JUDGMENT: ARENDT

In order to appreciate the distinctive force of Arendt’s understanding of opinion and judgment and to understand how it is related to Gadamer’s analysis of phronēsis and Habermas’s analysis of practical discourse, we need first to examine how these concepts are treated in her analysis of the vita activa and, in particular, in her discussion of the form of human activity which she calls “action,” which she sharply and categorically distinguishes from “work” and “labor.”50 The concepts of action, politics, public space, speech, plurality, freedom, equality or isonomy, and power are all interwoven for Arendt into an integrated whole. In order to explicate what she means by action and politics, let me start by reflecting on what Arendt would consider a truism—a truism that has all sorts of ramifications once these are teased out. She tells us, almost casually, that “debate constitutes the very essence of political life.”51 Note that in what initially appears to be an innocuous remark, she does not say that the essence of politics is domination, or the control of the “legitimate” means of violence, or that it consists of the ways in which individuals, groups, or classes seek to impose their interests on other individuals, groups, and classes. The essence of politics is debate, and we will see that this has a special meaning for Arendt.

Debate itself is a form of action, and “action” is the term that Arendt uses to designate what she takes to be the highest form of the vita activa. Action is not to be confused with or reduced to labor or work. Labor is the human activity grounded in biological necessity—the necessity to sustain and reproduce life. Labor must be distinguished from work or fabrication, which has as its end the fabrication of products and artificial objects that make up and constitute a human world.52 A human being is both an animal laborans and a homo faber. Both forms of activity are grounded in the human condition, but neither of these forms of activity is to be confused with action. And action itself is intimately related to speech.

Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: “Who are you?” This disclosure of who somebody is, is implicit in both his words and his deeds. . . . Without the accompaniment of speech, at any rate, action would not only lose its revelatory character, but, and by the same token, it would lose its subject, as it were; not acting men but performing robots would achieve what, humanly speaking, would remain incomprehensible. Speechless action would no longer be action because there would no longer be an actor, and the actor, the doer of deeds, is possible only if he is at the same time the speaker of words.53

A number of consequences follow from this rich passage about the close relationship between action and speech. The most important is that human plurality is the basic condition of action and speech. By plurality, Arendt does not merely mean that there is “otherness,” that there are individuals who oppose or thwart my desires, passions, interests, and ambitions. Rather it means that there is a unique distinctiveness about each and every individual, rooted in human natality, the capacity to begin, to initiate, to act. Plurality is not so much a permanent state of being as an achievement realized only when individuals act. “To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin . . . to set something into motion.”54 A life without speech and without action . . . is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men.”55 Human plurality is the basic condition of action and speech because action and speech take place in between men in their singularity and plurality. Action then is, intrinsically, political activity requiring the existence of that public space or polis within which individuals can encounter others and reveal who they are.

Given this account of action and speech as basically intersubjective communal activities which require a public space in between individuals, we can detect further important consequences for understanding action and politics. Equality or isonomy among citizens is also a condition for politics as debate. Equality is not a natural condition of men, not an attribute or right with which men have been endowed by their creator. Drawing on her interpretation of the Greek polis, Arendt writes:

Isonomy guaranteed equality, but not because all men were born or created equal, but, on the contrary, because men were by nature not equal, and needed an artificial institution, the polis, which by virtue of its would make them equal. Equality existed only in this specifically political realm, where men met one another as citizens and not as private persons. . . . The equality of the Greek polis, its isonomy, was an attribute of the polis and not of men, who received their equality by virtue of citizenship, not by virtue of birth.56

Returning to the gloss on the truism that “debate is the very essence of politics,” we can see more clearly why Arendt does not think of politics as involving rulership, where one person, group, or class dominates others. Rather it involves “no rule,” the mutual and joint action grounded in human plurality and the isonomy of citizenship where individuals debate and seek to persuade each other. Persuasion is not manipulation of others by image making. Persuasion involves free and open debate among equals in which they mutually seek to clarify, test, and purify opinions.

