Arendt's Judgment

Freedom, Responsibility, Citizenship

Jonathan Peter Schwartz

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780812248142, 9780812248142
• eBook ISBN: 9780812292817
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Arendt's Judgment, Jonathan Peter Schwartz explores the nature of human judgment, the subject of the planned third volume of Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind, which was left unwritten at the time of her death. Arguing that previous interpretations of Arendt failed to fully appreciate the central place of judgment in her thought, Schwartz contends that understanding Arendt's ideas requires not only interpreting her published work but also reconstructing her thinking from a broader range of sources, including her various essays, lecture course notes, unpublished material, and correspondence. When these sources are taken into account, it becomes clear that, for Arendt, political judgment was the answer to the question of how human freedom could be realized in the modern world.This new approach to understanding Arendt leads to what Schwartz argues are original insights Arendt can teach us about the nature of politics beyond sovereignty and the role of human agency in history. Above all, her novel understanding of the authentic nature and purpose of political philosophy is finally revealed. Schwartz claims that in her theory of political judgment Arendt presented a vision of political philosophy that is improved and deepened by the contributions of ordinary, active citizens. Along with challenging previous interpretations, Arendt's Judgment provides a roadmap to her published and unpublished work for scholars and students.

1	Action, Politics, Genealogy

Hannah Arendt’s theory of action has both inspired and perplexed her readers. Its revival of the ancient idea of publicly performed freedom reintroduced a lost dimension into political theory, one that insisted that free human action, at its highest level, was more than merely doing as one pleases in private life. Authentic action, according to Arendt, was something visible in the public realm, carrying a genuine potency capable of changing the world. Given its centrality to her thought and its radical character, it has, not surprisingly, been a target of significant critique. In this chapter, I want to attempt to turn aside some of the more serious criticism of Arendt by offering a new interpretation of her theory of action. I believe that a great deal of the criticism of her thought originates in a misunderstanding of the role and meaning of her theory of action, especially her attempt to revive the ancient ideal of noninstrumental political action. Though it may come as a surprise, I believe this criticism is rooted in a failure to understand Arendt’s long-standing concern over the problem of history and her unique practice of historiography.

There are at least two misunderstandings of Arendt that I believe the account of Arendtian action offered here can resolve. First, many critics have interpreted Arendt’s attempt to revive the noninstrumental ideal of political action as a deliberative, participatory, and performative activity, which situates politics from a kind of quasi-aesthetic perspective. They argue that Arendt—drawing strongly on the logic of Aristotle’s assertion that praxis, as the highest human activity, cannot have a telos beyond itself, but is a-telos, an “end in itself”—believed that any instrumental or teleological activity must therefore be kept out of politics. As a result, readers have often understood her as suggesting a dichotomous relationship between political action and instrumental activity, with the implication that social concerns such as poverty or discrimination cannot be a concern of genuine politics. Politics should instead be free to engage in a deliberative and performative disclosive activity of individual identity.¹ Readers have often found the idea that there could ever be such a sharp separation established between social concerns and the political odd and possibly unintelligible. Even Mary McCarthy, her close friend, editor, and literary executor, once told Arendt, “I have always asked myself: ‘What is somebody supposed to do on the public stage, in the public space, if he does not concern himself with the social? That is, what’s left?’”² A second misunderstanding concerns her theory of judgment. Some critics have argued that there is a contradiction in her accounts of judgment, and indeed that this contradiction is so fundamental that the only conclusion one might draw is that she must have had two different theories of judgment.³ These critics assert that her texts indicate that there was an earlier, more political and practical account of judgment in such places as the Between Past and Future essays, and a later much more contemplative and historical account offered in texts such as The Life of the Mind.⁴

