Cultural Reader: What Do We Judge By? Hannah Arendt, Kant, and the Crisis of Conscience

In the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt grappled with a searing question: How could so many people participate in evil — and how could so few resist? Her answer led her into the heart of a topic many philosophers hesitate to touch: judgment. Not legal judgment or technical assessment, but moral judgment — the human capacity to discern right from wrong without relying on rules, ideologies, or authorities.

Arendt came to believe that this form of judgment is what totalitarianism seeks to destroy. It isolates individuals, breaks down shared reality, and replaces reflection with obedience. But can judgment be rebuilt — not as dogma, but as freedom?

Kant Without Morality

To develop her theory, Arendt turned to an unlikely ally: Immanuel Kant. Specifically, she focused on his Critique of Judgment, where Kant explores aesthetic judgment — how we say something is “beautiful” without relying on formulas or proofs. For Arendt, this was the model of moral judgment we need: a form of reasoning that is neither purely subjective nor universally rule-bound, but reflective, imaginative, and situated.

In Kant’s terms, aesthetic judgment involves putting oneself in the position of others, imagining how a shared world might appear from multiple perspectives. Arendt adapted this to political life: to judge is to think from the standpoint of others, without abandoning one’s own sense of self. It is the very opposite of Eichmann’s mechanical compliance.

The Space of Inner Dialogue

Judgment, in Arendt’s philosophy, emerges from a quiet, inner dialogue — the thinking self speaking to itself. This dialogical model, inspired by Socrates, is what gives moral judgment its weight. When a person commits an unjust act, they break that dialogue. They become “not at home with themselves.”

This internal split — being unable to live with what one has done — is what Arendt saw as the true measure of moral failure. Not guilt imposed by law or society, but the collapse of the self’s own coherence. The capacity to judge, then, is not about knowledge. It is about integrity.

Rebuilding Conscience Without Certainty

In a time when ideological certainties are either collapsing or being reasserted with brutal simplicity, Arendt offers a different path: judgment as tentative, plural, situated. She resists both moral relativism and moral absolutism. Instead, she invites us to think with others, but not like others.

Arendt’s theory of judgment is an ethics without commandments. It is demanding precisely because it cannot be outsourced. We are responsible not only for what we do, but for how we see. And if we fail to judge, we risk becoming — once again — agents of the unthinkable.