The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  Kant's famous distinction between Vernunft and Verstand, between a faculty of speculative thought and the ability to know arising out of sense experience—where "all thought is but a means to reach intuition" ("In whatever manner and by whatever means a cognition may relate to objects, intuition is that through which it is in immediate relation to them, and to which all thought is directed as a means")82 —has consequences more far-reaching, and even perhaps quite other, than those he himself recognized.83 (While discussing Plato, he once remarked "that it is by no means unusual, upon comparing the thoughts which an author has expressed in regard to his subject ... to find that we understand him better than he has understood himself. As he has not sufficiently determined his concept, he has sometimes spoken, or even thought, in opposition to his own intention."84 And this is of course applicable to his own work.) Although he insisted on the inability of reason to arrive at knowledge, especially with respect to God, Freedom, and Immortality—to him the highest objects of thought—he could not part altogether with the conviction that the final aim of thinking, as of knowledge, is truth and cognition; he thus uses, throughout the Critiques, the term Vemunfterkenntnis, "knowledge arising out of pure reason,"85 a notion that ought to have been a contradiction in terms for him. He never became fully aware of having liberated reason and thinking, of having justified this faculty and its activity even though they could not boast of any "positive" results. As we have seen, he stated that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge ...to make room for faith,"86 but all he had "denied" was knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but for thought. He believed that he had built the foundations of a future "systematic metaphysic" as "a bequest to posterity,"87 and it is true that without Kant's unshackling of speculative thought the rise of German idealism and its metaphysical systems would hardly have been possible. But the new brand of philosophers—Fichte, Schelling, Hegel—would scarcely have pleased Kant. Liberated by Kant from the old school dogmatism and its sterile exercises, encouraged by him to indulge in speculative thinking, they actually took their cue from Descartes, went hunting for certainty, blurred once again the distinguishing line between thought and knowledge, and believed in all earnest that the results of their speculations possessed the same kind of validity as the results of cognitive processes.

  What undermined Kant's greatest discovery, the distinction between knowledge, which uses thinking as a means to an end, and thinking itself as it arises out of "the very nature of our reason" and is done for its own sake, was that he constantly compared the two with each other. Only if truth (in Kant, intuition), and not meaning, is the ultimate criterion of man's mental activities does it make sense in this context to speak of deception and illusion at all. "It is impossible," he says, that reason, "this highest tribunal of all the rights and claims of speculation should itself be the source of deceptions and illusions."88 He is right, but only because reason as the faculty of speculative thought does not move in the world of appearances and hence can produce non-sense and meaninglessness but neither illusion nor deception, which properly belong to the realm of sense perception and common-sense reasoning. He recognizes this himself when he calls the ideas of pure reason only "heuristic," not "ostensive" concepts;89 they are tentative—they do not demonstrate or show anything. "They ought not to be assumed as existing in themselves, but only as having the reality of a schema...[and] should be regarded only as analoga of real things, not as in themselves real things."90 In other words, they neither reach nor are able to present and represent reality. It is not merely the other-worldly transcendent things that they can never reach; the realness given by the senses playing together, kept in tune by common sense, and that is guaranteed by the fact of plurality—is beyond their grasp. But Kant does not insist on this side of the matter, because he is afraid that his ideas might then turn out to be "empty thought-things" (leere Gedankendinge)91 —as indeed they invariably do when they dare to show themselves nakedly, that is, untransformed and in a way unfalsified by language, in our everyday world and in everyday communication.

  It is perhaps for the same reason that he equates what we have here called meaning with Purpose and even Intention (Zweck and Absicht): The "highest formal unity, which rests solely on concepts of reason, is the purposive unity of things. The speculative interest of reason makes it necessary to regard all order in the world as if it had originated in the [intention] of a supreme reason."92 Now, it turns out, reason pursues specific purposes, has specific intentions in resorting to its ideas; it is the need of human reason and its interest in God, Freedom, and Immortality that make men think, even though only a few pages later he will admit that "the mere speculative interest of reason" with respect to the three main objects of thought—"the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God"—"is very small; and for its sake alone we should hardly have undertaken the labor of transcendental investigations ... since whatever discoveries might be made in regard to these matters, we should not be able to make use of them in any helpful manner in concreto. "93 But we do not have to go hunting for small contradictions in the work of this very great thinker. Right in the midst of the passages quoted above occurs the sentence that stands in the greatest possible contrast to his own equation of reason with Purpose: "Pure reason is in fact occupied with nothing but itself. It can have no other vocation."94

