Arendt, Kant and the Misreading of Judgement

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published online 4 June 2012Political Research QuarterlyMatthew C. Weidenfeld

Visions of Judgment: Arendt, Kant, and the Misreading of Judgment

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Within political theory, Hannah Arendt’s unfinished reflections on judgment have led to an explosion of inter-est in the phenomenon. Beiner (1983), for instance, draws on Arendt to move toward a concept of judgment that lies between the poles of Kant and Aristotle. Benhabib (1988) looks to Arendt’s work for a starting point for thinking about moral judgment, which she argues should be aug-mented by a discourse theory of ethics. Zerilli (2005) argues that the central concern of Arendt’s theory of judg-ment is not with validity, as Benhabib seems to argue, but with freedom. Obviously, the list here could go on, but what is striking is that despite wide differences in approaches to judgment and Arendt’s texts, all of these authors share in the thought that Arendt’s work reveals something crucial about judgment.1 As one looks at this growing body of literature, though, what is more startling is that Arendt’s unfinished reflections have not only driven quite a bit of recent work but also been a source of frustration for a number of contemporary theorists (see Hermsen and Villa 1999). Arendt’s reflections not only are incomplete but also rely on a number of conceptual distinctions that are difficult to locate phenomenally or that are, perhaps, confused; for instance, Arendt’s insis-tence of a line of demarcation between thinking and act-ing or her distinction between the actor and the spectator seem untenable or, at least, strain one’s ability to see the phenomenon she is attempting to illuminate. This article finds its starting point in both of these moments; that is, it starts from a concern over the phenomenal content of judgment, initially driven by Arendt’s reflections, but

also takes seriously this sense of frustration with Arendt’s conceptualization of judgment and, therefore, takes up a largely negative task. The task involved here is to offer both a critique of Arendt’s reading of her primary source in thinking about judgment, Kant, and to offer a critique of her reading of the phenomenal content of judgment. Ultimately, I argue that Arendt’s conceptualization of judgment may, in fact, drive political theorists only fur-ther from the phenomenon of judgment itself.

Throughout her life, Arendt’s work on judgment was guided by Kant’s (1987) thoughts on taste and by her reading of the Critique of Judgment.2 While there is no doubt among political theorists that Arendt’s reading of the Critique of Judgment is “idiosyncratic,” as Dana Villa (1992) puts it, the extent of the violence of Arendt’s read-ing has at times been lost on scholars.3 It is quite clear that Arendt is engaged in a creative destruction of Kant’s texts, which attempts to recover a select number of Kantian concepts from out of the intellectual debris that surrounds them, but at times scholars have seemed to take up Arendt’s reading as a faithful reading of Kant’s texts. For instance, Villa (1992, 297), after noting that Arendt’s reading is idiosyncratic, goes on to say,

446228 PRQXXX10.1177/1065912912446228WeidenfeldPolitical Research Quarterly

1Elon University, Elon, NC, USA

Corresponding Author:Matthew C. Weidenfeld, Department of Political Science, Elon University, Gray Pavilion–Pol. Science 210A, Elon, NC 27244, USA Email: [email protected]

Visions of Judgment: Arendt, Kant, and the Misreading of Judgment

Matthew C. Weidenfeld1

Abstract

Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of judgment may only drive political theorists further from the phenomenon. Throughout her life, Arendt’s work on judgment was guided by Kant’s thought. Arendt’s reading of Kant’s work raises two difficulties to which contemporary political scientists should attend. First, Arendt’s reading of Kant is a systematic misreading of his texts. Second, Arendt’s misreading of Kant pushes her toward a misreading of the phenomenon of judgment. More important, Arendt’s misreading has led political theorists to assume a divide between the points of view of the actor and of the spectator, which cannot be reconciled given the resources of Arendt’s thought.

Keywords

judgment, Arendt, Kant, intellectualism



2 Political Research Quarterly XX(X)

Kant’s conception of Aesthetic judgment—departing from the exchange of viewpoints necessary for rep-resentative thinking and culminating in the persua-sive exchange that accompanies the rendering of each judgment—is thus, for Arendt, political through and through.

The problem this reading poses is that Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment does not depart from an exchange of viewpoints or culminate in a persuasive exchange, two points that Villa seems to take as a given; instead, Villa’s reading actually recapitulates Arendt’s idiosyn-cratic reading of Kant. A number of authors conflate Arendt’s destruction of Kant’s texts for Kant’s actual textual arguments. For instance, Norris (1996, 167) argues that “[i]n his third Critique, Kant argues that our judgments of beauty are underwritten by a peculiar kind of common sense, one that is inherently public.” As we shall see below, while this is how Arendt portrays Kant’s text, it is not true of Kant in any simple sense that com-mon sense is inherently public. Bikowski (1993, 868) seems to take it as a given that “Kant’s faculty of aes-thetic judgment forswears objective validation of truth-claims in favor of subjective consensus and community standards and norms.” This is an accurate portrayal of how Arendt reads Kant, but the reference to community standards and norms cannot be found in Kant’s text. The violence of Arendt’s interpretive activity, then, is seem-ingly lost at points on even the most careful readers of Arendt’s thought.

Arendt’s destructive reading of Kant’s text, combined with the fact that Arendt’s reading has served as a start-ing point for much recent work concerning judgment in political theory, has left political theorists with two dif-ficulties. First, as I’ve already begun to hint at, Arendt’s reading of Kant is a (mis)reading of his texts.4 It goes without saying that an original appropriation of concepts and ideas may, of course, be warranted given the fresh purchase this gives a thinker on the phenomenon. Arendt’s method of “pearl diving” certainly does look to destroy texts in the name of bringing their phenomenal referents back into the light. Arendt’s (mis)reading of Kant, though, actually pushes her away from the phe-nomenon of judgment in a counterintuitive way. There are a number of difficulties that her thought leads us into—most notably, the distinction between the actor and the spectator—which are actually driven by an intellec-tualist kernel she retains from Kant, despite her destruc-tive reading of his texts on a number of points. This is the second problem: Arendt’s (mis)reading of Kant pushes her toward a misreading of the phenomenon of judg-ment. Arendt, with Kant, comes to see judgment as, pri-marily, an intellectual activity, and while Arendt’s reading perhaps could shed light on some forms of

reflective judgments, it results in a vision of judgment that cannot capture a good deal of the phenomenal evi-dence. This is the surprising nature of Arendt’s (mis)reading; that is, she reads Kant for her own ends but actually retains from Kant an intellectualism that then leads her to misread judgment.

