Jessica Maria Vargas Gonzalez

Abstract: The Arendtian conception of judgment is centered on the notion of an ‘enlarged mentality’. Based on this idea the author explains that the exercise of our faculty of judgment demands that we incorporate the others’ views into our own, that is, that ‘we train ourselves in visiting the others’ perspec-tives’. Likewise, Arendt repeatedly points out that the faculty of judgment is, perhaps, the most political of the human mental activities and, even, the po-litical faculty par excellence. Its political relevance arises, at least in part, from the fact that it implies a mode of thinking the human affairs that incorporates the human plurality. In the present article we critically examine the Arendtian notion of an ‘enlarged mentality’, by specifically posing the question of how to understand this claim that judging demands when we take human plurality into account.

I had the fortune of having Professor Bat-Ami Bar On as my mentor and dissertation supervisor. I engaged with her in sustained dialogue for over four years, from when she welcomed me to the graduate program in social, political, ethical, and legal philosophy at Binghamton University until our last conversation, shortly before her untimely death in November of 2020. I have been retracing in my memory some moments of this journey together, and as I do, I realize that writing this reflection is essentially a way of saying “Thank you” to Ami, or, at least, expressing my gratitude publicly to my teacher and mentor. At the same time, grateful as I am for how she guided and accompanied me, I cannot help feeling that our dialogue was abruptly interrupted and that (as time passes) the list of questions and issues that I would have liked to talk about with her only grows. Ami as a mentor and as a political thinker becomes more and more irreplaceable in my mind; and, as I recall her, I realize how much I would have liked to count on Ami for professional and personal advice in the years to come.

The analysis of anger’s role in politics needs to overcome the oversimplified views of anger as positive or negative. Instead, a more useful normative question is one that asks how we should distinguish between forms of anger that are appropriate or properly political, and those that are dangerous and impermissible, or antipolitical. By drawing on a conflict-theory framework that makes a normative distinction between agonistic and antagonistic conflicts, I argue that properly political anger should meet two criteria: fittingness and boundedness. Anger can sometimes be a fitting response to our unjust world. However, fittingness is not enough; it also matters how anger is channeled or acted upon in the public realm. Moreover, this paper contends that anger at structural injustice may relatively easily go wrong, as mistargeted or boundless anger. In light of these challenges, I argue that introducing a goal-frustration type of anger (as distinct from blaming anger) can prevent construing anger too narrowly, as always involving moral blame, and that one can learn (to some extent) to regulate one’s anger. At the same time, I acknowledge that the uptake that anger receives plays an essential role in creating an environment that favors (or disfavors) that anger at structural injustice remains bounded.

This paper develops an Arendtian-inspired notion of “civic care” that offers an alternative normative account of what should bring citizens together politically. Unlike consensual approaches, “civic care” stresses that a proper political bond should be able to get citizens to collaborate to solve collective action problems, but without marginalizing the conflictive character of politics. At the same time, “civic care” differs from accounts of the political bond that rely on appeals to patriotism, compassion, or love of a “people.” By building on Arendt’s notions of amor mundi and “civic friendship,” this paper argues that “civic care” does not involve any direct or natural connection to fellow citizens. Instead, it entails a worldly type of bond. Likewise, it argues that addressing the question of how we can be bonded across our political differences is crucial in our polarized times because modern democracies face what Arendt understood as the greatest threat: “worldlessness.” In the last section, the paper addresses the motivational challenge regarding how citizens can be brought to show “civic care.” It argues that the task of reconstituting agonistic polities requires taking into consideration the interdependencies in our behaviors, and specifically, the sources of motivation related to our social nature.

A conception of fear as a negative emotion in politics is unsatisfactory. There are threats to democracy that should probably be feared. This paper defends the claim that a more nuanced normative assessment requires distinguishing between fears that are anti-political and those that are properly political. I propose two criteria to discern the sense in which certain fears may be appropriate in political life. Likewise, I argue that an analysis of fear in politics requires acknowledging our non-ideal selves (specifically, our cognitive and social biases) to better understand the dangers and potentialities present in the collective mobilization of fear in the public realm.