ABSTRACT
Recent scholarship has shown that Arendt develops a distinctive phenomenological approach to politics that reframes basic philosophical concepts. Building on this literature I shall examine how her political phenomenology addresses basic conceptions of objectivity and reality in ways that are potentially productive in our so-called post-truth democracies. Characterized by appeals to subjective affects and claims to the validity of “alternative facts,” our current predicament understandably inspires various strategies of political and philosophical resistance. Many of these, however, fall prey to the very Western philosophical ideals of Truth and Objectivity that were once criticized by classical phenomenology and that evince a barely disguised hostility to the plural opinions that Arendt’s political reframing of the phenomenological critique first made visible. For Arendt, any effort to “save reality” by means of appeals to an objective world independent of what anyone might feel, think, or experience is bound to remain trapped in the impossible demands of that tradition and its disdain for the contingent world of human affairs. In her view, we have the world in common – that is, as objective, shared, or real – only insofar as we view it from different perspectives that are exchanged through quotidian practices of opinion formation and judgment. In this way, Arendt reframes the old philosophical problem of objectivity and its figure of “Man in the singular” through the political phenomenological lens of plurality. The practice that holds together the democratic play of plural opinions with the democratic capacity to distinguish truth and falsehood is called judgment.
