The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  It is appropriate because the willing ego when it forms its projects does indeed live for the future. In Hegel's famous words, the reason "the present [the Now] cannot resist the future" is by no means the inexorability with which every today is followed by a tomorrow (for this tomorrow, if not projected and mastered by the Will, could just as well be a mere repetition of what went before—as indeed it frequently is); the today in its very essence is threatened only by the mind's interference, which negates it and, by virtue of the Will, summons up the absent not-yet, mentally canceling the present, or, rather, looking upon the present as that ephemeral time span whose essence is not to be: "The Now is empty ... it fulfills itself in the future. The future is its reality."90 From the perspective of the willing ego, "the future is directly within the present, for it is contained as its negative fact. The Now is just as much the being that disappears as it is also the non-being [that]...is converted into Being."91

  To the extent that the self identifies itself with the willing ego—and we shall see that this identification is proposed by some of the voluntarists who derive the principium individuationis from the willing faculty—it exists "in a continual transformation of [its own] future into a Now, and it ceases to be the day when there is no future left, when there is nothing still outstanding [le jour où il n'y a plus davenir, où rien n'est plus à venir], when everything has arrived and when everything is 'accomplished.' "92 Seen from the perspective of the Will, old age consists in the shrinkage of the future dimension, and man's death signifies less his disappearance from the world of appearances than his final loss of a future. This loss, however, coincides with the ultimate accomplishment of the individual's life, which at its end, having escaped the incessant change of time and the uncertainty of its own future, opens itself to the "tranquillity of the past" and thereby to inspection, reflection, and the backward glance of the thinking ego in its search for meaning. Hence, from the viewpoint of the thinking ego, old age, in Heidegger's words, is the time of meditation or, in the words of Sophocles, it is the time of "peace and freedom"93 —release from bondage, not only to the passions of the body, but to the all-consuming passion the mind inflicts on the soul, the passion of the will called "ambition."

  In other words, the past begins with disappearance of the future, and, in that tranquillity, the thinking ego asserts itself. But this happens only when everything has reached its end, when Becoming, in whose process Being unfolds and develops, has been arrested. For "restlessness is the ground of Being";94 it is the price paid for Life, as death, or, rather, the anticipation of death, is the price paid for tranquillity. And the restlessness of the living does not come from contemplating either the cosmos or history; it is not the effect of external motion—the incessant movement of natural things or the incessant ups and downs of human destinies; it is localized in and engendered by the mind of man. What in later existential thought became the notion of the auto-production of man's mind we find in Hegel as the "auto-constitution of Time":95 man is not just temporal; he is Time.

  Without him there might be movement and motion, but there would not be Time. Nor could there be, if man's mind were equipped only for thinking, for reflecting on the given, on what is as it is and could not be otherwise; in that case man would live mentally in an everlasting present. He would be unable to realize that he himself once was not and that one day he will be no more, that is, he would be unable to understand what it means for him to exist. (It is because of Hegel's view that the human mind produces time that his other, more obvious, identification of logic and history comes about, and this identification is indeed, as Léon Brunschvicg pointed out long ago, "one of the essential pillars of his system."96 )

  But in Hegel the mind produces time only by virtue of the will, its organ for the future, and the future in this perspective is also the source of the past, insofar as that is mentally engendered by the mind's anticipation of a second future, when thé immediate I-shall-be will have become an I-shall-have-been. In this schema, the past is produced by the future, and thinking, which contemplates the past, is the result of the Will. For the will, in the last resort, anticipates the ultimate frustration of the will's projects, which is death; they too, one day, will have been. (It may be interesting to note that Heidegger, too, says "Die Gewesenheit entspringt in gewisser Weise der Zukunft"— the past, the "having-been," has its origin in a certain sense in the future.97)

