The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  What has brought about this change is a decisive radicalization of both the age-old tension between thinking and willing (to be resolved by the "Will-not-to-will") and of the personified concept, which appeared in its most articulate form in Hegel's "World Spirit," that ghostly Nobody that bestows meaning on what factually, but in itself meaninglessly and contingently, is. With Heidegger, this Nobody, allegedly acting behind the backs of acting men, has now found a flesh-and-blood incarnation in the existence of the thinker, who acts while he does nothing, a person, to be sure, and even identifiable as 'Thinker"—which, however, does not signify his return into the world of appearances. He remains the "solus ipse" in "existential solipsism," except that now die fate of the world, the History of Being, has come to depend on him.

  Thus far we have been following Heidegger's own repeated demands to pay due attention to the continuous development of his thinking ever since Being and Time, despite the "reversal" that took place in the middle thirties. We have relied, too, on his own interpretations of the reversal during the later thirties and early forties—interpretations closely and coher-ently borne out by his numerous publications of the fifties and sixties. But there is another, perhaps even more radical, interruption in his life as well as his thought to which, as far as I know, no one, Heidegger included, has paid public attention.

  This interruption coincided with the catastrophic defeat of Nazi Germany and his own serious difficulties with the academic community and the occupation authorities immediately thereafter. For a period of roughly five years he was so effectively silenced that among his published works there exist only two longer essays—the Letter on Humanism, written in 1946 and published in Germany and France in 1947, and "The Anaximander Fragment" ("Der Spruch des Anaximander"), also written in 1946 and published as the last essay of Holzwege in 1950.

  Of these, the Letter on Humanism contains an eloquent summing-up and immense clarification of the interpretive turn he had given the original reversal, but "The Anaximander Fragment" is of a different character: it presents an altogether new and unexpected outlook on the whole posing of the problem of Being. The main theses of this essay, which I shall now try to outline, were never followed up or fully explicated in his later work. He does mention, in a note to its publication in the Holzwege, that the essay was taken from a "treatise" (Ab-handlung) written in 1946, which unfortunately has never been published.

  To me it seems obvious that this new outiook, so isolated from the rest of his thought, must have emerged from another change of "mood," no less important than the change that happened between the first and the second volumes of the work on Nietzsche—the turn from the "Will-to-Power" as Will-to-will to the new Gelassenheit, the serenity of "letting-be" and the paradoxical "Will-not-to-will." The changed mood reflected Germany's defeat, the "point zero" (as Ernst Jünger called it) that for a few years seemed to promise a new beginning. In Heidegger's version: "Do we stand in the very twilight of the most monstrous transformation our planet has ever undergone...? [Or] do we gaze into the evening of a night which heralds another dawn?... Are we the latecomers ... at the same time precursors of the dawn of an altogether different age, which has already left our contemporary historiologi-cal representations of history behind?"96

  It was the same mood that Jaspers expressed at a famous symposium in Geneva in the same year: "We live as though we stood knocking at gates that are still closed.... What happens today will perhaps one day found and establish a world."97 This mood of hope disappeared quickly in the rapidity of German economic and political recovery from "point zero"; confronted with the reality of Adenauer's Germany, neither Heidegger nor Jaspers ever expounded systematically what must very soon have appeared to them as a complete misreading of the new era.

  Still, in Heidegger's case, we do have the Anaximander essay with its haunting hints at another possibility of ontological speculation, hints that are half hidden in the highly technical philological considerations of the Greek text (which is rather obscure and probably corrupt), and from them I shall risk an exegesis of this fascinating variant of his philosophy. In Heidegger's literal and provisional translation the short Greek text reads: "But that from which things arise [genesis] also gives rise to their passing away [phthora], according to what is necessary; for things render justice [dikēn didonai] and pay penalty [twin] to one another for their injustice [adikia], according to the ordinance of time."98 The subject, then, is the coming-to-be and passing-away of everything that is. While whatever is is, it "lingers" in the present "between a twofold absence," its arrival and its departure. During the absences it is hidden; it is unconcealed only for the short duration of its appearance. Living in a world of appearances, all we know or can know is a "movement which lets every emerging being abandon concealment and go forward into unconcealment," lingering there for a while, till it "in its turn abandons unconcealment, departing and withdrawing into concealment."99

