|
Article Excerpt
Truly political activities ... cannot be performed at all without the presence of others, without the public, without a space constituted by the many.
--Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture"
As a spectator you may understand the "truth" of what the spectacle is about; but the price you have to pay is withdrawal from participating in it.
--Arendt, The Life of the Mind
Exclusion from politics should not be derogatory ... self-exclusion, far from being arbitrary discrimination, would in fact give substance and reality to one of the most important negative liberties we have enjoyed since the end of the ancient world, namely freedom from politics, which was unknown to Rome or Athens and which is politically perhaps the most relevant part of our Christian heritage.
--Arendt, On Revolution
ONE OF THE FREEDOMS THAT REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY PROTECTS IS the freedom not to actively participate in politics, the freedom to stand on the sidelines and watch. * In modern liberal democracies most citizens take advantage of this freedom most of the time. Not participating seems to be the most common activity of democratic citizenship today. Among political scientists and political theorists, the overwhelming tendency is to lament this state of affairs and to long for a more participatory politics. This essay emerges from a different perspective on how best to defend democratic politics. I am interested in understanding and defending a kind of citizenship that is closer to what most citizens do in modern liberal democracies. To be clear, this is not a defense of passivity. Passivity is not the only kind of nonparticipation that we find in our politics, and it is clearly not the best kind. But many citizens who do not participate are also not entirely passive. Instead, they watch politics and they judge what is going on. A certain type of watching and judging is, it seems to me, a defensible way of being a democratic citizen. Of course, there are also unattractive versions of this activity--the combination of watching and judging that I want to explore must be distinguished from close cousins, such as judging without watching (prejudice) and watching without judging (being entertained). In order to adequately make such distinctions, we have to first establish the potential dignity of the citizen understood as a judging spectator, and to do that we have to explain precisely what the faculty of judgment is.
The suggestion of this essay is that Hannah Arendt's reflections on judgment can fruitfully be read as part of such a defense of the citizen as spectator-judge. This might be a surprising thesis about Arendt. She is best known as a theorist of action, not spectatorship, and her conception of politics in the strong sense of the word was one that seemed to give priority to those citizens who joined the controversy and debate of political life and disclosed themselves to others by taking action in the public arena. The American revolutionaries whom she admired in On Revolution were those who created a realm of politics through action. And her influence among political theorists is most obvious among those who defend a participatory conception of politics in which active contestation is central. (1) So I must admit from the beginning that my effort to enlist Arendt in the defense of any kind of nonaction pulls against a major strain of her thought, and against the most important legacy that her thought seems to have left behind.
Still, it seems to me that the emphasis on political action as participatory politics leaves out certain interesting facets of Arendt's thinking and may interfere with efforts to understand her writings on judgment. Arendt wrote that her interest in judgment emerged out of her experience with the Eichmann trial, and in this essay I draw mostly from the essays and lectures in which she was grappling with that experience. (2) Her main concern about Eichmann was not that he had failed to actively participate in politics; no true politics was available for him to participate in. Nor does she seem to have expected him to create a realm of true politics in the way that the American revolutionaries had; that would seem to be asking too much of the subjects of the Nazi regime. She did, however, blame Eichmann for having declined to judge the rightness of his actions for himself, and for refusing to take responsibility for them. Moreover, she thought that many of those who criticized her initial report on his trial often displayed an unwillingness to render judgment that was analogous to Eichmann's own attitude. "Who am I to judge?" asked her critics, ready to understand, if not excuse, Eichmann's actions. Arendt said she found this response to her writing particularly troubling. She thought that the disinclination to judge was an attitude brought on by modern mass democracy, and one that paved the way for totalitarianism. Her interest in judgment was rooted in an effort to undermine the philosophical tendency of thought behind the disinclination to judge. (3) Thus, her effort to defend the possibility and the dignity of judgment was as important a response to the perils of mass democracy as was her defense of participatory action.
Since the role of a spectator is more prominent in modern representative democracies than it was in ancient participatory republics, finding a defense of it in Arendt's thought might help to rescue her from the accusation that she was lost in nostalgia for the Greek polis. (4) The importance of citizens' judgment to the modern liberal-democratic tradition is rooted not primarily in Aristotelian phronesis but in John Locke, who, in answer to the question, "Who shall be judge?" at the end of the Second Treatise, offered an inspiring reply: "The people shall be judge" (Locke, 1967, sec. 240). If Arendt's writings can help to explain what it means for the people to judge, or to judge well, then they would offer a resource not only for nostalgic republicans, but also for defenders of modern liberty.
