Marshall, D. L. - 2010 - The Origin and Character of Hannah Arendt's Theory of Judgment

Special Section: Characterizing Arendt
Political Theory
38(3) 367–393
The Origin and © 2010 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591709359595
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of Judgment
David L. Marshall1
Abstract
Hannah Arendt’s theory of judgment has been the object of considerable
interest in the last three decades. Political theorists in particular have hoped
to find in her theory of judgment a viable account of how diverse modern
societies can sustain a commitment to dialogue in the absence of shared basic
principles. A number of scholars, however, have critiqued Arendt’s account
of judgment in various ways. This article examines criticisms from Richard
Bernstein, Ronald Beiner, George Kateb, Jürgen Habermas, and Linda Zerilli.
On the basis of early sources from Arendt’s manuscripts and Denktagebuch
that have not been used in these debates, this article contends that Arendt’s
position on judgment can be defended against these critics and that her
account warrants further exploration.
Keywords
Hannah Arendt, judgment, topics
Introduction
In 1955, Hannah Arendt taught a course at Berkeley on “Kant’s Political
Theory.” The unpublished typescripts and manuscripts of those lectures make
interesting reading. For Arendt in 1955, Kant’s political theory was based
1
Kettering University, Flint, MI, USA
Corresponding Author:
David L. Marshall, Department of Liberal Studies, Kettering University, 1700 W. Third Ave., Flint,
MI 48504.
Email: david.marshall@kettering.edu
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368 Political Theory 38(3)
entirely on the faculty of will. In Arendt’s reading of Kant, the political capacity
of human beings derived from their ability to draw themselves above the flux
of phenomena and assert their existence as moral agents by willing universal
laws. When individuals experience themselves only through introspection,
they remain pre-moral. In such introspection, the appearances of the self are
no more reliable indices of a “self-in-itself” than phenomena of the world are
reliable indices of “things-in-themselves.” Kantian individuals exist as moral
agents only in the act of willing, when that willing is understood as a promis-
ing to oneself. Autonomy (an imposing of law on oneself) is the condition of
possibility for moral existence. Without the faculty of the will, there is no
autonomy; without autonomy, there are no morally existent individuals; with-
out the existence of individuals capable of autonomy, there is no possibility of
political community—for there can be no such thing as a social contract
under such conditions. This is Arendt’s representation of political theory
according to Kant in 1955. Her verdict on Kantian political thought is damn-
ing. Such an account of political community begins with the assumption of
what Arendt terms “worldlessness.” All of Kant’s intellectual energy, accord-
ing to Arendt, is invested in examining the moral relationship of individuals
to themselves. And, from such a beginning, there is no chance of going on to
theorize how it is that connections between human beings are forged. For
Arendt in 1955, Kant is in fact an anti-political thinker.
Arendt’s 1955 criticism of Kant is surprising. Ever since the publication
of Ronald Beiner’s edition of Arendt’s 1970 New School lectures on Kant’s
political philosophy, readers have assumed that Arendt thought of Kant as an
important precursor to her own thinking about politics. In her Lectures on
Kant’s Political Philosophy, the reader encountered a series of powerful,
controversial arguments that appeared to go to the heart of Arendt’s own
intellectual project. She argued that Kant had never really written a political
philosophy, but that the foundations of an extremely useful account of poli-
tics could be extrapolated from his works. She argued, furthermore, that
Kant’s political relevance did indeed derive from his examination of a human
faculty—judging, not willing. Arendt concluded, chiefly on the basis of
Kant’s third critique, that the faculty of judgment could facilitate a thick
description of political communities that join individuals together and habit-
uate them to considering things from points of view other than their own.
Arendt seized upon two of Kant’s definitions: judgment as thinking the par-
ticular in terms of the universal and sensus communis as a capacity to engage
with the possible as well as the actual judgments of others. In Arendt’s esti-
mation, judgment was the key mental faculty for politics. In political life,
phenomena appear only as particulars and, of the mental faculties, judgment

Marshall 369
is the best suited to moving in such a world of resolute particularities. More-

over, judgment assumed that there would be no pre-established consensus in
response to particular phenomena and that politics is essentially concerned
with negotiating differences of opinion without presuming either that such
differences are merely subjective (and therefore baseless, arbitrary, and
intractable) or that differences of opinion may be resolved through a rational
process of verifying and falsifying claims.
The origin of Arendt’s theory of judgment is therefore a problem. This
article demonstrates that her thinking on judgment was originally informed by
engagements with Hegel and Aristotle (dating from 1952 and 1953) and that
the decisive shift in Arendt’s thinking about Kant took place between 1955
and 1957. Arendt’s Denktagebuch (her intellectual diary) records a sequence
of three key readings of Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik in 1952, Aristotle’s
Rhetoric in 1953, and Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft in 1957. The re-reading of
Kant’s third critique in 1957 was particularly important and was informed by
new work that had just been published on the subject by Karl Jaspers, Arendt’s
former mentor, but the engagements with Hegel and Aristotle are also crucial
for grasping the character of Arendt’s theory of judgment. It is important to
understand, however, that the origin of Arendtian judgment is a subject of
interest not simply for intellectual history but also for political theory. In the
three decades since Arendt’s death, political theorists have dedicated a signifi-
cant amount of attention to her theory of judgment, and a debate has emerged
on how it should be characterized and evaluated. There are many reasons for
this, but one of the most significant is that scholars have recognized a need—
or a desire—for a theory of politics that in no way assumes that a pluralistic
community will share basic assumptions about justice. Arendt’s account has
appeared to propose how a pluralistic community might share its discordant
value judgments in an open-ended and yet productive way. Richard Bernstein,
Ronald Beiner, George Kateb, Jürgen Habermas, and Linda Zerilli—to name
only a few of the key contributors to the debate—have raised five significant
problems with Arendt’s account. The chief argument of the present article is
that these scholars have made a mistake in not taking the origin of Arendt’s
treatment of judgment into account and that, in fact, this early material has
important ramifications for the concerns they raise.
Criticisms of Arendtian Judgment

Some have asked whether there existed in Arendt’s work a deep contradic-
tion between judgment as an active, agonal capacity to decide and judgment
as a passive, consensual capacity to discern, between the judgment of the

actor and the judgment of the spectator—Aristotelian phronēsis (practical

wisdom), on the one hand, and Kantian Geschmack (taste), on the other. It
was Bernstein who posed this question in its most acute form. If Arendt’s
account of judgment conceals a profound contradiction in her thinking, then
there are strong grounds for concluding that the entire account is fatally
flawed. For his part, Bernstein concluded that Arendt’s thought was charac-
terized by a “deep tension between acting and thinking” and that the apparent
contradiction in the theory of judgment was evidence that “she never recon-
ciled this tension.” On this issue, what the early material from the 1950s
reveals is that Arendt was accustomed to finessing the supposed incompati-
bility between the practical wisdom of Aristotelian phronēsis and the
spectatorial quality of Kantian Geschmack because for her the key term was
in fact krinein, a Greek verb that she rendered in German as both urteilen and
entscheiden—“to judge” and “to decide.” In the original rhetorical context of
krinein, out of which Arendt’s account evolved, there was no meaningful
distinction to be made between making a judgment and acting upon it.1
Even if the judgment of the actor is not incompatible in some deep sense
with the judgment of the spectator, however, others—such as Beiner—have
also argued that there is nevertheless a trajectory in Arendt’s thinking that
displays an increasing interest in the judgment of the spectator. The suspicion
is that as one loses faith in the ability of modern citizens to undertake mean-
ingful political action, some refuge for those citizens needs to be found in the
more practicable goal of engaging in political criticism—a kind of thinking or
writing or talking about politics while somehow not engaging directly in it. If
it is true that Arendt lost confidence in the possibility of a judging that existed
in close proximity to acting under modern conditions, then her account of
judging becomes vulnerable to the charge that it describes a merely literary
activity and not a properly political one. But, in fact, Beiner was wrong to say
that “it is in an article by Arendt entitled ‘Freedom and Politics,’ published in
1961, that we first encounter the idea that Kant’s Critique of Judgment con-
tains the seeds of a political philosophy distinct from, and indeed opposed to,
the political philosophy associated with the Critique of Practical Reason.”
The shift occurred between 1955 and 1957, and the chronological correction
leads us back to the slightly earlier engagements with Hegel and Aristotle in
the Denktagebuch. In turn, those engagements reveal that even in the early
period Arendt understood judging as something undertaken by both the spec-
tator and the actor. As a result, the hypothesis that Arendtian judgment evolved
from a practice in the vita activa to a faculty in the vita contemplativa is overly
simple and ought to be rejected.2
The suspicion that Arendt’s examination of judging as a form of criticism
gives her sense of politics an untenably literary quality has been taken even

