From actor to spectator: Hannah Arendt's ‘two theories’ of political judgment

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 1-27

  Yar, Majid ^a  

^a LANCASTER UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

action; aesthetics; community; freedom; history; judgment; reflection

Indexed keywords

EID: 84937320450     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/019145370002600201     Document Type: Article

References (104)

1. Howard Caygill, ‘Postmodernism and Judgement’, Economy and Society 17(1) (February 1988): 1–20;
2. Howard Caygill, Art of Judgment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
3. Caygill, ‘Postmodernism and Judgement’.
4. Richard Bernstein, ‘Hannah Arendt: The Ambiguities of Theory and Practice’, in Terence Ball (ed.), Political Theory and Praxis: New Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), pp. 144–155.
5. See Ronald Beiner's comments on the reconstruction of Arendt's theory of judgment in his ‘Interpretive Essay’, in Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (Brighton, Sx: Harvester Press, 1982).
6. Dana R. Villa, ‘Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticisation of Political Action’, in Political Theory 20(2) (May 1992): 274–308 (278).
7. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (London: Faber, 1961), p. 17; this edn includes the essays ‘Tradition and the Modern Age’, ‘What is Freedom?’, and ‘The Crisis in Culture’.
8. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 7, 81.
9. Kimberly Hutchings, Kant, Critique and Politics (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 84.
10. Arendt, Human Condition, p. 84.
11. Hutchings, Kant, Critique, p. 84.
12. Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 28–37, 38–49, 7, 7, 136–7, 136–44.
13. Hutchings, Kant, Critique, p. 85.
14. Hutchings, Kant, Critique, p. 85, 85–6.
15. Maurizio Passerin d'Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 140–144.
16. Hutchings, Kant, Critique, pp. 85–86.
17. d'Entrèves, Political Philosophy of Arendt, pp. 140–144, 5.
18. see also Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 211.
19. Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 153–159;
20. Villa, ‘Arendt, Nietzsche’, p. 278.
21. Villa, ‘Arendt, Nietzsche’, p. 278.
22. Hutchings, Kant, Critique, p. 86.
23. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 148.
24. See discussion in Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 215–239.
25. Arendt, Human Condition, p. 177.
26. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 167, 165, 153.
27. Arendt, quoted in Bernstein, ‘Hannah Arendt’, p. 145, 145–6.
28. Bernstein, ‘Hannah Arendt’, p. 146, 147.
29. d'Entrèves, Political Philosophy of Arendt, p. 85, 86.
30. Bernstein, ‘Hannah Arendt’, p. 222.
31. Arendt, Human Condition, p. 7.
32. d'Entrèves, Political Philosophy of Arendt, pp. 65–70;
33. Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 7–8.
34. Richard Bernstein, ‘Judging — the Actor and the Spectator’, in Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), p. 222, 223, 223–5.
35. Bernstein, ‘Hannah Arendt’, p. 145.
36. d'Entrèves, Political Philosophy of Arendt, p. 2;
37. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 23.
38. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 146.
39. Bernstein, ‘Judging’, pp. 222–228, 226–7.
40. This critique of metaphysics and abstract universality in favour of phenomenality and inassimilable particularity places Arendt in striking proximity to a number of postmodern philosophical accounts (see, for example, Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985]). This contiguity has led a number of commentators to claim Arendt as a ‘postmodern’
41. David Ingram, ‘The Post-Modern Kantianism of Arendt and Lyotard’, Review of Metaphysics 42 [September 1988]: 51–77) and even ‘pagan’ (Villa, ‘Arendt, Nietzsche’) thinker. Her apparent influence on a number of prominent ‘post—metaphysical’ thinkers in the contemporary wave of French neo-Heideggerianism, such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, would seem to give at least some credence to these evaluations (cf.
42. J.-L. Nancy and P. Lacoue-Labarthe, Retreating the Political, ed. Simon Sparks [London: Routledge, 1997]). However, as I show later in the paper, Arendt takes a much more complicated and ambiguous position with respect to problems of political and ethical universalism, an ambiguity that situates her somewhere between the current ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ stances.
43. Arendt, quoted in Bernstein, ‘Hannah Arendt’, p. 149.
44. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 153, 153–4.
45. d'Entrèves, Political Philosophy of Arendt, p. 76.
46. Bernstein, ‘Judging’, p. 228.
47. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 219, 220.
48. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1987), §40.
49. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 220, 220–1, 222.
50. Bernstein, ‘Judging’, p. 239.
51. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 222;
52. Kant, Critique of Judgement, §19.
53. Bernstein, ‘Judging’, p. 228.
54. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 222 221.
55. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 123, pp. 133–7;
56. d'Entrèves, Political Philosophy of Arendt, pp. 102–4.
57. Benhabib, Situating the Self, p. 134.
58. See, for example, the discussion of Gadamer's treatment of phronêsis as a general model of hermeneutic praxis, in Richard J. Bernstein, ‘From Hermeneutics to Praxis’, Review of Metaphysics 35 (June 1992): 823–45.
59. Benhabib, Situating the Self, p. 134.
60. Kant, Critique of Judgement, §§9–11, §§20–2, §§39–40.
61. d'Entrèves, Political Philosophy of Arendt, p. 10, 97–9.
62. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Hannah Arendt: On the Concept of Power’, Philosophical-Political Profiles (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 171.
63. Stephen K. White, ‘Reason, Modernity and Democracy’, in S. K. White (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Habermas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 12, 212–13.
64. Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), Chapter 1.
65. See in particular Benhabib, Situating the Self, Chapters 3 and 4.
66. Hutchings, Kant, Critique, p. 81.
67. Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 17–18;
68. see, for example, Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, ed. T. Bottomore and M. Rubel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 82–85, 90–1.
69. Hutchings, Kant, Critique, p. 89.
70. Beiner, ‘Interpretive Essay’, pp. 94–96.
71. Arendt, quoted in Beiner, ‘Interpretive Essay’, p. 96, 98.
72. Arendt, Lectures, p. 13.
73. Kant, Critique of Judgement, Ak. 215.
74. Kant, Critique of Judgement, Second Moment of a Judgment of Taste, §§6–9; Fourth Moment, §§18–22, §40, Ak. 293–4, Ak. 294.
75. Lectures, pp. 42–43.
76. Arendt, Lectures, p. 43.
77. Kant, Critique of Judgement, Ak. 294.
78. Kant, Critique of Judgement, §4, Ak. 207, First Moment of a Judgment of Taste, §§1–5, Ak. 204–5.
79. Arendt, Lectures, pp. 66–7.
80. Arendt, Lectures, pp. 66–7, 44, 55.
81. Beiner, ‘Interpretive Essay’, p. 127, 145, 127, 130.
82. d'Entrèves, Political Philosophy of Arendt, p. 4.
83. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 29.
84. Kant, Critique of Judgement, Ak. 294; this is, of course, Kant's definition of Enlightenment, a thinking free of heteronomy, prejudice and superstition.
85. Arendt, Lectures, p. 111.
86. Brice R. Wachterhauser, ‘Introduction: Is There Truth After Interpretation?’, in B. R. Wachterhauser (ed.), Hermeneutics and Truth (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), p. 4;
87. Robert Dostal, ‘The Experience of Truth for Gadamer and Heidegger: Taking Time and Sudden Lightning’, in Wachterhauser (ed.), Hermeneutics and Truth, pp. 47–50;
88. Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 69, 84–5.
89. Arendt, Lectures, p. 111.
90. Arendt, ‘Introduction’ to Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Fontana Press, 1992), pp. 48–51.
91. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 249.
92. Stephen Eric Bronner, ‘The Messianic Materialism of Walter Benjamin’, in S. E. Bronner, Of Critical Theory and its Theorists (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984);
93. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), Chapter 12;
94. Arendt, ‘Introduction’, pp. 43–53.
95. Arendt, ‘Introduction’, p. 54, 54–5.
96. d'Entrèves, Political Philosophy of Arendt, p. 4, 30–2.
97. Beiner, ‘Interpretive Essay’, p. 152, 154–5.
98. For an illuminating discussion of this distinction in Arendt's work, see Richard Bernstein, ‘Rethinking the Social and Political’ in Bernstein, Philosophical Profiles, p. 135.
99. Kant, Critique of Judgement, Ak. 294.
100. Beiner, ‘Interpretive Essay’, p. 152.
101. Kant, Critique of Judgement, Third Moment of Judgment of Taste, §§10–17.
102. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 2 vols (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), pp. 270–1;
103. also Bernstein, ‘Judging’, p. 237.
104. Bernstein, ‘Judging’, p. 237.