The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  That strange confidence cannot be expected from Augustine; it arose much later in order to neutralize, at least in the sphere of ethics and, as it were, by fiat the universal doubt that characterizes the modern age—which Nietzsche, rightly, I think, called the "era of suspicion." When men could no longer praise, they turned their greatest conceptual efforts to justifying God and His Creation in theodicies. But of course Augustine, too, needed some means of redemption for the Will. Divine grace would not help once he had discovered that the brokenness of the Will was the same for the evil and for the good will; it is rather difficult to imagine God's gratuitous grace deciding whether I should go to the theater or commit adultery. Augustine finds his solution in an entirely new approach to the problem. He now undertakes to investigate the Will not in isolation from other mental faculties but in its interconnectedness with them; the leading question now is: What function has the will in the life of the mind as a whole? Yet the phenonrenal datum that suggested the answer even before it was found and duly outlined is curiously like Mill's "enduring I." In Augustine's words, it is "that there is One within me who is more myself than my self."95

  The dominant insight of the treatise On the Trinity is derived from the mystery of the Christian trinity. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, three substances when each is related to itself, can at the same time form a One, thus insuring that the dogma does not signify a break with monotheism. The unity comes about because all three substances are "mutually predicated relatively" to each other without thereby losing their existence "in their own substance." (This is not the case, for instance, when color and the colored object are "mutually predicated" in their relation to each other, for color has "not any proper substance in itself, since colored body is a substance but color is in a substance."96)

  The paradigm for a mutually predicated relationship of independent "substances" is friendship: two men who are friends can be said to be "independent substances" insofar as they are related to themselves; they are friends only relatively to each other. A pair of friends forms a unity, a One, insofar and as long as they are friends; the moment the friendship ceases they are again two "substances," independent of each other. This demonstrates that somebody or something can be a One when related only to itself and still be so related to another, so intimately bound together with it, that the two can appear as a One without changing their "substance," losing their substantial independence and identity. This is the way of the Holy Trinity: God remains One while related only to Himself but He is three in die unity with Son and Holy Ghost.

  The point here is that such a mutually predicated relationship can occur only among "equals"; hence one cannot apply it to the relationship of body and soul, of carnal man and spiritual man, even though they always appear together, because here the soul is obviously the ruling principle. However, for Augustine the mysterious three-in-one must be found somewhere in human nature since God created man in His own image; and since it is precisely man's mind that distinguishes him from all other creatures, the three-in-one is likely to be found in the structure of the mind.

  We find the first inklings of this new line of investigation at the end of the Confessions, the work that most closely precedes On the Trinity. There for the first time it occurs to him to use the theological dogma of the three-in-one as a general philosophical principle. He asks the reader to "consider these three things that are in themselves...[and] are far other than the Trinity ... the three things I speak of are, to Be, to Know, and to Will. [The three are interconnected.] For I Am, and I Know, and I Will; I Am Knowing and Willing; and I know myself to Be and to Will; and I Will to Be and to Know. In these three let him discern who can, how inseparable is one life, one mind, one essence; finally, how inseparable a distinction there is, and yet there is a distinction."97 The analogy of course does not mean that Being is an analogy of the Father, Knowing an analogy of the Son, and Willing of the Holy Ghost. What interests Augustine is merely that the mental "I" contains three altogether different things that are inseparable and yet distinct.

  This triad of Being, Willing, and Knowing occurs only in the rather tentative formula of the Confessions: obviously Being does not belong here, since it is not a faculty of the mind. In On the Trinity, the most important mental triad is Memory, Intellect, and Will. These three faculties are "not three minds but one mind.... They are mutually referred to each other ... and each one is comprehended by" the other two and relates back to itself: "I remember that I have memory, understanding, and will; and I understand that I understand, will, and remember; and I will that I will, remember, and understand."98 These three faculties are equal in rank, but their Oneness is due to the Will.

  The Will tells the memory what to retain and what to forget; it tells the intellect what to choose for its understanding. Memory and Intellect are both contemplative and, as such, passive; it is the Will that makes them function and eventually "binds them together." And only when by virtue of one of them, namely, the Will, the three are "forced into one do we speak of thought"—cogitatio, which Augustine, playing with etymology, derives from cogere (coactum), to force together, to unite forcefully. ("Atque ita fit illa trinitas ex memoria, et interna visione, et quae utrumque copulat volúntate. Quia tria [in unum] coguntur, ab ipso coactum cogitatio dicitur."99)

