One wants to break free of the past: rightly, because nothing at all can live in its shadow, and because there will be no end to the terror as long as guilt and violence are repaid with guilt and violence; wrongly, because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive. National Socialism lives on. (Adorno, 2010, p. 213) In this article I defend an account of judgment that I term embodied reflective judgment, which implies that thinking and feeling are interconnected and both are crucial for critical judgment. However, when I say that both thinking and feeling are important for reflective judgment, I do not mean to imply that they are separate and distinct entities. Rather, the idea of reflective judgment is based on the insight that thinking and feeling are not only connected, but entangled with each other. The way in which we think about something can prompt an emotional response, and that response can prompt further reflection necessary for critical judgment. In this article I clarify the relationship between thinking and feeling by foregrounding guilt feelings as a specific issue that individuals and political collectivities must deal with to make embodied reflective judgment a possibility.If individuals and collectivities use defense mechanisms to evade their guilt feelings then their capacity to think critically is diminished and embodied reflective judgment remains diminished or altogether absent. I do not argue, however, that feelings trump thinking in my understanding of embodied reflective judgment. Rather, if guilt feelings are evaded via defense mechanisms then they cloud our ability to make critical judgments. A failure to live up to guilt feelings corrupts people's judgments in two ways. First, people make all sorts of flawed judgments to ward off having to deal with guilt feelings, and so thinking and rationality are used merely to fend off guilt feelings. Second, since it is guilt feelings that would prompt reflection, steps that ought to be taken to make reparations for the past and to prevent future injustices are less likely to be taken, because people don't judge that there's any need to take such steps. The emphasis here is specifically on how guilt feelings can impact on critical judgment. In developing this account of embodied reflective judgment I discuss Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) in which she documented and analyzed the trial of Eichmann, as well as well as her other work on responsibility and judgment. I also discuss passages of Theodor W. Adorno's Guilt and Defense (2010), which examines the remnants of fascist ideology in postwar group discussions with Germans, and which is part of a larger work titled Gruppenexperiment (group experiment) that examines the legacies of Nazi ideology among postwar West Germans, as well as his other works on fascism and capitalism.