Marshall 371
further by Kateb, who has contended that Arendt’s entire project is to be

understood as an aestheticization of politics. Kateb argues that the Arendtian
politician acts to exemplify passion, to display skill, and to experience the
sheer “exhilaration of acting” or excelling—in sum, to embody beauty. On
this account, Arendt’s exploration of judgment is a function of her need for
theories of exemplarity, the evaluation of skill, and the experience of excel-
lence. For Kateb, Arendt’s preference for the beautiful over the practical, the
true, and especially the moral is dangerous and unacceptable. In light of the
earlier engagements with judgment that Kateb does not consult, however,
one can say that Arendt’s is an interest in the aesthetic that does not preclude
(but rather enhances) interests in the practical, the true, and the moral. In the
context of the early engagements with Hegel, Aristotle, and Kant, “aesthet-
ics” is to be understood in its older Greek meaning, as a field of inquiry
pertaining to the senses. As a result, one should characterize her theory of
judgment not as an outgrowth of a philosophy of beauty but rather as a theory
of perception.3
One might say, however, that even if a preference for the beautiful over
the true is not in itself objectionable, one ought to prefer the true because
communities oriented to the true have a greater chance of achieving consen-
sus than communities oriented to the beautiful. A commitment to truth makes
verification and falsification possible, whereas a commitment to the beautiful
leads to an impasse—given that de gustibus non disputandum est (matters of
taste are not to be discussed). Habermas’s argument derives from something
like this intuition. He has doubted whether Arendtian judgment can be a
viable means of achieving intersubjective validity—that is, of resolving dif-
ferences of opinion such that diverse groups can come to agreement. To
Habermas, Arendt’s move to judgment seems to be a move from a realm of
argumentation where agreement can be compelled by weight of evidence, by
force of logic, and on pain of self-contradiction to one in which agreement
can only ever be requested and never required. As such, it would appear that
the divisions created by political debate can only ever be played down—at
best—and never rationally resolved. But the argument that Arendtian judg-
ment is non-cognitive (and therefore not oriented toward the true such that
her judgments can never aspire to the status of validity) is misguided. The
early sources reveal that Arendt is not as attached to the non-cognitive quality
of some forms of judgment she sometimes appears to be in the later writings.
They also reveal that her interest in developing a sense for the multiplicity of
judgments that are possible in particular cases is essentially an interest in
developing topoi. As a result, one can see that to raise the objection that
Arendtian judgments do not function as truth claims that can be verified
or falsified is to make a category mistake. Clusters of Arendtian judgments

constitute topoi, and topoi cannot be true or false. Instead, they sensitize
human beings to distinctions between things that might otherwise appear
very similar and, in this way, they make truth claims possible.4
One could accept all these arguments—that Arendt did not contradict
herself when she dealt with the judgment of both the actor and the spectator,
that she did not displace judging from the vita activa to the vita contempla-
tiva, that she did not aestheticize politics to the point that her political theory
became dangerously amoral, and that she did not prize the category of dis-
tinctiveness in such a way that differences of opinion became essentially
irreconcilable—and still contend that Arendt’s account of judgment is prom-
ising but incomplete because it permits imagination to play only a reproductive
and never genuinely productive role. Zerilli’s reception of Arendt on judg-
ment is one of the most sympathetic among recent commentators, but she
faults Arendt for only utilizing the faculty of imagination as a capacity to re-
present experiences to oneself such that one can achieve the kind of distance
from those experiences that makes impartiality possible. She argues that
Arendt’s account of imagination is strengthened by an added attention to the
productive—free, creative, and original—capacities of the imagination over
and above its capacity to reproduce experiences by means of representation.
In this case, what the early sources reveal is that Arendt did indeed have a
relatively clear sense of the creative role that imagination plays in the forma-
tion of new concepts that identify more clearly aspects of the human world
that had not previously been brought into focus. In addition, in her reading of
Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Arendt showed a real interest in the modality of possi-
bility that—it was presumed—was associated with any moment of real
decision. As a rhetorical capacity, Arendtian krinein was always already cen-
tered on the, often difficult, experience of freedom.
In order to substantiate these five arguments and in order to reveal the
strengths of her position, one must look more carefully at the origin of
Arendt’s theory of judgment in the 1950s.5
Arendt’s Hegelian Inheritance

In the 1955 Berkeley course, Arendt did mention Kantian judgment—not in
the typescript notes that seem to represent the body of the lectures them-
selves, but in the manuscripts and additional material that may well have
been appended later. Yet the form of judgment she discussed was not the
aesthetic judgment that would become the focus of her 1970 lectures. She
emphasizes the concept of judgment that Kant employed in the first cri-
tique—not the third. In a handwritten note added to the 1955 lectures, Arendt

Marshall 373
defined “judgment” as “the faculty of synthesis.”6 In the first instance, this

was a definition that derived from Kant’s discussion of the role of synthesis
in the discovery of pure concepts of the understanding. Arendt’s definition of
judgment is thus fleshed out by Kant’s definition of synthesis as “the act of
putting various presentations with one another and of comprising their mani-
foldness in one cognition.”7 Arendt herself understood this process of
intellectual synthesis as integral to the critical task that Kant had set himself.
In her 1955 notes, she recoursed to the etymology of the word “critique” and
connected it to a paradoxical process of distinguishing and conjoining that
derives from the Greek verb krinein. She explained that, because krinein is a
kind of discernment that isolates and separates out the particular qualities of
an object, Kritik appears to be an intellectual project opposed to synthesis
(which conjoins rather than dissolves). But she went on to show that in the
simple cognitive judgment “the sky is blue” a paradoxical process of synthesis
and analysis, joining and sundering is taking place. On the one hand, by means
of the copula “is” the judgment synthesizes the predicate “blue” into the sub-
ject “sky.” Indeed, metonymically, the word “sky” can stand in for the word
“blue” because occurrences of the first experience coincide with occurrences
of the second. On the other hand, the judgment “the sky is blue” calls attention
to the predicate by differentiating it from the subject. In this way, an intellec-
tual process begins that leads to the derivation of the abstract quality
“blueness.” What is more, Arendt contended that this double-movement of
binding and separating is “the origin of all abstract thought.”8
Arendt’s contention that Kritik derives from krinein and that krinein is a
simultaneously synthetic and analytic process of isolating the particular quali-
ties of a phenomenon and drawing those qualities into relationships with other
similar appearances certainly shows that in 1955 she was engaging more
closely with the first of Kant’s critiques than she was with the third. But an
examination of the Denktagebuch reveals that in her Berkeley lectures Arendt
was utilizing a series of concepts that derive in part from Kant, but also from
Hegel—and, indeed, from Aristotle. In order to understand those concepts
more fully, it is necessary to investigate Arendt’s earlier reception of the topos
“judging,” especially from Hegel.
In December 1952, the Denktagebuch records an engagement with Hegel’s
Wissenschaft der Logik in Lasson’s 1923 edition. On Arendt’s reading, “the
decisive aspect of Hegelian logic is the resolution of judging [die Auflösung
des Urteilens] into a closure where between subject and predicate a continuity
is confected, as opposed to the traditional subsumption of the individual into
the universal.”9 Arendt was suggesting that all judgment is really what Kant
describes as “reflective judgment”—that is, the mental operation where “only

