Πολιτικός θεμελιωτισμός και δημοκρατική κρίση στη Hannah Arendt

Abstract

This essay presents Arendt’s late work attempt to designate the faculty of judgment as the principal founding condition for political life. Based on Kant’s notion of ‘reflective judgment', Arendt presents a non-foundational argument, which discovers legitimated criteria for political judgment without reference to cognitive or moral truth. The criteria of critical thought are guided by the disposition of an ‘idealized communication’ with the other members of the political kingdom because they depend on the ability of the political agent to broaden his thought representing the stances of others in reference to a common, universal and impartial mind (sensus communis). The criteria of judgment are, thus, finally registered in publicness, i.e., they are inseparable from the very process of an unrestrained attestation of the agent’s opinion in public view and communication. I argue that the formal appeal of judgment to the viewpoints of the others and to the final consent of Humanity as such, fails to practically orientate human thought because it disentangles it from a living framework of socially acceptable rules and norms and abstracts it from any sociohistorical content (practical objective, concrete interest, moral or social concern). I also argue that Arendt’s project ultimately has an ontological rather than political role to play: by elevating History’s past examples into alternative orienting norms for judgment, she establishes the existential rooting of the subject’s position in the world and not the political legitimation of public life.