example of Arendt's refusal or failure to provide the "normative dimension of the political" (Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism, 193, 194).
12. Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 188-189. Benhabib finds a "normative lacuna in Arendt's thought" and the turn to the third, rather than the second, Critique to be one more "disturbing" example of Arendt's refusal or failure to provide the "normative dimension of the political" (Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism, 193, 194).
13. See Wellmer, "Hannah Arendt on Judgment," 166; and Beiner, "Interpretative Essay," 134.
14. See Wellmer, "Hannah Arendt on Judgment," 166; and Beiner, "Interpretative Essay," 134.
15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. by Paul Guyer and Alan W. Wood (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1977), B171.
16. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 1-vol. ed., vol. 2, "Willing" (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), 28-34.
17. Hannah Arendt, "Understanding and Politics," Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954, ed. by Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 307-327; quotation is from p. 325, n7. "The loss of [inherited] standards," Arendt observes, "is only a catastrophe for the moral [and political] world when one assumes that individuals are not capable of judging things in themselves [...] one cannot expect of them anything more than the application of known rules," Hannah Arendt, Was ist Politik? ed. by Ursula Ludz (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1993), 22. Hereafter, this is cited in the text as WIP. All translations are my own.
18. Hannah Arendt, "Understanding and Politics," Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954, ed. by Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 307-327; quotation is from p. 325, n7. "The loss of [inherited] standards," Arendt observes, "is only a catastrophe for the moral [and political] world when one assumes that individuals are not capable of judging things in themselves [...] one cannot expect of them anything more than the application of known rules," Hannah Arendt, Was ist Politik? ed. by Ursula Ludz (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1993), 22. Hereafter, this is cited in the text as WIP. All translations are my own.
19. In Arendt's view, totalitarianism is the paradigmatic event that strains our faculty of judgment, for "the death factories erected in the heart of Europe" confront us with an unprecedented sense of meaninglessness. How are we to judge an event that reveals the ruin of "our categories of thought and standards of judgment?" (Arendt, "Understanding and Politics," 313). If we stubbornly cling to rules that no longer speak to our experience, she argues, it is because what we have gotten used to is not so much the substance of any particular rule, but the fact of having rules with which to judge. Hannah Arendt, "Thinking and Moral Considerations," Social Research: Fiftieth Anniversary Issue 38, no. 3 (Autumn 1971): 416-446; see especially p. 436.
20. On the relationship of judgments (Urteile) to prejudices (Vorurteile), see WIP, 17-23.
21. This point is emphasized in Samuel Fleischacker, A Third Concept of Liberty: Judgment and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Fleischaker, too, sees freedom as deeply connected to the development of the judging faculty. In contrast to Arendt, however, he develops a theory of judgment from within the liberal tradition.
22. For Arendt, the development of a freedom-affirming faculty of judgment requires more than an acknowledgment of contingency. Although she fiercely defends contingency against the Western philosophical tradition's equally fierce defense of necessity, she is adamant that we need to be able to judge new political objects and events. We need to be able to judge them in their freedom, that is, produce a sense of coherence that is neither given in our pre-understanding nor exhausted by the application of known concepts. Merely affirming the contingency of objects and events does not address the quest for meaning that is at the heart of the judging faculty. And it does not take seriously the ever-present temptation, when confronted with "the haphazard character of the particular," to assume a stance devoid of care for the world, as if "any order, any necessity, any meaning you wish to impose will do" (Arendt, "The Concept of History," 89).
23. "The limits of a decisionistic treatment of practical questions are overcome as soon as argumentation is expected to test the generalizability of interests, instead of being resigned to an impenetrable pluralism of apparently ultimate value orientations," writes Habermas. "It is not the fact of this pluralism that is here disputed, but the assertion that it is impossible to separate by argumentation generalizable interests from those that remain particular." Citing this passage, Richard Bernstein finds a parallel in Arendt's claim that "judgment must liberate itself from 'subjective private conditions'." Richard Bernstein, Between Objectivism and Relativism: Science Hermeneutics and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 220. But Arendt's approach to the plurality of opinions is different from that of Habermas. For her, this plurality is something to preserve, not overcome, in the exercise of judgment. I examine this difference in Linda M. G. Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), chap. 4.
