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Visions of Judgment: Arendt, Kant, and the Misreading of Judgment

Matthew C. Weidenfeld Political Research Quarterly published online 4 June 2012 DOI: 10.1177/1065912912446228 The online version of this article can be found at: http://prq.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/05/14/1065912912446228

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228WeidenfeldPolitical Research Quarterly

446228

PRQXXX10.1177/1065912912446

Visions of Judgment: Arendt, Kant, and the Misreading of Judgment

Matthew C. Weidenfeld1

Political Research Quarterly XX(X) 113 2012 University of Utah Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1065912912446228 http://prq.sagepub.com

Abstract Hannah Arendts conceptualization of judgment may only drive political theorists further from the phenomenon. Throughout her life, Arendts work on judgment was guided by Kants thought. Arendts reading of Kants work raises two difficulties to which contemporary political scientists should attend. First, Arendts reading of Kant is a systematic misreading of his texts. Second, Arendts misreading of Kant pushes her toward a misreading of the phenomenon of judgment. More important, Arendts misreading has led political theorists to assume a divide between the points of view of the actor and of the spectator, which cannot be reconciled given the resources of Arendts thought. Keywords judgment, Arendt, Kant, intellectualism

Within political theory, Hannah Arendts unfinished reflections on judgment have led to an explosion of interest in the phenomenon. Beiner (1983), for instance, draws on Arendt to move toward a concept of judgment that lies between the poles of Kant and Aristotle. Benhabib (1988) looks to Arendts work for a starting point for thinking about moral judgment, which she argues should be augmented by a discourse theory of ethics. Zerilli (2005) argues that the central concern of Arendts theory of judgment is not with validity, as Benhabib seems to argue, but with freedom. Obviously, the list here could go on, but what is striking is that despite wide differences in approaches to judgment and Arendts texts, all of these authors share in the thought that Arendts work reveals something crucial about judgment.1 As one looks at this growing body of literature, though, what is more startling is that Arendts unfinished reflections have not only driven quite a bit of recent work but also been a source of frustration for a number of contemporary theorists (see Hermsen and Villa 1999). Arendts reflections not only are incomplete but also rely on a number of conceptual distinctions that are difficult to locate phenomenally or that are, perhaps, confused; for instance, Arendts insistence of a line of demarcation between thinking and acting or her distinction between the actor and the spectator seem untenable or, at least, strain ones ability to see the phenomenon she is attempting to illuminate. This article finds its starting point in both of these moments; that is, it starts from a concern over the phenomenal content of judgment, initially driven by Arendts reflections, but

also takes seriously this sense of frustration with Arendts conceptualization of judgment and, therefore, takes up a largely negative task. The task involved here is to offer both a critique of Arendts reading of her primary source in thinking about judgment, Kant, and to offer a critique of her reading of the phenomenal content of judgment. Ultimately, I argue that Arendts conceptualization of judgment may, in fact, drive political theorists only further from the phenomenon of judgment itself. Throughout her life, Arendts work on judgment was guided by Kants (1987) thoughts on taste and by her reading of the Critique of Judgment.2 While there is no doubt among political theorists that Arendts reading of the Critique of Judgment is idiosyncratic, as Dana Villa (1992) puts it, the extent of the violence of Arendts reading has at times been lost on scholars.3 It is quite clear that Arendt is engaged in a creative destruction of Kants texts, which attempts to recover a select number of Kantian concepts from out of the intellectual debris that surrounds them, but at times scholars have seemed to take up Arendts reading as a faithful reading of Kants texts. For instance, Villa (1992, 297), after noting that Arendts reading is idiosyncratic, goes on to say,
1

Elon University, Elon, NC, USA

Corresponding Author: Matthew C. Weidenfeld, Department of Political Science, Elon University, Gray PavilionPol. Science 210A, Elon, NC 27244, USA Email: mweidenfeld@elon.edu

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2 Kants conception of Aesthetic judgmentdeparting from the exchange of viewpoints necessary for representative thinking and culminating in the persuasive exchange that accompanies the rendering of each judgmentis thus, for Arendt, political through and through. The problem this reading poses is that Kants conception of aesthetic judgment does not depart from an exchange of viewpoints or culminate in a persuasive exchange, two points that Villa seems to take as a given; instead, Villas reading actually recapitulates Arendts idiosyncratic reading of Kant. A number of authors conflate Arendts destruction of Kants texts for Kants actual textual arguments. For instance, Norris (1996, 167) argues that [i]n his third Critique, Kant argues that our judgments of beauty are underwritten by a peculiar kind of common sense, one that is inherently public. As we shall see below, while this is how Arendt portrays Kants text, it is not true of Kant in any simple sense that common sense is inherently public. Bikowski (1993, 868) seems to take it as a given that Kants faculty of aesthetic judgment forswears objective validation of truthclaims in favor of subjective consensus and community standards and norms. This is an accurate portrayal of how Arendt reads Kant, but the reference to community standards and norms cannot be found in Kants text. The violence of Arendts interpretive activity, then, is seemingly lost at points on even the most careful readers of Arendts thought. Arendts destructive reading of Kants text, combined with the fact that Arendts reading has served as a starting point for much recent work concerning judgment in political theory, has left political theorists with two difficulties. First, as Ive already begun to hint at, Arendts reading of Kant is a (mis)reading of his texts.4 It goes without saying that an original appropriation of concepts and ideas may, of course, be warranted given the fresh purchase this gives a thinker on the phenomenon. Arendts method of pearl diving certainly does look to destroy texts in the name of bringing their phenomenal referents back into the light. Arendts (mis)reading of Kant, though, actually pushes her away from the phenomenon of judgment in a counterintuitive way. There are a number of difficulties that her thought leads us intomost notably, the distinction between the actor and the spectatorwhich are actually driven by an intellectualist kernel she retains from Kant, despite her destructive reading of his texts on a number of points. This is the second problem: Arendts (mis)reading of Kant pushes her toward a misreading of the phenomenon of judgment. Arendt, with Kant, comes to see judgment as, primarily, an intellectual activity, and while Arendts reading perhaps could shed light on some forms of

