Action, Judgment, and Imagination in Hannah Arendt’s Thought

• Date: 01 September 2017
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912917702500
• Author: Andrew H. Tyner
• Published date: 01 September 2017
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912917702500

Political Research Quarterly

2017, Vol. 70(3) 523 –534

© 2017 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912917702500

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Article

Toward the end of her life, Hannah Arendt turned her

attention to three mental faculties that have the potential

to prevent the perpetration of evil acts: thinking, willing,

and judging. Previous scholars point to her understanding

of Adolf Eichmann’s thoughtlessness as shaping this

direction in her writing (Celermajer 2010), a position that

Arendt herself confirms in The Life of the Mind. Arendt’s

fullest account of thinking and willing are contained in

that text, and, though she was unable to fully complete

her account of judgment, she articulated the outlines of

her thinking about judgment most extensively in her

Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, as well as in

brief remarks in other works.

In this paper, I present a fourth mental faculty that

emerges from an analysis of Arendt’s prominent writings

on political action and responsibility—a faculty that

helps support judgment but is not reducible to it: namely,

imagination. Imagination is a capacity that is crucial for

understanding Arendt’s conceptions of judgment and

action. I define imagination as the process of imaging a

new world in place of the one that currently exists. This

new world is a projection of the world as it might be or

could have been, a world that looks differently from the

world that actually exists.

As it stands, this description of imagination is unre-

markable. What makes Arendt’s conception of imagina-

tion unique, though, is that it is bounded to reality. We

do not simply conjure up any image of a new world that

strikes us and then act in light of that fantasy. Rather, we

imagine a new world that bears a close enough

resemblance to the world that exists in reality to guide

our actions within limits. These limits are important, for

Arendt, as it is only by acknowledging limitations that

we avoid actions that descend into excess and needless

destruction. Limitations guide us as we navigate the

world, and bounded imagination helps produce these

limits.

In what follows, I turn my attention to a variety of

Arendt’s discussions of action and judgment, looking

beyond instances of Arendt’s explicit treatment of these

as discrete human capacities to gain a fuller sense of how

these concepts work for Arendt “in operation.” Emerging

from these discussions is a conception of imagination that

prioritizes self-restraint and circumspection over absolute

freedom from limitations, such that imagination extends

our mental reach outward while ensuring it remains tied

to our world. Such imagination finds expression in

Arendt’s thought for both spectators—who look upon

political actors and render judgments—and the actors

themselves—who attempt to change the world and, in so

doing, subject themselves to the judgment of spectators.

This is to say, imagination is involved in both Arendtian

judgment and Arendtian action.

702500PRQXXX10.1177/1065912917702500Political Research QuarterlyTyner

research-article2017

1The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

Corresponding Author:

Andrew H. Tyner, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,

361 Hamilton Hall, CB 3265, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3265, USA.

Email: atyner@live.unc.edu

Action, Judgment, and Imagination

in Hannah Arendt’s Thought

Andrew H. Tyner1

Abstract

This article presents a conception of imagination that emerges from Hannah Arendt’s writings on action, judgment,

and responsibility. Imagination, for Arendt, is central to the processes of action and judgment, as it enables political

actors and spectators to imagine a new world that could look differently from the world that exists. Importantly,

though, this imagined world needs to bear some resemblance to the world that actually exists to avoid losing touch

with reality and factual truth. The loss of reality and factual truth risks judgments that are inattentive and actions

that are destructive and tyrannical. Imagination must be bounded, for Arendt, to ensure that action and judgment

remain tied to reality. The article first offers this novel interpretation of Arendtian imagination before discussing its

relationship to contemporary research on political participation, moral conviction, and attitude certainty.

Keywords

action, judgment, imagination, Arendt, conviction, certainty