Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind, moral judgment, conscience, free will, intersubjectivity ...

HANNAH ARENDT'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE WILL: CONTINGENCY, TEMPORALITY, AND THE NATURE OF MORAL JUDGMENT by Eric Helleloid (Under the Direction of Elizabeth Brient) ABSTRACT Hannah Arendt's final work, Life of the Mind, is the crucial text for understanding her mature moral theory. It was designed as a three-volume study—Thinking, Willing, and Judging—of the basic mental activities and their moral limits and potentialities. Only the first two volumes were completed at her death in 1975, and much scholarly work has since been done to understand how she would have written her volume on judging. My account tracks the development of Arendt's moral reflections through Life of the Mind and argues for a novel interpretation of Judging. The inadequacy of other readings lies in their inattention to the importance of Willing, where Arendt defends her own version of free will. In Life of the Mind, free will is recognized as a necessary condition for all moral claims about human action and the ground of moral responsibility. Arendt's account of moral judgment is structured to accommodate the implications of the will's freedom. The relationship between the freedom of the will and moral judgment is the central concern of this dissertation. Human freedom and moral judgment operate only within the context of human temporality, which is fraught with complex tensions between past, present, and future. These tensions are essential to understanding the contingency of the will's freedom and the related contingency of all moral judgments. Following Arendt, I will defend the intersubjectivity of moral judgment as well as its independence from any immanent consensus of the socio-political order. INDEX WORDS:

Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind, moral judgment, conscience, free will,

intersubjectivity, responsibility, contingency, temporality

HANNAH ARENDT'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE WILL: CONTINGENCY, TEMPORALITY, AND THE NATURE OF MORAL JUDGMENT

by Eric Helleloid B.A., Bethel University, 2005

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ATHENS, GEORGIA 2014

© 2014 Eric Helleloid All Rights Reserved

HANNAH ARENDT'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE WILL: CONTINGENCY, TEMPORALITY, AND THE NATURE OF MORAL JUDGMENT

by Eric Helleloid

Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2014

Major Professor:

Elizabeth Brient

Committee:

Richard D. Winfield René Jagnow

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project would not have begun without many stimulating discussions that took place within the University of Georgia philosophy department. My fellow graduate students and professors have been a great influence on my thinking. In particular, I feel very lucky to have met some great philosophical friends. Special thanks to A.J. Tiarsmith, Joey Carter, and especially Gregory Moss, whose love of thinking and questioning continues to be a great inspiration. I would like to thank Richard Dien Winfield and René Jagnow for their service on my dissertation committee. I feel especially indebted to Elizabeth Brient, who first introduced me to the thought of Hannah Arendt, for her willingness to work with me through this very long and difficult process. I thank her for all the wonderful insights and timely corrections as this dissertation was taking shape. I am grateful for the unwavering and bountiful support of my family, who first taught me the value of education and commitment. Finally, and most importantly, I thank my wife Jillian for all of her love, encouragement, patience, and for keeping me grounded in the world—I could not have done it without her.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements........................................................................................................................... iv Introduction....................................................................................................................................... 1 Part I: Situating Life of the Mind in Arendt's Corpus......................................................................... 4 Chapter 1

Totalitarianism, Politics, and Action......................................................... 6

Chapter 2

The Eichmann Trial and Moral Issues....................................................... 63

Part II: Arendt's Moral Philosophy in Life of the Mind..................................................................... 146 Chapter 3

Thinking...................................................................................................... 147

Chapter 4

Willing........................................................................................................ 224

Chapter 5

Judging....................................................................................................... 322

Bibliography...................................................................................................................................... 385

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INTRODUCTION Questions regarding moral judgment came to occupy Arendt as she considered the evils of twentieth century totalitarianism and the responsibility of those who were involved in these political movements. Despite the mass support and collaboration of so many ordinary people in the totalitarian evils, some individuals actively resisted and others were simply unwilling to participate. Arendt was particularly interested in this capacity for independent moral judgment in the midst of political, cultural, and moral collapse. How can individuals maintain their capacity for moral judgment in isolation from others who share their moral opinions? Arendt's final work Life of the Mind is, among other things, a prolonged reflection on this capacity, and will be the focal text of my investigation. Life of the Mind poses a number of interpretative difficulties, the most significant of which arise from the fact that it remains an unfinished work. Upon her death in 1975, Arendt had only written the first two of three intended volumes, each of which was dedicated to a particular mental faculty. The two finished volumes, Thinking 1 and Willing 2, were meant to be followed by Judging, which has received much scholarly attention, as commentators speculate about what Arendt would have written in the final volume. The results of such commentaries, in my opinion, have been mixed. Some have merely isolated a few favored ideas in Life of the Mind and used them in various tangential projects, while others have caught the momentum and direction of her thought in illuminating ways. My goal, at least with regard to the scholarship on Arendt, is to add another illuminating perspective to the literature on Judging by fleshing out the ideas that have not been given sufficient attention. Specifically, in the central (fourth) chapter of the dissertation, I will undertake a careful reading of the Willing volume, a task that I do not think has been achieved with adequate rigor.

1 2

Arendt, Life of the Mind, ed. Mary McCarthy (New York: Harcourt, 1978), vol. 1: Thinking. Arendt, Life of the Mind, vol. 2: Willing.

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Willing's many intertwining themes and vast historical scope pose an interpretative challenge of the highest degree. If one comes to Willing without having read Arendt's other writings, the text can be nearly impossible to understand. Even when armed with knowledge of Arendt's corpus, the most original parts of the text are often missed amid the various commonalities with Arendt's earlier works. I will highlight the originality of Willing within Arendt's mature corpus. While Arendt is often critical of all theories of free will in her early work, Willing contains a qualified defense of free will and its moral significance. It is her revised perspective on free will that will allow us to see Arendt's intentions for Judging with new eyes. I will track Arendt's growing appreciation for the faculty of the will and its paradoxes in order to illuminate a parallel development in her theory of judgment, a shift toward a conception of judging as a mental activity that is independent of, but not hostile to, the world of human interaction. Many readers of Arendt interpret her work exclusively or primarily in political terms, overlooking the depth and originality of her reflections on morality. One reason for this is that Arendt's early work is devoted mainly to political issues and is, at times, dismissive of moral considerations. Arendt mounts a thoroughgoing defense of human plurality and political action in the face of growing anti-political elements in the modern age, elements that became nightmarishly clear with the appearance of totalitarianism. In her mind, traditional moral beliefs and ethical systems were inadequate, for they were both incapable of preventing totalitarian evils in practice and unable in theory to respond to the political realities of the contemporary world, such as the loss of traditional authority and the rise of bureaucratic institutions. In her early work Arendt is generally critical of traditional theories of the will, due to their anti-political, overly individualistic, and moralistic implications. However, Arendt's attention to moral concerns begins in earnest after her experiences at the trial of Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann and the controversy that surrounded the publication of her wellknown—some might say notorious—Eichmann in Jerusalem. According to Arendt, the "banality of evil" appeared in the person of Eichmann, whose deeds were monstrous but whose character was marked by a profound "thoughtlessness" and lack of conviction. Eichmann's banality exemplified a major crisis of 2

moral responsibility and moral judgment in the contemporary world. This moral crisis motivates her investigations into the nature of our moral faculties. Part I of the dissertation will introduce the reader to the basic threads of Arendt's political theory (chapter 1), and then highlight the shift toward moral issues that occurs in her post-Eichmann work (chapter 2). Part II will investigate the three volumes of Life of the Mind, with one chapter devoted to each volume. By tracking the development of Arendt's theory of the mental faculties, and bringing out the unique arguments of Willing and Judging, I will motivate an interpretation of Life of the Mind that illuminates the complex relationship between moral judgment and the freedom of the will. The defining characteristics of this relationship concern the temporality and contingency of human experience.

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PART I: SITUATING LIFE OF THE MIND IN ARENDT'S CORPUS The opening part of the dissertation will introduce readers to Arendt's work prior to Life of the Mind. Arendt professed to begin her thinking from concrete experiences and events, and I will follow the development of her work in a generally (but not strictly) chronological fashion, emphasizing the key historical events that inspired her thinking. The two key events are the outbreak of totalitarianism in Europe and the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. The first sets the stage for all of Arendt’s major works, and the latter highlights a shift in the last stage of her career, a shift toward explicitly moral issues and human moral capacities. There are many common threads through the periods of Arendt’s work, and commentators have been quick to notice and draw out these connections. 1 By contrast, my interpretation of Arendt's work points to the influence the Eichmann trial exerted on Arendt’s work, an influence strong enough to motivate her reformulations of key human capacities in Life of the Mind and elsewhere. Since Arendt was a thinker who wished to stay attuned to the worldly events and political realities, I think it only charitable to follow her reflections with an eye to the way she is responding to events and novel experiences. The first part of the dissertation will be separated into two chapters, each of which deals with a different period of Arendt’s work prior to Life of the Mind. Arendt's experience with Eichmann initiated a shift in her thinking that I wish to capture with a division of her work into two periods. I will argue that, prior to the Eichmann trial, Arendt is primarily concerned with modern threats to human political life. The

1

Kampowski is a good example of an interpreter who focuses on continuity, as his project is aimed at drawing out similarities throughout Arendt's corpus as a whole, and especially from her dissertation in 1929 to her final works. Kampowski's treatment is illuminating but it certainly ignores the influence of totalitarianism on her thought: that event undermines her earlier reflections about the nature of human community. See Stephan Kampowski, Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning: The Action Theory and Moral Thought of Hannah Arendt in the Light of Her Dissertation on St. Augustine (Cambridge, U.K.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2008). I have not concerned myself with Arendt’s dissertation in this project—mainly for the reason that I think she leaves many of her dissertation ideas behind her once she confronted totalitarianism. Kampowski has brought out some of the thematic continuity from Arendt’s dissertation through Life of the Mind, but I think the differences are too great to warrant much treatment of her dissertation.

