The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  11. Thinking and doing: the spectator

  I have been speaking of the special predicaments of thinking that may be ascribed to the radicalism of its withdrawal from the world. By contrast, neither willing nor judging, though dependent on thought's preliminary reflection upon their objects, is ever caught up in these reflections; their objects are particulars with an established home in the appearing world, from which the willing or judging mind removes itself only temporarily and with the intention of a later return. This is especially true of the will, whose withdrawal phase is characterized by the strongest form of reflexivity, an acting back upon itself: the volo me velle is much more characteristic of the will than the cogito me cogitate is of thinking. What all these activities have in common, however, is the peculiar quiet, absence of any doing or disturbances, the withdrawal from involvement and from the partiality of immediate interests that in one way or another make me part of the real world, a withdrawal referred to earlier ([>]) as the condition prerequisite for all judgment.

  Historically, this kind of withdrawal from doing is the oldest condition posited for the life of the mind. In its early, original form it rests on the discovery that only the spectator, never the actor, can know and understand whatever offers itself as a spectacle. That discovery greatly contributed to the Greek philosophers' conviction of the superiority of the contemplative, merely onlooking, way of life, whose most elementary condition—according to Aristotle, who was the first to elaborate it49 —was scholē. Scholē is not leisure time as we understand it, the leftover spare time of inactivity after a day's work "used for meeting the exigencies of existence,"50 but the deliberate act of abstaining, of holding oneself back (schein) from the ordinary activities determined by our daily wants (he ton anagkaion scholē), in order to act out leisure (scholēn agein), which in turn was the true goal of all other activities, just as peace, for Aristotle, was the true goal of war. Recreation and play, in our understanding the natural activities of leisure, belonged, on the contrary, still to a-scholia, the state of being deprived of leisure, since play and recreation are necessary for the restoration of the human labor force charged with taking care of life's necessities.

  We find this act of deliberate, active non-participation in life's daily business, probably in its earliest, certainly its simplest, form, in a parable ascribed to Pythagoras and reported by Diogenes Laertius:

  Life ... is like a festival; just as some come to the festival to compete, some to ply their trade, but the best people come as spectators [theatai], so in life the slavish men go hunting for fame [doxa] or gain, the philosophers for truth.51

  What is stressed here as more noble than the competition for fame and gain is by no means a truth invisible and inaccessible to ordinary men; nor does the place the spectators withdraw to belong to any "higher" region such as Parmenides and Plato later envisioned; their place is in the world and their "nobility" is only that they do not participate in what is going on but look on it as a mere spectacle. From the Greek word for spectators, theatai, the later philosophical term "theory" was derived, and the word "theoretical" until a few hundred years ago meant "contemplating," looking upon something from the outside, from a position implying a view that is hidden from those who take part in the spectacle and actualize it. The inference to be drawn from this early distinction between doing and understanding is obvious: as a spectator you may understand the "truth" of what the spectacle is about; but the price you have to pay is withdrawal from participating in it.

  The first datum underlying this estimate is that only the spectator occupies a position that enables him to see the whole play-as the philosopher is able to see the kosmos as a harmonious ordered whole. The actor, being part of the whole, must enact his part; not only is he a "part" by definition, he is bound to the particular that finds its ultimate meaning and the justification of its existence solely as a constituent of a whole. Hence, withdrawal from direct involvement to a standpoint outside the game (the festival of life) is not only a condition for judging, for being the final arbiter in the ongoing competition, but also the condition for understanding the meaning of the play. Second: what the actor is concerned with is doxa, a word that signifies both fame and opinion, for it is through the opinion of the audience and the judge that fame comes about. It is decisive for the actor, but not for the spectator, how he appears to others; he depends on the spectator's it-seems-to-me (his dokei moi, which gives the actor his doxa); he is not his own master, not what Kant would later call autonomous; he must conduct himself in accordance with what spectators expect of him, and the final verdict of success or failure is in their hands.

  The withdrawal of judgment is obviously very different from the withdrawal of the philosopher. It does not leave the world of appearances but retires from active involvement in it to a privileged position in order to contemplate the whole. Moreover, and perhaps more significantly, Pythagoras' spectators are members of an audience and therefore quite unlike the philosopher who begins his bios thedretikos by leaving the company of his fellow-men and their uncertain opinions, their doxai that can only express an it-seems-to-me. Hence the spectator's verdict, while impartial and freed from the interests of gain or fame, is not independent of the views of others—on the contrary, according to Kant, an "enlarged mentality" has to take them into account. The spectators, although disengaged from the particularity characteristic of the actor, are not solitary. Nor are they self-sufficient, like the "highest god" the philosopher tries to emulate in thought and who, according to Plato, "is forever ... solitary by reason of his excellence, able to be together, he himself with himself, needing nobody else, neither acquaintance nor friend, he sufficient with himself."52 "

