The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  The life of the mind in which I keep myself company may be soundless; it is never silent and it can never be altogether oblivious of itself, because of the reflexive nature of all its activities. Every cogitate, no matter what its object, is also a cogito me cogitare, every volition a volo me velle, and even judgment is possible, as Montesquieu once remarked, only through a "retour secret sur moi-même." This reflexivity seems to point to a place of inwardness for mental acts, construed on the principle of the outward space in which my non-mental acts take place. But that this inwardness, unlike the passive inwardness of the soul, could only be understood as a site of activities is a fallacy, whose historical orgin is the discovery, in the early centuries of the Christian era, of the Will and of the experiences of the willing ego. For I am aware of the faculties of the mind and their reflexivity only as long as the activity lasts. It is as though the very organs of thought or will or judgment came into being only when I think, or will, or judge; in their latent state, assuming that such latency exists prior to actualization, they are not open to introspection. The thinking ego, of which I am perfectly conscious so long as the thinking activity lasts, will disappear as though it were a mere mirage when the real world asserts itself again.

  Since mental activities, non-appearing by definition, occur in a world of appearances and in a being that partakes of these appearances through its receptive sense organs as well as through its own ability and urge to appear to others, they cannot come into being except through a deliberate withdrawal from appearances. It is withdrawal not so much from the world—only thought, because of its tendency to generalize, i.e., its special concern for the general as opposed to the particular, tends to withdraw from the world altogether—as from the world's being present to the senses. Every mental act rests on the minds faculty of having present to itself what is absent from the senses. Re-presentation, making present what is actually absent, is the mind's unique gift, and since our whole mental terminology is based on metaphors drawn from vision's experience, this gift is called imagination, defined by Kant as "the faculty of intuition even without the presence of the object."14 The mind's faculty of making present what is absent is of course by no means restricted to mental images of absent objects; memory quite generally stores, and holds at the disposition of recollection, whatever is no more, and the will anticipates what the future may bring but is not yet. Only because of the mind's capacity for making present what is absent can we say "no more" and constitute a past for ourselves, or say "not yet" and get ready for a future. But this is possible for the mind only after it has withdrawn from the present and the urgencies of everyday life. Thus, in order to will, the mind must withdraw from the immediacy of desire, which, without reflecting and without reflexivity, stretches out its hand to get hold of the desired object; for the will is not concerned with objects but with projects, for instance, with the future availability of an object that it may or may not desire in the present. The will transforms the desire into an intention. And judgment, finally, be it aesthetic or legal or moral, presupposes a definitely "unnatural" and deliberate withdrawal from involvement and the partiality of immediate interests as they are given by my position in the world and the part I play in it.

  It would be wrong, I believe, to try to establish a hierarchical order among the mind's activities, but I also believe that it is hardly deniable that an order of priorities exists. It is inconceivable how we would ever be able to will or to judge, that is, to handle things which are not yet and things which are no more, if the power of representation and the effort necessary to direct mental attention to what in every way escapes the attention of sense perception had not gone ahead and prepared the mind for further reflection as well as for willing and judging. In other words, what we generally call "thinking," though unable to move the will or provide judgment with general rules, must prepare the particulars given to the senses in such a way that the mind is able to handle them in their absence; it must, in brief, de-sense them.

  The best description of this process of preparation I know of is given by Augustine. Sense perception, he says, "the vision, which was without when the sense was formed by a sensible body, is succeeded by a similar vision within," the image that re-presents it.15 This image is then stored in memory, ready to become a "vision in thought" the moment the mind gets hold of it; it is decisive that "what remains in the memory"—the mere image of what once was real—is different from the "vision in thought"—the deliberately remembered object. "What remains in the memory ... is one thing, and ... something else arises when we remember,"16 for "what is hidden and retained in the memory is one thing, and what is impressed by it in the thought of the one remembering is another thing."17 Hence, the thought-object is different from the image, as the image is different from the visible sense-object whose mere representation it is. It is because of this twofold transformation that thinking "in fact goes even further," beyond the realm of all possible imagination, "when our reason proclaims the infinity of number which no vision in the thought of corporeal things has yet grasped" or "teaches us that even the tiniest bodies can be divided infinitely."18 Imagination, therefore, which transforms a visible object into an invisible image, fit to be stored in the mind, is the condition sine qua non for providing the mind with suitable thought-objects; but these thought-objects come into being only when the mind actively and deliberately remembers, recollects and selects from the storehouse of memory whatever arouses its interest sufficiently to induce concentration; in these operations the mind learns how to deal with things that are absent and prepares itself to "go further," toward the understanding of things that are always absent, that cannot be remembered because they were never present to sense experience.

