The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  He has two antagonists; the first presses him from behind, from his origin. The second blocks the road in front of him. He gives battle to both. Actually, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment—and this, it must be admitted, would require a night darker than any night has ever been yet—he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other.

  For me, this parable describes the time sensation of the thinking ego. It analyzes poetically our "inner state" in regard to time, of which we are aware when we have withdrawn from the appearances and find our mental activities recoiling characteristically upon themselves—cogito me cogitare, nolo me velle, and so on. The inner time sensation arises when we are not entirely absorbed by the absent non-visibles we are thinking about but begin to direct our attention onto the activity itself. In this situation past and future are equally present precisely because they are equally absent from our sense; thus the no-longer of the past is transformed by virtue of the spatial metaphor into something lying behind us and the not-yet of the future into something that approaches us from ahead (the German Zukunft, like the French avenir, means, literally What comes toward). In Kafka, this scene is a battleground where the forces of past and future clash with each other. Between them we find the man Kafka calls "He," who, if he wants to stand his ground at all, must give battle to both forces. The forces are "his" antagonists; they are not just opposites and would hardly fight with each other without "him" standing between them and making a stand against them; and even if such an antagonism were somehow inherent in the two and they could fight each other without "him," they would have long ago neutralized and destroyed each other, since as forces they clearly are equally powerful.

  In other words, the time continuum, everlasting change, is broken up into the tenses past, present, future, whereby past and future are antagonistic to each other as the no-longer and the not-yet only because of the presence of man, who himself has an "origin," his birth, and an end, his death, and therefore stands at any given moment between them; this in-between is called the present. It is the insertion of man with his limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer change—which we can conceive of cyclically as well as in the form of rectilinear motion without ever being able to conceive of an absolute beginning or an absolute end—into time as we know it.

  This parable in which two of time's tenses, the past and the future, are understood as antagonistic forces that crash into the present Now, sounds very strange to our ears, whichever time concept we may happen to hold. The extreme parsimony of Kafka's language, in which for the sake of the fable's realism every actual reality that could have engendered the thought-world is eliminated, may cause it to sound stranger than the thought itself requires. I shall therefore use a curiously related story of Nietzsche's in the heavily allegorical style of Thus Spake Zarathustra. It is much easier to understand because it concerns, as its tide says, merely a "Vision" or a "Riddle."11 The allegory begins with Zarathustra's arrival at a gateway. The gateway, like every gateway, has an entrance and an exit, that is, can be seen as the meeting-place of two roads.

  Two paths meet here; no one has yet followed either to its end. This long lane stretches back for an eternity. And the other long lane out there, that is another eternity. They contradict each other, these roads; they offend each other face to face—and it is here, at this gateway, that they come together. The name of the gateway is inscribed above: "Now" ["Augenblick"].... Behold this Now! From this gateway Now, a long eternal lane leads backward; behind us lies an eternity [and another lane leads forward into an eternal future].

  Heidegger, who interprets the passage in his Nietzsche,12 observes that this view is not the view of the beholder but only that of the man who stands in the gateway; for the onlooker, time passes in the way we are used to think of it, in a succession of nows where one thing always succeeds another. There is no meeting-place; there are not two lanes or roads, there is only one. "The clash is produced only for the one who himself is the now.... Whoever stands in the Now is turning in both directions: for him Past and Future run against each other." And, summing up in the context of Nietzsche's doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, Heidegger says: "This is the authentic content of the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, that Eternity is in the Now, that the Moment is not the futile Now which it is only for the onlooker, but the clash of Past and Future." (You have the same thought in Blake—"Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/And eternity in an hour.")

  Returning to Kafka, we should remember that all these instances are dealing not with doctrines or theories but with thoughts related to the experiences of the thinking ego. Seen from the viewpoint of a continuously flowing everlasting stream, the insertion of man, fighting in both directions, produces a rupture which, by being defended in both directions, is extended to a gap, the present seen as the fighter's battleground. This battleground for Kafka is the metaphor for man's home on earth. Seen from the viewpoint of man, at each single moment inserted and caught in the middle between his past and his future, both aimed at the one who is creating his present, the battleground is an in-between, an extended Now on which he spends his life. The present, in ordinary life the most futile and slippery of the tenses—when I say "now" and point to it, it is already gone—is no more than the clash of a past, which is no more, with a future, which is approaching and not yet there. Man lives in this in-between, and what he calls the present is a life-long fight against the dead weight of the past, driving him forward with hope, and the fear of a future (whose only certainty is death), driving him backward toward "the quiet of the past" with nostalgia for and remembrance of the only reality he can be sure of.

