In the second series of these lectures I shall deal with willing and judging, the two other basic mental activities. Seen from the perspective of these time speculations, they concern matters which are absent either because they are not yet or because they are no more; but in contradistinction to the thinking activity that deals with the invisibles in all experience and with universals; they deal always with particulars and in this respect are much closer to the world of appearances. If we wish to placate our common sense that is so decisively offended by the need of reason to pursue its purposeless quest for meaning, an activity which obviously is “good for nothing,” it is tempting indeed to justify this need to think solely on the grounds that thinking is an indispensable preparation for deciding what shall be and for evaluating what is no more and therefore submitted to our judgment, whereby judgment, in turn, would be a mere preparation for willing. This is indeed the perspective, and, within limits, the legitimate perspective of man insofar as he is an acting being.
But this last attempt to defend the thinking activity against the reproach of its practical uselessness does not work. The decision at which the will arrives can never be derived from the mechanics of desire or the deliberation of the intellect that may precede it. The will is either an organ of free spontaneity that interrupts all causal chains of motivation, which would bind it or it is nothing but an illusion; with respect to desire on one hand and to reason on the other, it acts like “a kind of coup d’état,” as Bergson once said, and this implies of course that “free acts are exceptional,” and that “although we are free whenever we are willing to get back into ourselves, it seldom happens that we are willing.”*2 In other words, it is impossible to deal with the willing activity without touching on the problem of freedom, and it is entirely true that this problem “has been to the moderns what the paradoxes of the Eleatics were to the ancients.”*3
The most obvious and also the most plausible way out of all difficulties is to declare that the will, in distinction from other faculties of the mind, is a mere illusion of consciousness, an “artificial concept,” corresponding to nothing that has ever existed and creating useless riddles like so many of the metaphysical fallacies. This is the considered opinion of Gilbert Ryle, who believes he has refuted “the doctrine that there exists a Faculty…of the ‘Will,’ and, accordingly, that there occur processes, or operations, corresponding to what it describes as volitions.” And in support of his argument he quite correctly draws our attention to “the fact that Plato and Aristotle never mentioned [volitions] in their frequent and elaborate discussions of the nature of the soul and the springs of conduct,” because they were still unacquainted with this “special hypothesis [of later times] the acceptance of which rests not on the discovery but on the postulation of [certain] ghostly thrusts.”*4
This suspicion that such eminently important concepts, like will and freedom, of which we find almost no trace in ancient philosophy, are mere illusions is much older than modern philosophy. Spinoza as well as Hobbes firmly believed that they are due to a kind of optic delusion, to a trick played on us by the fact of consciousness and our ignorance of the causes that actually move us. Thus, a stone, having received “from the impulsion of an external cause a certain quantity of motion” and unable to detect the original external cause would, if it only is not “indifferent” to being moved, “believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish.”*5 And in almost the same terms, Hobbes speaks of “a wooden top that is lashed by the boys….[This top] if it were sensible to its own motion, would think it proceeded from its own will, unless it felt what lashed it.”*6 As John Stuart Mill put it: “our internal consciousness tells us that we have a power, which the whole outward experience of the human race tells us that we never use.”*7 In the same vein, Kant spoke of “the fact of freedom,” which reason can never prove or refute.
I propose to take this internal evidence, the “immediate datum of consciousness” (Bergson) seriously, and since I agree with Ryle—and many others—that this datum and all problems connected with it were unknown to Greek antiquity, I must accept what Ryle rejects, namely, that this faculty was indeed “discovered” and that we can date this discovery historically, whereby we shall find that this discovery coincides with the discovery of human “inwardness” as a specific region of our life. In brief, I shall analyze the faculty of the will in terms of its history, and this in itself has its difficulties.
Are not the human faculties, as distinct from the conditions and circumstances of human life, coeval with the appearance of man on earth—as I asserted before of man’s faculty and need of thinking? To be sure, there is such a thing as the “history of ideas” and our task would be easier if we traced the idea of freedom historically—how it changed from being a word indicating a political status, that of a free citizen and not a slave, and a physical fact, that of a healthy man whose body was at the command of his mind and who was not paralyzed—to indicating an inner disposition by virtue of which a man could feel free when he actually was a slave or unable to move his limbs. Ideas are mental artifacts and their history presupposes the unchanging identity of man as artificer. To assume that there is a history of the mind’s faculties as distinguished from the mind’s products is like assuming that with the invention of new tools and even implements that can serve as full-fledged substitutes for tools, the human body, which is a toolmaker’s and a tool user’s body, would also be subject to change. And still, there is the fact that prior to the rise of Christianity we find nowhere any notion of a mental faculty that corresponded to the “idea” of freedom as the faculty of the intellect corresponded to truth, and the faculty of reason to things beyond human knowledge or, as we have said, to meaning.
