The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  These difficulties and anxieties are caused by the Will insofar as it is a mental faculty, hence reflexive, recoiling upon itself—volo me velle, cogito me cogitare— or, to put it in Heideggerian terms, by the fact that, existentially speaking, human existence has been "abandoned to itself." Nothing of the sort disturbs our intellect, the mind's capability of cognition and its trust in truth. The cognitive abilities, like our senses, do not recoil upon themselves; they are totally intentional, namely, totally absorbed by the intended object. Hence at first glance it is surprising to find a similar bias against freedom in the great scientists of our century. As we know, they became greatly disturbed when their demonstrable discoveries in astrophysics, as well as in nuclear physics, gave rise to the suspicion that we five in a universe which, in Einstein's words, is ruled by a God who "plays dice" with it or, as Heisenberg suggested, that what we regard as the "outer world [may be] only our inner world turned inside out" (Lewis Mumford).

  Such thoughts and after-thoughts are, of course, not scientific statements; they do not claim to deliver demonstrable truths or tentative theorems that their authors can hope to translate eventually into propositions susceptible of proof. They are reflections inspired by a quest for meaning and therefore no less speculative than other products of the thinking ego. Einstein himself, in a much quoted remark, very clearly drew the line between cognitive statements and speculative propositions: "The most incomprehensible fact of nature is the fact that nature is comprehensible." Here we can almost watch how the thinking ego intrudes on the cognitive activity, interrupts and halts it by its reflections. It puts itself "out of order" with the scientist's ordinary activity by recoiling upon itself and musing on the fundamental incomprehensibility of what he is doing—an incomprehensibility that remains a riddle worth thinking about even though it cannot be solved.

  Such reflections may yield various "hypotheses," and some may even turn out to yield knowledge when tested; in any case, their quality and weight will depend on the cognitive achievements of their authors. Still, it is hardly deniable that the reflections of the great founders of modern science—Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger—have brought about a "crisis in the foundations of modern science" (Grund-lagenkrise), "and their central question" (What must the world be like in order that man may know it?) "is as old as science itself and it remains unanswered."117

  It seems only natural that this generation of founders, on whose discoveries modern science was based and whose reflections on what they were doing have brought about the "crisis in the foundations," should have been followed by several generations of less distinguished epigones who find it easier to answer unanswerable questions because they are less aware of the line separating their ordinary activities from their reflections on them. I have spoken of the orgy of speculative thinking that succeeded Kant's liberation of reason's need to think beyond the intellect's cognitive capacity, the games played by German Idealists with personified concepts and the claims made for scientific validity—a far remove from Kant's "critique."

  From the point of view of scientific truth, the Idealists' speculations were pseudo-scientific; now, at the opposite end of the spectrum, something similar seems to be going on. Materialists play the game of speculation with the help of computers, cybernetics, and automation; their extrapolations produce, not ghosts like the game of the Idealists, but materi-alizations like those of spiritualist séances. What is so very striking in these materialist games is that their results resemble the concepts of the Idealists. Thus Hegel's "World Spirit" has recently found materialization in the construction of a "nervous system" fashioned on the model of a Giant Computer: Lewis Thomas118 proposes to understand the world-wide community of human beings in the form of a Giant Brain, exchanging thoughts so rapidly "that the brains of mankind often appear functionally to be undergoing fusion." With mankind as its "nervous system," the whole earth thus "becomes ... a breathing organism of finely meshed parts," all growing under the "protective membrane" of the planet's atmosphere.119

  Such notions are neither science nor philosophy, but science fiction; they are widespread and demonstrate that the extravagances of materialist speculation are quite equal to the follies of Idealist metaphysics. The common denominator of all these fallacies, materialist or Idealist, apart from being historically derived from the notion of Progress and its concomitant, the undemonstrable entity called Mankind, is that they fulfill the same emotional function. In Lewis Thomas' words, they do away with "the whole dear notion of one's own self—the marvelous old free-willed, free-enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self," which is "a myth."120 The proper name of this myth, which we are admonished from all sides to get rid of, is Freedom.

  Professional thinkers, whether philosophers or scientists, have not been "pleased with freedom" and its ineluctable randomness; they have been unwilling to pay the price of contingency for the questionable gift of spontaneity, of being able to do what could also be left undone. Let us put them aside therefore and fasten our attention on men of action, who ought to be committed to freedom because of the very nature of their activity, which consists in "changing the world," and not in interpreting or knowing it.