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Eichmann trial draws Arendt’s focus from questions about politics and political structure to questions of morality and personal responsibility. The shift in emphasis does not imply that the concerns are necessarily exclusive, but rather that Arendt is asking new questions that are demanded by the circumstances. I will resist interpreting her work as the continuous development of an autonomous system of ideas, as though she was only working out the implications of earlier insights or filling in logical holes in prior accounts. The non-systematic nature of Arendt's philosophical method does not free us from the need to understand the larger sweep of her work. Insightful interpretations of Arendt carefully point to the continuity of her philosophy while, at the same time, stressing how Arendt responds to contemporary events. Life of the Mind is consciously written as a prolonged reflection on the questions that were raised by Arendt’s confrontation with Eichmann, and only in that light will it be understood. But the extended context of Arendt’s earlier work is also important for understanding Life of the Mind, and in particular, its thematic treatment of morality, temporality and freedom. While providing the broader background and context for Life of the Mind, I will also develop these themes in order to fully appreciate Arendt’s views on thinking, willing, and judging. In her early work, these themes appear independently, arising in many different discussions. In Life of the Mind, these themes become inseparable from one another and form the core of the text.

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CHAPTER 1: TOTALITARIANISM, POLITICS, AND ACTION Our inquiry will begin with Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, which was published in 1951. 2 In the third part of the book and in “Ideology and Terror,” an essay that was added to the second edition, Arendt explicates her understanding of totalitarian evil and its relation to human freedom. Arendt's analysis in Origins informs all of her subsequent thinking on morality—it remains a fixed point of reference for new insights and experiences. 3 From Origins, we will turn to a volume of essays entitled Between Past and Future, 4 which Arendt wrote during the 1950's as she tried to grapple with the significance of totalitarianism for the future of politics. As we look through these essays, I want to emphasize Arendt's method of balancing genuine concern for the unknown future with a desire to utilize the past as a resource for reflection. These issues of temporality are based on Arendt's claim that totalitarianism has demonstrated the collapse of the Western moral and philosophical tradition. The majority of the first chapter will discuss Arendt's Human Condition. 5 Arendt's theory of action in Human Condition is pivotal for my reading of her later moral reflections, mainly because Arendt is attempting to dissociate human action from traditional moral theories that have covered over the political and plural dimensions of human existence. While robustly defending action from these theories, Arendt does not provide a clear alternative moral theory, which leads some commentators to understand Arendt as promoting an amoral philosophy. The most common version of this interpretation reads Human

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Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1968). Margaret Canovan, in her book, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), develops a compelling reading of Arendt that stresses Origins as the key text in her corpus. I think Canovan's interpretation is strong on its own terms, but her perspective seems to limit the extent to which Arendt is formulating new questions and answers in response to Eichmann. Canovan stresses Arendt's response to one event, but does not necessarily allow that Arendt could also redirect her efforts in response to later events. 4 Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, introd. Jerome Kohn (New York: Penguin Books, 2006). 5 Arendt, Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 3

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Condition (and often other of Arendt's works along with it) along Nietzschean lines. In my own interpretation of the text, I wish to emphasize the context of Arendt's rejection of certain moral theories and perspectives. I will argue that Arendt's theory of action leaves theoretical space for a moral theory and that Human Condition is simply not aiming to provide one. For Arendt, the need for reflection on moral issues arises only after Human Condition. As a supplement to Human Condition's theory of action, I will also discuss Arendt's 1961 essay, "Crisis in Culture." 6 In the essay, Arendt conceives of judgment within the categories of politics and public life, highlighting the role of judgment in preserving the world and the meaningfulness of action. At this stage, judgment is considered primarily political and not moral. In her later works, judgment becomes a central moral faculty. The last piece to consider extensively in Arendt's pre-Eichmann works is an essay, "What is Freedom?," 7 that directly treats the relationship between freedom and the faculty of the will. At this stage of her career, Arendt's reflections on the will are primarily critical, stressing the overly subjective and anti-political aspects of the dominant traditional notions of free will. These critiques are valuable because they illuminate how dependent Arendt is on traditional theories at this stage. In her later works, Arendt departs from traditional assumptions about willing while at the same time she interacts more rigorously with many diverse historical accounts of the experiences of freedom and the will. Her growing attention to moral issues after Eichmann coincides with an expanding concern to rethink the activity of willing in a comprehensive way.

Totalitarianism and Radical Evil The concept of “radical evil,” which Arendt uses to mark the unprecedented and incomprehensible nature of totalitarian evil, is central to Origins of Totalitarianism. In her analysis, the concentration camps are the most complete expression of the totalitarian goal of eliminating humanity.

6 7

Arendt, "Crisis in Culture" in Between Past and Future, 194-222. Arendt, "What is Freedom?" in Between Past and Future, 142-169.

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For Arendt, totalitarian ideology is characterized by its claim to quasi-scientific validity. 8 Instead of discovering facts and already existing universal laws of nature, the ideology’s universal claims and predictions were to be realized only through the achievements of the movement itself. In Nazi totalitarianism, the concentration camps were the culmination of the process of fabricating the proof for the ideological theory—the world was made to fit the ideology, not vice versa. Totalitarian ideology is built upon the conviction that “everything is possible,” that all facts and realities can be changed, that the world can be remade in any form whatsoever. 9 In the place of factual reality is substituted a consistent ideological system that is to be "proven" by the operations of the concentration camps. Similarly, in Stalinist totalitarianism, the theory of dying classes was demonstrated by the implementation of extensive purges. In a later essay, Arendt explains that “everything is possible” is the expression of a new and more radical form of nihilism than the more traditional form in which “everything is permitted.” In the latter expression, it is still assumed that there are limits to what is possible, that reality limits what human beings can do. The former not only shows disrespect for moral limitations on human actions, but disregards the notion that reality limits human power in any way whatsoever. 10 In the Nazi regime, human beings are the subject of destruction and re-fabrication in the concentration camps. Terror functions to eliminate from human individuals every aspect that does not allow the human species to adhere to universal and predictable laws. The goal of creating a perfectly consistent and predictable reality requires that every human “be reduced to a never-changing identity of reactions, so that each of these bundles of reactions can be exchanged at random for any other.”11 Through a series of transformations, each victim is made to lose all sources of spontaneity, even the basic animal spontaneity of survival instinct. In the end, the victims are completely dominated when they walk to their own death without resistance.

8

Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 468. Ibid., 443. 10 Arendt, "The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern," in Between Past and Future, 87. 11 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 438. 9

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The totalitarian remaking of human beings is incomprehensible because it serves no further end. Total domination is the essential principle of the totalitarian form of government, and as such is considered an “end in itself.” While many evils are grotesque in their mistreatment of humans or of other living beings, it is usually obvious or at least assumed that those evils are undertaken for the sake of some other good. Murder, even on a mass scale, can be explained in terms of humanly understandable motives. Total domination has no human motivations because its purpose is to eliminate humanity—“totalitarian regimes take the greatest pride in having no need of [human motivations].” 12 This new radical evil “breaks down all standards we know” because both the victims and the criminals are unrecognizable— making the humanity of both victim and criminal superfluous to the goal of consistency and ultimate control. 13 When the impossible became possible it became the unpunishable, unforgiveable absolute evil which could no longer be understood and explained by the evil motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice…Just as the victims in the death factories or the holes of oblivion are no longer “human” in the eyes of their executioners, so this newest species of criminals is beyond the pale even of solidarity in human sinfulness. 14 To achieve control and domination over human beings, totalitarianism uses terror to eradicate the relationships between human beings and, consequently, human reality. For Arendt, the human sense of reality is maintained only through the perspectival interactions of human beings. Through communication human beings come to recognize a common reality that exists between them, simultaneously separating and connecting their perspectives. 15 The consistency of totalitarian ideology could replace the normal texture of reality because the atomization of society was made complete in the early stages of the movement. An utterly consistent logical system serves the needs of atomized individuals: no perspectives and no appeals to factual realities are needed to deduce consequences from the initial premise of the ideology. In other words, ideology appeals to the one cognitive process that is left to the atomized

12

Ibid., 456-457. Ibid., 443. 14 Ibid., 459. 15 Arendt, The Human Condition, 50, 53. 13

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individual: logical deduction. 16 The Nazi ideology, in particular, centers on the natural law of superior and inferior, dying peoples—this is the idea from which the atomized masses can deduce the awful consequences, which are then confirmed by the methods of the regime. Under the Nazi ideology, Nature is the only judge—the dying races are already condemned by nature—and the Nazi movement is merely executing the dictates of natural law. Under Stalinist Communism, the judge is History, whose laws dictate the rise and fall of different classes in society over the course of human history. From these ideological perspectives, it is pointless to condemn or resist the seemingly inevitable course of events.17 In the modern world, loneliness has become more prevalent in mass society and is a central political problem, according to Arendt, precisely because it limits the human mind to mechanical deterministic logic. This analysis of ideology and logic strongly informs Arendt's views on thinking in her later works. Thinking is not logical reasoning. Thinking is not an exercise for the human being in one's "singularity," as it incorporates a measure of plurality into its very structure. Also, thinking is not coercive: it does not follow necessary, mechanistic laws but is, in its own way, spontaneous. Later, I will explicate the reasons for her views on these issues. The real obstacle, and enduring opponent, of the totalitarian system is human spontaneity. The capacity for spontaneous action, which will always cease to be calculable and controllable, springs from the human condition of natality. Just as human individuals arrive in the world and begin their lives through birth, taking on a unique identity that cannot be fully explained, so also can human individuals begin a new series of events through action. These new births and new actions oppose all complete systems, all ideologies of nature or of history. 18 Human spontaneity disrupts the predictable course of events, and saves plurality by breaking up the one perspective that any ideology might impose on the world. Human freedom is manifest in the world in spontaneous action, when the continuity of historical events and the automatism of natural processes are undone.

16

Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 353, 468ff. Ibid., 465. 18 Ibid., 465-466. 17

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In every major work, Arendt develops this capacity of natality as a central feature of humanity. We will discuss its importance in Human Condition, Life of the Mind, and elsewhere. Arendt does not mention the capacity of free will in Origins. In retrospect, the closest reference is this: “Freedom as an inner capacity of man is identical with the capacity to begin, just as freedom as a political reality is identical with a space of movement between men.” 19 In totalitarian society in general, the public space of movement was destroyed through the regime’s use of terror and propaganda—there was no political freedom. However, the inner capacity for freedom, is not identical with political freedom. The freedom to begin is harbored in each human being, and this capacity is the closest thing to a guarantee that the totalitarian world will never achieve totality. 20 This is the extent of Arendt’s hope in light of totalitarianism. In her later book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, she communicates the same position: the few stories of genuine resistance to the Nazi regime indicate “that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not…Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.” 21 A key thread of my investigation is to follow the relationship between natality and willing as Arendt understands them. In its analysis of radical evil, Origins clearly expresses Arendt’s view that a world without spontaneity and beginnings is not a human world, and that the loss of the capacity for beginning would be the loss of humanity as we know it. Furthermore, while natality does not guarantee a perfect world, it protects us against the worst. I find no evidence that Arendt ever changed her mind on these issues. In her pre-Eichmann writings, she does not connect the freedom to begin with willing. In fact, in the essay “What is Freedom?,” which we will come to at the end of this chapter, Arendt distinguishes willing and spontaneous freedom explicitly. When we finally come to Life of the Mind in Part II, we will see that Arendt directly identifies natality, the inner capacity for spontaneity, with the will. This final identification, as we shall see, will require a thorough critique and redefinition of what

19

Ibid., 473. Emphasis added. Ibid., 478-479. 21 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), 233. 20

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traditionally constitutes willing. In other words, Arendt's conception of willing changes in such a way as to fully accommodate the characteristics of natality.

