Judgment and Disappointment: On the Ethical and Political Significance of Skepticism [electronic resource].

9781088320341

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2019.

1 online resource (298 p.)

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Questions of truth and judgment lie at the forefront of politics in today's world. As liberal democracies grapple with resurgent authoritarianism and ethnonationalism, organized lying has come to dominate political discourse. What makes political and factual judgments valid, and why has that ground of validity apparently evaporated in our contemporary political context? This thesis approaches these questions by focusing on the relationship between political judgment and philosophical skepticism. Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, I contend that the burdens of moral and political judgment produce an experience of alienation and a concomitant skeptical temptation to reject the shared criteria governing such judgments. While investigations into the rationality of political judgment abound, there has been little systematic examination of the systematic relationship between judgment and skepticism and the pernicious effects of the latter on the capacity to make reasoned, informed judgments. The purpose of this investigation is, in part, to show that many difficult problems surrounding the nature of judgment in contemporary political theory become more tractable when reframed in terms of this problem of skepticism.This thesis is divided into six chapters. The first chapter inquires into the standards of validity that govern normative judgment. Following what Nikolas Kompridis calls the "aesthetic turn in political thought", I examine the relationship between political and aesthetic judgments. Taste represents a paradigmatic site of skepticism: aesthetic criteria strike us as more subjective than perhaps any other kind of judgment. However, by recovering a normative notion of aesthetics, I show not only that aesthetic judgment involves rigorous criteria of validity, but more radically, that taste actually lies at the heart of all human judgment.The second chapter argues that aesthetic judgment represents the core of judgment as such through a close reading of Immanuel Kant. While Kant's third Critique has risen to prominence in theories of political judgment, political theorists have failed accurately to situate Kant's account of taste in relation to the epistemological problems raised in the first Critique. The chapter explores the conditions under which private perceptions hold good for others and argues that the role of perception in judgment is what makes it vulnerable to skepticism.Chapter 3 extends my account of Kant by arguing the way taste undergirds all judgments in ordinary communication. I examine the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell to describe how criteria for validity operate in ordinary language. According to Wittgenstein and Cavell, human communication rests upon shared, public criteria that are embedded in linguistic practices, or forms of life. I develop a universalist account of human forms of life that differs from traditional sociological accounts of a "lifeworld" (Lebenswelt). However, I argue that forms of life are a fundamentally unstable ground for judgment, permanently vulnerable to skeptical repudiation because they are, as Cavell puts it,"nothing more than human".Chapter 4 develops a detailed account of philosophical skepticism with two aims: to show (1) that skepticism arises from an ordinary human experience related to the basic conditions of judgment, and (2) that while skepticism cannot be refuted, it is susceptible to an immanent critique. In order to uncover the experience underlying skepticism, I examine Rene Descartes's classic case for systematic doubt. My close reading of Descartes indicates that skepticism originates in an experience that, following Arendt, I call world alienation. I conclude the chapter by examining Arendt's account of world and earth alienation, setting the stage for a discussion of the ethical and political consequences of skepticism.Chapter 5 examines ethical consequences of skepticism, describing the experience of alienation that generates skepticism. I argue that skepticism arises in response to shame, which functions as a mechanism for evading moral responsibility. Drawing from Arendt's account of the "banality of evil", I argue that skepticism produces a "thoughtlessness" with a destructive effect on the moral personality. At the same time, the project of overcoming skepticism also points the way towards a new ethical project and a form of social critique.Chapter 6 develops an account of the ethical and political of overcoming skepticism. Drawing from Cavell, I offer a version of moral perfectionism whose goal is to reawaken the individual's sense of ethical intelligibility and shared, human criteria. I return to Kant's account of aesthetic genius as a source of a concept of moral exemplarity. I argue that moral perfectionism represents a distinctive form of critique vital to the culture of democracy, suggesting how a perfectionist culture both critical and inclusive can address the pathologies that afflict the public sphere in today's liberal democracies.

Dissertations & Theses @ Yale University.

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English

January 17, 2020

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2019.

Yale University. Political Science.