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From actor to spectator Hannah

Arendts two theories of
political judgment

Article in Philosophy & Social Criticism March 2000

DOI: 10.1177/019145370002600201

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Majid Yar

From actor to spectator

Hannah Arendts two theories of
political judgment

Abstract The question of judgment has become one of the central

problems in recent social, political and ethical thought. This paper explores
Hannah Arendts decisive contribution to this debate by attempting to
reconstruct analytically two distinctive perspectives on judgment from the
corpus of her writings. By exploring her relation to Aristotelian and Kantian
sources, and by uncovering debts and parallels to key thinkers such as
Benjamin and Heidegger, it is argued that Arendts work pinpoints the key
antinomy within political judgment itself, that between the viewpoints of
the political actor and the political spectator. The paper concludes by high-
lighting some lacunae and difficulties in the development of Arendts
account, difficulties that set challenges for those theorists (such as Seyla
Benhabib and Alessandro Ferrara) who wish to appropriate and extend
Arendts contribution into the field of contemporary critical theory.
Key words action aesthetics community freedom history judgment
reflection

Introduction

In recent years the problem of judgment has emerged (or re-emerged)

as a central issue for a wide range of discourses in the humanities and
social sciences. It has become increasingly apparent that disputes in the
domains of aesthetics, ethics, political theory, law and rationality are
intimately bound up with the nature, capacities and limits of the human
faculty of judgment (Caygill 1988, 1989).1 In particular, differing
accounts of judgment have been enlisted by advocates of competing

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 26 no 2 pp. 127

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Copyright 2000 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2)
positions in debates around postmodern epistemology, knowledge and
ethics (for example, the HabermasLyotard debate).2 In current discus-
sions, one of the major resources has been Aristotles account of judg-
ment (as phronsis) elaborated in Book VI of the Ethics. However, even
more prominent has been the attention accorded to Kants Critique of
Judgment. In the writings of Hannah Arendt both thinkers were
brought into contiguity (and conflict) as she attempted to develop an
account of judgment as a quintessentially political faculty. One of the
most compelling features of Arendts encounter with the problem of
judgment is that it seems to yield not one but two accounts of what it
means to judge politically, and to judge well. By exploring this duality
I wish to show not that Arendt failed to resolve a tension that admits
of resolution, but that her work highlights what is perhaps the funda-
mental antinomy of judgment qua political faculty, that between the
actor and the spectator, between the one who judges to secure the
future, and the one who judges to redeem the past.
To attempt an exposition of Arendts insights into the problem of
political judgment is to run headlong into a number of difficulties. First
among these is that (as Richard Bernstein asserts, contrary to many of
her critics) Arendt is in fact a systematic thinker, in that her views on
a particular theme or issue can be understood only with reference to a
systematic web of concepts that inform and condition each other.3 Hence
her reflections on judgment cannot be understood apart from her highly
distinctive and elaborate theory of politics and action, and her historico-
philosophical critique of the modern age and its diremption of tradition.
Consequently, the first section of this paper will outline (albeit rather
schematically and cursorily) some of the most salient features of Arendts
political philosophy. A second difficulty arises once we realize (again
contrary to commentators such as dEntrves) that Arendts two theo-
ries of judgment do not fall neatly into distinct expositions corre-
sponding to her earlier and later works, nor do they correspond in any
clear-cut way with distinctive philosophical sources. Rather, her concern
with the judgment of actors and of spectators often (and sometimes per-
plexingly) intertwines throughout her writings, as do the two main
philosophical sources she draws upon, namely Aristotle and Kant
(further confused by Arendts highly idiosyncratic readings of both
thinkers, which seem to attempt a reconciliation that at times seems
inappropriate or merely confused). The task here, then, is to try ana-
lytically to separate out the two distinctive views on judgment which
inhabit Arendts work rather like Siamese twins one is never quite sure
where one ends and the other begins. This exegetical difficulty is further
compounded by the fact that Arendts reflections on judgment exist for
the most part in fragmentary form, as asides, sub-sections or excurses
within texts whose primary focus is elsewhere. Her only writings which

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Yar: From actor to spectator
concentrate on the problem of judgment exist in the form of lecture notes
for the course on Kants political philosophy which she gave at the New
School for Social Research in 1970 (these notes were posthumously pub-
lished as Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy). A volume on Judging,
which was to have been the third and concluding part of The Life of the
Mind, remained unwritten at the time of her death (the title page, con-
taining two epigraphs, one from Cato and the other from Goethe, was
found in her typewriter shortly thereafter). In the Kant Lectures Arendt
attempted to explicate what she believed to be Kants unwritten politi-
cal philosophy, a philosophy to be found not in his explicitly political
writings but implicitly in the Third Critique. Ironically, the Arendt
student or scholar is placed in a somewhat analogous position by having
to attempt to reconstruct Arendts (partly) unwritten philosophy of judg-
ment. However, there is sufficient reason to treat the Kant Lectures as a
template or preliminary draft for what would have been Arendts
mature and concluding reflections on judgment;4 given the contribution
that such a theory might make to current debates, a certain speculative
licence would appear warranted.

The vita activa versus the vita contemplativa

As already noted, Arendts reflections on judgment cannot be understood
apart from her political philosophy. This philosophy (at least in earlier
works, most especially The Human Condition) was fundamentally con-
cerned with the problem of reasserting the value of politics as part of the
realm of human action, praxis, and the world of appearances. Arendt
argues that the Western philosophical tradition has devalued the world
of human action which attends to appearances (the vita activa), subordi-
nating it to the life of contemplation which concerns itself with essences
and the eternal (the vita contemplativa). The prime culprit here is Plato,
whose metaphysics subordinates action and appearances to the eternal
realm of the Ideas.5 With the allegory of the Cave in The Republic begins
our tradition of political philosophy; here Plato describes the world of
human affairs in terms of shadows and darkness, and instructs those who
aspire to truth to turn away from it in favour of the clear sky of eternal
ideas.6 With the instantiation of this metaphysical hierarchy, theria is
placed above praxis and epistm over mere doxa. The realm of action
and appearance (including the political) is subordinated to and becomes
instrumental for the ends of the Ideas as revealed to the philosopher who
lives the bios theretikos. In The Human Condition and subsequent
works, the task Arendt set herself is to save the realm of action and
appearance, and with it the common life of the political and the values
of opinion, from the depredations of the philosophers. By systematically

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2)
elaborating what this vita activa might be said to entail, she hopes to rein-
state the life of public and political action at the apex of human goods
and goals.

The vita activa : labour, work and action

In The Human Condition Arendt argues for a tripartite division between
the human activities of labour, work and action. Moreover, she arranges
these activities in an ascending hierarchy of importance, and identifies
the overturning of this hierarchy as central to the eclipse of political
freedom and responsibility which, for her, came to characterize the
modern age. I shall proceed by (1) briefly considering the activities of
labour and work, and noting their place in human social and political
affairs, and (2) exploring the realm of action which for Arendt is central
to the constitution of freedom and the political, and which both requires
and entails the faculty of political judgment.

