The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  The insight that thinking and willing are not just two different faculties of the enigmatic being called "man," but are opposites, came to both Nietzsche and Heidegger. It is their version of the deadly conflict that occurs when the two-in-one of consciousness, actualized in the silent dialogue between me and myself, changes its original harmony and friendship into an ongoing conflict between will and counter-will, between command and resistance. But we have found testimony to this conflict throughout the history of the faculty.

  The difference between Heidegger's position and those of his predecessors lies in this: the mind of man, claimed by Being in order to transpose into language the truth of Being, is subject to a History of Being (Seinsgeschichte), and this History determines whether men respond to Being in terms of willing or in terms of thinking. It is the History of Being, at work behind the backs of acting men, that, like Hegel's World Spirit, determines human destinies and reveals itself to the thinking ego if the latter can overcome willing and actualize the letting-be.

  At first glance, this may look like another, perhaps a bit more sophisticated, version of Hegel's ruse of reason, Kant's ruse of nature, Adam Smith's invisible hand, or divine Providence, all forces invisibly guiding the ups and downs of human affairs to a predetermined goal: freedom in Hegel, eternal peace in Kant, harmony between the contradictory interests of a market economy in Adam Smith, ultimate salvation in Christian theology. The notion itself—namely, that the actions of men are inexplicable by themselves and can be understood only as the work of some hidden purpose or some hidden actor—is much older. Plato could already "imagine that each of us living creatures is a puppet made by gods, possibly as a plaything, possibly with some more serious purpose," and imagine that what we take for causes, the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, are but "the strings by which we are worked."72

  We hardly need a demonstration of historical influences to comprehend the stubborn resiliency of the idea, from Plato's airy fiction to Hegel's mental construct—which was the result of an unprecedented re-thinking of world history that deliberately eliminated from the factual record everything "merely" factual as accidental and non-consequential. The simple truth is that no man can act alone, even though his motives for action may be certain designs, desires, passions, and goals of his own. Nor can we ever achieve anything wholly according to plan (even when, as archōn, we successfully lead and initiate and hope that our helpers and followers will execute what we begin), and this combines with our consciousness of being able to cause an effect to give birth to the notion that the actual outcome must be due to some alien, supernatural force which, undisturbed by human plurality, has provided for the end result. The fallacy is similar to the fallacy Nietzsche detected in the notion of a necessary "progress" of Mankind. To repeat: " 'Mankind' does not advance, it does not even exist.... [But since] time marches forward, we'd like to believe that everything that is in it also marches forward—that the development is one that moves forward."73

  Certainly Heidegger's Seinsgeschichte cannot fail to remind us of Hegel's World Spirit. The difference, however, is decisive. When Hegel saw "the World Spirit on horseback" in Napoleon at Jena, he knew that Napoleon himself was unconscious of being the incarnation of the Spirit, knew that he acted out of the usual human mixture of short-term goals, desires, and passions; for Heidegger, however, it is Being itself that, forever changing, manifests itself in the thinking of the actor so that acting and thinking coincide. "If to act means to give a hand to the essence of Being, then thinking is actually acting. That is, preparing [building an abode] for the essence of Being in the midst of entities by which Being transposes itself and its essence into speech. Without speech, mere doing lacks the dimension in which it can become effective and follow directions. Speech, however, is never a simple expression of thinking, feeling, or willing. Speech is the original dimension in which the human being is able to respond to Being's claim and, responding, belong to it. Thinking is the actualization of that original correspondence."74

  In terms of a mere reversal of viewpoints, one would be tempted to see in Heidegger's position the justification of Valéry's aphoristic reversal of Descartes: "'L'homme pense, donc je suis'—dit Vunivers" ("Man thinks, therefore I am, says the universe").75 The interpretation is indeed tempting since Heidegger would certainly agree with Valéry's "Les événe-ments ne sont que Fécume des choses" ("Events are but the foam of things"). He would not agree, however, with Valéry's assumption that what really is—the underlying reality whose surface is mere foam—is the stable reality of a substantial, ultimately unchanging Being. Nor, either before or after the "reversal," would he have agreed that "the new is by definition the perishable part of things" ("Le nouveau est, par définition, la partie périssable des choses").76

  Ever since he re-interpreted the reversal, Heidegger has insisted on the continuity of his thought, in the sense that Being and Time was a necessary preparation that already contained in a provisional way the main direction of his later work. And indeed this is true to a large extent, although it is liable to de-radicalize the later reversal and the consequences obviously implicit in it for the future of philosophy. Let us begin with the most startling consequences, to be found in the later work itself, to wit, first, the notion that solitary thinking in itself constitutes the only relevant action in the factual record of history, and second, that thinking is the same as thanking (and not just for etymological reasons). Having done this, we shall try to follow the development of certain key terms in Being and Time and see what happens to them. The three key terms I propose are Care, Death, and Self.