We can further our understanding of what Arendt means by action by examining how she integrates the concepts of freedom and power. Referring to the philosophes of the Enlightenment, whose importance, she says, lies in their shrewd insight into the public character of freedom, Arendt tells us:

Their public freedom was not an inner realm into which men might escape at will from the pressures of the world, nor was it the liberum arbitrium which makes the will choose between alternatives. Freedom for them could exist only in public; it was a tangible, worldly reality, something created by men to be enjoyed by men rather than a gift or a capacity, it was the manmade public space or market-place which antiquity had known as the area where freedom appears and becomes visible to all.57

Freedom, according to Arendt, must be sharply distinguished from liberation. For liberation is always liberation from something, whether it is liberation from the hardships and necessities of life or liberation from oppressive rulers. But freedom does not have this negative connotation. It is the positive achievement of human action and exists only as long as that public space exists in which individuals debate together and participate with each other in determining public affairs. The distinction between freedom and liberation takes on enormous significance for Arendt. It is the key to her interpretation of history since the French and American revolutions. She argues that the conceptual and practical confusions between freedom and liberation, between political freedom and the social question of poverty have had disastrous consequences. In what might seem to be a harsh, but for Arendt only a realistic judgment, she declares, “Nothing, we might say today, could be more obsolete than to attempt to liberate mankind from poverty by political means; nothing could be more futile and more dangerous.”58 The key term here is “political.” For Arendt the problem of poverty is a social problem, not a political issue. She certainly thinks individuals ought to be liberated from poverty, and that this indeed is the primary social question. Nevertheless she argues that it is illusory and dangerous to think that this social question can be solved by political means.

To complete this sketch of Arendt’s conception of action (which sets the context for her analysis of opinion and judgment), let us see how power fits into this network of concepts. We want to observe not only how her concept of power differs from many other views, but why it does. A full-scale analysis would require examining the ways in which she distinguishes among power, authority, force, strength, and violence—violence being the furthest removed from politics but always ready to destroy the fragile public space required for politics.59 Power is not a fixed quantum that is distributed unevenly among human individuals. Power is created through participation.

In distinction to strength, which is the gift and the possession of every man in his isolation against all other men, power comes into being only if and when men join themselves together for the purpose of action, and it will disappear when for whatever reason, they disperse and desert one another. Hence, binding and promising, combining and covenanting are the means by which power is kept in existence; where and when men succeed in keeping intact the power which sprang up between them during the course of any particular act or deed, they are already in the process of foundation, of constituting a stable worldly structure to house, as it were, their combined power of action.60

So power, too—like freedom, equality, speech, and action—is essentially intersubjective and communicative; it comes into existence only in the mutual creation of a public space in between individuals.

Before turning to the question of how Arendt’s concepts of opinion and judgment fit into her analysis of action, let me address an often-repeated criticism of her concept of action that I think is wide of the mark. It is frequently argued that this understanding of action and politics is nothing but an idealized and romanticized image of the Greek polis, an image that does not even correspond to the realities of Greek life. And it is furthermore argued that whatever the merits of these concepts of action and politics, they seem to be completely irrelevant to the harsh realities and complexities of the politics of the modern state. I think it is false to suggest that Arendt was primarily interested in a “golden era” of the Greek city-state that many have argued never really existed. There is nothing nostalgic or sentimental about her thinking—though, as we shall see, there is a utopian element to it. On the contrary, her primary intention is to reclaim what she takes to be a permanent human possibility, one that is rooted in the human capacity to begin, to initiate, to act together, and which she claims has been exemplified in historical phenomena as diverse as the Greek polis, the American revolution, the Paris Commune, the original Russian soviets, the citizens councils formed in the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, and the beginnings of the civil rights movement and the anti–Vietnam War movement in the United States. Indeed, in On Revolution she argues that in the modern age it is only in the wake of revolutions that there have been the brief and fragile manifestations of this form of politics, which she takes to be the quintessence of “the revolutionary spirit.” This is the “lost treasure” that she seeks to reclaim. She can more easily be faulted for being ahistorical in her understanding of politics. For the essence of politics is always the same, wherever and whenever it spontaneously arises.

