This event features a discussion with Nicholas Poole (York University).
Abstract
Debates about democratic legitimacy often oppose justification and vindication as rival normative frames. The first seeks legitimacy through publicly endorsable reasons in advance of action (Kant, Korsgaard, Forst), the second through retrospective assessments of public outcomes (Machiavelli, Williams, Honig). This split also shapes the reception of Hannah Arendt’s writings on judgment: is her account chiefly spectatorial and redemptive, or also action-guiding and deliberative? Agonistic readers tend to embrace the vindicatory implications of the former (Zerilli, Kalyvas), while neo-Kantians pursue the justificatory promise of the latter but often find Arendt’s aesthetic turn too normatively thin (Habermas, Benhabib). I address both debates by developing Arendtian judgment as heautonomy, a reflexive mode of agency in which prospective reasons and retrospective appearances are reconciled in the imagination as exemplary company. By clarifying a central tension around Arendt’s unfinished third volume of The Life of the Mind, I uncover latent resources for addressing legitimacy crises via the deeper crisis of exemplarity that underwrites them.
I proceed in three steps. First, I offer a close reading of the final passage of Some Questions of Moral Philosophy where Arendt claims that our ability to tell right from wrong depends on our choice of examples as company. This claim culminates a course that, in condensed form, tracks The Life of the Mind: it begins with rootless evil, probes the limits of thinking and willing, and concludes with judgment as adequate to it. The passage yields a productive paradox: If thinking houses activities proper to justification (rational deliberation) and willing those proper to vindication (decision), Arendt’s separation of judgment from both suggests a normativity irreducible to either stance. Yet her positive account – our decisions of right and wrong depend on thinking in examples – implies not abandonment but redemption: judgment transforms rather than replaces thinking and willing. The question, then, is how judgment occupies this middle terrain.
In the second section, I draw from Arendt’s Kant lectures, Lessing essay, and engagement with Rene Char to specify the stance, ethic, and activity of judgment. The stance is heautonomy: the Greek he- adds third-personal reflexivity ( I see myself ) to the self-affirmative auto ( I myself see ), marking a first-person-plural agency answerable to appearance rather than principle or fiat. The ethic is congeniality: from con ( with ) and gen- ( birth, genie, genius ), congeniality recasts the non-adversarial dialogue of thinking and action-orientation of willing in a register fit for natality and plurality. It names an attitude of friendliness by which particulars are hosted in the mind as exemplary companions capable of inspiring a public voice of one’s own. The activity is selective affinity: a discerning arrangement of exemplars nearer or farther from the tonal center of the sensus communis by how they bear on the shared world. Unlike election, which elevates a specimen above the whole, selection sets particulars apart within the whole to which they (and we) remain answerable, and this way orients the imagination toward a felt affinity with what could endure in common (disinterested delight). With these terms in hand, justification and vindication appear united rather than balanced: appearances are vindicated retrospectively as world-revealing examples, and as companions in inner dialogue, generate prospectively shareable, reason-bearing opinions for how the world should look—without guarantee that it must or will look that way.
In the final section, I argue that the problem of democratic legitimacy is subtended by a deeper crisis of exemplarity. Disputes over monuments and street names, civic honours, curricula, and commemorations are not merely policy fights but symptoms of a thinning or polarisation in our shared repertoire of examples—citizens struggling to shape the world that shapes them. Since, for Arendt, legitimacy depends on power, and power on the judgments through which people act in concert, a faltering of judgment leads to a faltering of legitimacy. Read in this light, the familiar opposition between vindication and justification names two characteristic failures within a crisis of exemplarity. When actions no longer appear fit to be followed (or we lose our fitness to follow them), spectators slip into a vindicatory calculus: dirty hands reasoning replaces concerted power, and success displaces service. Conversely, when justification crowds out vindication, reasons float free of appearance, judgment congeals into rule application, and service to the world ossifies into proceduralism. As the array of shareable examples withers, justification loses a common addressee, vindication loses measure, and institutions forfeit their claim to act in our name. Hence, if Arendt is right that the by far greatest danger is indifference to the company we keep, then heautonomous judgment – the reflective choice of good company – sustains amor mundi in the life of the mind and, in so doing, reconciles justification and vindication.
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