But suppose Arendt understood politics and history to be much more closely related than these critics think? Might it be possible that Arendt was simply viewing judgment from two different perspectives: one from the side of politics and the vita activa, and the other from the side of history and the vita contemplativa? I argue here that Arendt’s political and historiographic concerns were in fact intimately linked, and it was the recognition of this link that prompted her to develop a unique genealogical approach. There were a set of long-standing modern conflations about the nature of politics and history that Arendt hoped to deconstruct, and her first step in doing this was through reconceiving the very nature of historical reflection. Thus, while it is no doubt true that her work was primarily focused on politics, we will see in this chapter that it was her concerns over history both as a political problem and as a methodological problem that originally prompted that concern with politics. In her work, she would seek to reassert the primary place of human agency in history, and when the implications of this project are adequately appreciated, many misunderstandings of her thought, I believe, are cleared up. On the account I propose, what defined political agency for Arendt had much more to do with the historical significance of a specific deed or event, and little to do with whether instrumental activity was involved in the deed. As for the notion that there is a conflict in Arendt between political judgment and historical reflection, her approach shows that she understood history and politics to be coterminous. Thus, what appears to be a conflict turns out merely to be a shift in perspective.

What results from this assertion of the primordial place of human action in history is an incredibly strong notion of human agency—stronger even than many readers already familiar with her work may realize. The difficulty understanding Arendt’s approach presents, however, is that she never explicitly formulated it, and therefore it must be gleaned from a number of disparate texts. As a result, the argument of this chapter must inevitably be somewhat long and dialectical. Pivotal will be understanding the central role her teacher and mentor Martin Heidegger played in the development of her approach, whose ideas she adopted but also heavily revised. It will therefore be necessary to discuss Heidegger’s contributions to Arendt’s ideas in some depth, before turning to her departures from him and their consequences. First, however, it will be helpful to have a sense of Arendt’s basic genealogical approach.

The Problem of Origins

A genealogy is a narrative that seeks to comprehend and explain a historic occurrence or circumstance by uncovering its origins or fundamental causes. This, of course, is an extraordinarily perplexing endeavor. How does one, after all, find these sources? What are the criteria for judging their relevance? On what authority does the genealogist make her claims? Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Arendt is often accused of contradicting herself or engaging in a mode of theorizing that was overly messy. This was to be expected: the chief goal of a genealogist is to pursue what Heidegger called aletheia, the fundamental experiences that lay at origins of history. Arendt was much more concerned with capturing those experiences adequately than she was with conceptual and logical consistency, which ultimately is more a consequence of the simplicity of our articulations of concepts than the authenticity of our explorations of lived experience.

The problem of genealogy seems to have been forced on Arendt by her analysis of the modern situation, and specifically what she felt was the complete failure of the tradition of political thought to cope with that situation. The tradition’s “moral, legal, theoretical, and practical standards,” she claimed, “together with its political institutions and forms of government, broke down spectacularly” in the first part of the twentieth century.⁵ As a result, we now lived in an era without a “testament,” or tradition, which “selects and names, which hands down and preserves, which indicates where the treasures are and what their worth is.”⁶ She believed Tocqueville captured the historical moment best when he wrote that “since the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.”⁷ As a result, we are “confronted anew … by the elementary problems of human living-together.”⁸ The elemental nature of such problems must present unique difficulties for historical reflection. If tradition has failed, there is no authority to appeal to in order to establish the validity of historical claims and the significance of events. As a result, a historian in this era ultimately has nothing to guide her but her own judgment. This, to say the least, is a daunting prospect, and Arendt recognized the almost unavoidable presumptuousness in this era of the kind of historical reflections she pursued. She called this activity “thinking without a banister.”⁹ It was her way of indicating that the practice of genealogy was the only place genuine historical reflection could begin in our era. The historian must go back to the primordial experiences that preceded the tradition and awaken those experiences in order to make history intelligible again.

