Nick Gaskill and I have been reading Linda Zerilli’s A Democratic Theory of Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2016).  It’s a good, thought-provoking book, especially valuable for its detailed engagements with Arendt, Kant, Wittgenstein, and Cavell.  It is, I think, finally disappointing because of some severe question-begging, but raises the right questions time after time even if its efforts to answer those questions are unsatisfying.  Or maybe my dissatisfaction stems from the way in which for me, even though her quartet of thinkers are central to my own way of thinking, I temper their work through my embrace of pragmatism.  Peirce, James, and Dewey are completely absent in her book, while Rorty only appears briefly to be dismissed, and Hilary Putnam is cited approvingly a number of times for his arguments against the fact/value divide.  In any case, the criticism of Zerilli’s book I will pursue in this post is, in my view, Rortyesque (with a soupçon of Barbara Herrnstein Smith).

Let me begin with what I think Zerilli gets right.  She writes: “What is ‘aesthetic’ in an aesthetic judgment is for Wittgenstein, as for Kant, not an object that is external and prior to judgment itself.  ‘Aesthetic’ is not an object but a mode of judgment” (81).The use of the word “aesthetic” here causes problems.  Why not just say “judgment” simpliciter constitutes its object?  Try substituting “scientific” for “aesthetic” in the passage from Zerilli.  Hasn’t Bruno Latour (and, for that matter, Dewey) shown us that the object in the lab also does not exist “ external and prior” to the operations of the bench scientist?  “Judgment,” in other words, precisely points us toward interaction—and those interactions promise to show us how a set of familiar dualisms (subject/object; reason/feelings; self/other; fact/value) belie the complexity of how the world appears to us, how it comes into sight.  This is the essential Arendtian point.  There is no world of any sort for the lone thinker, who communes only with himself.  It is only through interaction, through the encounter with plurality, with things and people who push back and impress (good Wordsworthian word) themselves upon me just as I impress myself upon them, that the world comes into view—and acquires enough stability within the flux of temporality, James’s “buzzing, blooming confusion,” to provide a place to stand, a space where I can appear and others can appear to me. 

Judgment, in short, is (as Zerilli helpfully stresses) “a way of seeing” (54).  She ties this understanding of judgment to Wittgenstein’s “seeing an aspect.”  Thus, the philosophical account of judgment (as we find it, especially, in Kant) should be seen (that is, grasped in this aspect) as a meta-description of what is entailed in that act of seeing.  One puzzle here is whether the term “judgment” is all-encompassing.  We stand in relation to the world and to others (basic pragmatist starting point).  Does the term “judgment” simply alert us to the multiple ways we constitute, we “see,” those relations?  Or are there other ways of standing in relation that are not “judgments,” but some other kind of thing?  Perhaps relations of brute force are entirely different.  I discover I have cancer.  I will have various attitudinal responses to that fact; I can view it, see it, in different ways that will constitute my relation to the fact.  But there are limits, which will play out over time, to the extent that my relation to the cancer will influence its development. 

In Kant, there are three kinds of judgments, but there doesn’t seem to be something other than judgment on the human side.  There is the determinative judgment that this is a case of colon cancer, not prostate cancer. (First critique; the way of seeing here is the way of science and it functions under the sign of natural necessity.) There is the practical judgment of what is the properly moral way to act in response to the fact of having colon cancer. (Second critique; the way of seeing here is moral and it functions under the sign of freedom.) And there is the affect-laden “aesthetic” judgment which describes my cancer in terms (“disaster,” a “blessing in disguise,” “just retribution for my bad habits,” and the like) that indicate my possible response to the fact, my Wittgensteinian ways of “going on” from here, perhaps my Deleuzian “lines of flight.” (Third Critique; the way of seeing here is aesthetic and it functions under the sign of feeling or sensation.) The processes of judgment differ in the three cases, but they are all called “judgment” because they leave me with a way of “seeing” the situation and of gauging appropriate responses to it.  I have judged that this is the situation, that this is the way to characterize, view, understand it.  And from that judgment, I project possible ways of acting from where I currently see myself as standing.  (All of this Zerilli’s work brings me to see. For Arendt’s relation to this tripartite Kantian division, see my end note to this post.)

