The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  18. Romans 7:15.

  19. Encyclopädie, 12.

  20. Of Human Freedom, Gutmann trans., p. 8.

  21. Critique of Pure Reason, B172–B173.

  Two / Willing

  Introduction

  The second volume of The Life of the Mind will be devoted to the faculty of the Will and, by implication, to the problem of Freedom, which, as Bergson said, "has been to the moderns what the paradoxes of the Eleatics were to the ancients." The phenomena we have to deal with are overlaid to an extraordinary extent by a coat of argumentative reasoning, by no means arbitrary and hence not to be neglected but which parts company with the actual experiences of the willing ego in favor of doctrines and theories that are not necessarily interested in "saving the phenomena."

  One reason for these difficulties is very simple: the faculty of the Will was unknown to Greek antiquity and was discovered as a result of experiences about which we hear next to nothing before the first century of the Christian era. The problem for later centuries was to reconcile this faculty with the main tenets of Greek philosophy: men of thought were no longer willing to abandon philosophy altogether and say, with Paul, "we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and folly to Gentiles," and let it go at that. This, as we shall see, only Paul himself was ever prepared to do.

  But the end of the Christian era by no means spells the end of these difficulties. The main strictly Christian difficulty, viz., how to reconcile faith in an all-powerful and omniscient God with the claims of free will, survives in various ways deep into the modem age, where we often meet almost the same kind of argumentation as before. Either free will is found to clash with the law of causality or, later, it can hardly be reconciled with the laws of History, whose meaningfulness depends on progress or a necessary development of the World Spirit These difficulties even persist when all strictly traditional—metaphysical or theological—interests have withered away. John Stuart Mill, for instance, sums up an oft-repeated argument when he says: "Our internal consciousness tells us that we have a power, which the whole outward experience of the human race tells us that we never use." Or, to use the most extreme example, Nietzsche calls "the entire doctrine of the Will the most fateful falsification in psychology hitherto ... essentially invented for the sake of punishment."

  The greatest difficulty faced by every discussion of the Will is the simple fact that there is no other capacity of the mind whose very existence has been so consistently doubted and refuted by so eminent a series of philosophers. The latest is Gilbert Ryle, to whom the Will is an "artificial concept" corresponding to nothing that has ever existed and creating useless riddles like so many of the metaphysical fallacies. Unaware, apparently, of his distinguished predecessors, he sets out to refute "the doctrine that there exists a Faculty ... of the "Will,' and, accordingly, that there occur processes, or operations, corresponding to what it describes as volitions." He is aware of "the fact that Plato and Aristode never mentioned [volitions] in their frequent and elaborate discussions of the nature of the soul and the springs of conduct," because they were still unacquainted with this "special hypothesis [of later times] the acceptance of which rests not on the discovery but on the postulation of [certain] ghostly thrusts."

  It is in the nature of every critical examination of the faculty of the Will that it should be undertaken by "professional thinkers" (Kant's Denker von Gewerbe), and this gives rise to the suspicion that the denunciations of the Will as a mere illusion of consciousness and the refutations of its very existence, which we find supported by almost identical arguments in philosophers of widely differing assumptions, might be due to a basic conflict between the experiences of the thinking ego and those of the willing ego.

  Although it is always the same mind that thinks and wills, as it is the same self that unites body, soul, and mind, it is by no means a matter of course that the thinking ego's evaluation can be trusted to remain unbiased and "objective" when it comes to other mental activities. For the truth of the matter is that the notion of free will serves not only as a necessary postulate of every ethics and every system of laws but is no less an "immediate datum of consciousness" (in the words of Bergson) than the I-think in Kant or the cogito in Descartes, whose existence was hardly ever doubted by traditional philosophy. To anticipate: what aroused the philosophers' distrust of this faculty was its inevitable connection with Freedom: "If I must necessarily will, why need I speak of will at all?" as Augustine put it. The touchstone of a free act is always our awareness that we could also have left undone what we actually did—something not at all true of mere desire or of the appetites, where bodily needs, the necessities of the life process, or the sheer force of wanting something close at hand may override any considerations of either Will or Reason. Willing, it appears, has an infinitely greater freedom than thinking, which even in its freest, most speculative form cannot escape the law of non-contradiction. This undeniable fact has never been felt to be an unmixed blessing. By men of thought, more often than not, it has been felt to be a curse.

  In what follows, I shall take the internal evidence of an I-will as sufficient testimony to the reality of the phenomenon, and since I agree with Ryle—and many others—that this phenomenon and all the problems connected with it were unknown in Greek antiquity, I must accept what Ryle rejects, namely, that this faculty was indeed "discovered" and can be dated. In brief, I shall analyze the Will in terms of its history, and this in itself has its difficulties.