  The Will's binding force functions not only in purely mental activity; it is manifest also in sense perception. This element of the mind is what makes sensation meaningful: In every act of vision, says Augustine, we must "distinguish the following three things ... the object which we see ... and this can naturally exist before it is seen; secondly, the vision which was not there before we perceived the object ... and thirdly the power that fixes the sense of sight on the object ... namely, the attention of the mind." Without the latter, a function of the Will, we have only sensory "impressions" without any actual perceiving of them; an object is seen only when we concentrate our mind on the perception. We can see without perceiving, and hear without listening, as frequently happens when we are absent-minded. The "attention of the mind" is needed to transform sensation into perception; the Will that "fixes the sense on that thing which we see and binds both together" is essentially different from the seeing eye and the visible object; it is mind and not body.100

  Moreover, by fixing our mind on what we see or hear, we tell our memory what to remember and our intellect what to understand, what objects to go after in search of knowledge. Memory and intellect have withdrawn from outside appearances and deal not with these themselves (the real tree) but with images (the seen tree), and these images clearly are inside us. In other words, the Will, by virtue of attention, first unites our sense organs with the real world in a meaningful way, and then drags, as it were, this outside world into ourselves and prepares it for further mental operations: to be remembered, to be understood, to be asserted or denied. For the inner images are by no means mere illusions. "Concentrating exclusively on the inner phantasies and turning the mind's eye completely away from the bodies which surround our senses," we come "upon so striking a likeness of the bodily species expressed from memory" that it is hard to tell whether we are seeing or merely imagining. "So great is the power of the mind over its body" that sheer imagination "can arouse the genital organs."101 And this power of the mind is due not to the Intellect and not to Memory but only to the Will that unites the mind's inwardness with the outward world. Man's privileged position within the Creation, in the outward world, is due to the mind which "imagines within, yet imagines things that are from without. For no one could use these things [of the outward world]...unless the images of sensible things were retained in the memory, and unless ... the same will [were] adapted both to bodies without and to their images within."102

  This Will as the unifying force binding man's sensory apparatus to the outside world and then joining together man's different mental faculties has two characteristics that were entirely absent from the various descriptions we have had of the Will up to now. This Will could indeed be und
erstood as "the spring of action"; by directing the senses' attention, presiding over the images impressed on memory, and providing the intellect with material for understanding, the Will prepares the ground on which action can take place. This Will, one is tempted to say, is so busy preparing action that it hardly has time to get caught in the controversy with its own counter-will. "And just as in man and woman there is one flesh of two, so the one nature of the mind [the Will] embraces our intellect and action, or our council and execution ... so as it was said of those: They shall be two in one flesh,' so it can be said of these [the inward and the outward man]: 'Two in one mind.'"103

  Here is a first intimation of certain consequences that Duns Scotus much later will draw from Augustinian voluntarism: the Will's redemption cannot be mental and does not come by divine intervention either; redemption comes from the act which—often like a "coup d'ètat," in Bergson's felicitous phrase—interrupts the conflict between velle and nolle. And the price of the redemption is, as we shall see, freedom. As Duns Scotus expressed it (in the summary of a modem commentator), "It is possible for me to be writing at this moment, just as it is possible for me not to be writing." I am still entirely free, and I pay for this freedom by the curious fact that the Will always wills and nills at the same time: the mental activity in its case does not exclude its opposite. "Yet my act of writing excludes its opposite. By one act of the will I can determine myself to write, and by another I can decide not to write, but I cannot be simultaneously in act in regard to both things together."104 In other words, the Will is redeemed by ceasing to will and starting to act, and the cessation cannot originate in an act of the will-not-to-will because this would be but another volition.

  In Augustine, as well as later in Duns Scotus, the solution of the Will's inner conflict comes about through a transformation of the Will itself, its transformation into Love. The Will-seen in its functional operative aspect as a coupling, binding agent—can also be defined as Love (voluntas: amor seu di-lectio105), for Love is obviously the most successful coupling agent. In Love, there are again "three things: he that loves, and that which is loved, and Love.... [Love] is a certain life which couples ... together two things, namely, him that loves and that which is loved."106 In the same way, Will qua attention was needed to effect perception by coupling together the one with eyes to see and that which is visible; it is only that the uniting force of love is stronger. For what love unites is "marvelously glued together" so that there is a cohesion between lover and the beloved—"cohaerunt enim mirabiliter glutino amoris "107 The great advantage of the transformation is not only Love's greater force in uniting what remains separate—when the Will uniting "the form of the body that is seen and its image which arises in the sense, that is, the vision ... is so violent that [it keeps the sense fixed on the vision once it has been formed], it can be called love, or desire, or passion"108 —but also that love, as distinguished from will and desire, is not extinguished when it reaches its goal but enables the mind "to remain steadfast in order to enjoy" it.