The philosopher, then, describes these different modes of judgment, the difference between how the doctor encounters cancer from the way the patient does.  Cancer means different things to the two of them—and suggests different ways of proceeding, of going on.  Zerilli adds the Arendtian point that cancer’s reality is undergirded by the fact that it appears to both the doctor and the patient, even though it appears from a different perspective for each of them.  This difference of perspective, she insists throughout her book (following the work of James Conant), attests to the object’s reality even as it indicates the different positions (different “points of view”) occupied by the various selves who see the object.  For Arendt, the “common world” is constituted out of plurality, out of the different viewpoints that converge on that common object.  My feelings of bodily discomfort and pain are confirmed by the doctor’s diagnosis of cancer.  That the doctor can see the “same thing” even though his viewing of it is through a battery of tests and not through my bodily experience substantiates that cancer’s existence.  It is not a figment of my imagination, my hypochondria, but a real thing. In this case, my view is not necessarily “corrected” by the doctor’s, but it is certainly augmented, and also given greater precision and specificity. But my first-person experience of the illness is hardly negated.

Zerilli puts a huge amount of stock (in some ways her whole argument hinges on this point) on the insistence that “whatever distortions arise from viewing the object from one perspective can be corrected by viewing the same object from other perspectives” (5).  This is the “enlarged” or “representative” thinking that Arendt highlights in her reading of Kant’s third Critique and that Zerilli (following Arendt) declares is indispensable to any politics at all.  “[U]nderstanding the democratic problem of judgment” entails recovering “the ordinary concept of perspective, according to which perspectives are perspectives on something and are corrigible by other perspectives (through representative thinking)” (267).  The problem that Arendt identifies is that we no longer share a common object, a common world, and this loss of multiple perspectives leaves us unable to talk together, to share anything, or to act in concert.  (Action in concert constitutes the space of appearances, the common world, in which freedom can then be realized.)  For Zerilli, it is this loss of a common world that afflicts us today, not irreconcilable clashes in values.

But that diagnosis is unclear.  Does she mean that the lack of a common world is prior to value disputes?  That is, once we do at least reestablish a basis for talking (for knowing/acknowledging that we are talking about the same thing), the value disputes will follow.  Or does she think that establishing a common world somehow mitigates value disputes—or translates them into a different register?  Even more fundamentally, what’s the difference between losing a common world and unbridgeable value disputes?

In other words, could this book have been written in 2020?  Is the way some Americans understand the 2020 election or the Covid virus as contrasted to how other Americans view what is ostensibly the same object a matter of different realities or different values? Is this a difference with any difference?  And absent any detailed description of the process by which one perspective can be corrected by another (a concrete description that Zerilli never provides), how exactly are we to proceed when faced with someone who says the virus is a hoax?  Retreating to Wittgensteinian ground at this point—here my spade turns, or the hoax theorist just occupies another form of life—is no help at all, just a fancy way of throwing up one’s hands. 

After 2020, Zerilli’s conclusion to her book looks naïve and irrelevant as a response to the ills of democracy in today’s United States.  “Judging is a continual testing of ‘what we say’ to find the always contingent limits of democratic community as they exist for us right now” (280).  Who is the “we” here and who, in our present moment, feels any ability to either designate or shape/revise a “democratic community” that is in tatters?  Plus I thought the non-existence of that community, of the common, was Arendt’s point.  We need to learn (in concrete terms) what is required to reconstitute that community (if it ever did exist) not to hear about judging within its confines. 

