Judgment and justice: an Arendtian vision
| Autor | Christina Miranda Ribas |
| Páginas | 605-612 |
Special Workshop: Citizenship and access to justice in the democratic order • 605
Judgment and justice: an Arendtian vision
Christina Miranda Ribas
Abstract: Starting with Hannah Arendt’s account of the main legal problems
of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, the question of justice is discussed on
the basis of the tension between the human capacity of judging and the evidence
of destruction of the traditional paerns of judgment caused by totalitarianism
that points to the relationship between thinking and judging, we try to ponder
on the question of justice in view of contemporary conditions, in an aempt to
understand it under the theoretical perspective of Hannah Arendt, guided by
the Arendtian conception of understanding as a producer of meaning - rooted
in the life process - which allows for the reconciliation with human reasons and
passions.
Keywords : Hannah Arendt, Justice, Judgment
1. It might be possible to say about justice what Arendt says about
freedom: to raise the question “what is justice” seems to be “a hopeless
enterprise. It is as though age-old contradictions and antinomies were
lying in wait to force the mind into dilemmas of logical impossibility...”
(ARENDT, 1993, p. 143).
Such a question can only be asked when traditional answers
are no longer valid. According to Arendt, the traditional categories of
thought have been gradually losing ground in experience; thought, de-
tached from experience, has either been limited to repeating old truths,
or has become deprived of meaning, which “…so sadly evaporated from
the very key words of political language – such as freedom and justice,
authority and reason, responsibility and virtue, power and glory – leav-
ing behind empty shells with which to sele almost all accounts, regard-
less of their underlying phenomenal reality” (ARENDT, 1993, p.15).
Hannah Arendt asked many questions during her lifetime. She
focused on fundamental political issues, such as freedom, authority,
power, totalitarianism, violence and revolution. She explored the exis-
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