The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  In the following I shall try to summarize those strikingly original and highly relevant thought-trains—or thought-experiments—which clearly go against the grain of our philosophical and theological traditions but are easily overlooked because they are presented in the manner of the schoolmen and easily lost in the intricacies of Scotian argumentations. I have already mentioned some of the striking insights: first, his objection to the old cliché that "all men will to be happy" (of which nothing more was left than "no man can will to be miserable"); second, his no less surprising proof of the existence of contingency ("let all those who deny contingency be tortured until they admit that it would be possible not to be tortured"67 ). Stumbling on such down-to-earth remarks in their erudite surroundings, one is tempted to read them as mere witticisms. Their validity, according to Scotus, depends on the experientia interna, an experience of the mind whose evidence can be denied only by those who lack the experience, as a blind man would deny the experience of color. The dry, tindery quality of such remarks could suggest flashes of insight rather than thought-trains, but these abrupt flashes usually occur only in the thought-thing, a single pithy sentence that is the result of long previous critical examinations. It is characteristic of Scotus that, despite his "passion for constructive thinking," he was no system builder; his most surprising insights often appear casually and, as it were, out of context; he must have known of the disadvantages of this, for he warns us explicitly against entering into disputes with "contentious" opponents who, lacking "internal experience," are likely to win an argument and lose the issue at stake.68

  Let us start with Contingency as the price to be paid for freedom. Scotus is the only thinker for whom the word "contingent" has no derogatory association: "I say that contingency is not merely a privation or defect of Being like the deformity ... which is sin. Rather, contingency is a positive mode of Being, just as necessity is another mode."69 This position seems to him unavoidable, a matter of intellectual integrity, if one wishes to save freedom. The primacy of the Intellect over the Will must be rejected "because it cannot save freedom in any way "—"quia hoc nullo modo salvat libertatem."70 For him the main distinction between Christians and pagans lies in the Biblical notion of the origin of the universe: the universe of Genesis did not come into being through the emanation of predetermined necessary forces, so that its existence would also be necessary, but was created ex nihilo by the decision of a Creator-God Who, we must suppose, was entirely free to create a different world in which neither our mathematical truths nor our moral precepts would be valid. From this it follows that everything that is might possibly not have been—save God Himself. His existence is necessary from the perspective of a non-necessary world which He freely "designed," but not necessary in the sense that there had ever been a necessity that coerced or inspired Him in His creation; such a necessity working through Him would be in clear contradiction to God's omnipotence as well as to His supremacy.

  Men are part and parcel of this Creation, and all their natural capabilities, including their intellect, naturally follow the laws laid down by divine Fiat. Yet Man, in contradistinction to all other parts of Creation, was not freely designed; he was created in God's own image—as though God needed not only angels in some supranatural world, but some creatures after His likeness in the midst of worldly nature to keep Him company. The hallmark of this creature, obviously closer to God than any other, is by no means creativity; in that case the creature would indeed have been something like a "mortal god" (and to my mind this is very likely the reason that Scotus did not follow up his notion of a "freely designed goal of the Will" even though he seems to have thought of such a "content-less ability to design freely" as "true perfection"71 ). Rather, God's creature is distinguished by the mental capacity to affirm or negate freely, uncoerced by either desire or reasoning. It is as though Being, having come into existence, needed God's final judgment for its fulfillment—"And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good"—and this judgment was elicited also from the mortal that had been created in His likeness.

  At any rate the price of the Will's freedom is to be free vis-à-vis every object; man can "hate God and find satisfaction in such hatred," because some pleasure (delectatio) attends every volition.72 The Will's freedom does not consist in the selection of means for a predetermined end—eudaimonia or beatitudo or blessedness—precisely because this end is already given by human nature; it consists in freely affirming or negating or hating whatever confronts it. It is this freedom of the will mentally to take a position that sets man apart from the rest of creation; without it he would be an enlightened animal (bonum animal) at best, or, as Olivi had said earlier, a bestia intellectualis, an intellectual beast.73 The miracle of the human mind is that by virtue of the Will it can transcend everything ("voluntas transcendit omne creatum," as Olivi said74 ), and this is the sign of man's being created in God's image. The Biblical notion that God showed him His preference by giving him dominion over all the works of His hands (Psalm 8) would only make him the highest of all created things; it would not set him absolutely apart from them. The willing ego, when it says in its highest manifestation, "Amo: Volo ut sis," "I love you; I want you to be"—and not 'I want to have you" or "I want to rule you"—shows itself capable of the same love with which supposedly God loves men, whom He created only because He willed them to exist and whom He loves without desiring them.

  That is how the matter presented itself to the Christian; it is why "Christians ... say that God acts contingently ... freely and contingently."75 But it is also possible, according to Scotus, to arrive at the same evaluation of contingency by way of philosophy. After all, it was the Philosopher who had defined the contingent and the accidental (to symbēbekos) as that which "could as well not be" (endechomenon mē einai),76 and what was the willing ego more aware of in every volition than that it could also not will (experitur enim qui vult se posse non velle77 )? How would man ever have been capable of distinguishing a free act of will from an overwhelming desire without that infallible internal test?