  Care—in Being and Time, the fundamental mode of man's existential concern with his own being—does not simply disappear in favor of the Will, with which it obviously shares a certain number of characteristics; it changes its function radically. It all but loses its relatedness to itself, its concern with man's own being, and, along with that, the mood of "anxiety" caused when the world into which man is "thrown" reveals itself as "nothingness" for a being that knows its own mortality—'"das nackte Dass im Nichts der Welt," "the naked That in the Nothingness of the world."77

  The emphasis shifts from Sorge as worry or concern with itself to Sorge as taking care, and this not of itself but of Being. Man who was the "caretaker" (Platzhalter) of Nothing and therefore open to the disclosure of Being now becomes the "guardian" (Hiiter) or "shepherd" (Hirte) of Being, and his speech offers Being its abode.

  Death, on the other hand, which originally was actual for man only as the utmost possibility—"if it were actualized [for instance, in suicide], man obviously would lose the possibility he has of existing in the face of death"78 —now becomes the "shrine" that "collects," "protects," and "salvages" the essence of mortals, who are mortals not because their life has an end but because to-be-dead still belongs to their innermost being.79 (These strange-sounding descriptions refer to well-known experiences, testified to, for instance, by the old adage de mortuis nil nisi honum. It is not the dignity of death as such that puts us in awe but, rather, the curious change from life to death that overtakes the personality of the dead. In remembrance—the way living mortals think of their dead—it is as though all non-essential qualities perished with the disappearance of the body in which they were incarnated. The dead are "enshrined" in remembrance like precious relics of themselves.)

  Finally there is the concept of the Self, and it is this concept whose change in the "reversal" is the most unexpected and the most consequential. In Being and Time, the term "Self" is the "answer to the question Who [is man]?" as distinguished from the question of What he is; the Self is the term for man's existence as distinguished from whatever qualities he may possess. This existence, the "authentic being a Self," is derived polemically from the "Them." ("Mit dem Ausdruck 'Selbst' antworten wir auf die Frage nach dem Wer des Daseins. . . . Das eigentliche Selbstsein bestimmt sich als eine existenzielle Modifikation des Man.")80 By modifying the "They" of everyday life into "being oneself," hum
an existence produces a "solus ipse," and Heidegger speaks in this context of an "existential solipsism," that is, of the actualization of the principium individuations, an actualizing we have encountered in other philosophers as one of the essential functions of the Will. Heidegger had originally ascribed it to Care, his early term for man's organ for the future.81

  To underline the similarity of Care (before the "reversal") and Will in a modem setting, we turn to Bergson, who—certainly not influenced by earlier thinkers but following the immediate evidence of consciousness—had posited, only a few decades before Heidegger, the co-existence of two selves, the one social (Heidegger's "They") and the other "fundamental" (Heidegger's "authentic"). The Will's function is "to recover this fundamental self" from "the requirements of social life in general and language in particular," namely the language ordinarily spoken in which every word already has a "social meaning."82 It is a cliche-ridden language, needed for communication with others in an "external world quite distinct from [ourselves], which is the common property of all conscious beings." Life in common with others has created its own kind of speech that leads to the formation of "a second self ... which obscures the first." The task of philosophy is to lead this social self back "to the real and concrete self ... whose activity cannot be compared to that of any other force," because this force is sheer spontaneity of which "each of us has immediate knowledge" obtained only by the immediate observation of oneself by oneself.83 And Bergson, quite in line with Nietzsche and also, as it were, in tune with Heidegger, sees die "proof' of this spontaneity in the fact of artistic creativity. The coming into existence of a work of art cannot be explained by antecedent causes as though what is now actual has been latent or potential before, whether in the form of external causes or inner motives: "When a musician composes a symphony, was his work possible before being real?"84 Heidegger is quite in line with the general position when he writes in volume I of his Nietzsche (i.e., before the "reversal"): "To will always means: to bring oneself to one's self.... Willing, we encounter ourselves as who we are authentically...."85

  Yet this is as much of an affinity between Heidegger and his immediate predecessors as can be claimed. Nowhere in Being and Time—except for a peripheral remark about poetic speech "as possible disclosure of existence"86 —is artistic creativity mentioned. In volume I of the Nietzsche, the tension and close relationship between poetry and philosophy, the poet and the philosopher, is twice noticed but not in either the Nietzschean or the Bergsonian sense of sheer creativity.87 On the contrary, the Self in Being and Time becomes manifest in "the voice of conscience," which calls man back from his everyday entanglement in the "man" (German for "one" or "they") and what conscience, in its call, discloses as human "guilt," a word (Schuld) that in German means both being guilty of (responsible for) some deed and having debts in the sense of owing somebody something.88

  The main point in Heidegger's "idea of guilt" is that human existence is guilty to the extent that it "factually exists"; it does not "need to become guilty of something through omissions or commissions; [it is only called upon] to actualize authentically the 'guiltiness' which it is anyhow."89 ® (It apparently never occurred to Heidegger that by making all men who listen to the "call of conscience" equally guilty, he was actually proclaiming universal innocence: where everybody is guilty, nobody is.) This existential culpability—given by human existence—is established in two ways. Inspired by Goethe's "One who acts always becomes guilty," Heidegger shows that every action, by actualizing a single possibility, at one stroke kills all the others among which it had to choose. Every commitment entails a number of defaults. More important, however, the concept of "being thrown into the world" already implies that human existence owes its existence to something that it is not itself; by virtue of its very existence it is indebted: Dasein— human existence inasmuch as it is—"has been thrown; it is there, but not brought into the there by itself."90

