Robert Burch
Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind was originally projected as a two-volume, three-part elaboration of her Gifford Lectures (1972–74), the broad purpose of which was to understand and relate three basic “faculties” of our mental life—thinking, willing, and judging. At the time of her death in 1975, Arendt had already delivered the lectures on thinking and the opening part of the lectures on willing. She had also prepared expanded versions of the first two parts of the project for publication, which (subject to Mary McCarthy’s posthumous editorial work) appeared in 1978 as two separate volumes, Thinking and Willing. These volumes were subsequently combined into a single paperback edition, The Life of the Mind (1981).
Arendt’s lectures on judging were never delivered, nor were any materials prepared specifically for publication, save for a title page bearing two epigraphs—one from Lucan’s De Bello Civili (Bk I, 128) and one from Goethe’s Faust (II, 11404–7). What presently serves faute de mieux for the missing third part are materials compiled and edited by Ronald Beiner as Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1982). This volume consists principally of lectures Arendt gave in the fall of 1970 at the New School. On the premise that “the real political faculty in Kant’s philosophy is . . . judgment,” these lectures focus on Kant’s third Critique. 1 Beiner also includes half-a-dozen pages on “imagination” from a seminar that Arendt gave concurrently on the Critique of Judgment itself, plus an edited version of the “Postscriptum” to the Thinking volume.
Despite its evident value, enhanced by Beiner’s solid interpretive essay, this collection does not claim to redeem fully the lack of an account of judgment from Arendt herself. For what is missing is not just an Arendtian doctrine of judgment per se as one might piece it together from various sources across her intellectual career, but her own account of the sense of judgment as an integral episode—indeed the consummating episode—of the whole story that she is telling in The Life of the Mind. That lack frustrates any assured attempt to give a straightforward summary of the work as a whole, not simply because the missing third part needs to be filled in, but because it leaves to the reader the task of reinterpreting so as to incorporate into a single coherent narrative the many insights into thinking and willing that Arendt already offers along the way in the existing published parts.
Yet, were The Life of the Mind complete as projected, it would still frustrate any ready attempt at philosophical summary. For having “said goodbye to philosophy once and for all,”2 Arendt does not articulate systematically a philosophical position. Instead, she provides a narrative account meant to make comprehensive, integral sense of the contemporary experience of thinking, willing, judging. With this narrative, her purpose is not to advance fixed universal truths about these faculties, but to “realize” (in both senses of the English term) an “enlarged mentality” that would inform our being in the world with others. That “mentality” cannot be meaningfully reduced to a set of philosophical knowledge-claims.
Tradition and Method
In undertaking this project, Arendt expressly aligns herself with “those who . . . have been attempting to dismantle metaphysics, and philosophy with all its categories.”3 Thus, she not only declines to satisfy the philosopher’s residual desire to know explicitly in philosophical terms how, in giving a narrative account of the life of the mind, she would account for her own thinking itself as a part of that very life, but also seems to treat the demand for such philosophical self-knowledge with casual sarcasm. “In such an enterprise,” she says, all of that—her “method,” “criteria,” and “values”—“is mercifully hidden from its author, though [such things] may be or, rather, seem to be quite manifest to the reader and listener.”4 Arendt doubtless knew, however, that once one enters into the circle of philosophy’s self-defining and self-legitimating thought, there is no philosophical escape, no refusal of philosophy as such that would not itself be philosophizing. There must be a different sense then to her “final farewell” to philosophy than simply a flat refusal or determinate negation. Arendt does suggest that her “dismantling process” has “its own technique,” but by her own admission, it is one that she herself treats only “peripherally.”5 Such treatment makes sense insofar as the dismantling of philosophy per se is not Arendt’s main purpose. Nevertheless, it is an explicit part of Arendt’s task in The Life of the Mind to “pave anew the path of thought”6 and to do so from the context of present experience wherein it seems to Arendt, as to those whose “ranks” she has joined, that the traditional path of philosophical thought no longer grants renewed possibilities or a way forward. The question of method in its original sense as meta ton hodon, following a path, is essential to the sense of the narrative that Arendt constructs in The Life of the Mind. Thus, although she herself may weave this methodological sense into the narrative itself as inherently “methodo-logical,” for the present task of recounting the overall sense of that narrative, the question of method has to be made more explicit.
In Arendt’s view, “the thread of tradition is broken” beyond all possibility of “renewal,”7 not because in principle all the claims of philosophy can be proved false, which eo ipso would be a work of philosophizing in any case, but because the way in which “philosophy, metaphysics, theology” has “framed and answered” its questions so as to define the tradition as such “has lost plausibility.”8 Such a loss cannot be internal to philosophical questioning itself. Rather, it must be that the way in which philosophy as such (i.e., philosophy that defines itself as the “science of truth”9 ), has framed and answered its questions is no longer maximally plausible as a way of asking about and making comprehensive sense of our contemporary worldly experience, and therefore in giving thought to what in that experience most calls for thought. In such circumstances, to continue along the strict trajectory of philosophical questioning and answering in its exclusive quest for truth, repeating all the old tropes in ever new variations, would not serve to advance, but in effect to work against, the realization of the kind of “enlarged mentality” that Arendt’s project tentatively seeks.
