Understanding Action, Judgment, and Politics in Hannah Arendt

1. Introduction/Abstract
- My research paper is on Hannah Arendt’s Political Philosophy. I entitled my research as
such because my discussion on Hannah Arendt’s politics flow from two of her important
political concepts: action and judgment.

- Why did I choose this topic?

My interest on politics began when I was just a little child. My father was a lawyer. Local
politicians, who happened to be my father’s kumpares, would often visit our house. And
because of that, I developed an interest in following the political landscape of our
country. Eventually, I started to observe also the political landscape of the United States
of America which I realized is not entirely different from ours. It is as dirty and as
polarizing as our politics here in the Philippines.

- Why is it so? One reason that I see is that the idea of politics have become limited to
mere governance or administration of goods and the issue of allegiance (Democrats-
Republican, Liberal-Conservative, and now, Dilawan-DDS) has become central to it.

- In the course of my philosophical studies, I came across a philosopher, by the name of

Hannah Arendt, who proposes a different approach towards politics. Whereas Plato
suggests a seemingly totalitarian government in his Republic and Thomas Hobbes says
that there is a need for a Leviathan so as to prevent people from destroying one another, it
seems that Hannah Arendt implies

- “No, let us not philosophize so as to come up with an ideal state/government that will
shape the political landscape. Rather, let us bring back first or look into what really
politics is all about and from there let people decide among themselves which form of
government is necessary for them.” In other words, the closest form of government that
Arendt advocates is a participatory democracy.

- Such politics of Hannah Arendt was shaped by her experience of two countries that were
seemingly poles apart at the onset of the 20th century. She was born in Germany which
eventually became under the Nazi party. And because she was a Jew, she was forced to
leave Germany for the United States of America where she settled for good.

- Such really made a great impact on her, for she was able to experience both an ‘ideal’
totalitarian government and an ‘ideal’ democratic government. These contexts greatly
influenced her politics.

- For Arendt, drawing her inspiration from her contexts and the ancient Greek polis,
politics is based on the fact of human plurality or in a community of peoples. If there is
only one man, politics would be unnecessary and even absurd. If a government becomes
totalitarian or dictatorial, politics ceases to exist.

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2. Statement of the Problem
- The reduction of politics to mere governance or administration can be traced back to
modernity which, for Arendt has two distinctive features, one is called “world
alienation.” The other is called “the rise of the social.”

A. “World Alienation”

- Modernity, as far as the history of philosophy is concerned, started with Rene Descartes,
who is known for his Cartesian Methodic Doubt.

- And because of the Methodic Doubt, there has been a serious question on the reliability
of the human senses and an emphasis on introspection.

- Arendt describes such introspection as the “sheer cognitive concern of consciousness

with its own content…must yield certainty, because here nothing is involved except what
the mind has produced itself; nobody is interfering but the producer of the product, man
is confronted with nothing and nobody but himself.” (The Human Condition p. 280)

- It means that introspection, in the Cartesian sense, achieves certainty without the aid of
anything or anyone except the self. The self has become central to the modern age.

- Maurizio D’ Entreves says that “by giving primacy to the experiences of an isolated
subject, the modern age has endowed subjectivity with the power to determine
reality, at the cost, however, of making this reality a purely private affair.” (The
Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt p. 25-26)

- Because reality has become a purely private matter in the modern age, deliberation on
political issues has become moot and academic. It has become unnecessary.

B. “Rise of the Social”

- Another feature of modernity is the “rise of the social” (HC p. 38-39) which is the
intrusion of economic concerns into the political realm.

- As far as the ancient Greeks are concerned, the oikos and the polis are separate but
complementary realms.

