Response to Thiele

The most difficult but also important task involved in responding critique of one's work is trying understand what disturbs the critic most. Three aspects of my reading of Arendt on judgment seem disturb Leslie Paul Thiele: (1) I do not pay attention the role of encounters in the formation of judgments, (2) I treat the whole practice of judgment as a fickle product of imaginative fancy, and (3) I deprive judgment of any moral import. I will try respond these criticisms in turn. I agree with Thiele about the importance of narrative in Arendt's account of But the role played by narrative was not the concern of my essay. The concern was foreground judgment as practice of freedom and in this way loosen the stranglehold that the validity problematic has on both our understanding of Arendt and much contemporary democratic political thinking. This problematic is definitive of, but in no way restricted to, the work of Jiirgen Habermas and theorists of deliberative democracy such as Seyla Benhabib. Thiele says my criticism of Habermas may be fair, but I unfairly put Ronald Beiner in the same camp. That was not my intention. Professor Beiner was the one reader who noticed and emphasized the problem of freedom in Arendt's account of Deeply indebted his reading, I am all the more puzzled that he would grant those aspects of Habermas's critique that turn on the question of validity. Professor Thiele characterizes my project as an effort to complete Arendt's unfinished theory of judgment. Demurring at such hubris, I would characterize it as an attempt recover the thematic of freedom, which (as Beiner noted) originally inspired Arendt raise the problem of judgment, and clarify why that theory is so often accused of failing answer the question of validity. Habermas's perplexity about Arendt's failure provide cognitive foundation for politics struck me as curious but not entirely unexpected. It was the occasion ask whether Arendt had explicated clearly

Criticism · Democracy · Epistemology · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Reading (process · Sociology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

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