Zerilli bravely marches on from that statement, acknowledging the inequities generated by political and economic power—inequities that generate oppositional visions of what is right and just.  “Let us put forward substantive public visions of what we hold to be right and just and debate these without the aid of newfangled democratic criteria created in the academic laboratories of ideal theory” (281).  Well and good if Zerilli means we cannot expect the adjudication of the debate coming from standards (criteria) held to transcend (be external to) the debate itself.  There is no impartial judge of the sort that Habermas (Zerilli persuasively demonstrates) wants to employ.  If one of our speaking points in the debate is to point toward “systematically distorted speech,” we need to use an understanding of “distortion” understandable to all its participants. In other words, any standards for judging must be immanent, internal to the community and the practices it shares. Of course, our problem is that we don’t seem to have that community or its practices in common.

But there, of course, is the rub.  Zerilli wants (desperately and at all costs) to avoid the pessimistic Weberian conclusion that we are destined to [she quotes Weber] “’the unending struggle between . . . [the] gods ‘ of the different systems and values or worldviews” (266).  She wants to find a path toward some kind of fundamental agreement—that world held in common so that when we debate we are at least talking about the same things.  And she seems to think that once we get that common world the problem of conflicting values will sort itself out.  Just how is not clear, since she scorns empathy as a solution, even while it requires an act of imagination to, in Arendt’s phrase, “think where one is not” (i.e. occupy in representative thinking the perspective of the other).

In any case, Wittgensteinian musings about “form of life” are not going to do any good at all.  That move is just a sleight of hand to explain intractable differences—neither an explanation of or solution to problems of conflict.  It is just a way of registering incomprehensibility.  The person who truly believes (not the self-serving politician who lies) that the 2020 election was stolen is like Wittgenstein’s lion.  I cannot understand him, so let’s label him as occupying a different form of life.  The label tells me nothing, just marks the gap.

The same, I think, holds for Gadamer, whom Zerilli discusses in Chapter Four. The appeal to “preunderstandings” or “tradition” is precisely what I mean by question-begging. “The formulation in speech of how things appear for us is no private langauge but an expression of common sense, of what I share with others by virtue of belonging to a particular sociohistorical culture” (129), But what agitates Arendt (as Zerilli makes abundantly clear) is the loss of “common sense.” The question is how to create that common sense, a question that can’t be solved by retreating to a ground where it always already exists.

Similarly, appeals to Cavell’s “agreement in patterns of support” (271) can’t do the trick since that assumes the existence of precisely what is lacking.  Not surprisingly (it is one of the occupational diseases of philosophers), Cavell links that notion of “patterns of support” to “rationality”—and Zerilli commits herself wholeheartedly to that project.  She is bound and determined to show that judgment of the aesthetic sort is just as rational as other modes of judgment.  The corrigibility of one perspective by another through the process of enlarged thinking counts as “rational revision of our beliefs” (40) and she insists, along with Cavell, “that aesthetic (and moral and political) arguments are not conclusive and rational in the same way [that arguments in science and logic are], and yet they can be conclusive and rational” (67).

Zerilli never in her long book shows us in what way aesthetic judgments are “conclusive.”  We are told that “quarrels” about aesthetic judgments will only end when I “bring someone to share my judgment [which] . . . must be a matter of getting the person to see what I see, to share, that is, my affective response” (55).  So, perhaps, “conclusive” in bringing this particular “quarrel” to an end, but “conclusive” for all who have a perspective on that object? 