The intellectualism of Arendt’s approach and the con-tinued engagement with Arendt’s philosophy of judgment has certainly improved our understanding of Arendt’s thought, but it isn’t clear that this has improved our under-standing of the faculty of judgment; in fact, the dive into Arendt’s texts may be transforming political theorists into the types of puzzle solvers she was actually quite worried about. In a note concerning her approach to Marx, Arendt (1958, 104) herself criticized a puzzle solving approach to the work of other theorists. “Jules Vuillemin’s L’etre et le Travail (1949) is a good example of what happens if on tries to resolve the central contradictions and equivocalities of Marx’s thoughts. This is possible only if one abandons the phenomenal evidence altogether and begins to treat Marx’s concepts as though they constituted in themselves a complicated jigsaw puzzle of abstractions.” My fear is that in pursuing Arendt’s work on judgment, political theo-rists have abandoned the phenomenal evidence and become the puzzle solvers Arendt warns us about. My aim, then, is to make it clear why, if our concern is not just with Arendt but with understanding the phenomenon of judgment, a turn away from a concern with solving the antinomies of Arendt’s philosophy of judgment may be warranted.

Obviously, the assertions I’ve made here are conten-tious, and what follows is intended to substantiate these claims. The argument proceeds in two sections, which are aimed at illuminating the two intertwined difficulties pointed toward above. The first section shows how, exactly, Arendt’s reading of the third Critique does a great deal of violence to Kant’s texts in a way that is, at times, overlooked by political theorists. It does this by focusing on Arendt’s reading of two of Kant’s concepts, the sensus communis and the enlarged mentality. What I argue in this first section is that Arendt systematically distorts the role of transcendental subjectivity in Kant’s thought. Arendt, then, offers us a (mis)reading of Kant. The second section moves beyond a textual critique, which has the value of reminding political theorists that Arendt’s reading is a destruction of Kant’s thought, and looks at the consequences the (mis)reading of Kant has for her conceptualization of judgment. The most impor-tant consequence brought to light is that Arendt, despite the violence of her reading of Kant’s texts and the ways in which she systematically underplays the universalism of Kant’s arguments, still retains from Kant the presup-position that judgment is primarily an intellectual matter. Arendt retains from Kant the idea that judgment must be a reflective capacity, and while this may seem to be an



Weidenfeld 3

innocuous assumption, I try to show that this is tied to an aporia that is central to her thought; that is, Arendt intel-lectualizes judgment, and this is what, ultimately, pushes her toward a divide between the actor and spectator that she is unable to reconcile.5 Arendt, then, also misreads the phenomenon of judgment. Given this basic aporia of Arendt’s thought, which cannot bring much of the every-day content of judgment into view, I conclude by won-dering if it may not be best to admit, as Arendt claimed of Kant, that Arendt never wrote a philosophy of judg-ment. This admission may allow us to return to the phe-nomenon with unclouded vision or, perhaps, subject her thought to a creative destruction of its own. To see why we may want to admit this, we must begin with Arendt’s reading of Kant.

The (Mis)reading of KantIn part 1, division 1 of the Critique of Judgment, Kant raises the problem of how it is possible that judgments of beauty, which are based only on a subjective feeling of pleasure, could claim universal assent. Kant claimed, in fact, that such judgments do have an a priori principle and are not mere statements of preference or, as Kant puts it, are not mere statements of what individuals hap-pen to find agreeable. The task Kant sets himself, then, is to offer a critique of this power of judgment. If we are to understand why Arendt turned to Kant as a starting point for her reflections on judgment, then an overview of relevant portions of the third Critique is in order.

Kant found that a critique of judgments of beauty was possible because of a new distinction he drew between determinate and reflective judgments. The first Critique had taken up the issue of judgment, but it had considered only determinant judgments, which Kant defined as “the faculty of subsuming under rules; that is, of distinguishing whether something does or does not stand under a given rule” (Kant, quoted in Allison 2001, 14). Kant conceptualized judgment in the first Critique along the lines of cognitive judgments in which one brings an intuition under a concept and, then, makes an objective validity claim; that is, in the first Critique, judgment is understood as the faculty of applying con-cepts of the understanding to intuitions. For instance, when one makes the judgment “this is a house,” one applies the concept of house, which is supplied by our understanding, to our empirical intuition of the object with four walls, windows, and so on that stands before one. The concept of a “house” determines our experi-ence of the intuition.

The third Critique, though, raises a new issue. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant argues that judgments of beauty and the pleasure we have in cognizing the beautiful occur in situations where, unlike determinant judgments, one

actually moves from the particular to the universal and no concept is supplied by the understanding. These judgments require reflection as one moves freely from the particular to the universal without one’s judgment being determined by the concepts of the understanding. In reflective judg-ments one must search for a concept under which to place the intuition. According to Kant, this is exactly the situa-tion that arises in judgments of beauty, where one makes a claim to an object’s beauty, based on one’s own feeling of pleasure, without a concept that can determine the object’s beauty. Even more important, these claims are normative because one makes a claim that one believes is intersubjec-tively valid; that is, one expects everyone to agree that these objects are beautiful and not merely that we like them for idiosyncratic reasons. The third Critique, then, is charged with the task of offering a critique of our power of judgment and to ground this normativity.

According to Kant, then, a judgment of beauty is not based on the shared features of objects (this would be a determinant judgment), but this judgment still makes a claim to intersubjective validity. How could it be that when I claim “this rose is beautiful,” I am also making the claim that I expect everyone else to agree with my judg-ment? I do not claim that the rose is merely agreeable to me or that I am merely stating a subjective preference for the rose but that the rose is beautiful and everyone should recognize this (Kant 1987, 18-44). Against those who would claim that matters of taste are merely subjective statements of preference, Kant, by examining our cogni-tive powers and the conditions that make aesthetic judg-ments possible, discloses the epistemic conditions that make subjectively universal claims concerning beauty possible. To put the matter rather simply, Kant argues that judgments of beauty can claim subjective universality because they are founded on the cognitive powers shared by all agents, which allow for knowledge.

What is striking about judgments of beauty is that their “determining basis cannot be other than subjec-tive.” A judgment of beauty is based on a subjective feeling of pleasure; it is not determined by a concept to which everyone could refer, but we still expect uni-versal assent to our judgments of beauty. This is why, according to Kant, judgments of beauty are reflec-tive; that is, judgments of beauty are given only a par-ticular object (this rose) and must try to find a concept under which to subsume it. Judgments of beauty can-not claim objective validity because there is no deter-minant concept of beauty, supplied by the understanding, to which all persons could refer. If we are to under-stand how judgments of taste could still expect uni-versal assent, Kant argues, we should begin by investigating the feeling of pleasure that we experi-ence in judgments of beauty to see how these judg-ments demand universal assent.




