Judgement is the capacity to distinguish the essential from the inessential in a concrete situation. It is neither knowledge nor opinion, but what remains when all methods have been exhausted: the ability to assess a unique set of circumstances for which no ready-made rule exists.
What judgement means
Judgement cannot be accumulated like knowledge or trained like a skill. It arises not from more information, but from a different way of seeing. In Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s work, a threefold order emerges: the intellect as a necessary but insufficient foundation; experience as an existential encounter that transforms; and wisdom as a living, ordering force that pervades both. Judgement lies between the second and third levels: it presupposes the intellect but goes beyond it, because it always involves an experiential dimension.
The Urphaenomen — the primordial phenomenon as Goethe understands it — marks a limit of knowledge. What underlies a phenomenon is itself a phenomenon, not some abstract quantity to be tracked down by reductionist analysis. At this limit, the human being must pause rather than press forward. Judgement shows itself in the ability to recognise this limit and to respect it, instead of leaping past it with analytical zeal.
In times of systematic confusion of language, judgement takes on an additional significance. There is a crisis of the word: word and deed no longer align, word and reality drift apart. Sedative phrases injected into public discourse cast a kind of spell, undermining immediate perception. The basic mechanism of manipulative rhetoric is not the argument, but the attack on self-worth. Judgement is the faculty of seeing through these layers and finding one’s way back to one’s own perception.
Where the concept comes from
Goethe (1749-1832) spoke of anschauende Urteilskraft — intuitive judgement — meaning a form of cognition in which perceiving and thinking coincide. Reason, he wrote in his Maxims and Reflections, depends on what is becoming; the intellect depends on what has already become. This distinction goes to the heart of the matter: the intellect orders what is already given, while judgement perceives what is in the process of becoming. It requires, Goethe said, a particular turn of mind to grasp formless reality in its own nature and to distinguish it from mere chimeras.
Kant’s distinction between determinative and reflective judgement provides the conceptual framework. Determinative judgement subsumes: it assigns a particular case to a known rule. Reflective judgement seeks the rule, starting from the particular case. What happens in philosophical accompaniment is closer to reflective judgement: not the application of a schema to a situation, but a dwelling with the situation until it speaks for itself.
The wise ruler in Chinese philosophy embodies this faculty. He differs from the merely clever through the union of humanity with an awareness of human failings. Mere cleverness without humanity produces tyranny; mere goodness without awareness of human weakness produces naivety. Wisdom shows itself in the farsightedness and humanity of the measures taken.
Judgement in practice
In philosophical accompaniment, judgement is not a topic to be discussed but a faculty that forms itself in conversation. When you encounter someone who thinks differently and are willing to let your own position be tested, you sharpen your eye for what is really at stake in a situation. Your own position is not destroyed but made more precise.
The philosopher accompanies — she does not treat and does not coach. She walks alongside. What therapeutic methods achieve through diagnostic categories also happens here: what was hidden comes to the surface. The path is different. Not the concept of disorder but the question guides perception: what wants to be understood here? The aim is orientation, judgement, an ethically integrated life.
For people in times of upheaval and for leaders who must make decisions that exceed what can be calculated, judgement is no luxury. It is what distinguishes a right decision from a merely logical one.
Related concepts
Judgement presupposes Thinking Empathy: only those who think and feel at once can grasp the essential in a concrete situation. It forms itself through Philosophical Accompaniment, whose conversations create the space in which judgement is practised. The epistemological background lies in Natural Philosophy, which understands the human being as a participating knower, not a detached observer.