The Rorty response to this hope for conclusive judgments is simple. To paraphrase Lincoln, you can persuade some of the people some of the time, but hardly expect to convince all of the people all of the time. Rorty would agree it’s about getting other people to see what I see, feel what I feel (for example, that women’s unpaid domestic labor needs to be acknowledged and compensated; if not, we have a case of injustice). But there is no pathway (Arendt would agree) to a conclusive judgment about such matters. And Rorty would add that there is no conclusive way to rule out certain kinds of arguments, reasons, or appeals in the rhetorical effort to convince others. Anything goes. We can’t stop politicians from lying about the 2020 election; efforts at censorship are notoriously ineffective and have side effects that are arguably worse than what can be achieved. I can only counter forms of speech (and actions tied to that speech like the recent Georgia law curtailing voting) I detest with speech of my own–and various actions (ranging from boycotts, demonstrations, court challenges, libel suits, and legislation all the way to secession and civil war). Politics is precisely about such public contestations–and there is no formula for bringing such contests to a conclusion. We just try to keep the contests to the realm of peaceful persuasion, in the awareness that violent confrontation is always possible (and may even prove in some cases unavoidable). There are no holds barred in these contestations, and the proof of a judgment is in the pudding, in how successfully it wins adherents, with very few judgments getting anywhere close to unanimity.

Zerilli, then, needs to provide us with a concrete example of how Arendtian judgment in practice would bring us to something like common sense. The fullest example she offers is of the Bush and Blair administrations’ lies leading up to the Iraq War. The argument is that the facts were known, but were not “acknowledged” (working with Cavell’s distinction between knowledge and acknowledgment), were not discussed in the public sphere in such a way as to make them “politically significant” (139). So the example shows how we lack a common world, a robust form of pluralistic discourse about actions and events. But we don’t get an (admittedly counter-factual) account of how, if the polity engaged in such discourse, it would reach a “conclusive” judgment about the two governments’ actions.

In other words, the diagnosis is convincing enough (albeit rather over-elaborate), but how we move toward a solution is not clear. To take my example from above: no one disagrees about the fact that women’s domestic labor is unpaid. But whether that fact is “politically significant” is disputed, and the best action to take in response to the fact (even if we agree it is politically significant) is also under dispute. Arendtian judgment points to a desirable political process of opinion-articulation about the issue, and recommends a good faith effort to understand others’ (opposing or different) opinions. But such efforts offer no guarantee of any conclusive result to that discussion. That we share a minimally common vision of the basic fact of unremunerated labor does very little to help settle the other questions. And when we disagree about the basic fact–i.e. that Biden won the 2020 election–the sharing of opinions and the effort to see where the other is coming from in his opinion gets us (as far as I can see) nowhere at all. We rely instead on court rulings and taking a vote (the January 6th vote in Congress) to bring the matter to a conclusion–and those procedures are adversarial, more likely to highlight the absence of conclusive judgments than their achievement.

Two further oddities to note here: 1) why the rush to collapse the plurality of perspectives into agreement? General agreement on electoral procedures may be necessary and certainly seem desirable in relation to issues of legitimacy and fairness. But it is not clear that conclusive judgments are desirable in aesthetic cases. The richness of aesthetic experiences is enhanced by different affective responses to those experiences—responses that are then articulated and even passionately defended by different members of the audience.  I might understand your response as you describe it, and even find my response shifted by yours, but need I come to “share” that response?  Might I not hold on to my different reading of this aspect or that of the experience?  Does “seeing an [one] aspect” preclude also seeing others?  After all, it is a duck/rabbit, not just a duck even when my seeing focuses in on the duck aspect.  And even if it is “conclusive” that it’s a duck/rabbit, not just a duck, it is not true in every case that assembling all the aspects gives us the proper result.  Zerilli quotes approvingly Arendt’s [and Kant’s] scorn for simply counting votes; the conclusive result is not aggregative.

My point is that both the need for a conclusive result and the means toward achieving it remain mysterious in Zerilli’s work.  At least on some points, non-conclusiveness (as Arendt knew and stressed) is preferable to an indisputable conclusion.  As for how much agreement is needed for a society to avoid secession and/or civil war (the ultimate forms of conflict), I think that’s an empirical question.  Procedures like voting exist precisely because there are conflicts that debate will not resolve.  Consensus about what is conclusive will not be reached, so “we” agree to move forward by holding a vote.  But, of course, agreement about this pragmatic procedure can also collapse—and the community fall apart.  There is nothing conclusive about the procedure.  It is simply a mechanism, contingent through and through upon acceptance by those who utilize it, for not letting conflict get out of hand.

