The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  At first glance, this doctrine of invulnerability and apathy (apatheia)—how to shield yourself against reality, how to lose your ability to be affected by it, for better or worse, in joy or in sorrow—seems so obviously open to refutation that the enormous argumentative as well as emotional influence of Stoicism on some of the best minds of Western mankind seems well-nigh incomprehensible. In Augustine, we find such a refutation in its shortest and most plausible form. The Stoics, he says, have found the trick of how to pretend to be happy: "Since a man cannot get what he wants, he wants what he can get" ("Ideo igitur id vult quod potest, quoniam quod vult non potest").55 Moreover, he goes on, the Stoics assume that "all men by nature wish to be happy" but they do not believe in immortality, at least not in bodily resurrection, that is, not in a future deathless life, and this is a contradiction in terms. For "if all men really will to be happy they must necessarily also will to be immortal....In order to live happily you must first be alive" ("Cum ergo beati esse omnes homines velint, si vere volunt, profecto et esse immortales volunt.... Ut enim homo beate vivat, oportet ut vivat").56 In other words, mortal men cannot be happy, and the Stoics' insistence on the fear of death as the main source of unhappiness testifies to this; the most they can achieve is to become "apathetic," to be unaffected by either life or death.

  This refutation, however, so plausible on this level of argument, misses a number of rather important points. There is first the question of why a will should be necessary in order not to will, why it should not be possible simply to lose the faculty under the sway of the superior insights of right reasoning. After all, don't we all know how relatively easy it has always been to lose at least the habit, if not the faculty, of thinking? Nothing more is needed than to live in constant distraction and never leave the company of others. It may be argued that it is harder to break men of the habit of wanting what is beyond their power than of the habit of thinking, but for a sufficiently "trained" man, it ought not to be necessary to repeat the not-willing over and over—since the me thele, the "do not will" where you cannot prevent, is at least as important to this schooling as the mere appeal to will power.

  Closely connected with the foregoing, and even more puzzling, is the fact that Epictetus is by no means content with the will's power noi-to-will. He does not just preach indifference to everything that is not within our power; he insistently demands that man will what happens anyhow. I have already cited the game parable in which the man whose sole concern is with the feeling-well of the self is admonished to wish "only that to happen which does happen, and only him to win who does win." In a different context Epictetus goes much farther and praises (unnamed) "philosophers" who said "that 'if the good man knew coming events beforehand he would help on nature, even if it meant working with disease, and death and maiming.' "57 To be sure, in his argument he falls back on the old Stoic notion of heimarmenē, the doctrine of fate which holds that everything happens in harmony with the nature of the universe and that every particular thing, man or animal, plant or stone, has its task allotted to it by the whole and is justified by it. But not only is Epictetus very explicitly uninterested in any question relating to nature or the universe; but also nothing in the old doctrine indicates that man's will, totally ineffectual by definition, would be of avail in the "ordering of the universe." Epictetus is interested in what happens to him: "I will a thing and it does not happen; what is there more wretched than I? I will it not and it happens; what is more wretched than I?"58 In short, in order "to live well" it is not enough to "ask not that events should happen as you will"; you must "let your will be that events should happen as they do."59

  It is only when will power has reached this climactic point, where it can will what is and thus never be "at odds with outward things," that it can be said to be omnipotent. Underlying all the arguments for such omnipotence is the matter-ofcourse assumption that reality for me gets its realness from my consent; and underlying that assumption, guaranteeing its practical effectiveness, is the simple fact that I can commit suicide when I truly find life unbearable—"the door is always open." And here this solution does not imply, as it does, for instance, in Camus, a kind of cosmic rebellion against the human condition; to Epictetus, such a rebellion would be entirely pointless, since "it is impossible that what happens should be other than it is."60 It is unthinkable because even an absolute negation depends on the sheer inexplicable thereness of all that is, including myself, and Epictetus nowhere demands an explanation or justification of the inexplicable. Hence, as Augustine will later argue,61 those who believe they choose non-being when they commit suicide are in error; they choose a form of being that will come about one day anyhow and they choose peace, which of course is only a form of being.

  The sole force that can hinder this basic, active consent given by the will is the will itself. Hence the criterion for right conduct is: "Will to be pleased, you with yourself' ("thelēson aresai autos seautó"). And Epictetus adds: "Will to appear noble to the god" ("thelēson kalos phanēnai tó theó"),62 but the addendum is actually redundant, for Epictetus does not believe in a transcendent God but holds that the soul is godlike and that the god is "within you, you are a fragment of him."63 The willing ego, it turns out, is no less split in two than the Socratic two-in-one of Plato's dialogue of thought. But, as we saw with Paul, the two in the willing ego are far from enjoying a friendly, harmonious intercourse with each other, although in Epictetus their frankly antagonistic relationship does not subject the self to the extremes of despair that we hear so much of in Paul's lamentation. Epictetus characterizes their relation as an ongoing "struggle" (agón), an Olympic contest demanding an ever-attentive suspicion of myself by myself: "In one word, [the philosopher, who always looks to himself for benefit and harm] keeps watch and guard on himself as his own enemy [hós echthron heautou], lying in wait for him."64 We need only remind ourselves of Aristotle's insight ("all friendly feelings toward others are an extension of the friendly feelings a person has for himself") to gauge ** distance the human mind has traveled since antiquity.