This characteristic of her thinking what we are doing, where it becomes manifest that she seeks to think in the gap between the past and the future61 and to recover what is still a permanent human possibility, helps to make sense of another leitmotif that pervades her work. In almost everything that Arendt wrote she was carrying on a battle against all forms of totalizing and necessaritarian arguments, whether they have their roots in Hegelian, Marxist, Weberian, or the new, cooler, technocratic modes of thought.62 The belief that there is an underlying logic to history that is ruthlessly working itself out behind the backs of men, a logic of history that according to some must lead to progress and the eventual triumph of freedom and according to others must inevitably result in total disaster, is not only false; it is one of the most virulent and dangerous diseases of the modern age. Her attacks on these doctrines have been sharp and multifaceted, in keeping with her central vision that ultimately such doctrines negate what is most distinctive about human individuals—their natality and plurality.

The story that she tells in The Human Condition is one of a double reversal, the first of which took place when the vita activa was taken to have precedence over the vita contemplativa, and the second of which occurred within the vita activa, when, in the modern age, the traditional hierarchy of action, work, and labor was inverted. But even The Human Condition ends on an ambiguous note when she says, “Needless to say, this does not mean that modern man has lost his capacities or is on the point of losing them.”63 This ambiguity, Arendt thought, is rooted in our contemporary situation. Action may be suppressed, repressed, forgotten, and defeated, but it can never be eliminated as long as there are human beings with their capacity to begin, to act together. Her concept of action is best seen as a critical concept. There is a utopian strain in her thinking, but it is utopian in the sense characterized by Gadamer when he says, “Utopia is not the projection of aims for action. Rather the characteristic element of utopia is that it does not lead precisely to the moment of action, the ‘setting one’s hand to a job here and now’. . . . It is not primarily a project of action but a critique of the present.”64

It is difficult to classify Arendt’s position with traditional labels, and throughout her life she was consistently attacked by those who identified themselves with both the political right and the left. She took herself to be an independent thinker. Against conservatives and neoconservatives she consistently maintained that in the modern age it is only with the “revolutionary spirit”—which was not anticipated by professional revolutionaries, and quickly defeated—that public freedom has made its brief appearances. But against radicals she consistently maintained that politics is only for the few, and that it must be sharply distinguished from “the social question.” She read Marx not as the great champion of public and political freedom but as the theoretician who sought to put an end to politics, to replace it with the administration of society—in short, as a thinker who gave expression to the triumph of a laboring mentality over that of fabrication and action. She even claimed that the tradition of political philosophy came to an end with Marx.65

But, as in Gadamer, there is also a radical impetus to her thinking that became increasingly evident over the years. It came into prominence in the 1960s in On Revolution and in her book of essays, Crises of the Republic, in which she turned to the question of a new concept of the state—a council system—in which the type of power, public freedom, and participation characteristic of her vision of politics might be “housed.”

Although I am not primarily concerned here with the development of Arendt’s thought, it is important to note a subtle but important shift of emphasis in her understanding of action in the course of her writings. In The Human Condition, when she first introduces her analysis of action, she emphasizes the revelatory quality of speech and action, the disclosure of who the agent is in his or her deeds and words, and tells us that “action needs for its full appearance the shining brightness we once called glory, and which is possible only in the public realm.”66 But while these themes are still present in her discussion of action in On Revolution and Crises of the Republic, in the latter books one finds a much greater stress on mutual debate, isonomy, persuasion among equals, public happiness, and public freedom, the features characteristic of action and authentic politics.