Labour: humanity as animal laborans

Labour is basically that activity which corresponds to the biological pro-
cesses and necessities of human existence, the practices which are neces-
sary for the maintenance of life itself.7 Labour is distinguished by its
never-ending character; it creates nothing of permanence, its efforts are
quickly consumed, and must therefore be perpetually renewed so as to
sustain life.8 In this aspect of their existence humans are closest to the
animals and so, in a significant sense, the least human (What men [sic]
share with all other forms of animal life was not considered to be
human9). Indeed, Arendt refers to humans in this mode as animal lab-
orans. Because the activity of labour is commanded by necessity, the
human as labourer is the equivalent of the slave; labour is characterized
by unfreedom. Arendt argues that it is precisely the recognition of labour
as contrary to freedom and thus to what is distinctively human which
underlay the institution of slavery amongst the ancient Greeks; it was
the attempt to exclude labour from the conditions of human life.10 In
view of this characterization of labour, it is unsurprising that Arendt is
highly critical of Marxs elevation of animal laborans to a position of
primacy in his vision of the highest ends of human existence.11 Drawing
on the Aristotelian distinction of the oikos (the private realm of the
household) from the polis (the public realm of the political community),
Arendt argues that matters of labour, economy and the like properly
belong to the former, not the latter.12 The emergence of labouring neces-
sity, the private concerns of the oikos, into the public sphere (what

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Yar: From actor to spectator
Arendt calls the rise of the social) has for her the effect of destroying
the properly political by subordinating the public realm of human
freedom to the concerns of mere animal necessity. The prioritization of
the economic which has attended the rise of capitalism has for Arendt
all but eclipsed the possibilities of meaningful political agency and the
pursuit of higher ends which should be the proper concern of public
life.13 (This concern reappears in the work of a number of subsequent
thinkers; for example, Habermas critique of the reduction of politics to
a steering mechanism for the economy.)

Work: humanity as homo faber

If labour relates to the natural and biologically necessitated dimension
of human existence, then work is the activity which corresponds to the
unnaturalness of human existence, which is not embedded in, and whose
mortality is not compensated by, the species ever-recurring life-cycle.14
Work (as both techn and poiesis) corresponds to the fabrication of an
artificial world of things, artifactual constructions that endure tempo-
rally beyond the act of creation itself. Work thus creates a world distinct
from anything given in nature, a world distinguished by its durability,
its semi-permanence and relative independence from the individual
actors and acts which call it into being.15 The human in this mode of
activity Arendt names homo faber; he/she is the builder of walls (both
physical and cultural) which divide the human realm from that of nature
and provide a stable context (a common world) of spaces and insti-
tutions within which human life can unfold.16 Homo fabers typical rep-
resentatives are the builder, the architect, the craftsperson, the artist and
the legislator, as they create the public world both physically and insti-
tutionally by constructing buildings and making laws.17
It should be clear that work stands in clear distinction from labour
in a number of ways. First, whereas labour is bound to the demands of
animality, biology and nature, work violates the realm of nature by
shaping and transforming it according to the plans and needs of humans;
this makes work a distinctly human (i.e. non-animal) activity.18 Second,
because work is governed by human ends and intentions it is under
human sovereignty and control, and it exhibits a certain quality of
freedom, unlike labour which is subject to nature and necessity.19 Third,
whereas labour is concerned with satisfying the individuals life-needs
and so remains essentially a private affair, work is inherently public; it
creates an objective and common world which both stands between
humans and unites them.20 While work is not the mode of human activ-
ity that corresponds to politics, its fabrications are nonetheless the pre-
conditions for the existence of a political community. The common

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2)
world of institutions and spaces that work creates furnishes the arena in
which citizens may come together as members of that shared world to
engage in political activity.21 In Arendts critique of modernity the world
created by homo faber is threatened with extinction by the afore-
mentioned rise of the social (see p. 5). The activity of labour and the
consumption of its fruits, which have come to dominate the public
sphere, cannot furnish a common world within which humans might
pursue their higher ends. Labour and its effects are inherently imperma-
nent and perishable, exhausted as they are consumed, and so do not
possess the qualities of quasi-permanence which are necessary for a
shared environment and a common heritage that endure between people
and across time.22 In industrial modernity all the values characteristic
of the world of fabrication permanence, stability, durability . . . are
sacrificed in favour of the values of life, productivity and abundance.23
The rise of animal laborans threatens the extinction of homo faber, and
with it comes the passing of those worldly conditions which make a com-
munitys collective and public life possible (a passing that Arendt refers
to as world alienation).

Action: humanity as zoon politikon

So, the activity of labour meets the needs essential for the maintenance
of humans physical existence, but by virtue of its necessary quality
occupies the lowest rung on the hierarchy of the vita activa. Then work,
which is a distinctly human (i.e. non-animal) activity, fabricates the
enduring, public and common world of our collective existence.
However, Arendt is at great pains to establish that homo fabers activ-
ity does not equate with the realm of human freedom and so cannot
occupy the privileged apex of the human condition. For work is still
subject to a certain kind of necessity, that which arises from its essen-
tially instrumental character. As techn and poiesis the act is dictated
by and subordinated to ends and goals outside itself; work is essentially
a means to achieve the thing which is to be fabricated (be it a work of
art, a building or a structure of legal relations) and so stands in a rela-
tion of mere purposiveness to that end.24 (Again it is Plato who stands
accused of the instrumentalization of action, of its conflation with
fabrication and subordination to an external teleology as prescribed by
his metaphysical system.25) For Arendt, the activity of work cannot be
fully free insofar as it is not an end in itself, but is determined by prior
causes and articulated ends.26 The quality of freedom in the world of
appearances (which for Arendt is the sine qua non of politics) is to be
found elsewhere in the vita activa, namely with the activity of action
proper.

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Yar: From actor to spectator
The fundamental defining quality of action is its ineliminable
freedom, its status as an end in itself and so as subordinate to nothing
outside itself. Arendt argues that it is a mistake to take freedom to be
primarily an inner, contemplative or private phenomenon, for it is in fact
active, worldly and public. Our sense of an inner freedom is derivative
upon first having experienced a condition of being free as a tangible
worldly reality. We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our
intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.27 In defin-
ing action as freedom, and freedom as action, we can see the decisive
influence of Augustine upon Arendts thought.28 From Augustines politi-
cal philosophy she takes the theme of human action as beginning:
To act, in its most general sense, means to take initiative, to begin (as the
Greek word archein, to begin, to lead, and eventually to rule indicates),
to set something in motion. Because they are initium, newcomers and begin-
ners by virtue of birth, men take initiative, are prompted into action.29
And further, that freedom is to be seen:
. . . as a character of human existence in the world. Man does not so much
possess freedom as he, or better his coming into the world, is equated with
the appearance of freedom in the universe; man is free because he is a begin-
ning.30
In short, the human being represents/articulates/embodies the faculty of
beginning. It follows from this equation of freedom, action and begin-
ning that freedom is an accessory of doing and acting;31 Men are free
. . . as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act
are the same.32 This capacity for initiation gives actions the character
of singularity and uniqueness, as it is in the nature of beginning that
something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever hap-
pened before.33 So, intrinsic to the human capacity for action is the
introduction of genuine novelty, the unexpected, unanticipated and
unpredictable into the world:
The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws
and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts
to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.34
This miraculous, initiatory quality distinguishes genuine action from
mere behaviour, i.e. from conduct which has an habituated, regulated,
automatized character; behaviour falls under the determinations of
process, is thoroughly conditioned by causal antecedents, and so is
essentially unfree.35 The definition of human action in terms of freedom
and novelty places it outside the realm of necessity or predictability.
Herein lies the basis of Arendts quarrel with Hegel and Marx, for to
define politics or the unfolding of history in terms of any teleology or
immanent or objective process is to deny what is central to authentic

