3
strong tendency towards compulsion, which, in turn, destroys the particular qua particular and
the very space in which political speech (including arguments) can appear.
6
She sees how we
tend to run the space of reasons into the space of causes: logical reasoning is transformed from a
dialogic tool of thought, with which we aim at agreement, into a monologic tool of thought, with
which we compel it. What Habermas calls “the rationality claim immanent in speech” risks
becoming what Wittgenstein calls “the hardness of the logical must.”
7
Thinking through the blind spots that attend critiques of Arendt’s unfinished project to
develop an account of judgment, we should ask, why did Arendt think she needed an account of
the judging faculty? To what problem was judgment to be an answer? According to Beiner, it
was this: “How to affirm freedom?” Present throughout her writings and explicitly posed in the
final paragraph of “Willing,” the second volume of the Life of the Mind, Arendt saw in the
judging faculty something that “allows us to experience a sense of positive pleasure in the
contingency of the particular.” Beiner continues:
Arendt’s thought here is that human beings have commonly felt the “awesome
responsibility” of freedom to be an insupportable weight, which they have sought to
evade by various doctrines, such as fatalism or the idea of historical process, and that the
only way in which human freedom can be affirmed is by eliciting pleasure from the free
acts of men by reflecting upon and judging them.”
8
Having astutely identified the importance of affect and the central problem of freedom in
Arendt’s work on judgment, Beiner goes on—quite inexplicably in my view—to endorse the
aforementioned Habermasian critique, which ignores the theme of freedom as Arendt understood
it (i.e., how to affirm the human capacity to begin anew) and casts the problem of judgment
strictly as one of ascertaining intersubjective validity. Seyla Benhabib, working within the
Habermasian framework, captures this decisive interpretive gesture when, likewise trying to
Convention