The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  I have cited these few pages from the Seventh Letter at some length because they offer an otherwise unavailable insight into a possible incompatibility between intuition—the guiding metaphor for philosophical truth—and speech—the medium in which thinking manifests itself: the former always presents us with a co-temporaneous manifold, whereas the latter necessarily discloses itself in a sequence of words and sentences. That the latter was a mere instrument for the former was axiomatic even for Plato and remained axiomatic throughout the history of philosophy. Thus Kant still says: "worauf alles Denken als Mittel abzweckt, [ist] die Anschauung," "all thinking is a means of reaching intuition."110 And here is Heidegger: "The dialegesthai has in itself a tendency towards a noein, a seeing.... It lacks the proper means of theōrein itself.... This is the basic meaning of Plato's dialectic, that it tends towards a vision, a disclosure, that it prepares the original intuition through the discourses.... The logos remains tied to vision; if speech separates itself from the evidence given in intuition, it degenerates into idle talk which prevents seeing. Legein is rooted in seeing, horan."111

  Heidegger's interpretation is borne out by a passage in Plato's Philebus112 where the inward dialogue of me with myself is once more mentioned but now on its most elementary level: A man sees an object in the distance and, since he happens to be alone, he asks himself: What is it that appears there? He answers his own question: It is a man. If "he had someone with him he would put what he said to himself into actual speech, addressed to his companion, audibly uttering the same thoughts.... Whereas if he is alone he continues thinking the same thing by himself." The truth here is the seen evidence, and speaking, as well as thinking, is authentic to the extent that it follows the seen evidence, appropriates it by translating it into words; the moment this speech becomes separated from the seen evidence, for instance, when other people's opinions or thoughts are repeated, it acquires the same inauthenticity that for Plato characterizes the image as compared to the original.

  Among the outstanding peculiarities of our senses is the fact that they cannot be translated into each other—no sound can be seen, no image can be heard, and so on—though they are bound together by common sense, which for this reason alone is the greatest of them all. I have quoted Aquinas on the theme: "the one faculty [that] extends to all objects of the five senses."113 Language, corresponding to or following common sense, gives an object its common name; this commonness is not only the decisive factor for intersubjective communication—the same object being perceived by different persons and common to them—but it also serves to identify a datum that appears altogether differently to each of the five senses: hard or soft when I touch it, sweet or bitter when I taste it, bright or dark when I see it, sounding in different tones when I hear it. None of these sensations can be adequately described in words. Our cognitive senses, seeing and hearing, have little more affinity with words than the lower senses of smell, taste, and touch. Something smells like a rose, tastes like pea soup, feels like velvet, that is as far as we can go. "A rose is a rose is a rose."

  All this, of course, is only another way of saying that truth, in the metaphysical tradition understood in terms of the sight metaphor, is ineffable by definition. We know from the Hebrew tradition what happens to truth if the guiding metaphor is not vision but hearing (in many respects more akin than sight to thinking because of its ability to follow sequences). The Hebrew God can be heard but not seen, and truth therefore becomes invisible: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or that is on the earth beneath." The invisibility of truth in the Hebrew religion is as axiomatic as its ineffability in Greek philosophy, from which all later philosophy derived its axiomatic assumptions. And while truth, if understood in terms of hearing, demands obedience, truth understood in terms of vision relies on the same powerful self-evidence that forces us to admit the identity of an object the moment it is before our eyes. Metaphysics, the "awesome science" that "beholds what is insofar as it is" (epistēmē hē theōrei to on he on),114 could discover a truth which "forced men by the force of necessity" (hyp' antēs tēs alētheias anagkazomenoi)115 because it relied on the same imperviousness to contradiction we know so well from sight experiences. For no discourse, whether dialectical in the Socratic-Platonio sense, or logical, using established rules to draw conclusions from accepted premises, or rhetorical-persuasive, can ever match the simple, unquestioned and unquestionable certainty of visible evidence. "What is it that appears there? It is a man." This is the perfect adequatio rei et intellectus,116 "the agreement of knowledge with its object," which even for Kant was still the definite definition of truth. Kant, however, was aware that for this truth "no general criterion can be demanded. [It] would ... be self-contradictory":117 Truth as self-evidence does not need any criterion; it is the criterion, the final arbiter, of everything that then may follow. Thus Heidegger, discussing the traditional truth concept in Sein und Zeit, illustrates it as follows: "Let us suppose that someone with his back turned to the wall makes the true assumption that 'the picture on the wall is hanging askew.' The assertion is confirmed when the man who makes it turns around and perceives the picture hanging askew on the wall."118

  The difficulties to which the "awesome science" of metaphysics has given rise since its inception could possibly all be summed up in the natural tension between theōria and logos, between seeing and reasoning with words—whether in the form of "dialectics" (dia-legesthai) or, on the contrary, of the "syllogism" (syl-logizesthai), i.e., whether it takes things, especially opinions, apart by means of words or brings them together in a discourse depending for its truth content on a primary premise perceived by intuition, by the nous, which is not subject to error because it is not meta logon, sequential to words.119 If philosophy is the mother of the sciences, it is itself the science of the beginnings and principles of science, of the archai; and these archai, which then become die topic of Aristotelian metaphysics, can no longer be derived; they are given to the mind in self-evident intuition.