  Although this last class of thought-objects—concepts, ideas, categories, and the like—became the special subject matter of "professional" philosophy, there is nothing in the ordinary life of man that cannot become food for thought, that is, be subjected to the twofold transformation that readies a sense-object to become a suitable thought-object. All the metaphysical questions that philosophy took as its special topics arise out of ordinary common-sense experiences; "reason's need"—the quest for meaning that prompts men to ask them—is in no way different from men's need to tell the story of some happening they witnessed, or to write poems about it In all such reflecting activities men move outside the world of appearances and use a language filled with abstract words which, of course, had long been part and parcel of everyday speech before they became the special currency of philosophy. For thinking, then, though not for philosophy, technically speaking, withdrawal from the world of appearances is the only essential precondition. In order for us to think about somebody, he must be removed from our presence; so long as we are with him we do not think either of him or about him; thinking always implies remembrance; every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought. It may, of course, happen that we start thinking about a still-present somebody or something, in which case we have removed ourselves surreptitiously from our surroundings and are conducting ourselves as though we were already absent.

  These remarks may indicate why thinking, the quest for meaning-as opposed to the thirst for knowledge, even for knowledge for its own sake—has so often been felt to be unnatural, as though men, whenever they reflect without purpose, going beyond the natural curiosity awakened by the manifold wonders of the world's sheer thereness and their own existence, engaged in an activity contrary to the human condition. Thinking as such, not only the raising of the unanswerable "ultimate questions," but every reflection that does not serve knowledge and is not guided by practical needs and aims, is, as Heidegger once observed, "out of order" (italics added).19 It interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop-and-think. Whatever the fallacies and the absurdities of the two-world theories may have been, they arose out of these genuine experiences of the thinking ego. And since whatever prevents thinking belongs to the world of appearances
and to those common-sense experiences I have in company with my fellow-men and that automatically guarantee my sense of the realness of my own being, it is indeed as though thinking paralyzed me in much the same way as an excess of consciousness may paralyze the automatism of my bodily functions, "l'accomplissement d'un acte qui doit être réflexe ou ne peut être," as Valéry phrases it. Identifying the state of consciousness with the state of thinking, he added: "on en pourrait tirer toute une philosophie que je résumerais ainsi: Tantôt je pense et tantôt je suis" ("At times I think, and at times I am").20 This striking observation, entirely based on equally striking experiences—namely, that the mere consciousness of our bodily organs is enough to prevent them from functioning properly—insists on an antagonism between being and thinking which we can trace back to Plato's famous saying that only the philosopher's body—that is, what makes him appear among appearances—still inhabits the city of men, as though, by thinking, men removed themselves from the world of the living.

  Throughout the history of philosophy a very curious notion has persisted of an affinity between death and philosophy. Philosophy for many centuries was supposed to teach men how to die; it was in this vein that the Romans decided that the study of philosophy was a fit occupation only for the old, whereas the Greeks had held that it should be studied by the young. Still, it was Plato who first remarked that the philosopher appears to those who do not do philosophy as though he were pursuing death,21 and it was Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, who, still in the same century, reported that the Delphic oracle, on his asking it what he should do to attain the best life, had answered: "Take on the color of the dead."22 In modern times it is not uncommon to find people holding, with Schopenhauer, that our mortality is the eternal source of philosophy, that "death actually is the inspiring genius of philosophy...[and that] without death there would scarcely be any philosophizing."23 Even the younger Heidegger of Sein und Zeit still treated the anticipation of death as the decisive experience through which man can attain an authentic self and be liberated from the inauthenticity of the They, quite unaware of the extent to which this doctrine actually sprang, as Plato had pointed out, from the opinion of the many.

  10. The intramural warfare between thought and common sense

  "Take on the color of the dead"—so indeed the philosopher's absent-mindedness and the style of life of the professional who devotes his entire life to thinking, thus monopolizing and raising to an absolute what is but one of the many human faculties, must appear to the common sense of common men, since we normally move in a world where the most radical experience of disappearing is death and withdrawal from appearance is dying. The very fact that there have always—at least since Parmenides—been men who chose this way of life deliberately without being candidates for suicide shows that this sense of an affinity with death does not come from the thinking activity and the experiences of the thinking ego itself. It is, rather, the philosopher's own common sense—his being "a man like you and me"—that makes him aware of being "out of order" while engaged in thinking. He is not immune from common opinion, because he shares, after all, in the "common-ness" of all men, and it is his own sense of realness that makes him suspect the thinking activity. And since thinking itself is helpless against the arguments of common-sense reasoning and the insistence on the "meaninglessness" of its quest for meaning, the philosopher is prone to answer in common-sense terms, which he simply turns upside down for the purpose. If common sense and common opinion hold that "death is the greatest of all evils," the philosopher (of Plato's time, when death was understood as the separation of soul from body) is tempted to say: on the contrary, "death is a deity, a benefactor to the philosopher, precisely because it dissolves the union of soul and body"24 and thus seems to liberate the mind from bodily pain and pleasure, both of which prevent our mental organs from pursuing their activity, just as consciousness prevents our bodily organs from functioning properly.25 The whole history of philosophy, which tells us so much about the objects of thought and so little about the process of thinking and the experiences of the thinking ego, is shot through with an intramural warfare between man's common sense, this sixth sense that fits our five senses into a common world, and man's faculty of thought and need of reason, which determine him to remove himself for considerable periods from it.

