The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  The first to refuse consciously and deliberately to come to grips with the implausibility of free will was Descartes: "It would be absurd to doubt that of which we inwardly experience and perceive as existing within ourselves, just because we do not comprehend a matter which from its nature we know to be incomprehensible."67 For "these matters are such that anyone ought to experience them in himself rather than be convinced by ratiocination; but you ... appear not to pay heed to what the mind transacts within itself. Refuse then to be free, if freedom does not please you" (italics added).68 To which one is tempted to reply that the Cartesian Cogito is certainly nothing but a "transaction of the mind within itself," but it never occurred either to Descartes or to those who objected to his philosophy to speak of thinking or cogitare as something assumed without proof, a mere datum of consciousness. What, then, is it that gives the cogito me cogitare its ascendancy over the volo me velle—even in Descartes, who was a "voluntarist"? Could it be that professional thinkers, basing their speculations on the experience of the thinking ego, were less "pleased" with freedom than with necessity? This suspicion appears inevitable when we consider the strange assembly of theories on record, theories trying either to deny outright the experience of freedom "within ourselves" or to weaken freedom by reconciling it with necessity by means of dialectical speculations that are entirely "speculative" in that they cannot appeal to any experience whatsoever. He suspicion is strengthened when one considers how closely all free-will theories are tied to the problem of evil. Thus Augustine begins his treatise De libero arbitrio voluntatis (The Free Choice of the Will) with the question: "Tell me, please, whether God is not the cause of evil?" It was a question first raised in all its complexity by Paul (in the Letter to the Romans) and then generalized into What is the cause of evil? with many variations concerning the existence both of physical harm caused by destructive nature and of deliberate malice caused by men.

  The whole problem has haunted philosophers, and their attempts at solving it have never been very successful; as a rule their arguments evade the issue in its stark simplicity. Evil is either denied true reality (it exists only as a deficient mode of the good) or is explained away as a kind of optical illusion (the fault is with our limited intellect, which fails to fit some particular properly into the encompassing whole that would justify it), all this on the unargued assumption that "only the whole is actually real" ("nur das Ganze hat eigentliche Wirk-lichkeit"), in the words of Hegel. Evil, not unlike freedom, seems to belong to those "things about which the most learned and ingenious men can know almost nothing."69

  5. The clash between thinking and willing: the tonality of mental activities

  If one looks at this record with eyes unclouded by theories and traditions, religious or secular, it is certainly hard to escape the conclusion that philosophers seem genetically unable to come to terms with certain phenomena of the mind and its position in the world, that we can no more trust men of thought to arrive at a fair estimate of the Will than we could trust them to arrive at a fair estimate of the body. But the philosophers' hostility to the body is well known and a matter of record ever since Plato at least. It is not motivated primarily by the unreliability of sense experience—for these errors can be corrected—or by the famous unruliness of the passions—for these can be tamed by reason—but by the simple and incorrigible nature of our bodily needs and wants. The body, as Plato rightly stresses, always "wants to be taken care of" and even under the best of circumstances—health and leisure on one hand, a well-regulated commonwealth on the other—it will interrupt with its ever-recurring claims the activity of the thinking ego; in terms of the Cave parable, it will compel the philosopher to return from the sky of Ideas to the Cave of human affairs. (It is usual to blame this hostility on die Christian antagonism toward the flesh. Not only is the hostility much older; one could even argue that one of the crucial Christian dogmas, the resurrection of the flesh, as distinguished from older speculations about the immortality of the soul, stood in sharp contrast not only to common gnostic beliefs but also to the common notions of classical philosophy.)

  The antagonism of the thinking ego toward the Will is of course of a very different kind. The clash here is between two mental activities that seem unable to co-exist. When we form a volition, that is, when we focus our attention on some future project, we have no less withdrawn from the world of appearances than when we are following a train of thought. Thinking and willing are antagonists only insofar as they affect our psychic states; both, it is true, make present to our mind what is actually absent,but thinking draws into its enduring present what either is or at least has been, whereaswilling, stretching out into the future, moves in a region where no such certainties exist. Our psychic apparatus—the soul as distinguished from the mind—is equipped to deal with what comes toward it from this region of the unknown by means of expectation, whose chief modes are hope and fear. The two modes of feeling are intimately connected in that each of them is prone to veer to its seeming opposite, and because of the uncertainties of the region these shiftings are almost automatic. Every hope carries within itself a fear, and every fear cures itself by tinning to the corresponding hope. It is because of their shifting, unstable, and disquieting nature that classical antiquity counted both among the evil gifts of Pandora's box.