In Arendt’s view, there is no life of the mind at all without thinking as our ability to make ongoing integral sense of experience. The constitution of this sense as lived-meaning has its source in the very need of our reason to actualize itself.10 At one level, such sense-making is the order of experience itself, and thereby constitutes the experiential locus of comprehensibility that is presupposed in all our questioning, since one can only question in terms of what one already in some sense understands. But the need of our reason also impels us in remembrance or repetition to think about our experience in a more comprehensive self-conscious way. Most individuals engage in such thinking as the experiential occasion demands. But, collectively, every human society tells itself some or other comprehensive story about the order of experience as a whole in order to endow the fact of existence with meaning. Yet, contrary to all philosophical self-accounting, it would seem to be Arendt’s view that there is no universal necessity that our thinking about experience as a whole be realized as philosophy, nor that it have its end and fulfillment exclusively in the pure grasp of universal and necessary truth, into which then all meaning of experience would have to be subsumed without essential remainder. To be sure, Arendt’s “dismantling” of the philosophical tradition does not presume to speak against truth absolutely, since that would be unintelligible. Moreover, as Arendt herself once remarked, “the reality of experience” requires “the distinction between fact and fiction,” as do “the standards of thinking” require minimally, “the distinction between true and false.”11 But Arendt’s narrative does speak against the continued relevance and the absolute priority of the metaphysical value of truth for the meaning of our being in the world with others.12 She does, so to speak, tell a story, and that story must be communally contestable, but it is not properly contestable on strictly metaphysical terms. Rather, to critique Arendt’s account on its own terms, one would need to provide an alternative, more plausible, comprehensive, and compelling story that would make better sense of our experience of the life of the mind as essentially a life inter homines. This story would not be told abstractly and in general, but in terms of a putatively more comprehensive account of current collective experience, and thus likewise in terms of what in our time most calls for thought. It could be argued that what above all calls for thought in our time is the contemporary loss, together, of human dignity and meaningful plurality amid the rule of increasingly narrowed and opposing mentalities. To borrow Kantian turns of phrase with which Arendt was familiar, what calls for thought is the dissolution of a worldly wisdom that would “accommodate itself to other people’s concepts,” into a self-centered and ultimately self-defeating prudence that simply “uses other human beings for one’s own purposes.”13
There are two aspects of this approach in particular worth emphasizing. With the break in tradition, not only does the past no longer shed meaningful light on the present but also “the continuity of the past as it seemed to be handed down from generation to generation, developing in the process its own consistency . . . has been lost.”14 It now confronts us as “a fragmented past that has lost its certainty of evaluation.” In the face of this fragmentation, Arendt’s historical allusions and references are not meant to renew a lost sense of continuity that would expose a hidden vector of progressive development. “It is against human dignity to believe in [such] progress,” writes Arendt.15 Rather, she responds in thought to the fragmented past precisely as fragmented, seeking in past thought-fragments “rich and strange”16 interpretive possibilities that can be appropriated to the present for the sake of a genuinely new, experientially responsible trajectory of thinking, willing, judging.
Second, for Arendt, experience plays the decisive role. “What is the subject of our thought?” she asks rhetorically. “Experience! Nothing else! And when we lose the ground of experience we get into all kinds of theories.”17 This appeal has a twofold structure: philosophical questioning as the search for knowledge of truth has lost plausibility because it cannot make maximal sense on these terms alone of our actual experience here and now in the world. But for the same reason, the “thoughtful” alternative to such questioning cannot be invoked by philosophy itself, but must have an experiential matrix. On the one hand, then, there must be something about our actual experience in these “dark times” such that philosophical questioning and answering in traditional terms cannot make proper sense of it, or misses its meaning altogether. And on the other hand, there must be something we have come to realize in the very experience of philosophizing as the pursuit of the knowledge of universal and necessary truth that philosophy itself cannot make sense of in knowledge on its own terms other than as a skeptical shortcoming. In Arendt’s account, these two matrices come together in a such a way that what is realized in making sense of the experience of philosophizing provides a clue to making sense of our experience in the actual world at this time, and vice versa, such that making sense of both experiences is mutually implicated and mutually illuminating.
