The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  The liberum arbitrium is neither spontaneous nor autonomous; we find the last vestiges of an arbiter between reason and desire still surviving in Kant, whose "good will" finds itself in a strange predicament: it is either "good without qualifications," in which case it enjoys complete autonomy but has no choice, or it receives its law—the categorical imperative—from "practical reason," which tells the will what to do and adds: Don't make an exception of yourself, obey the axiom of non-contradiction, which, since Socrates, has ruled the soundless dialogue of thought. The Will in Kant is in fact "practical reason"20 much in the sense of Aristode's nous praktikos; it borrows its obligatory power from the compulsion exerted on the mind by self-evident truth or logical reasoning. This is why Kant asserted time and again that every "Thou-shalt" that does not come from outside but rises up in the mind itself implies a "Thou-canst." What is at stake is clearly the conviction that whatever depends on us and concerns only ourselves is within our power, and this conviction is what Aristotle and Kant basically have in common, although their estimation of the importance of the realm of human affairs is greatly at variance. Freedom becomes a problem, and the Will as an independent autonomous faculty is discovered, only when men begin to doubt the coincidence of the Thou-shalt and the I-can, when the question arises: Are things that concern only me within my power?

  8. The Apostle Paul and the impotence of the Will

  The first and fundamental answer to the question I raised at the beginning of this chapter—what experiences caused men to become aware of their capability of forming volitions?—is that these experiences, Hebrew in origin, were not political and did not relate to the world, either to the world of appearances and man's position within it or to the realm of human affairs, whose existence depends upon deeds and actions, but were exclusively located within man himself. When we deal with experiences relevant to the Will, we are dealing with experiences that men have not only with themselves, but also inside themselves.

  Such experiences were by no means unknown to Greek antiquity. In the previous volume, I spoke at some length ol the Socratic discovery of the two-in-one, which we today would call "consciousness" and which originally had the function of what we today call "conscience." We saw how this two-in-one as a sheer fact of consciousness was actualized and articulated in the "soundless dialogue" that since Plato we have called "thinking." This thinking dialogue between me and myself takes place only in solitude, in a withdrawal from the world of appearances, where ordinarily we are together with others and appear as one to ourselves as well as to them. But the inwardness of the thinking dialogue that makes of philosophy Hegel's "solitary business" (although it is aware of itself—Descartes' cogito me cogitare, Kant's Ich denke, silently accompanying everything I do) is not thematically concerned with the Self but, on the contrary, with the experiences and questions that this Self, an appearance among appearances, feels are in need of examination. This meditating examination of everything given can be disturbed by the necessities of life, by the presence of others, by all kinds of urgent business. But none of the factors interfering with the mind's activity rises out of the mind itself, for the two-in-one are friends and partners, and to keep intact this "harmony" is the thinking ego's foremost concern.

  The Apostle Paul's discovery, which he describes in great detail in the Letter to the Romans (written between A.D. 54 and 58), again concerns a two-in-one, but these two are not friends or partners; they are in constant struggle with each other. Precisely when he "wants to do right (to kalon)," he finds that "evil lies close at hand" (7:21), for "if the law had not said, 'You shall not covet,'" he "should not have known what it is to covet." Hence, it is the command of the law that occasioned "all kinds of covetousness. Apart from the law sin lies dead" (7:7,8).

  The function of the law is equivocal: it is "good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin" (7:13), but since it speaks in the voice of command, it "arouses the passions" and "revives sin." "The very commandment which promised life proved to be death to me" (7:9–10). The result is that "I do not understand my own actions. ["I have become a question to myself."] For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate" (7:15). And the point of the matter is that this inner conflict can never be setded in favor of either obedience to the law or submission to sin; this inner "wretchedness," according to Paul, can be healed only through grace, gratuitously. It was this insight that "flashed about" the man of Tarsus named Saul, who had been, as he said, an "extremely zealous" Pharisee (Galatians 1:14), belonging to the "strictest party of our religion" (Acts 26:4). What he wanted was "righteousness" (dikaiosynē), but righteousness, namely, to "abide by all things written in the book of the law, and do them" (Galatians 3:10), is impossible; this is the "curse of the law," and "if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died to no purpose" (Galatians 2:21).

  That, however, is only one side of the matter. Paul became the founder of the Christian religion not only because, by his own declaration, he was "entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised" (Galatians 2:7), but also because wherever he went he preached the "resurrection of the dead" (Acts 24:21). The center of his concern, in sharp and obvious distinction from that of the gospels, is not Jesus of Nazareth, his preaching and his deeds, but Christ, crucified and resurrected. From this source he derived his new doctrine that became "a stumbling-block to Jews and folly to Gentiles" (I Corinthians 1:23).