24. "The limits of a decisionistic treatment of practical questions are overcome as soon as argumentation is expected to test the generalizability of interests, instead of being resigned to an impenetrable pluralism of apparently ultimate value orientations," writes Habermas. "It is not the fact of this pluralism that is here disputed, but the assertion that it is impossible to separate by argumentation generalizable interests from those that remain particular." Citing this passage, Richard Bernstein finds a parallel in Arendt's claim that "judgment must liberate itself from 'subjective private conditions'." Richard Bernstein, Between Objectivism and Relativism: Science Hermeneutics and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 220. But Arendt's approach to the plurality of opinions is different from that of Habermas. For her, this plurality is something to preserve, not overcome, in the exercise of judgment. I examine this difference in Linda M. G. Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), chap. 4.
25. Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture," Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1993), 221. Hereafter cited in the text as CC.
26. Who someone is, by contrast with what she is (e.g., a white middle-class American woman, qualities she necessarily shares with others like her), is the unique disclosure of human action that emerges in the stories and other human artifacts that speak of it. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), 181, 182.
27. This Homeric impartiality is still the highest type of objectivity we know. Not only does it leave behind the common interest in one's side and one's own people which, up to our own days, characterizes almost all national historiography, but it also discards the alternative of victory or defeat, which moderns have felt expresses the 'objective' judgment of history itself. (Hannah Arendt, "The Concept of History," Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought [New York: Penguin, 1993], 41-90; quotation is from p. 51. Hereafter cited in the text as CH.)
28. Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 56.
29. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms; Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 20; and Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 204. Habermas accuses Derrida, among other "postmodern" thinkers, of foregrounding the rhetorical capacity of language over its problem-solving capacity.
30. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms; Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 20; and Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 204. Habermas accuses Derrida, among other "postmodern" thinkers, of foregrounding the rhetorical capacity of language over its problem-solving capacity.
31. Emesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 26. Hereafter cited in the text as RP.
32. Arendt, The Human Condition, 171.
33. "The picture forces itself on us. [...]' It is very interesting that pictures do force themselves on us. And if that were not so, how could such a sentence as 'What's done cannot be undone' mean anything to us?" (RFM, I §14). Wittgenstein gives a close reading of the picture of "the machine as symbol," which lies at the origin of the language game of logical necessity, our sense of the "logical must" (ibid., I, §§121-122).
34. "The picture forces itself on us. [...]' It is very interesting that pictures do force themselves on us. And if that were not so, how could such a sentence as 'What's done cannot be undone' mean anything to us?" (RFM, I §14). Wittgenstein gives a close reading of the picture of "the machine as symbol," which lies at the origin of the language game of logical necessity, our sense of the "logical must" (ibid., I, §§121-122).
35. Ernesto Grassi, Die unerhörte Metapher (Frankfurt am Main: Anton Hain, 1992), 29.
36. This necessity is of a special kind. It is not a theoretical objective necessity, allowing us to cognize a priori that everyone will feel this liking for the object I call beautiful. Nor is it a practical objective necessity, where, through concepts of a pure rational will that serves freely acting beings as a rule, this liking is the necessary consequence of an objective law and means nothing other than that one absolutely (without any further aim) ought to act in a certain way. (Kant, CJ, §18, p. 85)
37. Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 26.
38. See Kant, CJ, §34, p. 149, See also Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 88.
39. See Kant, CJ, §34, p. 149, See also Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 88.
40. Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (Kant's "Critique of Judgment," §§23-29), trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). Lyotard finds in Kantian judgments of taste a resistance to reaching consensus through the giving of proofs. Although this is correct, Lyotard tends to exclude the possibility of coming to any agreement whatsoever. He thus turns to the aesthetic of the sublime, in which the faculties of imagination and reason are caught in a Wiederstreit, a quarrel with no possible resolution.
