The short answer is no. Hannah Arendt deliberately drew on Kant's idea of judgment, but she transformed it into something quite different. In fact, one of the most striking features of her later philosophy is that she elevates judgment from a faculty of aesthetic reflection into the central political faculty.
Here's how they compare.
Kant: Judgment as reflective universality
For Kant, especially in the Critique of Judgment (1790), judgment is the faculty that mediates between universal rules and particular cases.
He distinguishes two kinds:
- Determinant judgment: you already have the rule and classify a particular under it ("This is a triangle because it satisfies the definition.")
- Reflective judgment: you have only the particular and must determine what universal is appropriate. This is the more interesting case.
In aesthetic judgment ("This painting is beautiful"), there is no objective rule that proves the judgment. Yet Kant argues that when we judge something beautiful, we implicitly expect others to agree. This expectation rests on what he calls sensus communis ("common sense"), not meaning popular opinion but the capacity to think from a standpoint shared with others.
Judgment therefore has three important features:
- it begins with particulars rather than abstract laws;
- it requires imagination;
- it aims at a kind of universal validity without relying on strict deduction.
Arendt: Judgment as political thinking
Arendt became fascinated by this neglected part of Kant because she believed it described exactly the kind of thinking required after the catastrophes of the twentieth century.
After totalitarianism and the Holocaust, she believed people could no longer simply apply inherited moral rules. Instead, they had to judge unprecedented situations.
For Arendt, judgment is therefore the ability to
decide what is right or appropriate in a particular situation without relying on fixed moral rules.
This differs from reasoning by applying principles.
She associates judgment with:
- attending to concrete particulars;
- considering multiple perspectives;
- resisting ideological formulas;
- forming an independent opinion.
This is why judgment becomes central in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann's failure, in Arendt's view, was not primarily that he lacked intelligence. It was that he failed to judge. He relied entirely on rules, bureaucratic procedures, and clichés instead of asking whether what he was doing was actually right.
Representative thinking
Perhaps Arendt's most famous adaptation of Kant is what she calls representative thinking.
She takes Kant's notion of enlarging one's mentality (erweiterte Denkungsart) and makes it political.
To judge well is to
"go visiting"
other viewpoints in imagination.
This does not mean agreeing with everyone.
Instead, it means asking:
- How does this appear to others?
- What would this look like from different positions?
- Could my judgment withstand public scrutiny?
The more perspectives one can imaginatively represent, the sounder one's judgment becomes.
Why Arendt preferred Kant's aesthetics to his ethics
This is one of the surprising aspects of her work.
Most political philosophers borrow from Kant's moral philosophy (Groundwork or Critique of Practical Reason).
Arendt largely ignores these.
Instead she turns to the Critique of Judgment because she thinks political life resembles aesthetic judgment more than moral deduction.
Politics deals with:
- unique situations,
- plurality,
- contingency,
- persuasion rather than proof.
There is no algorithm for political judgment.
Did Arendt define judgment?
Not systematically.
One of the frustrations of reading Arendt is that she never completed the work in which she intended to explain judgment.
Her final major project, The Life of the Mind, contains volumes on Thinking and Willing.
The planned third volume, Judging, was never written because she died in 1975.
As a result, scholars reconstruct her theory from:
- The Human Condition,
- Eichmann in Jerusalem,
- essays such as The Crisis in Culture,
- and especially her posthumously published Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy.
So unlike Kant, Arendt leaves us with fragments rather than a finished definition.
The biggest difference
A useful comparison is:
| Kant | Arendt |
|---|---|
| Judgment is a philosophical faculty. | Judgment is the central political faculty. |
| Concerned with beauty and teleology. | Concerned with politics, history, and moral responsibility. |
| Universal validity comes from sensus communis. | Good judgment comes from imaginatively representing others' perspectives. |
| Judgment bridges nature and freedom. | Judgment enables responsible action in a world without fixed certainties. |
| Primarily philosophical. | Deeply practical and political. |
A concise formulation
If Kant asks:
"How can we make universally valid judgments about particulars?"
Arendt asks:
"How can human beings judge responsibly when no rule tells them what to do?"
That shift—from the philosophy of taste to the ethics and politics of responsibility—is what makes Arendt's appropriation of Kant both original and influential. Many contemporary political theorists regard her account of judgment as one of the earliest and most compelling attempts to explain how democratic citizens can deliberate in conditions of moral and political pluralism.
No comments:
Post a Comment