In framing her project in this way, Arendt appeals explicitly to Kant.18 Kant’s own philosophical experience “awakens” him to the realization that the search for metaphysical knowledge is internally and thus inevitably beset by “antinomies” that cannot be resolved in knowledge itself, and hence that the need of our reason to know cannot be truly satisfied in knowledge alone. Kant’s own response is twofold. He realizes “that ‘the urgent need’ of reason is both different from and ‘more than the mere quest and desire for knowledge,’” which he articulates in terms of a distinction between Vernunft and Verstand, “reason” and “intellect,” and on this basis he “finds it necessary to deny knowledge . . . to make room for faith.”19 This Kantian experience suggests to Arendt what she calls the “metaphysical fallacies.”20 These are not remediable mistakes in our objective cognition, but “semblances of reason” as ways in which “naturally” and so “plausibly” our reason deceives itself both in identifying and in satisfying its inherent animating need to make sense of experience and in the way it frames its questions. The most basic of these fallacies is “to interpret meaning on the model of truth.”21
Arendt’s basic thought, “put in a nutshell,”22 is that the need of reason is neither exclusively nor even principally the desire for knowledge, but the need to make comprehensive sense of our experience for the sake of thinking through our ongoing being in the world with others, a need that transcends the “limitations of cognition” and reconfigures the meaning of transcendence beyond all formulations in metaphysical knowledge. But then, according to Arendt, if one reads Kant in these terms, he does not so much deny knowledge to make room for faith as much as he “separates knowledge from thinking.”23 The Life of the Mind then is not itself a work of the intellect in its “quest for truth,” but serves instead the “need of reason inspired by the quest for meaning.”24 Its goal is not knowledge of universal and necessary truth about mental life as the last word—for Arendt there are no “last words” in thinking.25 It is instead to think through the situated experience of thinking, willing, and judging as the categories in terms of which the life of the mind has most recently come to articulate itself structurally, and to do so toward an enlarged mentality as a way to hold open the “mental” space for a renewed, humane way of willing and judging, and thereby a renewed humane way of our being in the world inter homines.
Meaning, Truth, and a Parting of the Ways
Arendt makes clear that the measure of such thinking is not truth in its metaphysical value—neither adaequatio intellectus ad rem nor the self-certainty of the cogito cogitationes. But, surprisingly, neither for her is it truth in its Heideggerian formulation as the revealing/concealing function of being (Sein) in its disclosure of beings (Seiende). To the contrary, Arendt judges Heidegger’s thinking of the truth of Being as “disclosedness” (Enthüllkeit) to be only “the latest and perhaps most striking instance of the fallacy” that “interpret[s] meaning on the model of truth.”26
That she should read Heidegger in this way is surprising for two obvious reasons. First, it seems directly at odds with the approval of Heidegger that is implied by the epigraph to the “Introduction” to The Life of the Mind. And it also seems at odds with what is familiarly known to be Heidegger’s express view of the issue thematized in the context of his reading of the history of Being as metaphysics in terms of the “forgetting of Being.”27 It is thus even more surprising that Arendt should think it sufficient evidence to show that Heidegger’s thinking is implicated in this “basic fallacy” merely to cite, without explanatory comment, a single passage.
Doubtle ss, to consider fully the elements of Arendt’s reading of Heidegger would lead too far afield. However, insofar as Arendt regards the fallacy of interpreting meaning on the model of truth as “the basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies,” and insofar as the basic sense of The Life of the Mind is itself implicated in “dismantling” that fallacy for the sake of a new path of thinking, her judgment against Heidegger on this particular point provides, at least obliquely, an important clue to the overall sense of Arendt’s own project.28 This issue takes on added importance when one considers that many of those thinkers whose “ranks” Arendt has claimed to “have joined”29 might well be accused of simply reversing the fallacy, interpreting all truth on the model of meaning. It could well be argued instead that Arendt herself is charting a third way between the fallacy and its mere reversal. A brief reminder of some Heideggerian essentials will afford some context for what is at issue here.
It is Heidegger’s express thesis that “metaphysics interrogates [befragte] beings as beings and does not turn to Being as Being.”30 In not turning to Being as such, metaphysics tends in one way or another to equate being and truth (verum significat omnino idem quod ens) to the effect that the meaning of beings (significatio etium), including even the significatio summum entis, is to be absolved without essential remainder into knowledge of truth (cognitio veritatis). In that respect, in its essential constitution metaphysics is for Heidegger onto-theology. It is with Hegel then—whom Heidegger agrees “is in a way more distant from the subject-matter [Sache] of [his] concern [Anliegen] than any other metaphysical position”31 —that the onto-theological trajectory of metaphysical thinking comes to its completion, that is, in the absolute sich selbst wissendes Wissen of Hegel’s Logic in which all difference of meaning and truth, Being and beings is demonstrated to be absolutely and essentially no different at all.32 It is Heidegger’s express thesis then that the “overcoming” of metaphysics, already in play in the thinking of Sein und Zeit, is centrally the overcoming of all variations upon the interpretation of “ontological” meaning/truth on the model of “ontic” truth.