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2)
human action, namely its capacity to initiate the wholly new, unantici-
pated, unexpected, and unconditioned by the laws of cause and effect36
(this emphasis on action as singular and unique has, as we shall later see,
a central bearing on how Arendt comes to understand the problem of
judgment, i.e. that it necessitates attendance to particularity which
cannot be subsumed under universals or antecedents).
In her philosophy of action Arendt clearly enjoys a proximity to
German existentialist thought. Similar themes of the freedom of action
and its opposition to necessity are central in the thought of both
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, as well as echoing in the work of Arendts
two most influential teachers, namely Jaspers and Heidegger.37 Indeed,
Martin Jay (drawing on Arendts 1946 essay What is Existenz Philo-
sophy?) has argued that she is a political existentialist who, in seeking
the greatest possible autonomy for action, falls into the danger of aes-
theticizing action and advocating decisionism.38 He seeks to connect
Arendts theory of action not just with the thought of Heidegger, but
with the agonistic decisionism of reactionary thinkers such as Carl
Schmitt, Ernst Jnger and Alfred Bumler.39 However, as both
dEntrves (The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt) and Bernstein
(Hannah Arendt) argue, such an interpretation of the political valency
of Arendts theory is unconvincing. Political existentialism lays great
stress on individual will and on decision as an act of existential choice
unconstrained by principles or norms.40 In contradistinction, Arendts
theory holds that actions cannot be justified for their own sake, but only
in light of their public recognition and the shared rules of a political com-
munity.41 For Arendt, action is a public category, a worldly practice that
is experienced in our intercourse with others, and so is a practice that
both presupposes and can be actualised only in a human polity.42 As
Arendt puts it:
Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men . . . corresponds
to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on
the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition
are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition
not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam of all politi-
cal life.43

Another way of understanding the importance of publicity and plu-

rality for action is to appreciate that action would be meaningless unless
there were others present to see it and so give meaning to it. The meaning
of the action and the identity of the actor can be established only in the
context of human plurality, the presence of others sufficiently like our-
selves both to understand us and to recognize the uniqueness of our-
selves and our acts.44 This communicative and disclosive quality of
action is clear in the way that Arendt connects action most centrally to

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Yar: From actor to spectator
speech. It is through action as speech that individuals come to disclose
their distinctive identity: Action is the public disclosure of the agent in
the speech deed.45 Action of this character requires a public space in
which it can be realized, a context in which individuals can encounter
one another as members of a community.46 For this space, as for much
else, Arendt turns to the ancients, holding up the Athenian polis as the
model for such a space of communicative and disclosive speech deeds.47
Such action is for Arendt synonymous with the political; politics is the
ongoing activity of citizens coming together so as to exercise their capa-
city for agency, to conduct their lives together by means of free speech
and persuasion.48 Politics and the exercise of freedom-as-action are one
and the same:
. . . freedom . . . is actually the reason that men live together in political
organizations at all. Without it, political life as such would be meaningless.
The raison dtre of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is
action.49

Political action as judgment

So, freedom and action are one; such action is public, taking place
between humans in a common space; it proceeds via speech and so is
communicative; as politics it takes the form of coming to shared under-
standings about who we are, and what our world is and should be like.
As free-acting members of a political community we seek to impress and
persuade each other through speech and deed; at the same time we listen
to others and make ourselves available to persuasion, we evaluate and
weigh the meaning and quality of others words, acts and propositions
in short we are called upon to judge and be judged.
For Arendt, the practice of political judgment by actors comprises
the formation, clarification and testing of opinions through free and
open communication and persuasion between individuals who enjoy the
formal status of equals within the political community or polis.50 It is
important to stress that for Arendt political life is precisely concerned
with establishing sound opinions and evaluations (what the Greeks
called endoxos, that which is both accepted and reputable), not with
establishing philosophical truth (epistm). The philosophical tradition,
starting with Plato, fails to recognize that the political is the realm of an
ineliminable plurality of opinions, and of distinctive and unique worldly
actions and appearances (pp. 78, above). It makes the fateful error of
trying to subordinate politics to the abstract and universal categories of
truth, a subsumption which does violence to the plurality and unique-
ness of the world of appearances.51 Thus Arendts endorsement of polit-
ical judgment qua opinion is consonant with her aim of rescuing the

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2)
credibility of the world of appearances and actions from its prob-
lematization at the hands of the philosophers and metaphysicians.52
Before going on to elaborate Arendts account of political judgment
as exercised by actors, it is worth making a further elaboration as
regards the need for such communities of judgment when dealing with
the realm of political action. As I have already noted, (p. 7 above) action
is distinguished by its freedom from necessity, including that of prior
causes and of mere instrumentality for intended ends. Whereas work as
fabrication is undertaken so as to produce something that endures
beyond the execution, action is not. Action is its own end and so pro-
duces nothing that outlasts it. Here Arendt draws upon the Aristotelian
notion of energia (actuality) with which he designated all activities that
do not pursue an end (are ateleis) and leave no work behind (no par
auta erga), but exhaust their full meaning in the performance itself.53 It
is this quality of action that leads Arendt to equate politics with the per-
forming (as opposed to the plastic) arts; both leave no artifacts behind.54
Consequently, political action is haunted by its finitude, its transience,
its fading from the world of human existence and experience. Its only
chance for survival lies in the remembrance of those who witness it; the
greatness, goodness and beauty of actions can endure in the world only
when there is a community (audience) to watch, evaluate, understand
and remember55 (what dEntrves refers to as communities of memory).
What the polis provided was precisely such a space of organised remem-
brance wherein the mortality of actors and the fragility of human deeds
could be partially overcome.56
Returning more specifically to the faculty of political judgment (as
persuasion and opinion formation) exercised by actors, Arendt gives her
most detailed philosophical exposition in the 1961 essay The Crisis in
Culture: Its Social and Political Significance. Here she argues that the only
way that political opinions can be formed in the context of a community
is by discussion and persuasion. Thus opinion formation requires each
member of the community to attend to the opinions of others; and there
is no test for the adequacy of an opinion, no authority for judging it, other
than the force of the better public argument.57 It is only by listening to
the plurality of opinions offered by others, exercising the imagination
necessary to represent other viewpoints to ourselves, and communi-
catively submitting them to testing and evaluation, that political judgment
may be exercised.58 It is at this point that Arendt embarks on a very un-
usual (not to say contentious) reading of Kants Critique of Judgment. She
argues that despite its ostensible concern with matters of taste (i.e. beauty)
the Third Critique in fact contains perhaps the greatest and most orig-
inal aspect of Kants political philosophy.59 Basically, Arendt takes Kants
account for the universalizability of subjective aesthetic judgments of taste
as the model for the formation of valid political judgments qua opinion

