“Like Gadamer, Arendt sees that the essential feature of the type of reasoning appropriate to praxis is the ability to do justice to particular situations in their particularity. She is just as skeptical as he is of any model of practical reasoning that identifies it with the subsumption of particulars to general rules or universals. This is what draws her to Kant’s analysis of reflective judgment, which Kant contrasted with the type of subsumption of particulars characteristic of determinative judgment. Like Gadamer, she seeks to show the importance of taste as a communal civic sense, a sensus communis that is basic for aesthetics, understanding, and politics. Her analysis of judgment as an intrinsically political mode of thinking is also motivated by the desire to show how this mode of thinking escapes the dichotomy of objectivism and relativism. Judgment is not the expression of private feelings or idiosyncratic subjective preferences. Neither is it to be identified with the type of universality that she takes to be characteristic of ‘cognitive reason.’ Judgment is communal and intersubjective; it always implicitly appeals to and requires testing against the opinions of other judging persons. It is not a faculty of Man in his universality, but of human individuals in their particularity and plurality.

Many of the most significant differences between Gadamer and Arendt can be related to the different roles that the interpretation of Aristotle and Kant play in their thinking. When Gadamer wants to show us ‘what practice really means,’ he turns to Aristotle’s analysis of phronesis. But although Arendt was deeply influenced by Aristotle, it is Kant-The Kant of the Critique of Judgment-who is the source of her analysis of judgment. Ironically, Gadamer sees the Critique of Judgment as the decisive text for encouraging the rise of ‘aesthetic consciousness’ and the modern subjectivism that he deplores, while Arendt interprets the Critique of Judgment as pointing to a way beyond this modern subjectivism.

This difference is consequential for their differing understanding of action and politics. While Gadamer asserts the crucial role of dialogue, conversation, and questioning, he does so, as we have seen, primarily in the context of a dialogue with works of art, texts, and tradition-which he then extends to the practical and political sphere. But when he makes this subtle shift, the very meaning and weight of these key concepts undergo an important shift of emphasis. A dialogue or conversation among individuals (as Gadamer acknowledges) must be based on mutual respect, equality, a willingness to listen and to risks one’s prejudices and opinions. Arendt’s analysis of action helps to bring into sharp focus the radical implications of Gadamer’s analysis.

This even has consequences for their differing understandings of authority. Arendt agrees with Gadamer that authority ‘precludes the use of external means of coercion; where force is used authority itself has failed.’ But she also goes on to say that

authority, on the other hand, is incompatible with persuasion, which presupposes equality and works through a process of argumentation. Where arguments are used, authority is left in abeyance. Against the egalitarian order of persuasion stands the authoritarian order, which is always hierarchical. If authority is to be defined at all, then, it must be in contradistinction to both coercion by force and persuasion through arguments.

In this respect, then, Arendt is much closer to Habermas and the types of criticisms he presses against Gadamer.

The differences between Arendt and Gadamer stand out especially clearly when we realize that whereas for Gadamer the key concept is tradition, for Arendt it is revolution-or more specifically the ‘revolutionary spirit’ which attempts to found public freedom. While she realizes that the revolutionary spirit always appeals to tradition, what is most important for her is its spontaneous quality, rooted in human natality. And it is with the appearance of this revolutionary spirit in the modern age that we find those experiences that have ‘exemplary validity’ for the type of debate, mutual participation, and persuasion that Gadamer himself makes so essential for political reason. Both see the principle of public freedom as being fundamental for the modern project. But whereas this theme is barely developed in Gadamer, it becomes the major motif in Arendt’s analysis of praxis” (Bernstein 1983:219-220).

Bernstein, Richard J.
1983 Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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