The single passage Arendt’s cites as evidence that Heidegger’s thinking, too, is implicated in a metaphysical fallacy is taken out of context from the “Introduction to ‘What is Metaphysics.’”33 “‘Meaning of Being’ and ‘Truth of Being’ say the same [dasselbe].”34 To make matters worse, she seems to read this particular passage in a decidedly non-Heideggerian way. In Heidegger’s vocabulary, the “same” (selbe) is explicitly contrasted not only with the “equal” (gleiche) but also in such a way that this passage is more plausibly read on Heidegger’s own terms as suggesting that the essential correlation of the meaning of Being and the truth of Being in the “same” is “undecidable.” In that case, neither correlate could simply “be interpreted on the model” of the other—neither meaning on the model of truth, nor truth on the model of meaning—in such a way as to equate one to the other without essential difference.35
Short of dismissing Arendt’s Heidegger-reading as sloppy, more sense can be made of it if one recalls that Arendt’s insight into the basic fallacy itself is derived from Kant. Theoretically, Kant was awoken from his “dogmatic slumbers” not so much by Hume’s skepticism (though he does say that36 ), but more profoundly by his recognition of the “antinomies” that inevitably beset our reason in trying to transcend all experience in metaphysical knowledge.37 Yet in setting limits to such knowledge in the face of these antinomies, the point of Kant’s critique is to allow for the “practical extension” of our reason.38 Part of what is revealed in that practical extension is that the need of our reason is not exhausted in theoretical object-knowledge that we obtain as observers of the world, but requires the meaning we come to understand as moral agents who act in the world with others. Thus, the genuine transcendence that constitutes our human selfhood is not found simply in the “transcendental truth that precedes and makes possible empirical knowledge”39 but also and above all in the practical meaning (Glaube) that we must think as agents in the world striving to realize our worldly human vocation and to make sense of that experience: “The human being is destined by reason to live in society with human beings and to cultivate itself, and to moralize itself.”40
Heidegger’s Kant-interpretation has the undoubted virtue of bringing to light the ontological mission of Kant’s first Critique in the face of all of the reductive epistemological readings that seem recurrently in fashion. But not only does it not do justice to the primacy of practical reason in Kant but it also dismisses it out of hand. “Even if the theoretical reason is built into the practical, the existenzial-ontologische problem of the self remains not only unsolved, but even unraised.”41 Herein lies a possible clue to Arendt’s judgment against Heidegger on the meaning/truth issue. It is not really that Heidegger interprets meaning directly on the model of truth, but has to do instead with his particular understanding of how “transcendence constitutes selfhood.”42 Simplistically characterized, transcendence for Heidegger is the coming to be of the truth of Being as the “disclosedness of Being that first makes possible the manifestness of beings.”43 Truth of being then is the being of truth as the most fundamental interpretive horizon that, by illuminating the mass of beings in a characteristic way, accounts for the existence of the “world” as a world of meaning.44 Transcendence constitutes selfhood in that the understanding of Being is itself a determination of the Being of the self as such, the essence of the self, lying in its interpretive “existence” as the locus and medium of Being’s disclosure.45
It remains an open question whether or not this existential-interpretive understanding of transcendence does full justice to what was once thought of as esse rerum, that is, the real in itself existence of things and the relations between them.46 Be that as it may, in accusing Heidegger of interpreting meaning on the model of truth, it would seem that Arendt does think that this understanding fails in a crucial sense to do full justice to the Being of persons as essentially esse inter homines. For Heidegger, being-with is an “Existenzial” of the transcendence of the self; but as such it is not first and foremost a real relation between persons within the world, but a transcending context of meaning that makes possible the manifestness of such persons and relations. Thus, in its “genuine” (echt) mode, an “authentic” (eigentlich) self-understanding does not take its lead from our relations to beings, not even to other human beings, but “arising from out of one’s own self as such,” it takes it lead from the understanding of Being that is always already in play in all encounters with beings and all such relations and that is the very matter of our selfhood.47 Now, on the one hand, Arendt herself does hold that making integral sense of our experience belongs to the need of our reason to actualize itself, and in that respect, we can be said, essentially, to be interpreters of the meaning of Being as the Being of meaning. However, on the other hand, there is the risk that in thinking of our selfhood exclusively in terms of ontological truth, albeit as an horizon of interpretation, we tend to efface ontic differences of interest, outlook, wealth, and power that obtain among flesh and blood people in the world, even though such “plurality” too “is one of the basic existential conditions of human life on earth.”48 But then insofar as it tends to efface that plurality in the name of ontological truth, such thinking would tend, paradoxically, to work against the “enlarged mentality” that would put itself in the place of every other, and for whose actualization it is the animating purpose of The Life of the Mind to open the way.