Political Research Quarterly XX(X) reflective judgments, it results in a vision of judgment that cannot capture a good deal of the phenomenal evidence. This is the surprising nature of Arendts (mis) reading; that is, she reads Kant for her own ends but actually retains from Kant an intellectualism that then leads her to misread judgment. The intellectualism of Arendts approach and the continued engagement with Arendts philosophy of judgment has certainly improved our understanding of Arendts thought, but it isnt clear that this has improved our understanding of the faculty of judgment; in fact, the dive into Arendts texts may be transforming political theorists into the types of puzzle solvers she was actually quite worried about. In a note concerning her approach to Marx, Arendt (1958, 104) herself criticized a puzzle solving approach to the work of other theorists. Jules Vuillemins Letre et le Travail (1949) is a good example of what happens if on tries to resolve the central contradictions and equivocalities of Marxs thoughts. This is possible only if one abandons the phenomenal evidence altogether and begins to treat Marxs concepts as though they constituted in themselves a complicated jigsaw puzzle of abstractions. My fear is that in pursuing Arendts work on judgment, political theorists have abandoned the phenomenal evidence and become the puzzle solvers Arendt warns us about. My aim, then, is to make it clear why, if our concern is not just with Arendt but with understanding the phenomenon of judgment, a turn away from a concern with solving the antinomies of Arendts philosophy of judgment may be warranted. Obviously, the assertions Ive made here are contentious, and what follows is intended to substantiate these claims. The argument proceeds in two sections, which are aimed at illuminating the two intertwined difficulties pointed toward above. The first section shows how, exactly, Arendts reading of the third Critique does a great deal of violence to Kants texts in a way that is, at times, overlooked by political theorists. It does this by focusing on Arendts reading of two of Kants concepts, the sensus communis and the enlarged mentality. What I argue in this first section is that Arendt systematically distorts the role of transcendental subjectivity in Kants thought. Arendt, then, offers us a (mis)reading of Kant. The second section moves beyond a textual critique, which has the value of reminding political theorists that Arendts reading is a destruction of Kants thought, and looks at the consequences the (mis)reading of Kant has for her conceptualization of judgment. The most important consequence brought to light is that Arendt, despite the violence of her reading of Kants texts and the ways in which she systematically underplays the universalism of Kants arguments, still retains from Kant the presupposition that judgment is primarily an intellectual matter. Arendt retains from Kant the idea that judgment must be a reflective capacity, and while this may seem to be an

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Weidenfeld innocuous assumption, I try to show that this is tied to an aporia that is central to her thought; that is, Arendt intellectualizes judgment, and this is what, ultimately, pushes her toward a divide between the actor and spectator that she is unable to reconcile.5 Arendt, then, also misreads the phenomenon of judgment. Given this basic aporia of Arendts thought, which cannot bring much of the everyday content of judgment into view, I conclude by wondering if it may not be best to admit, as Arendt claimed of Kant, that Arendt never wrote a philosophy of judgment. This admission may allow us to return to the phenomenon with unclouded vision or, perhaps, subject her thought to a creative destruction of its own. To see why we may want to admit this, we must begin with Arendts reading of Kant.

3 actually moves from the particular to the universal and no concept is supplied by the understanding. These judgments require reflection as one moves freely from the particular to the universal without ones judgment being determined by the concepts of the understanding. In reflective judgments one must search for a concept under which to place the intuition. According to Kant, this is exactly the situation that arises in judgments of beauty, where one makes a claim to an objects beauty, based on ones own feeling of pleasure, without a concept that can determine the objects beauty. Even more important, these claims are normative because one makes a claim that one believes is intersubjectively valid; that is, one expects everyone to agree that these objects are beautiful and not merely that we like them for idiosyncratic reasons. The third Critique, then, is charged with the task of offering a critique of our power of judgment and to ground this normativity. According to Kant, then, a judgment of beauty is not based on the shared features of objects (this would be a determinant judgment), but this judgment still makes a claim to intersubjective validity. How could it be that when I claim this rose is beautiful, I am also making the claim that I expect everyone else to agree with my judgment? I do not claim that the rose is merely agreeable to me or that I am merely stating a subjective preference for the rose but that the rose is beautiful and everyone should recognize this (Kant 1987, 18-44). Against those who would claim that matters of taste are merely subjective statements of preference, Kant, by examining our cognitive powers and the conditions that make aesthetic judgments possible, discloses the epistemic conditions that make subjectively universal claims concerning beauty possible. To put the matter rather simply, Kant argues that judgments of beauty can claim subjective universality because they are founded on the cognitive powers shared by all agents, which allow for knowledge. What is striking about judgments of beauty is that their determining basis cannot be other than subjective. A judgment of beauty is based on a subjective feeling of pleasure; it is not determined by a concept to which everyone could refer, but we still expect universal assent to our judgments of beauty. This is why, according to Kant, judgments of beauty are reflective; that is, judgments of beauty are given only a particular object (this rose) and must try to find a concept under which to subsume it. Judgments of beauty cannot claim objective validity because there is no determinant concept of beauty, supplied by the understanding, to which all persons could refer. If we are to understand how judgments of taste could still expect universal assent, Kant argues, we should begin by investigating the feeling of pleasure that we experience in judgments of beauty to see how these judgments demand universal assent.

The (Mis)reading of Kant

In part 1, division 1 of the Critique of Judgment, Kant raises the problem of how it is possible that judgments of beauty, which are based only on a subjective feeling of pleasure, could claim universal assent. Kant claimed, in fact, that such judgments do have an a priori principle and are not mere statements of preference or, as Kant puts it, are not mere statements of what individuals happen to find agreeable. The task Kant sets himself, then, is to offer a critique of this power of judgment. If we are to understand why Arendt turned to Kant as a starting point for her reflections on judgment, then an overview of relevant portions of the third Critique is in order. Kant found that a critique of judgments of beauty was possible because of a new distinction he drew between determinate and reflective judgments. The first Critique had taken up the issue of judgment, but it had considered only determinant judgments, which Kant defined as the faculty of subsuming under rules; that is, of distinguishing whether something does or does not stand under a given rule (Kant, quoted in Allison 2001, 14). Kant conceptualized judgment in the first Critique along the lines of cognitive judgments in which one brings an intuition under a concept and, then, makes an objective validity claim; that is, in the first Critique, judgment is understood as the faculty of applying concepts of the understanding to intuitions. For instance, when one makes the judgment this is a house, one applies the concept of house, which is supplied by our understanding, to our empirical intuition of the object with four walls, windows, and so on that stands before one. The concept of a house determines our experience of the intuition. The third Critique, though, raises a new issue. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant argues that judgments of beauty and the pleasure we have in cognizing the beautiful occur in situations where, unlike determinant judgments, one