  Even this non-speculative, strictly phenomenological description is clearly at variance with Heidegger's usual teaching of an ontological difference according to which a-lētheia, truth understood as Un-hiddenness or Unconcealment, is always on the side of Being; in the world of appearances, Being reveals itself only in the thinking response of man in terms of language. In the words of the Letter on Humanism, "Language is the house of Being" ("Die Sprache [ist] zumal das Haus des Seins und die Behausung des Menschenwesens").100 In the exegesis of the Anaximander fragment, unconcealment is not truth; it belongs to the beings that arrive from and depart into a hidden Being. What can hardly have caused but certainly facilitated this reversal is the fact that the Greeks, especially the pre-Socratics, often thought of Being as physis (nature), whose original meaning is derived from phyein (to grow), that is, to come to light out of darkness. Anaximander, says Heidegger, thought of genesis and phthora in terms of physis, "as ways of luminous rising and declining."101 And physis, according to a much quoted fragment of Heraclitus, "likes to hide."102

  Although Heidegger does not mention the Heraclitus fragment in the Anaximander essay, its main theses read as though it had been inspired by Heraclitus rather than by Anaximander. Of central importance is the speculative content; there the relation in the ontological difference is reversed, and this is spelled out in the following sentences: "The unconcealment of beings, the brightness granted them [by Being], obscures the light of Being"; for "as it reveals itself in beings, Being withdraws" ("Das Sein entzieht sich indem es sich in das Seiende entbirgt").103 The sentence I have italicized is stressed in the text by being emphatically repeated. Its immediate plausibility in the German original rests entirely on the linguistically cognate relation of verbergen (hide, conceal) with bergen (shield and shelter) and entbergen (disclose). If we try to explicate the speculative content of that cognateness as construed by Heidegger, we may sum it up as follows: the coming and going, appearing and disappearing, of beings always begins with a disclosure that is an ent-bergen, the loss of the original shelter (bergen) that had been granted by Being; the being then "lingers for a while" in the "brightness" of disclosure, and ends by returning to the sheltering shield of Being in its concealment: "Presumably, Anaximander spoke of genesis and phthora [generation and decline]...[that is] genesis estin (which is the way I should like to read it) and phthora ginetai, 'coming-to-be is,' and 'passing-away comes to be.' "104

  In other words, undoubtedly there is such a thing as becoming; everything we know has become, has emerged from some previous darkness into the light of day; and this becoming remains its law while it lasts: its lasting is at the same time its passing-away. Becoming, the law that rules beings, is now the opposite of Being; when, in passing-away, becoming ceases, it changes again into that Being from whose sheltering, concealing darkness it originally emerged. In this speculative context, the ontological difference consists of the difference between Being in the strong durative sense and becoming. It is through withdrawal that "Being holds to its truth" and shields it; it shields it against the "brightnes
s" of beings that "obscures the light of Being" even though, originally, Being has granted this brightness. This leads to the seemingly paradoxical statement "As [Being] provides the unconcealment of beings, it [establishes] the concealment of Being."105

  In the course of this speculation, the reversal of Heidegger's common approach to the "quest for Being" (die Seins-frage) and "the oblivion of Being" (Seinsvergessenheit) becomes manifest. It is no longer genuine inauthenticity or any other particularity of human existence that causes man to "forget" Being in his abandonment to the "man" (German for the plurality of "Them"); nor does he do so because he is distracted by the sheer superabundance of mere entities. "Oblivion of Being belongs to the self-veiling essence of Being ... the history of Being [and not the history of men in philosophy in general or metaphysics in particular] begins with the oblivion of Being, since Being—together with its essence, its distinction from beings—keeps to itself."106 Through Being's withdrawal from the realm of beings, these entities, whose unconcealment has been caused by it, are set "adrift in errancy," and this errancy constitutes "the realm of error ... the space in which history unfolds.... Without errancy there would be no connection from destiny to destiny: there would be no history" (italics added).107

