2
cannot be subjected to rational processes of validation anymore than we can validate judgments
of taste. Arendt’s turn to Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment in the third Critique, Habermas
maintains, is symptomatic of her refusal to provide a “cognitive foundation” for politics and
public debate. This leaves “a yawning abyss between knowledge and opinion that cannot be
closed with arguments.”
4
Taking up Habermas’s critique, Ronald Beiner, editor of Arendt’s Kant
lectures, too, emphasizes the problems associated with “the all-important contrast between
persuasive judgment and compelling truth” in Arendt’s thought and wonders why she failed to
recognize that “all human judgments, including aesthetic (and certainly political) judgments,
incorporate a necessary cognitive dimension.” (You will be a better judge of art if you know
something about the art you are judging.) A Kantian approach, which excludes knowledge from
political judgment, says Beiner, “renders one incapable of speaking of ‘uninformed’ judgment
and of distinguishing differential capacities for knowledge so that some persons may be
recognized as more qualified, and some as less qualified, to judge.”
5
Does Arendt severe the link between argument and judgment? In my view, the critical
charge entirely misses the mark. Her point is not to exclude arguments from the practice of
aesthetic or political judgment—as if something or someone could stop us from making
arguments in public contexts—but to press us to think about what we are doing when we reduce
the practice of politics to the contest of better arguments. Arendt disputes not the idea of
argument as such but rather the assumption that agreement in procedures for making arguments
ought to produce agreement in conclusions, hence agreement in the political realm can be
reached in the manner of giving proofs. Arendt is struggling with a difficult problem to which
her critics, focused as they are on the rational adjudication of political claims, are blind: our deep
sense of necessity in human affairs. If Arendt brackets the legitimation problematic that
dominates the thought of Habermas, it is because she sees in our practices of justification a
Convention