- But with the emergence of capitalism1 in the 17th century, the distinction between these
two realms blurred.
1
Capitalism, also called free market economy or free enterprise economy, economic system, dominant
in the Western world since the breakup of feudalism, in which most means of production are privately owned and
production is guided and income distributed largely through the operation of markets. (cf. The Editors of
Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Capitalism,” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., November 18,
2019, https://www.britannica.com/topic/capitalism, [accessed on March 28, 2020])

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 - Capitalism is characterized by an emphasis on productivity. People produce more than
what they actually need and because of this, they cannot anymore find meaning in the
fruits of their work and labor. They are reduced to mere cogs in a machine.

- With the rise of the social, values became attached to economic concerns, specifically to
productivity.
C. Here’s the problem:
- Giving too much importance to subjectivity and productivity has become destructive to
politics. It leads to a kind of politics that is characterized by mere administration or
bureaucratic governance.

- In the Arendtian sense, politics is possible only in a world that is shared with others.
(Hindi sa paggawa ng sariling mundo kagaya ng kay Rene Descartes bagkus sa
pakikibahagi ng mundo sa ibang tao.)

- The concern of politics, for Arendt, is neither subjectivity nor productivity but
intersubjectivity.

- Central to Arendt’s politics is the concepts of action and judgment.

- In line with this, the author aims discuss Hannah Arendt’s intersubjective politics, using
her concepts of action and judgment. And from those concepts, the researcher will elicit
some key ideas in Arendt’s politics. Specifically, it seeks to answer the following
questions:

a. What is Arendt’s notion of action?

b. What is Arendt’s concept of judgment?
c. How does one interpret Arendt’s political theory?

3. Important points in Chapter 2: Action

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A. Definition
- For Arendt, there are three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action.
 Labor is the activity that responds to the necessities of biological life. It is
a broad range of activities in which human persons are able to sustain and
reproduce life. In other words, it is bound to necessity.
 Work is the activity in which the human person fabricates a world over
and above what is merely given by nature. It refers to different activities
that produce the setting in which human persons live. It may refer to
building edifices and inventing gadgets that are useful to human persons.
In other words, it is bound to utility.
- Action, on the other hand, as Margaret Canovan defines it, refers to “a very broad
category of human activity that covers interactions with other people that are not
matters of routine behavior but require personal initiative” (Hannah Arendt: A
Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought p. 131).

 Only human persons can carry out such interactions since they require
personal initiative and are not merely matters of routine behaviour. Action,
therefore, is neither bound to necessity (like labor) nor utility (like work).

B. Essential Aspects: Freedom, Plurality, and Speech

1. Freedom
- Freedom is an important aspect of Hannah Arendt’s action. Here Arendt deviates
from the traditional notion of freedom that is often identified with free will or the
capacity to choose. Because for Arendt, what one wills does not necessarily
happen in reality. What happens, in reality, is a result of various factors other than
the human person’s capacity to choose or to will.

- Freedom is defined in an open-ended sense. It is the capacity to begin anew. Such

capacity is a characteristic element of action. In action, human persons can
interrupt human processes that have become automatic.

2. Plurality
- Moreover, action is never done in isolation. The context through which action
operates is human plurality, which refers to “the fact that men, not man, live on
earth and inhabit the world” (HC p. 7).

- Plurality does not merely pertain to sheer multiplicity. Rather, it is the condition
in which equality and distinction are recognized between human persons.

 Human persons are equal by virtue of belonging to the same humanity

while they are also distinct from one another in their individuality.
 Such equality and distinction are expressed through speech.

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 3. Speech
- Speech is characterized by the unique capacity of human persons to communicate
with others through the use language.

- Through speech and action, human persons are able to reveal their identities.
 For labor and work cannot sufficiently reveal a person’s identity, only
action can do that.
 In other words, human persons are known, not so much in the fruits of
their work or labor, but in the way they conduct themselves in the midst of
the community through which their action is plunged into a web of human
relationships.

C. Narrative and Remembrance

- Since action leaves no tangible marks or products, like that of work, it needs
narrative and remembrance in order to save it from futility or the oblivion of
forgetfulness.

- The identity that human persons reveal in engaging others in speech and action
can only be fully determined once they are done and are immortalized through the
stories that people tell.
D. Power and Space of Appearance
E. Unpredictability and Irreversibility
- Another feature of Hannah Arendt’s notion of action is unpredictability and
irreversibility.