  II. Mental Activities in a World of Appearances

  9. Invisibility and withdrawal

  Thinking, willing, and judging are the three basic mental activities; they cannot be derived from each other and though they have certain common characteristics they cannot be reduced to a common denominator. To the question What makes us think? there is ultimately no answer other than what Kant called "reason's need," the inner impulse of that faculty to actualize itself in speculation. And something very similar is true for the will, which neither reason nor desire can move. "Nothing other than the Will is the total cause of volition" ("nihil aliud a voluntate est causa totalis volitionis in voluntate"), in the striking formula of Duns Scotus, or "voluntas vult se velle" ("the will wills itself to will"), as even Thomas, the least voluntaristic of those who thought about this faculty, had to admit.1 Judgment, finally, the mysterious endowment of the mind by which the general, always a mental construction, and the particular, always given to sense experience, are brought together, is a "peculiar faculty" and in no way inherent in the intellect, not even in the case of "determinant judgments"—where particulars are subsumed under general rules in the form of a syllogism—because no rule is available for the applications of the rule. To know how to apply the general to the particular is an additional "natural gift," the want of which, according to Kant, is "ordinarily called stupidity, and for such a failing there is no remedy."2 The autonomous nature of judgment is even more obvious in the case of "reflective judgment," which does not descend from the general to the particular but ascends "from the particular ... to the universal" by deciding, without any over-all rules, This is beautiful, this is ugly, this is right, this is wrong; and here for a guiding principle, judging "can only give [it] as a law from and to itself."3

  I called these mental activities basic because they are autonomous; each of them obeys the laws inherent in the activity itself, although all of them depend on a certain stillness of the soul's passions, on that "dispassionate quiet" ("leidenschaftslose Stille") which Hegel ascribed to "merely thinking cognition."4 Since it is always the same person whose mind thinks, wills, and judges, the autonomous nature of these activities has created great difficulties. Reason's inability to move the will, plus the fact that thinking can only "understand" what is past but neither remove it nor "rejuvenate" it—"the owl of Minerva begins its flight when dusk is falling"5 —have led to the various doctrines asserting the mind's impotence and the force of the irrational, in brief to Hume's famous dictum that "Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions," that is, to a rather simple-minded reversal of the Platonic
notion of reason's uncontested rulership in the household of the soul. What is so remarkable in all these theories and doctrines is their implicit monism, the claim that behind the obvious multiplicity of the world's appearances and, even more pertinendy for our context, behind the obvious plurality of man's faculties and abilities, there must exist a oneness—the old hen pan, "the all is one"—either a single source or a single ruler.

  The autonomy of mental activities, moreover, implies their being unconditioned; none of the conditions of either life or the world corresponds to them directly. For the "dispassionate quiet" of the soul is not a condition properly speaking; not only does the mere quiet never cause the mental activity, the urge to think; "reason's need" more often than not quiets the passions. To be sure, the objects of my thinking or willing or judging, the mind's subject matter, are given in the world, or arise from my life in this world, but they themselves as activities are not necessitated or conditioned by either. Men, though they are totally conditioned existentially—limited by the time span between birth and death, subject to labor in order to live, motivated to work in order to make themselves at home in the world, and roused to action in order to find their place in the society of their fellow-men—can mentally transcend all these conditions, but only mentally, never in reality or in cognition and knowledge, by virtue of which they are able to explore the world's realness and their own. They can judge affirmatively or negatively the realities they are born into and by which they are also conditioned; they can will the impossible, for instance, eternal life; and they can think, that is, speculate meaningfully, about the unknown and the unknowable. And although this can never directly change reality—indeed in our world there is no clearer or more radical opposition than that between thinking and doing—the principles by which we act and the criteria by which we judge and conduct our lives depend ultimately on the life of the mind. In short, they depend on the performance of these apparently profitless mental enterprises that yield no results and do "not endow us directly with the power to act" (Heidegger). Absence of thought is indeed a powerful factor in human affairs, statistically speaking the most powerful, not just in the conduct of the many but in the conduct of all. The very urgency, the a-scholia, of human affairs demands provisional judgments, the reliance on custom and habit, that is, on prejudices. As to the world of appearances, which affects our senses as well as our soul and our common sense, Heraclitus spoke truly, in words still unburdened by terminology: The mind is separate from all things" (sophon esti pantōn kechōrismenon).6 It is because of that complete separateness that Kant could believe so firmly in the existence of other intelligible beings in a different corner of the universe, namely, of creatures capable of the same kind of reasonable thought although without our sensory apparatus and without our intellectual brain power, that is, without our criteria for truth and error and our conditions for experience and scientific cognition.

  Seen from the perspective of the world of appearances and the activities conditioned by it, the main characteristic of mental activities is their invisibility. Properly speaking, they never appear, though they manifest themselves to the thinking, willing, or judging ego, which is aware of being active, yet lacks the ability or the urge to appear as such. The Epicurean lathē biōsas, "live in hiding," may have been a counsel of prudence; it is also an at least negatively exact description of the topos, the locality, of the man who thinks; in fact, it is the very opposite of John Adams' "spectemur agendo" (let us be seen in action). In other words, to the invisible that manifests itself to thinking there corresponds a human faculty that is not only, like other faculties, invisible so long as it is latent, a mere potentiality, but remains non-manifest in full actuality. If we consider the whole scale of human activities from the viewpoint of appearance, we find many degrees of manifestation. Neither laboring nor fabrication requires display of the activity itself; only action and speaking need a space of appearance—as well as people who see and hear-in order to be actualized at all. But none of these activities is invisible. Were we to follow Greek linguistic custom, by which the "heroes," acting men in the highest sense, were called andres epiphaneis, men who are fully manifest, highly conspicuous, then we would call thinkers the inconspicuous men by definition and profession.7