  Conscience demands that man accept that "indebtedness," and acceptance means that the Self brings itself to a kind of "acting" (handeln) which is polemically understood as the opposite of the "loud" and visible actions of public life—the mere froth on what truly is. This acting is silent, a "letting one's own self act in its indebtedness," and this entirely inner "action" in which man opens himself to the authentic actuality of being thrown,91 can exist only in the activity of thinking. That is probably why Heidegger, throughout his whole work, "on purpose avoided"92 dealing with action. What is most surprising in his interpretation of conscience is the vehement denunciation of "the ordinary interpretation of conscience" that has always understood it as a kind of soliloquy, the "soundless dialogue of me and myself." Such a dialogue, Heidegger maintains, can be explained only as an inauthentic attempt at self-justification against the claims of the "Them." This is all the more striking because Heidegger, in a different context—and, it is true, only marginally—speaks of "the voice of the friend that every Dasein [human existence] carries with it."93

  No matter how strange and, in the last analysis, unaccounted for by phenomenological evidence Heidegger's analysis of conscience may prove to be, the tie with the sheer facts of human existence implicit in the concept of a primordial indebtedness certainly contains the first hint of his later identification of thinking and thanking. What the call of conscience actually achieves is the recovery of the individualized (verein-zeltes) self from involvement in the events that determine men's everyday activities as well as the course of recorded history—Vicume des choses. Summoned back, the self is now turned to a thinking that expresses gratitude that the "naked That" has been given at all. That the attitude of man, confronted with Being, should be thanking can be seen as a variant of Plato's thaumazein, the beginning principle of philosophy. We have dealt with that admiring wonder, and to find it in a modem context is neither striking nor surprising; we have only to think of Nietzsche's praise of the "Yes-sayers" or turn our attention from academic speculations to some of this century's great poets. They at least show how suggestive such affirmation can be as a solution for the apparent meaninglessness of an entirely secularized world. Here are two lines by the Russian Osip Mandelstam, written in 1918:

  We will remember in Lethe's cold waters

  That earth for us has been worth a thousand heavens.

  These verses can easily be matched by a number of lines by Rainer Maria Rilke in the Duino Elegies, written at about the same time; I shall quote a few:

  Erde du liebe, ich will. Oh glaub es bedürfte

  Nicht deiner Frühlinge mehr, mich dir zu gewinnen.

  Einer, ach ein einziger ist schon dem Blute zu viel.

  Namenlos bin ich zu dir entschlossen von weit her,

  Immer warst du im recht....

  Earth, you darling, I will. Oh, believe me, you need

  Your spring-times no longer to win me; a single one,

  Just one, is already more than my blood can endure.

  I've now been unspeakably yours for ages and ages.

  You were always right....

  Ninth Elegy

  And finally, as a reminder, I cite again what W. H. Auden wrote some twenty years later:

  That singular command

  I do not understand,

  Bless what there is for being,

  Which has to be obeyed, for

  What else am I made for,

  Agreeing or disagreeing?

  Perhaps these examples of non-academic testimony to the dilemmas of the last stage of the modern age can explain the great appeal of Heidegger's work to an elite of the intellectual community despite the almost unanimous antagonism it has aroused in the universities ever since the appearance of Being and Time.

  But what is true of the coincidence of thinking and thanking is hardly true of the merging of acting and thinking. With Heidegger, this is not just the elimination of the subject-object split in order to desubjectivize the Cartesian Ego, but actual fusion of the changes in the "History of Being" (Seinsgeschichte) with the activity of
thinking in the thinkers. "Being's History" secretly inspires and guides what happens on the surface, while the thinkers, hidden by and protected from the "Them," respond and actualize Being. Here the personified concept whose ghostlike existence brought about the last great enlivenment of philosophy in German Idealism has become fully incarnated; there is a Somebody who acts out the hidden meaning of Being and thus provides the disastrous course of events with a counter-current of wholesomeness.

  This Somebody, the thinker who has weaned himself from willing to "letting-be," is actually the "authentic Self" of Being and Time, who now listens to the call of Being instead of the call of Conscience. Unlike the Self, the thinker is not summoned by himself to his Self; still, to "hear the call authentically signifies once again bringing oneself into factually acting" ("sich in das faktische Handeln bringen").94 In this context the "reversal" means that the Self no longer acts in itself (what has been abandoned is the In-sich-handeln-lassen des eigensten Selbst95 ) but, obedient to Being, enacts by sheer thinking the counter-current of Being underlying the "foam" of beings—the mere appearances whose current is steered by the will-to-power.

  The "They" reappear here, but their chief characteristic is no longer "idle talk" (Gerede); it is the destructiveness inherent in willing.