Hegel and Arendt on Judgement , Culture , and the Experience of Thinking

In this paper, I consider the relationship between thinking and culture, arguing that the capacity for thought is properly realized, at least in part, in ways of caring for and cultivating non-instrumental intersubjective domains and practices—culture. To begin, I turn to Hegel’s critique of culture in the Phenomenology of Spirit to examine the form as which the individual’s explicit awareness of her own capacity for judgement, and, hence, her potential to take responsibility for the terms and manners of collective life, first establishes itself as the basis of culture--deliberately shaped and chosen intersubjective practices. I demonstrate that the shared intersubjective practices that Hegel calls “culture” are a necessarily destination of our capacity to withdraw from the world in order to judge it and shape it, but that this very capacity can be misunderstood and thereby undermine the possibility of freely cultivating domains in which meaningfully to engage with one another. Finally, I turn to the first volume of Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, “Thinking,” which offers another examination of our capacity for abstract reflection that itself demonstrates, largely by thematizing the Platonic experience of wonder and the exemplary character of Socrates’ thinking, how a different understanding of both subjective interiority and our capacity for abstract thinking can both prepare us for and orient us towards more realistic and potentially rewarding ways of sharing the world with one another. In this paper, I consider the relationship between thinking and culture, arguing that the capacity for thought is properly realized, at least in part, in ways of caring for and cultivating non-instrumental intersubjective domains and practices—culture. To begin, I turn to Hegel’s critique of culture in the Phenomenology of Spirit to examine the form as which the individual’s explicit awareness of her own capacity for judgement, and, hence, her potential to take responsibility for the terms and manners of collective life, first establishes itself as the basis of culture. In this first form, the individual understands that 1 The section on “culture” is arguable, the last one in which Hegel analyses the character of the lived socialiaty that accompanies our self-recognition as singular judging agents; after the reign of terror that accompanies the French revolution, no new insights into our political self-conception emerge. While I don’t address it here, the loneliness and superficiality of modern society that Arendt analyses especially in Origins of Totalitarianism, is likely linked to the possibilities of culture Hegel analyses. On this latter points, see Ramos, 174; on the previous, see Ramos, :