  It should not unduly alarm us that this time construct is totally different from the time sequence of ordinary life, where the three tenses smoothly follow each other and time itself can be understood in analogy to numerical sequences, fixed by the calendar, according to which the present is today, the past begins with yesterday, and the future begins tomorrow. Here, too, the present is surrounded by past and future inasmuch as it remains the fixed point from which we take our bearings, looking back or looking forward. That we can shape the everlasting stream of sheer change into a time continuum we owe not to time itself but to the continuity of our business and our activities in the world, in which we continue what we started yesterday and hope to finish tomorrow. In other words, the time continuum depends on the continuity of our everyday life, and the business of everyday life, in contrast to the activity of the thinking ego—always independent of the spatial circumstances surrounding it—is always spatially determined and conditioned. It is due to this thoroughgoing spatiality of our ordinary life that we can speak plausibly of time in spatial categories, that the past can appear to us as something lying "behind" us and the future as lying "ahead."

  Kafka's time parable does not apply to man in his everyday occupations but only to the thinking ego, to the extent that it has withdrawn from the business of everyday life. The gap between past and future opens only in reflection, whose subject matter is what is absent—either what has already disappeared or what has not yet appeared. Reflection draws these absent "regions" into the mind's presence; from that perspective the activity of thinking can be understood as a fight against time itself. It is only because "he" thinks, and therefore is no longer carried along by the continuity of everyday life in a world of appearances, that past and future manifest themselves as pure entities, so that "he" can become aware of a no-longer that pushes him forward and a not-yet that drives him back.

  Kafka's tale is, of course, couched in
metaphorical language, and its images, drawn from everyday life, are meant as analogies, without which, as has already been indicated, mental phenomena cannot be described at all. And that always presents difficulties of interpretation. The specific difficulty here is that the reader must be aware that the thinking ego is not the self as it appears and moves in the world, remembering its own biographical past, as though "he" were d la recherche du temps perdu or planning his future. It is because the thinking ego is ageless and nowhere that past and future can become manifest to it as such, emptied, as it were, of their concrete content and liberated from all spatial categories. What the thinking ego senses as "his" dual antagonists are time itself, and the constant change it implies, the relentless motion that transforms all Being into Becoming, instead of letting it be, and thus incessantly destroys its being present. As such, time is the thinking ego's greatest enemy because—by virtue of the mind's incarnation in a body whose internal motions can never be immobilized—time inexorably and regularly interrupts the immobile quiet in which the mind is active without doing anything.

  This final meaning of the parable comes to the fore in the concluding sentence, when "he," situated in the time gap, which is an immovable present, a nunc stans, dreams of the unguarded moment when time will have exhausted its force; then quiet will settle down on the world, not an eternal quiet but just lasting long enough to give "him" the chance of jumping out of the fighting line to be promoted to the position of umpire, the spectator and judge outside the game of life, to whom the meaning of this time span between birth and death can be referred because "he" is not involved in it.

  What are this dream and this region but the old dream Western metaphysics has dreamt from Parmenides to Hegel, of a timeless region, an eternal presence in complete quiet, lying beyond human clocks and calendars altogether, the region, precisely, of thought? And what is the "position of umpire," the desire for which prompts the dream, but the seat of Pythagoras' spectators, who are "the best" because they do not participate in the struggle for fame and gain, are disinterested, uncommitted, undisturbed, intent only on the spectacle itself? It is they who can find out its meaning and judge the performance.

  Without doing too much violence to Kafka's magnificent story, one may perhaps go a step further. The trouble with Kafka's metaphor is that by jumping out of the fighting line "he" jumps out of this world altogether and judges from outside though not necessarily from above. Moreover, if it is the insertion of man that breaks up the indifferent flow of everlasting change by giving it an aim, namely, himself, the being who fights it, and if through that insertion the indifferent time stream is articulated into what is behind him, the past, what is ahead of him, the future, and himself, the fighting present, then it follows that man's presence causes the stream of time to deflect from whatever its original direction or (assuming a cyclical movement) ultimate non-direction may have been. The deflection seems inevitable because it is not just a passive object that is inserted into the stream, to be tossed about by its waves that go sweeping over his head, but a fighter who defends his own presence and thus defines what otherwise might be indifferent to him as "his" antagonists: the past, which he can fight with the help of the future; the future, which he fights supported by the past.

  Without "him," there would be no difference between past and future, but oply everlasting change. Or else these forces would clash head on and annihilate each other. But thanks to the insertion of a fighting presence, they meet at an angle, and the correct image would then have to be what the physicists call a parallelogram of forces. The advantage of this image is that the region of thought would no longer have to be situated beyond and above the world and human time; the fighter would no longer have to jump out of the fighting line in order to find the quiet and the stillness necessary for thinking. "He" would recognize that "his" fighting has not been in vain, since the battleground itself supplies the region where "he" can rest when "he" is exhausted. In other words, the location of the thinking ego in time would be the in-between of past and future, the present, this mysterious and slippery now, a mere gap in time, toward which nevertheless the more solid tenses of past and future are directed insofar as they denote that which is no more and that which is not yet. That they are at all, they obviously owe to man, who has inserted himself between them and established his presence there. Let me briefly follow the implications of the corrected image.