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4 How, then, does Kant rationally reconstruct the judgment of beauty? Guyer (1997) argues that this is a twostep process. The first step is an unintentional reflection, which actually produces the pleasure of aesthetic response. In this first step, what is crucial is that the beautiful object brings the imagination, which is the faculty of intuition or presentation that brings together the multiplicity of a manifold into some coherence, and the understanding, which is the faculty that supplies the concepts that are assigned to our intuitions, into a state of free play. In a determinant judgment, the understanding applies a concept to the intuitions brought forward by the imagination, but in an aesthetic judgment no concept is available. In this situation, the understanding and imagination are left in a state of free play, where the imagination is not subordinate to the concepts of the understanding and the two faculties must mutually search for such a concept. Allison (2001, 171) renders this relationship more perspicuous when he argues that the basic idea is presumably that the imagination in its free play stimulates the understanding by occasioning it to entertain fresh conceptual possibilities, while, conversely, the imagination, under the general direction of the understanding, strives to conceive new patterns of order. A beautiful object brings our faculties into this state of free play, and, Kant argues, this produces a pleasurable feeling. These shared cognitive faculties serve, then, as the basis of our feeling of pleasure in the beautiful. To return to our example, one encounters a rose, for which no concept of beauty is available that could determine ones judgment, and this rose brings ones imagination and understanding into a state of free play that leads to a feeling of pleasure. This is the first step of aesthetic judgment. The second step is an exercise of reflection that leads to the actual judgment of beauty and with it an expectation of universal assent. This second step occurs when one reflects on whether this initial sense of pleasure has, in fact, been caused by the harmony of the faculties or by merely subjective preferences. What allows us to rationally expect universal assent to the judgment of beauty a priori is that the feeling of pleasure we have in judging the beautiful is, according to Kant, the nonconceptual awareness we have of the objects purposiveness for our cognitive powers (Guyer 1997). For instance, when one judges that this rose is beautiful, the feeling of pleasure one has in judging the beauty of the rose is derived from this free play of ones cognitive powers as they find harmony in arriving at the cognition of the roses beauty. It is as though the rose was there, was purposive, for this type of free play, and this surely, Kant argues, leads to a feeling of delight. This is what, Kant argues, actually makes possible universal subjective validity. The feeling of pleasure we have in judging the beautiful is nothing more than a

Political Research Quarterly XX(X) sense of the harmony of the cognitive powers brought about by the beautiful object, which we presuppose, a priori, everyone shares in common (Guyer 1997, 31). The feeling of pleasure brought about by beauty derives then from the free play of our cognitive powers. If this is the case, then we can expect that everyone, under the right conditions, could have the same feeling of pleasure. This is because what are shared a priori are the cognitive powers that would lead everyone, under the right conditions, to cognize the objects beauty. Recognizing whether our judgments have occurred under the right conditions is difficult and may always be open to revision, but Kant does offer the criteria of disinterest and formality as criteria of evaluation to see if our judgment of beauty is pure. The requirement of disinterest, while a notoriously difficult discussion in the third Critique, seems to require that our liking of an object cannot be tied to a liking for the things existence. As Kant (1987, 46) puts it, Everyone has to admit that if a judgment about beauty is mingled with the least interest then it is very partial and not a pure judgment of taste. Kant relies in this discussion on the example of an imagined palace and the question of the palaces beauty. While one might comment on the socioeconomic relationships that make such palaces morally noxious to one or state that one does not find objects of mere vanity agreeable, Kant (1987, 46) insists that this is not the question. All he [the questioner] wants to know is whether my mere presentation of the object is accompanied by a liking. The requirement of disinterest seems to imply that a judgment of beauty cannot be tied to a concept of any sort, whether this be tied to the good and our interest in the moral evaluation of the object, or a broader interest in theoretical cognition. One is not offering an aesthetic judgment when one brings ones intuitions under a concept of the good; in fact, one cannot evaluate the palace on the basis of any interest one might have in whether the object should exist at all. Kant also holds that our judgments of beauty must be formal and focus only on the fact that [the object] can dispose the faculties of imagination and understanding to the state of free play (Guyer 1997, 193).6 Given Kants own claims to be dealing only with judgments of beauty in these sections, we must wonder what it is that Arendt thought she had found in Kants Critique of Judgment that could serve as an implicit political theory and a guide to understanding judgment. First, Arendt begins with Kants conceptualization of reflective judgment, which requires that we think of the particular object without an available concept to place the object under, because she found in Kant a resource for conceptualizing a mode of judging that functions where concepts are not available (Arendt 1978, 69). Arendt argues that Kants conceptualization of reflective judgment is important

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Weidenfeld because under conditions of modernity, where the thread of tradition has broken, we are called on to constantly make particular judgments without concepts to guide us. Reflective judgments are now, according to Arendt, what we must make in political and ethical matters. Second, Arendt finds in Kants conceptualization of aesthetic judgment a mode of the life of the mind that is still connected to the world of appearances and the plurality of perspectives that is the stuff of politics; that is, she reads the Critique of Judgment as Kants political philosophy because it discloses, she thinks, a mode of thinking that is still linked to the plurality of others through the common sense. To make the case that Kant discloses an intellectual faculty still tied to plurality, Arendt leans on two Kantian concepts, the sensus communis and the enlarged mentality, for the sake of developing her own reflections concerning judgment.

5 points out an extra sense . . . that fits us into a community. More important, Arendt (1982, 73) claims that the sensus communis points toward the fact, crucial for the validity of judgments, that when one judges, one judges as a member of a community. Most important here is Arendts (2003b, 139) claim that [c]ommon sense for Kant did not mean a sense common to all of us, but strictly that sense which fits us into a community with others, makes us members of it and enables us to communicate things given by our five private senses. Arendt claims, then, that Kants conceptualization of the common sense ties our judgments into a community and ensures our membership therein. The validity of our judgments is decided only through their ties back to this community sense. Arendt wants to argue that the built-in plurality of judgment, which she thinks allows for its claims to general validity, is guaranteed by the ties of judgment to the sensus communis. Arendts understanding of the concept is ambiguous, but it certainly points toward empirical sociability; that is, judgment can make general claims, according to Arendt (1982, 72), because judgment is actually rooted in this common sense and is therefore open to communication once it has been transformed by reflection, which takes all others and their feelings into account. More important, she argues [When the judge] claims assent from others because in judging he has already taken them into account and hopes that his judgments will carry a certain general, though not perhaps universal, validity. The validity will reach as far as the community of which my common sense makes me a member. (Arendt 2003a, 140, emphasis added) Arendt argues that common sense fits us into the sense of a community, and good judgment requires that we expand this community as far as we can. Given Kants analysis of the a priori claims of judgments of beauty, outlined above, it would be rather odd if Kant were suddenly to discuss the central role of empirical sociability in judgments of taste; after all, what assures us of the universality of our judgments of beauty in Kants mind is the a priori fact that the understanding and imagination could be brought into a state of free play for all possible agents. This is our first clue and point of entry into Arendts (mis)reading. Kant (1987, 87) makes it clear, actually, that common sense is a subjective principle and is the effect arising from the free play of our cognitive powers. The important point of focus, for our purposes, is that Kant assumes that common sense is common because he assumes that the epistemologically a