  In Hegel, man is not distinguished from other animal species by being an animal rationale but by being the only living creature that knows about his own death. It is at this ultimate point of the willing ego's anticipation that the thinking ego constitutes itself. In the anticipation of death, the will's projects take on the appearance of an anticipated past and as such can become the object of reflection; and it is in this sense that Hegel maintains that only the mind that "does not ignore death" enables man to "dominate death," to "endure it and to maintain itself within it."98 To put it in Koyré's words: at the moment in which the mind confronts its own end "the incessant motion of the temporal dialectics is arrested and time has 'fulfilled' itself; this 'fulfilled' time falls naturally and in its entirety into the past," which means that the "future has lost its power over it" and it has become ready for the enduring present of the thinking ego. Thus it turns out that "the [future's] true Being is to be the Now."99 But in Hegel this nunc stans is no longer temporal; it is a "nunc aeternitatis," as eternity for Hegel is also the quintessential nature of Time, the Platonic "image of eternity," seen as the "eternal movement of the mind."100 Time itself is eternal in "the union of Present, Future and Past."101

  To oversimplify: That there exists such a thing as the Life of the mind is due to the mind's organ for the future and its resulting "restlessness"; that there exists such a thing as the life of the Mind is due to death, which, foreseen as an absolute end, halts the will and transforms the future into an anticipated past, the will's projects into objects of thought, and the soul's expectation into an anticipated remembrance. Thus summarized and oversimplified, the doctrine of Hegel sounds so modern, the primacy of the future in its time speculations so well attuned to his century's dogmatic faith in Progress, and its shift from thinking to willing and back again to thinking so ingenious a solution of the modem philosopher's problem of how to come to terms with the tradition in a mode acceptable to the modem age, that one is inclined to dismiss the Hegelian construct as an authentic contribution to the problems of the willing ego. Yet in his time speculations Hegel has a strange predecessor to whom nothing could have been more alien than the notion of Progress nor anything of less interest than discovering a law that ruled over historical events.

  That is Plotinus. He, too, holds that the human mind, man's "soul" (psyché), is the originator of time. Time is generated by the soul's "over-active" nature (polypragmōn, a term suggesting busybodiness); longing for its own future immortality, it "seeks for more than its present stage" and thus always "moves on to a 'next' and an 'after' and to what is not the same but is something else and then else again. So moving, we made a long stretch of our journey [toward our future eternity] and constructed time, the image of eternity." Thus, "time is the life of the soul"; since "the spreading out of life involves time," the soul "produces the succession [of time] along with its activity" in the form of "discursive thought" whose discursiveness corresponds to the "soul's movement of passing from one way of being to another"; hence time is "not an accompaniment of Soul ... but something which ... is in it and with it."102 In other words, for Plotinus as for Hegel, time is generated by the mind's innate restlessness, its stretching out to the future, its projects, and its negation of "the present state." And in both cases the true fulfillment of time is eternity, or, in secular terms, existentially speaking, the mind's switch from willing to thinking.

  However that may be, there are many passages in Hegel that indicate that his philosophy is less inspired by the works of his predecessors, less a reaction to their opinions, less an attempt to "solve" probl
ems of metaphysics, less bookish, in brief, than the systems of almost all post-ancient philosophers, not only those who came before him but those who came after, too. In recent times this peculiarity has been often recognized.103 It was Hegel who, by constructing a sequential history of philosophy that corresponded to factual, political history—something quite unknown before him—actually broke with the tradition, because he was the first great thinker to take history seriously, that is, as yielding truth.

  The realm of human affairs, in which everything that is has been brought into being by man or men, had never been so looked on by a philosopher. And the change was due to an event—the French Revolution. "The revolution," Hegel admits, "may have got its first impulse from philosophy," but its "world-historical significance" consists in that, for the first time, man dared to turn himself upside down, "to stand on his head and on thought, and to build reality according to it." "Never since the sun had stood in the firmament and the planets revolved around him had it been perceived that man's existence centers in his head, that is, in thought.... This was a glorious mental dawn. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch ... a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through the world, as if the reconciliation between the Divine and the Secular was now first accomplished."104 What the event had shown amounted to a new dignity of man; "making public the ideas of how something ought to be [will cause] the lethargy of smugly sedate people [die gesetzten Leute], who always accept everything as it is, to disappear."105