How, then, does Kant rationally reconstruct the judg-ment of beauty? Guyer (1997) argues that this is a two-step process. The first step is an unintentional reflection, which actually produces the pleasure of aesthetic response. In this first step, what is crucial is that the beau-tiful object brings the imagination, which is the faculty of intuition or presentation that brings together the multi-plicity of a manifold into some coherence, and the under-standing, which is the faculty that supplies the concepts that are assigned to our intuitions, into a state of “free play.” In a determinant judgment, the understanding applies a concept to the intuitions brought forward by the imagination, but in an aesthetic judgment no concept is available. In this situation, the understanding and imagi-nation are left in a state of free play, where the imagina-tion is not subordinate to the concepts of the understanding and the two faculties must mutually search for such a concept. Allison (2001, 171) renders this relationship more perspicuous when he argues that “the basic idea is presumably that the imagination in its free play stimu-lates the understanding by occasioning it to entertain fresh conceptual possibilities, while, conversely, the imagination, under the general direction of the under-standing, strives to conceive new patterns of order.” A beautiful object brings our faculties into this state of free play, and, Kant argues, this produces a pleasurable feel-ing. These shared cognitive faculties serve, then, as the basis of our feeling of pleasure in the beautiful.

To return to our example, one encounters a rose, for which no concept of beauty is available that could deter-mine one’s judgment, and this rose brings one’s imagina-tion and understanding into a state of free play that leads to a feeling of pleasure. This is the first step of aesthetic judgment. The second step is an exercise of reflection that leads to the actual judgment of beauty and with it an expectation of universal assent. This second step occurs when one reflects on whether this initial sense of pleasure has, in fact, been caused by the harmony of the faculties or by merely subjective preferences.

What allows us to rationally expect universal assent to the judgment of beauty a priori is that the feeling of pleasure we have in judging the beautiful is, according to Kant, the nonconceptual awareness we have of the object’s purposiveness for our cognitive powers (Guyer 1997). For instance, when one judges that “this rose is beautiful,” the feeling of pleasure one has in judging the beauty of the rose is derived from this free play of one’s cognitive powers as they find harmony in arriving at the cognition of the rose’s beauty. It is as though the rose was there, was purposive, for this type of free play, and this surely, Kant argues, leads to a feeling of delight. This is what, Kant argues, actually makes possible uni-versal subjective validity. The feeling of pleasure we have in judging the beautiful is nothing more than a

sense of the harmony of the cognitive powers brought about by the beautiful object, which we presuppose, a priori, everyone shares in common (Guyer 1997, 31). The feeling of pleasure brought about by beauty derives then from the free play of our cognitive powers. If this is the case, then we can expect that everyone, under the right conditions, could have the same feeling of pleasure. This is because what are shared a priori are the cognitive powers that would lead everyone, under the right condi-tions, to cognize the object’s beauty.

Recognizing whether our judgments have occurred under the right conditions is difficult and may always be open to revision, but Kant does offer the criteria of disin-terest and formality as criteria of evaluation to see if our judgment of beauty is pure. The requirement of disinter-est, while a notoriously difficult discussion in the third Critique, seems to require that our liking of an object cannot be tied to a liking for the thing’s existence. As Kant (1987, 46) puts it, “Everyone has to admit that if a judgment about beauty is mingled with the least interest then it is very partial and not a pure judgment of taste.” Kant relies in this discussion on the example of an imag-ined palace and the question of the palace’s beauty. While one might comment on the socioeconomic rela-tionships that make such palaces morally noxious to one or state that one does not find objects of mere vanity agreeable, Kant (1987, 46) insists that this is not the question. “All he [the questioner] wants to know is whether my mere presentation of the object is accompa-nied by a liking.” The requirement of disinterest seems to imply that a judgment of beauty cannot be tied to a concept of any sort, whether this be tied to the good and our interest in the moral evaluation of the object, or a broader interest in theoretical cognition. One is not offer-ing an aesthetic judgment when one brings one’s intu-itions under a concept of the good; in fact, one cannot evaluate the palace on the basis of any interest one might have in whether the object should exist at all. Kant also holds that our judgments of beauty must be formal and focus only on the “fact that [the object] can dispose the faculties of imagination and understanding to the state of free play” (Guyer 1997, 193).6

Given Kant’s own claims to be dealing only with judg-ments of beauty in these sections, we must wonder what it is that Arendt thought she had found in Kant’s Critique of Judgment that could serve as an implicit political the-ory and a guide to understanding judgment. First, Arendt begins with Kant’s conceptualization of reflective judg-ment, which requires that we think of the particular object without an available concept to place the object under, because she found in Kant a resource for conceptualizing a mode of judging that functions where concepts are not available (Arendt 1978, 69). Arendt argues that Kant’s conceptualization of reflective judgment is important



Weidenfeld 5

because under conditions of modernity, where the thread of tradition has broken, we are called on to constantly make particular judgments without concepts to guide us. Reflective judgments are now, according to Arendt, what we must make in political and ethical matters. Second, Arendt finds in Kant’s conceptualization of aesthetic judgment a mode of the life of the mind that is still con-nected to the world of appearances and the plurality of perspectives that is the stuff of politics; that is, she reads the Critique of Judgment as Kant’s political philosophy because it discloses, she thinks, a mode of thinking that is still linked to the plurality of others through the common sense. To make the case that Kant discloses an intellectual faculty still tied to plurality, Arendt leans on two Kantian concepts, the sensus communis and the enlarged mental-ity, for the sake of developing her own reflections con-cerning judgment.

Sensus CommunisJudgment, which Arendt (1978, 193) defines as “the abil-ity to say ‘this is wrong,’ ‘this is beautiful,’ and so on,” is the faculty that allows us to judge particulars objects or events without universals. While Arendt never defini-tively says how judgments operate, it is clear that she sees them as mental operations that take a stand on particular events, persons, and so on that can still claim general validity (more on this below) by making reference, in our minds, to a community of others, whom we encounter when we think beyond the narrow confines of our own interests and consider the particular with an “enlarged mentality.” The common sense is the sense, she argues, that fits us into this community and allows us to see an object or event from this plurality of perspectives and, in turn, allows us to feel assured that our judgments can demand general assent (Arendt 1968, 220-21).

