ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt never lived to write Part Three of the Life of the Mind. Arendt’s reflections on judging took the form of a commentary on Kant, owing to ‘the curious scarcity of souces providing authoritative testimony. Arendt contends that Kant sought desperately for a way of escaping this melancholy induced by the activity of judging, and that this gave rise to a grave tension within his theory of political judgment. For Arendt, the judging spectator – the historian, the poet, the storyteller – rescues the unique episodes from the oblivion of history, thereby salvaging a portion of human dignity which would otherwise be denied to the participants in the doomed causes. Arendt is especially concerned to establish the autonomy of-the mental activities vis-a-vis intellect, for the subordination of thinking, willing, and judgment to intellectual cognition would be to forfeit the freedom of the thinking, willing, and judging ego.