  This distinction between thinking and judging only came to the fore with Kant's political philosophy—not surprisingly, since Kant was the first, and has remained the last, of the great philosophers to deal with judgment as one of the basic mental activities. For the point of the matter is that in the various treatises and essays, all written late in Kant's life, the spectator's viewpoint is not determined by the categorical imperatives of practical reason, that is, reason's answer to the question What ought I to do? That answer is moral and concerns the individual qua individual, in the full autonomous independence of reason. As such, in a moral-practical way, he can never claim the right to rebel. And yet, the same individual, when he happens not to act but to be a mere spectator, will have the right to judge and to render the final verdict on the French Revolution on- no other grounds than his "wishful participation bordering on enthusiasm," his sharing in the "exaltation of the uninvolved public," his basing himself, in other words, on the judgment of his fellow-spectators, who also had not "the least intention of assisting" in the events. And it was their verdict, in the last analysis, and not the deeds of the actors, that persuaded Kant to call the French Revolution "a phenomenon in human history [which] is not to be forgotten."53 In this clash between joint, participating action, without which, after all, the events to be judged would never have come into being, and reflecting, observing judgment, there is no doubt for Kant as to which should have the last word. Assuming that history is nothing but the miserable story of mankind's eternal ups and downs, the spectacle of sound and fury "may perhaps be moving for a while; but the curtain must eventually descend. For in the long run, it becomes a farce. And even if the actors do not tire of it—for they are fools —the spectator does, for any single act will be enough for him if he can reasonably conclude from it that the never-ending play will be of eternal sameness" (italics added).54

  This is a telling passage indeed. And if we add to it Kant's conviction that human affairs are guided by the "ruse of nature," which leads the human species, behind the backs of acting men, into a perpetual progress, just as Hegel's "ruse of reason" leads them to the revelation of the Absolute Spirit, we may well be justified in asking if all actors are not fools, or if the spectacle, revealing itself only to the spectator, would not just as well be served by the acts of
fools. With more or less sophisticated qualifications, this has always been the secret assumption of the philosophers of history, that is, of those thinkers of the modern age who, for the first time, decided to take the realm of human affairs—Plato's ta tōn anthrōpōn pragmata—seriously enough to reflect upon it. And are they right? Is it not true that "something else results from the actions of men than what they intend and achieve, something else than they know or want"? "To give an analogy, a man may set fire to the house of another out of revenge.... The immediate action is to hold a small flame to a small part of a beam.... [What follows is] a vast conflagration.... This result was neither part of the primary deed nor the intention of him who commenced it.... This example merely shows that in the immediate action something else may be involved than is consciously willed by the actor."55 (These are Hegel's words, but they could have been written by Kant.) In either case it is not through acting but through contemplating that the "something else," namely, the meaning of the whole, is revealed. The spectator, not the actor, holds the clue to the meaning of human affairs—only, and this is decisive, Kant's spectators exist in the plural, and this is why he could arrive at a political philosophy. Hegel's spectator exists strictly in the singular: the philosopher becomes the organ of the Absolute Spirit, and the philosopher is Hegel himself. But even Kant, more aware than any other philosopher of human plurality, could conveniently forget that even if the spectacle were always the same and therefore tiresome, the audiences would change from generation to generation; nor would a fresh audience be likely to arrive at the conclusions handed down by tradition as to what an unchanging play has to tell it.

  If we speak of the mind's withdrawal as the necessary condition of all mental activities, we can hardly avoid raising the question of the place or region toward which the movement of absenting oneself is directed. I have treated the withdrawal of judgment to the spectator's standpoint prematurely and yet at some length because I wanted to raise the question first in its simplest, most obvious form by pointing to cases where the region of withdrawal is clearly located within our ordinary world, the reflexivity of the faculty notwithstanding. There they are, in Olympia, on the ascending rows of theater or stadium, carefully separated from the ongoing games; and Kant's "uninvolved public" that followed events in Paris with "disinterested pleasure" and a sympathy "bordering on enthusiasm" was present in every intellectual circle in Europe during the early nineties of the eighteenth century—although Kant himself was probably thinking of the crowds in the streets of Paris.

  But the trouble is that no such incontestable locality can be found when we ask ourselves where we are when we think or will, surrounded, as it were, by things which are no more or are not yet or, finally, by such everyday thought-things as justice, liberty, courage, that are nevertheless totally outside sense experience. The willing ego, it is true, early found an abode, a region of its own; as soon as this faculty was discovered, in the early centuries of the Christian era, it was localized within us, and if somebody were to write the history of inwardness in terms of an inner life, he would soon perceive that this history coincides with the history of the Will. But inwardness, as we have already indicated, has problems of its own even if one agrees that soul and mind are not the same. Moreover, the peculiar reflexive nature of the will, sometimes identified with the heart and almost always regarded as the organ of our innermost self, has made this region even harder to isolate. As for thinking, the question of where we are when we think seems to have been raised only by Plato, in the Sophist;56 there, after having determined the sophist's locality, he promised to determine the philosopher's proper locality as well—the topos noētos he had mentioned in the earlier dialogues57 —but he never kept this promise. It may have been that he simply failed to complete the trilogy of Sophist-Statesman-Philosopher or that he had come to believe that the answer was implicitly given in the Sophist, where he pictures the sophist as "at home in the darkness of Not-being," which "makes him so hard to perceive," "whereas the philosopher ... is difficult to see because his region is so bright; for the eye of the many cannot endure to keep its gaze fixed on the divine."58 That answer could indeed be expected from the author of the Republic and the Cave parable.