  The philosophers have interpreted that intramural warfare as the natural hostility of the many and their opinions toward the few and their truth; but the historical facts to support this interpretation are rather scanty. There is, to be sure, the trial of Socrates, which probably inspired Plato to declare at the end of the Cave parable (when the philosopher returns from his solitary flight into the sky of the ideas to the darkness of the cave and the company of his fellow-men) that the many, if they only could, would lay hands on the few and kill them. This interpretation of Socrates' trial echoes through the history of philosophy up to and including Hegel. Yet, leaving aside some very justified doubts about Plato's version of the event,26 the fact is, there are hardly any instances on record of the many on their own initiative declaring war on philosophers. As far as the few and the many are concerned, it has been rather the other way round. It was the philosopher who of his own accord quitted the City of men and then told those he had left behind that, at best, they were deceived by the trust they put in their senses, by their willingness to believe the poets and be taught by the populace, when they should have been using their minds, and that, at worst, they were content to live only for sensual pleasure and to be glutted like cattle.27 It seems rather obvious that the multitude can never resemble a philosopher, but this does not mean, as Plato stated, that those who do philosophy are "necessarily blamed" and persecuted by the many "like a man fallen among wild beasts."28

  The philosopher's way of life is solitary, but this solitude is freely chosen, and Plato himself, when he enumerates the natural conditions favorable to the development in "the noblest natures" of the philosophical gift, does not mention the hostility of the many. He speaks, rather, of exiles, of a "great mind born in a petty state whose affairs are beneath ... notice," and of other circumstances such as ill health that cut such natures off from the public affairs of the many.29 But this turning-of-the-tables, to make the warfare between thought and common sense the result of the few turning against the many, though perhaps a shade more plausible and better documented—to wit, on the philosopher's claim to rule—than the traditional persecution mania of the philosopher, is probably no nearer the truth. The most plausible explanation of the quarrel between common sense and "professional" thinking still is the point already mentioned (that we are dealing here with an intramural warfare) since surely the first to be aware of all the objections common sense could raise against philosophy must have been the philosophers themselves. And Plato—in a different context, where he is not concerned with a polity "worthy of the philosophical nature"—dismisses with laughter a question raised as to whether a man who is concerned with divine things is also good at things human.30

  Laughter rather than hostility is the natural reaction of the many to the philosopher's preoccupation and the apparent uselessness of his concerns. This laughter is innocent and quite different from the ridicule frequently turned on an opponent in serious disputes, where it can indeed become a fearful weapon. But Plato, who argued in the Laws for the strict prohibition of any writing that would ridicule any of the citizens,31 feared the ridicule in all laughter. What is decisive here are not the passages in the political dialogues, the Laws or the Republic, against poetry and especially comedians, but the entirely serious way in which he tells the story of the Thracian peasant girl who bursts out laughing when she saw Thales fall into a well while he was watching the motions of the heavenly bodies above him, "declaring that he was eager to know the things in the sky, but what was ... just at his feet escaped him." And Plato adds: "Anyone who gives his life to philosophy is open to such mockery.... The whole rabble will join the peasant girl in laughing at him...[as] in his helplessness
he looks like a fool."32 It is strange that in the long history of philosophy it occurred only to Kant—who was so singularly free of all the specifically philosophical vices—that the gift for speculative thought could be like the gift "with which Juno honored Tiresias, whom she blinded so that she might give him the gift of prophecy." He suspected that intimate acquaintance with another world could be "attained here only by forfeiting some of the sense one needs for the present world." Kant, at any rate, seems to have been unique among the philosophers in being sovereign enough to join in the laughter of the common man. Probably quite unaware of Plato's story of the Thracian girl, he tells in perfectly good humor a virtually identical tale about Tycho de Brahe and his coachman: the astronomer had proposed that they take their bearings from the stars to find the shortest way during a night journey, and the coachman had replied: "My dear sir, you may know a lot about the heavenly bodies; but here on earth you are a fool."33