  What apparently spoke against the Will's freedom to will or to nill was the law of causality, which Scotus also knew in the Aristotelian version: a chain of causation that would make movement intelligible and ultimately lead to an unmoved source of all motion, "the unmoved mover," a cause that itself is not caused. The strength of the argument, or, rather, its explicatory force, lies in the assumption that no more than one cause is sufficient to explain why something should be rather than not-be, that is, to explain motion and change. Scotus challenges the whole notion of a chain of causality leading in an unbroken line through a succession of sufficient and necessary causes and having to arrive finally at a First uncaused Cause in order to avoid an infinite regress.

  He starts the discussion by asking "whether the act of the will is caused in the will by the object moving it or by the will moving itself" and rejects the answer that the will is moved by an object outside itself, since in no way can that save freedom ("quia hoc nullo modo salvat libertatem"). The opposite answer, that the Will is omnipotent, he rejects because it cannot account for all the consequences that follow a volition ("quia tunc non possunt salvari omnes conditiones quae conse-quuntur actum volendi"). Thus he arrives at his "median position," actually the only position that saves both phenomena-freedom and necessity. Presented in this form, it sounds like one of the usual Scholastic logical exercises, a rather empty play with abstract concepts. Scotus, however, at once pursues the inquiry further and arrives at a theory of "partial causes...[which] may concur on an equal basis and independently of one another."

  Taking as his prime example procreation, where two independent substances, male and female, must come together to bring forth the child, he reaches the theory that all change occurs because a plurality of causes happens to coincide, and the coincidence engenders the texture of reality in human affairs.78 Therefore the crux of the matter is not simply to insist on Cod's original freedom in creating the w
orld, and hence on the possibility that He might have created a totally different one, but to show that change and motion as such, the phenomena that originally, in Aristotle, had led to the Law of Causality, the aitiai as well as the archai, are ruled by Contingency.

  "By 'contingent,'" said Scotus, "I do not mean something that is not necessary or which was not always in existence, but something whose opposite could have occurred at the time that this actually did. That is why I do not say that something is contingent, but that something is caused contingently "79 In other words, it is precisely the causative element in human affairs that condemns them to contingency and unpredictability. Nothing indeed could be in greater contradiction to every philosophical tradition than this insistence on the contingent character of processes. (We need only think of the libraries that have been produced to explain the necessity of the outbreaks of the last two wars, each theory picking out a different single cause—when in truth nothing seems more plausible than that it was a coincidence of causes, perhaps finally set in motion by one more additional one, that "contingently caused" the two conflagrations.)

  Although this notion of contingency corresponds to the experience of the willing ego, which in the act of volition knows itself to be free, uncoerced by its aims to act or not to act in their pursuit, at the same time it is in apparently unsolvable opposition to another, equally valid experience of the mind and of common sense telling us that actually we live in a factual world of necessity. A thing may have happened quite at random, but, once it has come into existence and assumed reality, it loses its aspect of contingency and presents itself to us in the guise of necessity. And even if the event is of our own making, or at least we are one of its contributing causes—as in contracting marriage or committing a crime—the simple existential fact that it now is as it has become (for whatever reasons) is likely to withstand all reflections on its original randomness. Once the contingent has happened, we can no longer unravel the strands that entangled it until it became an event—as though it could still be or not be.80

  The reason for this strange switch of perspective, which is at the root of many of the paradoxes connected with the problem of freedom, is that there is no substitute, real or imagined, for existence as such. To be sure, the flux of time and change may dissolve facts and events; but each of these dissolutions, even the most radical change, already presupposes the reality that preceded it. In Scotus' words, "everything that is past is absolutely necessary."81 It has become the necessary condition for my own existence, and I cannot, mentally or otherwise, conceive of my own non-existence since, being part and parcel of Being, I am unable to conceive of nothingness, just as I conceive of God as the Creator of Being but not of a God prior to the creatio ex nihilo.

  In other words, the Aristotelian understanding of actuality as necessarily growing out of a preceding potentiality would be verifiable only if it were possible to revolve the process back from actuality into potentiality, at least mentally; but this cannot be done. All we can say about the actual is that it obviously was not impossible; we can never prove that it was necessary just because it now turns out to be impossible for us to imagine a state of affairs in which it had not happened.

  This is what made John Stuart Mill say that "our internal consciousness tells us that we have a power [i.e., freedom], which the whole outward experience of the human race tells us that we never use"; for what does this "outward experience of the human race" consist of but the record of historians, whose backward-directed glance looks toward what has been—factum est—and has therefore already become necessary? At this moment "outward experience" displaces the certainties of "internal consciousness" without, however, destroying them, and the result is that for a mind wanting to co-ordinate and keep in balance both "internal consciousness" and "outward experience," it looks as though the ground of necessity itself depends on a contingency.