  The philosopher's self, ruled by the willing ego that tells him that nothing can hinder or constrain it but the will itself, is engaged in a never-ending fight with the counter-will, engendered, precisely, by his own will. The price paid for the Will's omnipotence is very high; the worst that, from the viewpoint of the thinking ego, could happen to the two-in-one, namely, to be "at variance with yourself," has become part and parcel of the human condition. And the fact that this fate is no longer assigned to Aristode's "base man" but, on the contrary, to the good and wise man who has learned the art of conducting his own life in no matter what external circumstances may well cause one to wonder whether this "cure" of human misery was not worse than the disease.

  Still, in this lamentable business there is one decisive discovery that no argument can eliminate and that at least explains why the feeling of omnipotence as well as of human freedom could come out of the experiences of the willing ego. A point we touched on marginally in our discussion of Paul, namely, that all obedience presumes the power to disobey, is at the very center of Epictetus' considerations. There the heart of the matter is the Will's power to assent or dissent, say Yes or No insofar, at any rate, as I myself am concerned. This is why things that in their pure existence—i.e., "impressions" of outside things—depend only on me are also in my power; not only can I will to change the world (though the proposition is of doubtful interest to an individual subject totally alienated from the world in which it finds itself), I can also deny reality to anything and' everything by virtue of an I-will-not. This power must have had something awful, truly overpowering, for the human mind, for there has never been a philosopher or theologian who, after having paid due attention to the implied No in every Yes, did not squarely turn around and demand an emphatic consent, advising man, as Seneca did in a sentence quoted with great approbation by Master Eckhart, "to accept all occurrences as though he himself had desired them and asked for them." To be sure
, if in this universal agreement one sees no more than the willing ego's last and deepest resentment of its existential impotence in the world as it factually is, he will also see only another argument here for the illusionary character of the faculty, an ultimate confirmation of its being an "artificial concept." Man in that case would have been given a truly "monstrous" faculty (Augustine), compelled by its nature to demand a power it is able to exercise only in the illusion-ridden region of sheer phantasy—the inwardness of a mind that has successfully separated itself from all outward appearance in its relendess quest for absolute tranquillity. And as the last and ironic reward for so much effort, it will have obtained an uncomfortably intimate acquaintance with the "painful storehouse and treasure of evils," in the words of Democritus, or with the "abyss" which, according to Augustine, lies hidden "in the good heart and in the evil heart."®65

  10. Augustine, the first philosopher of the Will

  If it is due to Scripture that there is

  a philosophy which is Christian,

  it is due to the Greek tradition that

  Christianity possesses a philosophy.

  Etienne Gilson

  Augustine, the first Christian philosopher and, one is tempted to add, the only philosopher the Romans ever had,66 was also the first man of thought who turned to religion because of philosophical perplexities. Like many educated people of the time, he had been brought up as a Christian; yet what he himself eventually described as a conversion—the subject matter of his Confessions—was utterly different from the experience that changed the extremely zealous Pharisee Saul into Paul, the Christian Apostle and follower of Jesus of Nazareth.

  In the Confessions, Augustine tells how his heart had first been set "on fire" by Cicero's Hortensius, a book (now lost) that contained an exhortation to philosophy. Augustine kept quoting from it till the end of his life. He became the first Christian philosopher because throughout his life he held fast to philosophy. His treatise On the Trinity, a defense of the crucial dogma of the Christian Church, is at the same time the most profound and the most articulated development of his own very original philosophical position. But its starting-point remained the Roman and Stoic quest for happiness—"Certain it is, said Cicero, that we all want to be happy."67 In his youth he had turned to philosophy out of inner wretchedness and as a man he turned to religion because philosophy had failed him. This pragmatic attitude, the demand that philosophy be "life's leader" (Cicero),68 is typically Roman; it had a more lasting influence on the formation of Augustine's thought than did Plotinus and the Neoplatonists, to whom he owed whatever he knew of Greek philosophy. Not that the general human wish to be happy had escaped the attention of the Greeks—the Roman proverb seems to have been a translation from the Greek—but this desire was not what made them do philosophy. Only the Romans were convinced that "there is no reason for man to philosophize unless in order to be happy."69