Arendt’s comments concerning common sense are ambiguous, at best. For instance, she claims that com-mon sense is “a kind of sixth sense needed to keep my five senses together and guarantee that it is the same object that I see touch, taste, smell, and hear” (Arendt 1978, 50). Or, common sense “discloses to us the nature of the world insofar as it is a common world” (Arendt 1968, 221). And, finally, common sense is “the sixth sense that fits our five senses into a common world” (Arendt 1978, 81). The concept, despite its ambiguity, is crucial to Arendt’s conceptualization of judgment because she argues that the standard of reflective judg-ment is common sense (Arendt 1978, 267).7 Arendt is quite clear that the concept of a common sense, and its role in judgment, is one she gained from Kant, though the difficulties involved with her interpretation of Kant begin to surface immediately. Arendt (1982, 70) argues, for instance, that the concept of the sensus communis

points out an “extra sense . . . that fits us into a commu-nity.” More important, Arendt (1982, 73) claims that the sensus communis points toward the fact, crucial for the validity of judgments, that “when one judges, one judges as a member of a community.” Most important here is Arendt’s (2003b, 139) claim that

[c]ommon sense for Kant did not mean a sense common to all of us, but strictly that sense which fits us into a community with others, makes us members of it and enables us to communicate things given by our five private senses.

Arendt claims, then, that Kant’s conceptualization of the common sense ties our judgments into a community and ensures our membership therein. The validity of our judgments is decided only through their ties back to this community sense. Arendt wants to argue that the built-in plurality of judgment, which she thinks allows for its claims to general validity, is guaranteed by the ties of judgment to the sensus communis. Arendt’s understand-ing of the concept is ambiguous, but it certainly points toward empirical sociability; that is, judgment can make general claims, according to Arendt (1982, 72), because judgment “is actually rooted in this common sense and is therefore open to communication once it has been trans-formed by reflection, which takes all others and their feelings into account.” More important, she argues

[When the judge] claims assent from others because in judging he has already taken them into account and hopes that his judgments will carry a certain general, though not perhaps universal, validity. The validity will reach as far as the community of which my common sense makes me a member. (Arendt 2003a, 140, emphasis added)

Arendt argues that common sense fits us into the sense of a community, and good judgment requires that we expand this community as far as we can.

Given Kant’s analysis of the a priori claims of judg-ments of beauty, outlined above, it would be rather odd if Kant were suddenly to discuss the central role of empiri-cal sociability in judgments of taste; after all, what assures us of the universality of our judgments of beauty in Kant’s mind is the a priori fact that the understanding and imagi-nation could be brought into a state of free play for all possible agents. This is our first clue and point of entry into Arendt’s (mis)reading. Kant (1987, 87) makes it clear, actually, that common sense is a “subjective prin-ciple” and is “the effect arising from the free play of our cognitive powers.” The important point of focus, for our purposes, is that Kant assumes that common sense is common because he assumes that the epistemologically a




priori conditions of judgment of beauty are the same in all possible agents and not because the sense is tied to a community.8

We get a sense of the difficulties involved with Arendt’s reading of the concept if we turn to what Kant says about the sensus communis in the Critique of Judgment. Kant (1987, 156) introduces the concept in his attempt to show that “we are justified in presuppos-ing universally in all people the same subjective condi-tions of the power of judgment that we find in ourselves.” When we assume the same cognitive faculties in all peo-ple that serve as the foundation of the power of judg-ment, we assume a common sense. Common sense ties us into the judgment of everyone else, but this does not link our judgments to an actual community; instead, the sensus communis is intended to point toward the condi-tions of transcendental subjectivity—the free play of the imagination and the understanding—that make judg-ments of taste possible for all persons. It is a sense that all persons share because all persons share the structures of transcendental subjectivity. Kant’s sensus communis does fulfill the function of “thinking from the standpoint of everyone else,” as Arendt would put it, but not by reflecting on the positions of others. Kant’s concept requires no such imagining because if our judgments of beauty attend only to the form of the object and are dis-interested, then we can assume that all other persons, who share the same conditions of judgment, could have a common sense of its beauty.

This is of central importance because of the crucial role that autonomy plays in Kant’s thinking about judg-ments of beauty. Kant (1987, 144) is quite clear that the universal validity of our judgments does not rely on “gathering votes and asking other people what kind of sensation they are having.” He insists on this point, in fact, because turning to the views of others would under-mine the autonomy of judgment. One need think only of Kant’s (1987, 146-47) discussion of the poet who judges his own poem to be beautiful, despite the claims of oth-ers, and who, if he relinquished his judgment, would do so only “in order to accommodate himself to the com-mon delusion.” Again, Kant (1987, 147, 153) makes it clear that “other people’s approval in no way provides [someone] with a valid proof by which to judge beauty,” and we must judge a priori “without being allowed to wait for other people’s assent.” To push common sense toward empirical sociability, Arendt overlooks the role of autonomy and, more important, Kant’s attempt to ground judgments of beauty in our shared cognitive fac-ulties. In fact, Arendt attempts to destroy these concepts with an eye toward recovering the phenomenal evidence that she believes truly lies behind Kant’s concepts. The problem here is that this not only does damage to Kant’s text but also, as we shall see, still operates out of the

basic presupposition of Kant’s framework that judgment is, primarily, an intellectual matter, and this may distort the phenomenon as well.

Arendt is able to overlook the role of transcendental subjectivity in Kant’s argument by eliding the difference between the sensus communis and what Kant refers to as “common human understanding.” Arendt (1982, 70) claims that

The term has changed. The term “common sense” meant a sense like our other sense—the same for everyone in his privacy. By using the Latin term, Kant indicates that he here means something different: an extra sense—like an extra mental capability—that fits us into a community. The “common understanding of men [common human understanding] . . . is the very least to be expected from anyone claiming the name of man.”

Arendt’s attempt to elide the difference becomes clear if we merely continue her citation of Kant’s text where she leaves off. Kant (1987, 160) argues, in full, that this “common human understanding . . . is the very least to be expected from anyone claiming the name of man: and this is why it enjoys the unfortunate honor of being called common sense (sensus communis).” Kant makes it clear that sensus communis is not the same as the common or vulgar human understanding and, in fact, that it is unfortunate that the two are confused. Arendt, though, overlooks this distinction to show that the sensus communis “fits us into a community,” but this is a reading of Kant that strains his text nearly beyond recognition. Kant (1987, 160) argues, in the text she refers to but fails to discuss, that

we must take sensus communis to mean the idea of a sense shared, i.e. a power to judge that in reflect-ing takes account (a priori), in our thought of everyone else’s way of presenting [something], in order as it were to compare our own judgment with human reason in general . . . we do this as follows: we compare our judgment not so much with actual as rather with the merely possible judgment of oth-ers, and thus, put ourselves in the position of every-one else, merely by abstracting from the limitations that [may] happen to attach to our own judging.