  If, on the other hand, the mind, in its uneasiness about the apparent contradiction it faces, decides to take its bearings exclusively from its own inwardness and enters into a state of reflection on the past, it will find that here, too, factually, as the result of Becoming, has already re-arranged and eliminated the randomness of the processes into a pattern of necessity. That is the necessary condition of the existential presence of the thinking ego pondering on the meaning of what has become and now is. Without an a priori assumption of some unilinear sequence of events having been caused necessarily and not contingently, no explanation of any coherence would be possible. The obvious, even the only possible, way to prepare and tell a story is to eliminate from the real happening the "accidental" elements, a faithful enumeration of which may be impossible anyhow, even for a computerized brain.

  Scotus is reported to have cheerfully admitted that "there is no real answer to the question as to the way in which freedom and necessity can be reconciled."82 He was still unacquainted with Hegelian dialectics in which the process of necessity can produce freedom. But to his way of thinking, no such reconciliation was needed, for freedom and necessity were two altogether different dimensions of the mind; if there was a conflict at all, it would amount to an intramural conflict between the willing and the thinking ego, a conflict in which the will directs the intellect and makes man ask the question: Why? The reason for this is simple: the will, as Nietzsche was later to discover, is incapable of "willing backwards"; hence, let the intellect try to find out what went wrong. The question Why?—what is the cause?—is suggested by the will because the will experiences itself as a causative agent.

  It is this aspect of the Will we stress when we say that "the Will is the spring of action"; or, in the language of the schoolmen, that "our will ... is productive of acts, and is that by which its possessor operates in formally willing."83 Speaking in terms of causality, the will first causes volitions, and these volitions then cause certain effects which no will can undo. The intellect, trying to provide the will with an explicatory cause to quiet its resentment at its own helplessness, will fabricate a story to make the data fall into place. Without an assumption of necessity, the story would lack all coherence.

  In other words, the past, precisely because it is the "absolutely necessary," is beyond the reach of the Will. For Scotus himself, the matter presented itself more simply: the decisive opposites are not freedom and necessity, but freedom and nature—Will ut natura and Will ut libera.84 Like the Intellect, the Will is naturally inclined to necessity, except that the Will, unlike the Intellect, can successfully resist the inclination.

  Closely connected with this doctrine of contingency is Scotus' surprisingly simple solution to the age-old problem of freedom insofar as the problem arises out of the willing faculty itself. We discussed at some length the curious brokenness of the will, the fact that the two-in-one division, characteristic of all processes of the mind and first discovered—by Socrates and Plato—in the thinking process, turns into a deadly struggle between an I-will and I-nill (between velle and nolle) which must both be present in order to guarantee freedom: "Experitur enim qui vult se posse non velle," "One who experiences a volition also has the experience of being able not to will."85 The schoolmen, following the Apostle Paul and Augustine's philosophy of the Will, were in accord that divine grace was necessary to heal the Will's misery. Scotus, perhaps the most pious among them, disagreed. No divine intervention is necessary to redeem the willing ego.

  It knows very well how to heal itself of the consequences of the priceless and yet highly questionable gift of human freedom, questionable because the fact that the will is free, undetermined and unlimited by either an exterior or an internally given object, does not signify that man qua man enjoys unlimited freedom. Man's normal way of escaping from his freedom is simply to act on the propositions of the will: "For example, it is possible for me to be writing at this moment, just as it is possible for me not to be writing; yet, my act of writing excludes its opposite. By one act of the will I can determine myself to write, and by another act I can decide not to write, but I c
annot be simultaneously in act in regard to both things together."86 In other words, the human will is indetermined, open to contraries, and hence broken only so long as its sole activity consists in forming volitions; the moment it stops willing and starts to act on one of the will's propositions, it loses its freedom—and man, the possessor of the willing ego, is as happy over the loss as Buridan's ass was happy to resolve the problem of choosing between two bundles of hay by following his instinct: stop choosing and start eating.

  Underlying this solution, which seems simplistic at first glance, there is a distinction Scotus made—probably under Aristotle's influence—between aetivum and factivum. It is between sheer activity, the Aristotelian energeia, which has its end and ergon within itself, and fabrication, facere, which consists in "producing or fashioning some external object," and this implies "that the operation is transient, that is, has a term outside the agent. Man's artifacts are produced by a transient activity."87 Mental activities, such as thinking or willing, are activities of the first kind, and these, Scotus considered, though they are resultless in the real world, are of higher "perfection" because essentially they are not transient. They cease, not because they have reached their own end but only because man as a limited and conditioned creature is unable to continue them indefinitely.

  Scotus likens these mental activities to the "activity" of light, which "is permanently renewed from its source and thus conserves its inner constancy and simply abides."88 Because the gift of free will was bestowed upon an ens creatum, this being in order to save itself is forced to switch from the aetivum to the factivum, from sheer activity to the fashioning of something that finds its term naturally with the emergence of the product. The switch is possible because there is an I-can inherent in every I-will, and this I-can sets limitations on the I-will that are not outside the willing activity itself. "Voluntas est potentia quia ipsa aliquid potest," "the Will is a power because it can achieve something," and this potency, inherent in the Will, is indeed the "opposite of the potentia passiva of the Aristotelians. It is an active ... powerful I-can ... which the ego experiences."89