In short, Zerilli seems, in her own way, to desire some solution to the conflict view she finds in Weber—and in that search hardly seems very different from Habermas.  She is saying that we can’t import the mechanism for alleviating conflict from outside the community.  Instead, we must create agreement through the processes by which we come to share affections, come to see things in the same way.  There I think she is absolutely right: agreement is utterly contingent, and completely fragile, and must be created and re-created continually through our interactions with one another and with the world.  That’s the part of Zerilli’s book I find clarifying and inspiring.  We do, as Arendt insists, create our space of appearances and our common world through “concert in action,” which I understand as those daily interactions.  And it is the fact, as Arendt makes clear and as Cavell sometimes affirms, that those interactions are utterly contingent and without foundation.  We can descend into civil war as well as hold our communities together even as we quarrel.  Nothing in principle, or in ideal theory, or in the realm of necessity influences whether we muddle on or fall apart.  That’s why Arendt on promises and forgiveness has more to offer us than Cavell on attunement, agreement, forms of life or (especially) rationality.

2) But one further point about judgment before finally getting to my critique of rationality.  Zerilli, I think, equivocates about judgment in ways that are not helpful.  Is judgment “a mode of seeing” (the Wittgensteinian path)?  Or is it a mode of evaluation (one way of reading Kant, and certainly a prevalent ordinary language use of the term, including by Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem.)  Or is judgment about decision-making, about figuring out what is appropriate to do in this situation (a common way of thinking about political judgment on the collective level and phronesis on the individual level)?  I think Zerilli embraces each of these possibilities at different points in her presentation.  I can see that she is wary of an apprehension/evaluation dualism, since that seems to accept a fact/value divide she is at pains to disavow.  I am sympathetic to that desire.  But still.  I see now (apprehension) that it’s a duck/rabbit.  Do I really (inevitable and inextricably) also simultaneously judge it a fine example of a duck/rabbit?  Do we never simply recognize a thing?  I am inclined to think we don’t, in every instance, have our evaluative hat on.  But this enters tricky ground—ground defined by Kant’s allegiance to “disinterestedness” and by the pragmatic insistence (hence Putnam’s attack on the fact/value distinction) that we are never mere spectators, that we always actively related to what we perceive.  In terms of Zerilli’s argument, if the fact/value dichotomy is spurious, then the Arendtian establishment of a common world is not so distinct from the value questions that agitate Habermas and Rawls as Zerilli wants us to believe.

OK.  So I have finally got to it: the critique of rationality.  Here’s what I see. Zerilli has made a compelling case that there are different forms of judgment. (I will return to the case she makes in my next post since that case raises its own thorny, and very interesting issues.) But then, even as she acknowledges that aesthetic judgment is different from science and logic, she works very hard to show aesthetic judgment is also rational.  To make that case, she has to appeal to tortured Kantianisms like “indeterminate concepts”  and “subjective validity” (Kant quoted in Zerilli, 257).  And then she has to show that these features of aesthetic judgment are rational?  What’s at stake?  What’s the value added (to be utterly crude about it)?  Zerilli looks utterly Habermasian to me at this moment.  She wants declaring aesthetic judgment “rational” to do some work I simply don’t think it can do—and precisely for the reasons she has outlined in her critique of Habermas. 

There are reasons, yes.  We offer and demand reasons in our interactions with others.  Reasons can serve to convince others—and, at times, oneself—about the fitness, the appropriateness, of one’s decisions and actions.  Such reasons are persuasive or not as the case may be.  They stand on their own ground as efforts at justification, at wooing (Arendt’s phrase in her lectures on Kant), at examining why and wherefore.  To call these reasons “rational” adds nothing.  It is just to make the empty claim that those reasons are good ones, worth paying heed.  But if the reasons themselves do not persuade, praising them as rational (or denigrating competing reasons as irrational) will not do the trick of gaining consent. 

