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Abstract
Both judgment and receptivity are important to optimal politics, and both are important to each other. In making this argument, I use an Arendtian conception of judgment and take mindfulness as an example of receptivity. I argue that receptivity offers a needed dimension to addressing the puzzles of what makes Arendtian judgment possible, and that judgment provides a necessary complement to receptivity for action in the world. Exploring this complementary relation between judgment and receptivity also reveals a surprising similarity between what each offers to the practice of politics, in particular to freedom and the possibility of transformation. At the same time, I argue, these important contributions to politics are best understood and realized if judgment and receptivity are thought of as distinct forms of relating to the world.
Notes
1. . Hannah Arendt, ‘Crisis in Culture’ in Between Past and Future, ed. Hannah Arendt, (New York: Meridan Books, 1961); Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, edited by Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1987). This section summarizing the Arenditan conception of judgment is drawn from ‘The Reciprocal Relation of Judgment and Autonomy: Walking in Another's Shoes and Which Shoes to Walk In’, in Being Relational: Reflections on Relational Theory and Health Law, ed. Jocelyn Downie and Jennifer J. Llewellyn. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011).
2. . I elaborate my understanding of judgment in Jennifer Nedelsky, ‘Embodied Diversity: Challenges to Law’, 42 McGill L.J. (1997): 91; Jennifer Nedelsky, ‘Communities of Judgment and Human Rights’, 1 Theoretical Inquiries in Law (2000): 245; Jennifer Nedelsky, ‘Legislative Judgment and the Enlarged Mentality: Taking Religious Perspectives’, in The Least Examined Branch: The Role of Legislatures in the Constitutional State, ed. Richard Bauman and Tsvi Kahana, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 93; Jennifer Nedelsky, ‘Law, Judgment, and Relational Autonomy’ in Judgment, Imagination and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt, ed. Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky, (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 103. See also the introduction and other chapters in this volume.
3. . Although, as I have argued elsewhere, this contribution becomes clearer in the context of relational theory. See Jennifer Nedelsky, ‘Judgment, Diversity, and Relational Autonomy’ in Beiner and Nedelsky, Judgment, Imagination and Politics.
4. . Kant identified what I see to be the central problem of judgment: how can a judgment that is genuinely and irreducibly subjective also be valid? What does the claim of validity mean if we do not transmute the subjective into something objective—and thus lose the essence of judgment as distinct from ascertaining a truth that can be demonstrably, and thus compellingly, proven? The language of judgment, as developed by Kant and appropriated by Arendt, offers us an answer. They offer us a conception of judgment as a distinct human faculty that is subjective, but which is not therefore something merely arbitrary.
5. . She is speaking here about critical thought: ‘It is precisely by applying critical standards to one's own thought that one learns the art of critical thought. And this application one cannot learn without publicity, without the testing that arises from contact with other peoples thinking. In order to show how it works, I shall read to you two personal passages from letters Kant wrote in the 1770s to Marcus Herz’. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, edited by Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 42. She then moves into a discussion of the Critique of Judgment, supra note 4, while continuing to use the language of critical thinking. I think this blurs a distinction she makes in other contexts— critical thinking is not something most people routinely engage in, and it is a mistake to assume that they will when thinking about the optimal structures of government. However, judgment is a capacity everyone has, although it is better educated in some than in others.
6. . Arendt, 1982, 42–43.
7. . 1961, 220–21.
8. . Melvin Hill, ed., Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979), 336.
9. . Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 5.
10. . Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness (New York: Hyperion, 2005), 262. The claims he makes are typical of much of the mindfulness literature.
11. . Ibid., 166.
12. . Siegel cites a study that analyzed numerous existing questionnaires on mindfulness and found five recurring factors: non-reactivity to inner experience; observing and attending; acting with awareness; labeling with words; non-judgmental of experience. Siegel, 2007, 12.
13. . Kabat-Zinn, 2005, 46.
14. . Ibid., 166.
15. . In Arendt's work, the language of perspective is obvious. For Kabat-Zinn it is less so. Nevertheless, is it a consistent theme. A clear example is the following: ‘So many things can get in the way, especially the way we think, or the notions we cling to without ever examining. Attaining place or view, any authentic view, requires openness. Ultimately, it does require a condition of complete simplicity, so that we can see what is available to be seen, and know what is available to be known, both of which are impossible if we persist, especially without knowing it, in only seeing through the lenses o four own ideas and opinions, however wonderful and erudite they may be’. Kabat-Zinn, 2005, 429.
16. . Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963). Adolph Eichmann was a Nazi official who was tried, convicted, and sentenced to execution by a specially constituted Israeli court for his role in the genocide of European Jews during the second world war. Hannah Arendt, reporting for the New Yorker, was among the many correspondents who covered this very public trial. Arendt's analysis of the trial was subsequently published in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem.
17. . Quoted in Kabat-Zinn, 2005, 109.
18. . Ibid., 109.
19. . Ibid., 111.
20. . Ibid.
21. . Ibid., 112.
22. . Ibid., 113.
23. . 1961, 220.
24. . In this sentence I am eliding the difference between critical though and judgment, as Arendt herself sometimes did. See note 5.