The Loss of Tradition Now, we must consider how Arendt thinks through the implications of totalitarianism for politics and for philosophical reflection. In Origins, Arendt is concerned with totalitarianism as a novel historical phenomenon that threatens human freedom. To do justice to its novelty, Arendt attempts to understand the development of totalitarianism without explaining it as the inevitable result of previous events. Arendt is careful to steer between two problematic stances. On the one hand, Arendt resists identifying the story of the development of totalitarianism with a causal history in which one event must follow necessarily from the last. This type of hypothesis would undermine our moral sense that it could and should have been avoided. On the other hand, Arendt thinks that the intelligibility of history does not depend upon causality, as some might assume. We can tell a coherent story of the historical events that helps us understand the advent of totalitarianism. In other words, the events are contingent, but that does not imply that the events did not take place in a context of other realities that allow the events to be understood. Arendt structured her analysis into three parts; the first two, dealing with anti-Semitism and imperialism, set the historical stage for the unprecedented totalitarian movements. Arendt uses the word “crystallization” to describe the way she envisions her thesis: the historical forces provide the basis for a unique constellation, but that constellation cannot be reduced to what preceded it.22 Totalitarianism, according to Arendt, is often misunderstood precisely because it is reduced to anti-Semitism or imperialism, or to other political phenomena such as tyranny and authoritarianism. The novelty of the phenomenon is lost when one looks to categorize it in terms of precedents. Arendt’s analysis aims to preserve the historical reality by highlighting the novelty of totalitarianism and its contingent appearance in the world.

22

Arendt, "A Reply to Eric Vogelin" in Essays in Understanding (New York: Harcourt, 1994), 403-405.

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In the years following the publication of Origins, Arendt’s writings follow out the implications of totalitarianism in many different arenas. While all events have a measure of unpredictability and novelty, totalitarianism is particularly important because it challenges key assumptions of the Western tradition. Arendt writes: Totalitarian domination as an established fact, which in its unprecedentedness cannot be comprehended through the usual categories of political thought, and whose “crimes” cannot be judged by traditional moral standards or punished within the legal framework of our civilization, has broken the continuity of Occidental history. The break in our tradition is now an accomplished fact. 23 Arendt finds evidence that the tradition of political philosophy was beginning to lose its authority for philosophers at least as early as Marx and Kierkegaard. In Marx, the traditional relationship of thought and action is completely reversed, with action supplanting thought in the hierarchy of human capacities. The collapse of the tradition takes longer to be felt on the political scene because established customs had at least some limited power to hold society together. 24 Arendt also locates earlier warnings about this situation: Montesquieu thought that moral customs could not survive without vibrant political activity that would give those customs substance and reinforce their meaning. 25 While the moral and political tradition has steadily lost its basis in modern political reality, totalitarian evil brings the loss of tradition into the center of public awareness. The tradition ceases to illuminate our contemporary experiences—all answers the tradition might give ignore the stark realities of the time. Politically, Arendt thinks the loss of tradition exposes us to the “elementary problems of human living together.” 26 The phenomenon of totalitarianism forces us to reconsider these fundamental problems, which had been overlooked in the modern age as long as traditional customs held sway. The tradition provided an authority distinct from those who possess political power; it limited and directed the possibilities of political action in a relatively impartial way. Tradition was a stabilizing force that—at

23 24

Arendt, "Tradition and the Modern Age" in Between Past and Future, 26. Arendt praises Nietzsche for illuminating the merely conventional state of morality in his time. See ibid.,

32-34. 25 26

Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” in Essays in Understanding, 315. Arendt, "What is Authority?," in Between Past and Future, 141.

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least in the best of times—balanced with the human power to change the world. With totalitarianism, human potentiality appears in the world unbridled by any restraints, which proves to be disastrous. The loss of tradition not only poses a threat to the political realm but it threatens the activity of thinking. Twentieth century philosophical movements like Existentialism, which is built upon the philosopher’s rejection of thinking in favor of committed action, bear witness to the crisis for thinkers. 27 Arendt describes the situation of contemporary reflection in her introduction to Between Past and Future. In this essay, Arendt utilizes a parable from Kafka as a description of the thinking experience in the void of tradition. 28 When the tradition was still intact, the experience of thinking might be understood as an experience of temporal continuity where the present and future can be illuminated by the past with its examples, established codes of conduct and well-defined categories. In that case, the present and future flow directly out of the past. The thinker has the power to “reconcile himself” with reality and feel at home within the world. 29 But with the break in the tradition, the thinker is pressed between two forces at war with each other, the past and the future. The past and the future become antithetical as the past becomes meaningless, pushing us into action to change the world, and the prospect of future action forces us to look to the past to consider what we may do. The conflict between past and future is not an automatic phenomenon, but arises as the individual thinker initiates the thinking process and discovers the rift in these temporal dimensions. The thinker stands at the center of the conflict, creating the tension with his mental capacities for remembrance and anticipation. The conflict, according to Arendt, cannot be overcome by seeking a metaphysical escape from human time into the eternal. Instead, by maintaining the activity of thought in the midst of this conflict, the hope is that one can create some impartial distance in order to negotiate the interaction between past and future. 30

27

"The Gap between Past and Future" in Between Past and Future, 8-9. The same theme can be found in earlier essays by Arendt, particularly “French Existentialism” in Essays in Understanding volume. 28 In Life of the Mind, Arendt once again uses the Kafka parable to characterize the thinking experience. There, however, Arendt’s application appears broader than simply the contemporary situation—the parable may be meant as a characterization of thinking per se. 29 Ibid., 6. 30 Ibid., 12.

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While Arendt does not believe we can return to tradition uncritically, the past is still available as a resource for reflection and understanding. Tradition provided interpretations of the past that were widely accepted, and these interpretations were the basis of shared common sense. Without these common sense interpretations, the thinker is left to interpret the meaning of the past independently. Arendt stresses how little we are prepared for this kind of thinking—the Kafka parable certainly exposes the difficulty. 31 The task of thinking, then, is to recover the meaning of basic human experiences that gave rise to the tradition without merely accepting the tradition's interpretations of those experiences. The undeniable loss of tradition in the modern world does not at all entail a loss of the past, for tradition and past are not the same, as the believers in tradition on one side and the believers in progress on the other would have us believe…With the loss of tradition we have lost the thread which safely guided us through the vast realms of the past, but this thread was also the chain fettering each successive generation to a predetermined aspect of the past. It could be that only now will the past open up to us with unexpected freshness and tell us things no one has yet had ears to hear. 32 So, in the absence of tradition, the contemporary thinker may have a distinct advantage in dealing with past events and experiences. Arendt suggests that as long we abstain from expecting traditional answers, we will have the ability to take on the demand to understand the contemporary world. Freed from servitude to the tradition, the thinker has the ability to judge which aspects of the past illuminate the present. Arendt’s starting point, in the void of tradition, is contemporary political realities: More specifically, these are exercises in political thought as it arises out of the actuality of political incidents…and my assumption is that thought itself arises out of these incidents of living experience and must remain bound to them as the only guideposts by which to take its bearings. 33 The activity of thinking must begin from particular events and experiences, and the past lies as a vast set of resources to analyze the present. 34 The past can help us recognize commonalities in all human experience, while also providing the material to make crucial distinctions between different eras of human history and thought. 31

Ibid., 13. Arendt, "What is Authority?," 93. 33 Arendt, "The Gap between Past and Future," 14. 34 The “must” here will be further clarified in the discussion of Thinking, as Arendt spends substantial efforts to delineate and critique certain philosophical views on the ways that human thought can be used. The title of the key section is “What Makes Us Think?” Thought certainly can be severed from events and experience, but any severing comes at great cost for the individual and the world. 32

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Arendt’s own reflections in the essays in Between Past and Future revolve around issues of temporality, specifically how humans navigate the dual demands of stability, which comes from the permanent aspects of the past, and novelty, which springs spontaneously from human freedom. Without the worldly stability of tradition, the thinker has the task of preserving the past, with its many treasures, without covering over the possibility for newness and spontaneity. 35 The view of thinking in Between Past and Future clarifies this important temporal tension, and Arendt's philosophical approach aims to preserve it.

Action in Human Condition Arendt’s Human Condition is another perfect example of her practice of thinking in the gap between past and future. The particular themes of the book developed naturally from her concerns in Between Past and Future—they are concerns about contemporary developments and our ability to understand our experiences in light of the past. Her explicit goal is to rethink many of the basic categories of our worldly life, using the history of thought critically and freely to understand ourselves. I think Taminiaux describes Arendt’s method best: she “combines a genealogy of many philosophical notions and a description of their relevance to specific experiences.” Her method also aims at “dismantling, or deconstructing” generalizations that have been adopted within the philosophical tradition and replacing them with her own phenomenological distinctions. 36 Arendt claims to “think about what we are doing” in light of contemporary events and concerns. Arendt contrasts her own investigation with a thoughtless repetition of traditional answers to political questions. The contemporary situation calls for a rethinking of politics itself, and the place of politics within the modern world. While the tradition has been lost and can no longer illuminate contemporary experience, Arendt turns to the past to investigate the various activities

35

In two particular essays, “The Crisis of Culture” and “The Crisis of Education,” the tension between stability and newness is explored within the context of specific practical themes. 36 Jacques Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), 199.