Once we turn to Arendt's writings on judgment, however, we cannot avoid confronting the fact that while her theory of judgment is very suggestive it is also notoriously difficult to understand; the standards of judgment are, in her account, difficult to describe or capture; they are elusive. In this essay I suggest that the elusiveness in Arendt's account of judgment arises from her effort to deal with what she regarded as a deep and fundamental philosophical problem confronting any theory of judgment: How is it possible to judge without putting oneself into a relation of obedience to the grounds of one's judgments? If we say that the grounds of our judgments have some authority over us, then we seem to cede authority, and thus responsibility, to those grounds. To defend the dignity and responsibility of a citizen-judge--and thus to defend the possibility of the role that Eichmann should have taken on--Arendt felt that she had to show how it was possible to judge without ceding responsibility to the principles or rules that one judges by.
In the first section of the paper I argue that we can see this problem shaping Arendt's thoughts on judgment if we read carefully her stance toward Kant's standard moral and political theory, especially in the lectures on moral philosophy edited recently by Jerome Kohn (Arendt, 2003). There is room to debate the weight that one should place on these lectures in relation to the rest of Arendt's work, but in this paper I take Richard Bernstein's advice about how to read Arendt: I follow one of Arendt's "thought-trains" (Bernstein, 1996). The train that is most apparent in these lectures on moral philosophy suggests that the reason that Arendt turned to the Critique of Judgment as a source of moral and political theory was that she had concluded that the Critique of Practical Reason and the associated writings, with their emphasis on rule-following, were too easily turned into excuses for nonjudgment. A prime example of this misuse of Kantian thought could be found in Eichmann's testimony, which confused the Kantian notion of following rules with the Fuhrer's requirement to follow Nazi laws. In the second section I suggest that this worry about Kantianism led Arendt toward a fundamentally Nietzchean insight about the advantage of a deeply subjective account of judgment. When Nietzsche asserted, "my judgments are my judgments," he created a tight link between an agent and his or her judgments, and thus ensured the agent's responsibility for those judgments (Nietzsche, 1990: 71).
But Arendt was not a Nietzschean. Unlike Nietzsche, she wanted to make agents' responsibility for their judgments moral. She thus faced the difficult task of trying to remoralize her post-Kantian, Nietzchean account of judgment. What possible grounds could a moral but post-Kantian kind of judgment rest upon? One proposed answer, offered to Arendt by Habermas and others, is that intersubjectivity provides an alternative ground for such judgments. In the third section of the paper I suggest that the worry about responsibility mentioned above helps to explain why Arendt did not adopt this strategy. She could not propose Habermasian intersubjectivity, or communicative rationality, as a ground for judgments without threatening the Nietzschean responsibility that she wanted to preserve. Arendt's own understanding of intersubjectivity, or "representative thinking," had to remain ultimately a subjective form of thinking; it had to remain grounded within the individual judge. A form of intersubjectivity that located the ground of judgment partially outside oneself might too easily have come to be viewed as an alternative source of responsibility for our judgments: it might too easily have become an excuse for our own bad judgments, too easily have been used to justify the same sort of unthinkingness that Arendt worried had been the unintended legacy of Kant's moral theory. Arendt's "representative thinking" therefore had to remain subjective, in the sense of ultimately grounding judgments within an individual, in order to preserve the individual's full responsibility for those judgments.
Nevertheless, Arendt's writings on representative thinking describe a certain sort of subjectivity, and in the final section of this essay I explore more precisely the character of this thinking and how it was linked to the responsible judgment that Arendt wished Eichmann, and citizens in general, would exercise more often. The key point about the mode of imaginative thinking that Arendt wanted to emphasize was that it required us not to be fully present to ourselves. The perspective of judge is one that requires me to imagine myself partly outside myself and my commitments, and yet still essentially belonging to the self doing the judging. The problem that Arendt was struggling with was how we could step outside our selves in this way without thereby ceding a measure of our individual responsibility for our judgments. Her view, I will suggest, was that the element of self-alienation involved in representative thinking helps to protect us from relying upon any one set of external standards and so helps to preserve our personal responsibility.
EICHMANN'S CONFUSED KANTIANISM
One of the simplest and most powerful responses that readers have given to Arendt's effort to find a "nonwritten" political philosophy in Kant's Critique of Judgment is to point out that Kant had a political philosophy that was written down. The written political philosophy emerged from and was congruent with the moral philosophy of his second Critique and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and it was articulated in some detail not only in the occasional essays such as Perpetual Peace and Theory and Practice, but also in the more systematic and complete Metaphysics of Morals. At the heart of Kant's political philosophy was the view that in the final analysis, politics must pay homage to morality; and at the heart of Kant's moral theory was the objective standard of the categorical imperative. Thus Kant himself distinguished carefully between moral judgment and aesthetic judgment. In the realm of morals there existed...
|