Sensus Communis
Judgment, which Arendt (1978, 193) defines as the ability to say this is wrong, this is beautiful, and so on, is the faculty that allows us to judge particulars objects or events without universals. While Arendt never definitively says how judgments operate, it is clear that she sees them as mental operations that take a stand on particular events, persons, and so on that can still claim general validity (more on this below) by making reference, in our minds, to a community of others, whom we encounter when we think beyond the narrow confines of our own interests and consider the particular with an enlarged mentality. The common sense is the sense, she argues, that fits us into this community and allows us to see an object or event from this plurality of perspectives and, in turn, allows us to feel assured that our judgments can demand general assent (Arendt 1968, 220-21). Arendts comments concerning common sense are ambiguous, at best. For instance, she claims that common sense is a kind of sixth sense needed to keep my five senses together and guarantee that it is the same object that I see touch, taste, smell, and hear (Arendt 1978, 50). Or, common sense discloses to us the nature of the world insofar as it is a common world (Arendt 1968, 221). And, finally, common sense is the sixth sense that fits our five senses into a common world (Arendt 1978, 81). The concept, despite its ambiguity, is crucial to Arendts conceptualization of judgment because she argues that the standard of reflective judgment is common sense (Arendt 1978, 267).7 Arendt is quite clear that the concept of a common sense, and its role in judgment, is one she gained from Kant, though the difficulties involved with her interpretation of Kant begin to surface immediately. Arendt (1982, 70) argues, for instance, that the concept of the sensus communis

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6 priori conditions of judgment of beauty are the same in all possible agents and not because the sense is tied to a community.8 We get a sense of the difficulties involved with Arendts reading of the concept if we turn to what Kant says about the sensus communis in the Critique of Judgment. Kant (1987, 156) introduces the concept in his attempt to show that we are justified in presupposing universally in all people the same subjective conditions of the power of judgment that we find in ourselves. When we assume the same cognitive faculties in all people that serve as the foundation of the power of judgment, we assume a common sense. Common sense ties us into the judgment of everyone else, but this does not link our judgments to an actual community; instead, the sensus communis is intended to point toward the conditions of transcendental subjectivitythe free play of the imagination and the understandingthat make judgments of taste possible for all persons. It is a sense that all persons share because all persons share the structures of transcendental subjectivity. Kants sensus communis does fulfill the function of thinking from the standpoint of everyone else, as Arendt would put it, but not by reflecting on the positions of others. Kants concept requires no such imagining because if our judgments of beauty attend only to the form of the object and are disinterested, then we can assume that all other persons, who share the same conditions of judgment, could have a common sense of its beauty. This is of central importance because of the crucial role that autonomy plays in Kants thinking about judgments of beauty. Kant (1987, 144) is quite clear that the universal validity of our judgments does not rely on gathering votes and asking other people what kind of sensation they are having. He insists on this point, in fact, because turning to the views of others would undermine the autonomy of judgment. One need think only of Kants (1987, 146-47) discussion of the poet who judges his own poem to be beautiful, despite the claims of others, and who, if he relinquished his judgment, would do so only in order to accommodate himself to the common delusion. Again, Kant (1987, 147, 153) makes it clear that other peoples approval in no way provides [someone] with a valid proof by which to judge beauty, and we must judge a priori without being allowed to wait for other peoples assent. To push common sense toward empirical sociability, Arendt overlooks the role of autonomy and, more important, Kants attempt to ground judgments of beauty in our shared cognitive faculties. In fact, Arendt attempts to destroy these concepts with an eye toward recovering the phenomenal evidence that she believes truly lies behind Kants concepts. The problem here is that this not only does damage to Kants text but also, as we shall see, still operates out of the

Political Research Quarterly XX(X) basic presupposition of Kants framework that judgment is, primarily, an intellectual matter, and this may distort the phenomenon as well. Arendt is able to overlook the role of transcendental subjectivity in Kants argument by eliding the difference between the sensus communis and what Kant refers to as common human understanding. Arendt (1982, 70) claims that The term has changed. The term common sense meant a sense like our other sensethe same for everyone in his privacy. By using the Latin term, Kant indicates that he here means something different: an extra senselike an extra mental capabilitythat fits us into a community. The common understanding of men [common human understanding] . . . is the very least to be expected from anyone claiming the name of man. Arendts attempt to elide the difference becomes clear if we merely continue her citation of Kants text where she leaves off. Kant (1987, 160) argues, in full, that this common human understanding . . . is the very least to be expected from anyone claiming the name of man: and this is why it enjoys the unfortunate honor of being called common sense (sensus communis). Kant makes it clear that sensus communis is not the same as the common or vulgar human understanding and, in fact, that it is unfortunate that the two are confused. Arendt, though, overlooks this distinction to show that the sensus communis fits us into a community, but this is a reading of Kant that strains his text nearly beyond recognition. Kant (1987, 160) argues, in the text she refers to but fails to discuss, that we must take sensus communis to mean the idea of a sense shared, i.e. a power to judge that in reflecting takes account (a priori), in our thought of everyone elses way of presenting [something], in order as it were to compare our own judgment with human reason in general . . . we do this as follows: we compare our judgment not so much with actual as rather with the merely possible judgment of others, and thus, put ourselves in the position of everyone else, merely by abstracting from the limitations that [may] happen to attach to our own judging. Kant makes it clear that the sensus communis does not fit us into an actual community; instead, the sensus communis points toward our cognitive faculties, which is the epistemological condition for the possibility of judgment that is shared by all agents.9 If our judgment already abstracts from our interests and attends only to the formal features of the presentation for our cognitive faculties, we

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Weidenfeld can assume that our sense of the beauty of an object is a common sense shared by all. This is not accomplished by comparing our judgments, in reality or imagination, with the judgments of other; instead, the deduction is meant to show that disinterested and formal judgments of beauty already achieve this universal perspective. Arendt, it seems, attempts to read back into Kants concept of the sensus communis the ethical content that Kant explicitly expunges (Gadamer 1999, 21-27). Arendts reflections on judgment move between Kants insistence that judgments of beauty are contemplative and her own thought that it must somehow be related to an actually existing ethos. This tension between the judgment as a theoretical and a practical capacity is not overcome by Arendts theory of judgment but is in fact reproduced in her distinction between the actor and the spectator. This tension leads not only to a misreading of Kant but also to a misreading of judgment, but before we turn to those consequences, we must turn to a second concept Arendt draws from the Critique of Judgment, the enlarged mentality.

