The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  Let me now at the end of these long reflections draw attention, not to my "method," not to my "criteria" or, worse, my "values"—all of which in such an enterprise are mercifully hidden from its author though they may be or, rather, seem to be quite manifest to reader and listener—but to what in my opinion is the basic assumption of this investigation. I have spoken about the metaphysical "fallacies," which, as we found, do contain important hints of what this curious out-of-order activity called thinking may be all about. In other words,I have clearly joined the ranks of those who for some time now have been attempting to dismantle metaphysics, and philosophy with all its categories, as we have known them from their beginning in Greece until today. Such dismantling is possible only on the assumption that the thread of tradition is broken and that we shall not be able to renew it. Historically speaking, what actually has broken down is the Roman trinity that for thousands of years united religion, authority, and tradition. The loss of this trinity does not destroy the past, and the dismantling process itself is not destructive; it only draws conclusions from a loss which is a fact and as such no longer a part of the "history of ideas" but of our political history, the history of our world.

  What has been lost is the continuity of the past as it seemed to be handed down from generation to generation, developing in the process its own consistency. The dismantling process has its own technique, and I did not go into that here except peripherally. What you then are left with is still the past, but a fragmented past, which has lost its certainty of evaluation. About this, for brevity's sake, I shall quote a few lines which say it better and more densely than I could:

  Full fathom five thy father lies,

  Of his bones are coral made,

  Those are pearls that were his eyes.

  Nothing of him that doth fade

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  The Tempest, Act I, Scene 2

  It is with such fragments from the past, after their sea-change, that I have dealt here. That they could be used at all we owe to the timeless track that thinking beats into the world of space and time. If some of my listeners or readers should be tempted to try their luck at the technique of dismantling, let them be careful not to destroy the "rich and strange," the "coral" and the "pearls," which can probably be saved only as fragments.

  'O plunge your hands in water,

  Plunge them in up to the wrist;

  Stare, stare in the basin

  And wonder what you've missed.

  The glacier knocks in the cupboard,

  The desert sighs in the bed,

  And the crack in the tea-cup opens

  A lane to the land of the dead...'

  W. H. Auden15

  Or to put the same in prose: "Some books are undeservedly forgotten, none are undeservedly remembered."16

  21. Postscriptum

  In the second volume of this work I shall deal with willing and judging, the two other mental activities. Looked at from the perspective of these time speculations, they concern matters that are absent either because they are not yet or because they are no more; but in contradistinction to the thinking activity, which deals with the invisibles in all experience and always tends to generalize, they always deal with particulars and in this respect are much closer to the world of appearances. If we wish to placate our common sense, so decisively offended by the need of reason to pursue its purposeless quest for meaning, it is tempting to justify this need solely on the grounds that thinking is an indispensable preparation for deciding what shall be and for evaluating what is no more. Since the past, being past, becomes subject to our judgment, judgment, in turn, would be a mere preparation for willing. This is undeniably the perspective, and, within limits, the legitimate perspective of man insofar as he is an acting being.

  But this last attempt to defend the thinking activity against the reproach of being impractical and useless does not work. The decision the will arrives at can never be derived from the mechanics of desire or the deliberations of the intellect that may precede it. The will is either an organ of free spontaneity that interrupts all causal chains of motivation that would bind it or it is nothing but an illusion. In respect to desire, on one hand, and to reason, on the other, the will acts like "a kind of coup d' état," as Bergson once said, and this implies, of course, that "free acts are exceptional": "although we are free whenever we are willing to get back into ourselves, it seldom happens that we are willing' (italics added).17 In other words, it is impossible to deal with the willing activity without touching on the problem of freedom.

  I propose to take the internal evidence—in Bergson's terms, the "immediate datum of consciousness"—seriously and since I agree with many writers on this subject that this datum and all problems connected with it were unknown to Greek antiquity, I must accept that this faculty was "discovered," that we can date this discovery historically, and that we shall thereby find that it coincides with the discovery of human "inwardness" as a special region of our life. In brief, I shall analyze the faculty of the will in terms of its history.

  I shall follow the experiences men have had with this paradoxical and self-contradictory faculty (every volition, since it speaks to itself in imperatives, produces its own counter-volition), starting from the Apostle Paul's early discovery of the will's impotence—"I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate"18 —and going on to examine the testimony left us by the Middle Ages, beginning with Augustine's insight that what are "at war" are not the spirit and the flesh but the mind, as will, with itself, man's "inmost self' with itself. I shall then proceed to the modern age, which, with the rise of the notion of progress, exchanged the old philosophical primacy of the present over the other tenses against the primacy of the future, a force that in Hegel's words "the Now cannot resist," so that thinking is understood "as essentially the negation of something being directly present" ("in der Tat ist das Denken wesentlich die Negation eines unmittelbar Vorhandenen").19 Or in the words of Schelling: "In the final and highest instance there is no other Being than Will"20 —an attitude that found its final climactic and self-defeating end in Nietzsche's "Will to Power."

