The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  If one comes to Thomas and Duns Scotus from Augustine, the most striking change is that neither is interested in the problematic structure of the Will, seen as an isolated faculty; what is at stake for them is the relation between Will and Reason or Intellect, and the dominant question is which of these mental faculties is "nobler" and therefore entitled to primacy over the other. It may be of even greater significance, especially in view of Augustine's enormous influence on both thinkers, that, of Augustine's three mental faculties—Memory, Intellect, and Will—one has been lost, namely, Memory, the most specifically Roman one, binding men back to the past. And this loss turned out to be final; nowhere in our philosophical tradition does Memory again attain the same rank as Intellect and Will. Quite apart from the consequences of this loss for all strictly political philosophy,6 it is obvious that what went out with memory—sedes animi est in memoria—was a sense of the thoroughly temporal character of human nature and human existence, manifest in Augustine's homo temporalis."7

  The Intellect, which in Augustine related to whatever was present in the mind, in Thomas relates back to first principles, that is, to what comes logically before anything else; it is from them that the reasoning process that deals with particulars takes off.8 The proper object of the Will is the end, yet this end is no more the future than the "first principle" is the past; principle and end are logical, not temporal, categories. So far as the Will is concerned, Thomas, closely following the Nicomachean Ethics, insists chiefly on the means-end category, and as in Aristotle, the end, though the Will's object, is given to the Will by the apprehensive faculties, that is, by the Intellect. Hence, the proper "order of action" is this: "First there is the apprehension of the end ... then counsel [deliberation] about the means; and finally desire for the means."9 At each step, the apprehensive power precedes, and has primacy over, the appetitive movement

  The conceptual foundation of all these distinctions is that "goodness and Being" differ only in thought; they are "the same realiter," and this to the point where they can be said to be "convertible": "As much as [a man] has of Being, so much has he of goodness, while so far as something is lacking in the fullness of [his] Being, so far does this fall short of goodness and is said to be evil."10 No being, insofar as it is, can be said to be evil, "but only insofar as it lacks Being." All this of course is no more than an elaboration of Augustine's position, but the position is enlarged and conceptually sharpened. From the perspective of the apprehensive faculties, Being appears under the aspect of truth; from the perspective of the Will, where the end is the good, it appears "under the aspect of desirableness, which Being does not express." Evil is not a principle, because it is sheer absence, and absence can be stated "in a privative and in a negative sense. Absence of good, taken negatively, is not evil ... for instance, if a man lacks the swiftness of the horse; evil is an absence where something is deprived of a good that belongs to it essentially—for instance, the blind man, who is deprived of sight."11 Because of its privative character, absolute or radical evil cannot exist. No evil exists in which one can detect "the total absence of good." For "if the wholly evil could be, it would destroy itself."12

  Thomas was not the first to regard evil as nothing but "privation," a kind of optical illusion that comes about if the whole, of which evil is only a part, is not taken into account. Already Aristode had had the notion of a universe "wherein every part has its own perfectly ordered place" so that the inherent goodness of fire "causes evil to water" by accident.13 And it remains the most resilient, and ever-repeated traditional argument against the real existence of evil; even Kant, who coined the concept of "radical evil," by no means believed that one who "cannot prove a lover" may on that account be "determined to prove a villain," that, to use Augustine's language, velle and nolle are interconnected and that the true choice of the Will is between willing and nilling. Still, it is true that this old topos of philosophy makes more sense in Thomas than in most other systems because the center of Thomas' system, its "first principle," is Being. In the context of his philosophy, "to say that God created not only the world but the evil in it, would be to say that God created nothingness," as Gilson pointed out.14

  All created things, whose main distinction is that they are, aspire "to Being [each] after its own manner," but only the Intellect has "knowledge" of Being as a whole; the senses "do not know Being except under the conditions of here and now."15 The Intellect "apprehends Being absolutely, and for all time," and man, insofar as he is endowed with this faculty, cannot but desire "always to exist." This is the "natural inclination" of the Will, whose ultimate goal is as "necessary" to it as truth is compelling to the Intellect. The Will is free, properly speaking, only with respect to "particular goods," by which it is not "necessarily moved," although the appetites may be moved by them. The ultimate goal, the Intellect's desire to exist forever, keeps the appetites under control so that the concrete distinction between men and animals manifests itself in the fact that man "is not moved at once [by his appetites, which he shares with all other living things]...but awaits the command of the Will, which is the superior appetite ... and so the lower appetite is not sufficient to cause movement unless the higher appetite consents."16

  It is obvious that Being, Thomas' first principle, is simply a conceptualization of Life and the life instinct—the fact that every living thing instinctively preserves life and shuns death. This, too, is an elaboration of thoughts we found expressed in more tentative formulae by Augustine, but its inherent consequence, an equation of the Will with the life instinct—without any relation to a possible eternal life—is commonly drawn only in the nineteenth century. In Schopenhauer it is explicitly stated; and in Nietzsche's will to power, truth itself is understood as a function of the life process: what we call truth is those propositions without which we could not go on living. Not reason but our will to five makes truth compelling.