This new form of government is the council system, which, as we know, has perished every time and everywhere, destroyed either directly by the bureaucracy of the nation-states or by the party machines. Whether this system is a pure utopia—in any case it would be a people’s utopia, not the utopia of theoreticians and ideologies—I cannot say. It seems to me, however, the single alternative that has ever appeared in history, and has reappeared time and again. Spontaneous organization of council systems occurred in all revolutions, in the French Revolution, with Jefferson in the American Revolution, in the Parisian commune, in the Russian revolutions, in the wake of the revolutions in Germany and Austria at the end of World War I, finally in the Hungarian Revolution. What is more, they never came into being as a result of a conscious revolutionary tradition or theory, but entirely spontaneously, each time as though there had never been anything of the sort before. Hence the council system seems to correspond to and to spring from the very experience of political action.67

She never developed the idea of this council system in detail, and she was skeptical about the prospect of its being realized; like her concept of action, it serves primarily as a critical concept for judging the present. She did not think that every person must or should participate in such councils; politics is ony for the few, but the radical implications of her understanding of politics and action become clear when she says,

Not everyone wants to or has to concern himself with public affairs. In this fashion a self-selective process is possible that would draw together a true political elite in a country. Anyone who is not interested in public affairs will simply have to be satisfied with their being decided without him. But each person must be given the opportunity.68 (italics added)

I do not think that Arendt ever fully pursued the consequences of what she says here—that each person must be given the opportunity to participate in politics. If she had done this, it would have required a major revision of her fundamental concepts and distinctions. For this passage indicates that the “social” and the “political” are much more intimately interrelated than Arendt at times leads us to think. There may be empirical limits to solving the social question of poverty, but no serious political program in the contemporary world can avoid confronting the question. Why? Because authentic politics requires that each person have the opportunity to participate in politics, and this at the very least means that each person must have the material means of life needed to permit him or her to participate in politics.69 Indeed, much more is required. To participate in the type of politics that Arendt describes requires a high level of education and culture. So if the opportunity to participate in politics is to be more than an empty “legal” right, then the social conditions that are necessary for such participation must be concretely realized. This telos or regulative ideal is implicit in Arendt’s own claim that no person (in principle) is to be excluded from public freedom. Furthermore, it is not just that certain necessary material conditions must be satisfied in order for politics to become manifest, but that the testing ground for politics in the modern and contemporary world has been in struggles for social liberation. Arendt knows this, but fails to emphasize it. Consider again some of the exemplary moments of politics which she says have manifested the “revolutionary spirit”: the Paris Commune, the original Russian soviets; the councils formed in the wake of the Hungarian revolution. No account of these movements is adequate that fails to consider how they originated out of the demand for social liberation.70

Arendt never fully appreciated a lesson that she might have learned from Marx. Marx realized, more profoundly than any other modern thinker, that the type of politics and action portrayed by Arendt is always in danger of becoming hypocritical and repressive unless one addresses the “social question” in its full complexity. Consequently, if one pursues the ideas that are implicit in her understanding of praxis, one is led to a far more radical understanding of action and politics than Arendt frequently acknowledges.71

There is another awkward and potentially disastrous consequence of Arendt’s categorial dichotomy of the “social” and the “political.” Like Gadamer and Habermas, Arendt was battling the modern mentality that gives a false authority to the rule of experts, social engineers, and technocrats. But the rigorous distinction between the “social” and the “political” that she makes has the consequence of endorsing the self-understanding of experts who claim special authority in “solving” social problems. Most of the major political questions of the day are classified by Arendt as social problems—problems of racism, economic well-being, housing, energy, even ecology. But as social problems they involve technical questions of administration and distribution of resources. According to her distinctions, they are problems to be “solved” by social experts.72 At times Arendt does show awareness that problems may have political and social dimensions.73 But she never explains clearly how one is to make this distinction in concrete situations of conflict.