  12. Language and metaphor

  Mental activities, invisible themselves and occupied with the invisible, become manifest only through speech. Just as appearing beings living in a world of appearances have an urge to show themselves, so thinking beings, which still belong to the world of appearances even after they have mentally withdrawn from it, have an urge to speak and thus to make manifest what otherwise would not be a part of the appearing world at all. But while appearingness as such demands and presupposes the presence of spectators, thinking in its need of speech does not demand or necessarily presuppose auditors: communication with our fellow-men would not necessitate human language with its intricate complexity of grammar and syntax. The language of animals—sounds, signs, gestures—would be amply sufficient to serve all immediate needs, not only for self-preservation and the preservation of the species, but also for making evident the moods and emotions of the soul.

  It is not our soul but our mind that demands speech. I referred to Aristotle when I drew a distinction between mind and soul, the thoughts of our reason and the passions of our emotional apparatus, and I called attention to the extent to which the key distinction in De Anima is reinforced by a passage in the introduction to his short treatise on language, De Interpretatione.59 I shall come back to the same treatise, for its most interesting point is that the criterion of logos, coherent speech, is not truth or falsehood but meaning. Words as such are neither true nor false. The word "centaur," for instance (Aristotle uses the example of "goat-stag," an animal that is half-goat, half-stag), "means something, though nothing true or false, unless one adds 'non-being' or 'being' to it." Logos is speech in which words are put together to form a sentence that is totally meaningful by virtue of synthesis (synthēkē). Words, meaningful in themselves, and thoughts (noēmata) resemble each other (eoiken). Hence speech, though always "significant sound" (phōnē semantikē), is not necessarily apophantikos, a statement or a proposition in which alētheuein and pseudesthai, truth and falsehood, being and non-being, are at stake. This is not always the case: a prayer, as we saw, is a logos, but neither true nor false.60 Thus implicit in the urge to speak is the quest for meaning, not necessarily the quest for truth. It is also noteworthy that nowhere in this discussion of the relation of language to thought does Aristotle raise the question of priorities; he does not decide whether thinking is the origin of speaking, as though speech were merely an instrument of communicating our thoughts, or whether thought is the consequence of the fact that man is a speaking animal. In any case, since words-carriers of meaning—and thoughts resemble each other, thinking beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think.

  Of all human needs, only "the need of reason" could never be adequately met without discursive thought, and discursive thought is inconceivable without words already meaningful, before a mind travels, as it were, through them—poreuesthai dia logōn (Plato). Language, no doubt, also serves communication between men, but there it is needed only because men are thinking beings and as such in need of communicating their thoughts; thoughts do not have to be communicated in order to occur, but they cannot occur without being spoken—silently or sounding out in dialogue, as the case may be. It is because thinking, though it always takes place in words, does not need auditors that Hegel, in agreement with the testimony of almost all philosophers, could say that "philosophy is something solitary." And it is not because man is a thinking being but because he exists only in the plural that his reason, too, wants communication and is likely to go astray if deprived of it; for reason, as Kant observed, is indeed "not fit to isolate itself, but to communicate."61 The function of that soundless speech-tacife secum rationare, to "reason silently with oneself," in the words of Anselm of Canterbury62 —is to come to terms with whatever may be
given to our senses in everyday appearances; the need of reason is to give account, logon didonai, as the Greeks called it with greater precision, of whatever there may be or may have occurred. This is prompted not by the thirst for knowledge—the need may arise in connection with well-known and entirely familiar phenomena—but by the quest for meaning. The sheer naming of things, the creation of words, is the human way of appropriating and, as it were, disalienating the world into which, after all, each of us is born as a newcomer and a stranger.

  These observations on the interconnection of language and thought, which make us suspect that no speechless thought can exist, obviously do not apply to civilizations where the written sign rather than the spoken word is decisive and where, consequently, thinking itself is not soundless speech but mental dealing with images. This is notably true of China, whose philosophy may well rank with the philosophy of the Occident. There "the power of words is supported by the power of the written sign, the image," and not the other way round, as in the alphabetic languages, where script is thought of as secondary, no more than an agreed-upon set of symbols.63 For the Chinese, every sign makes visible what we would call a concept or an essence—Confucius is reported to have said that the Chinese sign for "dog" is the perfect image of dog as such, whereas in our understanding "no image could ever be adequate to the concept" of dog in general. "It would never attain that universality of the concept which renders it valid of all" dogs.64 "The concept 'dog,'" according to Kant, who in the chapter on Schematism in the Critique of Pure Reason clarifies one of the basic assumptions of all Western thinking, "signifies a rule according to which my imagination can delineate the figure of a four-footed animal in a general manner, without limitation to any single determinate figure such as experience, or any possible image that I can represent in concreto, actually presents." And he adds, "This schematism of our intellect ... is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze."65