The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  With both Hobbes and Spinoza the negation of the Will is firmly grounded in their respective philosophies. But we find virtually the same argument in Schopenhauer, whose general philosophy was very nearly the opposite and for whom consciousness or subjectivity was the very essence of Being: like Hobbes, he does not deny Will but denies that Will is free: there is an illusory feeling of freedom when I experience volition; when I deliberate about what to do next, and, rejecting a number of possibilities, finally come to some definite decision, it is "with just as free a will ... as if water spoke to itself: 'I can make high waves ... I can rush down hill ... I can plunge down foaming and gushing ... I can rise freely as a stream of water into the air (...in the fountain)...but I am doing none of these things now, and am voluntarily remaining quiet and clear water in the reflecting pond."43 This kind of argument is best summed up by John Stuart Mill in the passage already quoted: "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" (italics added).44

  What is so striking in these objections raised against the very existence of the faculty is, first of all, that they are invariably raised in terms of the modern notion of consciousness—a notion just as unknown to ancient philosophy as the notion of the Will. Hie Greek synesis—that I can share knowledge with myself (syniēmi) about things to which no one else can testify—is the predecessor more of conscience than of consciousness,45 as is seen when Plato mentions how the memory of the bloody deed haunts the homicide.46

  Next, the same objections could easily be raised, but hardly ever were, against the existence of the faculty of thought. To be sure, Hobbes's reckoning with consequences, if that is to be understood as thinking, is not open to such suspicions, but this power of figuring and calculating ahead coincides, rather, with the willing ego's deliberations about means to an end or with the capacity used in solving riddles and mathematical problems. (Some such equation, clearly, is behind Ryle's refutation of "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.'" In Ryle's own words: "No one ever says such things as that ... he performed five quick and easy volitions and two slow and difficult volitions between midday and lunch-time."47 It cannot be seriously maintained that enduring thought-products, such as Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, could ever be understood in these terms.) The only philosophers I know of who dared doubt the existence of the faculty of thought were Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. The latter in his early thought-experiments held that the thinking ego (what he called the "vorstellendes Subjekt," deriving his terminology from Schopenhauer) could "in the last resort be mere superstition," probably an "empty delusion, but the willing subject exists." In justification of his thesis Wittgenstein reiterates the arguments commonly raised in the seventeenth century against Spinoza's denial of the Will, to wit, "If the Will did not exist, neither would there be ... the bearer of ethics."48 As for Nietzsche, it must be said that he had his doubts about both willing and thinking.

  The disturbing fact that even the so-called voluntarists among the philosophers, those entirely convinced, like Hobbes, of the power of the will, could so easily glide to doubting its very existence may be somewhat clarified by examining the second of our ever-recurring difficulties. What aroused the philosophers' distrust was precisely the inevitable connection with Freedom—to repeat, the notion of an unfree will is a contradiction in terms: "If I must necessarily will, why need I speak of will at all?...Our will would not be will unless it were in our power. Because it is in our power it is free."49 To quote Descartes, whom one may count among the voluntarists: "No one, when he considers himself alone, fails to experience the fact that to will and to be free are the same thing."50

  As I have said more than once, the touchstone of a free act—from the decision to get out of bed in the morning or take a walk in the afternoon to the highest resolutions by which we bind ourselves for the future—is always that we know that we could also have left undone what we actually did. Willing, it appears, is characterized by an infinitely greater freedom than thinking, and—again to repeat—this undeniable fact has never been felt to be an unmixed blessing. Thus we hear from Descartes: "I am conscious of a will so extended as to be subject to no limits....It is free will alone ... which I find to be so great in me that I can conceive no other idea to be more great; it is ... this will that causes me to know that ... I bear the image and similitude of God," and he immediately adds that this experience "consists solely in the fact that ... we act in such a way that we are not in the least conscious that any outside force constrains us [in] the power of choosing to do a thing or choosing not to do it."51

  In so saying, he leaves the door wide open on the one hand to the doubts of his successors and on the other to the attempts of his contemporaries "to make [God's] pre-ordinances harmonize with the freedom of our will."52 Descartes himself, unwilling to become "involved in the great difficulties [that would ensue] if we undertook to reconcile God's foresight and omnipotence with human freedom," explicitly appeals to the beneficial limitations of "our thought [which] is finite" and therefore subject to certain rules, for instance, the axiom of non-contradiction, and the compelling "necessities" of self-evident truth.53

  It is precisely the "lawless" freedom the will seems to enjoy that made even Kant occasionally talk of freedom as perhaps being no more than "a mere thought entity, a phantom of the brain."54 Others, like Schopenhauer, found it easier to reconcile Freedom and Necessity and thus escape the dilemma inherent in the simple fact that man is at the same time a thinking and a willing being—a coincidence fraught with the most serious consequences—by simply declaring: "man does at all times only what he wills, and yet he does this necessarily. But this is due to the fact that he... is what he wills.... Subjectively ... everyone feels that he always does only what he wills. But this merely means that his activity is a pure expression of his very own being. Every natural being, even the lowest, would feel the same, if it could feel."55