  Hegel never forgot that early experience. As late as 1829/30, he told his students: "In such times of political turnabout philosophy finds its place; this is when thought precedes and shapes reality. For when one form of the Spirit no longer gives satisfaction, philosophy sharply takes note of it in order to understand the dissatisfaction."106 In short, he almost explicitly contradicted his famous statement about the owl of Minerva in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right. The "glorious mental dawn" of his youth inspired and informed all of his writing up to the end. In the French Revolution, principles and thoughts had been realized; a reconciliation had occurred between the "Divine," with which man spends his time while thinking, and the "secular," the affairs of men.

  This reconciliation is at the center of the whole Hegelian system. If it was possible to understand World History—and not just the histories of particular epochs and nations—as a single succession of events whose eventual outcome would be the moment when the "Spiritual Kingdom ... manifests itself in outward existence," becomes "embodied" in "secular life,"107 then the course of history would no longer be haphazard and the realm of human affairs no longer devoid of meaning. The French Revolution had proved that "Truth in its living form [could be] exhibited in the affairs of the world."108 Now one could indeed consider every moment in the world's historical sequence as an "it was to be" and assign to philosophy the task of "comprehending this plan" from its beginning, its "concealed fount" or "nascent principle ... in the womb of time," up to its "phenomenal, present existence."109 Hegel identifies this "Spiritual Kingdom" with the "Kingdom of the Will"110 because the wills of men are necessary to bring the spiritual realm about, and for this reason he asserts that "the Freedom of the Will per se [that is, the freedom the Will necessarily wills]...is itself absolute ... it is ... that by which Man becomes Man, and is therefore the fundamental principle of the Mind."111 As a matter of fact, the only guarantee—if such it is—that the ultimate goal of the unfolding of the World Spirit in the world's affairs must be Freedom is inmplicit in the freedom that is implicit in the Will.

  "The insight then to which ... philosophy is to lead us, is, that the real world is as it ought to be,"112 and since for Hegel philosophy is concerned with "what is true eternally, neither with the Yesterday nor with the Tomorrow, but with the Present as such, with the 'Now' in the sense of an absolute presence,"113 since the mind as perceived by the thinking ego is "the Now as such," then philosophy has to reconcile the conflict between the thinking and the willing ego. It must unite the time speculations belonging to the perspective of the Will and its concentration on the future with Thinking and its perspective of an enduring present.

  The attempt is far from being successful. As Koyré points out in the concluding sentences of his essay, the Hegelian notion of a "system" clashes with the primacy he accords to the future. The latter demands that time shall never be terminated so long as men exist on earth, whereas philosophy in the Hegelian sense—the owl of Minerva that starts its flight at dusk—demands an arrest in real time, not merely the suspension of time during the activity of the thinking ego. In other words, Hegel's philosophy could claim objective truth only on condition that history were factually at an end, that mankind had no more future, that nothing could still occur that would bring anything new. And Koyré adds: "It is possible that Hegel believed this ... even that he believed ... that this essential condition [for a philosophy of history] was already an actuality ... and that this had been the reason why he himself was able—had been able—to complete it."114 (That in fact is the conviction of Kojève, for whom the Hegelian system is the truth and therefore the definite end of philosophy as well as history.)

