Something is going on in Hannah Arendt's Reflective Judgments for Design. There is also much going on in her thinking related to various extreme political situations right now, and the US has turned towards Donald Trump and authoritarianism, as the rest of the world appears to be heading.

Reading chapter 5 of Villa 2023 introduction to Arendt, there are several possibilities from her thinking, on thinking, and her political theory, for design:

• thinking (if the key part of design) is for everyone, and not only experts
• thinking is to be from particulars to universals
• design is a thinking from the standpoint of others {how many people are like this?}
• thinking is necessary to distinguish right from wrong – it is a moral and political activity, not just (or only) a determination of cause-effect in nature or society
• Design is never ultimately towards an answer, but is alwasy critical – always interrogating and disclosing faults, a “resultless enterprise”, leaving us with questions and perplexities, not answers.
• it needs to be liberated from received opinion and preconceived categories.
• it requires a dialogue with an inner self, that asks and incorporates the silent or exposed views of diverse others.
• The reflective judgments have 3 characteristics:
  • equality in that we all possess it (no experts).
  • shared appearances and the judgment of particulars (not the imposition of categories)
  • intersubjective nature of “taste” – i.e. we reach to others either silently or in conversation, to find some possible agreement
• Quote:
  • “even if I am quite alone in making up my mind, in an anticipated communication with others with whom I know I must finally come to some agreement. From this potential agreement judgment derives its specific validity.”(BPF, 217)
• Requirements for agreement
  • Requires individuals to eliminate all that is subjective or idiosyncratic {but what does that do to the critical inner voice earlier?} in the hopes of agreement with others.
  • Enlarged mentality: to develop a view across all of those individuals present {and perhaps not present? What would they say, how do we hold things cautiously and tenuously, never with a final answer? This would be Derrida's view also}
  • {it isn't ends focused – i.e. it isn't to “get all the stakeholders to the table”, to get “buy in”}
  • Not factual, but moral, political and aesthetic through persuasion and giving reasons to peers {but how do we deal with the MAGA crowd?}
• In contrast to what instrumental thinking
  • Heidegger: “Thinking does not bring knowledge as do the sciences. Thinking does not produce usable practical wisdom. Thinking does not solve the riddles of the universe. Thinking does not endow us directly with the power to act.“
  • Instead (Socrates), thinking is for its own sake as a human, to be alive. It has no particular end.
  • Quote
    • “For Socrates, “there is no ulterior motive or ulterior purpose for the whole enterprise. An unexamined life is not worth living. That’s all there is to it”
    • ”'Thinking things through' in the Socratic manner is closer to what we might call “ordinary” thinking—the kind of reflection all rational individuals are capable of—than it is to the activity practiced by “professional thinkers.””
  • Contrast with the search for “truth”, through ideals and categories, through specialists turned away from the world.
    • Quote: “This deductive habit of thought spread far beyond the relatively narrow precincts of philosophy. As Arendt points out in OR, even the American Founders, who discovered the power of mutual promising and acting together, felt compelled to cite a “higher law” to lend authority to their new constitutional creation. The notion that we cannot know what real justice is apart from such a transhuman reality or standard—originating in Plato, but spread throughout the Western world thanks to the triumph of p. 117 Christianity—has become virtually second nature to us. In its more aggressive versions (Plato’s Republic, militant Christianity, Jacobin radicalism, totalitarian ideology), this recurring pattern of deducing coercive and violent political action from some supposedly unquestionable Absolute (Nature, God, History, etc.) has been the bane of Western civilization.”
  • Quote: “Indeed, according to Arendt, Western philosophers were so scandalized by the idea that human beings possessed a capacity for spontaneous beginning that they continually sought ways to either deny freedom of the will (à la Hobbes and Spinoza) or demonstrate that new beginnings were actually the result of causal forces working “behind the backs” of the agents involved.”
  • Need to interrupt history, from a will: “And, despite her critique of the philosophical tendency to be embarrassed by the idea of genuine novelty and to p. 123 discount the “merely contingent,” she is no voluntarist. She does not say, with Goethe’s Faust, “in the beginning was the deed.” Rather, what she upholds is the human capacity to interrupt history, to make new beginnings that no one could have predicted.”
  • quote: “From her perspective, freedom is not a capacity lodged in the Will or any other “organ” of the individual. It is, rather, a reality made possible by the fact of human plurality and the availability of a public realm, one in which words never before said and deeds never before performed can occur. C5.P70 This is not to say that the philosophers get it wrong, and that political thinkers and actors get it right. As Arendt notes in the last chapter of LM, even the men of the American Revolution were frightened by what she calls the “abyss of freedom.” This fear led them to fall back upon either the Christian notion of divine providence or the Roman notion (expressed in Virgil’s Aeneid) that every foundation is actually a re-foundation.
  • Quote: “This capacity is “miraculous,” especially when compared to the repetitive behavior that characterizes much of everyday life. It is a miracle, however, that is made possible not by God but by political action— by plural agents “acting together, acting in concert” for the sake of a new beginning.”