- Since action always happens in the context of free human persons, it is

unpredictable and open-ended. Whenever a person engages in action, he/she
cannot control or predict the consequences of his/her action since it will be
entangle with the consequences of the action of others.

- Every disclosure through action is always an entrance into an already existing

web of human relationships. Thus, it is unpredictable.

- Moreover, since one cannot fully grasp the consequences of his/her actions,
he/she cannot ever undo what has been one.
 Every consequence is an effect of various and more primordial
consequences.
 In other words, there are no authors who can undo or destroy what they
had initiated once the outcome were proven disastrous.

- Furthermore, in order to save action from its frailties, Arendt offers some possible
remedies to its unpredictability and irreversibility: Forgiving and Promising

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  Forgiving is directed to the past, releasing others of the unintended
consequences of their actions (drawing her definition from the Greek,
hamartanein [to miss the mark, mistake], aphienai [to let go, to release])
 While binding oneself through promises serves to erect pillars of security
in the midst of an unpredictable future.
 Forgiving and promising are always done in the face of others.
 However, it must be clarified that forgiving and promising do not
ultimately eliminate the irreversibility and unpredictability of action, for if
they do, they would be self-defeating.
 Uncertainty is always inherent in action. But with the faculty of
promising, human persons can provide small certainties amid greater
uncertainties.
 Forgiving and promising simply provide coping mechanisms that would
enable human persons to keep on with life and start anew without being
doomed by the consequences of action.
4. Important points in Chapter 3: Judgment
A. Definition
- In the previous chapter, we dealt with the external activities of human persons, in
this chapter, we will deal with the mental activities of human persons.

- If action is the most political of all human activities, judgment is the most
political of all the mental faculties of human beings.

- Arendt conceptualizes it as “the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from
ugly” (Life of the Mind p. 193).

- Difficulty

- Judgment is another important aspect of Arendt’s political philosophy, which

complements her theory of action.
 However, she was not able to write a systematic explanation of her notion
of judgment.
 She died before doing so. Judgment was supposed to be the last section of
her last book, The Life of the Mind, which was published posthumously
two years after her death.
 What I have are scattered writings of Arendt.
 What I did is I tried to weave them together, with the help of some
commentators, in order to make a more or less systematic explanation of
Arendt’s concept of judgment.

- Another difficulty in ‘judgment’ is that it has no clear cut standard of operation,

unlike the two other mental faculties that Arendt talks about, namely, thinking and
willing.

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  Thinking is assessed in terms of coherence and logicality which is rooted
in a person’s dialogue with himself/herself.
 Willing is assessed by its determination or resoluteness to carry out
something.
 Although judgment share some of the features of thinking and willing, it is
not exhausted by them.
 In judgment, one does not only look into consistency or soundness or the
ability to determine actions in different situations, he/she also looks into
elements like “discrimination, discernment, imagination, sympathy,
detachment, impartiality, and integrity” (The Political Philosophy of
Hannah Arendt p. 102).
 Such elements are always situational. They entail flexibility.

- In other words, judgment evaluates things that are always subject to change.
 They evaluate actions and situations that are characterized by
unpredictability and changeability.

- Judgments are always dependent on situations. One cannot judge unless he or she
has a certain grasp of what had happened.
 In judging an event, one cannot simply jump into conclusions without
knowing the facts involved.
 Also, one cannot judge unless he/she knows the situation of a person or a
group of persons.
 In judging a person, one cannot simply jump into conclusions as to who a
person is without trying to know what he/she has gone through.
 Judgment, therefore, lies in its object and in the capacity of the one
judging to look at that object from a broader perspective.
 Moreover, looking at things from a wider perspective involves the process
of understanding.
B. Judgment and Understanding
- The connection that Arendt makes between judgment and understanding can be
traced back to her pre-occupation in making sense of the totalitarian regimes of
Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia.
 Those regimes were responsible for the death of millions of people in the
various concentration and extermination camps scattered throughout
Europe.
 In understanding totalitarianism, Arendt tries to divorce, such from any
historical or ideological explanation.
 Arendt says, “Comprehension does not mean denying the
outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or
explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the
impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It
means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden
which our century has placed on us – neither denying its existence