  In this, as in other respects, the mind is decisively different from the soul, its chief competitor for the rank of ruler over our inner, non-visible life. The soul, where our passions, our feelings and emotions arise, is a more or less chaotic welter of happenings which we do not enact but suffer (pathein) and which in cases of great intensity may overwhelm us as pain or pleasure does; its invisibility resembles that of our inner bodily organs of whose functioning or non-functioning we are also aware without being able to control them. The life of the mind, on the contrary, is sheer activity, and this activity, like other activities, can be started and stopped at will. The passions, moreover, though their seat is invisible, have an expressiveness of their own: we blush with shame or embarrassment, we grow pale with fear or anger, we can shine with happiness or look dejected, and we need a considerable training in self-control in order to prevent the passions from showing. The only outward manifestation of the mind is absent-mindedness, an obvious disregard of the surrounding world, something entirely negative which in no way hints at what is actually happening within us.

  The mere fact of invisibility, that something can be without being manifest to the eye, must always have been striking. How much so may be gauged by the strange disinclination of our whole tradition to draw clear lines between soul, mind, and consciousness, so often equated as objects of our inner sense for no other reason than that they are non-appearing to the outer senses. Thus Plato concluded that the soul is invisible because it is made for the cognition of the invisible within a world of visible things. And even Kant, among the philosophers by far the most critical of traditional metaphysical prejudices, will occasionally enumerate two kinds of objects: "T, as thinking, am an object of inner sense, and am called 'soul'. That which is an object of the outer senses is called 'body'."8 This, of course, is but a variation of the old metaphysical two-world theory. An analogy is made to the outwardness of sense experience, on the assumption that an internal space houses what is within us in the same way that external space provides for our bodies, so that an "inner sense," namely, the intuition of introspection, is pictured as fitted to ascertain whatever goes on "within" with the same reliability our outer senses have in dealing with the outer world. And for the soul, the analogy is not too misleading. Since feelings and emotions are not self-made but "passions" caused by outside events that affect the soul and bring about certain reactions, namely, the soul's pathemata— its passive states and moods—these inner experiences may indeed be open to the inner sense of introspection precisely because they are possible, as Kant once remarked, "only on the assumption of outer experience."9 Moreover, their very passivity, the fact that they are not liable to be changed by deliberate intervention, results in an impressive semblance of stability. This semblance then produces certain illusions of introspection, which in turn lead to the theory that the mind is not merely the master of its own activities but can rule the soul's passions—as though the mind were nothing but the soul's highest organ. This theory is very old and reached its climax in the Stoic doctrines of the mind's control of pleasure and pain; its fallacy—that you can feel happy when roasted in the Phalarian Bull—rests ultimately on the equation of soul and mind, that is, on ascribing to the soul and its essential passivity the powerful sovereignty of the mind.

  No mental act, and least of all the act of thinking, is content with its object as it is given to it. It always transcends the sheer givenness of whatever may have aroused its attention and transforms it into what Petrus Johannis Olivi, the thirteenth-century Franciscan philosopher of the Will, 10 called an experimentum suitatis, an experiment of the self with itself. Since plurality is one of the basic existential conditions of human life on earth—so that inter homines esse, to be amo
ng men, was to the Romans the sign of being alive, aware of the realness of world and self, and inter homines esse desinere, to cease to be among men, a synonym for dying—to be by myself and to have intercourse with myself is the outstanding characteristic of the life of the mind. The mind can be said to have a life of its own only to the extent that it actualizes this intercourse in which, existentially speaking, plurality is reduced to the duality already implied in the fact and the word "consciousness," or syneidenai— to know with myself. I call this existential state in which I keep myself company "solitude" to distinguish it from "loneliness," where I am also alone but now deserted not only by human company but also by the possible company of myself. It is only in loneliness that I feel deprived of human company, and it is only in the acute awareness of such deprivation that men ever exist really in the singular, as it is perhaps only in dreams or in madness that they fully realize the unbearable and "unutterable horror" of this state.11 Mental activities themselves all testify by their reflexive nature to a duality inherent in consciousness; the mental agent cannot be active except by acting, implicitly or explicitly, back upon himself. Consciousness, to be sure—Kant's "I think"—not only accompanies "all other representations" but all my activities, in which nevertheless I can be entirely oblivious of my self. Consciousness as such, before it is actualized in solitude, achieves nothing more than an awareness of the sameness of the I-am—"I am conscious of myself, not as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself, but only that I am"12 —which guarantees the identical continuity of a self throughout the manifold representations, experiences, and memories of a lifetime. As such, it "expresses the act of determining my existence."13 ® Mental activities, and, as we shall see later, especially thinking—the soundless dialogue of the I with itself—can be understood as the actualization of the original duality or the split between me and myself which is inherent in all consciousness. But this sheer self-awareness, of which I am, as it were, unconsciously conscious, is not an activity; by accompanying all other activities it is the guarantor of an altogether silent I-am-I.