  To sum up: We are still confronted with the ontological difference, the categorical separation of Being and beings, but this separation has acquired, as it were, a kind of history with a beginning and an end. In the beginning, Being discloses itself in beings, and the disclosure starts two opposite movements: Being withdraws into itself, and beings are "set adrift" to constitute the "realm (in the sense of a prince's realm) of error." This realm of error is the sphere of common human history, where factual destinies are connected and form a coherent shape through "erring." In that scheme, there is no place for a "History of Being" (Seinsgeschichte) enacted behind the backs of acting men; Being, sheltered in its concealment, has no history, and "every epoch of world history is an epoch of errancy." However, the very fact that the time continuum in the historical realm is broken up into different eras indicates that the casting adrift of entities also occurs in epochs, and in Heidegger's scheme there seems to exist a privileged moment, the transitional moment from one epoch to the next, from destiny to destiny, when Being qua Truth breaks into the continuum of error, when the "epochal essence of Being lays claim to the ecstatic nature of Da-sein."108 To this claim, thinking can respond, recognizing "the claim to destiny": that is, the spirit of a whole age may become "mindful of what is destined" instead of getting lost in the erring particularities of human day-to-day affairs.

  Nowhere in this context does Heidegger mention a connection between thinking and thanking and he is quite aware of the possible pessimistic, "not to say nihilistic," conclusions to be drawn from an interpretation that would fit only too well with Burckhardt's and Nietzsche's understanding of the Greek experience at its deepest level.109 Also, it may be worth noting that here he seems not at all interested in stressing the tension of the very close relation between philosophy and poetry. Instead he concludes the essay with something he has said nowhere else: "If the essence of man consists in thinking the truth of Being [N.B., now a Being that has withdrawn, that veils and hides itself], then thinking must poetize on the riddle of Being" ("am Rätsel des Seins dichten").110

  I have mentioned in passing the radical change the concept of death underwent in Heidegger's late writings, where death appears as the ultimate savior of man's essence, the Gebirg des Seins in dem Spiel der Welt, the "shelter of Being in the play of the world."111 And I have tried to explicate and, in a way, justify the strangeness of this by some well-known testimony to certain familiar experiences which, as far as I know, have never been conceptualized. In the Anaximander essay, the word "death" does not occur, but the concept is of course transparently present in the notion of life between two absences, before it arrives in birth and after it passes away in death. And here we do have a conceptual clarification of death as the shelter for the essence of human existence, whose temporal, transitory presence is understood as the lingering between two absences and a sojourn in the realm of errancy. For the source of this "erring"—and here of course we can see to what an extent this variant remains a mere variation of Heidegger's basic and enduring philosophical convictions—is the fact that a being that "lingers a while in presence" between two absences and has the ability to transcend its own presence can be said to be actually "present [only] insofar as it lets itself belong to the non-present."112

  It has a chance of achieving that if it seizes on the epochal moment in the transition between epochs when historical destinies change and the truth underlying the next era of errancy becomes manifest to thought. The Will as destroyer appears here, too, though not by name; it is the "craving to persist," "to hang on," the inordinate appetite men have "to cling to themselves." In this way they do more than just err: "lingering as persisting ... is an insurrection on behalf of sheer endurance."113 The insurrection is directed against "order" (dikē); it creates the "disorder" (adikia) permeating the "realm of errancy."