Kant makes it clear that the sensus communis does not fit us into an actual community; instead, the sensus com-munis points toward our cognitive faculties, which is the epistemological condition for the possibility of judgment that is shared by all agents.9 If our judgment already abstracts from our interests and attends only to the formal features of the presentation for our cognitive faculties, we



Weidenfeld 7

can assume that our sense of the beauty of an object is a common sense shared by all. This is not accomplished by comparing our judgments, in reality or imagination, with the judgments of other; instead, the deduction is meant to show that disinterested and formal judgments of beauty already achieve this universal perspective.

Arendt, it seems, attempts to read back into Kant’s concept of the sensus communis the ethical content that Kant explicitly expunges (Gadamer 1999, 21-27). Arendt’s reflections on judgment move between Kant’s insistence that judgments of beauty are contemplative and her own thought that it must somehow be related to an actually existing ethos. This tension between the judgment as a theoretical and a practical capacity is not overcome by Arendt’s theory of judgment but is in fact reproduced in her distinction between the actor and the spectator. This tension leads not only to a misreading of Kant but also to a misreading of judgment, but before we turn to those consequences, we must turn to a second concept Arendt draws from the Critique of Judgment, the enlarged mentality.

The Enlarged MentalityArendt (1978, 257) claims that “the ‘enlargement of mind’ plays a crucial role in the Critique of Judgment.” More pointedly, she claims that “Kant insisted upon a different way of thinking . . . which consisted of being able to ‘think in the place of everybody else’ and which he therefore called an ‘enlarged mentality’” (Arendt 1968, 220). For Arendt, this drives the idea that judging is a matter of thinking the particular in a way that is able to take into account the views of others. In a way, this is what Kant has in mind, but Arendt overemphasizes the role that actually thinking in the position of others could have in Kant’s thought. In the text of the third Critique, Kant’s discussion of the enlarged mentality is a digres-sion that refers to the maxims of “common human understanding.” Kant’s deduction of the a priori claims of judgment to universal validity is intended to show that there is no need to actually think in anyone else’s place or take into account the actual judgments of oth-ers.10 Again, Kant’s argument is that the cognitive facul-ties can be assumed to be the same in everyone and, in turn, if our judgment of beauty is disinterested and for-mal, then the judgment of beauty can already be assumed to be the same in everyone else. The fact that, as the deduction shows, judgment already takes into account everyone else’s standpoint, without reference to any actual community, may seem “too artful,” and, there-fore, Kant (1987, 160) brings in the maxims of human understanding to show that “nothing is more natural.” Kant’s mention of the maxim of common human under-standing to “think from the standpoint of everyone else”

is intended only to serve as phenomenological confirma-tion of the deduction and the a priori operation of the sensus communis.

The discussion of the enlarged mentality, then, con-tinues a tension already seen in Arendt’s reading of the sensus communis. Arendt wants to draw from Kant a vision of judgment as a mental activity that fits us into an actual plurality of other judges. For instance, Arendt (1978, 96) argues that the Critique of Judgment points toward spectators as those who pass judgment on events and “this is decisive, Kant’s spectators exist in the plu-ral.” In the Lectures on Kant, she insists that “judgments, and especially judgments of taste, always reflect upon others and their taste. This is necessary because I am human and cannot live outside the company of men. I judge as a member of this community and not as a mem-ber of the supersensible world” (Arendt 1982, 67). These claims are a matter of tying Kant’s conceptualization of judgment to plurality and, in turn, back into Arendt’s own conceptualization of politics. The hope that Kant ties judgment back to plurality and, in turn, politics leads Arendt to see the Critique of Judgment as a nascent polit-ical theory, but it continuously leads her to elide crucial distinctions Kant himself makes, as we have seen. This raises the fact that Arendt elides the distinction between the universal and the general.

Arendt (1978, 111, emphasis added) poses the problem of the deduction of the Critique of Judgment—how could the subjective pleasure we derive from the beautiful have universal validity—as “the question of how propositions of judgment could possibly claim, as indeed they do, general agreement.” Arendt draws no attention to her substitution of general for universal here, but it serves an important purpose for her reading. Arendt attempts to tie judgment to a general standpoint, and not a universal one as Kant would have it, to conceptualize judgment as a matter of bringing propositions into agreement with an actual, existing plural-ity of other judges. As she puts it, our “claims to validity can never extend further than the others in whose place the judging person has put himself for his considerations” (Arendt 1968, 221). Kant, though, does not limit judgment to a general standpoint, which brings in a limited range of others, with whom we compare our judgments; instead, he insists that judgment claims subjective universality. Our judgments make validity claims on all who share our cog-nitive powers, and this is why they claim universal, and not just general, assent. This slippage allows Arendt (1968, 221, emphasis added) to read the Critique of Judgment as making the claim that judgment requires “the ability to see things not only from one’s own point of view but in the perspective of all those who happen to be present.” Kant does not require such general assent; valid judgments already share the view of all who share our cognitive pow-ers and are universally valid.




What Arendt thinks she has found in Kant is a concep-tualization of a capacity to make autonomous judgments in a manner that is independent of universals or traditional guidance but that is still linked to the judgments of others, to plurality. This content, though, is not to be found in the Critique of Judgment in this way. Arendt’s admittedly cre-ative (mis)reading of Kant, then, seems to be clear, and while it is important to bring to light the extent of Arendt’s destruction of Kant’s text, my concern is not only with Arendt’s fidelity to the Kantian sources. More important, even though Arendt is engaged in this systematic destruc-tion of Kant’s texts, Arendt surprisingly retains Kant’s central intuition that judgment is primarily an intellectual affair. Arendt’s retention of this idea from Kant—despite her creative destruction of almost all of his other claims—actually pushes her toward a misreading of the phenome-non of judgment. Arendt, then, ends up caught between two poles—between Kant’s intellectualism and her own sense of the phenomenological dimensions of judging—and this comes to light in her attempts to read empirical community and plurality back into Kant where they can-not be found. Arendt, then, retains Kant’s thought that judgments of beauty must be reflective and intellectual, even when she systematically destructs his texts for her own purposes, and this leads Arendt into a much more troubling problem; that is, it leads her toward a misreading of judgment.