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Yar: From actor to spectator
in an actual political community. Arendt finds the necessary support for
this in Kants notions of the judges capacity to think from the standpoint
of everyone else via an enlarged mentality (eine erwerterte Den-
kungsart);60 the notion of taste as a kind of sensus communis;61 and the
notion of judgment as requiring ones liberation from subjective private
conditions.62 For Arendt this account implies that judgment proceeds on
a collective or communal basis. Judgment requires others to fulfil its con-
ditions of validity it needs the presence of others in whose place it
must think, whose perspectives it must take into consideration, and
without whom it never has the opportunity to operate at all.63
Kants account has a particular appeal for Arendt because, first, it
deals with the judgment not of the objects of theoretical reason, but of
the empirical which gives itself to the senses in the world of appearances.
Second, because it recognizes that matters of taste/opinion are subjective
and so plural, particular and the subject of dispute and difference. And
third, despite this subjectivity and plurality, which imply an irresolvable
dissensus or even arbitrariness with respect to such judgments, Kant
nevertheless finds a universalizing basis for them, giving judgments of
taste a public quality.64 In short, for Arendt, Kantian aesthetic judgment
is neither private opinion (with its irresolvable dissensus), nor the coer-
cive universality of cognitive reason or truth; it is a mode of thinking
which is capable of dealing with the particular in its particularity but
which nevertheless makes the claim to communal validity.65 But such
validity is not the imposition of a single standard which compels assent
or final agreement. Rather, judgments of taste/opinion are persuasive,
and the judging person can only, as Kant puts it, woo the consent of
everyone else in the hope of coming to an agreement eventually.66 So,
on the basis of the Critique of Judgment Arendt arrives at an account of
judgment as a political faculty which construes it as public, inter-
subjective, communicative, persuasive, empirically/phenomenally ori-
ented, ineliminably plural yet nevertheless tending towards a certain
universality.
Arendts first theory of political judgment, that which concerns
actors within a political community, rests on what Bernstein wryly
describes as an imaginative interpretation of the history of philosophy67
(I shall return to consider the adequacy or otherwise of her interpretation
of Kant). However, Arendt is not done in surprising us with her imagi-
native interpretations. In The Crisis in Culture she goes on to equate
the subjective necessity, the ought implied in Kantian judgments of taste,
with the Aristotelian concept of rhetoric as persuasive discourse.68
Indeed, she takes the capacity of political judgment as modelled on Kant
(representative thinking from the standpoint of others, thinking in terms
of a common sense, etc.) as synonymous with the practical capacity for
insight or phronsis as elaborated by Aristotle.69 As Benhabib, dEntrves

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2)
and numerous others have noted, the prima-facie implausibility of this
attempted synthesis constitutes a philosophical perplexity.70 After all, the
Aristotelian tradition emphasizes context and narrative-bound particu-
lars71 and, as Gadamer stresses, its concept of judgment-as-phronsis pre-
supposes an already existing ethos (norms, values and a substantive vision
of the good) which becomes the basis for the interpretation of particu-
lars.72 The Kantian model of reflective judgment, on the other hand,
eschews all such reference to the context-bounded values of a particular
community, and instead enjoins us abstractly to think from the place of
others.73 For Kant, the common ground for the universalizability of a
judgment lies not in what we might share as members of an ethical or
political community, but in what we share by virtue of being human at
all, namely the common functioning of the faculties of the understanding
and imagination; this is a purely formal unity devoid of any substantive
content, a unity which ultimately converges on the supersensible realm.74
How are we to understand Arendts attempt to unite these divergent
positions in a common framework? I would argue that the juxtaposition
of Aristotelian and Kantian models arises out of Arendts attempts to
address simultaneously not one, but two distinct concepts of action, of
the political, and attendant modalities of judgment. In the foregoing
exposition of Arendts theory of action one can see that the definition of
action oscillates between expressive and communicative poles. On the
one hand, it serves to disclose the uniqueness of action and identity to
others who effectively function as an audience; on the other, it is ori-
ented to communication, persuasion and the generation of shared under-
standings amongst members of the polis.75 Both these definitions of
action seem to run together in Arendts theory. The former, expressive
conception lends itself to an agonal or heroic conception of politics;
political actions are oriented to a virtuosity and greatness which will be
judged approvingly in the eyes of the community and so be preserved in
memory and narrative, granted a certain immortality.76 The latter,
communicative conception yields a model of politics which is basically
consensual and accommodative, a kind of participatory decision-making
we have come to associate above all with the tradition of civic repub-
licanism. And these two conceptions of politics map onto her treatment
of the problem of judgment, resulting in two distinct axes: judgment
from the perspective of the political actor, and judgment from the per-
spective of the political spectator. The communicative-accommodational
model of political action constitutes judgment as a problem of achiev-
ing shared and generally valid understandings on matters of public inter-
est; this serves to help coordinate the life of a community in a way in
which members enjoy the maximum degree of freedom and agency. It is
a future-oriented mode of judgment concerned with the not yet of
human existence. The expressive-agonal model constitutes judgment as

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Yar: From actor to spectator
a problem of evaluating the quality of acts already performed, of estab-
lishing the virtues and character of the agents who perform them, and
ultimately of preserving the beauty, greatness, or pathos of acts and
actors so that they may not perish altogether from the world of humans.
This is a mode of judgment which turns its face to the past, to the no
longer of deeds done and lives lived so as to consecrate them in the col-
lective memory of a community.
Each of the two modes of judgment outlined above enjoys varying
degrees of prominence in the course of Arendts writings. In some
(especially the earlier) writings the faculty of judgment apropos the actor
takes precedence (cf. The Crisis in Culture and On Revolution). It is
this public, consensual, discursive mode that I have sought to explicate
in my consideration of the vita activa. In her later writings judgment as
the purview of the spectator (especially the historian and storyteller)
takes centre stage (cf. the Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy, and
the Life of the Mind). It is in these later works, undertaken from the
perspective of the vita contemplativa, that Arendt furnishes her
most detailed account of judgment as a political faculty and provides her
most challenging exploration of the Critique of Judgment as a political
philosophy.

Judgment and the actor: a brief excursus on its influence

Before proceeding to explore in detail Arendts second theory of judg-
ment apropos the spectator, I would briefly like to dwell upon the
important influence that the communicative-consensual model of judg-
ment has exercised upon a number of thinkers. Undoubtedly the most
important of these is Jrgen Habermas, who admits the formative influ-
ence of Arendts model upon his own theory of communicative reason
and discourse ethics. Particularly important is the way in which Arendt
comes to understand power, namely as the capacity to agree in un-
coerced communication on some community action.77 Her model of
action as public, communicative, persuasive and consensual reappears
in Habermas thought in concepts such as that of communicative power
which comes about whenever members of a life-world act in concert via
the medium of language.78 It also reappears in his critique of the scien-
tisation of politics and his concomitant defence of practical, normative
reason in the domain of life-world relations from the hegemony of theor-
etical and technical modes of reasoning.79 An even more direct influence
upon one of the most notable contemporary critical theorists is evinced
in the reformulation of discourse ethics undertaken by Seyla Benhabib.
Benhabib draws explicitly and extensively upon Arendts account of
political judgment to save discourse ethics from its own universalist

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2)
excesses; Arendts attention to the particular, concrete, unique and lived
phenomena of human life furnishes Benhabib with a strong corrective
for Habermas tendency for abstraction, while nonetheless preserving
the project of a universalizing vision of ethical-political life.80 I mention
these influences here so as to draw attention to some of the ways in
which Arendts first theory of political judgment has provided a rich
vein of ideas for a number of the most significant interventions in recent
social and political theory.