  These statements take us back to familiar territory, as becomes evident when we read that the disorder is "tragic" and not a thing for which man can be made accountable. To be sure, there is no longer any "call of conscience" summoning man back to his authentic self, to the insight that, no matter what he has done or omitted to do, he was already schuldig ("guilty") since his existence was a debt he "owed" after having been thrown into the world. But, just as, in Being and Time, this "guilty" self could salvage itself by anticipating its death, so here the "erring" Dasein, while "lingering a while" in the present realm of errancy, can, through the thinking activity, join itself to what is absent. There is the difference, though, that here the absent (Being in its enduring withdrawal) has no history in the realm of errancy, and thinking and acting do not coincide. To act is to err, to go astray. We should consider, too, how the early definition of being-guilty as a primary trait of Dasein, independent of any specific act, has been replaced by "erring" as the decisive mark of all human history. (Both formulations, incidentally, for the German reader are curiously reminiscent of Goethe's "Der Handelnde wird immer schuldig" and "Es irrt der Mensch solang er strebt."114)

  To these distinct self-echoes we may then add the following sentences from the Anaximander essay: "Every thinker is dependent upon the address of Being. The extent of this dependence determines the freedom from irrelevant influences"115 —by which Heidegger clearly means the factual day-to-day events brought about by erring men. When we put these correspondences together, it does seem as though we are dealing here with a mere variation of Heidegger's basic teaching.

  However that may be, it is obvious that my present interpretation is tentative in the extreme; it cannot possibly be a substitute for the unpublished treatise of which the Anaximander essay was originally a part. In our present state of textual knowledge the whole thing remains very doubtful. But whether we see it as a variant or a variation, Heidegger's denunciation of the instinct of self-preservation (common to all living things) as a willful rebellion against the "order" of Creation as such is so rare in the history of ideas that I should like to quote here the only similar utterance of which I am aware, three little-known lines of Goethe in a poem written about 1821 under the tide "Eins und Alles":

  Das Ewige regt sich fort in allen:

  Denn alles muss in Nichts zerfallen,

  Wenn es im Sein beharren will.

  Hie Eternal works and stirs in all;

  For all must into Nothing fall,

  If it will persist in Being.

  16. The abyss of freedom and the novus ordo seclorum

  Very early in these deliberations I warned of an inevitable flaw in all critical examinations of the willing faculty. It is a rather obvious one but easy to overlook in discussing the particular arguments and counter-arguments: simply that every philosophy of the Will is conceived and articulated not by men of action but by philosophers, Kant's "professional thinke
rs," who in one way or another are committed to the bios theōrētikos and therefore by nature more inclined to "interpret the world" than to "change it."

  Of all the philosophers and theologians we have consulted, only Duns Scotus, we found, was ready to pay the price of contingency for the gift of freedom—the mental endowment we have for beginning something new, of which we know that it could just as well not be. No doubt the philosophers have always been more "pleased" with necessity than with freedom because for their business they needed a tranquillitas animae (Leibniz), a peace of mind, which—relying on Spinoza's acquiescentia sibi, one's agreement with oneself—could be effectively guaranteed only by an acquiescence in the arrangement of the world. The same self that the thinking activity disregards in its withdrawal from the world of appearances is asserted and ensured by the Will's reflexivity. Just as thinking prepares the self for the role of spectator, willing fashions it into an "enduring I" that directs all particular acts of volition. It creates the self's character and therefore was sometimes understood as the principium individuationis, the source of the person's specific identity.

  Yet it is precisely this individuation brought about by the Will that breeds new and serious trouble for the notion of freedom. The individual, fashioned by the will and aware that it could be different from what it is (character, unlike bodily appearance or talents and abilities, is not given to the self at birth) always tends to assert an "I-myself" against an indefinite "they"—all the others that I, as an individual, am not. Nothing indeed can be more frightening than the notion of solipsistic freedom—the "feeling" that my standing apart, isolated from everyone else, is due to free will, that nothing and nobody can be held responsible for it but me myself. The will with its projects for the future challenges the belief in necessity, the acquiescence in the arrangement of the world which it calls complacency. Yet isn't it clear to everyone that the world is not, and has never been, what it ought to be? And who knows, or has ever known, what this "ought" should be? The "ought" is Utopian; it has no proper topos or place in the world. Isn't trust in necessity, the conviction that everything is as "it was to be," infinitely preferable to freedom bought at the price of contingency? Under these circumstances, doesn't freedom look like a euphemism for the burnt-over area marked by the "forsakenness with which [human existence, the Dasein] has been abandoned to itself' ("die Verlassenheit in der überlassenheit an es selbst")?"116