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and their interrelationships. 37 Arendt also identifies threats to human freedom arising within the trajectory of modern developments. Many of these threats are entangled with modern conceptions of human activities, particularly of politics and action. Human Condition offers, among other things, a phenomenological account of human action and freedom, an account that attempts to overcome certain prejudices of the philosophical tradition broadly and the modern age specifically. Origins of Totalitarianism focused mostly on the Nazi form of totalitarianism, while the totalitarianism of Stalin's Russia is covered in less detail, due partly to the limited availability of knowledge at the time. Arendt had plans to remedy this inadequacy through a study that was to be called “Totalitarian Elements of Marxism.” 38 This study was never accomplished, but many of her concerns with Marxism appear in her writings throughout the 1950’s. Several essays in Between Past and Future address Marxist interpretations of world history and human activities. 39 Throughout the explication of its central categories of labor, work, and action, Human Condition expresses a thorough critique of Marx on the same themes. For Arendt, what is at stake in her evaluation of Marxism is the distinctly political realm of human affairs. In Marx, the political realm is a mere appendage of economic or social activity. But, according to Arendt, Marx is only the most extreme version of the modern tendency to subordinate politics to the social realm. Hence, her critique of Marx is essentially a critique of the development of the modern age. As in the totalitarian project of eliminating human spontaneity, the main trends of the modern age harbor contempt for human freedom. If the social realm were to completely subsume politics, human freedom would be lost. 40 Thus, for Arendt, the advent of totalitarianism in the modern world is not purely accidental; in fact, it has an affinity with the categories of modern understanding. Arendt uses the traditional term vita activa to designate the activities that are central to the human condition, but she by no means accepts the traditional formulations of these activities. Instead, Arendt 37

Arendt, Human Condition, 5-6. Elizabeth Young-Breuhl, For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 276. 39 See particularly “Tradition and the Modern Age” and “The Concept of History” for Arendt’s appraisal of Marx within the Western tradition. 40 An alternative way of understanding the goal of totalitarianism can be stated in this context: total domination is the ultimate victory of society over politics and action. I must thank O. Bradley Bassler for reminding me of this issue. 38

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subjects this term to major revision throughout the text. The primary reason for revision is to uncover experiences that the philosophical tradition did not include within its depiction of the vita activa. 41 For example, the polis experience of ancient Greece was lost even in the earliest philosophers, which meant that the specifically political activity of action was never adequately distinguished from the other activities of the vita activa. What was lost was the distinctive freedom that the Greek polis offered to the citizen, a freedom that transcended all the necessities of mere biological life and offered the opportunity for worldly immortality. 42 The only freedom fully embraced in the philosophical tradition is the freedom to withdraw into contemplation, 43 which leads to an unwarranted subordination of the vita activa to the vita contemplativa, a subordination of life in the world to the life of the philosopher. If, therefore, the use of the term vita activa, as I propose it here, is in manifest contradiction to the tradition, it is because I doubt not the validity of the experience underlying the distinction [between active and contemplative] but rather the hierarchical order inherent in it from its inception…My contention is simply that the enormous weight of contemplation in the traditional hierarchy has blurred the distinctions and articulations within the vita activa itself. 44 Arendt deconstructs the traditional views of human activities with the hope of gaining insight into possibilities that have been lost and opening up avenues for reevaluating the various forms of human life. 45

41

Arendt, Human Condition, 12. Some commentators criticize Arendt for her “Greco-philia”, that she naïvely praises polis life without recognizing its less appealing and darker aspects or the incompatibility of polis life with modern realities. See, for example, Sandra K. Hinchman and Lewis P. Hinchman, "Existentialism Politicized: Arendt's Debt to Jaspers," in Review of Politics 53 (1991), 435-468. I think this criticism misunderstands the function of Arendt’s appeals to Greek distinctions. It presupposes that Arendt is offering a blueprint or solutions to practical problems, that a return to Greek life is possible and that we ought to make such a return. I think we should instead understand Arendt’s use of Greek distinctions as part of her critical method—the Greek understanding of freedom is helpful as a contrast to our own modern conceptions. If she implicitly praises the Greek understanding of freedom and action, Arendt is not offering wholesale praise for the Greek world—she assumes that parts of Greek self-understanding can be illuminating for us, and that we can separate what we admire about Greek life from what we do not. Furthermore, Arendt does not think that only the Greeks experienced freedom. It is clear from On Revolution that Arendt recognizes isolated periods of political freedom in various modern revolutions. I attribute the use of the Greek polis as the primary example in Human Condition to Arendt’s resistance to the philosophical tradition: the loss of the notion of political freedom in the tradition is not just a modern development. 43 Arendt, Human Condition, 14. 44 Ibid., 16-17. 45 As we shall see, Life of the Mind contains a similar deconstructive reading of the tradition. Arendt aims to reinvigorate the real experiences of the mental life that have been buried under philosophical argumentation and prejudices, and, at the same time, point the reader to other possibilities for how we evaluate the various mental activities. 42

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The fundamental activities of the vita activa are labor, work, and action, and each of these activities is intrinsically tied to a basic condition of human life. Labor corresponds to the condition of life in the biological sense—it is the activity by which we sustain our biological being within the confines of nature. Labor is ruled by necessity, as we are forced to provide for and maintain our organism through the inevitable cycles of the life process. In labor, the human individual is merely a species being, and has no individuality apart from being a multiplication of the biological essence. There is no permanence in this activity, only endless repetition of the same. The life process is thus defined by circular time, as in the cycles of consumption and reproduction. The laboring activity can be made easier through the development of use objects that magnify the normal productive capacities of the human body. These use objects are not products of labor, however, but of work. Unlike the products of nature that are consumed in the life process, use objects have an independence and endurance that is qualitatively different. The use object will not last forever, as it is eventually “used up” and worn down, but it must last through multiple applications in order to be useful at all. Work does not only produce use items to ease the labor process, but also produces objects that are not meant to be used up at all. Artworks, for example, are not meant to be used; their “purpose” is to be stable fixtures of the world that do not just outlast multiple cycles of the life process but endure through the generations of human life. 46 While use objects and artworks are different, the process by which they are produced is the same: in its purest form, a single solitary worker envisions the final product and then transforms his materials to fit his vision. 47 Work corresponds to the condition of human “worldliness.” In its highest form, the activity of work builds an artificial world to last through the endless cycles of the life process and transcends the utility of use objects. The world acts as a backdrop of permanency that “houses” human beings during their life-span—the “most important task of the human artifice…is to offer mortals a dwelling place more

46 47

Ibid., 173. Ibid., 225.

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permanent and more stable than themselves.” 48 The world’s permanence overcomes the futility of the life process and the relativity of use to provide for the possibility of meaning. 49 From the perspective of the individual human being, the world existed before birth and will exist after death, and it is in the world that the individual will have one’s identity and significance. Because work produces things that last, the world can act as a storehouse for human memory, so that the history of human activities can be preserved despite human mortality. The world can offer a measure of immortality as long as it can preserve the memory of individual human beings and the things most precious to them. If the animal laborans needs the help of homo faber to ease his labor and remove his pain, and if mortals need his help to erect a home on earth, acting and speaking men need the help of homo faber in his highest capacity, that is, the help of the artist, of poets and historiographers, of monument-builders or writers, because without them the only product of their activity, the story they enact and tell, would not survive at all. 50 The public realm’s most important existential function for human beings is to save from “destruction by time,” to achieve a permanence that mere life cannot offer. 51 To be without public recognition by others, and without a hope of being remembered (or at least being part of something that will be remembered), human life is reduced to the futility of labor and the life process. 52 In laboring the human being is merely a biological organism, and in working one is merely the craftsman who shapes raw materials into use objects and lasting products. Animal laborans is measured by his productivity for the species, and homo faber is measured and defined by the quality of his products. In neither activity is the identity of the individual revealed. In action, by contrast, the individual is revealed in one’s unique identity, which cannot be reduced to biological functions or defined by tangible products. Action is the specific human capacity for self-disclosure: the uniqueness of each person enters the world through his or her own initiatives. While the uniqueness of persons is less tangible than objects or even general human characteristics—due partly to the characteristic universality of language—it can be

48

Ibid., 152. Ibid., 173. 50 Ibid., 173. 51 Ibid., 55, 57. 52 Ibid., 58. This indicates the privative aspect of the private sphere in human life, namely that it lacks the ability to immortalize. 49

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captured in narrative. If there is anything remotely like a “product” in action, it is the individual’s lifestory and its myriad relations to the world and to other stories. Through action, “we insert ourselves in the human world,” a complex “web of relationships” in which our individual life-stories are interconnected. 53 The identity of the person is constituted by his or her unique “place” in the fabric of the human world. In Human Condition, a helpful distinction is made between action and behavior. An action is the always rare and unprecedented deed of a unique person, while behavior is the mode of human activity in which individuals conform to trends and patterns that can be mapped statistically. What behavioral analyses reveal are not any particular persons, but only the forces of society and history—actions are the irrelevant “outliers” or “deviations” to be explained by further research. 54 For Arendt, whenever all people do the same thing, action and freedom is impossible. When humans merely behave, each human is a multiplication of the basic species, not an individual in the strict sense. The basic condition of action is human plurality, which is distinct from the numerical multiplication of a single kind of being: “Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.” 55 Plurality and natality are interdependent conditions of action. Natality is the human capacity for beginning, but each new beginning is at the same time the appearance of a unique being in the world occupied by others. Without human beings coming together to constitute the web of human relationships, the public realm will lose its ultimate existential purpose of disclosing individual human beings. Action requires human plurality because it “produces” the relationships between human beings, and only in the midst of plurality can reality take shape: “For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality.” 56 Arendt claims that human persons need a “space of appearance” to become real. This concept indicates the dependency of action upon a world in which it takes place, and it is an extension of the condition of plurality: action needs space to be executed since

53

Ibid., 178. Ibid., 43. 55 Ibid., 8. 56 Ibid., 50. 54

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actors must appear to others. The world both connects and separates the plurality of human beings, guaranteeing that they all have a common object but also that their perspectives are not identical.57 Without the world as a stage and a plurality of spectators as an audience, action cannot take place. 58 Deprived of a space of appearance, each individual loses the opportunity to appear before others who can confirm one’s identity and record the story of one’s deeds. The space of appearance allows for the reality of persons in the world, and the intercourse of action between human beings helps confirm the reality of the world as well: “…for without a space of appearance and without trusting in action and speech as a mode of being together, neither the reality of one’s self, of one’s own identity, nor the reality of the surrounding world can be established beyond doubt.” 59 As the context for action, the world inevitably becomes the subject of public discourse: “Most action and speech is concerned with this in-between, which varies with each group of people, so that most words and deeds are about some worldly objective reality in addition to being a disclosure of the acting and speaking agent.” 60 While action always requires a common world of durable objects to relate the plurality of human beings to each other, action also has an essential aspect in which individuals address each other directly. According to Arendt, speech is the primary mode of action, and in action we speak to others, and present ourselves to them, sharing our opinions and intentions. 61 The condition of plurality implies that no individual possesses the power to act on one’s own— power is generated only in the matrix of interaction. As Arendt puts it, power is a “power potential” that comes into being the moment when people act together but it disappears just as quickly when the interaction ends. 62 Thus, the public sphere—insofar as it is a space of appearance for action and the

