The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  Wherever philosophy is understood as the "science" that deals with the mind sheerly as consciousness—where therefore the question of reality can be left in suspense, bracketed out altogether—we encounter in fact the old Stoic position. Only missing is the original motive for making thought a mere instrument which does its business at the bidding of the will as master. In our context, the point is that this bracketing of reality is possible, and not because of the force of will power but because of the very nature of thinking. If one may count Epictetus among the philosophers, it is because he discovered that consciousness makes it possible for mental activities to recoil upon themselves.

  If while perceiving an object outside myself I decide to concentrate on my perception, on the act of seeing instead of the seen object, it is as if I lost the original object, because it loses its impact upon me. I have, so to speak, changed the subject—instead of the tree I now deal merely with the perceived tree, that is, with what Epictetus calls an "impression." This has the great advantage that I am no longer absorbed by the perceived object, something outside myself; the seen tree is inside me, invisible to the outside world as though it had never been a sense-object. The point here is that the "seen tree" is not a thought-thing but an "impression." It is not something absent that needed memory to store it up for the de-sensing process that prepares the mind's objects for thinking and is always preceded by experience in the world of appearances. The seen tree is "inside" me in its full sensory presence, the tree itself deprived only of its realness, an image and not an after-thought about trees. The trick discovered by Stoic philosophy is to use the mind in such a way that reality cannot touch its owner even when he has not withdrawn from it; instead of withdrawing mentally from everything that is present and close at hand, he has drawn every appearance inside himself, and his "consciousness" becomes a full substitute for the outside world presented as impression or image.

  It is at this moment that consciousness indeed undergoes a decisive change: it is no longer the silent self-awareness that accompanies all my acts and thoughts and guarantees my identity, the simple I-am-I (nor is it a question here of the strange difference that inserts itself into the core of this identity, which we shall come to later, an insertion peculiar to mental activities because of their recoil upon themselves). Since I am no longer absorbed by an object given to my senses (even though this object, unchanged in its "essential" structure, remains present as an object of consciousness—what Husserl called the "intentional object"), I myself, as sheer consciousness, emerge as an entirely new entity. This new entity can exist in the world in complete independence and sovereignty and yet seemingly remain in possession of this world, namely, of its sheer "essence," stripped of its "existential" character, of its realness that could touch and threaten me in my own. I have become I-for-myself in an emphatic way, finding in myself everything that was originally given as "alien" reality. It is not so much the mind as this monstrously enlarged consciousness that offers an ever-present, seemingly safe refuge from reality.

  This bracketing of reality—getting rid of it by treating it as though it were nothing but a mere "impression"—has remained one of the great temptations of the "professional thinkers," till Hegel, one of the greatest of them, went even further and built his philosophy of the World Spirit on the experiences of the thinking ego: reinterpreting this ego on the model of consciousness, he carried the whole world into consciousness as though it were essentially nothing but a mental phenomenon.

  The efficiency, for the philosopher, of turning away from the world into the self is beyond doubt. Existentially speaking, Parmenides was wrong when he said that only Being manifests itself in, and is the same as, thinking. Non-being is also thinkable if the will commands the mind. Its force of withdrawal is then perverted into an annihilating power, and nothingness becomes a full substitute for reality, because nothingness brings relief. The relief, of course, is unreal; it is merely psychological, a soothing of anxiety and fear. I still doubt that there ever was anybody who remained master of his "impressions" when roasted in the Phalarian Bull.

  Epictetus, like Seneca, lived under the rule of Nero, that is, under rather desperate conditions, though he himself, unlike Seneca, was scarcely persecuted. But over a hundred years earlier, during the last century of the republic, Cicero, well versed in Greek philosophy, had discovered the thought-trains by which one could take one's way out of the world. He found that such thoughts, by no means as extreme or as carefully elaborated as in Epictetus, were likely to offer comfort and help in the world as it then was (and, of course, always is, more or less). Men who could teach this way of thinking were highly esteemed in Roman literary circles; Lucretius calls Epicurus—who more than two hundred years after his death finally got a pupil worthy of him—"a god" because "he was the first to invent a way of life which is now called wisdom and through his art rescued life from such storms and so much darkness."79 For our purposes, however, Lucretius is not such a good example; he does not insist on thinking but on knowing. Knowledge acquired by reason will dispel ignorance and thus destroy the greatest evil—fear, whose source is superstition. A more appropriate example is Cicero's famous "Dream of Scipio."