Here are two further ways to make this point. First, the effort to expand our concept of Reason to include aesthetic judgments looks like semanticism, the vice philosophers (sometimes accurately) are always accused. Redefine Reason to be more capacious, so that it now includes what was formerly excluded. Does shifting the name and its range of reference really accomplish anything outside of the realm of words? Does it convince anyone that a set of arguments they used to find implausible are now, via the deus ex machina of redefinition, plausible? Second, is Reason a determinate or indeterminate concept? Zerilli, I think, must answer that it is a normative concept, like beautiful, and hence indeterminate. What are the consequences of that move? Basically, it means we must accept that norms are dynamic, ever open to revision and reformulation in unexpected ways. Our understanding of “beautiful” is transformed by the appearance of Van Gogh’s paintings. Using Raymond Williams’ useful terminology, the “dominant” understanding of beautiful could not encompass Van Gigh’s paintings as beautiful. But those paintings pointed toward an “emergent” understanding of beauty. Crucially, the example, the actual paintings and their growing appeal to certain viewers, comes first. The redefinition of “beauty” follows.

The same holds for Reason. What is deemed reasonable at any given moment depends of actual reasons, actual argumentative and demonstrative interactions that succeed in persuading. As Zerilli very helpfully and correctly puts it: “the locus of normativity is not rules, but our interests, purposes, and desires themselves” (26). I take it that this means that the articulation of the norm comes after the on-the-ground experience of the give-and-take of social intercourse that brings the norm into being. Norms are in flux; they emerge; they are, in certain moments of transition (or maybe at all times) a site of contestation. So you need to make your case for your understanding of the norm of “reasonable,” not just attempt to police the field by deeming this example reasonable and that one irrational. If Zerilli wants to plant her flag on “the rational revision of our beliefs” (40), she needs to work through concrete examples (as Kant and Arendt explain in their accounts of “exemplary validity”), rather than thinking that definition can do the work for her. (Arendt, it should be noted, is addicted to arguing via definitional distinctions, one of her greatest faults.) What is “reasonable” will be pragmatically determined (as the meaning of a word is) in “use” (Wittgenstein) as it is taken up by one’s auditors and points us toward ways to “go on.” But one’s auditors can also deny your normative indication of the proper (or best or most appropriate) way to proceed. They are not persuaded. They don’t deem your recommendations and representations “reasonable,” no matter how much you claim they truly are–a claim, I am saying, that will do nothing to advance your cause when the actual reasons you offer don’t do the job.

There are different styles of thinking, or argumentation, of coming to believe one thing rather than another.  We can, to some but a limited extent, articulate our “reasons” for our beliefs and decisions and arguments, but to collapse those different styles (processes) of thought under some general term Reason seems more an attempt to cover over differences we find embarrassing or threatening than to tell us anything substantial.  To call some beliefs rational and others irrational is empty name-calling.  It will not change my own or others’ relation to those beliefs.  Changing beliefs is a matter of the specific reasons and experiences and testimony offered in the give-and-take of interaction, not a matter of labeling one set of beliefs rational, an approach that actually abdicates from doing the work of specific reason-giving.  Or, as Mark Twain, put: “Man is the rational animal, and you can bet which animal said that.”

All honor to Zerilli for presenting such a thorough examination of the style of thinking we know as “reflective judgment” or “aesthetic judgment.” She has helped me clarify my allegiances and convictions on these issues. That style should not feel defensive in the face of science or in the face of restrictive understandings or “Reason.”  By attending to what actually convinces on the ground, on the actual processes of belief formation and of reason-giving, the phantasm of Reason can be returned to where it belongs—in company with Platonic forms, Being, the noumenon, and other metaphysical relics meant to relieve us from contingency and diversity/difference.  There is no good achieved by unifying the multiple practices of reason-giving under the term Reason, just as there is no good to come of unifying the multiple beings that inhabit the world under the term Being.