7 is intended only to serve as phenomenological confirmation of the deduction and the a priori operation of the sensus communis. The discussion of the enlarged mentality, then, continues a tension already seen in Arendts reading of the sensus communis. Arendt wants to draw from Kant a vision of judgment as a mental activity that fits us into an actual plurality of other judges. For instance, Arendt (1978, 96) argues that the Critique of Judgment points toward spectators as those who pass judgment on events and this is decisive, Kants spectators exist in the plural. In the Lectures on Kant, she insists that judgments, and especially judgments of taste, always reflect upon others and their taste. This is necessary because I am human and cannot live outside the company of men. I judge as a member of this community and not as a member of the supersensible world (Arendt 1982, 67). These claims are a matter of tying Kants conceptualization of judgment to plurality and, in turn, back into Arendts own conceptualization of politics. The hope that Kant ties judgment back to plurality and, in turn, politics leads Arendt to see the Critique of Judgment as a nascent political theory, but it continuously leads her to elide crucial distinctions Kant himself makes, as we have seen. This raises the fact that Arendt elides the distinction between the universal and the general. Arendt (1978, 111, emphasis added) poses the problem of the deduction of the Critique of Judgmenthow could the subjective pleasure we derive from the beautiful have universal validityas the question of how propositions of judgment could possibly claim, as indeed they do, general agreement. Arendt draws no attention to her substitution of general for universal here, but it serves an important purpose for her reading. Arendt attempts to tie judgment to a general standpoint, and not a universal one as Kant would have it, to conceptualize judgment as a matter of bringing propositions into agreement with an actual, existing plurality of other judges. As she puts it, our claims to validity can never extend further than the others in whose place the judging person has put himself for his considerations (Arendt 1968, 221). Kant, though, does not limit judgment to a general standpoint, which brings in a limited range of others, with whom we compare our judgments; instead, he insists that judgment claims subjective universality. Our judgments make validity claims on all who share our cognitive powers, and this is why they claim universal, and not just general, assent. This slippage allows Arendt (1968, 221, emphasis added) to read the Critique of Judgment as making the claim that judgment requires the ability to see things not only from ones own point of view but in the perspective of all those who happen to be present. Kant does not require such general assent; valid judgments already share the view of all who share our cognitive powers and are universally valid.

The Enlarged Mentality

Arendt (1978, 257) claims that the enlargement of mind plays a crucial role in the Critique of Judgment. More pointedly, she claims that Kant insisted upon a different way of thinking . . . which consisted of being able to think in the place of everybody else and which he therefore called an enlarged mentality (Arendt 1968, 220). For Arendt, this drives the idea that judging is a matter of thinking the particular in a way that is able to take into account the views of others. In a way, this is what Kant has in mind, but Arendt overemphasizes the role that actually thinking in the position of others could have in Kants thought. In the text of the third Critique, Kants discussion of the enlarged mentality is a digression that refers to the maxims of common human understanding. Kants deduction of the a priori claims of judgment to universal validity is intended to show that there is no need to actually think in anyone elses place or take into account the actual judgments of others.10 Again, Kants argument is that the cognitive faculties can be assumed to be the same in everyone and, in turn, if our judgment of beauty is disinterested and formal, then the judgment of beauty can already be assumed to be the same in everyone else. The fact that, as the deduction shows, judgment already takes into account everyone elses standpoint, without reference to any actual community, may seem too artful, and, therefore, Kant (1987, 160) brings in the maxims of human understanding to show that nothing is more natural. Kants mention of the maxim of common human understanding to think from the standpoint of everyone else

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8 What Arendt thinks she has found in Kant is a conceptualization of a capacity to make autonomous judgments in a manner that is independent of universals or traditional guidance but that is still linked to the judgments of others, to plurality. This content, though, is not to be found in the Critique of Judgment in this way. Arendts admittedly creative (mis)reading of Kant, then, seems to be clear, and while it is important to bring to light the extent of Arendts destruction of Kants text, my concern is not only with Arendts fidelity to the Kantian sources. More important, even though Arendt is engaged in this systematic destruction of Kants texts, Arendt surprisingly retains Kants central intuition that judgment is primarily an intellectual affair. Arendts retention of this idea from Kantdespite her creative destruction of almost all of his other claims actually pushes her toward a misreading of the phenomenon of judgment. Arendt, then, ends up caught between two polesbetween Kants intellectualism and her own sense of the phenomenological dimensions of judging and this comes to light in her attempts to read empirical community and plurality back into Kant where they cannot be found. Arendt, then, retains Kants thought that judgments of beauty must be reflective and intellectual, even when she systematically destructs his texts for her own purposes, and this leads Arendt into a much more troubling problem; that is, it leads her toward a misreading of judgment.

Political Research Quarterly XX(X) a problematic relationship with action, and this makes it difficult for her to conceptualize judgment as a practice (Arendt 1982, 68; Arendt 1978, 69). Mental activities come into being, Arendt argues, only through a deliberate withdrawal from appearances (Arendt 1978, 75). Like all theoretical capacities, judgment is a capacity that requires distance from action and events to fix its gaze on those objects. Judgment is a theoretical capacity that does not leave the world of appearances but retires from active involvement in it to a privileged position in order to contemplate the whole (Arendt 1978, 94). Arendt, in making this assertion, not only draws on the philosophical tradition, which insists on the proper remove required for theorein, but also is driven to this conclusion by Kant and his understanding of judgments of beauty as a complex matter of reflection. Arendt picks up on Kants argument that judgment is contemplative and must be disinterested, and she finds both of these conditions fulfilled in the existential position of the spectator. This emphasis on the privileged role of the spectator leads to a divide between actor and spectator in her thought, which makes it difficult to understand how agents actually judge. The problem here is that Arendt begins to have a difficult time understanding how agents take up the two-in-one position of actor and spectator in judging, which they quite clearly do. Arendt associates judgment with the glance of the spectator because of the importance she attaches to Kants claim that judgment should be disinterested. These connections lead Arendt, in one of her earliest attempts to understand the existential requirements of judging, to turn to Ciceros reflections on the ways in which philosophy prepares agents to approach appearances as mere spectators. What Arendt finds illuminating is that, for Cicero, the philosophers were as we would say today, completely disinterested and for this very reason those best qualified to judge, but also those who were most fascinated by the spectacle itself (Arendt 1968, 219).12 This is a continuing theme for Arendt, as she claims, for instance, that the existential ground for his [i.e., the judges] insight was his disinterestedness, his nonparticipation, his noninvolvement (Arendt 1982, 54). Arendt (1968, 219) insists that the existential preconditions of remove and disinterest required by judgment understood as an intellectual comportment are met by the spectator. What she finds important in Kant is the explicit tie he draws between judging and spectating. She insists, in fact, that judgment presupposes a definitely unnatural and deliberate withdrawal from involvement and the partiality of immediate interests (Arendt 1978, 76; also see Arendt 1982, 55). The emphasis Arendt places on these theoretical moments of judging, driven by Kants own thought that aesthetic judgment is reflective, leads her to see judgment as a capacity actualized by spectators, who

