Judgment and phronesis/le sens pratique are distinct, though mutually reinforcing.

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1. Judgment as orienting discernment

• Judgment (in Arendt’s sense, or Kant’s reflective judgment) is the faculty that orients us in a plural, uncertain situation. Judgment for Arendt is not subsumption under rules but the capacity to “think representatively,” to take the standpoint of others into account without erasing one’s own perspective.

• It is discursive and deliberative: “Given this world, how should we see this problem? What matters here? What stance do I take?”

• Example: judging that climate change is a political and ethical crisis, not just a technical matter; or that carbon emissions are an urgent priority.

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2. Le sens pratique / phronesis as embodied know-how

• Once judgment has oriented us, phronesis (or Bourdieu’s le sens pratique) is the practical skill and embodied know-how to act fittingly within a given context.

• This can be viewed as less discursive and more operative: learning how to install, scale, and adapt renewable energy systems; how to align projects with social realities; how to adjust when things don’t go by the book.

• It’s improvisational, adaptive, non-rule-bound.

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3. How they connect

• Judgment generates orientation and recognition of salience.
  (“This is the problem; this is what’s at stake; this is what matters to others.”)

• Phronesis enacts this orientation in situated practice.
  (“Here’s how to build, negotiate, compromise, adapt the solution in this particular context.”)

So in our example:

• Judgment → recognizing that carbon emissions demand radical rethinking of energy infrastructure.

• Phronesis → skillfully applying knowledge, tools, and political negotiation to actually deploy PV panels, wind, hydro, etc., in the messy real world.

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4. The dialectical loop

• Judgment without phronesis risks paralysis or moralism — seeing the problem but not being able to act effectively.

• Phronesis without judgment risks technocracy or misorientation — building things skillfully but in ways that miss the deeper stakes (e.g., renewable projects that displace indigenous communities).

Together, they form a virtuous cycle: judgment frames and phronesis enacts, while phronesis feeds back into judgment by exposing what works or fails in practice. Judgment can lead into le sens pratique, but it doesn’t dissolve into it. Judgment provides the orientation, phronesis the execution. They’re distinct but co-constitutive — the reflective and the embodied sides of practical reason.