the particular is given and judgment has to find the universal for it.” For her,
“subsumption” refered to the process at work in “determinative judgment”
where “if the universal (the rule, principle, law) is given, then judg-
ment . . . subsumes the particular under it.”10 But instead of restricting this
process of “reflection” (as opposed to “subsumption”) to the operations of
aesthetic judgment, Arendt followed Hegel in thinking of it as basically con-
stitutive of judgment as such—including the synthetic judgments that one
finds in Kant’s first critique. Thus, Arendt understood the copula around
which all judgments are constructed in a manner comparable to Hegel.
Arendt’s later emphasis on the role of imagination in the faculty of judgment
derives from Hegel’s reading of Kant. As Kant had stipulated in the first cri-
tique, “synthesis as such . . . is the mere effect produced by the imagination,
which is a blind but indispensable function of the soul without which we
would have no cognition whatsoever, but of which we are conscious only
very rarely.”11 Arendt praised Kant for being the first to realize the role that
imagination plays in cognition—an ascription that is wrong but revealing. In
this, she was following Hegel who argued that it was “one of Kant’s great
merits” to have seen that “the various kinds of judgment are no empirical
aggregate,” but rather “a systematic whole based on a principle.”12 The prin-
ciple here is the imaginative work of the soul in generating modes of
perceiving the individual in terms of its distinctiveness. Eventually, Arendt
came to suspect that the German word Urteil gives the erroneous impression
that sentences as diverse as those characteristic of art historical criticism and
propositional logic are more similar than they are different. Indeed, in 1970
she would go so far as to reject what she had accepted in 1955—namely, that
the assertion “the sky is blue” is a good example of the logic underpinning
genuine judgments. As she put it, “if you say the sky is blue or two and two
are four you do not ‘judge’; you say what is, compelled by the evidence of
either your senses or your mind.”13 In revising her position in this way,
Arendt was drawing attention to the weakness of an example that previously
she had allowed to stand. In order to be capable of generating topoi, judg-
ments must address themselves to phenomena that are complex to the point
of being controversial—that is, capable of being characterized in different
ways. On this point too, Arendt concurred with Hegel.14
Thus, for Hegel, the faculty of judgment is not simply a capacity to
perceive correctly predicates that are embedded in subjects. After all, to say
that “this wall is green” may be perfectly true and yet not qualify as a particu-
larly revealing judgment, given that there is so little work to be done to draw
the predicate out from the subject and given that so little has been achieved
when the predicate has been drawn out into the abstraction “greenness.” For

Marshall 375
this reason, Hegel (like Arendt) saw Kant’s real worth in his delineation of a
reflective judgment that works on “aesthetic ideas”—namely, individua that
can appear immediately to the senses and yet also stand in place of concepts
that cannot appear immediately. In Hegel and Arendt (more so than in Kant),
aesthetic ascriptions of the predicate “beautiful” are in fact placeholders that
call for further investigation into the significance of particular exempla for
particular communities. To call a phenomenon “beautiful” is not so much to
describe one of its qualities as to make a normative claim voiced in an imper-
ative mood: “consider what this phenomenon manifests.” As the predicates
called out by such shared investigation become more obscure, so the faculty
of judgment at work becomes more acute. Arendt developed Hegel’s reading
of Kant by agreeing that reflective judgment is the essential faculty and by
examining the work of communal interpretation that Hegel called for with a
greater sense of the simultaneously fragile and controversial nature of such
projects—which are inevitably political.
In an Arendtian gloss, Hegel’s emphasis on reflective judgment is a com-
mitment to worldliness, to history, and to the particular. Whereas determinative
judgment is supposed to begin with articles of abstract legislation (rules, prin-
ciples, laws), reflective judgment originates in particulars and “thinks” them.
In the Denktagebuch entry on Hegel, Arendt’s example for such a process of
thinking the particular was the judgment “Cicero is a great orator”—which
she lifted directly from Hegel. The judgment does not attach a predicate to
Cicero—“oratorical greatness”—that he does not himself possess. Instead, the
judgment renders explicit a quality that is already embedded in the subject.
The judgment also prompts investigation into the abstract quality of “oratori-
cal greatness.” Because neither sign has a perfectly transparent value, “Cicero”
inflects “oratorical greatness” at the same time as “oratorical greatness”
inflects “Cicero.” Because the predicate is embedded in the subject, however,
investigation into what constitutes this greatness must begin with the exam-
ple. Thus, the judgment begins an inquiry sequence: is one to identify
oratorical skill as such with Cicero’s oratorical performances, with his rhetori-
cal manuals, or with his politically astute letters?15
Recycling Hegel’s example “Cicero is a great orator” was, one might
suggest, provocatively obtuse on Arendt’s part. For one thing, the set of par-
ticularities that goes by the name “Cicero” is an example from history that
has become so familiar and so hackneyed that its specificity is more often
effaced than recalled. There is no way to “think” with Cicero other than to
return to the specificities of the man, which is done relatively rarely precisely
because the commonplace is so well established. Only in the context of
Cicero as a historical congeries of words and deeds is the topos “Cicero”

really thinkable at all. For another thing, without further conceptual work
“great” is indistinct in a way that is comparable to the pseudo-predicate
“beautiful.” There may have been a time when the adjective “great” was
not yet debased to the point of being simply prescriptive and not at all
descriptive—a time when greatness was a combination of courage and large-
ness of spirit. But in the modern age, to be called “great” is nothing more
than to be called out, tagged as needing or warranting further description.
Arendt sometimes appears to speak as if only predicates such as “beautiful”
or “great” or “moral” count as examples of judgments. And indeed, although
her theoretical account of the judiciousness of the critic is one that covers the
brilliant idiosyncrasy of a John Ruskin or a Walter Benjamin, it is also fair to
say that at times hers was “a mandarin sensibility.”16 But in fact these “predi-
cates” ought really to be understood as temporary substitutes for the more
specific qualities that will emerge from discussion about the particular
beauty, greatness, morality, or distinctiveness that a phenomenon manifests.
Ascriptions of this generic kind are thus inarticulate intuitions that the particu-
lar phenomena in question can bear scrutiny—and will reward it.
Arendt’s Encounter with Aristotle’s Rhetoric

Arendt’s allusion to rhetoric in the example of Cicero was not random. Her
conception of politics—a conception that turned not on power, traditionally
conceived, but on debate—was essentially rhetorical and, a year after her
exploration of the concept of Urteil through Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik,
it was in Aristotle’s Rhetoric that she found a more political representation of
the role played by judgment among hermeneuts concerned to discover the
universal in the particular. In her July 1953 engagement with the Rhetoric,
Arendt focused on Aristotle’s assertion that deliberative oratory is more
political, trickier, and less precisely discussed by commentators than forensic
oratory. Judging in the courts, Aristotle had said, entails making decisions
about the affairs of others, whereas judging in the assemblies—where actions
are examined in the name of the people as a whole—requires making deci-
sions about the affairs that one shares with others (koinōteron). Thus, in
Arendt’s estimation, rhetoric politicizes judgment by distinguishing between
those communities of hermeneuts that exercise judgment relative to matters
that concern themselves only and those communities that judge only in
matters pertaining to others.
The term that Aristotle used to denote “judging” here was krinein and
Arendt translated the Greek verb with a pair of German terms: urteilen und
entscheiden, “judging and deciding.”17 The double translation is significant.