  What recommended sight to be the guiding metaphor in philosophy—and, along with sight, intuition as the ideal of truth—was not just the "nobility" of this most cognitive of our senses, but the very early notion that the philosopher's quest for meaning was identical with the scientist's quest for knowledge. Here it is worth recalling the strange turn that Aristode, in the first chapter of the Metaphysics, gave to Plato's proposition that thaumazein, wonder, is the beginning of all philosophy. But the identification of truth with meaning was made, of course, even earlier. For knowledge comes through searching for what we are accustomed to call truth, and the highest, ultimate form of cognitive truth is indeed intuition. All knowledge starts from investigating the appearances as they are given to our senses, and if the scientist then wants to go on and find out the causes of the visible effects, his ultimate aim is to make appear whatever may be hidden behind mere surfaces. This is true even of the most complicated mechanical instruments, which are designed to catch what is hidden from the naked eye. In the last analysis, confirmation of any scientist's theory comes about through sense evidence—just as in the simplistic model I took out of Heidegger. The tension I alluded to between vision and speech does not enter here; on this level, as in the example quoted, speech quite adequately translates vision (it would be different if the content of the painting and not just its position on the wall had to be expressed in words). The very fact that mathematical symbols can be substituted for actual words and be even more expressive of the underlying phenomena that are forced by instruments to appear, as it were, against their own bent demonstrates the superior efficacy of sight metaphors to make manifest whatever does not need speech as a conveyor.

  Thinking, however, in contrast to cognitive activities that may use thinking as one of their instruments, needs speech not only to sound out and become manifest; it needs it to be activated at all. And since speech is enacted in sequences of sentences, the end of thinking can never be a
n intuition; nor can it be confirmed by some piece of self-evidence beheld in speechless contemplation. If thinking, guided by the old sight metaphor and misunderstanding itself and its function, expects "truth" from its activity, this truth is not only ineffable by definition. "Like children trying to catch smoke by closing their hands, philosophers so often see the object they would grasp fly before them"—Bergson, the last philosopher to believe firmly in "intuition," described very accurately what really happened to thinkers of that school.120 And the reason for the "failure" is simply that nothing expressed in words can ever attain to the immobility of an object of mere contemplation. Compared to an object of contemplation, meaning, which can be said and spoken about, is slippery; if the philosopher wants to see and grasp it, it "slips away."121

  Since Bergson, the use of the sight metaphor in philosophy has kept dwindling, not unsurprisingly, as emphasis and interest have shifted entirely from contemplation to speech, from nous to logos. With this shift, the criterion for truth has shifted from the agreement of knowledge with its object—the adequatio rei et intellectus, understood as analogous to the agreement of vision with the seen object—to the mere form of thinking, whose basic rule is the axiom of non-contradiction, of consistency with itself, that is, to what Kant still understood as the merely "negative touchstone of truth." "Beyond the sphere of analytic knowledge it has, as a sufficient criterion of truth, no authority and no field of application."122 In the few modern philosophers who still cling, however tenuously and doubtfully, to the traditional assumptions of metaphysics, in Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, the old sight metaphor has not altogether disappeared but has shrunk, as it were: in Benjamin truth "slips by" (huscht vorüber); in Heidegger the moment of illumination is understood as "lightning" (Blitz), and finally replaced by an altogether different metaphor, das Gelaut der Stille, "the ringing sound of silence." In terms of the tradition, the latter metaphor is the closest approximation to the illumination arrived at in speechless contemplation. For though the metaphor for the end and culmination of the thinking process is now drawn from the sense of hearing, it does not in the least correspond to listening to an articulated sequence of sounds, as when we hear a melody, but again to an immobile mental state of sheer receptivity. And since thinking, the silent dialogue of me with myself, is sheer activity of the mind combined with complete immobility of the body—"never am I more active than when I do nothing" (Cato)—the difficulties created by metaphors drawn from the sense of hearing would be as great as the difficulties created by the metaphor of vision. (Bergson, still so firmly attached to the metaphor of intuition for the ideal of truth, speaks of the "essentially active, I might almost say violent, character of metaphysical intuition" without being aware of the contradiction between the quiet of contemplation and any activity, let alone a violent one.123 ) And Aristotle speaks of "philosophical energeia, activity" as the "perfect and unhindered activity which [for this very reason] harbors within itself the sweetest of all delights ("Alia mēn hē ge teleia energeia kai akōlytos en heautē echei to chairein, hōste an eiē hē theōrētikē energeia pasōn hēdistē").124

  In other words, the chief difficulty here seems to be that for thinking itself—whose language is entirely metaphorical and whose conceptual framework depends entirely on the gift of the metaphor, which bridges the gulf between the visible and the invisible, the world of appearances and the thinking ego—there exists no metaphor that could plausibly illuminate this special activity of the mind, in which something invisible within us deals with the invisibles of the world. All metaphors drawn from the senses will lead us into difficulties for the simple reason that all our senses are essentially cognitive, hence, if understood as activities, have an end outside themselves; they are not energeia, an end in itself, but instruments enabling us to know and deal with the world.

