What Does Judgment Mean? Barbara Vinken

9 June 2020

An exhibition about Hannah Arendt also has to be about the desire and daring to use the faculty of judgment. For Arendt, this was synonymous with political action. From her experience of National Socialism, she deduced: ‘Don’t join in, judge for yourself: you don’t say we, you say I; you use your own judgment’. Arendt concluded that exercising personal judgment is essential to a living democracy, especially when it contradicts the majority.

In the exhibition, we present film interviews, where people from different backgrounds and professions talk about their personal experience of making judgments. Therefore, we asked the fashion theorist Barbara Vinken, what does judgment means to her.