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 nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short,
means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting
of, reality – whatever it may be” (The Origins of Totalitarianism
p. viii).
 For Arendt, to understand is to face reality as they appear without
immediately deducing them from history or ideology.
 To understand is to face reality in its freshness and rawness.

- Na kapag may binaril diyan sa kanto, madaling nasasabi ng marami… “ah drug
addict kasi yan…” absolving the perpetrator of his/her horrible deeds.
 The inhumanity committed was simply overshadowed by a general
explanation

- Such defect in understanding has a magnitude effect in one’s judgment.

- To understand is to face reality in its unprecedentedness. To judge is to tell

whether something is right or wrong, ugly or beautiful.
 When one fails in understanding, he/she necessarily fails in judging.

- In order to avoid a defect in understanding, Arendt offers the faculty of

imagination as a remedy.
 To imagine is to distance one’s self from an object and to look at the
corollary facts involving that object. In doing so, one is able to look at
things from their proper perspective without simply subsuming them to
pre-given explanations. Such perspective is necessary for an impartial
judgment.

- In brief, the connection that Arendt makes between judgment and understanding
is based on a retrospective evaluation of a thing of the past or something that
already exists.
C. Judgment and Thinking
- Furthermore, Arendt also connects judgment with thinking, which is not just
retrospective, like that of understanding, but also prospective.

- Thinking, for Arendt, is the constant dialogue of the human person with
himself/herself (The Life of the Mind p. 190-191).

- The connection that Arendt makes between thinking and judging draws its
inspiration from her attendance at Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem for crimes
against humanity. Adolf Eichman is one of the chief architect of the Holocaust
which systematically killed around six million Jews, which is about two-thirds of
the entire Jewish population in Europe.
 For her, the very reason why Eichmann committed such crimes was that he
did not simply think. And since he did not think, he was not able to judge
in the very situations where judgment was necessary.

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  Arendt’s observation of Eichmann led her to ask,
 “Is evil-doing (the sins of omission, as well as the sins of
commission) possible in default of not just “base motives”… but of
any motives whatever, of any particular prompting of interest or
volition? Is wickedness…not a necessary condition for evil-doing?
Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right
from wrong (judgment), be connected with our faculty of thought?
Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining
whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless
of results and specific content, could this activity be among the
conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even from
actually “condition” against them?” (The Life of the Mind p. 4-5)
 To answer this, Arendt appeals to the idea of conscience.

- Conscience is a product of thinking.

 For Arendt, it is not just the inner voice calling a person to do good and
avoid evil.
 It is more than a voice dictating one to do this and avoid that.
 Rather, conscience is derived from the fact that there is a voice in each
person whom he/she engages in dialogue and whom a person is
accountable for his/her deeds.
- In other words, more than to anyone else, a person is accountable to
himself/herself.
 And because of that, Arendt quoting Socrates, “It is better to suffer wrong
than to do wrong.”
 And for those who exercise their faculty of thinking, conscience inevitably
emerges.
 For Arendt, those who think are incapable of saying or doing anything that
would contradict himself/herself.

- If the conscience is the product of thinking by which one evaluates his/her words
and deeds, is it not the same as judgment?
 In terms of operation, they are similar.
 However, the difference lies in their ‘audience.’
 Conscience is directed to the self.
 Judgment is directed to the world.
 If conscience is an inner product of thinking, judgment is an outer
manifestation of thinking.
 As d’Entreves says, “If conscience represents the inner check by
which we evaluate our actions, judgment represents the outer
manifestation of our capacity to think critically” (The Political
Philosophy of Hannah Arendt p. 111).