57

Ibid., 57-58. Arendt often uses the metaphors of theatre to elucidate these characteristics of action. See Ibid., 188 and Arendt, "What is Freedom?," 151-152. By contrast, the plastic arts are essentially arts of making, in which the maker controls the work of art as a separate product that appears only at the end of fabrication, while the artist himself does not appear in the work itself. This point applies, of course, to theatre as well when we consider the role of the playwright: the writer does not appear and relates to his script as a maker to a product. 59 Arendt, Human Condition, 210. 60 Ibid., 182. 61 Ibid., 183. 62 Ibid., 199-200. 58

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disclosure of individual human beings—is utterly fragile and cannot be relied upon to maintain its own integrity, as you might depend on an independent object. If the public sphere disappears for a time because of inaction, it may spontaneously emerge again when people return to action but there is also the possibility that it does not exist for long periods. Commitment to the public sphere by many individuals is the only guarantee that public life will be a consistent possibility. 63 According to Arendt, in the modern world the primary importance of action in politics has been overcome by the demands of the “social,” a specifically modern form of communal life that glorifies and nurtures labor and the life process to the detriment of both work and action. 64 Mass society—which can also be characterized as a “consumer society”—is the culmination of the modern development, and the supposed purpose of the political body is to ensure provisions for the necessities of life and, once the necessities are met, to aid the ever-expanding power of consumption. In this conception of human communal life, there is no essential need for action or work. Action, insofar as it is a deviation from predictable and controllable patterns of behavior, can only be detrimental to a society focused on efficiency of production and consumption. Likewise, the products of work, insofar as they are not objects of consumption but stable fixtures of the world, will always be obstacles to the activity of consumption. 65 The “rise of the social” 66 is predicated on the breakdown of the division between private and public realms. In properly political times, the necessities of life were dealt with in the private sphere of the household, and the public sphere constituted a realm of action that transcended those concerns. The social realm of modern times is an amalgam of the private and public, with the necessities of life becoming the central concern of public activity, and the smooth efficiency of public institutions requiring

63

Arendt, "What is Freedom?," 152. Ibid., 40, also 305ff. 65 The contemporary commodification of houses illustrates Arendt’s point here. If houses are bought and sold rapidly, and individuals constantly move from one house to the next, then houses are being treated much more like use items than stable, worldly things that help orient our existence. Other examples could be drawn from the numerous “disposable” products that have been developed—even the relatively limited durability of tools has become superfluous. 66 Ibid., 38. This phrase is Arendt’s and is the title of an early section of the book. 64

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more and more intrusion and penetration into the household. 67 Real political freedom is not possible in the social realm—all that is left of freedom is perhaps economic freedom, the freedom of choice between given options that are beneficial to the economic structure, but never a freedom that reveals unique persons. To summarize: the distinctions between labor, work, and action are crucial to Arendt’s interpretation of society and politics. The necessity of labor and the life process must be distinguished from the freedom involved in the political sphere. The modern conception of society blends the three activities together, and Arendt understands the history of the modern world as a gradual decline of work and action and the increasing predominance of labor. 68 Arendt develops her account of action in Human Condition in direct opposition to this modern trend, emphasizing the dignity of action, freedom, and politics. But the account is not a wholesale glorification of action, as it is balanced by a concern for the permanence of the world. If the world disappears, the processes of action resemble the fleeting repetition of the life process.

Action’s Internal Problems Let us now turn to another important aspect of Arendt's account of action. While modernity might harbor a certain resistance to action and politics, action in its own internal structure generates several existential perplexities which partially explain the low esteem for this activity in the Western tradition overall. In other words, it is not just a modern phenomenon to underestimate and devalue the distinctiveness of politics and action. While action constitutes freedom from necessity and the only activity in which human plurality and individuality is real, action is difficult to undertake. Arendt is clear on the source of the difficulties: “The calamities of action all arise from the human condition of plurality, which is the condition sine qua non for that space of appearance which is the public realm.” 69

67

Ibid., 60-61. The most direct descriptions of this development occur in the final chapter of Human Condition, “The Vita Activa and the Modern Age.” 69 Ibid., 220. 68

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One of the reasons action is difficult arises from the fact that action itself is potentially threatening to every stable element of the public world. Somewhat paradoxically, the newness of action always has the potential to undermine the established relationships, structures and institutions that prior work and action have created. Each particular deed is a new beginning that is “boundless” in its consequences as it enters into the fabric of human relationships. 70 With the new comes the threat of transformation or perhaps even destruction of everything that has been, so that, while action depends upon the world’s permanence, it also threatens that permanence perpetually. Memory, and its manifestation in products of work, must preserve the past in the face of such emerging newness, at least if deeds will achieve any lasting significance. The most enduring aspect of the public realm is simply the ongoing processes of action, which are the subject matter of human history. As long as a genuine public realm persists, “deeds possess such an enormous capacity for endurance” because the process that is initiated by a single action may never come to an end. 71 The human capacity of memory allows past deeds to endure as the consequences—new events and actions—are traced through the historical processes back to their roots. The endurance of deeds, while ultimately necessary for action to be meaningful, can be problematic from the perspective of the individual actor. Since each action prompts responses and reactions, the actor will become part of something she could not have understood when she began, and her destiny will be shaped in ways she could not foresee. This makes the actor also a sufferer of her own deeds, at least insofar as the consequences always extend beyond her knowledge and control. 72 [Human beings] have known that he who acts never quite knows what he is doing, that he always becomes “guilty” of consequences he never intended or even foresaw, that no matter how disastrous and unexpected the consequences of his deed he can never undo it, that the process he starts is never consummated unequivocally in one single deed or event, and that its very meaning never discloses itself to the actor but only to the backward glance of the historian. 73

70

Ibid., 190. Ibid., 233. 72 Ibid., 234. 73 Ibid., 233. 71

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The meaning of an action is revealed only in hindsight, to the story-teller who has the vantage-point to perceive the whole historical process. However, the end of the process is never strictly objective, but a point of departure chosen by the historian to tell a coherent narrative. 74 So, the actor requires others to observe and determine the significance of his deeds, and the meaning is never secured by the actor himself in the moment. The distinction between work and action allows Arendt to emphasize that the actor does not control her own story as its author or maker, as if her identity were a separate product that could be manipulated through skill, like a product of work. By having the courage to act, the unique “who” of the individual is revealed for the first time in the world, a person unknown even to the actor and therefore beyond his or her control. 75 The only maker involved with action is the story-teller who takes up his task by looking at the past, shaping the historical facts into a final product to be presented to the world. But, unlike the historian, who remains distinct from his product, the actor’s identity in the human world will be defined by the stories that are told. Since deeds enter into the context of plurality, they cannot be revoked by the doer, the consequences rippling out into all relationships. While a craftsman may destroy the final product after it is complete and before others have seen it, eradicating any trace of its limited existence in the world, the actor cannot undo what he has done. Courage is a prime political virtue for precisely this reason: one risks their whole identity and self when they enter the public realm to act. 76 The actor, then, faces two main difficulties, one from each of two temporal perspectives. First, in considering the future, the individual cannot perfectly predict his own actions and their significance, all of which will define his identity in the world for an indefinite time to come. Second, with regard to the past, action is “irreversible.” Surely, one can act again to hopefully mitigate the consequences of prior action, but that action will be as unpredictable and irreversible as the original. The calamities of action tempt us to eliminate action in favor of work or making, both in terms of our reflection (we are drawn to portray

74

The selection of historical material and the determination of an end point from which to reflect on history are closely connected with judgment. In Arendt, these are choices made by the reflecting spectator. 75 Ibid., 184-186. 76 Ibid., 186-187. See also Arendt, "What is Freedom?," 154-155.

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acting in terms of making) and of activity (we refrain from genuine interaction with others). The fabrication process has the unmistakable advantage of being both predictable and reversible. The skillful craftsman can create a predictable product, and can destroy it if she wishes. Arendt perceives a tendency of philosophers to conflate action and making, to envision human interaction as something that can be structured according to a predetermined model or idea. 77 Arendt suspects the lack of articulation of action in the philosophical tradition is due to the experiential correspondence of making with the activity of contemplation. The “inner affinity” between contemplation and making lies in the “inherent element” of beholding the idea. 78 While not all contemplation terminates in the process of making, every maker, at least to some extent, contemplates his product before she makes it. Making requires contemplation, although the physical shaping of the artifact can be separated from the mental pre-conception. 79 Additionally, the activity of making and contemplation share the existential condition of being isolated from others, which is contrary to the plurality of action. In isolation the craftsman can have maximum control over the production process, with no other initiatives present to derail the realization of his idea. Likewise, the contemplator needs isolation to passively behold the idea: to see with the “mind’s eye” requires that one cease all activity, interaction with others and even the activity of sense perception. The categories and ideals of making have often skewed the tradition’s formulation of the vita activa: “Action…consists first of all of starting processes—a fact of which human experience has of course always been aware, even though the preoccupation of philosophy with making as the model of human activity has prevented the elaboration of an articulate terminology and precise description.”80 Plato is Arendt’s prime example of the introduction of the categories of making into the realm of action. For Arendt, Plato’s concept of “rule” indicates a pre-political form of interaction, drawn from the household, where the one who has knowledge and directs is distinct from those who do not know and merely execute

77

Ibid., 237. Ibid., 301-302. 79 For more on Arendt’s discussion of contemplation and its role in the modern age, see Ibid., 285-304. 80 Arendt, "The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern," in Between Past and Future, 85. 78

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the orders. 81 Plato’s conception of ruling was strengthened by using metaphors of making. The making metaphors allowed Plato to introduce objective standards into politics: the ruler knows the form the just city should take in the same way that the craftsman knows the form of his product. 82 The success of the ruler's political enterprise is measured by how well the polis conforms to the ruler's ideal. While the categories of making do not entail the risks of action, they destroy action and the political realm. Ultimately, the ideal of rulership is sovereignty, and sovereignty is impossible in the plurality of human affairs. It is an ideal borrowed from the experience of making, in which the craftsman has complete control over his product. Plurality cannot permit sovereignty, for if anyone gains complete control over human affairs, there ceases to be a space of appearance where individuals initiate new events and actualize their unique persons. Sovereignty is realized in the relation of ruler to ruled, which does not allow any person the freedom to appear publicly. The sovereign ruler forfeits his own individual reality in gaining control because he has eliminated the public space. 83 In light of action's calamities, Arendt's alternative to the traditional substitution of making for action centers on the potentialities of forgiveness and promising. Fortunately, action possesses these potentialities for mitigating its own problems. The following passage highlights the possibility of action’s self-redemption: What in each of these activities saves man—man qua animal laborans, qua homo faber, qua thinker—is something altogether different; it comes from the outside—not, to be sure, outside of man, but outside of each of the respective activities. From the viewpoint of the animal laborans, it is like a miracle that it is also a being which knows of and inhabits a world; from the viewpoint of homo faber, it is like a miracle, like the revelation of divinity, that meaning should have a place in this world. The case of action and action’s predicaments is altogether different. Here, the remedy against the irreversibility and unpredictability of the process started by acting does not arise out of another and possibly higher faculty, but is one of the potentialities of action itself. 84 Just as the problems of action are temporally oriented, so also are the remedies to those problems.