  Thinking is out of order because the quest for meaning produces no end result that will survive the activity, that will make sense after the activity has come to its end. In other words, the delight of which Aristotle speaks, though manifest to the thinking ego, is ineffable by definition. The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life the human body is a corpse; without thinking the human mind is dead. This in fact is the metaphor Aristotle tried out in the famous seventh chapter of Book Lambda of the Metaphysics: "The activity of thinking [energeia that has its end in itself] is life."125 Its inherent law, which only a god can tolerate forever, man merely now and then, during which time he is godlike, is "unceasing motion, which is motion in a circle"126 —the only movement, that is, that never reaches an end or results in an end product. This very strange notion that the authentic process of thinking, namely, the noesis noeseos, turns in circles—the most glorious justification in philosophy of the circular argument—has oddly enough never worried either the philosophers or Aristotle's interpreters—partly, perhaps, because of the frequent mistranslations of nous and theorist as "knowledge," which always reaches an end and produces an end result.127 If thinking were a cognitive enterprise it would have to follow a rectilinear motion, starting from the quest for its object and ending with cognition of it. Aristotle's circular motion, taken together with the life metaphor, suggests a quest for meaning that for man as a thinking being accompanies life and ends only in death. The circular motion is a metaphor drawn from the life process which, though it goes from birth to death, also turns in circles as long as man is alive. This simple experience of the thinking ego has proved striking enough for the notion of the circular movement to be repeated by other thinkers, even though it stands in flagrant contradiction to their traditional assumptions that truth is the result of thinking, that there is such a thing as Hegel's "speculative cognition."128 We find Hegel saying, without any reference to Aristotle: "Philosophy forms a circle.... [It] is a sequence which does not hang in the air; it is not something which begins from nothing at all; on the contrary, it circles back into itself" (italics added).129 And we find the same notion at the end of Heidegger's "What is Metaphysics?" where he defines the "basic question of metaphysics" as "Why is there anything and not rather nothing?"—in a way thinking's first question but at the same time the thought to which it "always has to swing back."130

  Yet these metaphors, although they correspond to the speculative, non-cognitive way of thinking and remain loyal to the fundamental experiences of the thinking ego, since they relate to no cognitive capacity, remain singularly empty, and Aristode himself used them nowhere else—except when he asserts that being alive is energein, that is, being active for its own sake.131 Moreover, the metaphor obviously refuses to answer the inevitable question, Why do we think?, since there is no answer to the question, Why do we live?

  In Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (written after he had convinced himself of the untenability of his earlier attempt in the Tractatus to understand language, and hence thought, as a "picture of reality"—"A proposition is a picture of reality. A proposition is a model of reality as we conceive it"132 ), there is an interesting thought game that may help illustrate this difficulty. He asks: "What does man think for?...Does man think because he has found that thinking works?—Because he thinks it advantageous to think?" That would be like asking "Does he bring his children up because he has found it works?" Still, it must be admitted that "we do sometimes think because it has been found to work," implying by his italics that this is only "sometimes" the case. Hence: "How can we find out why man thinks?" Whereupon he answers: "It often happens that we only become aware of the important facts, if we suppress the question 'why?"; and then in the course of our investigations these facts lead us to an answer."133 It is in a deliberate effort to suppress the question, Why do we think? that I shall deal with the question, What makes us think?

  III. What Makes Us Think?

  14. The pre-philosophic assumptions of Greek philosophy

  Our question, What makes us think?, does not ask for either causes or purposes. Ta
king for granted man's need to think, it proceeds from the assumption that the thinking activity belongs among those energeiai which, like flute-playing, have their ends within themselves and leave no tangible outside end product in the world we inhabit. We cannot date the moment when this need began to be felt, but the very fact of language and all we know of pre-historical times and of mythologies whose authors we cannot name give us a certain right to assume that the need is coeval with the appearance of man on earth. What we can date, however, is the beginning of metaphysics and of philosophy, and what we can name are the answers given to our question at different periods of our history. Part of the Greek answer lies in the conviction of al! Greek thinkers that philosophy enables mortal men to dwell in the neighborhood of immortal things and thus acquire or nourish in themselves "immortality in the fullest measure that human nature admits."1 For the short time they can bear to engage in it, philosophizing transforms mortals into godlike creatures, "mortal gods," as Cicero says. (It is in this vein that ancient etymology repeatedly derived the key word "theorem" and even "theatron" from "theos."2 ) The trouble with the Greek answer is that it is inconsistent with the very word "philosophy," love of or desire for wisdom, which cannot very well be ascribed to the gods; in the words of Plato, "No god philosophizes or desires to be wise; for he is."3