  Our third difficulty is linked with that dilemma. In the eyes of philosophers who spoke in the name of the thinking ego, it had always been the curse of contingency that condemned the realm of merely human affairs to a rather low status in the ontological hierarchy. But before the modern age, there had existed—not many but a few—well-trodden escape routes, at least for philosophers. In antiquity, there was the bios theōrētikos: the thinker dwelt in the neighborhood of things necessary and everlasting, partaking in their Being to the extent that this is possible for mortals. In the era of Christian philosophy, there was the vita contemplativa of the monasteries and the universities, but also the consoling thought of divine Providence, joined to the expectation of an after-life when what had seemed contingent and meaningless in this world would become crystal clear, the soul seeing "face to face" instead of "though a glass, darkly," no longer knowing "in part"—for he shall "know even as also [he is] known." Without such hope for a Hereafter, even Kant still deemed human life too miserable, devoid of meaning, to be borne.

  It is obvious that the advancing secularization, or, rather, de-Christianization, of the modern world, coupled, as it was, with an entirely new emphasis on the future, on progress, and therefore on things neither necessary nor sempiternal, would expose men of thought to the contingency of all things human more radically and more mercilessly than ever before. What had been ever since the end of antiquity the "problem of freedom" was now incorporated, as it were, in the haphazardness of history, "full of sound and fury," "a tale told by an idiot ... signifying nothing," to which there corresponded the random character of personal decisions originating in a free will that was guided neither by reason nor by desire. And this old problem reappearing in the dress of the new age, the Age of Progress, which is reaching its end only now in our own time (as Progress rapidly nears the limits given by the human condition on earth), found its pseudo-sol
ution in the nineteenth-century philosophy of history, whose greatest representative worked out an ingenious theory of a hidden Reason and Meaning in the course of world events, directing men's wills in all their contingency toward an ultimate goal they never intended. Once this story is complete—and Hegel seems to have believed that the beginning of the end of the story was coeval with the French Revolution—the backward-directed glance of the philosopher, through the sheer effort of the thinking ego, can internalize and recollect (er-innern) the meaningfulness and necessity of the unfolding movement, so that again he can dwell with what is and cannot not-be. Finally, in other words, the process of thinking coincides once more with authentic Being: thought has purified reality of the merely accidental.

  4. The problem of the new

  If we reconsider the objections raised by philosophers against the Will—against the faculty's existence, against the notion of human freedom implicit in it, and against the contingency adhering to free will, that is, to an act that by definition can also be left undone—it becomes obvious that they apply much less to what tradition knows as liberum arbitrium, the freedom of choice between two or more desirable objects or ways of conduct, than to the Will as an organ for the future and identical with the power of beginning something new. The liberum arbitrium decides between things equally possible and given to us, as it were, in statu nascendi as mere potentialities, whereas a power to begin something really new could not very well be preceded by any potentiality, which then would figure as one of the causes of the accomplished act.

  I have previously mentioned Kant's embarrassment "in dealing with ... a power of spontaneously beginning a series of successive things or states"—for instance, if "I at this moment arise from my chair ... a new series ... has its absolute beginning in this event, although [he adds] as regards time this event is only the continuation of a preceding series."56 What is so very troublesome is the notion of an absolute beginning, for "a series occurring in the world can have only a relatively first beginning, being always preceded by some other state of things," and this is, of course, also true for the person of the thinker inasmuch as I who think never cease to be an appearance among appearances, no matter how successfully I may have withdrawn from them mentally. No doubt the very hypothesis of an absolute beginning goes back to the Biblical doctrine of Creation, as distinct from the Oriental theories of "emanation," according to which pre-existing forces developed and unfolded into a world. But this doctrine is a sufficient reason in our context only if one adds that God's creation is ex nihilo, and of such a creation the Hebrew Bible knows nothing; it is an addition of later speculations.57

  These speculations arose when the Fathers of the Church had already begun to account for the Christian faith in terms of Greek philosophy, that is, when they were confronted with Being, for which the Hebrew language has no word. Logically speaking, it seems rather obvious that an equation of the universe with Being ought to imply "nothingness" as its opposite; still, the transition from Nothing to Something is logically so difficult that one may tentatively suspect that it was the new willing ego which, regardless of doctrines and credos, found the idea of an absolute beginning appropriate to its experience of forming projects. For there is something fundamentally wrong with Kant's example. Only if he, arising from his chair, has something in mind he wishes to do, does this "event" start a "new series"; if this is not the case, if he habitually gets up at this time or if he gets up in order to fetch something he needs for his present occupation, this event is itself "the continuation of a preceding series."

  But let us suppose that this was an oversight and that Kant had clearly in mind the "power of spontaneously beginning" and therefore was concerned about a possible reconciliation of a "new series of acts and states" with the time continuum that this "new series" interrupts: the traditional solution of the problem even at that date would still have been the Aristotelian distinction between potentiality and actuality, as saving the unity of the time concept by assuming that the "new series" was potentially contained in the "preceding series." But the insufficiency of the Aristotelian explanation is evident: Can anybody seriously maintain that the symphony produced by a composer was "possible before it was actual"?58 —unless one means by "possible" no more than that it was clearly not impossible, which of course is entirely different from its having existed in a state of potentiality, waiting for some musician who would take the trouble to make it actual.

  Yet, as Bergson very well knew, there is another side to the matter. In the perspective of memory, that is, looked at retrospectively, a freely performed act loses its air of contingency under the impact of now being an accomplished fact, of having become part and parcel of the reality in which we live. The impact of reality is overwhelming to the point that we are unable to "think it away"; the act appears to us now in the guise of necessity, a necessity that is by no means a mere delusion of consciousness or due only to our limited ability to imagine possible alternatives. This is most obvious in the realm of action, where no deed can be safely undone, but it is also true, though perhaps in a less compelling way, of the countless new objects that human fabrication constantly adds to the world and its civilization, art objects as well as use objects; it is almost as impossible to think away the great art works of our cultural inheritance as to think away the outbreak of the two World Wars or any other events that have decided the very structure of our reality. In Bergson's own words: "By virtue of its sheer factuality, reality throws its shadow behind it into an infinitely distant past; thus it appears to have existed in the mode of potentiality in advance of its own actualization." ("Par le seul fait de s'accomplir, la réalité projette derrière son ombre dans le passé indéfiniment lointain; elle paraît ainsi avoir préexisté, sous forme de possible à sa propre réalisation.")59

  Seen in this perspective, which is the perspective of the willing ego, it is not freedom but necessity that appears as a delusion of consciousness. Bergson's insight seems to me both elementary and highly significant, but may there not be significance, too, in the fact that this observation, despite its simple plausibility, never played any role in the endless discussions of necessity versus freedom? As far as I know, the point was made only once before Bergson. That was by Duns Scotus, the lonely defender of the primacy of the Will over the Intellect and—more than that—of the factor of contingency in everything that is. If there is such a thing as Christian philosophy, then Duns Scotus would have to be recognized not only as "the most important thinker of the Christian Middle Ages"60 but perhaps also as the unique one who did not seek a compromise between the Christian faith and Greek philosophy, and who dared, therefore, to make it a badge of true "Christians [to say] that God acts contingently." "Those who deny that some being is contingent," said Scotus, "should be exposed to torments until they concede that it is possible for them not to be tormented."61

  Whether contingency, for classical philosophy the ultimate of meaninglessness, burst as a reality upon the early centuries of the common era because of Biblical doctrine—which "pitted contingency against necessity, particularity against universality, will against intellect," thus securing "a place for the 'contingent' within philosophy against the latter's original bias"62 —or whether the shattering political experiences of these early centuries had forced wide open the truisms and plausibilities of ancient thinking may be open to doubt. What is not open to doubt is that the original bias against contingency, particularity, and Will—and the predominance accorded to necessity, universality, and Intellect—survived the challenge deep into the modern age. Religious and medieval as well as secular and modern philosophy found many different ways of assimilating the Will, the organ of freedom and the future, to the older order of things. For however we may look at these matters, factually Bergson is quite right when he asserts: "Most philosophers ... are unable ... to conceive of radical novelty and unpredictability.... Even those very few who believed in the liberum arbitrium have reduced it to a simple 'choice' between two or several o
ptions, as though these options were 'possibilities'...and the Will was restricted to 'realizing' one of them. Hence, they still admitted ... that everything is given. They seem never to have had the slightest notion of an entirely new activity.... And such an activity is after all free action."63 No doubt, even today if we listen to a dispute between two philosophers one of whom argues for determinism and the other for freedom, "it will always be the determinist who appears to be right.... [The audience] will always agree that he is simple, clear, and true."64

  Theoretically, the trouble has always been that free will—whether understood as freedom of choice or as the freedom to start something unpredictably new—seems utterly incompatible, not just with divine Providence, but with the law of causality; the Will's freedom can be assumed on the strength, or, rather, the weakness, of interior experience, but it cannot be proved. The implausibility of the assumption or Postulate of Freedom is due to our outward experiences in the world of appearances, where as a matter of fact, Kant notwithstanding, we seldom start a new series. Even Bergson, whose whole philosophy rests on the conviction that "each of us has the immediate knowledge ... of his free spontaneity,"65 admits that "although we are free whenever we are willing to get back into ourselves, it seldom happens that we are willing." And "Free acts are exceptional."66 (Most of our acts are taken care of by habits, just as many of our everyday judgments are taken care of by prejudices.)