Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt

345 Pages·2001·13.008 MB·English

by  Ronald Beiner (editor), Jennifer Nedelsky (editor)

Judgment, Imagination,
and Politics

Judgment, Imagination,
and Politics
Themes from Kant and Arendt
Edited by
Ronald Beiner
and Jennifer Nedelsky
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloglng-in-Publication Data
Judgment, imagination, and politics : themes from Kant and Arendt / edited by
Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 08476-9970-6 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8476-9971-4 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Political science—Philosophy. 2. Judgment—Political aspects. 3. Arendt,
Hannah—Contributions in political science. 4. Arendt, Hannah—Views on
judgments. I. Beiner, Ronald, 1953- II. Nedelsky, Jennifer.
JA71 J836 2001
172’. 1—dc21 2001019090
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of Ameri­
can National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Introduction vii
Part 1 The Problem of Judgment in Recent Moral and Political Philosophy
1. The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance
Hannah Arendt 3
2. Aesthetic Problems of Modem Philosophy
Stanley Cavell 27
3. Moral Judgment
Charles Larmore 47
4. The Public Use of Reason
Onora O’Neill 65
Part 2 Autour de Hannah Arendt: Debates in Contemporary Political
Theory Concerning the Arendtian Theme of Judging
5. Rereading Hannah Arendt’s Kant Lectures
Ronald Beiner 91
6. Judgment, Diversity, and Relational Autonomy
Jennifer Nedelsky 103
7. The Judgment of Arendt
George Kateb 121
vi Contents
8. Judging Human Action: Arendt’s Appropriation of Kant
Robert J. Dostal 139
9. Hannah Arendt on Judgment:
The Unwritten Doctrine of Reason
Albrecht Wellmer 165
10. Judgment and the Moral Foundations
of Politi£S'tfriianqah Arendt’s Thought
Seyla'Benhabib ) 183
11. Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder,
and Enlarged Thought
Iris Marion Young 205
12. Embodied Diversity and the Challenges to Law
Jennifer Nedelsky 229
13. When Actor and Spectator Meet in the Courtroom:
Reflections on Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Judgment
Leora Y Bilsky 257
Hannah Arendt: Modernity, Alienation, and Critique
Dana R. Villa 287
Index 311
About the Contributors 317
Introduction
As we enter the twenty-first century, there is a pressing need for an adequate
theory of judgment.1 It is essential to understanding politics, from the
demands and benefits of democratic citizenship, to the meaning of national
community and the debates over international human rights. In addition,
judgment can now be seen as essential to the realms of law and science,
whose claims to objectivity have been held out as grounds for expertise that
can supersede the “merely” political. Indeed, subjectivity—and its complex
relation to intersubjectivity—is now widely recognized as a dimension of all
human endeavor. The danger is that the recognition of subjectivity will be
misinterpreted as a collapse into the realm of the arbitrary, where only force
or “preference maximization” can hold sway. Hannah Arendt offers us an out­
line of a theory of judgment that shows how judgment, with its irreducibly
subjective dimension, can nevertheless claim validity, or how subjectivity
gets “transmuted” into fotersubjectivity. Her approach provides a path to
understanding the role of judgment in politics, in law, in science, and in daily
life, at the same time that it invites a rethinking of the terms objectivity, sub­
jectivity, truth, persuasion, and validity.2
Let us begin with Arendt’s own preoccupation: politics. The idea of democ­
racy presupposes an account of political judgment, for without an under­
standing of how human beings are capable of making reasoned judgments
about a shared public world, it would remain mysterious how one could con­
ceive the very notion of a democratic citizen. Hannah Arendt, who was
inspired by her reading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique ofJ udgment, tried to
make his jaccount ofaesthetic judgment the basis oFa^oIitical philosophy.7
What Arendt hoped to drawtheoretically from her politically charged read­
viii Introduction
ing of Kant’s third Critique is well summarized in the following passage from
an early version of Arendt’s Kant lectures:
The Critique of Judgment is the only [one of Kant’s] great writings where his
point of departure is the World and the senses and capabilities which made
men (in the plural) fit to be inhabitants of it. This is perhaps not yet political
philosophy, but it certainly is its sine qua non. If it could be found that in the
capacities and regulative traffic and intercourse between men who are bound
to each other by the common possession of a world (the earth) there exists an
a priori principle, then it would be proved that man is essentially a political
being.4
Here Arendt more or less announces the program for a political philosophy
of judgment drawn from Kant.
However, the attempt to reflect philosophically on what makes human
beings capable of sizing up the “ultimate particulars” that compose moral and
political life and that present themselves for judgment goes all the way back
to Aristotle’s analysis of phronesis, practical wisdom, in Book 6 of the Nico-
machean Ethics; and among contemporary theorists, a whole generation of
neo-Aristotelian philosophers have highlighted once again the importance of
concretely situated practical judgment as central to the understanding of eth­
ical and political life.5 The Aristotelian theme of practical wisdom is nicely
encapsulated by Alasdair MacIntyre when he defines moral virtue in terms of
a capacity for practical reasoning that “is not manifested so much in the
knowledge of a set of generalizations or maxims which may provide our prac­
tical inferences with major premises; its presence or absence rather appears
in the kind of capacity for judgment which the agent possesses in knowing
how to select among the relevant stack of maxims and how to apply them in
particular situations. ”6 In an important sense, reflection on the theme of judg-
ment teaches us the limits of theory, for judgment(whether in ethical or polit­
ical life) attends to particulars that are beyond the purview of theory as such.
As Hans Jonas makes the point: “there is no science of judgment... judgment
as concerned with particulars is necessarily outside science and strictly the
bridge between the abstractions of the understanding and the concreteness
of life.” He goes on (again in reference to Aristotle): “knowledge of use... is
acquired or learned in ways different from those of theory. This is the reason
why Aristotle denied there being a science of politics and practical ethics; the