  What the soul demands of the mind in this uncomfortable situation is not so much a prophetic gift that can foretell the future and thus confirm either hope or fear; far more soothing than the fraudulent games of the soothsayers—augurs, astrolo-gists, and the like—is the no less fraudulent theory that claims to prove that whatever is or will be "was to be," in the felicitous phrase of Gilbert Ryle.70 Fatalism, which indeed "no philosopher of the first or second rank has defended ... or been at great pains to attack," has nevertheless had an astoundingly successful career in popular thinking throughout the centimes; "we do all have our fatalist moments," as Ryle says,71 and the reason is that no other theory can lull so effectively any urge to act, any impulse to make a project, in short, any form of the I-will. These existential advantages of fatalism are clearly outlined in Cicero's treatise On Fate, still the classical argumentation of the case. For the proposition "Everything is foreordained," he uses the following example: When you get sick, "it is foreordained that you will recover or not recover, whether you call a doctor or do not call a doctor,"72 and of course whether you call in a doctor or not would also be foreordained. Hence the argument leads into "infinite regress."73 Under the name of "idle argument," it is rejected because it would obviously "lead to the entire abolition of action from life." Its great attraction is that through it "the mind is re-leased from all necessity of motion."74 In our context, the interest of the proposition lies in the fact that it succeeds in totally abolishing the future tense by assimilating it to the past. What will or may be "was to be," for "everything that will be, if it will actually be, cannot be conceived not to be" ("quicquid futurum est, id intelligi non potest, si futurum sit, non futurum esse"), as Leibniz put it.75 The formula's soothing quality is borrowed from what Hegel called "the quiet of the past" ("die Ruhe der Vergangenheit"),76 a quiet guaranteed by the fact that what is past cannot be undone and that the Will "cannot will backwards."77

  It is not the future as such but the future as the Will's project that negates the given. In Hegel and Marx, the power of negation, whose motor drives History forward, is derived from the Will's ability to actualize a project: the project negates the now as well as the past and thus threatens the thinking ego's enduring present. Inasmuch as the mind, withdrawn from the world of appearances, draws the absent—what is no more as well as what is not yet—into its own presence, it looks as though past and future could be united under a common denominator and thus be saved together from the flux of time. But the nunc stans, the gap between past and future where we localized the thinking ego, while it can absorb what is no more without any disturbance from the outside world, cannot react with the same equanimity to projects formed by t
he will for the future. Every volition, although a mental activity, relates to the world of appearances in which its project is to be realized; in flagrant contrast to thinking, no willing is ever done for its own sake or finds its fulfillment in the act itself. Every volition not only concerns particulars but—and this is of great importance—looks forward to its own end, when willing-something will have changed into doing-it. In other words, the normal mood of the willing ego is impatience, disquiet, and worry (Sorge), not merely because of the soul's reacting to the future in fear and hope, but also because the will's project presupposes an I-can that is by no means guaranteed. The will's worrying disquiet can be stilled only by the I-can-and-I-do, that is, by a cessation of its own activity and release of the mind from its dominance.

  In short, the will always wills to do something and thus implicitly holds in contempt sheer thinking, whose whole activity depends on "doing nothing." We shall see when we examine the history of the Will that no theologian or philosopher has ever praised the "sweetness" of the willing ego's experience, as philosophers were wont to praise that of the thinking ego. (There are two important exceptions: Duns Scotus and Nietzsche, both of whom understood the Will as a kind of power—"voluntas est potentia quia ipsa aliquid potest." That is, the willing ego is delighted with itself—"condelectari sibi"—to the extent that the I-will anticipates an I-can; the I-will-and-I-can is the Will's delight.78 )

  In this respect—let me call it the "tonality" of mental activities—the Will's ability to have present the not-yet is the very opposite of remembrance. Remembrance has a natural affinity to thought; all thoughts, as I have said, are after-thoughts. Thought-trains rise naturally, almost automatically, out of re-remembering, without any break. This is why anamnesis, in Plato, could become such a plausible hypothesis for the human capacity for learning, and why Augustine could so very plausibly equate mind and memoria. Remembrance may affect the soul with longing for the past, but this nostalgia, while it may hold grief and sorrow, does not upset the mind's equanimity, because it concerns things which are beyond our power to change. On the contrary, the willing ego, looking forward and not backward, deals with things which are in our power but whose accomplishment is by no means certain. The resulting tension, unlike the rather stimulating excitement that may accompany problem-solving activities, causes a kind of disquiet in the soul easily bordering on turmoil, a mixture of fear and hope that becomes unbearable when it is discovered that, in Augustine's formula, to will and to be able to perform, velle and posse, are not the same. The tension can be overcome only by doing, that is, by giving up the mental activity altogether; a switch from willing to thinking produces no more than a temporary paralysis of the will, just as a switch from thinking to willing is felt by the thinking ego to be a temporary paralysis of the thinking activity.