  We now turn to the question of which of the two mental powers, if compared with one another, is "absolutely higher and nobler." At first sight the question seems not to make much sense, since the ultimate object is the same; it is Being that appears good and desirable to the Will and true to the Intellect. And Thomas agrees: these two powers "include one another in their acts, because the Intellect understands that the Will wills, and the Will wills the Intellect to understand."17 Even if we distinguish between the "good" and the "true" as corresponding to different faculties of the mind, it turns out that they are very similar because both are universal in scope. As the Intellect is "apprehensive of universal being and truth," so the Will is "appetitive of universal good," and, just as the Intellect has reasoning as its subordinate power for dealing with the particulars, so the Will has the faculty of free choice (liberum arbitrium) as its subservient helper in sorting out the appropriate particular means to a universal end. Moreover, since both faculties have Being as their ultimate objective—in the guise of the True or of the Good—they seem to be equals, each of them attended by its proper servant to handle mere particulars.

  Hence, the really distinctive line separating higher and lower faculties seems to be the line dividing "superior" and "subservient" faculties, and that distinction is never questioned. For Thomas—as for nearly all his successors in philosophy, of whom there are more than avowed Thomists—it was a matter of course, actually the very touchstone of philosophy as a separate discipline, that the universal is "nobler and higher in rank" than the particular, and the only proof this needed was and remained the old Aristotelian statement that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.

  The great and rather lonely distinction of John Duns Scotus is to have questioned and challenged that assumption: Being in its universality is but a thought, what it lacks is reality; only particular things (res), which are characterized by "thisness" (haecceity) can be said to be real for man. Hence Scotus sharply contrasted "intuitive cognition, whose proper object is the existing singular perceived as existing, and abstractive cognition, whose proper ob
ject is the quiddity or essence of the known thing."18 Therefore—and this is decisive—the mental image (the seen tree), because it has lost its actual existence, is of less ontological stature than the actual tree, although no knowledge of what a thing is would be possible without mental images. The consequence of this reversal is that this particular man, for instance, in his living existence is higher in rank than, and precedes, the species or the mere thought of mankind. (Kierkegaard later raised a very similar argument against Hegel.)

  The reversal seems a rather obvious consequence for a philosophy that drew its main inspiration from the Bible, that is, from a Creator-God, who certainly was a person, who created men in His own image, that is, necessarily as persons. And Thomas is enough of a Christian to hold that "persona significat id quod est perfectissimum in tota natura" ("the person signifies what is most perfect in the whole of nature").19 The Biblical basis, as Augustine showed, is in Genesis, where all natural species were created in the plural—'"plura simul iussit exsistere" ("He commanded them to be many at once"). Only man was created as a singular, so that the human species (taken as an animal species) multiplied out of a One: "ex uno ... multiplicavit genus humanum."20 In Augustine and in Scotus, but not in Aquinas, the Will is the mental organ that actualizes this singularity; it is the principium individuationis.

  To return to Thomas, he insists: "If Intellect and Will be compared with one another according to the universality of their respective objects then ... the Intellect is absolutely higher and nobler than the Will." And this proposition is all the more significant because it does not follow from his general philosophy of Being. This is admitted in a way by Thomas himself. For him the primacy of the Intellect over the Will does not lie so much in the primacy of their respective objects—Truth over the Good—as in the way the two faculties "concur" within the human mind: "Every movement of the will [is]...preceded by apprehension"—no one can will what he does not know—"whereas ... apprehension is not preceded by an act of the will."21 (Here, of course, he parts company with Augustine, who maintained the primacy of the Will qua attention even for acts of sense perception.) This precedence shows itself in every volition. In "free choice," for instance, in which the means to an end are "elected," the two powers concur in the election: "cognitive power ... by which we judge one thing to be preferred to another ... and appetitive power [whereby] it is required that the appetite should accept the judgment of counsel."22

  If we look upon the Augustinian and the Thomistic positions in purely psychological terms, as their authors frequently used to argue them, we have to admit that their opposition is somewhat spurious because they are equally plausible. Who would deny that no one can will what he does not somehow know or, on the contrary, that some volition precedes, and decides upon, the direction we want our knowledge or our search for knowledge to go? Thomas' true reason for maintaining the primacy of the Intellect—like Augustine's final reason for electing the primacy of the Will—lies in the undemonstrable answer to the ultimate question of all medieval thinkers: In what does "man's last end and happiness consist?"23 We know that Augustine's answer was love; he intended to spend his after-life in an undesiring, never-to-be-sundered union of the creature with its creator. Whereas Thomas, obviously replying (though without mentioning them) to Augustine and the Augustinians, answers: Although someone might think that man's last end and happiness consists "not in knowing God, but in loving Him, or in some other act of will toward Him," he, Thomas, maintains that "it is one thing to possess the good which is our end, and another to love it; for love was imperfect before we possessed the end, and perfect after we obtained possession." For him, a love without desire is unthinkable and therefore the answer is categorical: "Man's ultimate happiness is essentially to know God by the Intellect; it is not an act of the Will." Here Thomas is following his teacher, Albertus Magnus, who had declared that "the supreme bliss comes to pass when the Intellect finds itself in the state of contemplation."24 It is noteworthy to see Dante in full agreement:

