Judgment and the reification of the faculties: A reconstructive reading of Arendt's Life of the Mind

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 34, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 157-176

  Fine, Robert ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

critique; Hannah Arendt; judgment; life of the mind; modernity; nihilism; thinking; understanding; will; worldliness

Indexed keywords

EID: 57749139734     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453707084279     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, ed. Mary McCarthy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). This is a one-volume edition of what was originally published as two volumes. Part I is ‘Thinking’ and Part II is ‘Willing’.
2. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, edited with an interpretive essay by Ronald Beiner (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1992).
3. See also Arendt's ‘The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and its Political Significance’, ‘Truth and Politics’ and ‘Freedom and Politics’, all in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin, 1977), especially pp. 219–26.
4. Albrecht Wellmer, ‘Hannah Arendt on Judgment: The Unwritten Doctrine of Reason’, in Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky (eds) Judgment, Imagination and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), p. 165. This is the most valuable collection on the topic.
5. Other key texts on Arendt's approach to judgment include: Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment (London: Methuen, 1983), especially ch. 6;
6. Maurizio Passerin d'Entrèves, ‘Arendt's Theory of Judgment’, in Dana Villa (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 245–60;
7. Ronald Beiner, ‘Judging in a World of Appearances: a Commentary on Hannah Arendt's Unwritten Finale’, in Lewis and Sandra Hinchman (eds) Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 365–87.
8. An analogy might be drawn here with Marx scholarship. When Marx scholars sought to reconstruct Marx's planned but incomplete work on law, morality and the state, a less than satisfactory approach was simply to pull together the various passages in which Marx commented on or expressed his opinions about these various issues. The more fruitful and certainly more scientific approach was to reconstruct the methodology that Marx employed in his critique of political economy and apply it, flexibly and with due regard to the shift of subject matter, to the absent critique of political philosophy. This approach has not always been done well because the thinking of Marx scholars has too often been locked within the categories of political economy, but as a mode of reconstruction it is superior to the search for Marx's scattered and situated ‘views’ on these subjects. See my own Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt (London: Routledge, 2001), ch. 5, ‘Right and Value: the Unity of Hegel and Marx’.
9. The relation to Kant is never far from the surface. Arendt writes of Kant's ‘paradoxical legacy … just as man comes of age and is declared autonomous, he is utterly debased’. She comments that this legacy is an accurate reflection of ‘the antinomical structure of human being as it is situated in the world’. The splitting of the life of the mind into the distinct ‘faculties’ of thinking, willing and judging turns out to be one aspect of the antinomical structure of human beings as we are currently situated in the world. Kant recognizes and helps to create one of modernity's major accomplishments, the autonomy of reason, but for Arendt he pays too big a price for it: the separation of reason into allegedly autonomous fields. Essays in Understanding 1930–1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), pp. 169–71.
10. Cited in Jerome Kohn, ‘Evil and Plurality: Hannah Arendt's Way to The Life of the Mind I’, in Larry May and Jerome Kohn (eds) Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 163.
11. Ronald Beiner writes: ‘It is not merely that the already completed accounts of two mental faculties were to be supplemented by a yet-to-be-provided third but, rather, that those two accounts themselves remain deficient without the promised synthesis in judging … So we arrive at the threshold of Judging still in search of solutions to the basic problems that impelled Arendt to write The Life of the Mind’ (‘Interpretive Essay’, in Hannah Arendt Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992]), pp. 89–90.
12. I find curious parallels between the structure of Life of the Mind and Arendt's earlier work On Revolution. In the latter Arendt distinguished between three moments of the revolutionary tradition: the American, the French, and the ‘lost treasure’ of town hall and council democracy that has existed on the margins of every modern revolutionary movement. At first sight, it appears that Arendt is positive about the tradition of 1776, negative about the tradition of 1789 and finds the realization of the revolutionary Idea in the lost treasure of participatory democracy. On reflection, however, we find along with Arendt that the American revolutionary tradition has its own disabling contradictions (e.g. its prioritization of private rights over rights of public participation); that the French revolutionary tradition represents a huge achievement despite the Terror (especially its formulation of the ‘constitution of liberty’); and that the ‘lost treasure’ of radical participatory democracy has far more problems than is apparent at first sight. Arendt