Judgment and the spectator: reflection and the life of the

mind
As Hutchings notes, philosophy (and the vita contemplativa as a whole)
has an ambiguous status in Arendts thought, standing both accused and
excused.81 On the one hand the apotheosis of the contemplative life as
the highest form of human existence (cf. Plato) is blamed for the den-
igration of the world of action, appearance and political life. But on the
other hand, philosophy seems to be entrusted with the project of mod-
ernitys salvation is not Arendt herself a philosopher who seeks, with
her diagnosis of the crises of modernity, to intervene in this decline and
so help redeem the possibility of a more humane, just and free form of
life? In her essay Tradition and the Modern Age (1961) Arendt approv-
ingly cites Marx as one of the harbingers of the end of our tradition of
philosophy; with his pronouncement that philosophy and truth do not
stand apart from and above human existence but emanate from the
world of humans, and find their realization therein, he effectively inverts
the hierarchy of thought over action, contemplation over labour, and
philosophy over politics which had stood from Plato onwards.82 Yet in
rescuing politics from the philosophers Arendt finds herself in need of
rescue, for what role remains for the political philosopher? With her
writing from the 1960s onwards starting with her famous account of
the Eichmann trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of
Evil (1963) Arendt begins to find a role for philosophy in respect of
political life.83 And this role casts the philosopher as spectator (story-
teller, narrator and historian) whose task it becomes to stand apart from
the practical life of humans that he/she might pass judgment upon it.
It can be fairly stated that covering the Eichmann trial brought
Arendt most ineluctably into confrontation with the crisis or aporia of
judgment. In judging Eichmann (and one must judge, one is always
already judging), Arendt confronts the question: on what basis can one
judge the unprecedented, the incredible, the monstrous which defies our
established understandings and experiences? It will be recalled that in
human action Arendt recognizes (for good or ill) the capacity to bring

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Yar: From actor to spectator
the new, unexpected and unanticipated into the world. This quality of
action means that it constantly threatens to defy or exceed our existing
categories of understanding or judgment; precedents and rules cannot
help us judge properly what is unprecedented and new. (It is precisely
for this reason that from relatively early in her writings she eschews a
judgment that subsumes particulars under universals in favour of Kants
model which is not determinate, but instead proceeds from the particu-
lar for which a rule must be found.) So for Arendt, our categories and
standards of thought are always beset by their potential inadequacy with
respect to that which they are called upon to judge. However, this aporia
of judgment reaches a crisis point in the 20th century under the repeated
impact of its monstrous and unprecedented events. The mass destruction
of two world wars, the development of technologies which threaten
global annihilation, the rise of totalitarianism, and the murder of mil-
lions in the Nazi death camps and Stalins purges have effectively
exploded our existing standards for moral and political judgment.84 Tra-
dition lies in shattered fragments around us and the very framework
within which understanding and judging could arise is gone.85 The
shared bases of understanding, handed down to us in our tradition, seem
irretrievably lost. If we are to think and judge at all, it must now be
without preconceived categories and . . . without the set of customary
rules which is morality;86 it must be thinking without a banister. In
order to secure the possibility of such judgment Arendt must establish
that there in fact exists an independent human faculty, unsupported by
law and public opinion, that judges anew in full spontaneity every deed
and intent whenever the occasion arises.87 This for Arendt comes to rep-
resent one of the central moral questions of all time, namely . . . the
nature and function of human judgment.88 It is with this goal and this
question in mind that the work of Arendts final years converges on the
unwritten political philosophy of Kants Critique of Judgment.
It is impossible (and hopefully unnecessary) to provide here a
detailed exegesis of Kants account of aesthetic reflective judgment which
he offers in the Analytic of the Beautiful of the Critique of Judgment.
However, what I will attempt to do is to give the lineaments of Arendts
reading of Kant which feature in the Kant Lectures, so as to bring to
light how she attempts to rescue the faculty of political judgment from
the collapse of tradition, and with it a role for the philosopher as spec-
tator and storyteller.
Kant embarks upon the Critique of Judgment faced with a perplexity
regarding aesthetic judgment which parallels that which confronts Arendt
with respect to the moral and political namely, such judgments would
seem to proceed with reference to particulars without any universal basis,
rule, or concept to guide them.89 If each act of judgment is specific, and
so literally incomparable, then it would imply that there can be no general

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2)
validity for judgments which could hold for all people judgments of taste
(or politics/morality for Arendt) would be purely subjective, idiosyncratic
and ultimately arbitrary. If this were the case then there would literally be
no disputing over matters of taste (de gustibus non est disputandum).
The possibility of judgments commanding any kind of common assent, or
enjoying any kind of public validity, would be lost.
Yet Kant notes that despite their seemingly subjective character,
judgments of taste imply a certain universality in judging something to
be beautiful I feel as if that thing were objectively beautiful (that beauty
was a property of the thing itself, and not merely my private response
to it), and so that all others ought to feel as I do when confronted with
this thing. Now Kant argues that such instances of judgment do not
connect the predicate of beauty with the concept of the object but
extend that predicate over the entire sphere of judging persons.90 In
other words, the quality of necessity which attends a subjective judgment
of taste is one which demands that this same judgment should hold true
of all others who judge (i.e. it claims an exemplary validity). For Kant
this demand for universal assent intimates that all individuals in fact
possess a common sense of taste, i.e. that aesthetic judgments rest upon
a response of the human faculties (specifically the imagination and the
understanding) to a sensation which holds for all subjects, hence the con-
viction that the judgment is a necessary one.91 The important upshot of
this for Arendt is that Kant finds in the judgment of particulars, which
is not compelled by a rule that determines it, the operation of a faculty
(a shared sensibility) which extends across individuals and so holds out
the possibility of the public validity of such judgments.
However, for Kant the arrival at a universally valid judgment of taste
is pursuant upon certain conditions being met: namely, that the judge
must set aside considerations which are purely private (matters of per-
sonal liking and private interest) and instead judge from the perspective
of what we share in common with others (i.e. must be disinterested). To
be generally valid a judgment must proceed from the basis of a universal
standpoint, from the perspective of a common human understanding
or common sense (sensus communis).92 Kant takes sensus communis to
mean
. . . the idea of a sense shared [by all of us], 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 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.93

Arendt places great weight upon this notion of a faculty of judgment that
thinks from the standpoint of everyone else.94 This broadened way of

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thinking or enlarged mentality (Arendt) enables us to compare our
judgment not so much with the actual as rather with the merely possible
judgment of others, and [thus] put ourselves in the position of everybody
else.95 For Arendt, this representative thinking is made possible by the
exercise of the imagination as Arendt beautifully puts it, To think with
an enlarged mentality means that one trains ones imagination to go visit-
ing.96 Going visiting in this way enables us to make individual, par-
ticular acts of judgment which can nevertheless claim a public validity.
Now one of the fundamental conditions of such broadened think-
ing is that it is disinterested. That is, by putting ourselves in the posi-
tion of everyone else we abstract from the limitations that [may] happen
to attach to our own judging, including our interest in the object of
judgment.97 Such interest includes a liking for the object because it is
good, be it treated as a means (i.e. because it is good (useful) for this or
that), or because it is deemed good for its own sake (i.e. intrinsically
good).98 Therefore, any interest in the existence of the object itself is
ruled out by the requirement of disinterestedness in thinking from a
universal standpoint.99 Consequently, Kant argues that we cannot dis-
interestedly judge an object with which we are directly confronted in per-
ception, for a sensuous apprehension implies involvement and so
interest. Therefore, a disinterested judgment of the object requires that
I confine myself only to the contemplation or reflection on its form as I
represent itself to myself in imagination.100 Imagination (the capacity to
represent the form of a thing to myself when it is no longer given in per-
ception) enables me to reflect upon the form of the object from a posi-
tion of distance and indifference to the object itself by removing the
object one has established the condition for impartiality.101
I stress this condition for the formation of valid judgments of taste in
Kants philosophy because it has profound implications for Arendts
political theory in terms of who is capable of exercising such judgment.
If valid judgment requires disinterestedness or indifference with respect
to the object (or act) that is being judged, and such disinterestedness can
only be established at a distance and after the fact (when one is no longer
confronted with the object or act), then this rules out the political actor
as an agent capable of such valid judgment. For the actor is always in
the thick of things, is committed to this or that cause, is in pursuit of a
particular end, desires a particular outcome, is motivated by particular
reasons, is interested in objects, events and actions because he/she deems
them to be right or wrong, good or bad. The disinterested standpoint of
Kants philosophy (and so of Arendts) is the standpoint of the specta-
tor.102 For Arendt, the spectator comes to have a privileged view over the
actor. Because the spectator has no part in the action he/she is impartial
by definition Hence withdrawal from direct involvement to a stand-
point outside the game is a condition sine qua non of all judgment.103

