The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  7. Reality and the thinking ego: the Cartesian doubt and the sensus communis

  Reality in a world of appearances is first of all characterized by "standing still and remaining" the same long enough to become an object for acknowledgment and recognition by a subject. Husserl's basic and greatest discovery takes up in exhaustive detail the intentionality of all acts of consciousness, that is, the fact that no subjective act is ever without an object: though the seen tree may be an illusion, for the act of seeing it is an object nevertheless; though the dreamt-of landscape is visible only to the dreamer, it is the object of his dream. Objectivity is built into the very subjectivity of consciousness by virtue of intentionality. Conversely and with the same justness, one may speak of the intentionality of appearances and their built-in subjectivity. All objects because they appear indicate a subject, and, just as every subjective act has its intentional object, so every appearing object has its intentional subject In Portmann's words, every appearance is a "conveyance for receivers" (a Sendung für Empfangsapparate). Whatever appears is meant for a perceiver, a potential subject no less inherent in all objectivity than a potential object is inherent in the subjectivity of every intentional act.

  That appearance always demands spectators and thus implies an at least potential recognition and acknowledgment has far-reaching consequences for what we, appearing beings in a world of appearances, understand by reality, our own as well as that of the world. In both cases, our "perceptual faith,"51 as Merleau-Ponty has called it, our certainty that what we perceive has an existence independent of the act of perceiving, depends entirely on the object's also appearing as such to others and being acknowledged by them. Without this tacit acknowledgment by others we would not even be able to put faith in the way we appear to ourselves.

  This is why all solipsistic theories—whether they radically claim that nothing but the self "exists" or, more moderately, hold that the self and its consciousness of itself are the primary objects of verifiable knowledge—are out of tune with the most elementary data of our existence and experience. Solipsism, open or veiled, with or without qualifications, has been the most persistent and, perhaps, the most pernicious fallacy of philosophy even before it attained in Descartes the high rank of theoretical and existential consistency. When the philosopher speaks of "man," he has in mind neither the species-being (the Gattungswesen, like horse or lion, which, according to Marx, constitutes man's fundamental existence) nor a mere paradigm of what, in the philosopher's view, all men should strive to emulate. To the philosopher, speaking out of the experience of the thinking ego, man is quite naturally not just word but thought made flesh, the always mysterious, never fully elucidated incarnation of the thinking capability. And the trouble with this fictitious being is that it is neither the product of a diseased brain nor one of the easily dispelled "errors of the past," but the entirely authentic semblance of the thinking activity itself. For while, for whatever reason, a man indulges in sheer thinking, and no matter on what subject, he lives completely in the singular, that is, in complete solitude, as though not men but Man inhabited the earth. Descartes himself explained and justified his radical subjectivism by the decisive loss of certainties entailed by the great scientific discoveries of the modern age, and I have, in a different context, followed up Descartes' reasoning.52 However, when—beset by the doubts inspired by the beginnings of modern science—he decided "à rejeter la terre mouvante et le sable pour trouver le roc ou l'argile" ("to reject the quicksand and mud in order to find the rock or clay"), he certainly rediscovered rather familiar territory in withdrawing to a place where he could live "aussi solitaire et retiré que dans les déserts les plus écartés" ("as solitary and retired as in the most remote deserts").53 Withdrawal from the "beastliness of the multitude" into the company of the "very few"54 but also into the absolute solitude of the One has been the most outstanding feature of the philosopher's life ever since Parmenides and Plato discovered that for those "very few," the sophoi, the "life of thinking" that knows neither joy nor grief is the most divine of all, and nous, thought itself, is "the king of heaven and earth."55

  Descartes, true to the radical subjectivism that was the philosophers' first reaction to the new glories of science, no longer ascribed the gratifications of this way of life to the objects of thinking—the everlastingness of the kosmos that neither comes into being nor ever vanishes from it and thus gives those few who have decided to spend their lives as its spectators their share of immortality. His very modern suspicion of man's cognitive and sensory apparatus made him define with greater clarity than anyone before him as properties of the res cogitans certain characteristics that were by no means unknown to the ancients but that now, perhaps for the first time, assumed a paramount importance. Outstanding among these was self-sufficiency, namely, that this ego has "no need of any place, nor does it depend on any material thing," and, next, worldlessness, namely, that in self-inspection, "examinant avec attention ce que j'étais," he could easily "feindre que je n'avais aucun corps et qu'il n'y avait aucun monde ni aucun lieu où je fusse" ( "feign that I had no body, and that there was no world nor place where I would be" ).56