Marshall 377
In Arendt’s reading, krinein has simultaneously retrospective and prospective

dimensions. As we saw earlier, in her 1955 lectures on Kant, Arendt would
associate the Greek verb krinein with the process of identifying the distin-
guishing features of the matter with which one is faced. In that account of
krinein, one does not leap to epideictic judgments of justification or condem-
nation so much as engage in a process of individuating the matter at hand. One
separates qualities that are essential to its identity from those that are immate-
rial to the task of distinguishing the particular phenomenon in question from
other comparable phenomena.18 But this critical process of recognizing the
matter in its particularity (which is simultaneously a thinking of it as a con-
crete universal) is constantly modulated by the need to find a remedy. On this
account, “critique” is not a merely negative process. Nor is it a specifically
aesthetic appreciation in the sense of being an evaluation of beauty. Instead,
considered as krinein, critique is a fine-grained, adroit attempt to perceive a
particularity in its most essential form such that a range of appropriate
responses to it may be located and surveyed.
The connection between urteilen and entscheiden, judging and deciding is
essential to the rhetorical understanding of krinein. In the context of Aristotle’s
Rhetoric, there is no such thing as a judge who is not at least potentially an
actor.19 There can be no absolutely passive judgment, no spectators who
think it impossible that they will become involved in the matter they are
judging. It may be that urteilen sometimes happens in the absence of ents-
cheiden. (There are plenty of inconclusive discussions in politics.) But Arendt
emphasized Aristotle’s stipulation that it is impossible for someone to involve
themselves with the business of judging if they have already concluded that
there is no possibility of acting upon a decision. As Aristotle says, “we only
deliberate about those things which seem to admit of issuing in two ways,”
because “for those things which cannot in the past, present, or future be oth-
erwise, no one deliberates about them.”20 Arendt thus imported Aristotelian
issues of modality—necessity and possibility—into her understanding of
judgment. Judgment deals with the possible, not with the necessary. And it
deals with the possible in at least two senses. If there is no possible remedy,
then there is no judging or examining (no krīseis or skēpseis). Moreover, if it
is not possible to describe something in at least two different ways (both of
them plausible), then there is no question of making a judgment or holding
an examination. In effect, she placed these issues of modality alongside the
Hegelian stipulation that only controversial judgments are real judgments.
Moreover, these Aristotelian parameters reassert themselves in Arendt’s
own detailed observations of the courtroom, where the parameters of the
judgable become an assertion that the refusal to judge is an abdication of

responsibility.21 Indeed, when one sees rhetoric as a dunamis—a power, or

possibility—of speaking, then Arendtian judging comes into focus as the
dunamis of listening.
In her reading of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Arendt emphasized this domain of
skēpseis and krīseis (examining and judging) as the domain of doubt in which
politics takes place. Possibility is such a major category for rhetoric, as Arendt
pointed out, because the discipline focuses so strongly on those moments in
human affairs when the range of possible outcomes is suddenly expanded.
Judging, krinein derives from doubt and examination, skepsis—precisely
because it is in these moments of augmented possibility that close attention to
particularity is decisive. And emerging from such moments of openness is not
easy. Vacillation is a constant danger. Thus, Arendt picked up on the Aristote-
lian rhetorical emphasis on prohairesis too—which is not simply “purpose” or
“plan,” but also “choosing one thing before another.”22 Deliberating, thus, is a
process of liberating oneself from the (potentially debilitating) plurality of
options set out by the moment of crisis.23 Yet, as Aristotle confirmed in Book
VI of the Nicomachean Ethics (where he discussed phronēsis), “intellect
itself . . . moves nothing.” Intellect is insufficient for the task of removing
oneself from the zone of indecision that is associated with krinein, judging.
Choice, prohairesis is instead “deliberate desire.”24 Affective responses are
indispensable in deciding. They propel the judge through possibility toward
determination.
Arendt found three things decisive in Aristotle’s discussion of krinein in its
relation to rhetoric. First, judging and deciding deal only with things that are
non-necessary. Second, all actions and all deeds belong to this class of non-
necessary things. Third, “philosophy” has nothing to do with the non-necessary
and, as such, has nothing to do with judging and deciding.25 But this severing
of “philosophy” from rhetoric was not as easily accomplished as Arendt might
have hoped. She began her gloss of Aristotle with the first line of the Rhetoric,
where the Stagyrite reported the opinion that rhetorikē is the antistrophe of
dialektikē. The meaning of antistrophe is debated. Two German translations
render it, alternatively, Gegenteil and korrespondierende Gegenstück, while
Arendt inserts an anodyne English translation—“public speaking is the coun-
terpart of philosophical speech.” But as Aristotle defined it “dialectic” is not
simply philosophical speech over against the political speech of the rhetorical
genres. And, indeed, as Arendt noted in her gloss, Aristotle went on to point
out that rhetoric is, in a sense, a part of dialectic. Rhetoric deals particularly
with the enthymeme, those syllogisms that begin with premises that are prob-
ably (but not necessarily true), that utilize particular (and not universal)

Marshall 379
propositions appealing directly to the imagination, and that often leave parts
of the argument implicit so that the auditor is responsible for rendering the
logic of the syllogism explicit. Dialectic, on the other hand, deals with all
usages of syllogism—not simply with probable inferences, but with necessary
ones too. For Arendt, the implication was that dialectic is not so much the
counterpart of rhetoric as its “superset”—a derived, historically subsequent
abstraction.26
From her critique of ideology to her suspicion of the categorical imper-
ative, however, Arendt rejected necessitarian logic. For her, Kantian moral
philosophy began with universal injunctions that had achieved a special,
transcendental status (on account of the unthinkability of societies that do not
assume them) and operated through a series of deductive syllogisms of the
form “All actions of that kind are forbidden; this is an action of that kind;
therefore this is forbidden.” Her focus on judgment was precisely a reinvigo-
ration of Aristotle’s focus in the Rhetoric on probable reasoning. Beginning
with particulars and engaging in a process of krinein, urteilen and ents-
cheiden emphasizes a logic of the example. Rarely deductive, the logic of the
example concentrates instead on a kind of “sensory topics” where the catego-
ries of similarity and difference modulate the coupling and decoupling of
particularities—like with like, unlike from unlike. When she said that the
Socratic practice of dialogue also consisted in krinein, she was thinking of
the eminently topical method of Socrates who was particularly sensitive to
inductions by analogy—which is a method predisposed to find the distinc-
tiveness of things by comparing them to whatever is similar.27
Ultimately, however, one ought to conclude that Arendt’s engagement
with Aristotle’s Rhetoric was thin. Although Aristotle himself was a constant
point of reference in The Human Condition, the Rhetoric did not become a
text that she referred back to often. Certainly, her gloss of the text pales in
comparison to that of her mentor, Martin Heidegger. In the semester before
she officially began studying at Marburg in 1924, he lectured on Aristotle and
argued that it was in the Rhetoric that the greatest number of basic Aristote-
lian concepts intersected.28 Nevertheless, Theodore Kisiel describes rhetoric
as Arendtian “proto-politics” and, for the purposes of putting Arendtian
judgment in a context of comparable ideas on which she drew, the rhetorical
tradition distilled so decisively by Aristotle is an unavoidable point of depar-
ture.29 Just so, as Arendt imagined it, discussion taking place after an example
has been put forward as “beautiful” can never be a matter of absolute proof
and must always be a matter of persuasion or “wooing”—a point that she
emphasized while glossing Kant when she connected his werben to Aristotle’s

peithein.30 Even more decisively, Arendt acknowledged that Kant’s third cri-
tique inherited aesthetics, the new science of the eighteenth century, and that
rhetoric is itself “the political element in aesthetics.”31
The Reversal in Arendt’s Reading of Kant