  To understand how extraordinary this concluding chapter of Cicero's Republic actually is and how strange its thoughts must have sounded to Roman ears, we must briefly recall the general background against which it was written. Philosophy had found a kind of foster home in Rome during the last century before Christ, and in that thoroughly political society it had first of all to prove that it was good for something. In the Tusculan Disputations, we find Cicero's first answer: it was a question of making Rome more beautiful and more civilized. Philosophy was a proper occupation for educated men when they had retired from public life and had no more important things to worry about. There was nothing essential about philosophizing. Nor did it have to do with the divine; to the Romans, founding and conserving political communities were the activities most closely resembling those of the gods. Nor had it any connection with immortality. Immortality was human as well as divine, but was not the property of individual men, "for whom death is not only necessary but frequently desirable." By contrast, it was definitely the potential property of human communities: "If a commonwealth (civitas) is destroyed and extinguished, it is as though—to compare small things with great—this whole world were to perish and collapse."80 For communities, death is neither necessary nor ever desirable; it comes only as a punishment, "for a community ought to be so constituted that it be eternal."81 All this is from the treatise that finishes with Scipio's Dream—hence, Cicero, though old now and disappointed, had clearly not changed his mind. As a matter of fact, nothing even in his Republic itself prepares us for the Dream of Scipio at the end—except the lamentations of Book 5: "Only in words and because of our vices, and for no other reasons, do we still retain and keep the public thing [the res publico, the subject matter of the treatise]; the thing itself we have lost long since."82

  And then comes the dream.83 Scipio Africanus, the victor of Carthage, relates a dream he had shortly before he destroyed the city. The dream showed him a hereafter where he met an ancestor who told him he would destroy Carthage and warned him that after the destruction of the city he would have to restore the public thing in Rome by assuming the supreme authority of Dictator, if only he could escape being assassinated—which, it turned out, he could not. (Cicero meant to say that Scipio might have been able to save the republic.) And in order to do the job properly, to summon up the necessary courage, he is told that he should hold (sic habeto) the following to be true: Men who have preserved the patria are certain to find their place in heaven and be blessed with eternal time. "For the highest god who governs the world likes nothing better than the assemblies and the intercourse of men which are called commonwealths; their governors and conservators return to heaven after having left this world. Their job on earth is to stand guard over the earth." This, of course, does not imply a Christian promise of resu
rrection in a hereafter; and although the citation of divine wishes is still in the vein of Roman traditions, there sounds an ominous note: it is as though, failing the promise of such a reward, men might no longer want to do what the public thing demands of them.

  For—and this is essential—the rewards of this world, Scipio's ancestor informs him, are in no way sufficient to compensate you for your labors. They are insubstantial and unreal if you think about them from the right perspective: high up in heaven, Scipio is invited to look down on the earth, and the earth appears so small that "he was pained to see our empire as a mere dot." Whereupon he is told: if the earth appears small to you from here, then always look up to the sky so that you may be able to despise human matters.

  For what kind of fame is it that you may be able to attain in the conversation of men or what kind of glory among them? Don't you see how narrow the space is in which glory and fame reside? And those who speak about us today, how long will they talk? And even if there were reason to place our trust in tradition and the memory of future generations, one day there will be natural catastrophes— floods or fire—so that we cannot obtain a long-lasting fame, let alone an eternal one. If you raise your eyes you will see how futile all this is; fame was never eternal, and the oblivion of eternity extinguishes it.

  I have given the gist of this passage at some length to make clear how much these proposed thought-trains stand in open contradiction to what Cicero, in common with other educated Romans, had always believed in and had expressed even in the same book. In our context, I wanted to offer an example (and an eminent one, perhaps the first recorded in intellectual history) of how certain trains of thought actually aim at thinking oneself out of the world, and by means of relativization. In relation to the universe, the earth is but a dot; what does it matter what happens on her? In relation to the immensity of time, centuries are but moments, and oblivion will finally cover everything and everybody; what does it matter what men do? In relation to death, the same for all, everything specific and distinguishing loses its weight; if there is no hereafter—and life after death for Cicero is not an article of faith but a moral hypothesis—whatever you do or suffer does not matter. Here thinking means following a sequence of reasoning that will lift you to a viewpoint outside the world of appearances as well as outside your own life. Philosophy is called upon to compensate for the frustrations of politics and, more generally, of life itself.

  This is the mere beginning of a tradition that culminated philosophically in Epictetus and reached a climax of intensity about five hundred years later, at the end of the Roman Empire. Boethius' On the Consolation of Philosophy, one of the most popular books throughout the Middle Ages and hardly read by anyone today, was written in a condition of extremity of which Cicero had no premonition. Boethius, a noble Roman, had fallen from the height of fortune, found himself in jail, and was awaiting his execution. Because of that setting, the book has been likened to the Phaedo— a rather strange analogy: Socrates in the midst of his friends after a trial in which he had been permitted to speak at length in his own defense, awaiting an easy, painless death, and Boethius jailed without a hearing, absolutely alone after the death sentence has been pronounced in a mock trial at which he was not even present, much less given the opportunity to defend himself, and now waiting for execution by slow and abominable tortures. Although he is a Christian, it is Philosophy and neither God nor Christ that comes to console him; and although, while still in high office he had spent his "secret leisure" in studying and translating Plato and Aristotle, he consoles himself with typically Ciceronian and also Stoic thought-trains. Except that what was mere relativization in Scipio's dream is now turned into violent annihilation. The "immense spaces of eternity" to which in duress you must direct your mind annihilate reality as it exists for mortals; the ever-changing nature of Fortune annihilates all pleasures, for even if you enjoy what Fortune has given you (riches, honor, fame), you are in constant fear of losing it. Fear annihilates all happiness. Everything you unthinkingly believe to exist does not exist once you begin to think about it—that is what Philosophy, the goddess of consolation, tells him. And here the question of evil, which is hardly touched upon by Cicero, comes up. The thought-train concerning evil, still rather primitive in Boethius, already contains all the elements we find later in a much more sophisticated and complex form throughout the Middle Ages. It runs thus: God is the final cause of everything that is; God as the "highest good" cannot be the cause of evil; everything that is must have a cause; since there are only apparent causes of evil but no ultimate cause, evil does not exist. The wicked ones, he is told by Philosophy, not only are not powerful, they are not. What you unthinkingly consider evil has its place in the order of the universe, and insofar as it is, it is necessarily good. Its bad aspects are an illusion of the senses which you can get rid of by thinking. It is old Stoic advice: What you negate by thought—and thought is in your power—cannot affect you. Thinking makes it unreal. Immediately, of course, we are reminded of Epictetus' glorification of what today would be called will power; and undeniably there is an element of willing in this kind of thinking. To think along these lines means to act upon yourself—the only action left when all acting in the world has become futile.

  What is so very striking about this thinking of late antiquity is that it is centered exclusively on the self. To that, John Adams, living in a world in his day not completely out of joint, had an answer: "A death bed, it is said, shows the emptiness of titles. That may be. [However]...shall laws and government, which regulate sublunary things, be neglected because they appear baubles at the hour of death?"84

  I have dealt with two sources from which thinking as we know it historically has sprung, the one Greek, the other Roman, and they are different to the point of being opposites. On the one hand, admiring wonder at the spectacle into which man is born and for whose appreciation he is so well equipped in mind and body; on the other, the awful extremity of having been thrown into a world whose hostility is overwhelming, where fear is predominant and from which man tries his utmost to escape. There are numerous indications that this latter experience was by no means alien to the Greeks. Sophocles' "Not to be born surpasses every logos; second-best by far is to go as swiftly as possible whence we came"85 seems to have been the poet's variation on a proverbial saying. The remarkable fact is that, so far as I know, this mood is nowhere mentioned as a source of Greek thought; perhaps even more remarkable, it has nowhere produced any great philosophy—unless one wants to count Schopenhauer among the great thinkers. But although the Greek and Roman mentalities were worlds apart and though the chief fault of textbook history of philosophy is smoothing out such sharp distinctions—till it sounds as if everybody somehow said vaguely the same thing—it is also true that the two mentalities do have things in common.

  In both cases, thinking leaves the world of appearances. Only because thinking implies withdrawal can it be used as an instrument of escape. Moreover, as has already been emphasized, thinking implies an unawareness of the body and of the self and puts in their place the experience of sheer activity, more gratifying, according to Aristode, than the satisfaction of all the other desires, since for every other pleasure we depend on something or somebody else.86 Thinking is the only activity that needs nothing but itself for its exercise. "A generous man needs money to perform generous acts ... and a man of self-control needs the opportunity of temptation."87 Every other activity of high or low rank has something to overcome outside itself. This is true even of the performing arts, such as flute-playing, whose end and purpose is in the exercise itself—to say nothing of productive works, which are undertaken for their result and not for themselves and where happiness, the satisfaction of a job well done, comes after the activity itself has come to an end. The frugality of philosophers has always been proverbial, and Aristotle mentions this: "a man engaged in theoretical activity has no needs ... and many things are only a hindrance to it. Only insofar as he is a human being ... will he
need such things for the business of being human [anthrōpeuesthai]"—having a body, living together with other men, and so on. In the same vein, Democritus recommends abstinence for thinking: it teaches how the logos derives its pleasures from itself (auton ex heautou).88

  The unawareness of the body in the thinking experience combined with the sheer pleasure of the activity explains better than anything else not only the soothing, consoling effects certain thought-trains had on the men of late antiquity but also their curiously extreme theories of the power of mind over body—theories clearly refuted by common experience. Gibbon writes in his comments on Boethius: "Such topics of consolation, so obvious, so vague, or so abstruse, are-ineffectual to subdue the feelings of human nature," and the final victory of Christianity, which offered these "topics" of philosophy as literal facts and sure promises, proves how right Gibbon was.89 He added: "Yet the sense of misfortune may be diverted by the labour of thought," and he hinted at least at what actually is the case, namely, that fear for the body disappears as long as the "labour of thought" lasts, not because the contents of thought can overcome fear but because the thinking activity makes you unaware of having a body and can even overcome the sensations of minor discomforts. The inordinate strength of this experience may elucidate the otherwise rather strange historical fact that the ancient body-mind dichotomy with its strong hostility to the body could be adopted virtually intact by the Christian creed, which was based after all on the dogma of the incarnation (the Word become Flesh) and on belief in bodily resurrection, that is, on doctrines that should have spelled the end of the body-mind dichotomy and its unsolvable riddles.