Three Basic Faculties
In a manner loosely analogous to Kant’s system of reason, Arendt frames her project in three parts correlated to three basic “faculties” of our mental life. She regards these mental “faculties” as a “plurality” in that each is “autonomous” and each “obeys the laws inherent in the activity itself.”49 Yet, she also claims that “behind the obvious plurality of . . . faculties . . . there must exist a oneness.” 50 However, insofar as Arendt separates the quest for meaning from the quest for knowledge of truth, and yet also does not analyze this latter capacity as such, her account of the mental faculties is not exhaustive. It does not show how thinking and knowing can fit together with willing and judging as one. Rather, Arendt’s concern is to show how knowing can be essentially thoughtless and thus how there can be a narrow-minded willing and judging based on thoughtless knowing.
In providing her account, Arendt emphasizes the gerundial form of the nouns—it is thinking, willing, and judging as mental activities that are her focus, not thought, will, and judgment as mental properties. In this sense, the language of “faculties” is misleading. For thinking, willing, and judging are not objective “parts” of the mind that can be theoretically identified and that would serve theoretically to explain the experience of thinking, willing, and judging. There is nothing of faculty psychology in Arendt’s account. Instead, thinking willing, and judging are capacities of the mind as one is reflexively aware of them in the activity itself, and indeed is “aware . . . only as long as the activities last. It is as though the organs of thought or will or judgment came into being only when I think or will or judge.”51 As with questions of method in general, Arendt does not thematize, methodologically, her talk of mental life specifically in terms of “faculties.” One has to gather the sense of such talk from the narrative as a whole.
Arendt’s choice of the term “faculty” seems to be principally a Kantian borrowing, “faculty” being the common English translation of the German Vermögen. Yet Kant’s own talk of faculties is ambiguous. It had been a commonplace of pre-Kantian metaphysics to define human being as the rational animal, rationality being the capacity or potential (dunamis, potentia) grounded in a permanent human nature and serving to define that nature specifically, through the exercise of which in speculative knowing each human being in and of itself would reach its specific fullness of being. Now, in separating freedom and nature, Kant in effect rules out a theoretical definition of human being as rational animal, at least one where “rationality” is the specific difference and “animal” is the proximate genus. Indeed, in strict Kantian terms, such a definition would amount to a metabasis eis allo genos, since what is meant by “animal” belongs to nature, whereas what is meant by “rational” transcends nature. Moreover, in Kant’s system of reason there is no universal genus in and for our theoretical knowledge that combines them both. Nevertheless, in the context of the primacy of practical reason, Kant does invoke something of this traditional language, by claiming that human being “as an animal endowed with the capacity of reason (animal rationabile) can make of itself a rational animal (animal rationale),”52 not by gaining theoretical knowledge, but by working practically to realize the highest good in the world, the possibility of which is opened up by setting limits to theoretical knowledge. Analogously, Arendt appropriates this language of “faculties” not to identify theoretically a permanent property of human nature, but in terms of the distinction of the quest for meaning and the quest for truth, to identify a possible ordering of our mental life, having become actual in our time and that, in the context of the break with tradition, could better serve our being in the world with others. Accordingly, insofar as Arendt looks to “dismantle philosophy with all its categories,” her analysis of basic mental faculties in The Life of the Mind is not properly read as a contribution to the metaphysics of experience. Instead, it is a tentative venture that begins to sort out the meaning of thinking, willing, and judging as the way in which at the present time our mental life has come to order itself, and how that ordering serves to make sense of contemporary experience. There are three basic aspects of such talk that are worth particular note.
First, the metaphysical talk of capacities grounded in a permanent human nature gives way to talk of mental capacities as they are exercised in relation to the human condition. One sees something of this shift already in The Human Condition, insofar as Arendt speaks of “general human capacities which grow out of the human condition and are permanent, that is, which cannot be irretrievably lost unless the human condition itself is not changed.”53 But notwithstanding the metaphysical predispositions of this earlier work,54 Arendt is already beginning to realize that the relation of “general human capacities” and the “human condition” is one of mutual dependence and mutual implication as an internal relation wherein the relation itself grounds what it relates. Arendt herself hints at this point when she says, “The conditions of human existence—life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth—can never ‘explain’ what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely.”55 At least tacitly in The Life of the Mind, the meaning of this insight is carried further. There are no actual human mental capacities separate from their being actualized by us within the limits of the human condition, but likewise, there is no actual human condition separate from the ways in which these limits actually enter into and structure our human activities. We can of course identify theoretically mental capacities on the one hand—thinking, willing, and judging—and structures of human condition on the other—natality, mortality, plurality, etc. But to regard these capacities and conditions as externally related objective facts that determine all human beings universally would be a falsifying abstraction.