One of Arendt’s earliest discussions of her approach came in her reply to Eric Voegelin’s review of The Origins of Totalitarianism.¹⁰ Voegelin criticized her for incorporating value judgments too deeply into her analyses of totalitarianism, arguing that the “morally abhorrent and the emotionally existing will overshadow the essential.”¹¹ Arendt rejected this criticism. She insisted that this qualitative aspect of the analysis formed “an integral part of it. This has nothing to do with sentimentality or moralizing, although, of course, either can become a pitfall for the author. If I moralized or became sentimental, I simply did not do well what I was supposed to do, namely, to describe the totalitarian phenomenon as occurring, not on the moon, but in the midst of human society.” She argued that, for instance, her use of “the image of Hell” to describe the Nazi death camps was not meant “allegorically, but literally … a description of the camps as Hell on earth is more ‘objective,’ that is, more adequate to their essence than statements of a purely sociological or psychological nature.”¹² For Arendt, in other words, descriptions of historical phenomena cannot be separated from their qualitative context.¹³

She was significantly influenced in this approach by the “critical interpretation of the past” done by Heidegger and her close friend Walter Benjamin.¹⁴ Heidegger and Benjamin showed Arendt a mode of genealogical practice that could bring the original meaning of vital words in our language back to life through thought and imagination. They had argued that words carried behind them authentic experiences that often are lost with passage of time. These experiences could be revived and used to shed light on the past and, consequentially, also on the present world where tradition can no longer illuminate the most important aspects of lives.¹⁵ She called this mode of genealogy “pearl diving”:¹⁶

[Pearl diving] works with the “thought fragments” it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea … to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and coral in the depths and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past.… What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization … as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living.¹⁷

For Arendt, the break in tradition meant that there was no longer an “Ariadne thread” that connected our political language to our commonsense experiences.¹⁸ Our political words were “empty shells,”¹⁹ which, because they had lost their moorings in authentic experiences, could be redefined at will so long as they served to support some “functionalized” theory.²⁰ While pearl diving could not “retie the broken thread of tradition,” it could perhaps “discover the real origins of traditional concepts in order to distill from them anew their original spirit.”²¹

However, what distinguished Arendt was a determination to anchor her genealogical studies in an unprecedented assertion of the role of human agency in history. Arendt first articulated this agency-based approach in The Human Condition, arguing that historical “events,” which for her always involved the “deeds” of acting human beings, were “sui generis”²² and characterized by “absolute, objective novelty.”²³ It is in the nature of events and deeds “to break through the commonly accepted and reach into the extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists is unique and sui generis.”²⁴ Arendt believed that the invention of the telescope was one such event. While many of the elements of the modern scientific outlook, such as the development of nominalist ontologies, the idea of an Archimedean thought experiment, and skepticism about the veracity of the senses preceded the telescope’s invention, it required an act of pure human natality—the uniquely human capacity to begin something new—to turn these disparate elements into a potent historical “event.” In other words, according to Arendt, there must be an act of sheer human spontaneous natality at the heart of all historical trends and processes. Such acts must appear from the viewpoint of historical causality as “miraculous.”²⁵

Every act, seen from the perspective not of the agent but of the process in whose framework it occurs and whose automatism it interrupts, is a “miracle”—that is, something which could not be expected.… History, in contradistinction to nature, is full of events; here the miracle of accident and infinite improbability occurs so frequently that it seems strange to speak of miracles at all. But the reason for this frequency is merely that historical processes are created and constantly interrupted by human initiative, by the initium man is insofar as he is a human being.²⁶

To assert this strong objectivity on behalf of the deeds and events of historical phenomena—an objectivity anchored in a powerful assertion of spontaneous human agency and initiative—Arendt clearly must have had an alternate conception of the meaning of historiographic “truth.” This historiography was drawn from Heidegger’s philosophy, but it would involve a series of highly original and imaginative critiques and revisions of that philosophy.

Arendt’s Heideggerian Foundation

The relationship of Arendt’s thought to Heidegger²⁷ has been dealt with elsewhere by writers such as Seyla Benhabib, Lewis and Sandra Hinchman, Jacques Taminiaux, and Dana Villa.²⁸ While I have learned a great deal from this work, in my view n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction. In Pursuit of Authentic Political Philosophy
• 1. Action, Politics, Genealogy
• 2. Arendt’s Politics of Founding
• 3. Philosophy and the Tradition of Political Thought
• 4. The Origins of Necessity in Human Affairs
• 5. Arendt’s Theory of Judgment
• Conclusion. Only the Citizen’s Judgment
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments