The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  It is generally admitted that philosophy, which since Aristotle has been the field of inquiry into things that came after the physical and transcended them (ton meta ta physika, "about what comes after the physical"), is Greek in origin. And being Greek in origin it set itself the original Greek goal, immortality, which seemed even linguistically the most natural aim for men who understood themselves as mortals, thnētoi or brotoi, for whom, according to Aristotle, death was "the greatest of all evils," and who had as their kindred, their blood relations, as we would say, "drawing breath from one mother," the immortal gods. Philosophy did nothing to change this natural goal; it only proposed another way to attain it. Summarily speaking, the goal disappeared with the decline and fall of the Greek people and disappeared from philosophy altogether with the arrival of Christianity, bearing its "good news," telling men they were not mortals, that, contrary to their former pagan beliefs, the world was doomed to end, but they would be bodily resurrected after death. The last trace of the Greek quest for the everlasting may be seen in the nunc stans, the "standing now" of the medieval mystics' contemplation. The formula is striking, and we shall see later that it indeed corresponds to an experience highly characteristic of the thinking ego.

  However, while the mighty incentive to philosophize disappeared, the topics of metaphysics remained the same and continued to prejudge throughout the centuries which things are worthy of being thought about and which are not. What for Plato was a matter of course—that "pure knowledge is concerned with the things that are always the same without change or mixture, or with what is most akin to them"36 —remained in manifold variations the chief assumption of philosophy up to the last stages of the modem age. Excluded by definition were all matters concerning human affairs, because they were contingent; they could always be different from what they actually were. So even when Hegel, under the influence of the French Revolution—in which, according to him, eternal principles such as freedom and justice had been actualized—took history itself as his field of inquiry, he could do it only on the assumption that not only the revolutions of the skies and sheer thought-things such as numbers and the like followed the iron laws of necessity, but that the course of human affairs on earth also followed such laws, the laws of the incarnation of the Absolute Mind. From then on, the goal of philosophizing was not immortality but necessity: "Philosophical contemplation has no other intention than to eliminate the accidental."37

  The originally divine metaphysical topics, the everlasting and the necessary, survived the need to "immortalize" through the mind's effort to "stay" and remain in the presence of the divine, an effort rendered otiose when, with the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality. And in a different way the evaluation of spectatorship as the essentially philosophical and best way of life also persisted.

  In pre-Christian times that notion was still alive in the philosophical schools of late antiquity, when life in the world was no longer considered a blessing and involvement in human affairs no longer seen as a distraction from a more divine activity but, rather, as dangerous and joyless in itself. To keep yourself out of political involvement meant to occupy a position outside the turmoil and misery of human affairs and their inevitable shifts. The Roman spectators were no longer situated on the ascending rows of a theater where they could look down godlike on the game of the world; their place was now the secure shore or haven where they could watch, without being endangered, the wild and unpredictable upheavals of the storm-swept sea. These are the words of Lucretius praising the advantages of mere spectatorship: "What joy it is, when out at sea the stormwinds are lashing the waters, to gaze from the shore at the heavy stress some other man is enduring! Not that anyone's afflictions are in themselves a source of delight; but to realize from what troubles you yourself are free is joy indeed."38 Here, of course, the philosophic relevance of spectatorship is entirely lost—a loss that befell so many Greek notions when they fell into Roman hands. What is lost is not only the spectator's privilege of judging, as we found it in Kant, and the fundamental contrast between thinking and doing, but also the even more fundamental insight that whatever appears is there to be seen, that the very concept of appearance demands a spectator, and that therefore to see and to behold are activities of the highest rank.

  It was left to Voltaire to draw conclusions from Lucretius' proposition. According to him, the desire to see is nothing but cheap curiosity: it attracts people to the spectacle of a ship about to be shipwrecked; it drives people to climb trees or look at the massacres of battle or attend public executions. And this passion, according to Voltaire, man shares with monkeys and young dogs. In other words, if Lucretius is right and man's passion for seeing spectacles is due solely to his sense of safety, then the sheer lust for seeing can be ascribed only to an immature irrational drive that endangers our very existence. The philosopher, for whom Lucretius speaks, will not need to see the shipwreck to be warned against entrusting his safety to the wildness of the sea.

