When Actor and Spectator Meet in the Courtroom: Reflections on Hannah Arendt's Concept of Judgment

This approach might help us understand [Hannah Arendt]'s choice of the narrative mode in Eichmann's case. It might also explain some of the misunderstanding that her judgment caused, since the critics understood the book as aiming to render a "final judgment" that would master the events once and for all. This could not have been further from Arendt's intentions. In her view, judgment cannot be reduced to the court decision with this title, nor is it the whole book where Arendt struggles to render Eichmann's acts and deeds meaningful. Rather, judgment is an act of narration that sets a process in motion; an act of participation in the public realm, informed by a sense of individual responsibility to the community. A sign of a good judgment is the way that it binds together actors and spectators in a human community.(81) Such was indeed the effect of Arendt's book. It was not meant to produce consensus but to set in motion a process of deliberation and public debate. Interestingly, Arendt herself refuses to see the same narrative function in trials.(82) Guarding the line between the political and the legal, she criticizes the prosecution's efforts to give a stage to the victims' stories. Similarly, she opposes the "educational" role that [David Ben Gurion] assigned to the trial -- the role of creating a national narrative for the Israeli audience.(83) However, almost against her will, Arendt is impelled at last to admit the important role of the victims' storytelling. Hearing the testimony of Zindel Grynszpan, Arendt realizes that his story can illuminate the whole horror and senselessness of Nazi crimes. Grynszpan's story leads her to entertain the "foolish" (her words) thought that "everyone [i.e. every victim] should have his day in court."(84) More important, it is in this possibility of storytelling (however difficult) that she finds hope for humanity. Storytelling becomes the countervailing force to what she interprets as crimes against humanity -- crimes that try to erase some stories from the face of the earth by eliminating the conditions for their production: human natality and human plurality.(85)
In the sentence I have quoted in the epigraph to this paper Arendt suggests a way of reconciling these two strands: "this critic and spectator sits in every actor...without this critical judging faculty the doer or maker would be so isolated from the spectator that he would not even be perceived." She means that in order for the actor to decide his future actions and to judge their value, he has to learn to internalize the point of view of the spectator. Taking this observation a step further, we can add to it Arendt's observation that the spectator too (because he is not alone) has to learn to obtain the viewpoints of other spectators (including the viewpoint of the actor) in forming his own judgment. Thus, the ideal of reflective judgment is constituted by a reciprocal movement between the perspective of actors and spectators. There is no Archimedean point from which we can judge but only a plurality of viewpoints that we have to "go visit" and negotiate. Eichmann's trial becomes a symbol of both the success and the failure of this type of judgment. We learn of Eichmann's failure to engage his victims' viewpoint by hiding behind stock phrases and clichés (refusal of judgment) and of Arendt's attempts to engage Eichmann's viewpoint in order to judge him by making a story from the disparate details of Eichmann's crimes (responsibility of judgment). At the same time, Arendt's refusal to "go visit" the viewpoints of her own spectators before rendering her judgment indicates a failure on her part. All this makes the reader all the more aware of the heavy task laid on the Israeli judges who had to make their way between the pressures of the present (a political trial) and the pressures of the past (legal precedents) in order to arrive at a valid judgment. The trial, and Arendt's book about the trial, turn out to be variations on the theme of judgment played simultaneously by actors and spectators.