This fundamental confusion in Arendt can be related to her appropriation and use of the concepts of praxis and technē. Although Arendt insists that both praxis (action) and technē (fabrication or making) are grounded in the human condition, her rhetoric frequently suggests that the threat to praxis in the modern age comes from technē and a laboring mentality. But the criticism of Gadamer that I suggested earlier is also applicable to Arendt: the danger for praxis does not come from technē, but from domination,74

In analyzing Arendt’s understanding of action and politics, I have already anticipated the central role that opinion and judgment play for her.75 Arendt, who was a great lover of distinctions, distinguishes between truth and opinion, and also between interest and opinion. There has always been a battle, she says, between truth (alētheia) and opinion (doxa). But the procedures, standards, and means of establishing the validity of claims to truth are different from those appropriate to opinion, whether it be the sort of “rational truth” that has inspired pure philosophers or the empirical truth of “fact gatherers.”76 This is not to deny the relevance of truth and facts for the formation of opinion but to stress that the relevance of truth for the formation of opinion is no warrant for identifying truth and opinion. There have always been those who have sought to impose the standards appropriate to truth, and the peculiar element of coercion that truth carries, on the realm of politics, typically with disastrous results. To impose these standards on politics is in effect to destroy politics and action, with its essential and nonreducible plurality and variability of opinions. Arendt thought that the main tradition of political philosophy was not so much concerned with doing justice to what is distinctive about action and politics but with judging politics by the alien standards of truth. In ancient times the battle between truth and opinion was articulated in terms of the contest between a rational or philosophic truth and opinion. However, in the contemporary world, where there is so much skepticism about the very possibility of rational or philosophic truth, there has been a new twist in this battle. There is a tendency, exhibited not only in totalitarian regimes but in those forms of government obsessed with image making, that seeks to deny or transform the coerciveness of factual truth by blurring the distinction between facts and opinions. There is a tendency to try to destroy factual truths by treating them as if they were faulty opinions.

Opinions, however, are the very stuff of politics. Individuals do not simply “have” opinions, they form opinions. In this respect the political thinking required for the formation of opinions is representative thinking.

I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. . . . The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion.77

The formation of opinions is not a private activity performed by a solitary thinker. Opinions can be tested and enlarged only where there is a genuine encounter with differing opinions, whether this be an actual encounter or one achieved through imagination and “representative thinking.” There is no test for the adequacy of an opinion, no authority for judging it, other than the force of the better public argument. The formation of opinions therefore requires a political community of equals and a willingness to submit opinions to public exposure and debate.

Opinion must not only be distinguished from truth; it must also be distinguished from interest.

Interest and opinion are entirely different political phenomena. Politically, interests are relevant only as group interests, and for the purification of such group interests it seems to suffice that they are represented in such a way that their partial character is safe-guarded under all conditions, even under the condition that the interest of one group happens to be the interest of the majority. Opinions, on the contrary, never belong to groups but exclusively to individuals, who “exert their reason cooly and freely,” and no multitude, be it the multitude of a part or of the whole of society, will ever be capable of forming an opinion. Opinions will rise wherever men communicate freely with one another and have the right to make their views public; but these views in their endless variety seem to stand also in need of purification and representation.78

The stress on communication, testing, and purification of opinions in a public arena enables us to see how judging is involved in the formation of opinions. “Judging is one, if not the most, important activity in which this sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass.”79 Although Arendt recognizes the affinity between what she means by judging and the Greek concept of phronēsis, she draws her inspiration from a highly original (and controversial) interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Judgment.80 She even claims that of all philosophers, only Kant provides us with insight about the distinctiveness of judgment, and that “what . . . is quite new and even startlingly new in Kant’s propositions in the Critique of Judgment is that he discovered this phenomenon in all its grandeur precisely when he was examining the phenomenon of taste.”81

Leaving aside the scholarly question of how faithful or accurate her interpretation of Kant is, let me focus on what she thinks that Kant “discovered.” Arendt makes the striking claim that it is in the first part of the Critique of Judgment, where Kant deals with aesthetic judgments (which are frequently thought to be the furthest removed from politics), that we find his “unwritten political philosophy.” What she has in mind is Kant’s analysis of “reflective judgment,” the mode of judging particulars that does not subsume particulars under general rules but ascends “from particular to universal.” Such judging requires an “enlarged mentality” (eine erweiterte Dekungsart) that enables one to “think in the place of everybody else.” “The judging person, as Kant says quite beautifully, can only ‘woo the consent of everyone else’ in the hope of coming to an agreement with him eventually.”82 This wooing itself is a form of rational persuasion that is characteristic of politics. What fascinated Arendt about Kant’s insight into reflective judgment is that he was able to define the “specific validity” of judgment, which is not to be identified with the “universal validity” of cognition. Judgment’s claim to validity can never extend further than the others in whose place the judging person has put himself or herself in the process of making a judgment. “Judgment, Kant says, is valid ‘for every single judging person’ but the emphasis in the sentence is on ‘judging’; it is not valid for those who do not judge or for those who are not members of the public realm where the objects of judgment appear.”83