The (Mis)reading of JudgmentIt seems that Arendt wants to understand, among other things, how judgment can operate in a contextual man-ner, without guidance from universals, and autonomously. All of these factors led Arendt to Kant, but the question of autonomy makes Kant a crucial source for Arendt.11 The problem is, though, that Arendt’s reading of Kant drives her away from the phenomenon of judgment because, despite her destruction of Kant’s text, she still retains Kant’s thought that judgment is a reflective and intellectual capacity—it is a matter of the life of the mind. This leads Arendt to engage in the error of what Pierre Bourdieu (1990, 29) refers to as intellectualism, which he describes as a case “in which the observer’s relation to the social world, and therefore the social rela-tion which makes the observation possible, is made the basis of the practice analyzed.” That is, Arendt retains from Kant the idea that judgment, if it is to be more than mere statement of subjective preference, must manifest itself as an intellectual contemplation of the world that comes to look a good deal like the theorist’s own rela-tionship to the world. Arendt, then, retains from Kant the idea that judgment is primarily intellectual and in doing so reads back into judgment the theorist’s relationship to the world. Arendt’s intellectualization ends up having

a problematic relationship with action, and this makes it difficult for her to conceptualize judgment as a practice (Arendt 1982, 68; Arendt 1978, 69).

Mental activities come into being, Arendt argues, only “through a deliberate withdrawal from appear-ances” (Arendt 1978, 75). Like all theoretical capacities, judgment is a capacity that requires distance from action and events to fix its gaze on those objects. Judgment is a theoretical capacity that “does not leave the world of appearances but retires from active involvement in it to a privileged position in order to contemplate the whole” (Arendt 1978, 94). Arendt, in making this assertion, not only draws on the philosophical tradition, which insists on the proper remove required for theorein, but also is driven to this conclusion by Kant and his understanding of judgments of beauty as a complex matter of reflection. Arendt picks up on Kant’s argument that judgment is contemplative and must be disinterested, and she finds both of these conditions fulfilled in the existential posi-tion of the spectator. This emphasis on the privileged role of the spectator leads to a divide between actor and spectator in her thought, which makes it difficult to understand how agents actually judge. The problem here is that Arendt begins to have a difficult time understand-ing how agents take up the two-in-one position of actor and spectator in judging, which they quite clearly do.

Arendt associates judgment with the glance of the spectator because of the importance she attaches to Kant’s claim that judgment should be disinterested. These con-nections lead Arendt, in one of her earliest attempts to understand the existential requirements of judging, to turn to Cicero’s reflections on the ways in which philoso-phy prepares agents to approach appearances as mere spectators. What Arendt finds illuminating is that, for Cicero, the philosophers were “as we would say today, completely disinterested and for this very reason those best qualified to judge, but also those who were most fas-cinated by the spectacle itself” (Arendt 1968, 219).12 This is a continuing theme for Arendt, as she claims, for instance, that “the existential ground for his [i.e., the judge’s] insight was his disinterestedness, his nonpartici-pation, his noninvolvement” (Arendt 1982, 54). Arendt (1968, 219) insists that the existential preconditions of remove and disinterest required by judgment understood as an intellectual comportment are met by the spectator. What she finds important in Kant is the explicit tie he draws between judging and spectating. She insists, in fact, that judgment “presupposes a definitely ‘unnatural’ and deliberate withdrawal from involvement and the par-tiality of immediate interests” (Arendt 1978, 76; also see Arendt 1982, 55). The emphasis Arendt places on these theoretical moments of judging, driven by Kant’s own thought that aesthetic judgment is reflective, leads her to see judgment as a capacity actualized by spectators, who



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exercise judgment on events already past (Arendt 1978, 192, 213, and 216; also see Kateb 2001, 126).

What is startling about these conceptual distinctions that Arendt begins to draw is that they begin to crystal-lize into a hypostatized divide between spectators and actors. While Yar (2000, 2) has argued that Arendt’s work helps to illuminate the “fundamental antinomy of judgment,” which lies in the disjuncture between the per-spective of the actor and the spectator, it may be better to see this divide as, in fact, an artifact of Arendt’s own thinking. If judgment is intellectual, if it requires a stop and think that includes an imagined dialogue with our community sense, if it is a matter of being disinterested, then judgment becomes a matter for spectators. Arendt’s surprising retention of Kant’s intellectualism makes it difficult for her to think the role of judgment in action; that is, Arendt begins to see judgment as a capacity exer-cised solely by those with the ability to stand apart and look back. Allow me to point out what this conceptual constellation and intellectualization of judgment lead Arendt to cover over, why this is also a misreading of judgment, and why the supposed antinomy of judgment may be only an artifact of Arendt’s misreading.

Certainly, the picture provided by Arendt’s account of a spectator, who judges past events through explicit thinking, brings these judgments into imagined dialogue with other spectators, and then arrives at a final explicit and propositional stance on what has already happened, may seem to be a plausible account of certain moments of judgment. We can imagine, for instance, a situation where we reflect on the Iranian elections of 2009 and must reflect on whether these were legitimate. In a hard case like this, we might begin to look for a rule and char-acteristics of fair and free elections, consider it in a detached way, attempt to form a proposition, and, per-haps, think about what others would say about the case. These moments do tend to stand out; they capture the gaze of theoretical accounts of judgment for that reason. The problem is that, as authors such as Bourdieu (1977), Connolly (2002), Thiele (2006), and Dreyfus (1991) have shown, very little of our ethical, political, and aes-thetic lives are taken up by these sorts of intellectual operations; instead, judgment tends to operate without engaging in the deliberate forms of reflection Arendt and Kant would lead us to expect. That is, they are not con-templative. Hubert Dreyfus (1991, 8) argues,

We should try to impress on ourselves what a huge amount of our lives—working, getting around, talk-ing, eating, driving, and responding to the needs of others—manifest know-how, and what a small part is spent in the deliberate, effortful, subject/object mode of activity which requires knowing-that. Yet deliberate action and its extreme form, deliberation,

are the ways of acting we tend to notice, and so are the only ones that have been studied in detail by philosophers.

Dreyfus’s examples call to mind political and ethical judgments that have a difficult time appearing in an intellectualist account, such as Arendt’s, for instance, when one becomes enraged at another’s political posi-tion and begins to argue immediately, cringing in the face of shame, experiencing embarrassment over a friend’s comments in public and changing the subject quickly, or grabbing a nephew’s arm as he runs into traf-fic. These are ethico-political judgments that are not experienced as an ego, who judges an outside event, forms an explicit opinion about the event, and, then, begins a process of representative thinking. Perhaps Arendt would want to claim that these intellectual operations are what really or actually occur in these experiences (perhaps not), but the description of the phenomenon cannot bear this out; instead, one just changes the topic of conversation or grab’s the nephew. It would appear to us that these practices involve judg-ment, but they do not appear in the manner of Arendt’s account, which retains Kant’s intellectualism. We must wonder if, at this level, judgment has a structure with which an intellectualist account cannot come to terms.