41. Kant excludes community standards as the basis for judgment. [W]henever a subject offers a judgment as proof of his taste [concerning some object], we demand that he judge for himself; he should not have to grope about among other people's judgments. [...] [T]o make other people's judgments the basis determining one's own would be heteronomy. (Kant, CJ, §32, pp. 145-146) This is the basis for Hans-George Gadamer's controversial claim that the Kantian sensus communis marks an unfortunate departure from the tradition of Cicero, Vico, and Shaftesbury, for whom common sense is a way of knowing based in the moral and civic community. Hans-George Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), pt. 1, chap. 2. See also Ernesto Grassi, "The Priority of Common Sense and Imagination: Vico's Philosophical Relevance Today," Social Research 43 (1976): 553-580; quotation is from p. 560. For a critique of the Gadamerian view, see Lyotard, Lessons. Arendt's compressed discussion in LKPP (pp. 70-72) understands common sense neither as an a priori principle (Kant) nor as a communal mode of knowledge (Gadamer), but simply as a way of marking what is public and communicable rather than private.
42. Kant excludes community standards as the basis for judgment. [W]henever a subject offers a judgment as proof of his taste [concerning some object], we demand that he judge for himself; he should not have to grope about among other people's judgments. [...] [T]o make other people's judgments the basis determining one's own would be heteronomy. (Kant, CJ, §32, pp. 145-146) This is the basis for Hans-George Gadamer's controversial claim that the Kantian sensus communis marks an unfortunate departure from the tradition of Cicero, Vico, and Shaftesbury, for whom common sense is a way of knowing based in the moral and civic community. Hans-George Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), pt. 1, chap. 2. See also Ernesto Grassi, "The Priority of Common Sense and Imagination: Vico's Philosophical Relevance Today," Social Research 43 (1976): 553-580; quotation is from p. 560. For a critique of the Gadamerian view, see Lyotard, Lessons. Arendt's compressed discussion in LKPP (pp. 70-72) understands common sense neither as an a priori principle (Kant) nor as a communal mode of knowledge (Gadamer), but simply as a way of marking what is public and communicable rather than private.
43. Kant excludes community standards as the basis for judgment. [W]henever a subject offers a judgment as proof of his taste [concerning some object], we demand that he judge for himself; he should not have to grope about among other people's judgments. [...] [T]o make other people's judgments the basis determining one's own would be heteronomy. (Kant, CJ, §32, pp. 145-146) This is the basis for Hans-George Gadamer's controversial claim that the Kantian sensus communis marks an unfortunate departure from the tradition of Cicero, Vico, and Shaftesbury, for whom common sense is a way of knowing based in the moral and civic community. Hans-George Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), pt. 1, chap. 2. See also Ernesto Grassi, "The Priority of Common Sense and Imagination: Vico's Philosophical Relevance Today," Social Research 43 (1976): 553-580; quotation is from p. 560. For a critique of the Gadamerian view, see Lyotard, Lessons. Arendt's compressed discussion in LKPP (pp. 70-72) understands common sense neither as an a priori principle (Kant) nor as a communal mode of knowledge (Gadamer), but simply as a way of marking what is public and communicable rather than private.
44. Kant excludes community standards as the basis for judgment. [W]henever a subject offers a judgment as proof of his taste [concerning some object], we demand that he judge for himself; he should not have to grope about among other people's judgments. [...] [T]o make other people's judgments the basis determining one's own would be heteronomy. (Kant, CJ, §32, pp. 145-146) This is the basis for Hans-George Gadamer's controversial claim that the Kantian sensus communis marks an unfortunate departure from the tradition of Cicero, Vico, and Shaftesbury, for whom common sense is a way of knowing based in the moral and civic community. Hans-George Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), pt. 1, chap. 2. See also Ernesto Grassi, "The Priority of Common Sense and Imagination: Vico's Philosophical Relevance Today," Social Research 43 (1976): 553-580; quotation is from p. 560. For a critique of the Gadamerian view, see Lyotard, Lessons. Arendt's compressed discussion in LKPP (pp. 70-72) understands common sense neither as an a priori principle (Kant) nor as a communal mode of knowledge (Gadamer), but simply as a way of marking what is public and communicable rather than private.
45. Kant quoted in Robert J. Dostal, "Judging Human Action," Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt, ed. by Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedlesky (Boston: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 139-164; quotation is from p. 154. Dostal accuses Arendt of losing sight of the importance of rationality in Kant's thought.
