Chapter 3 - Exercises in Political Thinking

Summary

Arendt’s point of departure is the situation of the breach of tradition, which had already started with Marx and became a fact with the rise of totalitarianism (TMA; Arendt 2002: 300). For Arendt, this means that, in politics, we cannot rely on the authority of the past or appeal to general rules that seem to have governed politics in the past. What, then, should we do? In this situation, Arendt suggests, reflective judgment needs to stand in for any firm orientation in political practices. Judgment is a particular activity of the mind, political thinking, situated between the past that cannot guide us anymore and the future that we cannot foresee. And so, the relevance of judging is universal as “each new generation, indeed every new human being as he inserts himself between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave it anew” (GBPF 13). This chapter will engage with the practice of reflective judgment and Arendt’s suggestion on how to acquire, improve, and exercise one’s ability to judge.

The difficulty with Arendt’s theory of judgment is that she could not complete the respective study during her lifetime. After her death, a page with the headline of the third volume of The Life of the Mind: Judging was found in her typewriter (Young-Bruehl 1982: 467). The manuscript was likely to be based on Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Theory, which Arendt gave in 1964 at the University of Chicago and then in 1970 at the New School for Social Research. Based on notes of these lectures, Ronald Beiner published an interpretative reconstruction of Arendt’s theory of judgment, expressing hope that this reconstruction, together with other references to judgment throughout her work, “can offer clues to the likely direction Hannah Arendt’s thinking would have taken in this area” (Beiner 1992: vii). As Arendt had already written about judging in numerous essays, such as “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship” (published in 1964), “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy” (1965/6), and “Thinking and Moral Considerations” (1971), traces of her reflections on this topic can be found in her essay “Philosophy and Politics” (a fragment of the lectures at Notre Dame University, which she was preparing in 1954), and she even mentions it in her “A Reply to Eric Voegelin: The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1953), the material at our disposal is relatively broad.