finishes the text on this note when she calls the council system an ‘aristocratic’ form of government run by a self-constituting elite (OR 279–80). As her study of revolution unfolds, it becomes apparent that there is no ‘pure’ revolutionary tradition, no ideal form of actualization, no formula for liberation from tyranny and the constitution of liberty that does not reinstate the perplexities of foundation and new beginnings. The underlying structure of On Revolution, then, is not ‘dialectical’ or rather is dialectical only in the sense that it is a study of the development of the idea of revolution as it dissolves and produces its various particularizations. The lesson Arendt drew or seems to have drawn is not to repudiate the modern revolutionary tradition but to retain our political judgment in the midst of its perplexities. See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1988).
13. See, for example, Seyla Benhabib, ‘Judgment and the Moral Foundations of Politics’, in Beiner and Nedelsky, Judgment, Imagination and Politics.
14. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1994).
15. Hannah Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003), pp. 159–60.
16. ‘Introduction’, to The Life of the Mind I, p. 5.
17. Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, p. 189.
18. Arendt, Life of the Mind I, p. 5.
19. Dana Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays in the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), ch. 4, ‘Thinking and Judging’, pp. 89–90.
20. Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, p. 167.
21. Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, p. 167
22. Arendt, Life of the Mind I, p. 176.
23. Arendt, Life of the Mind I, p. 177
24. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest, 1976), ch. 10, ‘A Classless Society’, part II, pp. 326–40.
25. Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power (New York: Vintage Press, 1969), p. 9.
26. Arendt, Origins, p. 330.
27. See Dana Villa, ‘The Banality of Philosophy: Arendt on Heidegger and Eichmann’, in May and Kohn, Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, pp. 179–96.
28. Hannah Arendt, ‘What is Freedom?’, in Between Past and Future (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1977), pp. 157–61.
29. Arendt, Life of the Mind II, p. 164.
30. These quotations are drawn from On Revolution, ch. 2, ‘The Social Question’, pp. 73–94 and footnote at p. 321.
31. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 225.
32. Arendt, Life of the Mind II, p. 201.
33. Arendt, Life of the Mind II, p. 199.
34. Arendt, Life of the Mind II, p. 161.
35. Arendt, Life of the Mind II, p. 168.
36. Arendt, Life of the Mind II, p. 178.
37. Arendt, Life of the Mind II, p. 169.
38. Arendt, Life of the Mind II, pp. 207 and 216. We may be reminded of Arendt's comment in her discussion of the camps to the effect that the nihilist principle of freedom that everything is permitted came to mean only that everything is possible and can be destroyed. Arendt, Origins, p. 340.
39. Hegel put it well: ‘Only in destroying something does this negative will have a feeling of its own existence … its actualization can only be the fury of destruction.’ G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, §5 A and R (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Paradoxically, there are some interesting parallels between the respective analyses of Hegel and Arendt.
40. Arendt, Life of the Mind II, pp. 168–70.
41. Hegel writes: ‘When I think of something, it no longer stands opposed to me as something external. I re-present it in my mind and thereby make it my own. Similarly, when I am active, I again make things my own in a practical way — by making them into objects of my will’ (Philosophy of Right, §5 R).
42. Arendt, Life of the Mind I, p. 193.
43. Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 295.
44. Alessandro Ferrara has alerted me to the importance of Rudolf Makkreel's investigation of the space that separates the two extremes of pure determinant and pure reflective judgment, and of the intermediate forms of ‘oriented reflective judgment’ where the orienting factor reduces the otherwise vast range in which the search for principle might take place without pinpointing a subsuming principle. See Rudolf Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994);
45. Alessandro Ferrara, Justice and Judgment: The Rise and Prospect of the Judgment Model in Contemporary Political Philosophy (London: Sage, 1999), pp. 6–7;
46. and Makkreel's review of this book in Philosophy and Social Criticism 27(3), pp. 105–10.
47. Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, pp. 75–6.
48. Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding 1930–1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), p. 308.
49. Arendt, Life of the Mind I, p. 88.
50. Arendt, Life of the Mind II, p. 196.
51. Arendt, Essay in Understanding, p. 388.
52. Arendt, Essay in Understanding, p. 391.
53. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 39.
54. See Peter Baehr, ‘Identifying the Unprecedented: Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism and the Critique of Sociology’, American Sociological Review 67(6) (2002): 804–31;
55. and ‘Of Politics and Social Science: Totalitarianism in the Dialogue of David Riesman and Hannah Arendt’, European Journal of Political Theory 3(2): 191–217.
56. Arendt, Essays in Understanding, p. 404.
57. Arendt, Origins, p. 445.
58. See Susan Neiman, ‘Theodicy in Jerusalem’, in Steven Ascheim (ed.) Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 65–90.