Two years after teaching the 1955 course on Kant’s political theory at Berkeley,
where Arendt asserted in effect that Kant exemplified some of the anti-political
presuppositions common among philosophers, Arendt recorded the results of
a close re-reading of Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft in her Denktagebuch. The
transformation in her thinking on Kant was immediate. At once, she made the
claim that would be at the heart of her 1970 Kant lectures—namely, “that
Kant’s true political philosophy derives from discussion of the appearances of
beauty.”32 Arendt had been reading Die großen Philosophen by Karl Jaspers
and had been struck particularly by its treatment of Kant. Indeed, writing to
Jaspers (her former teacher) in a letter dated 29 August 1957, she confided that
“I’ve always loved [the work on judgment] most of Kant’s critiques, but it has
never before spoken to me as powerfully as it does now that I have read your
Kant chapter.” Whereas her 1955 lectures had taken the second critique as a
point of departure for evaluating Kant’s contribution to political thought, by
August 1957 she believed that Kant’s real political philosophy was hidden not
in the Critique of Practical Reason, but rather in the Critique of Judgment.33
Jaspers’s emphasis on reflective judgment made a particular impression
on Arendt, who began now to differentiate more categorically between the
assorted kinds of judgment—determinative, reflective, aesthetic, teleologi-
cal, cognitive, prudential—that Hegel had perceived as modulations of a
single principle. Jaspers had given an expansive interpretation of reflective
judgment.34 Likewise, Arendt’s explicit rejection of determinative judgment
as a significant form was a rejection of the moral agent who is fully in pos-
session of a set of moral imperatives and has only to work on the correct
application of a set of rules that is in itself static (even as it responds to a
very unstable set of challenges).35 The legal systems that rely on the logic of
precedence—which Arendt associated in 1957 with both English and (interest-
ingly) Roman law—put reflective judgment into practice precisely because
such systems do not begin with a set of clearly and univocally articulated
rules designed to deal with the particularity of the world encountered in the
courtroom.36 Indeed, in her 1957 reception of Kant, Arendt went so far as to
argue that any determinative judgment requires a prior reflective judgment.
In order to decide whether a particular case falls under a given rule the case
must first be examined and its nature extrapolated into a rule, by means of

Marshall 381
reflective judgment. If the extrapolated rule is the same as the original given
rule, then a subsequent determinative judgment may follow claiming the
particular as an instance or application of the universal, but—strictly speaking—
that subsequent determinative judgment is redundant.37
In 1957, Arendt’s continued interest in accounts of the logic of predication
drew on the model developed in her 1952 engagement with Hegel. Moreover,
the concern to represent concepts that cannot appear directly to the senses by
means of aesthetic ideas that can rewrites in a Kantian register some of the
basic rhetorical concerns set out by Aristotle. Communicability of ideas—
when speaking to the many and not the few—is a basic issue, both in Aristotle
and in Arendt’s reading of Kant.38 Thus, issues from Arendt’s earlier engage-
ments with the topos “judging” in Hegel and Aristotle continued to play out in
her 1957 reading of Kant. Nevertheless, the decisive issue was new. For
Arendt in 1957, the most significant aspect of Kant’s third critique was its
contribution to the politicization of thinking itself.
For Arendt, Kantian aesthetic judgment became a means of arguing that the
presence of others is not corruptive of the process of thinking for oneself, but
potentially constitutive of it. In her 1955 reading, Arendt placed Kant in the
tradition of Rousseau, where socialization is a danger because it assails the
integrity of the self and transforms its amour de soi into an amour propre. But
in 1957 Arendt placed a new emphasis on Kant’s stipulation that freedom of
thought is guaranteed only under conditions of publicity, Öffentlichkeit.39
Continuing the fertile interconnectedness of dialectic and rhetoric (awareness
in matters pertaining to contradicting oneself and contradicting others) that
she had perceived in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Arendt began to understand judg-
ment as a faculty of locating the similarities and dissimilarities between one’s
own judgments and the judgments of others. Arendt went so far as to say that
“what the presence of the universal—the a priori in reason—is for ‘determina-
tive judgment,’ so the presence of others is for ‘reflective judgment.’”40 The
striking substitution in this analogical scheme is the substitution of “the pres-
ence of others” for “the particularities of examples.” The judgments of others
are individua that fall into the category of “judgments about particularity A.”
A richer and not merely statistical approximation of the category is possible
under the conditions of diversity of judgment. Anticipating the judgments of
others is not motivated by a desire to conform to them, but rather by a desire
to measure the distances between one’s own judgment and a range of others,
and then to distinguish one’s own judgments from them in a way that is defen-
sible even in the face of such difference.
In order to give a more detailed account of this sense in which thinking
itself is dependent on the existence of others, Arendt latched on to the

paragraph in the third critique where Kant described taste as a kind of sensus
communis (§40). This is a move that is familiar to readers of the 1970 Kant
lectures, but in 1957 Arendt was more explicit about the limitations of Kant’s
assertions. Departing from a long sequence of competing definitions of
common sense, Kant argued that sensus communis should be understood as
“a power to judge that in reflecting takes account (a priori), in our thought, of
everyone else’s way of presenting [something], in order as it were to compare
our own judgment with human reason in general and thus escape the illusion
that arises from the ease of mistaking subjective and private conditions for
objective ones, an illusion that would have a prejudicial influence on the
judgment.”41 In 1957, Arendt contended that this is clearly an error. She
argued that there are always limits on one’s capacity to think oneself beyond
the conditions of one’s thinking. If one’s thought is dependent on the pres-
ence of others, then it is impossible for thought to abstract itself entirely from
those others—even as it does not simply liquidate itself into them without
resistance. Cosmopolitanism, for Arendt, was not a view from nowhere. If I
am not immersed in a culture, then my ears and eyes are not attuned to the
field of aesthetic judgments that structure common sense: “I cannot say how
the Indian world ought to look or how Indian music ought to sound,” Arendt
argued, and yet “I know that there is such a thing as competent judging there
too.”42 Arendt was willing to follow Kant beyond the actual judgments of
others to the simply possible judgments of others. But—echoing Aristotle,
one might say—possibility was not, for her, a category that absents itself
naturally or even easily from specific contexts.
In 1957, Arendt’s reading of whether others actually need to be present—
or, alternatively, may be simply represented—was rather ambiguous. On the
one hand, she thought that there are fundamental limitations on one’s ability
to appreciate artifacts embedded in other cultures. On the other hand, she
clearly believed that the work of encountering the judgments of others was
not only done in actual discursive exchange with those others. Arendt argued
that the faculty of imagination—making present that which is absent—was
the active form of judgment, where common sense was its passive form.43
Thus, a good part of the work of judgment consists in going beyond oneself
in order to make present the judgments of others by means of the imagination
and in representing those judgments for other people because they cannot
present them for themselves.
Representing the judgments of others is, however, fraught. Elsewhere in
the Denktagebuch, Arendt says that the Sophists were among the first to
pay explicit attention to competing judgments of the same phenomenon.
But even they—in the free (for some, irresponsibly free) play of their

Marshall 383
imaginations—tended to reduce the diversity of opinions to two, to the

stylizations of antilogy.44 For Arendt, the human capacity to maintain the
particularity of individual judgments even as they are brought into the con-
ceptual field of comparable and competing judgments was limited. The
actual presence of others tends to prevent the erosion of the distinctiveness
of their opinions and yet the virtual representation of others is necessary to
supplement the inevitably limited diversity of any given here and now.
Arendt was, in effect, arguing that judgments about the judgments of others
are able to establish what the Greeks referred to as topoi—common places,
points of shared reference, exemplars around which communities of interpre-
tation accrete. Without the accretion of judgments, aesthetic ideas are—as it
were—stillborn and fail to take on a genuinely political role in mediating the
vast differences of perspective that characterize politics as such. Such topoi
are, in a sense, spaces of appearance that shed light on individual judgments
by comparing them to other judgments. Arendt is often assumed to have
thought that spaces of appearance—“where I appear to others as others appear
to me”—could only exist where political communities actually came together
for the purpose of deliberation. Thus, only the Greek polis, the Jeffersonian
ward, or the Hungarian council could count as a genuine space of appearance.
What Arendt’s 1957 engagement with Kant shows is a willingness to concep-
tualize the topoi brought into being by judgment, sensus communis, and
imagination as spaces of appearance—an issue that I have addressed exten-
sively elsewhere.45
The Character of Arendtian Judgment