  To be sure, none of these discoveries, or, rather, re-discoveries, was of great importance in itself to Descartes. His main concern was to find something—the thinking ego or, in his words, "la chose pensante," which he equated with the soul—whose reality was beyond suspicion, beyond the illusions of sense perception: even the power of an all-powerful Dieu trompeur would not be able to shatter the certainty of a consciousness that had withdrawn from all sense experience. Although everything given may be illusion and dream, the dreamer, if he will only consent not to demand reality of the dream, must be real. Hence, "Je pense, donc je suis," "I think, therefore I am." So strong was the experience of the thinking activity itself, on the one hand, so passionate on the other the desire to find certainty and some sort of abiding permanence after the new science had discovered "la terre mouvantet" (the shifting quicksand of the very ground on which we stand), that it never occurred to him that no cogitatio and no cogito me cogitare, no consciousness of an acting self that had suspended all faith in the reality of its intentional objects, would ever have been able to convince him of his own reality had he actually been bom in a desert, without a body and its senses to perceive "material" things and without fellow-creatures to assure him that what he perceived was perceived by them too. The Cartesian res cogitans, this fictitious creature, bodiless, senseless, and forsaken, would not even know that there is such a thing as reality and a possible distinction between the real and the unreal, between the common world of waking life and the private non-world of our dreams. What Merleau-Ponty had to say against Descartes is brilliantly right: To reduce perception to the thought of perceiving ... is to take out an insurance against doubt whose premiums are more onerous than the loss for which it is to indemnify us: for it is to ... move to a type of certitude that will never restore to us the 'there is' of the world."57

  Moreover, it is precisely the thinking activity—the experiences of the thinking ego—that gives rise to doubt of the world's reality and of my own. Thinking can seize upon and get hold of everything real—event, object, its own thoughts; their realness is the only property that remains stubbornly beyond its reach. The cogito ergo sum is a fallacy not only in the sense that, as Nietzsche remarked, from the cogito only the existence of cogitationes could be inferred; the cogito is subject to the same doubt as the sum. The I-am is presupposed in the I-think; thought can seize on this presupposition but it can neither prove nor disprove it. (Kant's argument against Descartes was entirely right, too: The thought "I am not... cannot exist; for if I am not, it follows that I cannot become aware that I am not."58 ) Reality cannot be derived; thought or reflection can accept or reject it, and the Cartesian doubt, starting from the notion of a Dieu trompeur, is but a sophisticated and veiled form of rejection.59 It remained for Wittgenstein, who had set out to investigate "how much truth there is in solip
sism" and thus became its most relevant contemporary representative, to formulate the existential delusion underlying all its theories: "At death the world does not alter, but comes to an end." "Death is not an event in life; we do not live our death."60 This is the basic premise of all solipsistic thinking.

  Although everything that appears is perceived in the mode of it-seems-to-me, hence open to error and illusion, appearance as such carries with it a prior indication of realness. All sense experiences are normally accompanied by the additional, if usually mute, sensation of reality, and this despite the fact that none of our senses, taken in isolation, and no sense-object, taken out of context, can produce it. (Art therefore, which transforms sense-objects into thought-things, tears them first of all out of their context in order to de-realize and thus prepare them for their new and different function.)

  The reality of what I perceive is guaranteed by its worldly context, which includes others who perceive as I do, on the one hand, and by the working together of my five senses on the other. What since Thomas Aquinas we call common sense, the sensus communis, is a kind of sixth sense needed to keep my five senses together and guarantee that it is the same object that I see, touch, taste, smell, and hear; it is the "one faculty [that] extends to all objects of the five senses."61 This same sense, a mysterious "sixth sense"62 because it cannot be localized as a bodily organ, fits the sensations of my strictly private five senses—so private that sensations in their mere sensational quality and intensity are incommunicable—into a common world shared by others. The subjectivity of the it-seems-to-me is remedied by the fact that the same object also appears to others though its mode of appearance may be different. (It is the inter-subjectivity of the world, rather than similarity of physical appearance, that convinces men that they belong to the same species. Though each single object appears in a different perspective to each individual, the context in which it appears is the same for the whole species. In this sense, every animal species lives in a world of its own, and the individual animal does not need to compare its own physical characteristics with those of its fellow-members in order to recognize them as such.) In a world of appearances, filled with error and semblance, reality is guaranteed by this three-fold commonness: the five senses, utterly different from each other, have the same object in common; members of the same species have the context in common that endows every single object with its particular meaning; and all other sense-endowed beings, though perceiving this object from utterly different perspectives, agree on its identity. Out of this threefold commonness arises the sensation of reality.

  To each of our five senses corresponds a specific, sensorily perceptible property of the world. Our world is visible because we have vision, audible because we have hearing, touchable and full of odors and tastes because we have touch, smell, and taste. The sixth sense's corresponding worldly property is realness, and the difficulty with this property is that it cannot be perceived like other sensory properties. The sense of realness is not a sensation strictly speaking; reality "is there even if we can never be certain that we know it" (Peirce),63 for the "sensation" of reality, of sheer thereness, relates to the context in which single objects appear as well as to the context in which we ourselves as appearances exist among other appearing creatures. The context qua context never appears entirely; it is elusive, almost like Being, which qua Being never appears in a world filled with beings, with single entities. But Being, since Parmenides the highest concept of Western philosophy, is a thought-thing that we do not expect to be perceived by the senses or to cause a sensation, whereas realness is akin to sensation; a feeling of realness (or irreality) actually accompanies all the sensations of my senses, which without it would not make "sense." This is why Thomas Aquinas defined common sense, his "sensus communis," as an "inner sense"—sensus interior—that functioned as "the common root and principle of the exterior senses" ("Sensus interior non dicitur communis ... sicut genus; sed sicut communis radix et principium ex-teriorum sensuum").64