Kant was particularly incisive in basing judgment on taste, taste which is a discriminatory sense and is not to be identified with “private feelings.” On the contrary, taste is a kind of sensus communis: it is a “community sense,” the sense that fits us into human community. What Arendt is struggling to discriminate and isolate for us is a mode of thinking that is neither to be identified with the expression of private feelings nor to be confused with the type of universality characteristic of “cognitive reason.” It is a mode of thinking that is capable of dealing with the particular in its particularity but which nevertheless makes the claim to communal validity. When one judges, one judges as a member of a human community. The condition sine qua non for such judgment is an “enlarged mentality” achieved through imagination and “representative thinking.”84 This is the mode of thinking that is essential for politics—the debate, opinion formation, persuasion, and argumentation that are characteristic of action. And what is important for this mode of thinking is to be able to discriminate those particulars that have exemplary validity. We might even say that Arendt herself, in singling out, emphasizing, and reclaiming those brief moments in history when action, politics, and public freedom have appeared, is exercising her own faculty of judgment.85 She seeks to call attention to those particular instances that have exemplary validity for understanding praxis.

Arendt realizes that in approaching the analysis of reflective judgment, Kant was primarily concerned with the disinterested judgment of the “pure” spectator, not with that of the participant in human affairs. In this respect there is a tension in her own thinking when she compares judging with phronēsis and says that the “wooing” or persuading characteristic of judging “corresponds closely to what the Greeks called, the convincing and persuading speech which they regarded as the typically political form of people talking with one another.”86 But Arendt seeks to reconcile the different perspectives of the actor and the spectator by declaring that the “critic or spectator sits in every actor and fabricator; without this critical, judging faculty the doer or maker would be so isolated from the spectator that he would not even be perceived.”87 Many of the essential characteristics of Arendt’s understanding of judgment are summed up in the following passage:

The power of judgment rests on a potential agreement with others, and the thinking process which is active in judging something is not, like the thought process of pure reasoning, a dialogue between me and myself, but finds itself always and primarily, even if I am quite alone in making up my mind, in an anticipated communication with others with whom I know I must finally come to some agreement. From this potential agreement judgment derives its specific validity. This means, on the one hand, that such judgment must liberate itself from the “subjective private conditions,” that is, from the idiosyncrasies which naturally determine the outlook of each individual in his privacy and are legitimate as long as they are only privately held opinions, but which are not fit to enter the market place, and lack all validity in the public realm. And this enlarged way of thinking, which as judgment knows how to transcend its own individual limitations, on the other hand, cannot function in strict isolation or solitude; 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.88

We are now ready to compare Arendt’s analysis of action, speech, public space, judgment, and the type of wooing and persuading that are essential for politics with the views of Gadamer and Habermas. Such a comparison brings their similarities and differences into sharp relief. For all three there is an attempt to reclaim praxis from assimilation to technē.

Like Gadamer, Arendt sees that the essential feature of the type of reasoning appropriate to praxis is the ability to do justice to particular situations in their particularity. She is just as skeptical as he is of any model of practical reasoning that identifies it with the subsumption of particulars to general rules or universals. This is what draws her to Kant’s analysis of reflective judgment, which Kant contrasted with the type of subsumption of particulars characteristic of determinative judgment.89 Like Gadamer, she seeks to show the importance of taste as a communal civic sense, a sensus communis that is basic for aesthetics, understanding, and politics. Her analysis of judgment as an intrinsically political mode of thinking is also motivated by the desire to show how this mode of thinking escapes the dichotomy of objectivism and relativism. Judgment is not the expression of private feelings or idiosyncratic subjective preferences. Neither is it to be identified with the type of universality that she takes to be characteristic of “cognitive reason.” Judgment is communal and intersubjective; it always implicitly appeals to and requires testing against the opinions of other judging persons. It is not a faculty of Man in his universality, but of human individuals in their particularity and plurality.