  It is the concern with eternal life, ubiquitous in the Roman Empire at the time, that separates the new era so sharply from antiquity and becomes the common bond that syncretistically united the many new Oriental cults. Not that Paul's concern with individual resurrection was Jewish in origin; to the Hebrews, immortality was felt to be necessary only for the people and granted only to them; the individual was content to survive in his progeny, content also to die old and "sated with years." And in the ancient world, Roman or Greek, the only immortality asked for or striven for was the non-oblivion of the great name and the great deed, and therefore of the institutions—the polis or civitas—which could guarantee a continuity of remembrance. (When Paul said that "the wages of sin is death" [Romans 6:23], he might have been recalling the words of Cicero, who had said that although men must die, communities [civitates] are meant to be eternal and perish only as a consequence of their sins.) Lying behind the many new beliefs is clearly the common experience of a declining, perhaps a dying, world; and the "good news" of Christianity in its eschatological aspects said clearly enough: You who have believed that men die but that the world is everlasting need only turn about, to a faith that the world comes to an end but that you yourself will have everlasting life. Then, of course, the question of "righteousness," namely, of being worthy of this eternal life, takes on an altogether new, personal importance.

  Concern with personal, individual immortality appears in the gospels, too, all of them written during the last third of the first century. Jesus is commonly asked, "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" (e.g., Luke 10:25), but Jesus seems not to have preached resurrection. Instead, he said that if people would do as he told them—"go and do likewise" or "follow me"—then "the kingdom of God is in the midst of you" (Luke 17:21) or "has come upon you" (Matthew 12:28). If people pressed him further, his answer was always the same: Fulfill the law as you know it and "sell all that you have and distribute it to the poor" (Luke 18:22). The thrust of Jesus' teaching is contained in this "and," which drove the well-known and accepted law to its inherent extreme. This is what he must have meant when he said, "I have come not to abolish [the law] but to fulfill [it]" (Matthew 5:17). Hence, not "Love your neighbors," but "Love your enemies"; "to him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also"; "from him who'takes away your cloak do not withhold your coat as well." In short, not "What you don't want to be done to you, don't do to others," but "As you wish that men would do to you, do so to them" (Luke 6:27–31)—certainly the most radical possible version of "Love your neighbor as yourself."

  Paul was certainly aware of
the radical turn the old demand to fulfill the law had taken in the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. And he may well have suddenly understood that in this lay the law's only true fulfillment, and then have found out that such fulfillment was beyond human power: it led to an I-will-but-cannof, even though Jesus himself seems never to have told any of his followers that they could not do what they willed to do. Still, in Jesus, there is already a new stress on the inner life. He would not have gone so far as Eckhart, more than a thousand years later, and asserted that having the will to do was enough to "earn eternal life," for "before God to will to do according to my capacity and to have done are the same." Yet Jesus' stress on the "Thou shall not covet," the only one of the Ten Commandments that relates to an inner life, points in that direction—"every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery ... in his heart" (Matthew 5:28). Similarly, in Eckhart, a man who has the will to kill without ever killing anybody has committed no less a sin than were he to have murdered the whole human race.21

  Of perhaps even greater relevance are Jesus' preachings against hypocrisy as the sin of the Pharisees and his suspicion of appearances: "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?" (Luke 6:41). And they "like to go about in long robes, and love salutations in the market places" (Luke 20:46), which poses a problem that must have been familiar to men of the Law. The trouble is that whatever good you do, by the very fact of its appearing either to others or to yourself becomes subject to self-doubt.22 Jesus knew about that: "Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing" (Matthew 6:3), that is, live in hiding, in hiding even from yourself, and do not bother to be good—"No one is good but God alone" (Luke 18:19). Yet this lovely carelessness could hardly be maintained when to do good and to be good had become the requirement for overcoming death and being granted eternal life.

  Hence, when we come to Paul, the accent shifts entirely from doing to believing, from the outward man living in a world of appearances (himself an appearance among appearances and therefore subject to semblance and illusion) to an inwardness which by definition never unequivocally manifests itself and can be scrutinized only by a God who also never appears unequivocally. The ways of this God are inscrutable. For the Gentiles, His chief property is His invisibility; for Paul himself, what is the most inscrutable is that "Sin indeed was in the world before the law was given but sin is not counted where there is no law" (Romans 5:13), so that it is entirely possible "that Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained it ... but that Israel who pursued the righteousness which is based on the law did not succeed in fulfilling that law" (Romans 9:30–31). That the law cannot be fulfilled, that the will to fulfill the law activates another will, the will to sin, and that the one will is never without the other—that is the subject Paul deals with in the Letter to the Romans.

  Paul, it is true, does not discuss it in terms of two wills but in terms of two laws—the law of the mind that lets him delight in the law of God "in his inmost self' and the law of his "members" that tells him to do what in his inmost self he hates. Law itself is understood as the voice of a master demanding obedience; the Thou-shalt of the law demands and expects a voluntary act of submission, an I-will of agreement The Old Law said: thou shalt do; the New Law says: thou shalt will. It was the experience of an imperative demanding voluntary submission that led to the discovery of the Will, and inherent in this experience was the wondrous fact of a freedom that none of the ancient peoples—Greek, Roman, or Hebrew-had been aware of, namely, that there is a faculty in man by virtue of which, regardless of necessity and compulsion, he can say "Yes" or "No," agree or disagree with what is factually given, including his own self and his existence, and that this faculty may determine what he is going to do.

