The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  I have drawn attention to the passage in Hippias Major in its stark simplicity because it provides a metaphor that can help simplify—at the risk of over-simplification—matters that are difficult and therefore always in danger of over-complication. Later times have given the fellow who awaits Socrates in his home the name of "conscience." Before its tribunal, to adopt Kantian language, we have to appear and give account of ourselves. And I chose the passage in Richard III, because Shakespeare, though he uses the word "conscience," does not use it here in the accustomed way. It took language a long time to separate the word "consciousness" from "conscience," and in some languages, for instance, in French, such a separation never was made. Conscience, as we understand it in moral or legal matters, is supposedly always present within us, just like consciousness. And this conscience is also supposed to tell us what to do and what to repent; before it became the lumen naturale or Kant's practical reason, it was the voice of God.

  Unlike this ever-present conscience, the fellow Socrates is talking about has been left at home; he fears him, as the murderers in Richard III fear conscience—as something that is absent. Here conscience appears as an after-thought, roused either by a crime, as in Richard's own case, or by unexamined opinions, as in the case of Socrates. Or it may be just the anticipated fear of such after-thoughts, as with Richard's hired murderers. This conscience, unlike the voice of God within us or the lumen naturale, gives no positive prescriptions (even the Socratic daimon, his divine voice, only tells him what not to do); in Shakespeare's words "it fills a man full of obstacles." What causes a man to fear it is the anticipation of the presence of a witness who awaits him only if and when he goes home. Shakespeare's murderer says: "Every man that means to live well endeavors ... to live without it," and success in that comes easy because all he has to do is never start the soundless solitary dialogue we call "thinking," never go home and examine things. This is not a matter of wickedness or goodness, as it is not a matter of intelligence or stupidity. A person who does not know that silent intercourse (in which we examine what we say and what we do) will not mind contradicting himself, and this means he will never be either able or willing to account for what he says or does; nor will he mind committing any crime, since he can count on its being forgotten the next moment. Bad people—Aristotle to the contrary notwithstanding—are not "full of regrets."

  Thinking in its non-cognitive, non-specialized sense as a natural need of human life, the actualization of the difference given in consciousness, is not a prerogative of the few but an ever-present faculty in everybody; by the same token, inability to think is not a failing of the many who lack brain power but an ever-present possibility for everybody—scientists, scholars and other specialists in mental enterprises not excluded. Everybody may come to shun that intercourse with oneself whose feasibility and importance Socrates first discovered. Thinking accompanies life and is itself the de-materialized quintessence of being alive; and since life is a process, its quintessence can only lie in the actual thinking process and not in any solid results or specific thoughts. A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence—it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers.

  For the thinking ego and its experience, conscience that "fills a man full of obstacles" is a side effect. No matter what thought-trains the thinking ego thinks through, the self that we all are must take care not to do anything that would make it impossible for the two-in-one to be friends and live in harmony. This is what Spinoza meant by the term "acquiescence in one's self" (acquiescentia in seipso): "It can spring out of reason [reasoning], and this contentment is the greatest joy possible."141 Its criterion for action will not be the usual rules, recognized by multitudes and agreed upon by society, but whether I shall be able to live with myself in peace when the time has come to think about my deeds and words. Conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home.

  For the thinker himself this moral side effect is a marginal affair. And thinking as such does society little good, much less than the thirst for knowledge, which uses thinking as an instrument for other purposes. It does not create values; it will not find out, once and for all, what "the good" is; it does not confirm but, rather, dissolves accepted rules of conduct. And it has no political relevance unless special emergencies arise. That while I am alive I must be able to live with myself is a consideration that does not come up politically except in "boundary situations."

  This term was coined by Jaspers for the general, unchanging human condition—"that I cannot live without struggling and suffering; that I cannot avoid guilt; that I must die"—to indicate an experience of "something immanent which already points to transcendence" and which, if we respond to it, will result in our "becoming the Existenz we potentially are."142 In Jaspers, the term gets its suggestive plausibility less from specific experiences than from the simple fact that life itself, limited by birth and death, is a boundary affair in that my worldly existence always forces me to take account of a past when I was not yet and a future when I shall be no more. Here the point is that whenever I transcend the limits of my own life span and begin to reflect on this past, judging it, and this future, forming projects of the will, thinking ceases to be a politically marginal activity. And such reflections will inevitably arise in political emergencies.

  When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join in is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action. In such emergencies, it turns out that the purging component of thinking (Socrates' midwifery, which brings out the implications of unexamined opinions and thereby destroys them—values, doctrines, theories, and even convictions) is political by implication. For this destruction has a liberating effect on another faculty, the faculty of judgment, which one may call with some reason the most political of man's mental abilities. It is the faculty that judges particulars without subsuming them under general rules which can be taught and learned until they grow into habits that can be replaced by other habits and rules.