Weidenfeld (2011) has argued that to make sense of these judgments an approach that understood judgment in terms of comportment would be necessary. The claim here is that a turn to the structure of comportments, such as the examples cited above, would help theorists to come to terms with the judgments that Arendt’s account seemingly overlooks—such as reacting angrily to the bigotry of another’s evaluation of a political candidate, grabbing one’s nephew’s arm as he runs into traffic, shielding a friend from criticism by changing the topic of conversation—because of her assumption that at some level judgment must be an intellectual and reflective matter, rooted ulti-mately in the life of the mind. The judgments discussed above would seem to be prereflective, but this is not a defi-ciency. Obviously, it is not a deficiency to know the proper disposition in these situations without reflection; without it, the bigot would walk away, the nephew would be harmed, the friend would be unduly criticized. Arendt’s account, though, does not bring these judgments into our view, and if it does, we are left to solve the puzzle of how these judgments actually or really rely on the spectatorial perspective she assumes.

Now, Arendt was fully aware of a conceptualization of judgment that would focus on the practice of judging as it is engaged in by actors in concrete situations. Certainly Arendt, who was a close reader of Aristotle’s works, was aware of the possibility of a phenomenological examina-tion of phronesis (prudence or practical wisdom) that




proceeds by way of looking toward what the phronimos does.13 Arendt, though, is unable to make this move because of a hypostatized distinction she draws between thinking and acting. Judging becomes for Arendt a men-tal operation, which following Kant she ties to its claims to autonomy, but the cost here is the conceptual impossi-bility of tying this conceptualization back to action.

The intellectualism Arendt takes on from Kant, despite her destructive interpretation on a number of other fronts, makes it difficult to bring judging as a practice into view and of conceptualizing the interrelation between the actor and the spectator. Now, Arendt may have been driven toward Kant and the distinction between the spectator and the actor for political reasons; after all, Arendt was well aware of the dangers of attaching judgment too closely to a form of acting within an ethos. A focus on judgment as tied to or as a form of practice might continue to locate the capacity under morals or ethics, and, as is well-known, Arendt (2003a, 43) wanted to avoid such a move because ethics and morals had become dangerously malleable under totalitarian governments.

Nonetheless, despite her own misgivings concerning the malleability of an ethos and, in turn, our habits and customs, Arendt was aware that the contexts were ines-capable dimensions of human being; that is, she was obviously aware that these habits and customs formed the context of our practices and the context for our daily life. Arendt (2005, 99) conceptualizes the content of our prac-tices and these contexts as “prejudices.”

The prejudices that we share, that we take to be self-evident, that we toss out in conversation with-out any lengthy explanations are, as already noted, themselves political in the broadest sense of the word—that is, something that constitutes an inte-gral part of those human affairs that are the context in which we go about our daily lives.

These prejudices are the central context for our daily lives and, I might add, constitute the background for the judg-ments that actors make in the midst of life’s flow. It may be that Arendt has left a path to be followed in attempting to understand judgment as comportment through the lens of prejudice. Arendt, though, forecloses this possibility because she argues that these cannot be judgments—they do not operate in the intellectual manner she demands—and, more important, they “are normally recognized by their unabashed appeal to the authority of ‘they say’” (Arendt 2005, 100).

Arendt (2005, 100) claims that prejudice derives its authority from what “they say” and that it “plays a major role in the social arena.” Prejudice is ruled out as authentic judgment, even though it “always conceals some previously formed judgment which had its own appropriate and

legitimate experiential basis” because prejudice is a social as opposed to a political phenomenon. In fact, prejudice “makes both judgment and genuine experience of the pres-ent impossible” (Arendt 2005, 101). Most simply put, prej-udice is aligned with the social where judgment is aligned with the political. And while Arendt’s concept of the social is notoriously difficult to unpack, her concern here is that the social and its overgrowth into the public realm have led not only to an atrophy of action but also to a crisis in cul-ture and judgment (Arendt 1958, 38-50).14 The develop-ment of the social has left us with a mass of men distinguished by a “capacity for consumption, accompa-nied by [an] inability to judge, or even to distinguish” (Arendt 1968, 199). What is worse, with the growth of the social there has been “an atrophy of common sense, the faculty we ordinarily rely on to get our bearings in the world” (Beiner 1982, 95).

This constriction in our scope of vision is a political problem for Arendt. She wants to know how judgment can operate authentically and independently—that is, free from the bounds of what “they say”—and still main-tain some ties to the world of men and their plurality of perspectives. Arendt’s (1978, 71) solution, as we’ve already seen, is to turn to Kant and conceptualize judg-ment as an intellectual operation. Kant seems to hold out the resources for conceptualizing judgment as both autonomous—it relies on the criteria of the mind and not what “they say”—and tied to the conditions of politics because, according to her reading, its mental operation brings to mind plurality. What Arendt is looking for, then, is a context-independent way to judge beyond the norms of the social that is still attached to plurality. It is a faculty both of and removed from the world. The ten-sion between these two demands—to be both of the world and withdrawn from the world—is obvious and is tied to both the misreading of Kant and the judgment that Arendt offers. The turn to Kant both leads to a misread-ing of his texts, because he does not supply the resources to tie judgment to an actually existing plurality of others in the way Arendt hopes, and leads to a misreading of judgment because she nonetheless retains from Kant an intellectualism that is unable to account for the phenom-enological experience of judgment as a moment of prac-tice. Perhaps, then, the divide between actor and spectator is not the antinomy of judgment but the antinomy of Arendt’s thought, which is driven by Arendt’s desire to understand judgment as a faculty both of the world and removed from it.

ConclusionPolitical theorists have spent a good deal of effort diag-nosing and, then, attempting to make their way through the aporia posed by the distinction between the actor and



Weidenfeld 11

the spectator via the resources of Arendt’s thought. I think we should begin to wonder, though, if this is truly an impasse on the way to judgment or an artifact of Arendt’s (mis)reading of the phenomenon. Perhaps the attempt to look at the phenomenon of judgment with eyes unclouded by intellectualism might provide a new path. Either way, the argument I’ve offered here is that Arendt’s explicit reflections on judgment may not pro-vide us with the resources to make our way through; in fact, I’ve argued that Arendt’s reflections have pushed theorists toward a potential misreading of Kant and a misreading of judgment, which are intertwined. The pres-ent article set out on an admittedly negative path and, then, must end on a deflationary note.