- In other words, judgment makes it possible for thinking to be manifested in the

world.
 People are able to see that one thinks critically in the way he/she judges.
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D. Judgment and Enlarged Mentality
- Judgment, therefore, is a manifestation of thinking critically and part of such
thinking is the capacity of human persons for representative thought (The Political
Philosophy of Hannah Arendt p. 111).
 In other words, judgment, in Arendt’s sense, considers the point of view of
other people.
 It is not simply taking the opinion of others hook, line, and sinker.
 Rather, it is a way of considering things from the standpoint of others.

- Arendt calls this an ‘enlarged mentality,’ a term she borrows from Kant’s
Critique of Judgment (Ibid. p. 112). In other words, in Kant’s aesthetics.

- Judgment, in Arendt’s sense as she elicits it from Kant, deals with particulars.
 It does not deny any universality but that it constantly tries to find the
universal in the particular, not merely depending on pre-given universals.

- In particular, the judgment that Arendt elicits from Kant is his reflective
judgment.
 Kant has two notions of judgment.
 One is reflective, the other is determinant.
 In a nutshell, determinant judgments are deductive, reflective
judgments are inductive.

- For Kant, a reflective judgment proceeds from the particular to the universal
without the mediation pre-given concepts or universals.
 In the case of aesthetic reflective judgment, one can only apply the
concept of beauty upon experiencing in actuality a particular object that
embodies it.
 In other words, the validity of such judgment lies in its exemplarity.
 Concrete examples allow a person to bridge the particular to the universal.

- For Arendt, the application of such ‘exemplarity validity’ is not limited to

aesthetic objects or individuals; they can also be applied to events wherein one
can derive meaning that is of universal significance.
 For instance, the idea of a peaceful revolution that brought an end to a
dictatorial regime can be derived from the actual event that happened in
the Philippines in 1986.
 Moreover, events like that can only be judged impartially from the
perspective of a spectator.
 This claim is rooted in the fact that no one can be a good judge of
his/her own case.
 That is why Arendt claims that withdrawing from direct
involvement to a perspective outside the ‘game’ is necessary for
judgment.

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  In other words, impartiality and disinterestedness are essential
characteristics of judgment.

- Furthermore, two faculties must be employed by the spectator in order to have

such kind of judgment: imagination and common sense.
 Imagination is the faculty in which a person creates a mental
representation of things already perceived by the senses.
 This faculty creates the necessary distance for an impartial
judgment wherein one is able to see the object/s represented from
different points of view.
 And in such position, one is able to judge the real value of an
object.
 Common sense or sensus communis is another faculty in which one
transcends his/her individual idiosyncrasies.
 Common sense is not merely the knowledge that one expects of
others like one plus one equals two.
 In Arendt, it is a sense of the community
 It entails the capacity to communicate one’s judgment to others
and allow others to influence one’s judgment, which guarantees the
possibility of a rational communicative relation transcending the
mere application of any principle or concept.

- In brief, the validity of judgment lies in its degree of impartiality, which can only
be attained by employing an enlarged mentality.
 In an enlarged mentality, a person uses his/her faculties for imagination
and common sense.

5. Important points in Chapter 4: Politics

- In Chapter Two, the researcher explained that human plurality, spaces of
appearance, unpredictability, and irreversibility are distinctive features of
Arendt’s notion of action.

- In Chapter Three, the researcher saw that Arendt’s idea of impartial judgment
depends upon the recognition of human plurality within political communities
where different perspectives necessarily arise.

- Therefore, in this chapter, I will be expounding Hannah Arendt’s politics around

the ideas of the public realm, the private sphere, and the plurality of human
existence.