But then, second, the internal relation of mental capacities and the human condition is not itself an altogether fixed structure that simply has different historical variations according to an unchanging pattern. Arendt hints at this point when (as in the case of willi ng) she claims that the “faculties” have come to be over time as “the result of experiences” for whose meaning they were “discovered.”56 That implies that in their plurality the actuality of the faculties themselves is not a permanent property of human being whose range is predefined, but a need of reason that gives rise effectively to new faculties in the course of experience. Likewise, the effective reality of the limits of the human condition are not fixed universal structures that are met in various ways according to our fixed mental capacities, but are effectively actual as the need of our reason and the conditions that limit the fulfillment of that need change in the ongoing course of experience.
Turn to the Life of the Mind
Arendt identifies two reasons for turning to the topic of mental life. First is her experience of reporting on the Eichmann trial: that the deeds for which Eichmann was being prosecuted were indisputably “monstrous” and yet they were the actions of such a manifestly ordinary, shallow human being.57 The issue for Arendt is first and foremost one of “thoughtlessness.” Whereas she concedes that Eichmann was “quite intelligent” (ganz intelligent) in a calculative functionary way, she also sees that he was “outrageously dumb” (von empörender Dummheit), evidenced in his basic “incapacity” or “simple unwillingness to imagine what is actually going on with the other.”58
The second “rather different”59 origin of her interest derives from Arendt’s own experience of philosophizing on the question of acting in relation to thinking. In The Human Condition (1958), she broaches this question in terms of the traditional vita activa and vita contempletiva distinction. Yet at the end of that study, Arendt calls for an “altogether different viewpoint.” Later, she explains: “The main flaw and mistake of The Human Condition is the following: I still look at what is called in the tradition the vita activa from the viewpoint of the vita contempletiva, without ever saying anything real about the vita contempletiva.” And yet “to look at it from the vita contempletiva is already the first fallacy.”60
Arendt deliberately characterizes Eichmann’s “incapacity” by paraphrasing Kant, who writes: “To think oneself in the place of every other” is the “maxim” of a “broad-minded way of thinking” (erweiterter Denkungsart) and of a “common [gemeinen] human understanding.”61 It is in these terms that the whole project of The Life of the Mind can be framed; for thinking in accord with this maxim works toward a “universal standpoint” (allgemeinen Standpunkte) and something like this “standpoint” plays a twofold, unifying role in Arendt’s approach to mental life. On the level of experience itself, it is the “universal” measure for the everyday thinking we do in the course of experience “as long as [we] are alive,” the thinking by which we make sense of what has happened.62 On the same level, such thinking affords the standpoint for both “broad-minded” willing and “broad-minded” judging. It does so by uniting these activities in terms of a common “mental” context, that is to say, a more or less comprehensive context of human meaning and human understanding as the interpretive horizon—the enlarged mentality—within which we think and act in the world of our experience. In experience itself then, it is the standpoint specifically both for “broad-minded,” communicable judgment as an “attunement” (Einstimmung) with the “other” that one makes as a “mature” member of a human community and ultimately as a member of the human world, as well as for one’s “broad-minded” willing as a matter of one’s “attunement” with one’s own “erweitertes” self as essentially a human being among others in the world where our willing initiates something new.63
The Life of the Mind repeats and transforms in self-reflective thought the everyday way of thinking that we do as our way of establishing ourselves in the world.64 Yet it starts such reflection with Eichmann’s thoughtlessness, that is, with the poignant recognition of a lack. What precisely is lacking in Eichmann’s case, and that which provokes Arendt’s thinking about mental life, is how a form of such everyday thinking, which at some level we cannot be without, can effectively reduce to a thoroughly thoughtless intelligence. In thinking about the life of the mind then, Arendt is concerned to understand how the particular instance of Eichmann is possible as a “concrete model” of the banality of evil.65 Yet, it is thinking about his “incapacity” that leads her to thinking about the “broadest” standpoint from whic h to make the most comprehensive and revealing sense of the experiential possibilities of meaning for thinking, willing, judging in general. Thus, in its theoretical form (and so withdrawn from all considerations of action), Arendt’s thinking about the life of the mind explicates an interpretive structure already immanent in mental life itself, though one to which Eichmann himself is largely oblivious. She appropriates and legitimates the meaning of that structure so as to transform what is implicit as a possibility in experience, that is, broad-mindedness as a maxim for thinking and thereby as a precept for willing and a rule for judging into an “unalterable command” (unwandelbar Gebot).
This “broad-mindedness” involves a presumptive universality, though not of a strict abstract sort (universalitas) that rules in principle over the rational self-activity of all finite rational beings. Instead, it is an indefinite and elusive concrete universality as an always still to be realized “commonality” (generalitas, Gemeinsamkeit) that we strive for “in communication with human beings [in der Mitteilung mit Menschen]”66 (to borrow Kant’s own phrase) in the public world of our experience. It is in these terms that Arendt’s step from what she calls “the relatively safe fields of political science and theory” to the “awesome matters” having to do with the life of the mind makes sense.67 It is a step from a narrower and thus more abstract frame of mind to a more comprehensive and thus concrete universal point of view. In the achievement of something like this “commonality,” the very meaning of “our” experience is contested, to be erweitert toward a genuine, communal “our” amid and out from all fragmentation and disruption with a view to an erweitert and shared sense of human dignity—precisely what at heart Eichmann lacked.