  Unfortunately, it is in this rather shallow form that the beneficial and "noble" distance between the spectator and his object has been handed down in our tradition—if we leave out of consideration the high rank of contemplation in medieval philosophy with its altogether different connotations. And it is curious how frequently Lucretius is the implicit or explicit source. Thus Herder writes about the French Revolution: "We can look upon the French Revolution from the safe port as though we looked upon a shipwreck on the open, alien sea, unless bad fortune should throw us in against our will." And Goethe, asked after the battle of Jena how he had fared, answered with the same image: "I cannot complain. I was like a man who looks from a solid rock down upon the furious sea and who, though unable to assist the shipwrecked, cannot be reached by the breakers, and according to some ancient author this is supposed to be a rather comfortable feeling."39

  As we come to the modern age, the nearer we get to our own time, the less is left—not in the textbooks but in actual experience—of the pre-philosophic assumptions that were actually the midwives of the "awesome" science (McKeon) called metaphysics.

  15. Plato's answer and its echoes

  In Greek philosophy, there exists, however, one answer to our question What makes us think? that has nothing to do with these pre-philosophic assumptions which became so very important for the history of metaphysics and which probably long ago lost their relevance. It is the saying of Plato I have already cited, namely, that the origin of philosophy is Wonder, an answer that in my opinion has lost nothing of its plausibility. For this wonder is in no way connected with the quest for immortality; even in Aristotle's famous interpretation of wonder as aporein (being puzzled on account of ignorance, which can be dispelled by knowledge), there is no mention of athanatizein, the immortalizing activity we know from the Nicomachean Ethics40 and which indeed is entirely Platonic. Plato's remark about wonder occurs rather abruptly (and, so far as I can see, is nowhere repeated in his work) during a discussion of the relativity of sense perceptions. Speaking about something that is "out of order," the passage itself is somewhat out of order, as happens frequently in Plato, where the most telling sentences can easily be isolated and sound out of context, especially when, after getting involved in the logical and other perplexities typical of his century and of which one could rightly say they are dated, he suddenly breaks off discussing them. Here Theaetetus has said that he was "wondering"—in the ordinary sense of being "puzzled"—whereupon Socrates compliments him: "This is the true mark of the philosopher," and never comes back to the issue under consideration. The short passage reads: "For this is chiefly the passion (pathos) of the philosopher, to wonder (thaumazein). There is no other beginning and principle (arche) of philosophy than this one. And I think he [namely Hesiod] was not a bad genealogist who made Iris [the Rainbow, a messenger of the gods] the daughter of Thaumas [the Wonderer]."41 At first glance, this seems merely to say that philosophy as understood by the Ionian school is a child of astronomy; it s
prings from marveling at the miracles of the sky. As the rainbow connecting the sky with the earth brings its message to men, so thinking or philosophy, responding in wonder to the daughter of the Wonderer, connects the earth with the sky.

  Upon closer inspection, these few words hint at much more. The word "Iris," rainbow, also occurs in the Cratylus,42 where Plato derives it "from the verb to tell (eirein), because she was a messenger," whereas the word for "wonder" (thaumazein), which he here divests of the ordinary sense in which Theaetetus had used it by giving its genealogy, occurs regularly in Homer and is itself derived from one of the many Greek verbs for seeing in the sense of "beholding": theāsthai— the same root we met earlier in Pythagoras' theatai, spectators. In Homer, this wonder-struck beholding is usually reserved for men to whom a god appears; it is also used as an adjective for men in the sense of O admirable onel—namely worthy of the admiring wonder we usually reserve for the gods, a godlike man. Moreover, the gods who appeared to men had this peculiarity: they appeared in familiar human disguise and were recognized as divinities only by those whom they approached. The responding wonder, therefore, is not something men can summon up by themselves; the wonder is a pathos, something to be suffered, not acted; in Homer, it is the god who acts, whose appearance men have to endure, from whom they must not run away.