  Are not the human faculties, as distinct from the conditions and circumstances of human life, coeval with the appearance of man on earth? If this were not the case, how could we ever understand the literature and thoughts of bygone ages? To be sure, there is a "history of ideas," and it would be rather easy to trace the idea of Freedom historically: how it changed from being a word indicating a political status—that of a free citizen and not a slave—and a physical fact—that of a healthy man, whose body was not paralyzed but able to obey his mind—into a word indicating an inner disposition by virtue of which a man could feel free when he actually was a slave or unable to move his limbs. Ideas are mental artifacts, and their history presupposes the unchanging identity of man the artificer. We shall return to this problem later. In any event, the fact is that prior to the rise of Christianity we nowhere find any notion of a mental faculty corresponding to the "idea" of Freedom, as die faculty of the Intellect corresponds to truth and the faculty of Reason to things beyond human knowledge, or, as we said here, to Meaning.

  We shall begin our examination of the nature of the willing capability and its function in the life of the mind by investigating the post-classical and pre-modern literature testifying to the mental experiences that caused its discovery as well as to those that the discovery itself caused—a literature covering the period from Paul's Letter to the Romans to Duns Scotus' questioning of Thomas Aquinas' position. But first I shall deal briefly with Aristotle, partly because of "the philosopher" 's decisive influence on medieval thought, and partly because his notion of proairesis, in my opinion a kind of forerunner of the Will, can serve as a paradigmatic example of how certain problems of the soul were raised and answered before the discovery of the Will.

  However, this section—embracing chapters II and III—will be preceded by a rather lengthy preliminary consideration of the arguments and theories which, since the revival of philosophy in the seventeenth century, have overlaid but also reinterpreted many of these authentic experiences. After all, it is with these theories, doctrines, and arguments in mind that we approach our subject.

  The final section will begin with an examination of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's "conversion" to the philosophy of antiquity as a consequence of their re-evaluation and repudiation of the willing faculty. We then shall ask ourselves whether men of action were not perhaps in a better position to come to terms with the problems of the Will than the men of thought dealt with in the first volume of this study. What will be at stake here is the Will as the spring of acti
on, that is, as a "power of spontaneously beginning a series of successive things or states" (Kant). No doubt every man, by virtue of his birth, is a new beginning, and his power of beginning may well correspond to this fact of the human condition. It is in line with these Augustinian reflections that the Will has sometimes, and not only by Augustine, been considered to be the actualization of the principium individuationis. The question is how this faculty of being able to bring about something new and hence to "change the world" can function in the world of appearances, namely, in an environment of factuality which is old by definition and which relentlessly transforms all the spontaneity of its newcomers into the "has been" of facts—fieri; factus sum.

  I. The Philosophers and the Will

  1. Time and mental activities

  I concluded the first volume of The Life of the Mind with certain time speculations. This was an attempt to clarify a very old question, first raised by Plato but never answered by him: Where is the topos noētos, the region of the mind in which the philosopher dwells?1 I reformulated it in the course of the inquiry as: Where are we when we think? To what do we withdraw when we withdraw from the world of appearances, stop all ordinary activities, and start what Parmenides, at the beginning of our philosophical tradition, had so emphatically urged on us: "Look at what, though absent [from the senses], is so reliably present to the mind."2

  1. Notes are on [>].

  Framed in spatial terms, the question received a negative answer. Though known to us only in inseparable union with a body that is at home in the world of appearances by virtue of having arrived one day and knowing that one day it will depart, the invisible thinking ego is, strictly speaking, Nowhere. It has withdrawn from the world of appearances, including its own body, and therefore also from the self, of which it is no longer aware. This to the point that Plato can ironically call the philosopher a man in love with death, and Valéry can say "Tantôt je pense et tantôt je suis " implying that the thinking ego loses all sense of reality and that the real, appearing self does not think. From this it follows that our question—Where are we when we think?—was asked outside the thinking experience, hence was inappropriate.

  When we then decided to inquire into the time experience of the thinking ego, we found our question no longer out of place. Memory, the mind's power of having present what is irrevocably past and thus absent from the senses, has always been the most plausible paradigmatic example of the mind's power to make invisibles present. By virtue of this power,the mind seems to be even stronger than reality; it pits its strength against the inherent futility of everything that is subject to change; it collects and re-collects what otherwise would be doomed to ruin and oblivion. The time region in which this salvage takes place is the Present of the thinking ego, a kind of lasting "todayness" (hodiemus, "of this day," Augustine called God's eternity),3 the "standing now" (nunc stans) of medieval meditation, an "enduring present" (Bergson's présent qui dure),4 or "the gap between past and future," as we called it in explicating Kafka's time parable. But only if we accept the medieval interpretation of that time experience as an intimation of divine eternity are we forced to conclude that not just spatiality but also temporality is provisionally suspended in mental activities. Such an interpretation shrouds our whole mental life in an aura of mysticism and strangely overlooks the very ordinariness of the experience itself. The constitution of an "enduring present" is "the habitual, normal, banal act of our intellect,"5 performed in every kind of reflection, whether its subject matter is ordinary day-to-day occurrences or whether the attention is focused on things forever invisible and outside the sphere of human power. The activity of the mind always creates for itself un présent qui dure, a "gap between past and future."