A. Public Realm

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- For Arendt, politics depends upon the public realm. Such realm is created when
human persons gather together in speech and action. For her, the public realm
refers both to the ‘space of appearance’ within the ‘world’ that human beings have
created and to the ‘world’ itself.
 As the space of appearance, the public sphere constitutes a kind of shared
reality.
 It is where individual experiences are shared, actions are evaluated
through judgment, and identities are revealed and made to flourish.
 In the public realm, human persons go beyond their individuality
without losing them in order to engage others.
 Arendt’s standard for reality is the public realm for private
experiences cannot attain reality unless they are shared.
 Moreover, such space of appearance goes beyond pre-existing
political structures for it “predates and precedes all formal
constitution of the public realm and the various forms of
government” (HC p. 199).
 For Arendt, politics is a process.
 It is not merely a reproduction of ready-made political
systems.
 Politics is something that creates new political structures or
new processes within existing systems.
 In other words, politics constantly recreates, which is only
possible when a space of appearance is generated through
the constant convocation of human individuals where each
person is given a chance to deliberate and actualize their
rationality.

 Furthermore, human persons can only generate such ‘space’ if it is

supported by a ‘world’ which human persons held in common.
 Such world is also referred to as the public realm, although in a
broader sense.
 The ‘world’ is common to all human persons and “distinguished
from our privately owned place in it” (HC p. 52).
 It is distinguished from human persons’ privately owned place in it.
The world is not the same as the earth or nature.
 Nature is something merely given to human beings by
virtue of being born.
 What characterizes the world is its artificiality in which
human persons alter some elements of nature and create
something out of them.
 For instance, a tree is of nature. But the chair, made out of
wood from that tree, is of the world.

- In brief, Arendt’s idea of the public realm is dependent both on the notion of a
durable common world and on the space of appearance that occurs within it
whenever human persons congregate in speech and action.

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- Furthermore, in participating in the affairs of the public realm, Arendt highlights
the significance of going beyond one’s private interests without entirely losing
them.
 Arendt makes a distinction between a person’s private interests as an
individual and a person’s public interests as a citizen of the public realm
(cf. “Public Rights and Private Interests,” Small Comforts for Hard Times:
Humanists on Public Policy p. 104).
 For her, public interests cannot be automatically derived from a set of
private interests.
 Mere majority consent among individuals is not a pre-requisite for an
interest to be considered ‘public.’
 Most of the time, public interests even go against the private interests of a
majority of people.
 In other words, ‘worldly’ interests are not necessarily the interests of
human persons as private individuals.
 They belong to the public sphere, in the strictest sense, because
they transcend the limited life expectancy and narrow individual
interests of human beings.

- In a jury system, the distinction between public and private interests is much
clearer.
 In legal cases under such system, members of the jury are expected to
uphold the public interests of justice and impartiality.
 And in doing so, jurors often put their lives in real danger.
 For instance, whenever they decide on a legal case involving
members of a drug syndicate, jurors often receive a lot of death
threats.
 If they allow themselves to be intimidated and prioritize more their
private interests, they will be putting public interests in jeopardy.
However, if they uphold public interests, they will be putting their
private interests at risk.
 Thus, safeguarding public interests involves a lot of courage,
which, for Arendt, is compensated by ‘public happiness.’
 For it is only through participating in the affairs of the public
realm and enjoying public happiness that human beings are able to
find meaning in public interests and be willing to transcend their
limited private interests.

B. Private Realm

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- With Arendt’s emphasis on the public realm, it might be misinterpreted that the
private realm is less important.
 However, through a thorough reading of Arendt, one can realize that this is
not her goal (Cf. Cooper, “Hannah Arendt’s Political Philosophy: An
Interpretation” p. 155).
 It is true that, for Arendt, a life spent in total solitude is not fully human.
 However, it is also true that a life spent entirely in public is neither fully
human as well.

- The private sphere, like that of the public realm, has its own significance.
 The private realm prepares the human person for the public realm so that
he may acquire first some values and principles so as not to be easily
swayed by others.
 So that when he goes out into the public, he is not merely one of the
many, but one who really engages the many in rational discourse.