where, when, to whom . . . cannot be reduced to general principles. Thus
there is tl^eorpaajluse of theory, but no theory of the use of theory.”7 Or as
Hans-Geor^Gadamep more succinctly puts it: “There are no rules governing
the reasonable use of rules.”8
An account of political judgment that attempted to vindicate the capacities
for judging and deliberating on the part of democratic citizens would be
founded on the following three claims:
Introduction ix
1) We are constantly making political judgments. In saying “we,” what is
meant is not any particular group of specialists, or specially qualified
persons, but ordinary people, that is, common citizens.
2) In making these judgments, we relate to (and at the same time consti­
tute) an intersubjectively shared public world.
3) The active exercise of a faculty of political judgment is good for us as
human beings. The corollary of this is that the shrinking of opportuni­
ties for active judgment, or the increasingly passive adherence to norms
and beliefs within society, indicates a dislocation, or even pathology,
within contemporary political life. This places the account of political
judgment within the wider context of a theory of the human good. It
also characterizes reflection on political judgment as a point of depar­
ture for a more general political philosophy of citizenship. The exercise
of active judgment is good for us because citizenship in general is good
for us. Citizenship is an important aspect of the human good, and, it fol­
lows, so is “civic judgment,” or the judging of public affairs “as a citizen.”
If it can be shown (as we believe a full account of political judgment would
seek to show) that the quality of our experience atrophies in proportion as
we passively yield to the judgments of others and cede greater and greater
dimensions of political responsibility (a process that is everywhere at work
in modem liberal society), then we would have powerful reasons to believe
that active citizenship is a major component of the human good. In actively
rendering judgments upon our shared world, we at the same time resolve to
comport ourselves as citizens (rather than as clients of the state, or as priva­
tized consumers), and thereby affirm our own nature as political beings.
As crucial as a theory of judgment is for politics, judgment is equally impor­
tant for the realms once contrasted with what some regard as the mere sub­
jectivity of politics. Institutions central to Western culture, such as law and
science, have long rested upon claims of objectivity that are now subject to
serious dispute. In the physical sciences, it is now widely recognized that the
“objective” pursuits of science often take place within paradigms that are not
themselves the result of objectively determined selection. The necessary
choices among theories involve such elusive (and competing) values as ele­
gance and messiness.9 Methodologies involve choices between stances of dis­
tance and detachment as opposed to loving engagement.10 And commitments
bom of a researcher’s life work based on a particular paradigm routinely, per­
haps unavoidably, hinder the recognition of alternatives.11 In short, science
requires not just reproducible results, but judgment.
In law, scholars point to the way unexamined, largely unconscious
metaphoric frameworks shape the ways judges see and choose among alter­
natives.12 Others argue that the ruling model of impartiality requires the sup­
pression of attention to difference—with negative consequences for women
X Introduction
and other subordinated groups.13 Still others show how the unstated norm in
law is a male norm.14 And, in a slightly different vein, many argue that the
inevitable interpretive choices in law involve an important subjective element.
The purpose of these diverse arguments has often been to call into question
traditional claims of neutrality and objectivity. In addition, these arguments
have been useful not simply for revealing hidden biases, but for highlighting
the centrality of choices that must inevitably have a subjective dimension.
The recognition of subjectivity inherent in human judgment is not, of
course, limited to law and science. For example, many of the contemporary
debates about the nature of moral decision making or of the values people
hold15 are, in essence, debates about how it is possible to make reasoned,
defensible judgments on matters about which there is no universal, clearly
demonstrable, or objective truth.16
The task now is to reconstruct the norms of optimal decision making in all
fields—in other words, to articulate the nature and norms of judgment. Over
and over, the central issue is to show that once we acknowledge the role of
subjectivity, it does not follow that we are in the realm of the arbitrary, of
interests that can only be negotiated or advanced through the force of power.
A great deal of contemporary political and economic rhetoric assumes that
anything subjective is an “interest” or preference that can be counted, maxi­
mized, or bargained about, but is not something to be treated as a judgment,
subject to evaluation or persuasion. This rhetorical stance is powerful and
pervasive and infects all areas where subjectivity is seen to play a role.
Hannah Arendt’s work on judgment offers a promising starting point from
which to generate a theory of judgment that can meet these needs. It is only
a starting point because she did not live to write the volume on judgment that
would have completed her projected trilogy for The Life of the Mind.17
Arendt believed that Kant’s work on aesthetic judgment18 provided the key
insights into a distinct human faculty: judgment. She wanted to show that it
was this faculty that was crucial in politics.
While^Arendt’s appropriation of Kant is contested, there is a set of core
ideas that Arendt and Kant clearly shared. For both, the key idea of judgment
isTfiaTTTis'nefther about cognitive truth claims nor about mere subjective
preference. According to Kant, the claim “this painting is beautiful” cannot
be proven as an objective truth; but in contrast to “I like this painting,” it is
not merely a statement of preference. The claim of beauty is a genuine judg­
ment because it makes a claim of agreement from others who judge. I cannot
compel agreement, as I could with certain kinds of truth claims.19 But I can
persuade and claim that if other judges are truly judging—are not being
biased by private inclinations—they will agree. I thus claim that my judgment
is valid for the community of judging others. _____
The core of what makes such judgment possible is oufr “common sense/'
shared by other judging subjects. It is this shared sense that allows us to exer-