By the end of Arendt’s 1957 gloss of Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft, the broad
contours of the argument made famous by the posthumous edition of her
1970 New School lectures on Kant’s political philosophy are clearly discern-
able. In stark contrast to the Berkeley lectures from 1955, the 1957
Denktagebuch notes are broadly consonant with the reading given in 1970.
The point of charting the lines of development in Arendt’s thinking about the
topos “judging” through the 1950s, however, is not simply to show the stages
through which Arendt passed on the way to articulating what scholars already
knew she said. The point is that, precisely because she never expressed her-
self conclusively on the issue of judgment, scholars ought to hold the aspects
of judgment that she gleaned from Hegel and Aristotle in a kind of concep-
tual tension with the aspects that she found in Kant.
It is important to emphasize that in the Denktagebuch engagement with
Aristotle, it is krinein and not phronēsis that is at issue. Moreover, in Arendt’s

own etymology, krinein connects the Greek and German dimensions of her
thought. Arendt’s conscious translation of Aristotle’s krinein as urteilen and
entscheiden shows her awareness of the simultaneity and interdependence of
discerning and deciding in the original rhetorical locus of judgment. The
early history of judging in Arendt therefore suggests that it would be a mis-
take to suppose that the judgment of the actor and the judgment of the
spectator are necessarily incompatible. What is more, it is Aristotle’s Rhetoric
and not the Nicomachean Ethics that is more decisive for Arendt’s compari-
son of Greek and German engagements with “judging.”46
It is true that textual evidence drawn from the 1950s cannot prove that
there is no move toward the judgment of the spectator after the 1960s. But it
can indicate that even as Arendt was conceiving and writing The Human
Condition, she was not espousing an account of judgment that emphasized
only the practical wisdom of the actor without stressing also the discernment
of the judge. Indeed, in light of the strong connection between practical and
critical concerns in the early texts from the 1950s, the narrative of judgment’s
transformation from political to contemplative faculty begins to unravel. In
Arendt, judgment was always already concerned with the absence of “banis-
ters for thought,” such that judgment cannot merely subsume the particular
under the universal but must instead think the particular. For Arendt, such
thinking of the particular always involved a stepping out of the actual into the
possible that is entirely consonant with her later characterization of such
movement as a stepping outside of the pressure point between past and future.
Arendt was interested primarily in Kant’s account of reflective judgment
and, through Hegel, she understood reflective judgment as a particularly
astute account of all those judgments which bring new phenomena into focus
on behalf of the political community. Arendt’s use of the word “aesthetic” in
fact owed more to the Greek than to the German, such that the term stipulates
an interest in “that which appears” and not so much in “the beautiful” (as that
term is conventionally understood).47 Being discerning is not the same as
being an aesthete and so there is no necessary connection between Arendt’s
emphasis on judgment and a politics founded exclusively or predominantly
on the norm of the beautiful. Arendtian judgment is properly concerned with
the diversification of predicates. Thus, even as it does not moralize political
discourse, Arendtian judgment contributes to ethical practice.
What the early texts on judging reveal is that Arendt did not see judgments
as ends in themselves but rather as means to the end of bringing new phenom-
ena into focus. A topos—an concentration of judgments—is neither valid nor
invalid. It is simply useful or useless for the purpose of perceiving particular
challenges in an apposite and insightful fashion. It is wrong-headed either to

Marshall 385
assert or to deny that Arendtian judgments can themselves lead directly to

intersubjective consensus such that singular judgments can be adopted or
rejected by groups of individuals. Again, Arendtian judgments are not in
themselves correct or incorrect, but—by means of their accretion into topoi—
those judgments make correct and incorrect assertions possible. In this
reading, judgment (iudicium) is to be understood as the rhetorical antistrophe
to ingenium, the capacity to perceive similarity in objects that are distant or
dissimilar. “Judging” does not aim at the elision of differences of opinion.
Rather, it aims at a sharpening of the powers of perception by constantly
attending to what distinguishes a particularity from all those other particulars
that share predicates with it.48
Thus, Arendt’s faculty of judging remains closely connected to Kant’s first
critique even as it aligns itself more explicitly with the third. In its guise as a
faculty of holding particular phenomena in a tension with other phenomena
that exhibit similarities and differences, judging is—on Arendt’s account—
always extremely close to perception itself. It is for this reason that in a 1970
seminar on Kant at the New School, Arendt emphasized Kant’s claims that
“imagination is actually the common root of the other cognitive faculties” and
that imagination “is one of the original sources . . . of all experience.” The
lesson she derived from this was that “our sensibility seems to need imagina-
tion not only as an aid to knowledge but in order to recognize sameness in the
manifold.”49 The role that imagination plays for the faculty of judgment there-
fore is not simply one of making present that which is absent by reproducing
it in representation. In addition to that, imagination gathers the comparable in
such a way that the distinctive, the new, the unprecedented can appear.50
It is wrong to suppose that Arendt’s theory of judgment was merely a pre-
cursor to Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality.51 It is not the case
that Arendt’s theory of judgment is flawed because it is based on assumptions
that “ignore the fact that even our senses and our brain are symbolically struc-
tured and thus part of an intersubjective world opened up by speech.”52 In fact,
it would be more correct to say that she was trying to emphasize the importance
of precisely this kind of symbolic structuring. Moreover, if Arendt’s account of
the role of imagination in cognition appears thin or idiosyncratically derivative
of Kant, then one ought to recall that it has deep Heideggerean roots too.53
While it is true that Arendt’s assertions that imagination has a fundamental role
in cognition and that aesthetic judgments are non-cognitive do at times appear
contradictory, that apparent contradiction can be rendered coherent. One
needs to distinguish between individual acts of imaginative synthesis and the
consciousness of difference that emerges from the overlaying of various judg-
ments on a single phenomenon—that is, between the copula and the topos.

In a sense, Arendt synthesized the more classically rhetorical space-

time that she encountered in Aristotle’s rhetoric with the world-historical
time of Hegelian predication and ended up with a revised account of
topics—the dimension of classical rhetoric that had dealt with the afterlife
of political dispute in culture. Scholars are liable to see Hegel’s assertion
that die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht as another version of the antin-
omy that Arendt located in Kant at the end of her 1970 lectures. There she
saw the Kantian notion that human being is only realized in the fullness of
historical time (and never in the limited span of the bios) as a challenge to
the presupposition that individual human beings can achieve a certain dig-
nity in the course of a single life-cycle. But when Weltgericht is understood
through Arendt’s early engagement with Hegel’s account of judgment,
then the term becomes a metaphor for the “space of appearance,” the topos
that gathers together all the most distinctive predicates that have been
brought out of the subject in question—in the long course of human
engagement with that subject. In stark contrast to the basically necessitar-
ian structure of teleological historiography, however, Arendt’s interest in
topoi as spaces of appearance assumes that such topoi accrete and record
the most unpredictable qualities that emerge out of the least determined
circumstances (where the number of particular possibilities pursuant to the
situation in question is highest). In the context of Arendtian judgment, a
topos is a congeries of precise differences and those differences, in turn,
facilitate the measurement of differences between received opinions and
novel ones.54
Conclusion
The method of investigation in this article has been primarily intellectual
historical. Political theorists, therefore, will quite reasonably respond with
this question: What is the significance of this research for political theory?
The point is well taken. The implications of Arendt’s early writings on judg-
ment for political theory as such must be made explicit. The argument made
in this article is that, when its origin and character are understood, Arendt’s
theory of judgment can be defended against the best criticisms that so far
have been arrayed against it by political theorists and that it is worthwhile to
devote intellectual energy to developing her account further. I have defended
Arendt against criticisms from Bernstein, Beiner, Kateb, Habermas, and Zer-
illi (who, it must be said, has come closest to critiquing Arendt’s position in
order to advance it). I have also attempted to describe more precisely the
strengths of Arendt’s account of judgment. By way of conclusion, let me
articulate those strengths once again, in a different register. Arendt’s account