  But this faculty is of a curiously paradoxical nature. It is actualized by an imperative that says not merely "Thou shalt"—as when the mind speaks to the body and, as Augustine put it later, the body immediately and, as it were, mindlessly obeys—but says "Thou shalt will," and this already implies that, whatever I may in fact eventually do, I can answer: I will, or I will not. The very commandment, the Thou-shalt, puts me before a choice between an I-will and an I-will-not, that is, theologically speaking, between obedience and disobedience. (Disobedience, it will be remembered, later becomes the mortal sin par excellence, and obedience, the very foundation of Christian ethics, the "virtue above all virtues" [Eckhart], and one, incidentally, that, unlike poverty and chastity, can hardly be derived from the teaching and preaching of Jesus of Nazareth.) If the will did not have the choice of saying "No," it would no longer be a will; and if there were not a counter-will within me that is aroused by the very commandment of the Thou-shalt, if, to speak in Paul's terms, "sin" did not dwell "within me" (Romans 7:20), I would not need a will at all.

  I have spoken earlier of the reflexive nature of mental activities: the cogito me cogitare, the volo me velle (even judgment, the least reflexive of the three, recoils, acts back upon itself). Later we shall be seeing that this reflexivity is nowhere stronger than in the willing ego; the point is that every I-will arises out of a natural inclination toward freedom, that is, out of the natural revulsion of free men toward being at someone's bidding. The will always addresses itself to itself; when the command says, Thou shalt, the will replies, Thou shalt will as the command says—and not mindlessly execute orders. That is the moment when the internal contest begins, for the aroused counter-will has a like power of command. Hence, the reason "all who rely on works of the law are under a curse" (Galatians 3:10) is not only the I-will-and-cannot but also the fact that the I-will inevitably is countered by an I-nill, so that even if the law is obeyed and fulfilled, there remains this inrier resistance.

  In the fight between the I-will and the I-nill, the outcome can depend only on an act—if works no longer count, the Will is helpless. And since the conflict is between velle and nolle, persuasion nowhere enters, as it did in the old conflict between reason and the appetites. For the phenomenon itself, that "I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do" (Romans 7:19), is of course not new. We find almost the same words in Ovid: "I see what is better and approve of it; I follow what is worse,"23 and this is probably a translation of the famous passage in Euripides' Medea (lines 1078–60): "I know indeed what evil I intend to do; but stronger than my deliberations [bouleumata] is my thymos [what makes me move], which is the cause of the greatest evils among mortals." Euripides and Ovid might have deplored the weakness of reason when confronted with the passionate drive of the desires, and Aristotle might have gone a step farther and detected a self-contradiction in the choosing of the worse, an act that provided him with his definition of the "base man," but none of them would have ascribed the phenomenon to a free choice of the Will.

  The Will, split and automatically producing its own counter-will, is in need of being healed, of becoming one again. Like thinking, willing has split the one into a two-in-one, but for the thinking ego a "healing" of the split would be the worst thing that could happen; it would put an end to thinking altogether. Well, it would be very tempting to conclude that divine mercy, Paul's solution for the wretchedness of the Will, actually abolishes the Will by miraculously depriving it of its counter-will. But this is no longer a matter of volitions, since mercy cannot be striven for; salvation "depends not upon man's will or exertion, but upon God's mercy," and He "has mercy upon whomever he wills, and he hardens the heart of whomever he wills" (Romans 9:16, 18). Moreover, just as "the law came in" not merely to make sin identifiable but to "increase the trespass," so grace "abounded" where "sin increased"—felix culpa indeed, for how could men know the glory if they were unacquainted with wretchedness; how would we know what day was if there were no night?

  In brief, the will is impotent not because of something outside that prevents willing from succeeding, but because the will hinders itself. And wherever, as in Jesus, it does not hinder itself, it does not
yet exist. For Paul, the explanation is relatively simple: the conflict is between flesh and spirit, and the trouble is that men are both, carnal and spiritual. The flesh will die, and therefore to live according to the flesh means certain death. The chief task of the spirit is not just to rule over the appetites and make the flesh obey but to bring about its mortification—to crucify it "with its passions and desires" (Galatians 5:24), which in fact is beyond human power. We saw that from the perspective of the thinking ego a certain suspicion of the body was only natural. Man's carnality, though not necessarily the source of sin, interrupts the mind's thinking activity and offers a resistance to the soundless, swift dialogue of the mind's exchange with itself, an exchange whose very "sweetness" consists in a spirituality in which no material factor intervenes. This is a far cry from the aggressive hostility to the body that we find in Paul, a hostility, moreover, that, quite apart from prejudices against the flesh, arises out of the very essence of the Will. Its mental origin notwithstanding, the will grows aware of itself only by overcoming resistance, and "flesh" in Paul's reasoning (as in the later disguise of "inclination") becomes the metaphor for an internal resistance. Thus, even in this simplistic scheme, the discovery of the Will has already opened a veritable Pandora's box of unanswerable questions, of which Paul himself was by no means unaware and which from then on were to plague with absurdities any strictly Christian philosophy.