Hannah Arendt’s Kantian Socrates: Moral and Political Judging

The central claim in this essay is that Hannah Arendt advanced two different concepts of judgment: The first is moral and it is her Socratic reinterpretation of Kant’s «categorical imperative»; the second is political and it represents her Socratic adaptation of Kant’s «enlarged mentality». I show that Arendt’s concepts of judgment runs on two different trains of thought throughout her work. One train branches out of her characterization of Adolf Eichmann as a thoughtless being, and it mostly consists of both her exploration of the possible relation between thinking and morality and her quest for an autonomous source of morality. In this first case, Arendt reframes Kant’s categorical imperative in Socratic terms by revealing a principle of non-imperative self-respect. The second train of thought is less contingent; it stems out of Arendt’s realization that recovering plurality and the world in-between men would require more than just the phenomenological recovery of political action, it requires the recovery of the public and equi-vocal manifestation of thought. In this other case, Arendt suggests a reevaluation of the Socratic phronimos by way of the Kantian notions of sensus communis and enlarged mentality. The result is her concept of Judging