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2)
Only the spectator is capable of reflecting upon political actions and
events impartially and disinterestedly, of entertaining the standpoints of
all others, and thus of coming to a generally valid judgment as to their
ultimate worth. Thus, ironically, in following Kant, Arendt is led back to
that which she first set out to overthrow, namely the supremacy of the
bios thertikos, the life of contemplation.
Who, exactly, is the figure of the spectator? He/she is the philoso-
pher, the historian, the poet and above all the storyteller. The role of the
judging spectator is that of rescuing past meanings and actions from the
oblivion and forgetting of history, redeeming them and so salvaging a
portion of human dignity.104 This task becomes especially urgent in the
modern age with the collapse of tradition without the storyteller to
judge and remember all meanings threaten to succumb to the tyranny
of time.105 Arendt would often cite the brief flickering of hope in events
such as the 1871 Paris Commune, the Russian soviets of 1905 and 1917,
the Hungarian uprising of 1956, or even the doomed heroism of the
Warsaw Ghetto resistance.106 The storyteller stands in a relation of
ethical responsibility to such lives and sacrifices, is charged with the
responsibility of redeeming them through the act of remembrance.
Arendt argues that such events possess an exemplary validity; by
attending to the particular the spectator is able to illuminate the uni-
versal without reducing the particular to universals.107 Thus the unique-
ness of the action, event or life is upheld.
A further implication of this stance to the past is that it is the his-
torian, and not History, who stands as the ultimate judge. Arendts anti-
teleological and non-determinable concept of action rejects the notion
of any metaphysical project of History whose fulfilment secures the
meaning of lives and action.108 If we subordinate the particular in itself
to History we say with Hegel Die Welgeschicte ist das Weltgericht,
leaving the ultimate judgment to Success.109 Or with Arendt, we can pre-
serve particularity, reclaim the dignity of human lives, and secure the
autonomy of the spectator who will judge in freedom. As Arendt puts
it, we may reclaim our dignity, win it back, as it were, from the pseudo
divinity named History of the modern age, without denying historys
importance but denying its right to be the ultimate judge110 (it is in this
spirit that we can understand the epigraph from the title page of her
unwritten volume on Judging: The victorious cause pleased the gods,
but the defeated one pleases Cato).

Judgment as hermeneutics and redemptive criticism

The tenor of this theory of judgment which compelled Arendts attention
in her final years can perhaps be more clearly understood by exploring its

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Yar: From actor to spectator
convergence with two of the centurys most influential, and certainly most
unique, thinkers namely Arendts teacher Martin Heidegger, and her
friend Walter Benjamin. I draw attention to these influences on Arendts
thought not as an exercise in intellectual biography, but hopefully so as
to bring to light valencies that are only implicit in Arendts uncompleted
writings on judgment.
Under Heideggers influence the task of the judge becomes akin to
the project of a hermeneutics of recovery. A deconstructive reading of
tradition enables the judge to recover the original meaning of things,
those primordial experiences (Urphnomene) which have been occluded,
covered over by distorting encrustations of tradition.111 It is with this
sort of task in mind that Arendt can find a glimmer of hope in the ruin
of tradition, for it offers the great chance to look upon the past with
eyes undistorted by any tradition, with a directness which has disap-
peared from Occidental reading and hearing ever since Roman civilisa-
tion submitted to the authority of Greek thought.112 The end of the
tradition which began with the Greeks (which is the tradition of meta-
physics) can help us see the past with new eyes. Thus while thinking
without a banister, without the support of tradition, is an onerous
burden it nonetheless holds out the possibility of genuinely thinking for
oneself (Selbstdenken).113 The influence of Heidegger is also decisive in
Arendts concern for the particular, the need to judge things without the
coercion of fixed categories, habits of thought or ossified rules and stan-
dards.114 This is undoubtedly related to the Heideggerian notion of truth
as altheia, as unhiddenness, the uncovering (Unverborgenheit) or dis-
closure (Erschlossenheit) of phenomena themselves.115 Truth as unveil-
ing (rather than a coercive fabrication on the part of the subject) requires
that we attend to things as they give themselves that they might be
known. Thus in a Heideggerian turn of phrase Arendt stresses that The
objects of our judgment are particulars that open themselves to our
purview, and that by refusing to attend to the particular we run the risk
that we will not open ourselves fully to the phenomenal richness of the
appearances that make themselves available for our judgment.116 Thus
attention to particularity, freed from both the coercion of conceptual
reasoning and distortions of tradition, becomes the condition for the
recovery and preservation of the past.
With respect to Benjamin, we can see perhaps an ever more direct
connection with Arendts theory of historical-political judgment as
redemptive criticism. Indeed, in her introductory essay for Benjamins
Illuminations Arendt herself makes explicit references to Benjamins
work in this regard, ruminations which tell us as much about the con-
tours of her thinking on the problem of judgment as about his. Arendts
concern with the particulars of past events, actions and lives parallels
Benjamins preoccupation with thought fragments, the scraps of the

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2)
past.117 Both shared a conviction that there had been an irreparable
diremption of tradition, and an attendant loss of authority and failure
in the transmittability of the past to the present and the future. For Ben-
jamin, to gaze upon history was to be confronted by a field of shattered
ruins a sense captured most hauntingly in his evocation of the angel of
history who is propelled by the storm of progress into the future, and
whose backward gaze beholds one single catastrophe which keeps piling
wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.118 If the trans-
mittability of the past is lost, then the historians recovery can be only
of its fragments the figure of Benjamin himself, haunting the ruins and
devastation, searching for scraps which he might rescue from the debris.
By bringing these fragments of meaning into the present one might lib-
erate them; and by juxtaposing them in unexpected and shocking ways,
one might illuminate the present and transfigure the future.119 The image
that Arendt applies to Benjamin (and perhaps to herself) is that of the
pearl diver, the one who descends into the depths to pry loose the rich
and the strange from their lightless and lifeless confinement.120 This task
is guided by
. . . the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of . . . time,
the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallisation, that in
the depths of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive,
some things suffer a sea change and survive in new crystallised forms and
shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for
the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up
into the world of the living.121

From Benjamins fragmentary historiography Arendt takes the idea that

the storyteller or historian can recover the lost potentials of the past in
the hope that they may find actualisation in the present.122 It will be
recalled that for Arendt human life is haunted by its finitude, its mortal-
ity and vulnerability to the ravages of time. Such permanence as there is
in the world of humans must be fashioned in the form of meanings and
recollections which endure. And in an age afflicted by the collapse of tra-
dition and the obliteration of memory, we face the loss of the world, of
the meanings and continuity which give us the bearings of our exist-
ence.123 In a world such as this the immortalization of the moment in the
act of judgment takes on an ontological function. It has the function of
anchoring man in a world that would otherwise be without meaning and
existential reality: a world unjudged would have no human import for
us.124 In the latter, for Arendt judging ultimately becomes the means of
confirming our place in the world, a form of reconciliation (Versh-
nung). It serves to reconcile time and worldliness;125 that is, to secure an
enduring world of shared meanings and understandings which we need
to be human against the flux of time which threatens its annihilation.

