A Pragmatics of Political Judgment

Abstract

I. Introduction: A Pragmatics of JudgementTo take part in politics is to judge and in judgement we seek rectitude and finality. We attempt to establish what is the case in matters of right and wrong, advantageous and harmful, just and unjust. We declare what should be done. But judgement in politics is marred by faults-bias, lack of measure, automatism, dependency on the object of judgement, inefficacy-and due to these faults each judgement is open to be corrected by a counter-judgement, to be corrected in turn, and so it goes: 'endless wrangling' in Edmund Burke's terms. Yet we continue to judge. Is this not monstrous? Each participant in a political scene insists on judging others despite it being evident that no participant can claim to speak for the whole, despite the evidence that all participants-failing violence-have to co-exist. Why the ostensive act of communication when no dialogue is sought with the object of judgement? Is the real goal just to shore up one's own position? In critical and polemical judgement-one side calling the other 'terrorist,' the other side responding 'colonizer'-there is no subjectivisation of the object of judgement, not even a pedagogy, just the command 'disqualify that voice, count it for less.' Critical judgement itself does not seek to change the very object that it claims must be changed. The monstrosity of judgement is evident: it arrogates rectitude yet perpetuates error; it claims to put an end to controversy yet fuels it. The task of this paper is rid ourselves of this, one of our forms of monstrosity.The first question is if political judgement so evidently fails to correct the other or to accurately guide future action then what does it do?When philosophers explore the question of judgement, they often take an epistemological or a normative approach. The question is either one of what kind of knowledge forms a basis for correct judgement, or what source of normative criterion forms the basis for evaluation. In the Principles of Philosophy Descartes defines judgement as an affirmation concerning both the existence and the nature of objects falling under the senses. The process of hyperbolic doubt begins in the philosopher's recognition that many of his 'past opinions' and judgements were founded on unguaranteed principles and inexact knowledge. It is the faculty of will in its adolescent haste to overtake and surpass the faculty of judgement that causes error in judgement. Descartes's project is to search for clear and evident first principles from which to deduce perfect knowledge of objects. This is the route of epistemological foundationalism.1Isaiah Berlin chooses this route in his essay on political judgement. He searches for a foundation of judgement either in a supposed science of politics based on the laws of history, or in the nature of practical reason. His embrace of the latter leads him to repeat Aristotle's tautology of defining phronesis (practical wisdom) as the knowledge possessed by the phronimon, the wise man. Berlin's exemplar is Bismarck, apparently a match for Aristotle's supposed subject of knowledge, Pericles.2 In line with Berlin, Vincent Descombes defines political judgement as an instance of practical rationality: a deliberation that leads directly to action. To identify error in political judgement he seeks normative criteria and finds them not in reason, nor in communicative action, but in those norms and ends that are internal to social roles and professions (Hegel's objective spirit). An actor will be said to have made an error in judgement when it contradicts such norms. Society, and its natural evolution, is thus the ultimate judge.Here Descombes joins Hannah Arendt who condemns the French Revolution for the Jacobins' attempt to change society itself-in contrast with the American Revolution, which focused on constitutional change alone. In her lectures on Kant's political philosophy-reconstructed as the third volume 'Judging' of The Life of the Mind-Arendt conceives of political judgement as the activity of a disinterested spectator rather than an actor. …