The (Mis)reading of Judgment

It seems that Arendt wants to understand, among other things, how judgment can operate in a contextual manner, without guidance from universals, and autonomously. All of these factors led Arendt to Kant, but the question of autonomy makes Kant a crucial source for Arendt.11 The problem is, though, that Arendts reading of Kant drives her away from the phenomenon of judgment because, despite her destruction of Kants text, she still retains Kants thought that judgment is a reflective and intellectual capacityit is a matter of the life of the mind. This leads Arendt to engage in the error of what Pierre Bourdieu (1990, 29) refers to as intellectualism, which he describes as a case in which the observers relation to the social world, and therefore the social relation which makes the observation possible, is made the basis of the practice analyzed. That is, Arendt retains from Kant the idea that judgment, if it is to be more than mere statement of subjective preference, must manifest itself as an intellectual contemplation of the world that comes to look a good deal like the theorists own relationship to the world. Arendt, then, retains from Kant the idea that judgment is primarily intellectual and in doing so reads back into judgment the theorists relationship to the world. Arendts intellectualization ends up having

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Weidenfeld exercise judgment on events already past (Arendt 1978, 192, 213, and 216; also see Kateb 2001, 126). What is startling about these conceptual distinctions that Arendt begins to draw is that they begin to crystallize into a hypostatized divide between spectators and actors. While Yar (2000, 2) has argued that Arendts work helps to illuminate the fundamental antinomy of judgment, which lies in the disjuncture between the perspective of the actor and the spectator, it may be better to see this divide as, in fact, an artifact of Arendts own thinking. If judgment is intellectual, if it requires a stop and think that includes an imagined dialogue with our community sense, if it is a matter of being disinterested, then judgment becomes a matter for spectators. Arendts surprising retention of Kants intellectualism makes it difficult for her to think the role of judgment in action; that is, Arendt begins to see judgment as a capacity exercised solely by those with the ability to stand apart and look back. Allow me to point out what this conceptual constellation and intellectualization of judgment lead Arendt to cover over, why this is also a misreading of judgment, and why the supposed antinomy of judgment may be only an artifact of Arendts misreading. Certainly, the picture provided by Arendts account of a spectator, who judges past events through explicit thinking, brings these judgments into imagined dialogue with other spectators, and then arrives at a final explicit and propositional stance on what has already happened, may seem to be a plausible account of certain moments of judgment. We can imagine, for instance, a situation where we reflect on the Iranian elections of 2009 and must reflect on whether these were legitimate. In a hard case like this, we might begin to look for a rule and characteristics of fair and free elections, consider it in a detached way, attempt to form a proposition, and, perhaps, think about what others would say about the case. These moments do tend to stand out; they capture the gaze of theoretical accounts of judgment for that reason. The problem is that, as authors such as Bourdieu (1977), Connolly (2002), Thiele (2006), and Dreyfus (1991) have shown, very little of our ethical, political, and aesthetic lives are taken up by these sorts of intellectual operations; instead, judgment tends to operate without engaging in the deliberate forms of reflection Arendt and Kant would lead us to expect. That is, they are not contemplative. Hubert Dreyfus (1991, 8) argues, We should try to impress on ourselves what a huge amount of our livesworking, getting around, talking, eating, driving, and responding to the needs of othersmanifest know-how, and what a small part is spent in the deliberate, effortful, subject/object mode of activity which requires knowing-that. Yet deliberate action and its extreme form, deliberation, are the ways of acting we tend to notice, and so are the only ones that have been studied in detail by philosophers.

Dreyfuss examples call to mind political and ethical judgments that have a difficult time appearing in an intellectualist account, such as Arendts, for instance, when one becomes enraged at anothers political position and begins to argue immediately, cringing in the face of shame, experiencing embarrassment over a friends comments in public and changing the subject quickly, or grabbing a nephews arm as he runs into traffic. These are ethico-political judgments that are not experienced as an ego, who judges an outside event, forms an explicit opinion about the event, and, then, begins a process of representative thinking. Perhaps Arendt would want to claim that these intellectual operations are what really or actually occur in these experiences (perhaps not), but the description of the phenomenon cannot bear this out; instead, one just changes the topic of conversation or grabs the nephew. It would appear to us that these practices involve judgment, but they do not appear in the manner of Arendts account, which retains Kants intellectualism. We must wonder if, at this level, judgment has a structure with which an intellectualist account cannot come to terms. Weidenfeld (2011) has argued that to make sense of these judgments an approach that understood judgment in terms of comportment would be necessary. The claim here is that a turn to the structure of comportments, such as the examples cited above, would help theorists to come to terms with the judgments that Arendts account seemingly overlookssuch as reacting angrily to the bigotry of anothers evaluation of a political candidate, grabbing ones nephews arm as he runs into traffic, shielding a friend from criticism by changing the topic of conversation because of her assumption that at some level judgment must be an intellectual and reflective matter, rooted ultimately in the life of the mind. The judgments discussed above would seem to be prereflective, but this is not a deficiency. Obviously, it is not a deficiency to know the proper disposition in these situations without reflection; without it, the bigot would walk away, the nephew would be harmed, the friend would be unduly criticized. Arendts account, though, does not bring these judgments into our view, and if it does, we are left to solve the puzzle of how these judgments actually or really rely on the spectatorial perspective she assumes. Now, Arendt was fully aware of a conceptualization of judgment that would focus on the practice of judging as it is engaged in by actors in concrete situations. Certainly Arendt, who was a close reader of Aristotles works, was aware of the possibility of a phenomenological examination of phronesis (prudence or practical wisdom) that