81

Ibid., 222. Ibid., 225. 83 Ibid., 234. 84 Ibid., 236. 82

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Forgiveness mitigates the irreversibility of the past. Forgiveness does not change the past per se, but, as action, is bringing about something new. The normal, predictable reaction to wrongdoing is punishment and retribution, and forgiveness breaks into the predictable chain of revenge, action and reaction, in order to free the future from past wrongs. While forgiveness is no safeguard to future wrongs, it frees the actor and the sufferer from the automatic cycles of revenge. Forgiveness is primarily for the person—we forgive the deed for the sake of the doer, allowing him or her to begin again without the full weight of the past. Just like all other action, it requires courage to forgive because the future that is opened up is uncertain and no one can adequately predict how others will respond. 85 The problem of unpredictability is mitigated by the potential for making and keeping promises. Promises help to secure some portion of the future against the unpredictability of human action. Arendt uses the metaphor of “isolated islands” of predictability in a vast sea of uncertainty. For promises to be effective—i.e. make the unpredictability of action palatable—promises must be limited, for if they were not limited, action itself would be eliminated altogether by fixing the future in its minutest details. Promises keep the space of appearance in existence by binding the actors together, to some minimum commitments, through the course of acting. 86 The promises that stabilize action are importantly distinct from social customs: promises are agreements made by the actors, not conventions that lie outside their agency and coerce conformity. The unpredictability of action also has another, more “psychological” aspect that is remedied by promises: “Man’s inability to rely upon himself or to have complete faith in himself (which is the same thing) is the price human beings pay for freedom.” 87 By making and keeping promises, the individual can prove his own ability to be consistent. By being held to account by others, the promise-maker can overcome the suspicion of hypocrisy which can never be belied in isolation from others. 88 Humanly

85

Ibid., 241. Ibid., 244. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid., 237. Arendt hints at another response to action’s calamities in Human Condition. Arendt describes Stoicism as the deliberate and systematic “abstention from the whole of human affairs.” See Ibid., 234-235. Because 86

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speaking, the only way to establish personal identity—at least one that is more substantial than the meaningless “I am” of consciousness—is to act into a realm in which you rely on others and they rely on you. When all the potentialities of action are at work in the human world—i.e. when there are new beginnings occurring within the context of promises that provide stability, and forgiveness is mitigating dangerous processes of reaction—there is a temporal coherence in the world, where past, present, and future are in relative harmony. The other ways of overcoming the problems of action diminish human temporality by attempting to eliminate the new beginnings that constitute an authentic future—i.e. by trying to eliminate action altogether.

Morality in Human Condition I have discussed many of the key concepts in Human Condition regarding temporality and freedom. Let us now turn to its moral themes. Most often, explicit references to morality in the Human Condition are historical and descriptive. Often Arendt, in explicating certain historical developments, will discuss the changes in the general moral standards of a people or period. There are few moral claims that Arendt clearly supports, but when we consider the overall sweep of the work, I think it possible to say a few things about Arendt’s moral position. In many ways, Human Condition is most helpful in showing the limitations of common moral systems in dealing with the phenomenon of action. In general, the term “morality” in Human Condition indicates the conventions of society, the standards of behavior that enforce conformity within a particular community. In one particularly helpful passage, Arendt opposes “morality” to “greatness,” which is the proper standard of action. Unlike human behavior—which the Greeks, like all civilized people, judged according to “moral standards,” taking into account motives and intentions on the one hand and aims and consequences on the other—action can be judged only by the criterion of greatness because it is in its nature to break through the commonly accepted and reach into the extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies

this abstention is achieved through primarily mental activities, we will discuss Stoicism at length when we come to consider Life of the Mind.

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because everything that exists is unique and sui generis…Motives and aims, no matter how pure or how grandiose, are never unique; like psychological qualities, they are typical, characteristic of different types of persons. Greatness, therefore, or the specific meaning of each deed, can lie only in the performance itself and neither in its motivation nor its achievement. 89 Greatness is the criterion of the public realm insofar as it celebrates the freedom to begin something new and to allow for something worthy of remembrance. Conventional “moral” standards measure those aspects of human beings that are never individual but merely typical. Action requires a certain level of what Arendt calls “moral irresponsibility,” for to act is to break with everyday modes of behavior and to disregard the expectations of different sectors of society. 90 This opposition between convention and action does not require that action disregards morality in every sense, however—notice especially in the above passage that Arendt sets out “moral standards” in quotations. Arendt is not suggesting that action cannot be morally scrupulous in any manner whatsoever, or that moral categories—right, wrong, good, evil, etc.—do not apply to action. Instead, I believe Arendt’s argument is this: if morality and moral categories are going to be appropriate to action, they must be derived from some source other than social convention. Strict adherence to social convention will suffocate the spontaneity of action and the vitality of the public realm of plurality. Again, the opposition is between everyday social convention and the greatness of unique words and deeds. Morality per se and greatness are not inextricably opposed. 91

89

Ibid., 205-206. Ibid., 220. 91 For confirmation of this idea, see Ibid., 206. Initially, Arendt relies on Pericles’ “supreme confidence” in the power of action to argue for the criterion of greatness, and then she quotes Pericles to suggest that both good and evil deeds can be great. Greatness does not guarantee goodness, but it is the criterion of what makes action stand out from everyday behavior. This line of argument is central to my overall reading of Arendt as a moral theorist. Some commentators read Human Condition as opposing action to every type of moral standard. This interpretation tends to highlight the Nietzschean elements of Arendt’s thought. For a prime example, see B. Honig, “Arendt, Identity, and Difference,” in Political Theory 16 (1988): 77-98. The Nietzschean interpretation of Arendt understands her elevation of greatness over standards of behavior in Human Condition as a rejection of any moral theory whatsoever. While I think that Nietzsche’s influence on Arendt is very strong, especially in her critiques of other moral positions, she is not a Nietzschean thinker through and through. She offers some strong direct criticisms of Nietzschean glorification of life and his overall individualistic emphasis. As we shall see, this interpretation also fails to make much sense of Life of the Mind’s moral themes. 90

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Connected with the concern about action’s relation to morality is Arendt’s treatment of goodness. The discussion occurs in the context of her broader reflections on the distinction between the public and the private realms: "The most elementary meaning of the two realms indicates that there are things that need to be hidden and others that need to be displayed publicly if they are to exist at all." 92 At first glance, it appears that Arendt is suggesting that goodness is one of those things that needs the protection of privacy in order to be what it is. But, the strange thing about Arendt's presentation is that goodness is an "extreme example" of an activity that "is not even at home in the realm of privacy." 93 Goodness seems to be unable to appear at all—or, better, its appearance is wholly negative. Let us look into the details of Arendt's discussion. Since goodness "in the absolute sense, as distinguished from the 'good-for' or the 'excellent' in Greek and Roman antiquity, became known in our civilization only with the rise of Christianity," Arendt chooses to analyze the phenomenon of goodness in its expression in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. The non-public nature of goodness is a profound reason, Arendt claims, for "Christian hostility toward the public realm." 94 On her interpretation, Jesus recommends keeping goodness in complete hiding, both from others and from oneself: For it is manifest that the moment a good work becomes known and public, it loses its specific character of goodness, of being done for nothing but goodness’ sake. When goodness appears openly, it is no longer goodness, though it may still be useful as organized charity or an act of solidarity. Therefore: “Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them." Goodness can exist only when it is not perceived, not even by its author; whoever sees himself performing a good work is no longer good, but at best a useful member of society or a dutiful member of a church. Therefore, "Let not thy left hand know what they right hand doeth." 95 Jesus' example of giving alms might help us unpack the meaning here. In giving alms publicly, one was recognizing the social expectations of the time to give and, in meeting those expectations, receiving public admiration. This kind of adherence to public codes of conduct can never appear as if it were done for goodness exclusively. Goodness is inimical to public appearance when the act conforms to socially recognized codes—in other words, when one knows that the act will be publicly praised. One may appear 92

Arendt, Human Condition, 73. Ibid., 78. 94 Ibid., 73-74. 95 Ibid., 74. 93

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to be a good citizen or a good member of an organization, but never appear good per se. The good work is intimately connected to the individual's social status, and it is impossible not to suspect that this selfish motive is at play to some extent in the behavior. 96 Arendt, following Jesus, extends this line of thinking to one's relationship with oneself. If I recognize that my action conforms to social morality, even if my act does not appear to others, there is no way to rule out the selfish element. I can suspect myself of wanting to be good for the sake of my own self-satisfaction or moral superiority. This argument could also be applied to a moral code I have dictated solely for myself but is not identical to social conventions. Goodness qua selflessness can never appear, not even to the one who performs the good works. Neither the actor in reflecting on her motives nor the outside spectator who describes what has happened can avoid referring to a person—a self—at the center of the story. The person who loves goodness "cannot even trust himself to witness what he is doing...good deeds can never keep anybody company; they must be forgotten the moment they are done, because even memory will destroy their quality of being 'good'." 97 A person who is only good—who is wholly dedicated to a life of goodness—would be the loneliest of all, unable to keep company with himself or with others. 98 For Arendt, goodness is defined by a "curious negative quality...the lack of outward manifestation." 99 Goodness "must go into absolute hiding and flee all appearance if it is not to be destroyed." 100 Certainly, Arendt admits, there may be some humans that love goodness for its own sake and try to translate this love of goodness into good works, but goodness itself cannot appear. The attempt to "be good" is self-negating: "And no less absurd is the Christian demand to be good and to turn the other cheek, when not taken metaphorically but tried as a real way of life."101 The love of goodness often lends itself to the "otherworldliness of religious experience," as one flees the space of appearance and

96

It would also seem that, in a case like this, a good work is not an action in Arendt's sense: it does not really reveal an individual human being but only the social forces at work in behavior. 97 Ibid., 76. 98 Ibid., 73-78. 99 Ibid., 74. 100 Ibid., 75. 101 Ibid.

