The Situatedness of Judgment and Action in Arendt and Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

Political philosophy must be able to give an account of action and judgment. The relation between the two is a product of concrete history. In this instance, action and judgment appropriate the past and future in different manners, yet both their meanings and senses (sens) are grounded in temporality. For Arendt (particularly in her late work), action takes up the past and uses it as a (metaphysical) tool in order to create the future – this is the ‘new order of ages’; judgment, however, concerns itself with the future by reappropriating and reappraising the past in order to provide the future with meaning (or meaningful values). Merleau-Ponty’s approach to action and judgment shares similar characteristics, except that under his late experiential notions of the flesh and reversibility, the role of ambiguity plays a more central role in understanding these human projects. That is not to say that Arendt does not consider the opaque characterisitics of action (d’Entreves, 1994: 80) 2 and judgment, but her prescriptive ideas tend to gloss over this inherent problem. This is due to the idealistic and utopian influences of Greek thought and civilization on her conception of politics; she is just as guilty of ‘crossing the rainbow bridge of concepts’ (Arendt, 1978: 149-58) in her quest for the origins and legitimacy of political institutions and power, as the German idealists of the nineteenth century. Unlike her historical counterparts, she does not reappropriate these concepts by treating them as static and worthy of strict emulation. These two political philosophers developed their thought after the end of World War II. Arendt attempted to come to grips with two major aspects of the war. The first was her investigation of the ‘banality of evil’ (Arendt, 1978: 3). The trial of Eichmann initiated a line of questioning which led her to formulate various conceptions of the faculty of judgment; actually in Eichmann’s case, it was the lack of judgment or critical self-evaluation that prompted her thinking.