  At the same time I shall follow a parallel development in the history of the Will according to which volition is the inner capacity by which men decide about "whom" they are going to be, in what shape they wish to show themselves in the world of appearances. In other words, it is the will, whose subject matter is projects, not objects, which in a sense creates the person that can be blamed or praised and anyhow held responsible not merely for its actions but for its whole "Being," its character. The Marxian and existentialist notions, which play such a great role in twentieth-century thought and pretend that man is his own producer and maker, rest on these experiences, even though it is clear that nobody has "made" himself or "produced" his existence; this, I think, is the last of the metaphysical fallacies, corresponding to the modern age's emphasis on willing as a substitute for thinking.

  I shall conclude the second volume with an analysis of the faculty of judgment, and here the chief difficulty will be the curious scarcity of sources providing authoritative testimony. Not till Kant's Critique of Judgment did this faculty become a major topic of a major thinker.

  I shall show that my own main assumption in singling out judgment as a distinct capacity of our minds has been that judgments are not arrived at by either deduction or induction; in short, they have nothing in common with logical operations—as when we say: All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, hence, Socrates is mortal. We shall be in search of the "silent sense," which—when it was dealt with at all—has always, even in Kant, been thought of as "taste" and therefore as belonging to the realm of aesthetics. In practical and moral matters it was called "conscience," and conscience did not judge; it told you, as the divine voice of either God or reason, what to do, what not to do, and what to repent of. Whatever the voice of conscience may be, it cannot be said to be "silent," and its vali
dity depends entirely upon an authority that is above and beyond all merely human laws and rules.

  In Kant judgment emerges as "a peculiar talent which can be practised only and cannot be taught." Judgment deals with particulars, and when the thinking ego moving among generalities emerges from its withdrawal and returns to the world of particular appearances, it turns out that the mind needs a new "gift" to deal with them. "An obtuse or narrow-minded person," Kant believed, "... may indeed be trained through study, even to the extent of becoming learned. But as such people are commonly still lacking in judgment, it is not unusual to meet learned men who in the application of their scientific knowledge betray that original want, which can never be made good."21 In Kant, it is reason with its "regulative ideas" that comes to the help of judgment, but if the faculty is separate from other faculties of the mind, then we shall have to ascribe to it its own modus operandi, its own way of proceeding.

  And this is of some relevance to a whole set of problems by which modern thought is haunted, especially to the problem of theory and practice and to all attempts to arrive at a halfway plausible theory of ethics. Since Hegel and Marx, these questions have been treated in the perspective of History and on the assumption that there is such a thing as Progress of the human race. Finally we shall be left with the only alternative there is in these matters—we either can say with Hegel: Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht, leaving the ultimate judgment to Success, or we can maintain with Kant the autonomy of the minds of men and their possible independence of things as they are or as they have come into being.

  Here we shall have to concern ourselves, not for the first time, with the concept of history, but we may be able to reflect on the oldest meaning of this word, which, like so many other terms in our political and philosophical language, is Greek in origin and derived from historein, to inquire in order to tell how it was —legein ta eonta in Herodotus. But the origin of this verb is again Homer (Iliad XVIII) where the noun histor ("historian," as it were) occurs, and that Homeric historian is the judge. If judgment is our faculty for dealing with the past, the historian is the inquiring man who by relating it sits in judgment over it. If that is so, we may reclaim our human dignity, win it back, as it were, from the pseudo-divinity named History of the modem age, without denying history's importance but denying its right to being the ultimate judge. Old Cato, with whom I started these reflections—"never am I less alone than when I am by myself, never am I more active than when I do nothing"—has left us a curious phrase which aptly sums up the political principle implied in the enterprise of reclamation. He said: "Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni" ("The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the defeated one pleases Cato").

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. Critique of Pure Reason, B871. For this and later citations, see Norman Kemp Smith's translation, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, New York, 1963, which the author frequently relied on.

  2. Eichmann in Jerusalem, New York, 1963.

  3. Notes on metaphysics, Kant's handschriftlicher Nachlass, vol. V, in Kant's gesammelte Schriften, Akademie Ausgabe, Berlin, Leipzig, 1928, vol. XVIII, 5636.

  4. Hugh of St. Victor.

  5. André Bridoux, Descartes: Oeuvres et Lettres, Pléiade ed., Paris, 1937, Introduction, p. viii. Cf. Galileo: "les math- ématiques sont la langue dans laquelle est écrit l'univers," p. xiii.

  6. Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx, Notre Dame, 1967, p. 419.

  7. De Republica, I,17.

  8. The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (1910), New York, 1964, "Sense-Certainty," p. 159.

  9. See the note to "Vom Wesen der Wahrheit," a lecture first given in 1930. Now in Wegmarken, Frankfurt, 1967, p. 97.

  10. See "Glauben und Wissen" (1802), Werke, Frankfurt, 1970, vol. 2, p. 432.

  11. llth ed.

  12. Werke, Darmstadt, 1963, vol. I, pp. 982, 621, 630, 968, 952, 959, 974.

  13. Introduction to his The Basic Works of Aristotle, New York, 1941, p. xviii. In citations from Aristotle, McKeon's translation has occasionally been used.