  We find this pragmatic concern for private happiness throughout the Middle Ages; it underlies the hope for eternal salvation and the fear of eternal damnation and clarifies many otherwise rather abstruse speculations whose Roman origins are difficult to detect. That the Roman Catholic Church, despite the decisive influx of Greek philosophy, remained so profoundly Roman was due in no small measure to the strange coincidence that her first and most influential philosopher should also have been the first man of thought to draw his deepest inspiration from Latin sources and experiences. In Augustine, the striving for eternal life as the summum bonum and the interpretation of eternal death as the summum malum reached the highest level of articulation because he combined them with the new era's discovery of an inward life. He understood that the exclusive interest in this inner self meant that "I have become a question for myself" ("quaestio mihi factus sum")—a. question that philosophy as it was then taught and learned neither raised nor answered.70 The famous analyses of the concept of Time in the eleventh book of the Confessions are a paradigmatic illustration of the challenge of the new and problematic: time is something utterly familiar and ordinary so long as no one asks What is Time?—at which moment it turns into an "intricate riddle" whose challenge is that it is both entirely ordinary and entirely "hidden."71

  There is no doubt that Augustine belongs among the great and original thinkers, but he was not a "systematic thinker," and it is true that the main body of his work is "Uttered with lines of thought that are not worked through to their conclusion and with abandoned literary enterprises"72 —besides being shot through with repetitions. What is remarkable under the cirmcumstances is the continuity of the chief topics that finally, at the end of his life, he subjected to a searching examination titled Retractationes, or "Recantations," as though the Bishop and Prince of the Church were his own Inquisitor. Perhaps the most crucial of these ever-recurring topics was the "Free Choice of the Will" (the Liberum arbitrium voluntatis), as a faculty distinct from desire and reason, although he devoted but one whole treatise to it under that title. This was an early work, whose first part is still entirely in the vein of his other early philosophical writings despite its having been written after the dramatic event of his conversion and baptism.

  It rather speaks, I think, for the quality of the man and the thinker that it took him ten years to write down in minute detail what to him was the most momentous event of his life—and this not just for remembrance's or piety's sake but for the sake of its mental implications. As his most recent biographer, Peter Brown, puts it a bit simplistically, "he was very definitely not a type croyant, such as had been common among educated men in the Latin world before his time";73 for Augustine, it was not a matter of abandoning the uncertainties of philosophy in favor of revealed Truth but of finding the philosophical implications of his new faith. In that tremendous effort he relied first of all on the Letters of the Apostle Paul, and the measure of his success can perhaps best be gauged by the fact that his authority throughout the subsequent centuries of Christian philosophy became equal to that of Aristotle—for the Middle Ages "the philosopher."

  Let us start with Augustine's early interest in the faculty of the Will as expounded in the first part of the early treatise (the two concluding parts were written almost ten years later, roughly at the same time as the Confessions). Its leading question is an inquiry into the cause of evil: "for evil could not have come into being without a cause" and God cannot be the cause of evil because "God is good." The question, current even then, had "disturbed [him] exceedingly since his youth ... and indeed driven [him] into heresy," namely, into adhering to the teachings of Mani.74 What follows is strictly argumentative reasoning (though in dialogue form) as we found it in Epictetus, and the telling points at this late time sound like a summing up for educational purposes until we reach the conclusion, where the disciple is made to say: "I question whether free will ... ought to have been given to us by Him who made us. For it seems that we would not have been able to sin, if we did not have free will. And it is to be feared that in this way God may appear to be the cause of our evil deeds." At this point Augustine reassures the questioner and postpones the discussion.75 Thirty years later, in a different way, in the City of God, he takes up the question of the "purpose of the Will" as the "purpose of Man."

  The question whose answer he postponed for so many years is the starting-point for Augustine's own philosophy of the Will. But a close interpretation of Paul's Letter to the Romans was the original occasion of his framing it. In the Confessions, as well as in the last two sections of On Free Choice of the Will, he draws the philosophical inferences and articulates the consequences of the strange phenomenon (that it is possible to will and, in the absence of any outside hindrance, still be unable to perform) which Paul had described in terms of antagonistic laws. But Augustine does not speak of two laws but of "two wills, one new and the other old, one carnal and the other spiritual," and describes in detail, like Paul, how these wills struggled "within" him and how their "discord undid [his] soul."76 In other words, he is careful to avoid his own ea
rlier Manichaean heresy, which taught that two antagonistic principles rule the world, one good and one evil, one carnal and one spiritual. For him now, there is only one law, and the first insight therefore is the most obvious but also the most startling one: "Non hoc est velle quod posse" "to will and to be able are not the same."77

  It is startling because the two faculties, willing and performing, are so closely connected: "Will must be present for power to be operative"; and power, needless to say, must be present for the will to draw on. "If you act ... it can never be without willing" even if "you do a thing unwillingly, under compulsion." "When you do not act" it may be that "will is lacking" or that "the power is lacking."78 This is all the more surprising as Augustine agrees with the Stoics' main argument for the predominance of the Will, namely, that "nothing is so much in our power as the will itself, for there is no interval, the moment we will—there it is,"79 except that he does not believe that the Will is enough. "The law would not command if there were no will, nor would grace help if will were enough." The point here is that the Law does not address itself to thè mind, in which case it would simply reveal and not command; it addresses itself to the Will because "the mind is not moved until it wills to be moved." And this is why only the Will, and neither reason nor the appetites and desires, is "in our power; it is free."80