Many of the most significant differences between Gadamer and Arendt can be related to the different roles that the interpretation of Aristotle and Kant play in their thinking. When Gadamer wants to show us “what practice really means,” he turns to Aristotle’s analysis of phronēsis. But although Arendt was deeply influenced by Aristotle, it is Kant—the Kant of the Critique of Judgment—who is the source of her analysis of judgment. Ironically, Gadamer sees the Critique of Judgment as the decisive text for encouraging the rise of “aesthetic consciousness” and the modern subjectivism that he deplores, while Arendt interprets the Critique of Judgment as pointing to a way beyond this modern subjectivism.

This difference is consequential for their differing understandings of action and politics. When Gadamer asserts the crucial role of dialogue, conversation, and questioning, he does so, as we have seen, primarily in the context of a dialogue with works of art, texts, and tradition—which he then extends to the practical and political sphere. But when he makes this subtle shift, the very meaning and weight of these key concepts undergo an important shift of emphasis. A dialogue or conversation among individuals (as Gadamer acknowledges) must be based on mutual respect, equality, a willingness to listen and to risk one’s prejudices and opinions. Arendt’s analysis of action helps to bring into sharp focus the radical implications of Gadamer’s analysis.

This even has consequences for their differing understandings of authority. Arendt agrees with Gadamer that authority “precludes the use of external means of coercion; where force is used authority itself has failed.” But she also goes on to say that

authority, on the other hand, is incompatible with persuasion, which presupposes equality and works through a process of argumentation. Where arguments are used, authority is left in abeyance. Against the egalitarian order of persuasion stands the authoritarian order, which is always hierarchical. If authority is to be defined at all, then, it must be in contradistinction to both coercion by force and persuasion through arguments.90

In this respect, then, Arendt is much closer to Habermas and the types of criticisms he presses against Gadamer.

The differences between Arendt and Gadamer stand out especially clearly when we realize that whereas for Gadamer the key concept is tradition, for Arendt it is revolution—or more specifically the “revolutionary spirit” which attempts to found public freedom.91 While she realizes that the revolutionary spirit always appeals to tradition, what is most important for her is its spontaneous quality, rooted in human natality. And it is with the appearance of this revolutionary spirit in the modern age that we find those experiences that have “exemplary validity” for the type of debate, mutual participation, and persuasion that Gadamer himself makes so essential for political reason. Both see the principle of public freedom as being fundamental for the modern project. But whereas this theme is barely developed in Gadamer, it becomes the major motif in Arendt’s analysis of praxis.

Comparing Habermas with Arendt also enriches our understanding of praxis and the mode of thinking appropriate to it. What Arendt calls “judgment” and Habermas “practical discourse” must be understood within the context of communicative action that is oriented to mutual understanding. Both writers stress the categorical difference between this type of activity and instrumental or strategic activity. For both, too, there is a sharp distinction to be made between “subjective private feelings” and those “generalizable interests,” or communal opinions, that are tested and purified through public debate.92 I have noted that for Arendt judgment must liberate itself from “subjective private conditions” and the idiosyncracies that determine the outlook of each individual in his or her privacy. This point is echoed by Habermas when he says,

The limits of a decisionistic treatment of practical questions are overcome as soon as argumentation is expected to test the generalizability of interests, instead of being resigned to an impenetrable pluralism of apparently ultimate value orientations. . . . It is not the fact of this pluralism that is here disputed, but the assertion that it is impossible to separate by argumentation generalizable interests from those that are and remain particular.93

Arendt’s underscoring of equality, isonomy, and “no rule” is paralleled by Habermas’s insistence on the symmetry of roles in a genuine practical discourse and by his demand for uncoerced communication that is free from systematic distortion and “structural violence.” For both, the power of judgment rests upon a potential agreement with others, an anticipated communication with others with whom I know I must finally come to agreement.

