Arendt (LM:69) – pensar – querer – julgar

Thinking, willing, and judging are the three basic mental activities; they cannot be derived from each other and though they have certain common characteristics they cannot be reduced to a common denominator. To the question What makes us think? there is ultimately no answer other than what Kant called “reason’s need,” the inner impulse of that faculty to actualize itself in speculation. And something very similar is true for the will, which neither reason nor desire can move. “Nothing other than the Will is the total cause of volition” (“nihil aliud a voluntate est causa totalis volitionis in voluntate”), in the striking formula of Duns Scotus, or “voluntas vult se velle” (“the will wills itself to will”), as even Thomas, the least voluntaristic of those who thought about this faculty, had to admit. Judgment, finally, the mysterious endowment of the mind by which the general, always a mental construction, and the particular, always given to sense experience, are brought together, is a “peculiar faculty” and in no way inherent in the intellect, not even in the case of “determinant judgments”—where particulars are subsumed under general rules in the form of a syllogism—because no rule is available for the applications of the rule. To know how to apply the general to the particular is an additional “natural gift,” the want of which, according to Kant, is “ordinarily called stupidity, and for such a failing there is no remedy.” The autonomous nature of judgment is even more obvious in the case of “reflective judgment,” which does not descend from the general to the particular but ascends “from the particular…to the universal” by deciding, without any over-all rules, This is beautiful, this is ugly, this is right, this is wrong; and here for a guiding principle, judging “can only give (it) as a law from and to itself.”