Toward a Return to Plurality in Arendtian Judgment

Abstract

ithout further ado: the perplexities surrounding the relation of Arendt’s early and late theories of judgment are rooted in her singular commitment to the abiding yet fragile possibility of human freedom. These perplexities are not a function of the theoretical faux paux conventionally ascribed to her by well meaning interpreters and sympathetic critics. Indeed, her work exhibits an admirable, if scandalous, refusal to be reduced to the imperatives of an overdetermined moral-theoretical field, an impertinence I hope to honor in this essay. For example, Seyla Benhabib seek to “resolve” Arendtian “puzzles” through reinscribing them within the neoKantian architectonics of discourse ethics.1 Ronald Beiner, by contrast, wonders why Arendt didn’t further mine Aristotelian wells in elaborating her own account(s) of judgment. 2 Herein I will take up these putative ambiguities. Interpreters are undoubtedly correct that decisive ambiguities remain between Arendt’s early and late accounts of judgment, but these ambiguities issue from Arendt’s own problems, concerns, and project. In what follows, I take up the problem of judgment from within Arendt’s own theoretical fabrics. I begin by recounting orthodox accounts of the ambiguity of judgment in Arendt, clearing away standard prejudices so as to grasp the ambiguity more sharply and from within her own framework. I then do a close reading of her 1971 essay “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” the essay that introduces the shift in her thinking on judgment.3 After querying the theoretical motives for this shift, I outline the problems Arendt creates from herself on her own terms and not external criteria of foreign moral-theoretical projects. I conclude by outlining the basic characteristics any reconstruction of Arendtian judgment must exhibit, and provide a provisional sketch for such a reconstruction. I suggest that the work of Emmanuel Levinas may give us