The concepts of validity and argumentation are as important to Arendt’s analysis of judgment as they are to Habermas’s analysis of practical discourse. And there is even similarity in what these writers mean by “validity” in this context. The only test for communal validity, both hold, is the argumentation of the participants or the judging persons in a discourse or debate.

But these similarities also point to an important and consequential difference between Arendt and Habermas. Neither identifies theoretical discourse that seeks to validate claims to truth with practical discourse or judgment. But whereas Habermas stresses the similarities between theoretical and practical discourse, Arendt stresses the differences. This is the point of her sharp contrast between opinion and truth, and of her claim that judgment is not cognition. She consistently claims that truth “coerces” and “compels,” that it is completely foreign to the wooing and persuasion of judgment. Her intention is to defend opinion and judgment against the tyrannical tendencies of “professional truth-tellers.” Her frequent characterizations of truth as coercive, compelling, and tyrannical is not accidental. The Platonic tendency to denigrate the realm of opinion, to judge and condemn it for the failure to live up to the standards of truth, is essentially antipolitical. But Arendt seems to be oblivious to what we have learned from the postempiricist philosophy of science—that judgment has an essential role to play in science itself. What is worse, in stressing the gap between opinion and truth she tends to underestimate the importance of a concept that is most essential for her own understanding of judgment—argumentation. Argumentation does not make any sense unless there is some common acceptance of what is to count in support of, or against, an opinion. Without the possibility of a potential agreement that can be backed by reasons, argumentation, as the positivists and emotivists have claimed, is “pseudo argumentation.” Arendt failed to realize that in exaggerating the differences between truth and opinion and between the validity tests for each of them, she was leading us down the slippery slope of “noncognitivism,” where all argumentation about practical affairs is “pseudo argumentation.”

In this respect, Habermas serves as an important corrective to Arendt. By showing that the implicit claim to validity is just as essential for practical discourse as it is for theoretical discourse, he reveals the importance of argumentation for both forms of discourse.94 He even helps to make sense of Arendt’s own thesis that the power of judgment rests on a potential agreement with others and that the specific validity of such judgment depends on an anticipated communication with others with whom I know I must finally come to some agreement.

But Arendt also serves as a corrective to Habermas. For while Habermas acknowledges the nonreducible plurality of opinions that is characteristic of politics and action, he is not always as sensitive to the consequences of this plurality as Arendt is. This difference between them can be related to the different problematics that constitute the major focus for each of them. It is decisionism, emotivism, and relativism that Habermas seeks to challenge in his theory of communicative action and practical discourse. He carries out his analysis at a level of abstraction that is intended to isolate the “formal-pragmatic” universals of the norms of rational speech. Arendt also rejects the varieties of relativism when she discusses judgment, but she is much more wary of the invidious ways in which action and politics are threatened when we fail to acknowledge the irreducible plurality and variability of opinions that are to be tested, purified, and validated through reciprocal argumentation.

Consequently, to use the dichotomy of the cognitive and the noncognitive to characterize the difference between Habermas and Arendt is misleading, despite the fact that Habermas insists that practical discourse is “cognitive” while Arendt emphatically declares that judgment is “not cognition,” for they are using the term “cognitive” in different ways. When Habermas claims that practical discourse is cognitive, his major point is that such discourse presupposes and involves rational argumentation. But this is precisely the point that Arendt wants to make about judgment, insisting, however, that such rational argumentation always presupposes the plurality of opinions that are tested and purified in communal debate. Paradoxically, despite Arendt’s understanding of the coercive power of “truth” and of what she takes to be cognition proper, she thinks argumentation (as debate) is irrelevant to truth and cognition. But this tells us more about her peculiar (and inadequate) conception of truth and cognition than it does about her positive analysis of judgment, which always presupposes intersubjective and communal argumentation.95