  Conceptually speaking, we turn from the notion of philosophical freedom to political liberty, an obvious difference which, as far as I know, only Montesquieu spoke of, and that in passing, when he used philosophical freedom as a backdrop against which political liberty could be more sharply oudined. In a chapter entitled "De la liberté du citoyen" ("Of the citizen's liberty") he said: "La liberté philosophique consiste dans l'exercise de sa volonté, ou du moins (s'il faut parler dans tous les systèmes) dans Vopinion où l'on est que Von exerce sa volonté. La liberté politique consiste dans la'sûreté, ou du moins dans l'opinion que l'on a de sa sûreté"—"Philosophie liberty consists in the exercise of the will, or at least (if we must take account of all systems) in the opinion that we exert our will. Political liberty consists in safety, or at least in the opinion of being safe."121 The citizen's political liberty is "that tranquillity of mind that comes from the opinion that everybody has of his safety; and in order to be in possession of this liberty the government must be such that one citizen could not be afraid of another."122

  Philosophic freedom, the freedom of the will, is relevant only to people who live outside political communities, as solitary individuals. Political communities, in which men become citizens, are produced and preserved by laws, and these laws, made by men, can be very different and can shape various forms of government, all of which in one way or another constrain the free will of their citizens. Still, with the exception of tyranny, where one arbitrary will rules the liveS of all, they nevertheless open up some space of freedom for action that actually sets the constituted body of citizens in motion. The principles inspiring the actions of the citizens vary in accordance with the different forms of government, but they are all, as Jefferson rightly called them, "energetic principles";123 and political freedom "ne peut consister qu'à pouvoir faire ce que l'on doit vouloir et à n'être point contraint de faire ce que l'on ne doit pas vouloir"—"can consist only in the power of doing what we ought to will and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will."124

  The emphasis here is clearly on Power in the sense of the I-can; for Montesquieu, as for the ancients, it was obvious that an agent could no longer be called free when he lacked the capacity to do what he wanted to do, whether this was due to exterior or interior circumstances. Moreover, the Laws which, according to Montesquieu, transform free and lawless individuals into citizens are not God's Ten Commandments or the voice of conscience or reason's lumen rationale enlightening all men alike, but man-made rapports, "relations," which, since they concern the changeable affairs of mortal men—as distinguished from God's eternity or the immortality of the cosmos—must be "subject to all the accidents that can happen and vary in proportion as the will of man changes."125 For Montesquieu, as for pre-Christian antiquity and for th
e men who at the end of the century founded the American Republic, the words "power" and "liberty" were almost synonymous. Freedom of movement, the power of moving about unchecked by disease or master, was originally the most elementary of all liberties, their very prerequisite.

  Thus political freedom is distinct from philosophic freedom in being clearly a quality of the I-can and not of the I-will. Since it is possessed by the citizen rather than by man in general, it can manifest itself only in communities, where the many who live together have their intercourse both in word and in deed regulated by a great number of rapports— laws, customs, habits, and the like. In other words, political freedom is possible only in the sphere of human plurality, and on the premise that this sphere is not simply an extension of the dual I-and-myself to a plural We. Action, in which a We is always engaged in changing our common world, stands in the sharpest possible opposition to the solitary business of thought, which operates in a dialogue between me and myself. Under exceptionally propitious circumstances that dialogue, we have seen, can be extended to another insofar as a friend is, as Aristotle said, "another self." But it can never reach the We, the true plural of action. (An error rather prevalent among modern philosophers who insist on the importance of communication as a guarantee of truth—chiefly Karl Jaspers and Martin Buber, with his I-thou philosophy—is to believe that the intimacy of the dialogue, the "inner action" in which I "appeal" to myself or to the "other self," Aristotle's friend, Jaspers' beloved, Buber's Thou, can be extended and become paradigmatic for the political sphere.)

  This We arises wherever men live together; its primal form is the family; and it can be constituted in many different ways, all of which rest ultimately on some form of consent, of which obedience is only the most common mode, just as disobedience is the most common and least harmful mode of dissent. Consent entails the recognition that no man can act alone, that men if they wish to achieve something in the world must act in concert, which would be a platitude if there were not always some members of the community determined to disregard it and who in arrogance or in despair try to act alone. These are tyrants or criminals, depending on the final goal they aim at; what they have in common and what sets them apart from the rest of the community is that they put their trust in the use of the instruments of violence as a substitute for power. This is a tactic that only works for the short-range goals of the criminal, who after completing his crime can and must return to membership in the community; the tyrant, on the other hand, always a sheep in wolf's clothing, can last only by usurping the rightful seat of leadership, which makes him dependent on helpers to see his self-willed projects through. Unlike the mind's will power to affirm or negate, whose ultimate practical guarantee is suicide, political power, even if the tyrant's supporters consent to terror-that is, the use of violence-is always limited power, and since power and freedom in the sphere of human plurality are in fact synonyms, this means also that political freedom is always limited freedom.

  Human plurality, the faceless "They" from which the individual Self splits to be itself alone, is divided into a great many units, and it is only as a member of such a unit, that is, of a community, that men are ready for action. The manifoldness of these communities is evinced in a great many different forms and shapes, each obeying different laws, having different habits and customs, and cherishing different memories of its past, i.e., a manifoldness of traditions. Montesquieu was probably right in assuming that each such entity moved and acted according to a different inspiring principle, recognized as the ultimate standard for judging the community's deeds and misdeeds—virtue in republics, honor and glory in monarchies, moderation in aristocracies, fear and suspicion in tyrannies-except that this enumeration, guided by the oldest distinction between forms of government (as the rule of one, of a few, of the best, or of all) is of course pitifully inadequate to the rich diversity of human beings living together on the earth.