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Some critical remarks on the two theories of judgment
In this final section, I would like to entertain and evaluate some of the
criticisms that can be directed to Arendts reflections on judgment. The
criticisms which can be directed over the whole range of her political
philosophy are many (for example, her problematic reliance on the Aris-
totelian distinction between oikos and polis which leads to an overly
narrow definition of the political, excluding as it does all matters econ-
omic and personal).126 However, I will confine myself here to criticisms
that bear directly on the problem of judgment in Arendts philosophy,
especially with reference to her use of Aristotelian and Kantian sources.
I have already commented on the difficulties attendant upon
Arendts attempt to synthesize Aristotle and Kant as sources for her first
theory of judgment apropos the actor. As Beiner noted in his Interpre-
tive Essay (1982), given the requirements for a disinterested attitude, a
reflective posture, etc., in Kants model of judgment one cannot but
recognize its incompatibility with the demands of political action
(which, being tied up with normative ends, is inevitably teleological, in
the Aristotelian sense, and so interested).127 Moreover, Arendt reads
Kant literally where he speaks metaphorically with regard to the com-
munality exhibited by the faculty of judgment. By this I mean that Kant
asserts that the sensus communis operates by taking cognizance of
others standpoints, by as it were comparing ones judgment with
human reason in general; it is a way of thinking in abstracto, not an
exercise in concreto.128 However, Arendt (mis)takes this broadened
thinking to denote an actual dialogue with real others. This interpre-
tation of Kant is not, of course, unique to (early) Arendt the move from
an imagined to an actual dialogue is central to the discourse ethics posi-
tion staked out by Habermas and his followers. I do not here intend to
get into the question of the tenability or otherwise of this interpretation,
but merely to note the discrepancy between Kants formulation of the
sensus communis and Arendts appropriation of it in her earlier writings
on judgment (cf. The Crisis in Culture). I think that the adoption of
this reading follows precisely from the need to render judgment appro-
priate for the demands of deliberation in an actual political community.
And, as Gadamer notes in his critique of Kantian aesthetics in Part I of
Truth and Method, the abstract and formal nature of the Kantian com-
munity renders it problematic for a substantive political praxis.129 It is
for this reason (amongst others) that Gadamer argues instead for a
model of political judgment grounded in Aristotelian phronsis.
With respect to Arendts latter theory of judgment apropos the spec-
tator, Kants account of reflective judgment would appear to furnish a
much more convincing philosophical grounding. After all, the position
of Kants aesthetic judge and Arendts disinterested spectator would

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2)
appear to enjoy a close affinity. There are, of course, many questions one
can raise regarding Arendts theory which follow from the perceived
weaknesses, tensions, and lacunae in the Critique of Judgment.
However, for present purposes I will take Kants account as given, and
confine myself to one particular problem that I think attends Arendts
appropriation of it, even in her latter theory. This problem concerns the
basis that Kant ultimately gives for the common operation of the faculty
of judgment, i.e. its status as a common sense upon which is founded
the exemplary validity of its pronouncements. Initially, Kant seems to
argue that this commonality rests upon the purely empirical grounds of
the identical interplay of the faculties of the imagination and under-
standing in all humans. It is the fact that a particular representation is
purposive for their harmonious play that renders it the object of a
universal liking.130 However, Kant ultimately arrives at the conclusion
that the basis for this purposiveness of the representation for the
harmony of the faculties rests in the supersensible substrate of human-
ity.131 In other words, the basis for the exemplary validity of judgments
of taste ultimately resides in a unity on the transcendental rather than
the merely empirical realm. Now we may (or may not) find this persua-
sive or acceptable, depending in part upon our disposition towards the
validity (or otherwise) of invoking the supersensible realm. The problem
for Arendt, I think, is that Kant leads where she, given her resolutely
anti-metaphysical stance, cannot follow. For Arendt the commonality of
the faculty of judgment, and hence the basis of the universal validity of
its pronouncements, must reside in the sensible realm, or nowhere at all.
The upshot of all this is that if recourse to the supersensible is essential
to secure the universality of aesthetic reflective judgment, then Arendt is
left on the horns of a dilemma she must either forsake the basis of uni-
versality in the name of her anti-metaphysical commitment, or she must
eschew those long-standing commitments in favour of a supersensible
unity. Now (as far as I am aware) Arendt never acknowledged this
apparent difficulty with her appropriation of Kant. Indeed, she applauds
Kants account for its resolute attention to the realm of appearances
rather than a metaphysical realm beyond. In doing so she disregards the
fact that the Third Critique represents the completion of Kants critical
project and so is continuous with his metaphysical system as a whole.

Concluding remarks: the antinomy of action and reflection

So, in Arendts writings we are confronted with two species of judgment,
those of the actor and the spectator. They seem, Janus-like, to look in
opposite directions: one to the future that it seeks to secure, the other to
a past that it yearns to redeem. One takes an interest in the affairs and

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Yar: From actor to spectator
aspirations of humans, the other eschews such interests that it might see
better, understanding more. One can only operate in intercourse with
others, while the other shuns its fellows and instead goes visiting in the
imagination (one is reminded here of Kants Weltbetrachter or world-
spectator, who is of course Kant himself, surveying the doings of human-
ity from the seclusion of his Knigsberg study). The two would seem
wholly incompatible, an antinomy that cannot be resolved. For if the
spectator judges as an actor, he/she loses the standpoint which grants
him breadth of vision; and if the actor judges as a spectator, he/she for-
sakes the capacity to be in the world with others as an agent. We might
see this failure of reconciliation as the triumph of plurality or as the
defeat of unity. But Arendt has the capacity to surprise, and at the last
she intimates the possibility of a reconciliation, a possibility held out by
Kants deliberations about a united humankind:
It is by virtue of this idea of mankind, present in every single man, that men
are human, and they can be called civilized or humane to the extent that
this idea becomes the principle of their actions as well as their judgments.
It is at this point that actor and spectator become united; the maxim of the
actor and the maxim, the standard, according to which the spectator
judges the spectacle of the world become one.132
This reconciliation, barely hinted at, confronts us like parallel lines which
seem to converge at some point beyond the horizon, in some remotely
possible future or other world. In the meanwhile, as Richard Bernstein
notes, the search to find some resolution between the actor and the spec-
tator continues to be one of the deepest problems of our time.133

Lancaster University, Department of Sociology, Lancaster, UK

PSC

Notes
1 Howard Caygill, Postmodernism and Judgement, Economy and Society
17(1) (February 1988): 120; Howard Caygill, Art of Judgment (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1989).
2 Caygill, Postmodernism and Judgement.
3 Richard Bernstein, Hannah Arendt: The Ambiguities of Theory and
Practice, in Terence Ball (ed.), Political Theory and Praxis: New Perspec-
tives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), pp. 14455.
4 See Ronald Beiners comments on the reconstruction of Arendts theory of
judgment in his Interpretive Essay, in Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kants
Political Philosophy (Brighton, Sx: Harvester Press, 1982).
5 Dana R. Villa, Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticisation of Political
Action, in Political Theory 20(2) (May 1992): 274308 (278).