As for her second concern, Arendt finds a clue to “an altogether different viewpoint” on the issue of thought and action in a self-description by Scipio Africanus that Cicero ascribes to Cato the Elder. Of himself, Scipio says: “Never am I more active than when I do nothing, never am I less alone than when I am by myself.”68 This fragment recalls the sheer self-activity of our reason in its need to actualize itself. This self-activity is more active (plus agere) than when one is doing nothing (quam nihil cum ageret), since while one is simply thinking, this self-activity is not distracted or limited by the demands of worldly action or the company of others. It has only the sheer sense-making activity of thinking to occupy it. Likewise, in simply thinking one is less alone (minus solum) than when one lacks the company of others (quam cum solus esset), insofar as the sense-making self-activity of thinking gathers in explicit understanding, and thereby serves to realize authentically for the first time, a “common sense” that is the very ground of our being in the world with others.
In The Life of the Mind, however, Arendt cites this Cicero passage only as the occasion to formulate questions about thinking. Yet, instead of asking how thinking proceeds in time, she asks, “Where are we when we think?” appealing to a Kafka parable for insight.69 This leads to a seemingly contradictory view. Having dismissed out of hand as “the last of the metaphysical fallacies” the thesis that the self is “self-making,”70 Arendt likewise dismisses the whole post-Kantian tradition wherein the activity of thinking is seen essentially as a self-constituting activity. Thus, instead of asking directly how as a self-constituting activity thinking integrates and re-integrates its own past as it projects its future, with the present in and for the activity of thinking itself being a self-renewing moment of integration,71 Arendt invokes “without saying anything real about it,” an image of “thought-trains . . . beaten by the activity of thought,” and of “remembrance and anticipation, [that] save whatever they touch from the ruin of historical and biographical time.”72 The “present” of such activity Arendt represents as “a small inconspicuous track of non-time”—a “track” for which on the one hand she does not account, and on the other represents as analogous to the nunc stans of the vita contempliva. Ironically, then, in excerpting this Kafka parable as a fragment from a disrupted tradition and reading it as she does to form a key step in her effort to “pave anew the path of thought,” Arendt seems inadvertently to remain implicated in the very fallacy she was looking to escape.
In Place of a Summary
A comment on the two quotes from the title page of “Judging” may serve to round out our overview of the sense of The Life of the Mind as a whole. In the first, Arendt quotes Lucan. “The victorious cause pleased the gods, the defeated cause pleased Cato.”73 Historically, the “victorious cause” was of course Caesar’s military victory over Pompey, making Pompey’s the “defeated cause.” Caesar’s victory pleased the gods as a decisive advance toward the worldly imperium sine fine that was the divine will. Neither cause pleased Cato; for his was the higher defeated “cause” o f Roman libertas, irrespective of divine will. Implicit to the meaning of this passage then is the contrasts in judgment: the judgment of the gods that defines human victory “fatefully” in terms of the success of the divine will itself through its human pawns; and the judgment of Cato in human “worldly” terms between the recurrent worldly possibility of “Caesarism” and regimes “that confer legality on crime”74 as somehow being in accord with a superintending divine judgment and will, and the possibility of a genuine human libertas in the world as the work of human judgment and will. Doubtless, as she suggests in The Life of the Mind, Arendt would have “dismantled” the meaning of this fragment for use against the Hegelian thesis that “die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht.”75 For within the fragmented tradition and thus dissociated from history as the progress of consciousness to freedom, the Hegelian thesis “leaves the ultimate judgement to success,” which has then always to be decided and so deferred. As Arendt makes clear the trajectory of her own account of judgment would have been Kantian,76 the broken thread of the tradition putting the responsibility for judgment, as an unending worldly “decision” for human dignity and communality, on each thinking and acting individual here and now, no longer bound by any List der Vernunft.
Kant’s own account of judgment was meant, theoretically, to unite the realms of freedom and nature with a view ultimately to establishing the possibility of the worldly fulfillment of our human vocation. Arendt’s work on judging may well have served an analogous function, showing how the activities of thinking and willing could come together in judging for the sake of our worldly being inter homines, such that—as Arendt’s Goethe epigraph suggests—“the effort to be human would be worthwhile.” Yet, the elusive “freedom” (Freie) that Faust believed would make his being human in the world worthwhile has become for us, in the aftermath of the Nazi experience, an elusive freedom for all reasonable beings having to make their way in common between past and future, though now in circumstances unpropitious and even more obstructed than was Faust by “magic” and “incantations” not yet “completely unlearned.”77
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 169.