  Speaking in terms of tonality—that is, in terms of the way the mind affects the soul and produces its moods, regardless of outside events, thus creating a kind of life of the mind—the predominant mood of the thinking ego is serenity, the mere enjoyment of an activity that never has to overcome the resistance of matter. To the extent that this activity is closely connected with remembrance, its mood inclines to melancholy-according to Kant and Aristotle, the mood characteristic of the philosopher. The predominant mood of the Will is tenseness, which brings ruin to the "mind's tranquillity," Leibniz's "animi tranquillitas," which, according to him, all "serious philosophers" insist on79 and which he himself found in thought-trains proving that this is the "best of all possible worlds." In this perspective, the only task left for the Will is indeed to "will not to will," since every willed act can only interfere with the "universal harmony" of the world, in which "everything that is, looked at from the viewpoint of the Whole, is the best."80

  Thus Leibniz, with admirable consistency, finds that the sin of Judas lies not in his betrayal of Jesus but in his suicide: in condemning himself, he implicitly condemned the whole of God's creation; by hating himself, he hated the Creator.81 We find the same thought in its most radical version in one of Master Eckhart's condemned sentences: "Should a man have committed a thousand mortal sins, were he rightly disposed he ought not to will not to have committed them" ("Wenn jemand tausend Todsünden begangen hätte, dürfte er, wäre es recht um ihn bestellt, nicht wollen, sie nicht begangen zu haben").82 We may be permitted to conjecture that this startling rejection of repentance on the part of two Christian thinkers in Eckhart was motivated by a superabundance of faith, which demanded, Jesus-like, that the sinner forgive himself as he was asked to forgive others, "seven times a day," because the alternative would be to declare that it would have been better—not only for him but also for the whole of Creation—never to be born ("that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea"), whereas in Leibniz we may see it as an ultimate victory of the thinking ego over the willing ego, because of the latter's futile attempt at willing backward which, if successful, could only end in the annihilation of everything that is.

  6. Hegel's solution: the philosophy of History

  No philosopher has described the willing ego in its clash with the thinking ego with greater sympathy, insight, and consequence for the history of thought than Hegel. This is a somewhat complex business, not only because of Hegel's esoteric and highly idiosyncratic terminology, but also because he treats the whole problem in the course of his time speculations and not in the rather meager though by no means insignificant passages—in the Phenomenology of Mind, the Philosophy of Right, the Encyclopedia, and the Philosophy of History— that deal directly with the Will. These passages have been assembled and interpreted by Alexandre Koyré in a little-known and very important essay (published in 1934 under the misleading tide Hegel à léna),83 devoted to Hegel's crucial texts on Time—from the early Jenenser Logik and the Jenenser Realphilosophie to the Phenomenology, the Encyclopedia, and the various manuscripts belonging to the Philosophy of History. Koyré's translation and commentaries became "the source and basis" of Alexandre Kojèeve's highly influential interpretation of the Phenomenology,84 In the following I shall closely follow Koyré's argumentation.

  His central thesis is that Hegel's "greatest originality" resides in his "insistence on the future, the primacy ascribed to the future over the past."85 We would not find this surprising if it were not said about Hegel. Why should not a nineteenth-century thinker, sharing the confidence in Progress of his predecessors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and of his contemporaries, too, draw the proper inference and ascribe to the future primacy over the past? After all, Hegel himself said that "everyone is the son of his own time, and therefore philosophy is its time comprehended in thought." But he also said in the same context that "to understand what exists is the task of philosophy, for what exists is reason," or "what is thought is, and what is exists only insofar as it is thought" ("Was gedacht ist, ist; und was ist, ist nur, insofern es Gedanke ist").86 And it is on this premise that Hegel's most important and most influential contribution to philosophy is based. For Hegel is, above all, the first thinker to conceive of a philosophy of history, that is, of the past: re-collected by the backward-directed glance of the thinking and remembering ego, it is "internalized" (er-innert), becomes part and parcel of the mind through "the effort of the concept" ("die Anstrengung des Be griffs"), and in this internalizing way achieves the "reconciliation" of Mind and World. Was there ever a greater triumph of the thinking ego than is represented in this scenario? In its withdrawal from the world of appearances, the thinking ego no longer has to pay the price of "absent-mindedness" and alienation from the world. According to Hegel, the mind, by sheer force of reflection, can assimilate to itself—suck into itself, as it were—not, to be sure, all the appearances but whatever has been meaningful in them, leaving aside everything not assimilable as irrelevant accident, without consequence for either the course of History or the train of discursive thought.

  The primacy of the past, however—as Koyré discovered—disappears entirely when He
gel comes to discuss Time, for him, above all, "human time"87 whose flux man first, as it were, unthinkingly experiences as sheer motion, until he happens to reflect on the meaning of outside events. It then turns out that the mind's attention is primarily directed toward the future, namely, toward the time that is in the process of coming toward us (indicated, as I have said, in the German Zukunft, from zu kommen, like the French avenir from à venir), and this anticipated future negates the mind's "enduring present," which it transforms into an anticipated "no-more." In this context, "the dominant dimension of time is the future, which takes priority over the past." "Time finds its truth in the future since it is the future that will finish and accomplish Being. But Being, finished and accomplished, belongs as such to the Past."88 This reversal of the ordinary time sequence—past-present-future—is caused by man's denying his present: he "says no to his Now" and thus creates his own future.89 Hegel himself does not mention the Will in this context, nor does Koyré, but it seems obvious that the faculty behind the Mind's negation is not thinking but willing, and that Hegel's description of experienced human time relates to the time sequence appropriate to the willing ego.