  The crisis in understanding is therefore coeval with a crisis in judgment, insofar as understanding for Arendt is “so closely related to and interrelated with judging that one must describe both as the subsumption of something particular under a universal rule” (UP, 383). Once these rules have lost their validity we are no longer able to understand and to judge the particulars, that is, we are no longer able to subsume them under our accepted categories of moral and political thought. Arendt, however, does not believe that the loss of these categories has brought to an end our capacity to judge; on the contrary, since human beings are distinguished by their capacity to begin anew, they are able to fashion new categories and to formulate new standards of judgment for the events that have come to pass and for those that may emerge in the future.