  To equate this "inner sense," which cannot be physically localized, with the faculty of thought is tempting indeed, because among the chief characteristics of thinking, occurring in a world of appearances and performed by an appearing being, is that it is itself invisible. From this property of invisibility, shared by common sense with the faculty of thought, Peirce concludes that "reality has a relationship to human thought," ignoring the fact that thinking is not only itself invisible but also deals with invisibles, with things not present to the senses though they may be, and mostly are, also sense-objects, remembered and collected in the storehouse of memory and thus prepared for later reflection. Thomas Landon Thorson elaborates Peirce's suggestion and comes to the conclusion that "reality bears a relationship to the thought process like the environment does to biological evolution."65

  These remarks and suggestions are based on the tacit assumption that thought processes are in no way different from common-sense reasoning; the result is the old Cartesian illusion in modern disguise. Whatever thinking can reach and whatever it may achieve, it is precisely reality as given to common sense, in its sheer thereness, that remains forever beyond its grasp, indissoluble into thought-trains—the stumbling block that alerts them and on which they founder in affirmation or negation. Thought processes, unlike common sense, can be physically located in the brain, but nevertheless transcend all biological data, be they functional or morphological in Portmann's sense. Common sense, on the contrary, and the feeling of realness belong to our biological apparatus, and common-sense reasoning (which the Oxford school of philosophy mistakes for thinking) could certainly bear the same relation to reality that biological evolution does to environment. With respect to common-sense reasoning, Thorson is right: "We may indeed be talking about more than an analogy; we may be describing two aspects of the same process."66 And if language, in addition to its treasure of words for things given to the senses, did not offer us such thought-words, technically called "concepts," as justice, truth, courage, divinity, and so on, which are indispensable even in ordinary speech, we would certainly lack all tangible evidence for the thinking activity and hence might be justified in concluding with the early Wittgenstein: "Die Sprache ist ein Teil unseres Organismus" ("language is a part of our organism").67

  Thinking, however, which subjects everything it gets hold of to doubt, has no such natural, matter-of-fact relation to reality. It was thought—Descartes' reflection on the meaning of certain scientific discoveries—that destroyed his common-sense trust in reality, and his error was to hope he could overcome his doubt by insisting on withdrawing from the world altogether, eliminating every worldly reality from his thoughts and concentrating only on the thinking activity itself. (Cogito cogitationes, or cogito me cogitate, ergo sum, is the correct form of the famous formula.) But thinking can neither prove nor destroy the feeling of realness arising out of the sixth sense, which the French, perhaps for this reason, also call le bon sens, the good sense; when thinking withdraws from the world of appearances, it withdraws from the sensorily given and hence also from the feeling of realness, given by common sense. Husserl claimed that the suspension [epoche] of this feeling was the methodological foundation of his phenomenological science. For the thinking ego, this suspension is a matter of course and by no means a special method to be taught and learned; we know it as the quite ordinary phenomenon of absent-mindedness, to be observed in anyone who happens to be absorbed in no matter what sort of thought. In other words, the loss of common sense is neither the vice nor the virtue of Kant's "professional thinkers"; it happens to everybody who ever reflects on something; it only happens more often to professional thinkers. These we call philosophers, and their way of life will always be "the life of a stranger" (bios xenikos), as Aristotle called it in his Politics.68 And the reason that strangeness and absent-mindedness are not more dangerous, that all "thinkers," professionals and laymen alike, survive so easily the loss of the feeling of realness, is just that the thinking ego asserts itself only
temporarily: every thinker no matter how eminent remains "a man like you and me" (Plato), an appearance among appearances equipped with common sense and knowing enough common-sense reasoning to survive.

  8. Science and common sense; Kant's distinction between intellect and reason; truth and meaning

  Something very similar seems, at first glance, to be true of the modern scientist who constantly destroys authentic semblances without, however, destroying his own sensation of reality, telling him, as it tells us, that the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening. It was thinking that enabled men to penetrate the appearances and unmask them as semblances, albeit authentic ones; common-sense reasoning would never have dared to upset so radically all the plausibilities of our sensory apparatus. The famous "quarrel between the ancients and the moderns" actually turns on the question of what the aim of knowledge is; is it "to save the phenomena," as the ancients believed, or to discover the hidden functional apparatus which makes them appear? Thought's doubt of the reliability of sense experience, its suspicion that things might be quite different from the way they appear to human senses, was by no means uncommon in antiquity. Democritus' atoms were not only indivisible but invisible, moving in a void, infinite in number, and, through various configurations and combinations, producing impressions on our senses; Aristarchus in the third century B.C. first proposed the heliocentric hypothesis. It is interesting that the consequences of such daring were rather unpleasant: Democritu? was suspected of being insane, and Aristarchus was threatened with an indictment for impiety. But the relevant point is of course that no attempt was made to prove these hypotheses and no science came out of it.