We shall follow the experiences men had with this paradoxical and self-contradictory faculty (every volition since it speaks to itself in imperatives produces its own counter-volition) from the Apostle Paul’s early discovery of the impotence of the will—“I do not what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…I can will what is right but I cannot do it”*8—through the Middle Ages, beginning with Augustine’s insight that what is “at war” here is not the spirit and the flesh but the mind as will with itself, man’s “inmost self” with itself. I shall then proceed to the modern age which, with the rise of the notion of progress, exchanged the old philosophical primacy of the present over the other tenses for the primacy of the future, a force that in Hegel’s words “the now cannot resist” so that thinking is understood “as essentially the negation of something being there” (“in der Tat ist das Denken wesentlich die Negation eines unmittelbar Vorhandenen”).*9 In the words of Schelling, “In the final and highest instance there is no other Being than Will,”*10 an attitude which found its final climactic and self-defeating end in Nietzsche’s “will to Power.”
At the same time we shall follow another parallel development in the history of the will according to which this is the inner capacity by which men decide about “Who” they are going to be, in what shape they wish to show themselves in the world of appearances. In other words, it is the will, whose subject matter are projects, not objects, which in a sense creates the person who can be blamed or praised and anyhow held responsible not merely for his actions but also for his whole “being,” his character. “For Will is in itself the consciousness of personality or of everybody as an individual.”*11 The Marxian and existentialist notions which play such a great role in twentieth-century thought and pretend that man is his own producer and maker, rest on these experiences, despite the fact that I certainly did not “make myself” or “produce” my existence; this, I think, is the last of the metaphysical fallacies, corresponding to the modern age’s emphasis on willing as a replacement of thinking.
I shall conclude this second series of lectures with an analysis of the faculty of judgment, and our chief difficulty will be of an altogether different kind, consisting of the curious scarcity of sources which could provide us with authoritative testimony. It was not before Kant’s Critique of Judgment that this faculty became a major topic of a major thinker. My main assumption in singling out this faculty will be that judgments are not arrived at by either deduction or induction, that, in brief, they have nothing in common with logical operations—as when we say: All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore, Socrates is mortal. The first to be aware of such a separate faculty was, as far as I know, Cicero, who, wondering how the “crowd of the unlearned” could be receptive to and hence persuaded by the highly sophisticated rhetorical devices of orators, said as follows:
Everybody discriminates [diiudicare] between right and wrong in matters of art and proportion by some silent sense without any knowledge of art and proportion…and [people] display this [discrimination] much more in judging…words since these are fixed [infixa] in common sense and in these things nature did not want anybody not to be an expert….It is remarkable how little difference there is between the learned and the ignorant in judging while there is the greatest difference in making”*12 (my italics).
We shall be in search of this “silent sense,” which—if it was dealt with at all—has always, even in Kant, been thought of as “taste” and therefore as belonging to the realm of aesthetics; in practical and moral matters it was called “conscience” and conscience did not judge; it told you, as the divine voice of either God or reason, what to do, what not to do, and what to repent of. Whatever the voice of conscience may be, it cannot be said to be “silent” and its validity depends entirely upon an authority which is above and beyond all merely human laws and rules.
Kant had been concerned with the phenomenon of taste in his youth and he had failed to elaborate on this concern because the “critical business,” the desire to inquire into the “scandal of reason,” intervened and kept him busy for more than ten years. When he returned to his early concern, which for him was rooted in the “sociability” of man, in the fact that man is a social [geselliges] being for whom nothing would make any sense if he were unable to share it with others, he changed his youthful project and wrote not a Critique of Taste but a Critique of Judgment, perhaps because he had discovered, while busy with the Critique of Pure Reason, this special faculty for which “general logic contains no rules”; even then, he counted this faculty together with intellect and reason among the “higher faculties of the mind.”*13 In the context of the Critique of Pure Reason, judgment has the function of naming the particular under general rules, and for this task, Kant found, there are no rules to instruct the mind “whether something does or does not come under them”; and even if there were such rules, “for the very reason that [they are rules they would] again demand guidance from judgment.”*14 Thus judgment emerges as “a peculiar talent which can be practiced only, and cannot be taught.”
Judgment deals with particulars, and when thinking, moving among generalities emerges from its withdrawal and returns to the world of particular appearances, it turns out that the mind needs a new “gift” to deal with them. And Kant adds: “Deficiency” in this gift “is ordinarily called stupidity, and for such a failing there is no remedy. An obtuse or narrow-minded person…may indeed be trained through study, even to the extent of becoming learned. But as such people are commonly still lacking in judgment, it is not unusual to meet learned men who in the application of their scientific knowledge betray that original want, which can never be made good.”*15 For the only help to “sharpen” this peculiar talent of the mind “are examples,” the “go cart of judgment,” and in order to find the right examples one needs, of course, again judgment. Such is the case for what Kant calls the determinate judgment about which he has little to say; the Critique of Judgment then deals with “reflexive judgment” which appears in the Critique of Pure Reason only in a footnote;*16 here judgment in matters of the beautiful is said to be “the proper test of the correctness of the rules,” which is only another way of saying that in the last instance the particular decides, sits in judgment, as it were, on the validity of the general.
