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:

• inability to place Eichmann (a German officer who was simply “following orders”) under pre-existing “universals” to understand this “normal” person, carrying out the extermination of Jews.
• she needed a new criminal type, to fit what she termed the “banality of evil”.
• she must ascend from the particular to a universal, in this uneasy case. We must “either actively uncover or imaginatively invent”.
• defending himself as simply following orders, with no one questioning the Final Solution, Arendt considers him thoughtless in a particular sense – his inability to see beyond the rules and procedures (see nihlism perhaps), and his “inability to see things from the standpoint of others”.
• she goes on to think that we have over a long history, considered thinking a specialized activity of a few (perhaps now even AI). If thinking is a part of thinking right from wrong, then we must demand it of everyone, as an inner dialogue by stopping and thinking.
• drawing on Socrates, the thinking is not towards an answer, but is critical – always interrogating and disclosing faults, a “resultless enterprise”, leaving us with questions and perplexities, not answers.
• Quote: “The intrinsically destructive character of all genuine thinking has, according to Arendt, “a liberating effect on another human faculty, the faculty of judgment, which one may call, with some justification, the most political of man’s mental abilities” (TMC, 188). For judgment is liberated only to the extent that we can free ourselves from received opinion and preconceived categories.”
• This thinking involves an inner partner, who we converse with. According to Socrates, it is better to be out of tune with other people and society than to be out-of-tune with this inner voice {note: doesn't seem to be a problem for some people}
• In situations where everyone is swept along by unthinking, this inner self ceases to be marginal and by definition political in terms of a kind of resistance through “action”.
• Drawing upon the person of wisdom and phronesis, this individual wisdom still upholds a few individuals as the ones who think and can act wisely.
• Drawing upon Kant's aesthetic Judgment raises 3 points:
  • equality and that we all possess it (no experts).
  • shared appearances and the judgment of particulars (not the imposition of categories)
  • intersubjective natures of “taste”