END NOTE on Arendt and Kant:

I have said the Kant gives us three specimens of judging and that all the forms of thought he describes appear (at first blush; I want to be tentative about this) to be species of judgment, if we take judgment to mean a sizing up, a way of seeing, the situation in which one finds oneself (using Heidegger’s resonant use of the word “find”). Does Arendt’s tripartite division in the Life of the Mind follow suit? Certainly not exactly. Pure reason (the thinking described in Kant’s first critique) has no place in Arendt’s final work. She is either not very interested in the forms of scientific thought–or she believes humans are so directly and obviously subject to the “necessities” of what she deems “life processes” that there is nothing of interest to say. All her interest is in forms of thought that promise some kind of freedom from necessity. So the Socratic “thinking” that occupies the first volume of Life of the Mind has nothing in common with Kant’s pure reason. Willing (the subject of the second volume of Life of the Mind), on the other hand, does chime in certain ways with Kantian practical reason and its focus on the “good will” and on the space of human freedom. I won’t pursue the limits of those echoes here.

Instead, I want to consider if it is possible to differentiate Socratic thinking from judgment (the proposed topic of Arendt’s third volume, one she discusses in several essays and in the Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy). Socratic thinking, unlike the “representative thinking” that characterizes judgment, is not irreducibly social, but consists instead of a internal dialogue with one’s self. Its focus is integrity, consistency, or “harmony.” It judges whether this belief or that action is one I can live with, one that I can affirm as who I am, who I am content to be. Arendt gets to this idea through her need to explain how some people (very few, but not no one) were able to resist changing their morals as easily as changing their table manners after the Nazis took power. So the distinction between this internal meditation and enlarged thinking (which takes account of the views of others) seems clear.

Except for three worries. 1. Isn’t it odd to ascribe this kind of internal thinking to Socrates when he constantly engaged in dialogue with others, when all his commitments were worked out through those conversations with others, with that soliciting of their views? He seems a terrible example of the dialogue of self with self. (Zerilli, pp. 121-24, points us toward places–especially in the Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy–where Arendt focuses in on the dialogical and public nature of Socrates’ thinking, which only makes the account of Socrates in Thinking all the more puzzling.)

2. Eichmann’s “thoughtlessness,” as Arendt characterizes it, is precisely his inability to think from the standpoint of the other. Eichmann, we are told, can’t think. Which suggests (very plausibly, I think) that internal, Socratic “thinking” is, in fact, impossible if not accompanied by judgment (understood as representative thinking). You can’t have one without the other; they are inextricably intertwined. Socrates needs those dialogues with others to do the kind of thinking he does when he is by himself. Conversely, Eichmann can do any internal thinking because he is incapable of any representative thinking.

3. The kind of integrity (harmony) achieved in the dialogue with one’s self is, it seems to me, inevitably responsive to outside pressures. That is, the very threat of non-integrity does not arise unless others are urging you to do something that threatens your harmony. It is this gap that makes thinking necessary, so that the internal dialogue is always already social, because referencing the external pressures working against one’s personal standards (of integrity, consistency, of proper or moral behavior). And if we accept Wittgenstein’s argument against private language (as I do), then it doesn’t even make sense to speak of “personal standards.” There are just different publicly available standards that are in conflict with one another–and which have been internalized in different ways. (Zerilli talks in places of “initiation into practices.” I want to hear more about that, especially in relation to a plurality of practices, some of which might conflict with one another, as contrasted to a monolithic, singular “form of life.”)

In sum, thinking and judging, which Arendt wants to keep distinct, seem to collapse into one another. Or, if they don’t quite collapse, they always appear in tandem. You can’t have one without the other. Which may just be a way of stating what I take to be an obvious truth: you can’t have an individual without a community to which she is bound.