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negates the public world in order to keep oneself pure. But goodness itself is impossible as a "consistent way of life." 102 Arendt's distinction between goodness and the love of goodness can be clarified by a parallel Arendt draws to philosophy. Arendt uses Socrates as the example of a philosopher who demonstrates most clearly how the love of wisdom flows from the insight that humans "cannot be wise." Absolute wisdom is not humanly achievable but wisdom can be pursued nonetheless. Likewise, "the whole life story of Jesus seems to testify how love for goodness arises out of the insight that no man can be good." 103 Arendt seems to suggest that Jesus himself is a paradoxical figure because, on the one hand, he has often been understood as the prime example of goodness, but, on the other hand, he himself taught that goodness was not humanly achievable. Arendt might allow that there may be a level of selflessness involved in any good action—and Jesus' actions attest to the human capacity to care for others more than for oneself—but it is not pure selflessness due to the nature of action and appearance. It appears, in the case of Jesus anyway, that the love of goodness may lead us to being more selfless, or better, less selfish. Pure wisdom and pure goodness must be understood as impossible ideals, not as known or achievable goals. Clearly, as the train of thought above addresses goodness in the absolute sense, Arendt is not rejecting outright the applicability of the moral term “good” to human affairs and action. The specific opponent is the tradition of Christian ethics in which selflessness is the highest good for human beings. 104 For Arendt, goodness qua selflessness is an otherworldly and isolating moral standard, inimical to the basic condition of human plurality and impossible to achieve in reality. This criticism may also apply to Kantian ethics as well. Insofar as the main principle is the “good will” of the moral agent, and the good will is unable to appear in the world of plurality, it cannot be a public standard. On the individual level, if 102

Ibid., 77. Ibid., 75. 104 In a later work, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," Arendt continues this critique of Christian ethics. There, she writes: "This curious selflessness, the deliberate attempt at self-extinction for the sake of God or the sake of my neighbor, is indeed the very quintessence of all Christian ethics that deserve this name,” Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," in Responsibility and Judgment. ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 116. 103

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the good will is defined by doing what is right for its own sake, or being motivated by the right reasons, it can only be a standard if the agent can confidently assess her own motives. While Kant has his own doubts about the ability of the moral agent to know her own motives, Arendt is unequivocally skeptical of the power of introspection in general, and specifically when it comes to motives. 105 Other moral theories are also critiqued in Human Condition. The critiques follow from Arendt’s distinctions between labor, work and action: we ought not to judge action by the standards derived from the activities of labor and work. If the standards of labor and work become the dominant mores of society, society will condemn and attempt to eliminate action. Utilitarianism is problematic on several levels. Utility is the measure of homo faber in his making of the use object. The material and the process of making is for the sake of the tool that will be used to produce something else. As such, it is a relative standard, relative to what is to be achieved. The relativity is overcome only if the initial end does not itself become a means to another end. Applied broadly as a moral principle, utility relativizes everything in the world as a means, including persons and durable worldly things. 106 Utilitarianism can only be salvaged from this relativity by appealing to some other standard besides use. Historically, the common appeal is to the subjective but universal standard of happiness, or pleasure and pain. While it overcomes the relativity of use, the standard of pain and pleasure is essentially drawn from the realm of life and the experience of labor and consumption, reducing human beings to their membership and commonality in the species. Alternatively, the realm of use and fabrication can be grounded in relation to the permanent human world, where things and persons appear for their own sake. Arendt claims that utility’s relevance is restricted to the fabrication process only, and is not a standard to

105

Arendt's evaluation of Kant's ethics is a complicated matter. Of Kant's three Critiques, The Critique of Practical Reason is by far the most problematic in Arendt's mind, mostly because she thinks Kant has misunderstood the will and made it a mere executor of reason's dictates. For now, I wish only to emphasize the problem of motives. I will have much more to say about Arendt’s evaluation of Kant and his moral philosophy, for it rests on a complex interpretation of Kant’s texts that comes to the fore in her post-Eichmann writings. We will have the chance to see how Arendt interprets the categorical imperative in terms of conscience, and we will also see how she interprets the Critique of Judgment in moral terms. 106 Arendt, Human Condition, 153-154. Arendt writes: “The trouble with the utility standard inherent in the very activity of fabrication is that the relationship between means and ends on which it relies is very much like a chain whose every end can serve again a means in some other context. In other words, in a strictly utilitarian world, all ends are bound to be of short duration and to be transformed into means for some further ends.”

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judge either finished products of work or human actions. 107 Either something is useful for the sake of life and labor, in which case the futility of life is transferred to what is used; or, it is used for the sake of the world, in which case the utility is grounded in the permanence of beauty and meaning. 108 Arendt develops a similar line of critique of thinking in terms of moral “values.” The experiential point of reference here, distinct from utility’s embeddedness in the fabrication process, is the market of exchange, where objects are valued never in themselves but in terms of other goods to be attained. 109 The problem of relativity arises again here. Moral standards are subject to the volatility of the market—e.g. justice may be a valuable for a time, but its value may decrease in proportion to some other more desirable standard. Values are compared to one another, and no value stands outside the possibility of being exchanged for something else, for nothing is so "valuable" as to be beyond price. From Arendt's perspective, it is wrongheaded to think of moral life as a series of quantitative tradeoffs between values. She is wary that this approach is essentially identical to a subjective pragmatism. Arendt believes that Nietzsche correctly identified the problem of thinking in terms of moral "values" as an essentially modern problem, but she is critical of his alternative. By raising life to the place of the "highest good," Nietzsche reverses the traditional hierarchy and in effect eliminates the question of morality altogether. If life is the highest good, we cannot meaningfully ask what constitutes the good life—i.e. we need not consider how we ought to live. 110 The criterion of life is utterly relative as a moral standard. While it is fair to say that Nietzsche did not glorify labor in any simple sense, his ideals are drawn from the realm of biological life with its coercive necessity and ultimate futility. 111 Arendt draws heavily from Nietzsche in her writings, but she is critical of his thought at crucial junctures. By paying

107

See Ibid., 157: “The issue at stake is, of course, not instrumentality, the use of means to achieve an end, as such, but rather the generalization of the fabrication experience in which usefulness and utility are established as the ultimate standards for life and the world of men.” See also Ibid., 174. 108 Ibid., 173. 109 Ibid., 163-167. 110 In Ibid., 36-37, Arendt praises the ancient Greek outlook that strictly distinguished life from the good life of politics and action. 111 See Ibid., 97 for a typical "give and take" reference to Nietzsche. On the one hand, Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" is the quintessential affirmation of all life philosophies, according to Arendt. But the context implies that eternal recurrence is a rejection of the world that persists through the life process, and therefore also a rejection of political life and plurality.

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attention to the criticisms, we can avoid reading Arendt on strictly Nietzschean lines, as some commentators have done. 112 The main departure from Nietzsche is Arendt's emphasis on worldly stability and permanence, and their importance for human plurality. This departure leads Arendt to retain an explicitly moral vocabulary; she is reluctant to go "beyond good and evil" as Nietzsche does. 113 In my mind, Arendt attempts to maneuver herself into a middle position between the extremes of relativism and absolutism. The problem, again, is the tension between stability and spontaneity. The relativisms of use, value and life, when considered as overarching moral standards, threaten the world's permanence and thereby undermine human relationships. These standards are drawn from different realms of worldly life, but their moral relevance to human action and to the common public world is negligible. As we shall see, Arendt also rejects appeals to moral absolutes as well, primarily for reasons that have to do with the limits of the human mind. However, from Arendt's perspective in Human Condition, one could argue that the main problem of moral absolutism is that it destroys our receptivity to others' ideas and opinions, and therefore undermines the interaction of public life. Ultimately, we have to share the world with others, and to make absolute moral claims is to eject oneself from the situatedness of life in the human world. There must be a kind of relativity that is less problematic than the kinds mentioned above, a relativity that does not undermine the reality of the common world. I will have much more to say about this issue as we proceed. As Kampowski demonstrates quite thoroughly, Arendt's theory of action can be seen to mirror many features of Aristotle's theory, and chiefly his distinction between action and fabrication. 114 Arendt

112

I have in mind Honig and Villa as prime examples of this kind of interpretation, especially Dana R. Villa's "Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of Political Action," Political Theory 20 (1992), 274-308. 113 Villa quite convincingly argues that Arendt critiques the teleological, Platonic moral tradition in the vein of Nietzsche by consciously aestheticizing action. Villa's further claim that "she and Nietzsche are one in their celebration of a nonsovereign, decentered freedom of action 'beyond good and evil'" is problematic in light of Arendt's later works. See Ibid, 287. Villa locates Arendt's departure from Nietzsche in the Kantian strain of her aestheticism, which is certainly a promising insight. The real question that Villa leaves unresolved is why Arendt adopts the Kantian account of judgment for morality and not just for the phenomenon of beauty. This pits Arendt against both Kant's and Nietzsche's moral philosophies. 114 Kampowski, Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning, 61.