  Ideally, the action of the two forces that form our parallelogram should result in a third force, the resultant diagonal whose origin would be the point at which the forces meet and upon which they act. The diagonal would remain on the same plane and not jump out of the dimension of the forces of time, but it would in one important respect differ from the forces whose result it is. The two antagonistic forces of past and future are both indefinite as to their origin; seen from the viewpoint of the present in the middle, the one comes from an infinite past and the other from an infinite future. But though they have no known beginning, they have a terminal ending, the point at which they meet and clash, which is the present. The diagonal force, on the contrary, has a definite origin, its starting-point being the clash of the two other forces, but it would be infinite with respect to its ending since it has resulted from the concerted action of two forces whose origin is infinity. This diagonal force, whose origin is known, whose direction is determined by past and future, but which exerts its force toward an undetermined end as though it could reach out into infinity, seems to me a perfect metaphor for the activity of thought.

  If Kafka's "he" were able to walk along this diagonal, in perfect equidistance from the pressing forces of past and future, he would not, as the parable demands, have jumped out of the fighting line to be above and beyond the melee. For this diagonal, though pointing to some infinity, is limited, enclosed, as it were, by the forces of past and future, and thus protected against the void; it remains bound to and is rooted in the present—an entirely human present though it is fully actualized only in the thinking process and lasts no longer than this process lasts. It is the quiet of the Now in the time-pressed, time-tossed existence of man; it is somehow, to change the metaphor, the quiet in the center of a storm which, though totally unlike the storm, still belongs to it. In this gap between past and future, we find our place in time when we think, that is, when we are sufficiently removed from past and future to be relied on to find out their meaning, to assume the position of "umpire," of arbiter and judge over the manifold, never-ending affairs of human existence in the world, never arriving at a final solution to their riddles but ready with ever-new answers to the question of what it may be all about.

  To avoid misunderstanding: the images I am using here to indicate, metaphorically and tentatively, the location of thought can be valid only within the realm of mental phenomena. Applied to historical or biographical time, these metaphors cannot possibly make sense; gaps in time do not occur there. Only insofar as he thinks, and that is insofar as he is not, according to Valéry, does man—a "He," as Kafka so rightly calls him, and not a "somebody"—in the full actuality of his concrete being, live in this gap between past and future, in this present which is timeless.

  The gap, though we hear about it first as a nunc stans, the "standing now" in medieval philosophy, where it served, in the form of nunc aetemitatis, as model and metaphor for divine eternity,13 is not a historical datum; it seems to be coeval with the existence of man on earth. Using a different metaphor, we call it the region of the spirit, but it is perhaps rather the path paved by thinking, the small inconspicuous track of non-time beaten by the activity of thought within the time-space given to natal and mortal men. Following that course, the thought-trains, remembrance and anticipation, save whatever they touch from the ruin of historical and biographical time. This small non-time space in the very heart of time, unlike the world and the culture into which we are born, cannot be inherited and handed down by tradition, although every great book of thought points to it somewhat cryptically—as we found
Heraclitus saying of the notoriously cryptic and unreliable Delphic oracle: "oute le gei, oute kryptei alia'sémainei" ("it does not say and it does not hide, it intimates").

  Each new generation, every new human being, as he becomes conscious of being inserted between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave anew the path of thought. And it is after all possible, and seems to me likely, that the strange survival of great works, their relative permanence throughout thousands of years, is due to their having been born in the small, inconspicuous track of non-time which their authors' thought had beaten between an infinite past and an infinite future by accepting past and future as directed, aimed, as it were, at themselves—as their predecessors and successors, their past and their future—thus establishing a present for themselves, a kind of timeless time in which men are able to create timeless works with which to transcend their own finiteness.

  This timelessness, to be sure, is not eternity; it springs, as it were, from the clash of past and future, whereas eternity is the boundary concept that is unthinkable because it indicates the collapse of all temporal dimensions. The temporal dimension of the nunc stans experienced in the activity of thinking gathers the absent tenses, the not-yet and the no-more, together into its own presence. This is Kant's "land of pure intellect" (Land des reinen Verstandes), "an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits," and "surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean," the sea of everyday life.14 And though I do not think that this is "the land of truth," it certainly is the only domain where the whole of one's life and its meaning—which remains ungraspable for mortal men (nemo ante mortem beatus esse did potest), whose existence, in distinction from all other things which begin to be in the emphatic sense when they are completed, terminates when it is no more—where this ungraspable whole can manifest itself as the sheer continuity of the I-am, an enduring presence in the midst of the world's ever-changing transitoriness. It is because of this experience of the thinking ego that the primacy of the present, the most transitory of the tenses in the world of appearances, became an almost dogmatic tenet of philosophical speculation.