  14. Critique of Pure Reason, B878. The striking phrase occurs in the last section of the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant claims to have established metaphysics as a science the idea of which "is as old as speculative human reason; and what rational human being does not speculate, either in scholastic or in popular fashion?" (B871). This "science"..."has now fallen into general disrepute" because "more was expected from metaphysics than could reasonably be demanded" (B877). Cf. also sections 59 and 60 of Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.

  15. The Gay Science, bk. III, no. 125, "The madman."

  16. "How the True World' finally became a fable," 6.

  17. "Nietzsches Wort 'Gott ist tot,'" in Holzwege, Frankfurt, 1963, p. 193.

  18. B125 and B9.

  19. René Char, Feuillets d'Hypnos, Paris, 1946, no. 62.

  20. Symposium, 212a.

  21. Kant's handschriftlicher Nachlass, vol. VI, Akademie Ausgabe, vol. XVIII, 6900.

  22. Werke, vol. I, p. 989.

  23. "Prolegomena," Werke, vol. III, p. 245.

  24. Critique of Pure Reason, Bxxx.

  25. Kant's handschriftlicher Nachlass, vol. V, Akademie Ausgabe, vol. XVIII, 4849.

  26. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, London, 1962, p. 1. Cf. pp. 151 and 324.

  27. "Einleitung zu 'Was ist Metaphysik?' " in Wegmarken, p. 206.

  28. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Baillie trans., Introduction, p. 131.

  29. Ibid., p. 144.

  Chapter I

  1. The three ways of life are enumerated in Nicomachean Ethics, I, 5 and the Eudemian Ethics, 1215a35 £F. For the opposition of the beautiful to the necessary and the useful, see Politics, 1333a30 ff. It is interesting to compare the three Aristotelian ways of life with Plato's enumeration in the Philebus— the way of pleasure, the way of thinking (phronēsis), and a way of both mixed (22); to the way of pleasure Plato objects that pleasure in itself is unlimited in time as well as intensity: "it does not contain within itself and derive from itself either beginning or middle or end" (31a). And although he "agrees with all sages (sophoi) ...that nous, the faculty of thought and of truth, is for us king of heaven and earth" (28c), he also thinks that for mere mortals a life that "knows neither joy nor grief," though the most divine (33a-b), would be unbearable and that therefore "a mixture of the unlimited with what sets limits is the source of all beauty" (26b).

  2. Thomas Langan, Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Reason, New Haven, London, 1966, p. 93.

  3. Frag. 1.

  4. Republic, VII, 514a-521b. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, "Republic," trans. Paul Shorey, New York, 1961, has sometimes been drawn on, as has Francis MacDonald Cornford's The Republic of Plato, New York, London, 1941.

  5. Kant, Opus Postumum, ed. Erich Adickes, Berlin, 1920, p. 44. Probable date of this remark is 1788.

  6. Critique of Pure Reason, B565.

  7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, 1968, p. 17.

  8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, Evanston, 1964, Introduction, p. 20.

  9. Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Berlin, 1959, vol. II, B26.

  10. The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 40–41.

  11. Das Tier als soziales Wesen, Zürich, 1953, p. 252.

  12. Animal Forms and Patterns, trans. Hella Czech, New York, 1967, p. 19.

  13. Ibid., p. 34.

  14. Das Tier als soziales Wesen, p. 232.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Ibid., p. 127.

  17. Animal Forms and Patterns, pp. 112,113.

  18. Das Tier als soziales Wesen, p. 64.

  19. Biologie und Geist, Zürich, 1956, p. 24.

  20. Of Human Understanding, bk. III, chap. 1, no. 5.

  21. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, Introduction, p. 17.

  22. The Visible and the Invisi
ble, p. 259.

  23. Signs, p. 21.

  24. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 259.

  25. De Anima, 403a5–10.

  26. Ibid., 413b24 ff.

  27. De generatione animalium, II, 3, 736b5–29, quoted from Lobkowicz, op. cit., p. 24.

  28. De Interpretatione, 16a3–13.

  29. Mary McCarthy, "Hanging by a Thread," The Writing on the Wall, New York, 1970.

  30. Enarrationes in Psalmos, Patrologiae Latina, J.-P. Migne, Paris, 1854–66, vol. 37, CXXXIV, 16.

  31. Frag. 149.

  32. Schelling, Of Human Freedom (1809), 414. Trans. James Gutmann, Chicago, 1936, p. 96.

  33. Frag. 34.

  34. Critique of Pure Reason, B354–B355.

  35. Ibid., A107. Cf. also B413: "In inner intuition there is nothing permanent," and B420: Nothing "permanent" is "given ... in ... intuition" "insofar as I think myself."

  36. The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 18–19.

  37. Critique of Pure Reason, A381.

  38. Critique of Pure Reason, B565-B566. Kant writes here "transcendental" but means "transcendent." This is not the only passage in which he himself falls prey to the confusion that constitutes one of the pitfalls for the reader of his works. His clearest and simplest explanation of the use of the two words can be found in the Prolegomena, where he answers a critic, in the note on [>