- The private realm also guards the human person against the ever-increasing
growth, accumulation, and transformation of the world that has happened during
the industrial age.
 With the rise of capitalism and its rival, socialism, there has been a threat
to diminish and abolish the significance of the private realm.
 Capitalism and socialism abolish the much need private property
that people needed in order to flourish as human persons and to
become fully human.
 One is not able to thrive as a human person if he/she is merely driven by
the endless cycle of accumulation of wealth, as in the case of the rich, and
daily satisfaction of needs, as in the case of the middle class and poor
people.
 The point is that when one is too pre-occupied with accumulating more or
in trying to meet his/her daily needs, he/she is unable to flourish as a
human person.

- Moreover, the private realm is a requirement for one’s participation in the public
realm.
 To possess private property is to have a particular place in the world which
entails one’s belongingness in a political body.
C. The Plurality of Human Existence
- Even though the public realm is important, it does not constitute the entirety of
human life.
 This is what Leroy Cooper describes as the ‘pluralistic’ political theory of
Hannah Arendt.

- Each realm has its own significance in the holistic flourishing of human
individuals.

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- However, their significance diminishes whenever each realm and their proper
activities get entangled with one another.
 For example, Arendt criticizes the over-arching application of
utilitarianism (a philosophy that evaluates and operates things on the basis
of their usefulness and utility) to all aspects of life.
 The application of the utilitarian principles is acceptable only in work or
in fabrication.
 Arendt strongly opposes its application to human life as a whole, for there
are aspects of human life that must not be governed by mere utility.
 For instance, if utility becomes the principle that governs politics,
it would entail the end of politics.
 Intersubjective human discourse, the very principle of
politics, will no longer be needed.
 Human persons will be seen as mere instruments to a ready-
made structure.
 Such paves the way for totalitarian or dictatorial rule.
 Moreover, if utilitarian values become the governing
principle of human life, as a whole, human persons are
reduced to mere cogs in a machine deprived of any freedom
and humanity.

- The point of Arendt’s pluralistic way of looking at human life is to highlight the
importance of striking a balance in the life of human persons.
 Such balance can only be achieved in small-scale, face to face politics.
 Arendt recommends a ‘council system’ that is characterized by action and
participation, not by command and obedience to a ready-made design.
 Such system is applicable only to a small group of people living closely
with one another.
 However, Arendt did not leave a detailed blueprint on how such council
would operate.
 Such is consistent with her philosophizing. In other words, the
proper form of government should not come from her or a single
individual.
 Rather, it must arise from the debate and deliberation among
human persons.

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6. Conclusion
A. Action
- Hannah Arendt's emphasis on action salvages human persons from extreme
subjectivity, which leads them to world alienation and from extreme
intersubjectivity, which reduces them into mere dispensable parts of the
world at large.

- Action neither claims the illusions of absolute certainty nor uncertainty.

 In action, human persons are neither reduced into isolated individuals nor
a mere fragment of the many.
 Action allows human persons to rise above their subjectivity and realize
their potentials in the midst of a community of persons.
 It also allows human persons to realize their real identity and not simply
equate them with sheer productivity that is informed by a capitalistic or
economic mindset.
 So what is action? It is a broad category of human activity that covers
interactions with other people that are not matters of routine behavior but
require personal initiative.
B. Judgment
 Hannah Arendt’s concept of judgment enables one to rise above
his/her subjectivity and consider the ‘possible’ standpoint of other
persons.
 Such kind of mindset is very crucial in saving politics from the destructive
effects of totalitarianism and other dictatorial forms of government which
springs from the utter disregard of a plurality of perspectives.
 So what is judgment? It is an intersubjective way of determining whether
something is right or wrong, beautiful or ugly…..
C. Politics
- And how does one interpret Hannah Arendt’s politics?
- For her, politics should not be narrowed down to mere governance.
 It is more than that.
 It is a process in which human persons are able to interact with one
another in speech and action, which allows them to flourish as human
beings.
 In other words, the focus of politics should not be mere administration or
bureaucracy…The focus of politics should be human flourishing which
can only happen in the midst of a community.

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