  In other words, what sets men wondering is something familiar and yet normally invisible, and something men are forced to admire. The wonder that is the starting-point of thinking is neither puzzlement nor surprise nor perplexity; it is an admiring wonder. What we marvel at is confirmed and affirmed by admiration which breaks out into speech, the gift of Iris, the rainbow, the messenger from above. Speech then takes the form of praise, a glorification not of a particularly amazing appearance or of the sum total of things in the world, but of the harmonious order behind them which itself is not visible and of which nevertheless the world of appearances gives us a glimpse. "For the appearances are a glimpse of the non-revealed" ("opsis gar tōn adēlōn ta phainomena"), in the words of Anaxagoras.43 Philosophy begins with an awareness of this invisible harmonious order of the kosmos, which is manifest in the midst of the familiar visibilities as though these had become transparent. The philosopher marvels at the "non-visible harmony," which, according to Heraclitus, is "better than the visible" ("harmoniē aphanēs phanerēs kreittōn").44 Another early word for the invisible in the midst of the appearances is physis, nature, which according to the Greeks was the totality of all things that were not man-made and not created by a divine maker but that had come into being by themselves; and of this physis Heraclitus said that "it likes to hide itself,"45 namely behind the appearances.

  I have introduced Heraclitus by way of explication, because Plato himself does not specify what his admiring wonder is directed at. Nor does he say how this original marveling transforms itself into the dialogue of thinking. In Heraclitus, the significance of logos is at least suggested in the following context: Apollo, he says, "the lord of the Delphian oracle" and, we may add, the god of the poets, "does not speak out nor does he conceal but indicates" ("oute legei oute kryptei alia sēmainef ),46 that is, hints at something ambiguously, to be understood only by those who have an understanding of mere hints (the god winkt, as Heidegger translates). Even more tantalizingly suggestive is another fragment: "Bad witnesses are eyes and ears for men if they have barbarian souls,"47 that is, if they do not possess logos— for the Greeks not just speech but the gift of reasoned argument that distinguished them from the barbarians. In short, wonder has led to thinking in words; the experience of wonder at the invisible manifest in the appearances has been appropriated by speech, which at the same time is strong enough to dispel the errors and illusions that our organs for the visible, eyes and ears, are subject to unless thinking comes to their help.

  From this, it should be obvious that the wonder that befalls the philosopher can never concern anything particular but is always aroused by the whole, which, in contrast to the sum total of entities, is never manifest. Heraclitus' harmony comes about through the sounding together of opposites—an effect that can never be the property of any particular sound. This harmony in a way is separate (kechorismenon) from the sounds that produce it, just as the sophon, which one "may not and may call by the name of Zeus,"48 is "set apart from all other things."49 In terms of the Pythagorean parable, it is the beauty of the game of the world, the meaning and meaningfulness of all the particulars acting together. As such this is manifest only to a beholder in whose mind the particular instances and sequences are invisibly united.

  Since Parmenides, the key word for this invisible imperceptible whole implicitly manifest in all that appears has been Being—seemingly the most empty and general, the least meaningful word in our vocabulary. What happens to a man who suddenly turns about to become aware of Being's all-pervasive presence in the world of appearances was described with great precision thousands of years after its first discovery in Greek philosophy. The passage is relatively modern and therefore more insistent on personal, subjective emotions than any Greek text would be, and for that very reason perhaps more persuasive to psychologically trained ears. Coleridge writes:

  Hast thou ever raised thy mind to the consideration of existence, in and by itself, as the mere act of existing? Hast thou ever said to thyself thoughtfully, It isl Heedless in that moment, whether it were a man before thee, or a flower, or a grain of sand,—without reference, in short, to this or that particular mode or form of existence? If thou hast indeed attained to this, thou wilt have felt the presence of a mystery, which must have fixed thy spirit in awe and wonder. The very words,—There is nothing! or,—There was a time, when there was nothing! are self-contradictory. There is that within us which repels the proposition with as full and instantaneous a light, as if it bore evidence against the fact in the right of its own eternity.