25. . 2007.
26. . Ibid., 136.
27. . Ibid., 135.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 147.
30. . Ibid., 148.
31. . Ibid., 150.
32. . ‘Should democratic politics require work on oneself? Should we aspire to a kind of change where we are different, what we recognize as problems is different, our world is different (Cavell)? If not, we cannot speak of a politics of receptivity’. Nikolas Kompridis, ‘Receptivity and Reflective Disclosure: Agencies of Political Change and Resources of Solidarity’ (paper presented at the American Political Science Association, August, 2010).
33. . See Nedelsky in Downie and Llewellyn, 2011.
34. . Kabat-Zinn, 2005, 65–66.
35. . David Whyte, ‘Midlife and the Great Unknown: Finding Courage and Clarity Through Poetry,’ CD from Sounds True, www.soundstrue.com
36. . In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984).
37. . She says that, ‘the trick of critical thinking does not consist in an enormously enlarged empathy through which one can know what actually goes on in the minds of others’. Arendt, 1982, 43.
38. . See Nedelsky in Downie and Llewellyn, 2011.
39. . Ibid.
40. . Leslie Paul Thiele, The Heart of Judgment: Practical Wisdom, Neurosceince, and Narrative (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 155.
41. . Kabat-Zinn, 2005, 375. He describes the experiment on 368–75 and provides a citation to the article reporting on the research in Psychosomatic Medicine 65 (2003): 564–70.
42. . See Nedelsky, ‘Embodied Diversity: Challenges to Law’ 42 McGill L.J. (1997): 91 and chapter 4, Thiele.
43. . Kabat-Zinn has an interesting chapter on teaching mindfulness to judges, Coming to Our Senses, 451–55.
44. . ‘Reconciliation: The Aesthetics of Enlightenment,’ (presented at the American Political Science Association, August, 2010, 16). See also, Morton Schoolman (forthcoming, Fall 2011), ‘Democratic Enlightenment: Whitman and Aesthetic Education’, in Democratic Vistas Today: Walt Whitman and Aesthetic Education, John Seery, ed. (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press)
45. . ‘Reconciliation,’ Ibid., 20.
46. . In his forthcoming book, Democratic Enlightenment: Political Education through the Visual Image, Schoolman addresses the issue of judgment.
47. . See for example, Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein, ‘Insight Meditation: An In-Depth Correspondence Course’, (Sounds True), www.soundstrue.com.
48. . Arendt did not live to write her book on judgment, which she had planned as the third volume of The Life of the Mind. What we have are her posthumously published lecture notes and some earlier essays on the topic. Arendt, 1982.
49. . 2005, 512.
50. . Ibid., 518.
51. . Ibid., 525.
52. . Ibid., 526.
53. . Ibid., 529.
54. . I discuss the ways control is (counter to common imagery) inconsistent with autonomy, the respect for the autonomy of others in particular, in Law's Relations: A Relational Theory of Self, Autonomy, and Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011): Chapter 7.
55. . Kabat-Zinn offers his own version of stages of receptivity and judgment in his imagined instructions to a jury: ‘Be aware of the tendency of your mind to jump to conclusions before all the evidence has been presented and the final arguments made. As best you can, continually try to suspend judgment and simply witness with your full being everything that is being presented in the courtroom moment by moment by moment. If you find your mind wandering a lot, you can always bring it back to your breathing and to what you are hearing over and over again if necessary. When the presentation of evidence is complete, then it will be your turn to deliberate together as a jury and come to a decision. But not before’. 2005, 455.
56. . Even in the meditative state, practitioners are asked to discern the nature of what is arising, to be able to tell when they have become caught up in a thought, when their attention has shifted from the body to a thought about the body, when an idea of what the practice is supposed to be (an undesirable form of judgment in this context) is interfering with direct attention. Another version of this discernment in receptivity comes from Siegel: ‘Attention helps selectively guide the process of information flow. Assemblies of neural representations in non-verbal clusters of neural nets, these unworded narratives help organize the “information” that is actually flowing. In turn, conscious attention, awareness of a specific sensory domain, can then enable the mind to sample these assemblies and then order them, selecting certain ones and discarding others’ (Siegel, 2007, 143). This sounds like a form of judgment to me.
57. . For example, Kompridis says: ‘the freedom I am referring to comes into play when we spontaneously and accountably make room for the call of another, rendering intelligible what may have been previously unintelligible. Becoming receptive to such a call means facilitation its voicing, letting it become a voice that we did not allow ourselves to hear before, responding to it in a way that demands (my emphasis) something of us we never recognized before’. Of course, this is a special kind of demand, for compliance with it must be free: ‘In responding freely to such a call, we allow ourselves to be unsettled, decentered, thereby making it possible to occupy a potentially self-critical and illuminating perspective. From such a perspective it may become necessary to confront the possibility that we cannot go on as before, that some change is demanded of us, a change to which we feel obligated to be receptive.’ ‘Receptivity and Reflective Disclosure’, 2010.
58. . See Law's Relations, 2011.
59. . Linda Zerilli offers a particularly helpful discussion of the relation between Arendt's conceptions of freedom and judgment in Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).