46. Grassi, "The Priority of Common Sense and Imagination," 565.
47. The task of aesthetic and teleological judgment, as Kant explains, is to judge without a concept and thus the notion of a "purpose" (end [Zweck]). But judgment is only possible if we assume that nature has an order that we can discern and could potentially cognize, hence a purposiveness (finality [Zweckmässigkeit]). Thus aesthetic judgments have "finality without an end" or "purposiveness without a purpose" (Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck).
48. Hannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics," Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1993), 227-264; quotation is from p. 241.
49. This process is the "enlargement of the mind," in which "we compare our judgment not so much with the actual as rather with the merely possible judgments of others, and [thus] put ourselves in the position of everyone else" (Kant, CJ, §40, p. 160). Like Kant, Arendt does not exclude the role that the actual judgments of other people might play in our own. But neither does she dispute his claim that enlarged thought is not based on re-presenting to oneself opinions one has heard or of transposing oneself into the place of another person. See LKPP, 43.
50. This process is the "enlargement of the mind," in which "we compare our judgment not so much with the actual as rather with the merely possible judgments of others, and [thus] put ourselves in the position of everyone else" (Kant, CJ, §40, p. 160). Like Kant, Arendt does not exclude the role that the actual judgments of other people might play in our own. But neither does she dispute his claim that enlarged thought is not based on re-presenting to oneself opinions one has heard or of transposing oneself into the place of another person. See LKPP, 43.
51. Arendt, "Understanding and Politics," 323.
52. Iris Marion Young, "Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought," Judgment, Imagination, and Politics, ed. by Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 205-228; quotation is from p. 225.
53. Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, 168.
54. Ronald Beiner, "Rereading Hannah Arendt's Kant Lectures," Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt, ed. by Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedlesky (Boston: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 91-102; quotation is from p. 97. Beiner, Young, and Disch share the view that Arendt was mistaken to turn to Kant, for she is really interested in empirical sociability as the basis for judgment and he is not. I find it misleading to ascribe to Arendt an empirical conception of sensus communis, as if the universal voice were the result of a vote, and it is conversely misleading to assert that, for Kant's transcendental conception of sensus communis, nothing empirical matters. Kant makes numerous gestures toward the actual social practices of judgment, not to dismiss these as totally irrelevant to what an aesthetic judgment is, but to discern the existence of our mutual attunement.
55. This limited view of imagination as empirical and reproductive is tied to certain suppositions about the status of normative political claims and the kind of rationality that is proper to politics, both of which are central to Habermas's discourse ethics: (1) that political claims are cognitive and can be treated like claims to truth; and (2) that the justification of claims requires that speakers engage in an actual practice of argumentative justification. Even defenders of Arendt's noncognitive account of political judgment against Habermas's charge of incoherence (e.g., Lisa Disch) take for granted (2) because they never really find a way to counter (1), beholden as they are to the validity problematic that defines our understanding of politics.
56. Hannah Arendt, "What Remains? The Language Remains," Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954, ed. by Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 1-23; quotation is from p. 20.
57. For Habermas, the perspective of the third installs the objectification typical of the philosophy of consciousness. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 297.
58. David Carroll, "Rephrasing the Political with Kant and Lyotard: From Aesthetic to Political Judgments," Diacritics 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1984): 73-88; quotation is from p. 82.
59. Beiner, "Interpretive Essay," 92-93.
60. Beiner argues that Arendt's earliest writings on judgment (e.g., "The Crisis in Culture" and "Truth and Politics") reflect her concern with the actual dialogic activity of judging citizens. In her later work, Arendt describes a solitary judging subject, who "weighs the possible judgments of an imagined Other, not the actual judgments of real interlocutors" (ibid., 92).
61. Lyotard, Lessons, 18. For a similar critique, see David Carroll, "Community after Devastation: Culture, Politics, and the 'Public Space'," Politics, Theory, and Contemporary Culture, ed. by Mark Poster (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 159-196.
62. Lyotard, Lessons, 18. For a similar critique, see David Carroll, "Community after Devastation: Culture, Politics, and the 'Public Space'," Politics, Theory, and Contemporary Culture, ed. by Mark Poster (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 159-196.