  Not to be, then, is impossible: to be, incomprehensible. If thou hast mastered this intuition of absolute existence, thou wilt have learnt likewise, that it was this, and no other, which in the earlier ages seized the nobler minds, the elect among men, with a sort of sacred horror. This it was that first caused them to feel within themselves a something ineffably greater than their own individual nature50

  The Platonic wonder, the initial shock that sends the philosopher on his way, was revived in our own time when Heidegger, in 1929, concluded a lecture entitled "What is Metaphysics?" with the words, already cited, "Why is there anything at all and not, rather, nothing?" and called this "the basic question of metaphysics."51

  The question, expressing the philosopher's shock in modern terms, had been asked before him. It occurs in Leibniz' "Principes de la nature et de la grâce": "Pourquoi il y a plutôt quelque chose que rien?" For since "le rien est plus simple et plus facile que quelque chose,"52 this something must have a sufficient cause for its existence, and this cause in turn must have been caused by something else. Following this train of thought, one finally arrives at the causa sui, at something which is its own cause, so that Leibniz' answer arrives at the ultimate cause, called "God," an answer we already find in Aristotle's "unmoved mover"—the god of the philosophers. It was Kant, of course, who dealt the death blow to that god, and in his words on the subject we can clearly recognize what Plato only hinted at: the uncaused and "unconditioned necessity" our cause-and-effect thinking "so indispensably require[s] as the last bearer of all things, is for human reason the veritable abyss.... We cannot put aside, and yet also cannot endure the thought, that a being, which we represent to ourselves as supreme amongst all possible beings, should, as it were, say to itself: 'I am from eternity to eternity, and outside me there is nothing save what is there through my will, but whence then am IF All support here fails us; and the greatest perfection, no less than the least perfection, is unsubstantial and baseless for the merely speculative reason, which makes not the least effort to retain either the one or the other, and feels indeed no loss in allowing them to vanish entirely."53 What strikes us here a
s specifically modern is that in the restatement of Parmenides' early insight that nothingness is inconceivable, unthinkable, the emphasis has shifted, as it were, from nothingness to Being: Kant nowhere says that the abyss of nothing because of being inconceivable is not, and though he might have said that the antinomies of reason, rousing him from dogmatic slumber, had made him think, he nowhere says that the experience of this abyss—the other side of Plato's wonder-had done so.

  Schelling quoted Kant's words emphatically and it was probably from this passage, rather than from the more casual remark in Leibniz, that he derived his own repeated insistence on this "ultimate question" of all thinking—Why is something at all, why is there not nothing?54 He calls it the "most despairing question."55 This reference to sheer despair, as arising out of thinking itself, occurs in Schelling's late writings, and it is so very significant because the same thought had haunted him earlier, in his youth when he still believed that no more was needed to banish nothingness than "absolute affirmation," which he called "the essence of our soul." By virtue of it "we recognize that non-being is forever impossible," neither knowable nor understandable. And for the young Schelling, this ultimate question—Why is there not nothing, why is there anything at all?—posed by the intellect seized with vertigo at the rim of the abyss—is forever suppressed by the insight that "Being is necessary, [made so] that is, by the absolute affirmation of Being in cognition."56

  All this would suggest a simple return to the position of Parmenides if Schelling had not felt that only the "absolute positing of the idea of God" could guarantee this affirmation, which according to him is "the absolute negation of nothingness": it is "as certain that reason forever negates nothingness, and that nothingness is nothing, as it is certain that reason affirms the All and that God is eternal." Hence, the only "completely valid answer to the question, Why is there not nothing, why is there anything at all? is not the something but the All or God."57 " Reason, unaided by the idea of God, according to "its mere nature," may "posit a Being that is forever," but then, confronting this thought which it is in reason's nature to posit, reason remains as it were "thunderstruck (quasi attonita), paralyzed, unable to move."58 No Iris-like messenger, bringing the gift of speech, and with it the gift of reasoned argument and reasonable response, accompanies the philosophical shock; and the affirmation of Being, clearly corresponding to the element of admiration in Plato's wonder, needs faith in a Creator-God to save human reason from its speechless dizzy glance into the abyss of nothingness.