Plural Perspectives and Independence: Political and Moral Judgement in Hannah Arendt

Abstract

Judgement is a very important but difficult topic in Hannah Arendt’s conception of human existence in general, and of plurality in particular. Her well-known notion of plurality — it is not human kind but human beings, in the plural, who inhabit the earth — is fleshed out in phenomenological analyses of action and judgement, two activities that, in Arendt’s view, constitute the humanness of human life. Her phenomenological attitude is far removed from the phenomenological methods of the founder, Edmund Husserl. Instead of theoretical constructions and reflections, and systematic conceptual analysis, Arendt is dedicated to the explication and interpretation — in a narrative style and everyday, non-technical language — of real-life, historical experiences that animate political concepts like ‘freedom’, ‘revolution’, ‘terror’, but also more general philosophical concepts such as ‘contingency’, ‘causality’, and ‘free will’. In contrast to most philosophers, including the philosopher who has inspired her account of judgement, Immanuel Kant, Arendt doesn’t prefer the neat consistency of a philosophical theory at the expense of facing human reality in all its haphazard, messy and sometimes bewildering factuality. It is this commitment to face the world and to understand the often traumatic events that shake the world, as well as her very keen eye for the contingencies of human existence, that make Arendt’s work so refreshing and, compared to established philosophy, quite unique.1