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2)
6 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (London: Faber, 1961), p. 17;
this edn includes the essays Tradition and the Modern Age, What is
Freedom?, and The Crisis in Culture.
7 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1958), p. 7.
8 ibid., p. 81; Kimberly Hutchings, Kant, Critique and Politics (London:
Routledge, 1996), p. 84.
9 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 84.
10 ibid.
11 ibid., Chapter 3; Hutchings, Kant, Critique, p. 84.
12 Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 2837.
13 ibid., pp. 3849.
14 ibid., p. 7.
15 ibid., pp. 7, 1367.
16 ibid., pp. 13644; Hutchings, Kant, Critique, p. 85.
17 Hutchings, Kant, Critique, p. 85.
18 ibid., pp. 856.
19 ibid.
20 ibid.; Maurizio Passerin dEntrves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah
Arendt (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 1404.
21 Hutchings, Kant, Critique, pp. 856.
22 dEntrves, Political Philosophy of Arendt, pp. 1404.
23 ibid., p. 5; see also Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 211.
24 Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 1539; Villa, Arendt, Nietzsche, p. 278.
25 Villa, Arendt, Nietzsche, p. 278.
26 Hutchings, Kant, Critique, p. 86.
27 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 148.
28 See discussion in Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient
Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 21539.
29 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 177.
30 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 167.
31 ibid., p. 165.
32 ibid., p. 153.
33 Arendt, quoted in Bernstein, Hannah Arendt, p. 145.
34 ibid., pp. 1456.
35 Bernstein, Hannah Arendt, p. 146.
36 ibid.
37 ibid., p. 147.
38 dEntrves, Political Philosophy of Arendt, p. 85.
39 ibid., p. 86.
40 ibid.
41 ibid.
42 Bernstein, Hannah Arendt, p. 222.
43 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 7.
44 dEntrves, Political Philosophy of Arendt, pp. 6570; Arendt, Human
Condition, pp. 78.
45 Richard Bernstein, Judging the Actor and the Spectator, in Philo-
sophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1986), p. 222.

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Yar: From actor to spectator
46 ibid., p. 223.
47 ibid., pp. 2235; Bernstein, Hannah Arendt, p. 145.
48 dEntrves, Political Philosophy of Arendt, p. 2; Arendt, Between Past and
Future, p. 23.
49 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 146.
50 Bernstein, Judging, pp. 2228.
51 ibid., pp. 2267.
52 This critique of metaphysics and abstract universality in favour of
phenomenality and inassimilable particularity places Arendt in striking
proximity to a number of postmodern philosophical accounts (see, for
example, Jean-Franois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming
[Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985]). This contiguity has led
a number of commentators to claim Arendt as a postmodern (David
Ingram, The Post-Modern Kantianism of Arendt and Lyotard, Review of
Metaphysics 42 [September 1988]: 5177) and even pagan (Villa,
Arendt, Nietzsche) thinker. Her apparent influence on a number of
prominent post-metaphysical thinkers in the contemporary wave of
French neo-Heideggerianism, such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, would seem to give at least some credence to these
evaluations (cf. J.-L. Nancy and P. Lacoue-Labarthe, Retreating the
Political, ed. Simon Sparks [London: Routledge, 1997]). However, as I
show later in the paper, Arendt takes a much more complicated and
ambiguous position with respect to problems of political and ethical
universalism, an ambiguity that situates her somewhere between the
current modern and postmodern stances.
53 Arendt, quoted in Bernstein, Hannah Arendt, p. 149.
54 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 153.
55 ibid., pp. 1534.
56 dEntrves, Political Philosophy of Arendt, p. 76.
57 Bernstein, Judging, p. 228.
58 ibid.
59 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 219.
60 ibid., p. 220; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S.
Pluhar (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1987), 40.
61 ibid.
62 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 220.
63 ibid., pp. 2201.
64 ibid., p. 222.
65 Bernstein, Judging, p. 239.
66 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 222; Kant, Critique of Judgement,
19.
67 Bernstein, Judging, p. 228.
68 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 222.
69 ibid., p. 221.
70 Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodern-
ism in Contemporary Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 123, pp.
1337; dEntrves, Political Philosophy of Arendt, pp. 1024.
71 Benhabib, Situating the Self, p. 134.
72 See, for example, the discussion of Gadamers treatment of phronsis as a

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2)
general model of hermeneutic praxis, in Richard J. Bernstein, From
Hermeneutics to Praxis, Review of Metaphysics 35 (June 1992): 82345.
73 Benhabib, Situating the Self, p. 134.
74 Kant, Critique of Judgement, 911, 202, 3940.
75 dEntrves, Political Philosophy of Arendt, p. 10.
76 ibid., pp. 979.
77 Jrgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt: On the Concept of Power, Philo-
sophical-Political Profiles (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 171.
78 Stephen K. White, Reason, Modernity and Democracy, in S. K. White
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Habermas (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), pp. 12, 21213.
79 Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jrgen Habermas (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1978), Chapter 1.
80 See in particular Benhabib, Situating the Self, Chapters 3 and 4.
81 Hutchings, Kant, Critique, p. 81.
82 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 1718; see, for example, Karl Marx,
Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, ed. T. Bottomore
and M. Rubel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 825, 901.
83 Hutchings, Kant, Critique, p. 89.
84 Beiner, Interpretive Essay, pp. 946.
85 Arendt, quoted in Beiner, Interpretive Essay, p. 96.
86 ibid.
87 ibid., p. 98.
88 ibid.
89 Arendt, Lectures, p. 13.
90 Kant, Critique of Judgement, Ak. 215.
91 Kant, Critique of Judgement, Second Moment of a Judgment of Taste,
69; Fourth Moment, 1822.
92 ibid., 40.
93 ibid., Ak. 2934.
94 ibid., Ak. 294; Arendt, Lectures, pp. 423.
95 ibid.
96 Arendt, Lectures, p. 43.
97 Kant, Critique of Judgement, Ak. 294.
98 Kant, Critique of Judgement, 4, Ak. 207.
99 ibid., First Moment of a Judgment of Taste, 15.
100 ibid., Ak. 2045; Arendt, Lectures, pp. 667.
101 Arendt, Lectures, pp. 667.
102 ibid., p. 44.
103 ibid., p. 55.
104 Beiner, Interpretive Essay, p. 127.
105 ibid., p. 145.
106 ibid., p. 127.
107 ibid.
108 ibid.
109 ibid., p. 130.
110 ibid.
111 dEntrves, Political Philosophy of Arendt, p. 4.

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112 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 29.
113 Kant, Critique of Judgement, Ak. 294; this is, of course, Kants definition
of Enlightenment, a thinking free of heteronomy, prejudice and supersti-
tion.
114 Arendt, Lectures, p. 111.
115 Brice R. Wachterhauser, Introduction: Is There Truth After Interpre-
tation?, in B. R. Wachterhauser (ed.), Hermeneutics and Truth (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), p. 4; Robert Dostal, The
Experience of Truth for Gadamer and Heidegger: Taking Time and
Sudden Lightning, in Wachterhauser (ed.), Hermeneutics and Truth, pp.
4750; Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of
Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 69,
845.
116 Arendt, Lectures, p. 111.
117 Arendt, Introduction to Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London:
Fontana Press, 1992), pp. 4851.
118 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 249.
119 Stephen Eric Bronner, The Messianic Materialism of Walter Benjamin, in
S. E. Bronner, Of Critical Theory and its Theorists (Oxford: Blackwell,
1984); Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell,
1990), Chapter 12; Arendt, Introduction, pp. 4353.
120 Arendt, Introduction, p. 54.
121 ibid., pp. 545.
122 dEntrves, Political Philosophy of Arendt, p. 4.
123 ibid., pp. 302.
124 Beiner, Interpretive Essay, p. 152.
125 ibid., pp. 1545.
126 For an illuminating discussion of this distinction in Arendts work, see
Richard Bernstein, Rethinking the Social and Political in Bernstein,
Philosophical Profiles.
127 ibid., p. 135.
128 Kant, Critique of Judgement, Ak. 294.
129 Beiner, Interpretive Essay, p. 152.
130 Kant, Critique of Judgement, Third Moment of Judgment of Taste,
1017.
131 ibid., 57, Solution of the Antinomy of Taste.
132 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 2 vols (London: Secker &
Warburg, 1978), pp. 2701; also Bernstein, Judging, p. 237.
133 Bernstein, Judging, p. 237.

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