If this is the case, then perhaps one way to take up this antinomy of Arendt’s thought and make our way through this impasse is to take on Arendt’s example in at least one crucial respect; that is, it may be best to follow Arendt and be audacious in our approach to the divide between the actor and the spectator and a satisfactory account of judgment. A first step in this direction would be to say of Arendt, as she once claimed of Kant, that she never wrote a philosophy of judgment (Arendt 1982, 7). This may free theorists up for a destruction of her texts, a project in part taken up in the present article, or allow for a return to the phenomenon itself. At the very least, this admission may help us to realize the ways in which Arendt has clouded our own vision of judgment.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. One need make only a quick scan of the literature on politi-cal judgment to see the wide variety of authors who are either drawing on or responding to the work of Arendt. Alessandro Ferrara (2008) draws on Arendt’s discussion of exemplary validity to develop his own theory of judgment. Also see the essays in Beiner and Nedelsky (2001) for a sense of the range of approaches to Arendt’s work.

2. David L. Marshall (2010) has shown that Arendt was, in fact, influenced by a number of sources in her thinking about judgment, including, of course, Aristotle and Hegel, and came to Kant by way of Jaspers’s interpretations.

3. I refer to Arendt’s reading of Kant as a destruction to call to mind Heidegger’s (1962) method of textual interpreta-tion in Being and Time and its close parallels with Arendt’s method of pearl diving. Destruction in Heidegger

and Arendt’s hands is a matter of reading texts to get to the phenomenal content that lies beneath the sedimentation of traditional concepts. Engaging in this interpretive process requires an attempt to move toward the phenomenal refer-ent lying behind a set of concepts, and what the reader should keep in mind and what I hope to bring out through-out the article is the degree of violence involved in this interpretive strategy.

4. Others have investigated and criticized Arendt’s appropria-tion of Kant. See, for instance, Dostal (1984), who argues that Kant is an inappropriate resource for the revival of com-mon sense as Arendt wishes to understand it; Beiner (1982), who argues, as I do in depth, that Arendt underestimates the role of transcendental subjectivity in Kant’s thought; and Riley (1997), who argues that Arendt’s attempt to extend reflective judgments to claims such as “this is beautiful, this is ugly, this is right, this is wrong” is misguided because Kant would not allow that moral judgments could be reflec-tive. Moral judgments are determined by concepts that are already given by reason for Kant; they are not reflective. More important, the claim to have found Kant’s political philosophy in the third Critique is misguided and is, quite clearly, contained in his explicit works of political philoso-phy. I agree with these analyses on a number of points and try to bear some of these claims out in the present article. Beyond this, what I show is that Arendt’s reading of Kant is tied to what can only seem to be a surprising result, given how destructive her reading is; that is, her destruction of Kant’s texts still retains a kernel of his thought that actually pushes her toward a misreading of judgment.

5. Beiner (1982) and Villa (1999), to name only two, are sensi-tive to this problem as well. Beiner, though, tends to see the divide between the actor and the spectator to be a matter of the early versus late reflections of Arendt. The argument is that Arendt’s early thought placed emphasis on the active, engaged role of judgment, and her later thought came to see judgment as a theoretical capacity. While the texts do sup-port Beiner’s reading to a point, the divide between the actor and the spectator is, I hope to show, implicit in all of Arendt’s reflections on judgment, and this is driven by her emphasis on Kant as the source for thinking about judgment.

6. The requirement of formality is a thicket in Kant scholar-ship and the actual content of Kant’s argument a subject of much debate. See Allison (2001, chap. 6) on this matter. We, though, are licensed to move through this topic rather quickly given the fact that it does not form a central point of concern for Arendt.

7. Readers of Arendt must keep in mind that even the assump-tion that common sense is the standard of reflective judg-ment is a controversial one, at least in that it stands opposed to other interpretations of Kant’s arguments. For instance, Allison (2001) argues that this standard or prin-ciple of reflective judgments of beauty lies in Kant’s argu-ments concerning purposiveness.




8. Arendt’s indeterminacy in regard to the concept of com-mon sense may, in fact, be driven by Kant’s own text, where the concept is mentioned a number of times with seemingly little overlap and dubious results. More impor-tant, Arendt focuses on sections 39–41 of the third Critique, but the concept is first mentioned in section 21 as a portion of Kant’s first attempt at a deduction. More important, as Guyer (1997, 249-50) has shown, Kant actually uses the phrase common sense in at least three different ways: First, he uses the term as “a principle which allows one to regard a response as universal and necessary on the basis of one’s own feeling.” Second, he uses the term “as if it referred to a feeling rather than a principle.” Third, and finally, “he writes [in section 40] as if the common sense were the faculty of taste itself.” Ultimately, Guyer concludes that the concept “is a needless complexity.”

9. Arendt (1958, 283) is aware of and critical of these Kantian arguments. The interesting point here is that she ties these problems to Descartes, but never to Kant. “For Common Sense, which once had been the one by which all other senses, with their intimately private sensations, were fitted into a common world, just as vision fitted man into a visi-ble world, now became an inner faculty without any world relationship. This sense was now called common merely because it happened to be common to all. What men now have in common is not the world, but the structure of their minds.” Perhaps Kant is more caught up in the scope of what Arendt calls the modern age than she was willing to recognize.

10. An anonymous reviewer for this journal has pointed out, quite rightly, that Arendt’s enlarged mentality does not ask what sensation others are actually having; instead, when one thinks from the standpoint of others representatively, one still thinks as one’s own self. Nonetheless, Arendt’s position still relies on a taking into account of the opinions (dokei moi) of others that Kant would not allow.

11. Dana Villa (1999) offers a clear account of how the experi-ence of totalitarianism led Arendt to place autonomy at the center of her account of judgment.

12. It is Arendt’s constant emphasis on the centrality of specta-torship to judgment that makes it difficult to see, as Beiner (1982) argues, an early and later theory of judgment in Arendt, where the early theory is agent centered and the later spectator or theory centered. As these passages show, throughout her reflections on judgment, Arendt gave a central role to those who watch.

13. The concept of phonesis, which can be roughly translated as prudence, circumspection, or practical wisdom and which points toward a concept of judgment, is from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (see esp. book 6). The phronimos is the practically wise person who acts in the right way, at the right time, and, in turn, discloses the situation for what it really is to all involved. To get a sense of what this might mean, notice how the truly funny person (who has a capacity for telling the right times and places for humor) makes the

right joke, in the right way, at the right time. At her or his best, the funny person actually reveals a situation as a funny one in a way no one could have anticipated. The phronimos exercises this circumspective capacity in ethical and politi-cal matters, according to Aristotle.

14. For an excellent account of Arendt’s concept of the social and the difficulties it presents for comprehension, see Pitkin (2000).

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Bio

Matthew C. Weidenfeld is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Elon University. His interests lie at the intersection of phenomenology and ancient Greek political thought, and, most recently, his research has centered on judg-ment. His work has recently appeared in Contemporary Political Theory and the European Journal of Political Theory.



Arendt, Kant and the Misreading of Judgement

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