  Hegel's ultimate failure to reconcile the two mental activities, thinking and willing, with their opposing time concepts, seems to me evident, but he himself would have disagreed: Speculative thought is precisely "the unity of thought and time";115it does not deal with Being but with Becoming, and the object of the thinking mind is not Being but an "intuited Becoming."116 The only motion that can be intuited is a movement that swings in a circle forming "a cycle that returns into itself ... that presupposes its beginning, and reaches its beginning only at the end." This cyclical time concept, as we saw, is in perfect accordance with Creek classical philosophy, while post-classical philosophy, following the discovery of the Will as the mental mainspring for action, demands a rectilinear time, without which Progress would be unthinkable. Hegel finds the solution to this problem, viz., how to transform the circles into a progressing line, by assuming that something exists behind all the individual members of the human species and that this something, named Mankind, is actually a kind of somebody that he called the "World Spirit," to him no mere thought-thing but a presence embodied (incarnated) in Mankind as the mind of man is incarnated in the body. This World Spirit embodied in Mankind, as distinguished from individual men and particular nations, pursues a rectilinear movement inherent in the succession of the generations. Each new generation forms a "new stage of existence, a new world" and thus has "to begin all over again," but "it commences at a higher lever because, being human and endowed with mind, namely Recollection, it "has conserved [the earlier] experience" (italics added).117

  Such a movement, in which the cyclical and die rectilinear notions of time are reconciled or united by forming a Spiral, is grounded on the experiences of neither the thinking ego nor the willing ego; it is the non-experienced movement of the World Spirit that constitutes Hegel's Geisterreich, "the realm of spirits ... assuming definite shape in existence, [by virtue of] a succession, where one detaches and sets loose the other and each takes over from the predecessor the empire of the spiritual world."118 No doubt this is a most ingenious solution of the problem of the Will and its reconciliation with sheer thought, but it is won at the expense of both—the thinking ego's experience of an enduring present and the willing ego's insistence on the primacy of the future. In other words, it is no more than a hypothesis.

  Moreover, the plausibility of the hypothesis depends entirely on the assumption of the existence of one World Mind ruling over the plurality of human wills and directing them toward a "meaningfulness" arising out of reason's need, that is, psychologically speaking, out of the very human wish to live in a world that is as it ought to be. We encounter a similar solution in Heidegger, whose insights into the nature of willing are incomparably more profound and whose lack of sympathy with that faculty is outspoken and constitutes the actual tuming-about (Kehre) of the later Heidegger: not "th
e Human will is the origin of the will to will," but "man is willed by the Will to will without experiencing what this Will is about.""119

  A few technical remarks may be appropriate in view of the Hegel revival of the last decades in which some highly qualified thinkers have played a part. The ingenuity of die triadic dialectical movement—from Thesis to Antithesis to Synthesis—is especially impressive when applied to the modern notion of Progress. Although Hegel himself probably believed in an arrest in time, an end of History that would permit the Mind to intuit and conceptualize the whole cycle of Becoming, this dialectical movement seen in itself seems to guarantee an infinite progress, inasmuch as the first movement from Thesis to Antithesis results in a Synthesis, which immediately establishes itself as a new Thesis. Although the original movement is by no means progressive but swings back and returns upon itself, the motion from Thesis to Thesis establishes itself behind these cycles and constitutes a rectilinear line of progress. If we wish to visualize the kind of movement, the result would be the following figure:

  The advantage of the schema as a whole is that it assures progress and, without breaking up time's continuum, can still account for the undeniable historical fact of the rise and fall of civilizations. The advantage of the cyclical element in particular is that it permits us to look upon each end as a new beginning: Being and Nothingness "are the same thing, namely Becoming.... One direction is Passing Away: Being passes over into Nothing; but equally Nothing is its own opposite, a transition to Being, that is, Arising."120 Moreover, the very infinity of the movement, though somehow in conflict with other Hegelian passages, is in perfect accord with the willing ego's time concept and the primacy it gives the future over the present and the past. The Will, untamed by Reason and its need to think, negates the present (and the past) even when the present confronts it with the actualization of its own project. Left to itself, man's Will "would rather will Nothingness than not will," as Nietzsche remarked,121 and the notion of an infinite progress implicitly "denies every goal and admits ends only as means to outwit itself."122 In other words, the famous power of negation inherent in the Will and conceived as the motor of History (not only in Marx but, by implication, already in Hegel) is an annihilating force that could just as well result in a process of permanent annihilation as of Infinite Progress.