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10 proceeds by way of looking toward what the phronimos does.13 Arendt, though, is unable to make this move because of a hypostatized distinction she draws between thinking and acting. Judging becomes for Arendt a mental operation, which following Kant she ties to its claims to autonomy, but the cost here is the conceptual impossibility of tying this conceptualization back to action. The intellectualism Arendt takes on from Kant, despite her destructive interpretation on a number of other fronts, makes it difficult to bring judging as a practice into view and of conceptualizing the interrelation between the actor and the spectator. Now, Arendt may have been driven toward Kant and the distinction between the spectator and the actor for political reasons; after all, Arendt was well aware of the dangers of attaching judgment too closely to a form of acting within an ethos. A focus on judgment as tied to or as a form of practice might continue to locate the capacity under morals or ethics, and, as is well-known, Arendt (2003a, 43) wanted to avoid such a move because ethics and morals had become dangerously malleable under totalitarian governments. Nonetheless, despite her own misgivings concerning the malleability of an ethos and, in turn, our habits and customs, Arendt was aware that the contexts were inescapable dimensions of human being; that is, she was obviously aware that these habits and customs formed the context of our practices and the context for our daily life. Arendt (2005, 99) conceptualizes the content of our practices and these contexts as prejudices. The prejudices that we share, that we take to be self-evident, that we toss out in conversation without any lengthy explanations are, as already noted, themselves political in the broadest sense of the wordthat is, something that constitutes an integral part of those human affairs that are the context in which we go about our daily lives. These prejudices are the central context for our daily lives and, I might add, constitute the background for the judgments that actors make in the midst of lifes flow. It may be that Arendt has left a path to be followed in attempting to understand judgment as comportment through the lens of prejudice. Arendt, though, forecloses this possibility because she argues that these cannot be judgmentsthey do not operate in the intellectual manner she demands and, more important, they are normally recognized by their unabashed appeal to the authority of they say (Arendt 2005, 100). Arendt (2005, 100) claims that prejudice derives its authority from what they say and that it plays a major role in the social arena. Prejudice is ruled out as authentic judgment, even though it always conceals some previously formed judgment which had its own appropriate and

Political Research Quarterly XX(X) legitimate experiential basis because prejudice is a social as opposed to a political phenomenon. In fact, prejudice makes both judgment and genuine experience of the present impossible (Arendt 2005, 101). Most simply put, prejudice is aligned with the social where judgment is aligned with the political. And while Arendts concept of the social is notoriously difficult to unpack, her concern here is that the social and its overgrowth into the public realm have led not only to an atrophy of action but also to a crisis in culture and judgment (Arendt 1958, 38-50).14 The development of the social has left us with a mass of men distinguished by a capacity for consumption, accompanied by [an] inability to judge, or even to distinguish (Arendt 1968, 199). What is worse, with the growth of the social there has been an atrophy of common sense, the faculty we ordinarily rely on to get our bearings in the world (Beiner 1982, 95). This constriction in our scope of vision is a political problem for Arendt. She wants to know how judgment can operate authentically and independentlythat is, free from the bounds of what they sayand still maintain some ties to the world of men and their plurality of perspectives. Arendts (1978, 71) solution, as weve already seen, is to turn to Kant and conceptualize judgment as an intellectual operation. Kant seems to hold out the resources for conceptualizing judgment as both autonomousit relies on the criteria of the mind and not what they sayand tied to the conditions of politics because, according to her reading, its mental operation brings to mind plurality. What Arendt is looking for, then, is a context-independent way to judge beyond the norms of the social that is still attached to plurality. It is a faculty both of and removed from the world. The tension between these two demandsto be both of the world and withdrawn from the worldis obvious and is tied to both the misreading of Kant and the judgment that Arendt offers. The turn to Kant both leads to a misreading of his texts, because he does not supply the resources to tie judgment to an actually existing plurality of others in the way Arendt hopes, and leads to a misreading of judgment because she nonetheless retains from Kant an intellectualism that is unable to account for the phenomenological experience of judgment as a moment of practice. Perhaps, then, the divide between actor and spectator is not the antinomy of judgment but the antinomy of Arendts thought, which is driven by Arendts desire to understand judgment as a faculty both of the world and removed from it.

Conclusion
Political theorists have spent a good deal of effort diagnosing and, then, attempting to make their way through the aporia posed by the distinction between the actor and

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Weidenfeld the spectator via the resources of Arendts thought. I think we should begin to wonder, though, if this is truly an impasse on the way to judgment or an artifact of Arendts (mis)reading of the phenomenon. Perhaps the attempt to look at the phenomenon of judgment with eyes unclouded by intellectualism might provide a new path. Either way, the argument Ive offered here is that Arendts explicit reflections on judgment may not provide us with the resources to make our way through; in fact, Ive argued that Arendts reflections have pushed theorists toward a potential misreading of Kant and a misreading of judgment, which are intertwined. The present article set out on an admittedly negative path and, then, must end on a deflationary note. If this is the case, then perhaps one way to take up this antinomy of Arendts thought and make our way through this impasse is to take on Arendts example in at least one crucial respect; that is, it may be best to follow Arendt and be audacious in our approach to the divide between the actor and the spectator and a satisfactory account of judgment. A first step in this direction would be to say of Arendt, as she once claimed of Kant, that she never wrote a philosophy of judgment (Arendt 1982, 7). This may free theorists up for a destruction of her texts, a project in part taken up in the present article, or allow for a return to the phenomenon itself. At the very least, this admission may help us to realize the ways in which Arendt has clouded our own vision of judgment. Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 5.

11
and Arendts hands is a matter of reading texts to get to the phenomenal content that lies beneath the sedimentation of traditional concepts. Engaging in this interpretive process requires an attempt to move toward the phenomenal referent lying behind a set of concepts, and what the reader should keep in mind and what I hope to bring out throughout the article is the degree of violence involved in this interpretive strategy. Others have investigated and criticized Arendts appropriation of Kant. See, for instance, Dostal (1984), who argues that Kant is an inappropriate resource for the revival of common sense as Arendt wishes to understand it; Beiner (1982), who argues, as I do in depth, that Arendt underestimates the role of transcendental subjectivity in Kants thought; and Riley (1997), who argues that Arendts attempt to extend reflective judgments to claims such as this is beautiful, this is ugly, this is right, this is wrong is misguided because Kant would not allow that moral judgments could be reflective. Moral judgments are determined by concepts that are already given by reason for Kant; they are not reflective. More important, the claim to have found Kants political philosophy in the third Critique is misguided and is, quite clearly, contained in his explicit works of political philosophy. I agree with these analyses on a number of points and try to bear some of these claims out in the present article. Beyond this, what I show is that Arendts reading of Kant is tied to what can only seem to be a surprising result, given how destructive her reading is; that is, her destruction of Kants texts still retains a kernel of his thought that actually pushes her toward a misreading of judgment. Beiner (1982) and Villa (1999), to name only two, are sensitive to this problem as well. Beiner, though, tends to see the divide between the actor and the spectator to be a matter of the early versus late reflections of Arendt. The argument is that Arendts early thought placed emphasis on the active, engaged role of judgment, and her later thought came to see judgment as a theoretical capacity. While the texts do support Beiners reading to a point, the divide between the actor and the spectator is, I hope to show, implicit in all of Arendts reflections on judgment, and this is driven by her emphasis on Kant as the source for thinking about judgment. The requirement of formality is a thicket in Kant scholarship and the actual content of Kants argument a subject of much debate. See Allison (2001, chap. 6) on this matter. We, though, are licensed to move through this topic rather quickly given the fact that it does not form a central point of concern for Arendt. Readers of Arendt must keep in mind that even the assumption that common sense is the standard of reflective judgment is a controversial one, at least in that it stands opposed to other interpretations of Kants arguments. For instance, Allison (2001) argues that this standard or principle of reflective judgments of beauty lies in Kants arguments concerning purposiveness.