  Hence may be seen how the celestial bliss

  Is founded on the act that seeth God,

  Not that which loves, which comes after this.25

  At the start of these considerations I tried to stress the distinction between Will and desire, and by implication distinguish the concept of Love in Augustine's philosophy of the Will from the Platonic eros in the Symposium, where it indicates a deficiency in the lover and a longing for the possession of whatever he may be lacking. What I have just quoted from Thomas shows, I think, to what an extent his concept of the appetitive faculties is still indebted to the notion of a desire to possess in a hereafter whatever may be lacking in earthly life. For the Will, basically understood as desire, stops when the desired object is brought into its possession, and the notion that "the Will is blessed when it is in possession of what it wills"26 is simply not true—this is precisely the moment when the Will ceases to will. The Intellect, which, according to Thomas, is "a passive power,"27 is assured of its primacy over the Will not only because it "presents an object to the appetite," and hence is prior to it, but also because it survives the Will, which is extinguished, as it were, when the object has been attained. The transformation of Will into Love—in Augustine as well as in Duns Scotus—was at least partly inspired by a more radical separation of the Will from appetites and desires as well as by a different notion of "man's last end and happiness." Even in the hereafter man still remains man, and his "ultimate happiness" cannot be sheer "passivity." Love could be invoked to redeem the Will because it is still active, though without restlessness, neither pursuing an end nor afraid of losing it.

  That there could be an activity that has its end in itself and therefore can be understood outside the means-end category never enters Thomas' considerations. For him, "every agent acts for an end ... the principle of this motion lies in the end. Hence it is that the art, which is concerned with the end, by its command moves the art which is concerned with the means; just as the art of sailing commands the art of shipbuilding."28 To be sure, this comes right out of the Nicomachean Ethics, except that in Aristotle it is true of only one kind of activity, namely, poiesis, the productive arts, as distinguished from the performing arts, where the end lies in the activity itself—flute-playing, compared with flute-making, or just going for a walk, compared with walking in order to reach a predetermined destination. In Aristotle it is quite clear that praxis must be understood in analogy to the performing arts and cannot be understood in terms of the means-end category; and it is quite striking that Thomas, who depended so heavily on the Philosopher's teachings and especially on the Nicomachean Ethics, should have neglected the distinction between poiesis and praxis.

  Whatever the advantages of this distinction may be—and I think they are crucial for any theory of action—they are of little relevance to Thomas' notion of ultimate happiness. He opposes Contemplation to any kind of doing, and here he is quite in agreement with Aristotle, for whom the energeia ton theou is contemplative, since action as well as production would be "petty and unworthy of the gods." ("If we take away action from a living being, to say nothing of production, what is left but contemplation?") Hence, humanly speaking, contemplation is "not-doing-anything," being blessed by sheer intuition, blissfully at rest. Happiness, says Aristotle, "depends on leisure, for our purpose in being busy [either acting or making] is to have leisure, and we wage war in order to have peace."29 For Thomas, only this last end—the bliss of contemplation—"moves the will" necessarily; "the will cannot not-will it" Hence "the Will moves the Intellect to be active in the way an agent is said to move; but the Intellect moves the Will in the way the end moves"30 —that is, in the way Aristotle's "unmoved mover" was supposed to move, and how could that move except by virtue of "being loved," as the lover is moved by the beloved?31

  What in Aristotle was the "most continuous of all pleasures" is now hoped for as eternal bliss, not the pleasure that may attend volitions but a delight that puts the will to rest, so
that the ultimate end of the Will, seen in reference to itself, is to cease willing—in short, to attain its own non-being. And in the context of Thomas' thought, this implies that every activity, since its end is never reached while it is still active, ultimately aims at its own self-destruction; the means disappear when the end is reached. (It is as though, while writing a book, one were constantly driven by the desire to have it finished and be rid of writing.) To what extremes Thomas, in his single-minded predilection for contemplation as sheer seeing and not-doing, was prepared to go becomes manifest in a rather casual side remark he lets drop when interpreting a Pauline text dealing with human love between two persons. Could the "enjoyment" of loving somebody, he asks, signify that the Will's ultimate "end" has been placed in man? The answer is "No," for, according to Thomas, what Paul said in effect was that "he enjoyed his brother as a means toward the enjoyment of God"32 —and God, as we have seen, cannot be reached by Man's Will or Love but only by his Intellect.

  This is of course a far cry from Augustine's Love, which loves the love of the beloved, and it is also rather offensive to the ears of those who, schooled by Kant, are pretty well convinced that we ought to "treat humanity, whether in [our] own person or in that of any other ... as an end withal, never as means only."33

  12. Duns Scotus and the primacy of the Will