2 Hannah Arendt, The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (London: Penguin Classics), 3.
3 Hannah Arendt, Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 212.
4 Ibid., 211.
5 Ibid., 212.
6 Ibid., 210.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., 10.
9 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 993b20.
10 Hannah Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 303.
11 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 474.
12 Cf. e.g., Arendt, Thinking, 15–16.
13 Immanuel Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Prussian Academy, 1902–55), VII:228, 201.
14 Ibid., 212.
15 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 77.
16 Arendt, Thinking, 212.
17 Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” 308.
18 Arendt, Thinking, 15.
19 Ibid., 14.
20 Ibid., 12, 44–45. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 386 (B354–55).
21 Arendt, Thinking, 15.
22 Idem.
23 Ibid., 14.
24 Ibid., 13, 15.
25 Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 166–67. Cf. “I think that all thinking . . . has the earmark of being tentative” (“On Hannah Arendt,” 338).
26 Arendt, Thinking, 15. Cf. ibid., 23–24.
27 Martin Heidegger, “Zur Seinsfrage,” in Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967), 243.
28 Arendt, Thinking, 15–16; 211–12.
29 Ibid., 212.
30 Martin Heidegger, “Einleitung zu ‘Was ist Metaphysik,” in Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967), 196.
31 Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969), 28.
32 Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), esp. 43–58.
33 Arendt, Thinking, 15; Cf. Heidegger, “Einleitung zu ‘Was ist Metaphysik,’” 206.
34 Heidegger, “Einleitung zu ‘Was ist Metaphysik,’” 206.
35 Cf. “The same [selbe] never coincides with the equal [gleichen], not even with the empty oneness of mere identity. The equal always moves toward the absence of difference [Unterschiedlose], so that in it everything unites in one [übereinkomme]. By contrast, the same is the belonging together of what differs through a gathering by way of the difference. The same can only be said, when the difference is thought” (Martin Heidegger, “. . . dichterisch wohnet der Mensch . . . ,” in Vorträge und Aufsätze [Pfullingen: Neske, 1954], 193).
36 Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, IV, 260.
37 Ibid, IV, 338; cf. also Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, XII:257–58. “The antinomy of pure reason . . . first aroused me from my dogmatic slumber and drove me to the critique of reason itself” (Letter to Garve, September 11, 1798).
38 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 117 (Bxxx).
39 Ibid., 276 (B 185).
40 Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, VII:324–25.
41 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 320n. (§64), Heidegger’s emphasis. This footnote remains the same throughout the editions, and the translation is my own variation on the Macquarrie & Robinson version. So for the German Sein und Zeit, 13 Aufl. (Tübingen: Verlag Max Niemeyer, 1976), 320n. (§64). For the English, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 496–97.
42 Martin Heidegger, “Vom Wesen des Grundes,” in Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967), 34–35.
43 Ibid., 28.
44 Cf. e.g., “What is put into question in the question to be worked out is Being, that which determines beings as beings, that on the basis of which [woraufhin] beings are always already understood, however they may be discussed” (Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 6 [§2]). But “that on the basis of which [Woraufhin] . . . something is understood as something is meaning” (Ibid., 151 [§32]).
45 Cf. Ibid., 11–14 (§4).
46 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der Logik (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1978), Bd. 26, 194–95.
47 Ibid., 146 (§31).
48 Arendt, Thinking, 74.
49 Ibid., 70.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., 76, my emphasis.
52 Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, VII:321.
53 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 6.
54 Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” 305.
55 Arendt, Human Condition, 11.
56 Arendt, Willing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 3.
57 Arendt, Thinking, 4.
58 Hannah Arendt and Joachim Fest, Eichmann war von empörender Dummheit (Munich and Zurich: Piper Verlag, 2011), 43–45.
59 Arendt, Thinking, 3.
60 Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” 305.
61 Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, V:293–96 (CJ §40) and VII:228–29 (Anthro. §59).
62 Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” 303.
63 Cf. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 71–75; Arendt and Fest, Eichmann war von empörender Dummheit, 45.
64 Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950–1973 (Munich: Piper, 2003), II:782.
65 Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 251.
66 Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, VII:228 (Anthro, §59).
67 Arendt, Thinking, 3.
68 Cicero, De Republica, I:17. This is the conventional way of referring to the text, that is, by book and section number. However, I used my own (very old) Loeb Classical Library version, so the details are: Cicero, De Republica, De Legibus, trans C. W. Keyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), 48 for the Latin; 49 for the English translation.
69 Arendt, Thinking, 202–10.
70 Ibid., 215.
71 Cf. e.g., Emil Fackenheim, Metaphysics and Historicity (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1961), 25–44.
72 Ibid., 210.
73 Cato, De Bello Civili, Bk I, 128; also cited in Arendt, Thinking, 216.
74 Ibid., Bk I, 2.
75 Arendt, Thinking, 216.
76 Ibid., 215–16; cf. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, passim.
77 J. W. von Goethe, Faust, II:11404–7.