The Power of Judging – or how to distinguish ‘indifference’ in Kant and Arendt. Some critical notes on the structure of activities

Abstract

One of the most horrific scenarios in ethics – more than immorality or amorality – is moral indifference. Arendt’s final work, The Life of the Mind, shows a different facet of ‘indifference’ and sees it as a vital component of judgement and reflection. The following article addresses this understanding of indifference. Arendt draws from Immanuel Kant’s Third Critique, where emotion and experience are considered constitutive, in contrast to the two earlier Critiques, the first of which deals with the logical function of judging and the second, with moral judgement. In this respect – the Arendtian background to judging that belongs to aesthetics rather than ethics – it is the freedom of aesthetic judgement that guarantees its ethical potential. In Arendt’s work, judgement is the undisputed basis of her thinking. In addition to Kant’s two conventional types of judgement – determinative and reflective – he presents a third way of judging in his Critique of the Faculty of Judgement. Only this third, subjective reflective aesthetic judgement (subjektiv “ästhetisch-reflektierendes Urteil” (KANT, 1974, p. 57; KANT, 2007, p. 169) has the potential for what Kant himself calls the ‘rehabilitation of emotion’. Further analysis of this third type of judging would demonstrate that here Kant combines a form of indifference and the idea of prototype judging, giving indifference a positive aspect. And only this third form constitutes the basis for Arendt’s general thoughts on  udging. The range of types of judgement in Kant’s thinking could in fact be interpreted not only as three differents ways of thinking, which he refers to with the term Denkungsart, but rather as three different ways of understanding the world. It is thus of particular interest  o Arendt in terms of what she calls “worldlineness”. The diversity of judging worked out in Kant’s Third Critique is an
existential expression of the human ability for what is known as ‘Haltung’ in the German language and in every other language
only translates fragmentarily into ‘posture’, ‘habit’ or ‘attitude’. It is not simply the ability to adopt a certain ‘Haltung’, but
also to change it.