  (Aristode, it seems, was the first to mention this suspension of time's motion in an enduring present, and this, interestingly enough, in his discussion of pleasure, hédonê, in the tenth book of the Nicomachean Ethics. "Pleasure," he says, "is not in time. For what takes place in a Now is a whole"—there is no motion. And since according to him the activity of thinking, "marvelous in purity and certainty," was the "most pleasant" of all activities, clearly he was talking about the motionless Now,6 the later nunc stans. For him, the most sober of the great thinkers, this seems to have been no less a moment of rapture than it was for the medieval mystics except, of course, that Aristotle would have been the last to indulge in hysterical extravagances.)

  I have said before that mental activities, and especially the activity of thinking, are always "out of order" when seen from the perspective of the unbroken continuity of our business in the world of appearances. There the chain of "nows" rolls on relentlessly, so that the present is understood as precariously binding past and future together: the moment we try to pin it down, it is either a "no more" or a "not yet." From that perspective, the enduring present looks like an extended "now"—a contradiction in terms—as though the thinking ego were capable of stretching the moment out and thus producing a kind of spatial habitat for itself. But this seeming spatiality of a temporal phenomenon is an error, caused by the metaphors we traditionally use in terminology dealing with the phenomenon of Time. As Bergson first discovered, they are all terms "borrowed from spatial language. If we want to reflect on time, it is space that responds." Thus "duration is always expressed as extension,"7 and the past is understood as something lying behind us, the future as lying somewhere ahead of us. The reason for preferring the spatial metaphor is obvious: for our everyday business in the world, on which the thinking ego may reflect but in which it is not involved, we need time measurements, and we can measure time only by measuring spatial distances. Even the common distinction between spatial juxtaposition and temporal succession presupposes an extended space through which the succession must occur.

  Such preliminary and by no means satisfactory considerations of the time concept seem to me necessary for our discussion of the willing ego because the Will, if it exists at all—and an uncomfortably large number of great philosophers who never doubted the existence of reason or mind held that the Will was nothing but an illusion—is as obviously our mental organ for the future as memory is our mental organ for the past. (The strange ambivalence of the English language, in which "will" as an auxiliary designates the future whereas the verb "to will" indicates volitions, properly speaking, testifies to our uncertainties in these matters.) In our context, the basic trouble with the Will is that it deals not merely with things that are absent from the senses and need to be made present through the mind's power of re-presentation, but with things, visibles and invisibles, that have never existed at all.

  The moment we turn our mind to the future, we are no longer concerned with "objects" but with projects, and it is not decisive whether they are formed spontaneously or as anticipated reactions to future circumstances. And just as the past always presents itself to the mind in the guise of certainty, the future's main characteristic is its basic uncertainty, no matter how high a degree of probability prediction may attain. In other words, we are dealing with matters that never were, that are not yet, and that may well never be. Our Last Will and Testament, providing for the only future of which we can be reasonably certain, namely our own death, shows that the Will's need to will is no less strong than Reason's need to think; in both instances the mind transcends its own natural limitations, either by asking unanswerable questions or by projecting itself into a future which, for the willing subject, will never be.

  Aristode laid the foundations for philosophy's attitude toward the Will, and throughout the centuries their resiliency has withstood the most momentous tests and challenges. According to Aristotle,8 all matters that may be or may not be, that have happened but may not have happened, are by chance, kata symbēbekos—or, in the Latin translation, accidental or contingent—as distinguished from what necessarily is as it is, what is and cannot not be. This second, which he called the "hypokeimenon," lies below what is added by chance, i.e., whatever does not belong to the very essence—as
color is added to objects whose essence is independent of these "secondary qualities." Attributes that may or may not attach to what underlies them—their substratum or substance (the Latin translations of hypokeimenon)—are accidental.

  There can hardly be anything more contingent than willed acts, which—on the assumption of free will—could all be defined as acts about which I know that I could as well have left them undone. A will that is not free is a contradiction in terms—unless one understands the faculty of volition as a mere auxiliary executive organ for whatever either desire or reason has proposed. In the framework of these categories, everything that happens in the realm of human affairs is accidental or contingent ("prakton d'esti to endechomenon kaialiōs echein," "what is brought into being by action is that which could also be otherwise"9 ): Aristotle's very words already indicate the realm's low ontological status—a status never seriously challenged till Hegel's discovery of Meaning and Necessity in History.

  Within the sphere of human activities, Aristotle admitted one important exception to this rule, namely, making or fabrication— poiein, as distinct from prattein, acting or praxis. To use Aristotle's example, the craftsman who makes a "brazen sphere" joins together matter and form, brass and sphere, both of which existed before he began his work, and produces a new object to be added to a world consisting of man-made things and of things that have come into being independent of human doings. The human product, this "compound of matter and form"—for instance, a house made of wood according to a form pre-existing in the craftsman's mind (rums)—clearly was not made out of nothing, and so was understood by Aristotle to pre-exist "potentially" before it was actualized by human hands. This notion was derived from the mode of being peculiar to the nature of living things, where everything that appears grows out of something that contains the finished product potentially, as the oak exists potentially in the acorn and the animal in the semen.