  What the will is not able to accomplish is this steadfast enjoyment; will is given as a mental faculty because the mind "is not sufficient to itself' and "through its need and want, it becomes excessively intent upon its own actions."109 The will decides how to use memory and intellect, that is, it "refers them to something else," but it does not know how "to use with the joy, not of hope, but of the actual thing."110 That is the reason the will is never satisfied, for "satisfaction means that the will is at rest,"111 and nothing—certainly not hope-can still the will's restlessness "save endurance," the quiet and lasting enjoyment of something present; only "the force of love is so great that the mind draws in with itself those things upon which it has long reflected with love."112 The whole mind "is in those things upon which it thinks with love," and these are the things 'without which it cannot think of itself."113

  The emphasis here is on the mind thinking of itself, and the love that stills the will's turmoil and resdessness is not a love of tangible things but of the "footprints" "sensible things" have left on the inwardness of the mind. (Throughout the treatise, Augustine is careful to distinguish between thinking and knowing, or between wisdom and knowledge. "It is one thing not to know oneself, and another thing not to think of oneself."114) In the case of Love, the lasting "footprint" that the mind has transformed into an intelligible thing would be neither the one who loves nor his beloved but the third element, namely, Love itself, the love with which the lovers love each other.

  The difficulty with such "intelligible things" is that although they are as "present to the gaze of the mind as ... tangible things are present ... to the senses of the body," a man "who arrives [at them] does not abide in them ... and thus a transitory thought is formed of a thing that is not transitory. And this transitory thought is committed to the memory ... so that there may be a place to which the thought may again return." (The example he gives of lastingness in the midst of human transience is drawn from music. It is as if "one were to grasp [a melody] passing through intervals of time while it stands apart from time in a kind of secret and sublime silence"; without memory to record the sequence of sounds, one could never even "conceive of the melody as long as that singing could be heard."115 ) What Love brings about is lastingness, a perdurance of which the mind otherwise seems incapable. Augustine has conceptualized Paul's words in the Letter to the Corinthians: "Love never ends"; of the three that "abide"—Faith, Hope, Love—"the greatest [the most durable, as it were] is love" (I Corinthians 13:8).

  To summarize: this Will of Augustine's, which is not understood as a separate faculty but in its function within the mind as a whole, where all single faculties—memory, intellect, and will—are "mutually referred to each other,"116 finds its redemption in being transformed into Love. Love as a kind of enduring and conflicdess Will has an obvious resemblance to Mill's "enduring I," which finally prevails in the will's decisions. Augustine's Love exerts its influence through the "weight"—"the will resembles a weight"117 —it adds to the soul, thus arresting its fluctuations. Men do not become just by knowing what is just but by loving justice. Love is the soul's gravity, or the other way round: "the specific gravity of bodies is, as it were, their love."118 What is saved, moreover, in this transformation of his earlier conception is the Will's power of assertion and denial; there is no greater assertion of something or somebody than to love it, that is, to say: I will that you b e—Amo: Volo ut sis.

  Thus far, we have left to one side all strictly theological questions and with them the chief problem free will presents to all strictly Christian philosophy. In the first centuries after Christ, the existence of the universe could be explained as emanation, the outflow of divine and anti-divine forces, requiring no personal God behind it. Or, following the Hebrew tradition, it could be explained as creation having a divine person for its author. The divine author created the world of His own free will and out of nothingness. And He created man after His image, that is, endowed, too, with a free will. From then on, the theories of emanation corresponded to the fatalist or determinist theories of necessity; the creation theories had to deal theologically with the Free Will of God, Who decided to create the world, and to reconcile this Freedom with the freedom of the creature, man. Insofar as God is omnipotent (He can overrule man's will), and has foreknowledge, human freedom seems to be doubly canceled out The standard argument, then, is: God only foreknows; He does not compel. You find the argument in Augustine, too, but at his best he proposes a very different line of thought

  Earlier, we took up the basic arguments put forward for determinism and fatalism because of their great importance to the mentality of the ancient world, especially Roman antiquity. And we saw, following Cicero, how this reasoning always ended in contradictions and paradoxes. You remember the so-called idle argument—When you were sick, whether you would recover or not recover was predestined, hence why have called a doctor; but whether you called a doctor or did not call him was also predetermined, and s
o on. In other words, all your faculties become idle once you think along these lines without cheating. The reasoning relies on antecedent causes; that is, it relies on the past. But what you actually are interested in is of course the future. You want the future to be predictable—"it was to be"—but the moment you start arguing along these lines, you are up against another paradox: "If I can foresee that I am going to be killed tomorrow in an airplane crash, then I will not get out of bed tomorrow. But then I will not be so killed. But then I will not have correctly foreseen the future."119 The flaw in the two arguments, the one relating to the past, the other to the future, is the same: the first extrapolates the present into the past, the second extrapolates it into the future, and both assume that the extrapolator stands outside the sphere in which the real event takes place and that he, the outside observer, has no power at all to act—he himself is not a cause. In other words, since man is himself part and parcel of the temporal process, a being with a past and a special faculty for the past, called "memory," since he fives in the present and looks forward to the future, he cannot jump out of the temporal order.