4.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes
1. One need make only a quick scan of the literature on political judgment to see the wide variety of authors who are either drawing on or responding to the work of Arendt. Alessandro Ferrara (2008) draws on Arendts discussion of exemplary validity to develop his own theory of judgment. Also see the essays in Beiner and Nedelsky (2001) for a sense of the range of approaches to Arendts work. 2. David L. Marshall (2010) has shown that Arendt was, in fact, influenced by a number of sources in her thinking about judgment, including, of course, Aristotle and Hegel, and came to Kant by way of Jasperss interpretations. 3. I refer to Arendts reading of Kant as a destruction to call to mind Heideggers (1962) method of textual interpretation in Being and Time and its close parallels with Arendts method of pearl diving. Destruction in Heidegger

6.

7.

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12
8. Arendts indeterminacy in regard to the concept of common sense may, in fact, be driven by Kants own text, where the concept is mentioned a number of times with seemingly little overlap and dubious results. More important, Arendt focuses on sections 3941 of the third Critique, but the concept is first mentioned in section 21 as a portion of Kants first attempt at a deduction. More important, as Guyer (1997, 249-50) has shown, Kant actually uses the phrase common sense in at least three different ways: First, he uses the term as a principle which allows one to regard a response as universal and necessary on the basis of ones own feeling. Second, he uses the term as if it referred to a feeling rather than a principle. Third, and finally, he writes [in section 40] as if the common sense were the faculty of taste itself. Ultimately, Guyer concludes that the concept is a needless complexity. 9. Arendt (1958, 283) is aware of and critical of these Kantian arguments. The interesting point here is that she ties these problems to Descartes, but never to Kant. For Common Sense, which once had been the one by which all other senses, with their intimately private sensations, were fitted into a common world, just as vision fitted man into a visible world, now became an inner faculty without any world relationship. This sense was now called common merely because it happened to be common to all. What men now have in common is not the world, but the structure of their minds. Perhaps Kant is more caught up in the scope of what Arendt calls the modern age than she was willing to recognize. 10. An anonymous reviewer for this journal has pointed out, quite rightly, that Arendts enlarged mentality does not ask what sensation others are actually having; instead, when one thinks from the standpoint of others representatively, one still thinks as ones own self. Nonetheless, Arendts position still relies on a taking into account of the opinions (dokei moi) of others that Kant would not allow. 11. Dana Villa (1999) offers a clear account of how the experience of totalitarianism led Arendt to place autonomy at the center of her account of judgment. 12. It is Arendts constant emphasis on the centrality of spectatorship to judgment that makes it difficult to see, as Beiner (1982) argues, an early and later theory of judgment in Arendt, where the early theory is agent centered and the later spectator or theory centered. As these passages show, throughout her reflections on judgment, Arendt gave a central role to those who watch. 13. The concept of phonesis, which can be roughly translated as prudence, circumspection, or practical wisdom and which points toward a concept of judgment, is from Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics (see esp. book 6). The phronimos is the practically wise person who acts in the right way, at the right time, and, in turn, discloses the situation for what it really is to all involved. To get a sense of what this might mean, notice how the truly funny person (who has a capacity for telling the right times and places for humor) makes the

Political Research Quarterly XX(X)

right joke, in the right way, at the right time. At her or his best, the funny person actually reveals a situation as a funny one in a way no one could have anticipated. The phronimos exercises this circumspective capacity in ethical and political matters, according to Aristotle. 14. For an excellent account of Arendts concept of the social and the difficulties it presents for comprehension, see Pitkin (2000).

References
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Weidenfeld
Dostal, Robert J. 1984. Judging Human Action: Arendts Appropriation of Kant. Review of Metaphysics 37:725-55. Dreyfus, Hubert. 1991. What Is Moral Maturity. http:// socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/rtf/Moral_Maturity_8_ 90.rtf. Ferrara, Alessandro. 2008. The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment. New York: Columbia University Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1999. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and David L. Marshall. New York: Continuum. Guyer, Paul. 1997. Kant and the Claims of Taste. New York: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: HarperCollins. Hermsen, Joke, and Dana Villa, eds. 1999. The Judge and the Spectator: Hannah Arendts Political Philosophy. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters. Kant, Immanuel. 1987. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Kateb, George. 2001. The Judgment of Arendt. In Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt, edited by Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky (pp. 121-138). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Marshall, David L. 2010. The Origin and Character of Arendts Theory of Judgment. Political Theory 38:367-93. Norris, Andrew. 1996. Arendt, Kant, and the Politics of Common Sense. Polity 29:165-91. Pitkin, Hanna. 1998. The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendts Concept of the Social. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Riley, Patrick. 1997. Hannah Arendt on Kant, Truth, and Politics. In Essays on Kants Political Philosophy, edited by Howard Williams (pp. 305-323). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thiele, Lelsie Paul. 2006. The Heart of Judgment: Practical Wisdom, Neuroscience, and Narrative. New York: Cambridge University Press. Villa, Dana. 1992. Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of Political Action. Political Theory 20:274-308. Villa, Dana. 1999. Thinking and Judging. In The Judge and the Spectator: Hannah Arendts Political Philosophy, edited by Joke Hermsen and Dana Villa (pp. 9-28). Leuven, Belgium: Peeters. Weidenfeld, Matthew. 2011. Comportment, Not Cognition: Toward an Phenomenology of Judgment. Contemporary Political Theory 10:232-54. Yar, Majid. 2000. From Actor to Spectator: Hannah Arendts Two Theories of Political Judgment. Philosophy and Social Criticism 26:1-27. Zerilli, Linda. 2005. We Feel Our Freedom: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Hannah Arendt. Political Theory 33:158-88.

Bio
Matthew C. Weidenfeld is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Elon University. His interests lie at the intersection of phenomenology and ancient Greek political thought, and, most recently, his research has centered on judgment. His work has recently appeared in Contemporary Political Theory and the European Journal of Political Theory.

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