In this interesting time of crisis, we are also experiencing one of the biggest divide in politics. It feels like society is at the blink of collapse into chaos; countless life engulfed by pandemics, explosions, and natural disasters. Where human solidarity most needed are places flooded with “outrages” and violent crackdown.
“History repeats itself.”; thus maybe it is now a good time to read about how philosophers dealt with wars, violences, and personal responsibilities while facing human atrocities. Maybe we learn a few things from them and contemplate our roles in preserving our human dignity in this precarious life.
Rethinking political judgment looked into the work on Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt. Their re-examinations of human judging abilities in times of moral and political crisis invoke our empathy on “the human condition” we all bound to.
Inspecting their political stances on the French-Algerian war, Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, and the south-Africa Apartheid system, we learn about our responsibilities and freedoms, as human to confront injustices and violences.
The book begins with the departure of a “universal value”, formulated from abstract thinking and the existence of “God” in religion.
Through the denial of a universal “yardstick”, human judgment becomes arbitrary and stuck with the perils of uncertainty. However, it is argued that lacking any “yardsticks” shall be the typical human living experience. It is based on the simple observation that most human, even living in the same world, do experience the world very differently. Embracing the fact that our living experiences differ, but yet share the fundamental commonality, we human must forgo the “universal rules” that govern how we live our life but to seek to live within a political plurality. There, rational knowledges and logics dissipate as these frameworks do not acknowledge the human individualities and is forcing “one’s own ethics” upon others.
In sum, plural human experiences show that there is no one singular reality and thus universal rules for human. Human have to navigate through the chaotic world through recognizing other fellow humans freedoms and responsibilities, rather than using a set of rules/values derived from his/her own “rational” thinking and experiences, as no one know whether their “perceived reality” is better/correct/closer to the turth than other “realities” experienced.
“The recognition of the limits of human reason, in turn, represents the condition of possibility of human freedom. Freedom, if it is to be indeed free, cannot depend ‘on anything empirical’, but must be posited as a noumenal reality, existing at the very boundary of our knowledge.”
Acknowledging our ambiguity on “wordly judgement”, we are bound to seek our own truth and validate their agreeableness via communicative means. Such communicability leads to political actions: we can act freely to judge, debate and apply our judgments interactively with others. Inversely, an individual’s refusal to engage with the perspectives of others and consider their judgments constitutes an attempt to deny or alienate their freedom.
“Judgment as aesthetic practice embodies the realisation that in the world devoid of absolute standards, it is others alone who can endow our particular disclosures with value and make meaningful our freedom.”
Only through actively engage with the world and the people living it it that we can create meanings and values via reflective thinking and judgment. It also confronts our singularity self involving and understanding the world around us that built by the human plurality. “Human existence therefore is characterized by an indissoluble bond between humans and the world that both binds and separates them at the same time.”
Building from the ideas of a lack of universal standards, we dive into our means to justify our political judgment and our responsibilities upon exercising our judgment on others in conflicts. If we treat our “idealist judgment” to an end we strive to achieve and human beings as disposable means that we used to achieve our political end, we risk eliminating our freedom of judgment out of “necessity of things”, implying a willingness to sacrifice everything, even human themselves.
“[humans] themselves are their own end’ and finds in this claim the ‘objective justification”. Beauvoir thus insisted that any political agenda treated as a end is unjust, even totally persuadable in the abstract regime of “rationality and logics”, which is mere an illusion. In that light of her narrative judging sensibility that political action are directed to general human values, Beauvoir do not easily accept any violences, in contrast to Sartre’s idea that violences is justified as the necessary means of the oppressed resistance.
Camus found the horrendousness of crime lies not in the sheer violences committed but in the fact that all these acts were deemed “reasonable” somehow, either under the flag of “freedom” or “rules of law”. This descends into the spiral of violences could not be attributed solely to a number of “evil souls” but the over-confidence in human reasoning that both opposing camps fought to impose their truth on each other, even resorted to violent means of coercion. “Rather than enlarging the scope of human freedom, it ended up ‘incarcerating’ humanity in new ‘reasonable’ deities.” Camus urge us to commit to accept the lucid political justifications and always take “the side of the victims” and denounce all instances of oppression regardless of the noble ends pursued by the perpetrators.
Hannah Arendt persistently pointed out that the sense of common world only emerges in relationships between human individuals, manifested into actions and speeches. The identification of political judgment as rational knowledge with absolute yardsticks demolish the importance of human involvements in politics into mere involuntary objects. Arendt advocated “representative thinking” that develop understandings on different or even opposing points of view all shared the underlying commonality of the human sense derived from the same world. The purpose of representative thinking is the cultivation of what Arendt, following Kant, calls sensus communis. “In this sense, political judgment becomes a continuous process of weaving the multiplicity of actions and events into the fabric of the common world, of reinvigorating our sense of worldly reality and facing up to the ambiguity of political action.” Among these collective actions, we have the freedom to choose our path within the perplexity and confront our own limitations on political reasoning.
In the world devoid of an absolute measure of “good and evil”, we human rely on our own (in)ability for judging and responding to the selectiveness of our common world. How we can imagine others as dignity human beings via sympathetic reflection is deemed a powerful narrative that helps us to judge. This realisation also challenge us deeply when we inflict violence on others to attain political ideals. And via choosing our political actions as autonomy agents, we enjoy our greatest freedom from predetermined ideology as well as exercising our biggest responsibility to safeguard human dignity. As Arendt pointed out, there are not obligation but supports to a particular regime. What we tolerate is what we support, even under a suffocating environment that free thinking is not allowed. With a plethora of individuals giving up their ultimate freedom in political judgment and action, we submitted ourselves as the stalkholder of atrocity.
This book has refreshed a few important yet overlooked ideas of the political import of today, an era with constant “outrage”, shouts of “facts and logics” and negligence of the sufferings of other, merely paint them as “feelings” that no one care.
First, we have to acknowledge that political judgment is not a personal thought experiment that we can come to the “truth” via rational thinking. Rather it is a collective engagement in dialogs that take into diverse narratives of individuals who experience the world in different ways. Only by reflective thinking and exploring the experience of suffering and oppression of the others that we can arrive at our political judgment, giving ourself meanings and values.
Second, we as human have to exercise our “freedom” to political speech and actions in order to weave a future prospective that all of us can live in. We have to forgo the ideas of victims and perpetrators, but rather permit ourselves to imagine alternative type of interactions that we can treat each other as equals.
Most importantly, human is the end not a means. We shall never permit sacrifice on human life and well-beings to fulfill a political end. And as human, we can exert our freedom to refuse the coercion of autocracy as well as our responsibility to resist from giving up our thinking and judgment even in the most oppressive situation.