  The faculty of judging particulars (as brought to light by Kant), the ability to say "this is wrong," "this is beautiful," and so on, is not the same as the faculty of thinking. Thinking deals with invisibles, with representations of things that are absent; judging always concerns particulars and things close at hand. But the two are interrelated, as are consciousness and conscience. If thinking—the two-in-one of the soundless dialogue—actualizes the difference within our identity as given in consciousness and thereby results in conscience as its by-product, then judging, the by-product of the liberating effect of thinking, realizes thinking, makes it manifest in the world of appearances, where I am never alone and always too busy to be able to think. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge; it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And this, at the rare moments when the stakes are on the table, may indeed prevent catastrophes, at least for the self.

  IV. Where Are We When We Think?

  19. "Tantôt je pense et tantôt je suis" (Valéry): the nowhere

  As I approach the end of these considerations, I hope that no reader expects a conclusive summary. For me to make such an attempt would stand in flagrant contradiction to what has been described here. If thinking is an activity that is its own end and if the only adequate metaphor for it, drawn from our ordinary sense experience, is the sensation of being alive, then it follows that all questions concerning the aim or purpose of thinking are as unanswerable as questions about the aim or purpose of life. I am putting the question-Where are we when we think?—at the end of our examination not because the answer could supply any conclusion but only because the question itself and the considerations it raises can make sense only in the context of this whole approach. Since what is to follow rests so heavily on my previous reflections, I shall briefly summarize them in what must appear (but are not me
ant) to be dogmatic propositions:

  First, thinking is always out of order, interrupts all ordinary activities and is interrupted by them. The best illustration of this may still be—as the old story goes—Socrates' habit of suddenly "turning his mind to himself," breaking off all company, and taking up his position wherever he happened to be, "deaf to all entreaties" to continue with whatever he had been doing before.1 Once, we are told by Xenophon, he remained in complete immobility for twenty-four hours in a military camp, deep in thought, as we would say.

  Second, the manifestations of the thinking ego's authentic experiences are manifold: among them are the metaphysical fallacies, such as the two-world theory, and, more interestingly, the non-theoretical descriptions of thinking as a kind of dying or, conversely, the notion that while thinking we are members of another, noumenal, world—present to us by intimation even in the darkness of the actual here-and-now—or Aristotle's definition of the bios theórètikos as a bios xenikos, the life of a stranger. The same experiences are reflected in the Cartesian doubt of the reality of the world, in Valéry's "At times I think, and at times I am" (as though to be real and to think were opposites), in Merleau-Ponty's "We are truly alone only on the condition that we do not know we are; it is this very ignorance which is our [the philosopher's] solitude."2 And it is true that the thinking ego, whatever it may achieve, will never be able to reach reality qua reality or convince itself that anything actually exists and that life, human life, is more than a dream. (This suspicion that life is but a dream is, of course, among the most characteristic traits of Asian philosophy; examples from Indian philosophy are numerous. I shall give a Chinese example which is very telling because of its briefness. It reports a story told about the Taoist (i.e., anti-Confucian) philosopher Chuang Tzu. He "once dreamt he was a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming it was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction!")3

  The intensity of the thinking experience, on the other hand, manifests itself in the ease with which the opposition of thought and reality can be reversed, so that only thought seems to be real whereas all that merely is seems to be so transitory that it is as though it were not: "What is being thought, is; and what is, is only insofar as it is thought" ( Was gedacht ist, ist; und was ist, ist nur, insofern es Gedanke ist).4 The decisive point here, however, is that all such doubts disappear as soon as the thinker's solitude is broken in upon and the call of the world and our fellow-men changes the inner duality of the two-in-one into a One again. Hence the notion that everything that is might be a mere dream is either the nightmare that rises out of the thinking experience or the consoling thought to be summoned up, not when I have withdrawn from the world, but when the world has withdrawn from me and become unreal.

  Third, these oddities of the thinking activity arise from the fact of withdrawal, inherent in all mental activities; thinking always deals with absences and removes itself from what is present and close at hand. This, of course, does not prove the existence of a world other than the one we are part of in ordinary life, but it means that reality and existence, which we can only conceive in terms of time and space, can be temporarily suspended, lose their weight and, together with this weight, their meaning for the thinking ego. What now, during the thinking activity, become meaningful are distillations, products of de-sensing, and such distillations are not mere abstract concepts; they were once called "essences."