  The only trait that all these various forms and shapes of human plurality have in common is the simple fact of their genesis, that is, that at some moment in time and for some reason a group of people must have come to think of themselves as a "We." No matter how this "We" is first experienced and articulated, it seems that it always needs a beginning, and nothing seems so shrouded in darkness and mystery as that "In the beginning," not only of the human species as distinguished from other living organisms, but also of the enormous variety of indubitably human societies.

  The haunting obscurity of the question has hardly been illuminated by recent biological, anthropological, and archaeological discoveries, whatever success they have had in extending the time span which separates us from an ever more distant past. And it is unlikely that any factual information will ever throw light on the bewildering maze of more or less plausible hypotheses, all of which suffer from the incurable suspicion that their very plausibility and probability may well turn out to be their undoing since our whole real existence—the genesis of the earth, the development of organic life on it, the evolution of man out of the countless animal species—occurred against statistically overwhelming probabilities. All that is real in the universe and in nature once was an "infinite" improbability. In the everyday world where we spend our own exiguous quotient of reality we can only be sure of a shrinkage of time behind us that is no less decisive than the shrinkage of spatial distances on the earth. What only a few decades ago, remembering Goethe's "three thousand years" ("Wer nicht von dreitausend Jahren / Sich weiss Rechenschaft zu geben, / Bleib im Dunkel, unerfahren / Mag von Tag zu Tage leben"), we still called antiquity is much closer to us today than it was to our ancestors.

  This predicament of not-knowing is all too likely never to be resolved, corresponding, as it does, to other manifest limitations inherent in the human condition, which sets definite insurmountable boundaries to our thirst for knowledge—for example, we know of the immensity of the universe and nevertheless we shall never be able to know it—and the best we can do in the quandary is turn to the legendary tales that in our tradition have aided former generations to come to grips with the mysterious "In the beginning." I mean the foundation legends, which clearly had to do with a time antecedent to any form of government and to any particular principles that set governments in motion. Yet the time they dealt with was human time, and the beginning they recounted was not a divine creation but a man-made set of occurrences that memory could reach through an imaginative interpretation of old tales.

  The two foundation legends of Western civilization, the one Roman and the other Hebrew (nothing comparable, Plato's Timaeus notwithstanding, ever existed in Greek antiquity), are utterly different from each other, except that both arose among a people that thought of its past as a story whose beginning was known and could be dated. The Jews knew the year of the creation of the world (and reckon time to this very day from it), and the Romans, as contrasted with the Greeks, who reckoned time from Olympiad to Olympiad, knew (or believed they knew) the year of the foundation of Rome and reckoned time accordingly. Much more striking, and fraught with much more serious consequences for our tradition of political thought, is the astounding fact that both legends (in sharp contradiction with the well-known principles allegedly inspiring political action in constituted communities) hold that in the case of foundation—the supreme act in which the "We" is constituted as an identifiable entity—the inspiring principle of action is love of freedom, and this both in the negative sense of liberation from oppression and in the positive sense of the establishment of Freedom as a stable, tangible reality.

  Both the difference and the connection between the two—the freedom that comes from being liberated and the freedom that arises out of the spontaneity of beginning something new—are paradigmatically represented in the two foundation legends that have acted as guides for Western political thought. We have the Biblical story of the exodus of Israeli tribes from Egypt, which preceded the Mosaic legislation constituting the Hebrew people, and Virgil's story of the wanderings of Aeneas, which led to
the foundation of Rome—'"dum conderet urbem," as Virgil defines the content of his great poem even in its first lines. Both legends begin with an act of liberation, the flight from oppression and slavery in Egypt and the flight from burning Troy (that is, from annihilation); and in both instances this act is told about from the perspective of a new freedom, the conquest of a new "promised land" that offers more than Egypt's fleshpots and the foundation of a new City that is prepared for by a war destined to undo the Trojan war, so that the order of events as laid down by Homer could be reversed. Virgil's reversal of Homer is deliberate and complete.126 This time it is Achilles in the guise of Turnus ("Here too shalt thou tell that a Priam found his Achilles") who flees and is killed by Hector in the guise of Aeneas; in the center, "the source of all that woe" is again a woman, but this time she is a bride (Lavinia) and not an adulteress; and the end of the war is not triumph for the victor and utter destruction for the vanquished but a new body politic—"both nations unconquered join treaty under equal laws forever."

  No doubt if we read these legends as tales, there is a world of difference between the aimless desperate wanderings of the Israeli tribes in the desert after the Exodus and the marvelously colorful tales of the adventures of Aeneas and his fellow Trojans; but to the men of action of later generations who ransacked the archives of antiquity for paradigms to guide their own intentions, this was not decisive. What was decisive was that there was a hiatus between disaster and salvation, between liberation from the old order and the new freedom, embodied in a novus ordo saeclorum, a "new order of the ages" with whose rise the world had structurally changed.