Marshall 387
is important for political theory because the practitioner of Arendtian judg-

ment is able to:
1. Analyze debates topically by examining the degrees, kinds, and

intractability of differences of perspectives on phenomena;
2. Identify and articulate perspectives on phenomena that have not
been perceived in such debates;
3. Bring new concepts into being by identifying and articulating per-
spectives that have never been perceived in any debate before;
4. Represent new perspectives in terms of their distinctiveness relative
to the perspectives of others;
5. Make it possible to reveal the world more fully by crafting idioms in
which new perspectives are communicable in the long-term;
6. Increase the responsiveness and political sustainability of discursive
negotiation as a process for collective decision-making.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or pub-
lication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this
article.
Notes
1. R. Bernstein, “Judging—The Actor and the Spectator,” in Philosophical Profiles:
Essays in a Pragmatic Mode (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1986), 231, 237. See also A. Norris, “Arendt, Kant, and the Politics of Common
Sense,” Polity 29 (1996): 183 and M. Yar, “From Actor to Spectator: Hannah
Arendt’s ‘Two Theories’ of Political Judgment,” Philosophy and Social Criti-
cism, 26 (2000): 12.
2. R. Beiner, “Hannah Arendt on Judging,” in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philoso-
phy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 101. His chief claim is that
“in her writings up until the 1971 essay, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations,’
judgment is considered from the point of view of the vita activa; in her writ-
ings from that essay onward, judgment is considered from the point of view of
the life of the mind. The emphasis shifts from the representative thought and
enlarged mentality of political agents to the spectatorship and retrospective judg-
ment of historians and storytellers” (91). Beiner comes to this conclusion despite
his awareness of the close relationship between judging and deciding in Greek
thought—see Political Judgment (London: Methuen, 1983), 87. Subsequently,

Beiner has reemphasized his sense that Arendt herself was more spectator than
actor in “Rereading Hannah Arendt’s Kant Lectures,” Philosophy and Social
Criticism 23 (1997): 29-30. Lee-Nichols too emphasizes the role of the dimin-
ished conditions for action offered by late modern societies. See R. Lee-Nichols,
“Judgment, Memory, History: Arendt and Benjamin on Connecting Us to Our
Past,” Philosophy Today 50 (2006): 307-23.
Yet there are other scholars who do not agree that such criticism would be a
merely literary activity and would not in itself constitute political action. Thus,
Dana Villa argues that even “in a world in which the opportunities to be a
‘participator in government,’ to share words and deeds on a public stage, have
been dramatically curtailed, we still have the choice between being passive
consumers of media-packaged spectacle, or independent judges of the events
which constitute the ‘spectacle’ of the public world and history.” See “Think-
ing and Judging,” in The Judge and the Spectator: Hannah Arendt’s Political
Philosophy, J. J. Hermsen and D. R. Villa, eds. (Leuven: Peeters, 1999), 25. The
negative role of the critic is a properly political one for him, as he has argued
in Socratic Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); and for
him the question of what role the public should play in an age that impedes its
political participation in a myriad of ways is the political theoretical question
of late modernity—Public Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2008). Similarly, Garston is relatively clear on what “political criticism” would
look like—neither judging without watching (prejudice), nor watching without
judging (entertainment)—and what such criticism would entail for the politi-
cal theory of late modern democracies. See B. Garsten, “The Elusiveness of
Arendtian Judgment,” Social Research 74 (2007): 1071-108. In a manner that
is consonant with the Greek origins of the term (shared by krinein), Taylor
argues that “crisis” should have a broader reference and that Beiner over-
emphasizes Arendt’s statement that judgment really only comes into play in
moments of crisis, when “the chips are down.” See D. Taylor “Hannah Arendt
on Judgement: Thinking for Politics,” International Journal of Philosophical
Studies, 10 (2002): 156.
3. Kateb’s essay has been published several times: “The Judgment of Arendt,”
Revue Internationale de Philosophie 53 (1999): 133-54, as well as in Judgment,
Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt (Rowman & Little-
field: Lanham, 2001), and again in Patriotism and Other Mistakes (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2006). It is the most recent of these contexts that is the
most useful (and the one cited here), given the proximity of a related essay on
“Aestheticism and Morality.” Kateb’s criticism is one that Villa anticipated when
he set about demonstrating “how . . . the appropriation of the third Critique
enable[s] Arendt to escape the excesses of an aestheticized, agonistic conception

Marshall 389
of politics.” D. R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 102.
4. See J. Habermas, “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power,”
Social Research 44 (1977): 23—“Arendt sees a yawning abyss between knowl-
edge and opinion that cannot be closed with arguments. She has to look for
another foundation for the power of opinion, and she finds it in the capability
of responsible subjects to make and to keep promises.” Compare S. Benhabib,
The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (London: Sage, 1996), 188-89: “in
Kant’s conception of reflective judgment, restricted by Kant himself . . . to the
aesthetic realm alone, Arendt discovered a procedure for ascertaining intersub-
jective agreement in the public realm.” See also S. Benhabib, “Judgment and
the Moral Foundations of Politics in Arendt’s Thought,” Political Theory, 16
(1988): 39.
5. L. M. G. Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005), 130. Projecting from the first two volumes of The Life of
the Mind, in a not dissimilar fashion, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl argued that the
“axial principle” for judgment in the projected but uncompleted third volume of
that work ought to have been that “judgment must not be coerced—not by ‘truth,’
philosophical or scientific, not by violence, intellectual or political, and not even
by the beauty of things, natural or fabricated.” See Mind and the Body Politic
(Routledge: New York, 1988), 36.
6. Box 58, ms. 032323, Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C.
7. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, W. Pluhars, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996),
130.
8. Box 58, ms. 032308, Hannah Arendt Papers.
9. H. Arendt, Denktagebuch, U. Ludz and I. Nordmann, eds. (Munich: Piper, 2003),
1.286. See G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, G. Lasson, ed. (Hamburg:
F. Meiner, 1934), 2.270-71.
10. I. Kant, Critique of Judgment, W. Pluhars, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987),
18-9.
11. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 130.
12. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, W. Wallace, trans. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975),
§171. Hegel’s praise of the account of synthetic judgment in the first critique is
elsewhere developed into praise of Kant’s presentation of reflective judgment in
the third critique. Thus, compare §171 with §55.
14. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, 2.267-68.
15. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1.286; the Cicero example comes from Hegel, Wissen-
schaft der Logik, 2.279. Thus, “Cicero” functions in 1957 as “Achilles” does in