  Essences cannot be localized. Human thought that gets hold of them leaves the world of the particular and goes out in search of something generally meaningful, though not necessarily universally valid. Thinking always "generalizes," squeezes out of many particulars—which, thanks to the de-sensing process, it can pack together for swift manipulation—whatever meaning may inhere. Generalization is inherent in every thought, even though that thought is insisting on the universal primacy of the particular. In other words, the "essential" is what is applicable everywhere, and this "everywhere" that bestows on thought its specific weight is spatially speaking a "nowhere." The thinking ego, moving among universals, among invisible essences, is, strictly speaking, nowhere; it is homeless in an emphatic sense—which may explain the early rise of a cosmopolitan spirit among the philosophers.

  The only great thinker I know of who was explicitly aware of this condition of homelessness as being natural to the thinking activity was Aristotle—perhaps because he knew so well and spelled out so clearly the difference between acting and thinking (the decisive distinction between the political and the philosophical way of life) and, drawing the obvious inference, refused to "share the fate" of Socrates and to let the Athenians "sin twice against philosophy." When a charge of impiety was brought against him, he left Athens and "withdrew to Chalcis, a stronghold of Macedonian influence."5 He had counted homelessness among the great advantages of the philosophers way of life in the Protreptikos, one of his early works, which was still well known in antiquity but has come down to us only in fragments. There he praises the bios theōrētikos because it needed "neither implements nor special places for [its] trade; wherever on earth somebody devotes himself to thinking, he will attain the truth everywhere as though it were present." Philosophers love this "nowhere" as though it were a country (philochōrein) and they desire to let all other activities go for the sake of scholazein (doing nothing, as we would say) because of the sweetness inherent in thinking or philosophizing itself.6 The reason for this blessed independence is that philosophy (the cognition kata logon) is not concerned with particulars, with things given to the senses, but with universals (kath' holou), things that cannot be localized.7 It would be a great mistake to look for such universals in practical-political matters, which always concern particulars; in this field, "general" statements, equally applicable everywhere, immediately degenerate into empty generalities. Action deals with particulars, and only particular statements can be valid in the field of ethics or politics.8

  In other words, it may well be that we were posing a wrong, inappropriate question when we asked for the location of the thinking ego. Looked at from the perspective of the everyday world of appearances, the everywhere of the thinking ego-summoning into its presence whatever it pleases from any distance in time or space, which thought traverses with a velocity greater than light's—is a nowhere. And since this nowhere is by no means identical with the twofold nowhere from which we suddenly appear at birth and into which almost as suddenly we disappear in death, it might be conceived only as the Void. And the absolute void can be a limiting boundary concept; though not inconceivable, it is unthinkable. Obviously, if there is absolutely nothing, there can be nothing to think about. That we are in possession of these limiting boundary concepts enclosing our thought within (insurmountable walls—and the notion of an absolute beginning or an absolute end is among them—does not tell us more than that we are indeed finite beings. To assume that these limitations could serve to map out a place where the thinking ego could be localized would be just another variation of the two-world theory. Man's finitude, irrevocably given by virtue of his own short time span set in an infinity of time stretching into both past and future, constitutes the infrastructure, as it were, of all mental activities: it manifests itself as the only reality of which thinking qua thinking is aware, when the thinking ego has withdrawn from the world of appearances and lost the sense of realness inherent in the sensus communis by which we orient ourselves in this world.

  In other words, Valéry's remark—when we think, we are not—would be right if our sense of realness were entirely determined by our spatial existence. The everywhere of thought is indeed a region of nowhere. But we are not only in space, we are also in time, remembering, collecting and recollecting what no longer is present out of "the belly of memory" (Augustine), anti
cipating and planning in the mode of willing what is not yet. Perhaps our question—Where are we when we think?—was wrong because by asking tor the topos of this activity, we were exclusively spatially oriented—as though we had forgotten Kant's famous insight that "time is nothing but the form of inner sense, that is, of the intuition of ourselves and of our inner state." For Kant, that meant that time had nothing to do with appearances as such—"neither with shape nor position" as given to our senses—but only with appearances as affecting our "inner state," in which time determines "the relation of representation."9 And these representations—by which we make present what is phenomenally absent—are, of course, thought-things, that is, experiences or notions that have gone through the de-materializing operation by which the mind prepares its own objects and by "generalizing" deprives them of their spatial properties as well.

  Time determines the way these representations are related to each other by forcing them into the order of a sequence, and these sequences are what we usually call thought-trains. All thinking is discursive and, insofar as it follows a train of thought, it could by analogy be presented as "a line progressing to infinity," corresponding to the way we usually represent to ourselves the sequential nature of time. But in order to create such a line of thought we must transform the juxtaposition in which experiences are given to us into a succession of soundless words—the only medium in which we can think—which means we not only de-sense but de-spatialize the original experience.

  20. The gap between past and future: the nunc stans

  In the hope of finding out where the thinking ego is located in time and whether its relendess activity can be temporally determined, I shall turn to one of Kafka's parables, which, in my opinion, deals precisely with this matter. The parable is part of a collection of aphorisms entitled "HE."10