And this seems logically impossible. If judgment, “the faculty of thinking the particular,” has nothing to rely on but other particulars “for which the general has to be found,”*17 it lacks all standards or criteria by which to judge. The standard cannot be borrowed from experience and cannot be derived from the outside. I cannot judge one particular by another particular: in order to determine its worth or its value, I need a tertium comparationis, something related to the two particulars and yet distinct from both. In Kant himself, it is reason with its “regulative ideas” which comes to the help of the faculty of judgment, but if the faculty is separate from other faculties of the mind then we shall have to ascribe to it its own modus operandi, its own way of proceeding.
And this is of some relevance to a whole set of problems by which modern thought is haunted, especially to the problem of theory and practice and to all attempts to arrive at a halfway plausible theory of ethics. Since Hegel and Marx these questions have been treated under the perspective of History and under the assumption that there is such a thing as Progress of the human race. Finally we shall be left with the only alternative there is in these matters: we either can say with Hegel: Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht, leaving the ultimate judgment to Success, or we can maintain with Kant the autonomy of the minds of men and their possible independence of things as they are or as they have come into being. In which case we still shall have to concern ourselves with the concept of history, but we may then be able to reflect on the oldest meaning of this word, which, like so many other terms of our political and philosophical language, is Greek in origin and derived from historein, to inquire, to say what is, legein ta eonta, in Herodotus. But the origin of the verb historein is to be found in Homer—Iliad XXIII—where the noun histor occurs, the “historian” as it were, and this Homeric historian is a judge.*18 If judgment is our faculty to deal with the past, the historian is the man who by saying what is sits in judgment over it. In which case we may reclaim our human dignity, win it back as it were from the pseudo-divinity of the modern age, called History, not denying its importance but denying its right to being the ultimate judge. Old Cato with whom I started these lectures—“never am I less alone than when I am by myself, never am I more active than when I do nothing”—has left us a curious phrase which is apt to summarize the political principle implied in this enterprise. He said: Victrix causa deis placuit sed victa Catoni: The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the defeated one pleased Cato.*19
1974
*1 The manuscript of “Thinking,” the first volume of Arendt’s posthumously published Life of the Mind, ends with a section called “Transition.” For reasons unknown, this was changed in the published edition of 1978 to “Postscriptum” and shortened from ten to four pages. Though it was tempting simply to print the deleted pages here, it was judged preferable to print the entire “Transition” as Arendt wrote it, and in which material from the four previously published pages is interspersed. The principal reason for doing this—and also a possible rationale for the earlier editing—is the growing interest in what Arendt was prevented by her death from writing on “Judging,” which may well have turned out to be a third volume of The Life of the Mind. The following “Transition” certainly says more about the activity of judging in relation to the activities of both thinking and willing than the previously published “Postscriptum.” —Ed.
*2 Bergson, Time and Free Will, pp. 142, 167, 169, 240.
*3 Ibid.
*4 Concept of the Mind, ch. 3, pp. 62ff.
*5 Spinoza, Letter LXII.
*6 Hobbes, “The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance,” English Works, London, 1841, vol. V.
*7 “An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy.”
*8 Letter to the Romans, 5:15–19.
*9 Jenenser Realphilosophie, Philosophy of Nature, I A, “The Concept of Motion.”
*10 On Human Freedom (1809), translation by James Gutman (Chicago, 1936), p. 8.
*11 Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, Baillie edition, p. 601.
*12 In De Oratore, III, 195–197.
*13 B169 and 171.
*14 B172.
*15 B173.
*16 Kant’s footnote to B35–36 in “The Transcendental Aesthetic” of The Critique of Pure Reason reads as follows: “The Germans are the only people who now employ the word ‘aesthetics’ to indicate what others call the critique of taste. At the foundation of this term lies the disappointed hope, which the eminent analyst Baumgarten conceived, of subjecting the criticism of the beautiful to principles of reason, and so of elevating its rules into a science. But his endeavors were in vain, for the said rules are, in respect to their chief sources, merely empirical, consequently never can serve as determinate laws a priori, by which our judgment in matters of taste is to be directed. It is rather our judgment which forms the proper test of the correctness of the rules. On this account it is advisable to give up the use of the term as designating the critique of taste, and to apply it solely to that doctrine, which is true science—the science of the laws of sensibility—and thus come nearer to the language and the sense of the ancients in their well-known division of the objects of cognition into aisthēta kai noēta, or to share it with speculative philosophy, and employ it partly in a transcendental, partly in a psychological signification.” —Ed.
*17 Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, part IV.
*18 In Iliad, Canto 23, the funeral games—chariot racing, boxing, foot racing, throwing, archery—are judged by the histor, who awards prizes justly, and disqualifies participants suspected of cheating.
—Ed.
*19 In fact this is not the same “old Cato” quoted earlier, but his great grandson, Cato the Younger (95–46 BCE), as imitated by the poet Lucan in his epic Pharsalia, I, 128. Arendt makes this error consistently, as far back as the 1930s. It is a curious error for someone of her proficiency in scanning classical verse. It is, perhaps, the exception that proves the rule. —Ed.