1970. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 77, 84-5. In each case, the
individual (Cicero and Achilles) oscillates with the quality (“oratoricality” and
courage) as the tertium comparationis that unites individual acts. Comparability is
the essential requirement in judgment, which is why Arendt argues that aesthetic
judgments of the sublime may be reflective, in a Kantian account, but do not pro-
vide the matrix of similarities and differences that underwrites the public quality
of imaginative topoi. Box 59, ms. 032285, Hannah Arendt Papers.
16. The “mandarin” description comes from Kateb, “The Judgment of Arendt,” 165.
17. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1.408—glossing Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1354b23 and
1354b29-1355a1.
18. As Aristotle says, “practical wisdom is concerned with the ultimate particular,
which is the object not of knowledge but of perception—not the perception of
qualities peculiar to one sense but a perception akin to that by which we perceive
that the particular figure before us is a triangle” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1142a).
19. Aristotle is not entirely consistent on this point; he also perceives a difference
between “understanding” and “practical wisdom” by saying that “practical wis-
dom issues commands, since its end is what ought to be done or not to be done;
but understanding only judges” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1143a).
20. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1357a4-5.
21. Note that “for Kant . . . the judge was only a legal metaphor, but not so for
Arendt”—witness Eichmann. L. Y. Bilsky, “When Actor and Spectator Meet in
the Courtroom: Reflections on Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Judgment,” in Judg-
ment, Imagination, and Politics, 258.
22. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1.413; Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1374a11.
23. On this point and many others concerning modality, I am deeply indebted to
N. S. Struever, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009).
24. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1139a-b.
25. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1.409.
26. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1.408-9; Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1354a.
28. M. Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der Aristotelischen Philosophie (Frankfurt a.M.: V.
Klostermann, 2002).
29. T. Kisiel, “Rhetorical Protopolitics in Heidegger and Arendt,” in Heidegger and
Rhetoric, D. M. Gross and A. Kemmann, eds. (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005),
131-60. Kisiel notes that Arendt was exposed to Heidegger’s summarizing of his
conclusions about Aristotelian practical philosophy in his WS 1924-5 lectures on
Plato’s Sophist, but concludes that “it is not clear whether Arendt in her Marburg
years (1924-26) ever had access to any of the circulated student transcripts of the
summer semester 1924 course on Aristotle’s ground concepts, from which she

Marshall 391
could have gleaned . . . Heidegger’s phenomenological conception of the proto-

politics of the speech situation” (153).
30. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1.576. The point is picked up by Arendt in the first published
piece that really dealt extensively with her conception of judging—namely, “The Cri-
sis of Culture.” See H. Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political
Thought (New York: Viking, 1961), 222-23. See also Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1.572.
33. Arendt to Jaspers, 29 August 1957, in Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Briefwechsel,
L. Kohler and H. Saner, eds. (Munich: Piper, 1985), 355.
34. The work of reflective judgment is both discerning and inventive: “in the par-
ticular, the unknown universal; in the contingent, the lawful; in the empirical, an
indication of something that comes out to it from the supersensible.” K. Jaspers,
The Great Philosophers: The Foundations, H. Arendt, ed., R. Mannheim, trans.
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1957), 289.
36. Ibid., 1.569.
37. Ibid., 1.571.
38. Ibid., 1.572.
39. Ibid., 1.570.
40. Ibid., 1.570.
41. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 160.
43. Ibid., 1.570.
44. Ibid., 1.390-91.
45. See D. L. Marshall, “The Polis and its Analogues in the Thought of Hannah
Arendt,” Modern Intellectual History (forthcoming).
46. To be sure, when she discussed the relationship between phronēsis and Urteil-
skraft in the 1961 essay “The Crisis in Culture,” she referred to Book VI of the
Ethics. But in that essay it was the distinction between dialēgesthai and peithein
(which she derives from the antistrophic relationship between dialektikē and
rhetorikē with which the Rhetoric begins) that was conceptually central to her
understanding of the kind of speech that links politics and culture. Arendt, “Crisis
in Culture,” in Between Past and Future, 221-23.
47. See, for example, her awareness of Kant’s own debt to the Greek. Arendt, Denk-
tagebuch, 1.582; Kant, Critique of Judgment, 28.
48. Thus, the early sources confirm the significance of disagreement in Arendt’s
account of opinion. This echoes a point made by I. M. Young, but offers a differ-
ent rationale. See “Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and
Enlarged Thought,” in Judgment, Imagination, and Politics, 205-28.

49. Arendt, “Imagination—Seminar on Kant’s Critique of Judgment, given at the

New School for Social Research, Fall, 1970,” in Lectures on Kant’s Political
Philosophy, 81, 82, 83.
50. It is important to note how it is that the perception of similarity can bring
difference into sharper focus. Kirstie McClure is particularly good at recalling
the Renaissance consciousness of difference (Guicciardini is her example) even
in the context of an intellectual culture of exemplarity and imitation—indeed,
because of it. See “The Odor of Judgment: Exemplarity, Propriety, and Politics in
the Company of Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics,
C. Calhoun and J. McGowan, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1997), 53.
51. Habermas makes such an interpretation possible when he acknowledges his own
debt to Arendt’s “rediscovery of Kant’s analysis of Urteilskraft or judgment for a
theory of rationality” in “On the German-Jewish Heritage,” Telos 44 (1980): 128.
52. A. Wellmer, “Hannah Arendt on Judgment: The Unwritten Doctrine of Reason,”
in Judgment, Imagination, and Politics, 172.
53. Although Heidegger appears to reject Urteil in Sein und Zeit, he was in fact reject-
ing the way in which Urteil had come to mean something like “proposition” in
German philosophy. M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1957),
§7. What is more, Heidegger’s interest in Urteil was deeper than scholars of Arendt
have acknowledged. See his dissertation: Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologis-
mus: Ein Kritisch-Positiver Beitrag zur Logik (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1914).
54. Thus, Zerilli claims correctly that Arendtian judgment “creates political space,”
but without a thicker description of topics the nature of that “space” is unclear.
L. M. G. Zerilli, “We Feel Our Freedom: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought
of Hannah Arendt,” Political Theory 33 (2005): 158-88. In response to Zerilli,
Thiele has emphasized the role of narrative in judgment. But the argument simply
reinforces the impression that the reception of classical rhetoric is often thin, for
narratio is but one of many rhetorical tools of analysis. L. P. Thiele, “Reply to
Zerilli,” Political Theory 33 (2005): 712. For a considerably thicker description
of the topos “judgment,” however, see also L. P. Thiele, The Heart of Judgment:
Practical Wisdom, Neuroscience, and Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2006). In reply to Thiele, Zerilli emphasized a more fundamental com-
ponent of classical rhetoric, ingenium—the faculty of perceiving and combining
similarities and dissimilarities. Political Theory 33 (2005): 718. The spatial meta-
phor (which has a long tradition in the history of rhetoric) is noted by Joanna Vec-
chiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark in their edition of Arendt’s dissertation on
Augustine. As they put it, “while Arendt’s lectures on Kant’s Critique of Judgment
are suggestive, they lack the full context of vantage point provided by the bridge
of the dissertation,” such that “the missing link is Arendt’s use of memoria as the

Marshall 393
‘space’ between past and future, which is the existential context for the mental act
of judging.” See “Rediscovering Hannah Arendt,” in Love and Saint Augustine
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 148.
Bio
David L. Marshall is an assistant professor of Humanities at Kettering University.
His first book is Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). He is currently working on the inter-
sections of rhetorical inquiry and republican political thought in Weimar Germany.

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Special Section: Characterizing Arendt

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is the best suited to moving in such a world of resolute particularities. More-

Criticisms of Arendtian Judgment

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actor and the judgment of the spectator—Aristotelian phronēsis (practical

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further by Kateb, who has contended that Arendt’s entire project is to be

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Arendt’s Hegelian Inheritance

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defined “judgment” as “the faculty of synthesis.”6 In the first instance, this

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Arendt’s Encounter with Aristotle’s Rhetoric

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In Arendt’s reading, krinein has simultaneously retrospective and prospective

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responsibility.21 Indeed, when one sees rhetoric as a dunamis—a power, or

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The Reversal in Arendt’s Reading of Kant

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imaginations—tended to reduce the diversity of opinions to two, to the

The Character of Arendtian Judgment

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assert or to deny that Arendtian judgments can themselves lead directly to

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In a sense, Arendt synthesized the more classically rhetorical space-

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is important for political theory because the practitioner of Arendtian judg-

1. Analyze debates topically by examining the degrees, kinds, and

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

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could have gleaned . . . Heidegger’s phenomenological conception of the proto-

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49. Arendt, “Imagination—Seminar on Kant’s Critique of Judgment, given at the

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Marshall, D. L. - 2010 - The Origin and Character of Hannah Arendt's Theory of Judgment

Marshall, D. L. - 2010 - The Origin and Character of Hannah Arendt's Theory of Judgment