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seems to affirm Aristotle's general emphasis on action being for its own sake, and they both agree that human virtue in action is not relative to some further end to be achieved. But, Arendt wants to distance her notion of action even further from the instrumental reasoning of Aristotle. One might say that the teleological underpinnings of Aristotle's theory override the distinctive characteristics of action. This becomes especially evident when Aristotle formulates the basic activities of moral reasoning in decisively instrumental terms. In the fourth chapter, when we consider the lack of a genuine notion of the will in Greek philosophy, we will discuss Arendt's interpretation of Aristotle's faculty of proairesis. The main issue is that proairesis is overly rational and instrumental, so that the action that results from this faculty too closely resembles a product of fabrication. In other words, Arendt is suspicious that Aristotle's theory eliminates the spontaneity of action. If we emphasize the spontaneity of action, as Arendt does, the mental processes that precede action need to be wholly distinct from instrumental reasoning. Another important point of departure from Aristotelian virtue theory for Arendt involves the role of tradition and authority in moral education. The virtuous agent, under the Aristotelian paradigm, learns how to be virtuous by participating in the continuity of institutions or communal practices. Virtue is always referred to stable communities that educate the youth by providing examples to emulate. For Arendt, the problem with this paradigm is that virtue seems unachievable without communal continuity. Tradition needs to "authorize" all attributions of virtue to action. Any action that breaks with the tradition cannot be virtuous, nor can virtue be attributed if a tradition has been lost. In the contemporary predicament, with the general loss of tradition and authority, there is nothing to ground virtue theory from an Aristotelian perspective. If we are to retain virtue theory for the contemporary era, it must be freed from any reliance on a single continuous communal or cultural tradition. 115 Despite her disagreements with Aristotle, on the broadest level, Arendt is closest to virtue theory in her approach. In Arendt's mature moral theory, as we will see, the virtues are not referenced to any 115

Some contemporary virtue theorists attempt to get around this problem in interesting ways. For instance, in After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre, instead of finding a ground for virtue other than tradition, locates virtue within smaller-scale traditions and practices—e.g. the practice of medicine—that possess the continuity implied in the original Aristotelian scheme. Instead of a single, overarching cultural tradition, there is a plurality of less extensive traditions and practices, each of which promotes specific virtues within its own circumscribed sphere of activity.

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specific cultural tradition or communal practice—in fact, they are not referenced to any general or universal standard at all. The virtues are ultimately grounded in individual virtuous actors, and the stories we tell about those actors. Instead of only learning virtuous behavior solely from traditional and cultural practice, Arendt proposes that the most important aspects of virtue might also be learned from examples far removed from one's immediate experience and historical context. For Arendt, moral narratives have incredible relevance across historical and cultural differences. Virtuous actions are inspired by moral examples, and, in the absence of a guiding tradition to pinpoint which examples to follow, the individual person must decide which examples he or she will choose to emulate. One of the most important activities of the moral life—and it is essentially tied up with the activity of judgment—is selecting moral examples, which will help determine how one thinks about morality and also how one acts. In the second and fifth chapters, we will dwell on the role of examples in moral judgment in much more depth and detail. The most definitive passage in Human Condition that expresses Arendt’s view of the morality of action is found in the context of forgiveness and promising: In so far as morality is more than the sum total of mores, of custom and standards of behavior solidified through tradition and valid on the ground of agreements, both of which change with time, [morality] has, at least politically, no more to support itself than the good will to counter the enormous risks of action by readiness to forgive and to be forgiven, to make promises and to keep them. These moral precepts are the only ones that are not applied to action from the outside, from some supposedly higher faculty or from experiences outside action’s own reach. They arise, on the contrary, directly out of the will to live together with others in the mode of acting and speaking, and thus they are like control mechanisms built into the very faculty to start new and unending processes. 116 There are several points to bring out of this passage. Notice first the reference to tradition’s role in a morality of customs and behavior. From Arendt’s perspective, the modern age has lost the tradition that might ground such a morality in the public realm. But, even if the tradition was intact, tradition is itself subject to change and not altogether impervious to decay and eventual corruption. 117

116

Arendt, Human Condition, 245-246. Emphasis added. Arendt will have much more to say about the role of accepted rules and customs when we come to consider Eichmann. In that context, adherence to moral rules and customs functions to atrophy our moral capacities and leave us with no means of resisting disastrous shifts in moral conventions. 117

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Also, notice the passage claims that morality can be “more” than merely conventional. In that case, the central moral precepts (at least politically) are forgiveness and promising. A commitment to forgiveness and promising is the basis on which morality can transcend convention. Forgiveness and promising are the political support for a morality beyond conventions, but Arendt leaves open the possibility that support could arise from a non-political source. Importantly for the coherence of her corpus, Arendt has left open the possibility that the human mind could be another source of a nonconventional, public morality. While the loss of tradition leaves the realm of action with no fixed standards, action has the potential to curb its own dangers through the faculties of promising and forgiving. It is important that these precepts are internal to action and that action can generate its own safeguards, however limited. The idea is that to be committed to the public realm and supportive of action as a human possibility requires a commitment to both promising and forgiveness. It is the most general and fundamental “ought” of action. 118 These moral precepts bridge the transitions between periods of tradition or convention. Some commentators question whether these moral precepts are sufficient. For instance, Kateb claims that forgiving and promising do not really limit the range of action to that which is morally acceptable. 119 Kateb also argues that Arendt is lacking an account of properly "moral motivations" for action. 120 Kateb’s criticisms are somewhat misdirected, since clearly Arendt is only addressing the way in which action can mitigate its own existential problems, and she is not developing a full account of the moral life. 121 We can glean from the above passage that Arendt sees the need for some kind of morality

118

As Arendt states in the passage above, these precepts are based on the "good will" to forgive and promise and the "will to live together" in plurality. Here, I interpret both of these uses of "will" in the sense of commitment. Arendt's phrasing suggests a hypothetical imperative: if you are committed to plurality (and its benefits and vicissitudes), then you will also be committed to promising and forgiveness. I wish to refrain from drawing any other implications from the use of "will" in this context. 119 George Kateb, Politics, Conscience, Evil (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1984), 35. 120 Ibid., 30, 36. 121 Kateb seems concerned that Arendt has not eliminated the totalitarian possibility from the realm of morality. As I explained in the earlier section on Origins, the totalitarian impulse is to annihilate humanity and spontaneity altogether. In the language of Human Condition, totalitarian action aims to eliminate all future action, to make all future action impossible or superfluous. Given this interpretation, one might simply reject Kateb’s concern as not taking into account Arendt’s understanding of totalitarianism. I think the bigger problem with Kateb’s

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more flexible than tradition and convention to limit action’s potentiality. In the light of the collapse of conventional morality before and during totalitarianism, Arendt is looking "within" action for moral limits. Her claim is very minimal: without the minimum safeguards of forgiveness and promising, action would be nearly self-defeating, or existentially impossible for human beings to take on. In Arendt’s terms, these special types of action are redemptive in the sense that they save humans from an otherwise unbearable predicament. So, Kateb’s concern is correct from the perspective of a full account of human morality, but Arendt is not trying to provide one in Human Condition. 122 Promising and forgiveness, one could say, are formal requirements for action—they do not determine which promises to make and which actions to forgive. The concrete content of morality is not generated from action itself, but from other human faculties. As Arendt suggests in the passage above, the commitments to forgiveness and promising are the only truly “political” moral precepts, but that does not rule out the possibility of there being moral faculties that limit action from, as she says, “the outside.” Arendt will not ever come to the point where she acknowledges a “higher faculty” that generates moral precepts but the mental faculty of judgment, as Arendt conceives it, is certainly external to action. So, within the development of Arendt’s corpus, Human Condition leaves us with important questions about additional moral limits to action. Her later work certainly provides material to answer these questions, although she answers them in unexpected and unorthodox ways. In particular, Life of the Mind will help us clarify how moral limits arise from the mental faculties of thinking, willing, and judging.

criticism is that he does not countenance the fact that Arendt is not talking about moral precepts that determine which actions are right and wrong in every situation, but only which moral precepts are needed to keep action alive as an ongoing reality for human beings. At this level of generality, Kateb’s concern does not apply. Totalitarianism, in its very essence, destroys action and the basic moral capacities for promising and forgiving. 122 It is quite telling that Kateb relegates his treatment of Life of the Mind to a short appendix. See Ibid., 189-196. By doing so, he overlooked the most bountiful text for Arendt's moral philosophy.

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Judgment in Arendt's Early Work Let me briefly outline the role of judgment within the framework of Arendt's pre-Eichmann writings. The 1960 essay, "Crisis in Culture" addresses the topic directly. On the most general level, Arendt is reflecting on the relation between aesthetics and politics. Unlike philosophy and the activity of fabrication, both of which can be done only in solitude, the love of beauty is active and can only happen within the public world shared with others. 123 An art object is essentially worldly, properly produced for no other reason than to contribute to the common world that will outlive any individual human being. Art and politics, although antagonistic in other respects, are connected by "culture," which, in its original meaning, referred to activities that preserved and took care of the common world. 124 Politics and art are codependent: politics protects the public space of appearance through action and art captures political words and deeds and attempts to makes them imperishable. 125 In culture, the spectators, not the artists and not the actors, have the final word over the beauty and meaning of works, performances, and deeds. The standards of beauty and of action are public and not private; they arise from the public interaction of spectators. According to Arendt, the rise of mass society in the modern age threatens all cultural activities and objects. In mass society, art is treated as a form of "entertainment," a consumer good to be used up in the life process. Art works are not viewed in their relationship to the world and judged on the basis of their enduring beauty, but instead are evaluated in reference to the needs of the private individual.126 Entertainment is consumed passively and indiscriminately out of self-interest. In this way, modern society shares an attitude to the world that the Greeks called "barbarian": "an indiscriminate sensitivity which did not know how to choose" or "how to judge" what was worthy of appearance in the world. 127 In this sense, mass society decidedly lacks culture.

123

Arendt, "Crisis in Culture," 215. Ibid., 208, 215. 125 Ibid., 214-215. 126 Ibid., 204. 127 Ibid., 211. 124

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The activity of aesthetic judgment, which Arendt also called "taste," is "an active relationship to what is beautiful" that engages the common world and one's fellow spectators: "Judging is one, if not the most, important activity in which this sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass." 128 Judging requires that the needs of the life process and of mere self-interest are left out of consideration. To be a judge is to take a "disinterested" attitude toward the world that allows the perspectives of others to be accounted for. Taste is the activity that brings true culture into the world, by discriminating between things that appear and taking care of those things that it judges are the best. This active relation to the world and to beauty has a role in defining the web of human relationships as well. The judge "discloses to an extent also himself, what kind of person he is" by communicating what he thinks should and should not appear in the world. In this way, judging is a form of action in which a person's identity can become defined in the human world. Thus, taste reflects not just the objective character of the world, but the humanity of the judge: "Taste de-barbarizes the world of the beautiful in its own 'personal' way and thus produces a 'culture.'" 129 But the judge is not isolated from others; in judging the world, she also chooses her "company" and decides "who belongs together in [the world]." 130 Thus, judgments of taste are ultimately decisions about our relationships to others—our political affiliations as well as our friendships. In "Crisis in Culture," Arendt portrays judgment as a faculty that mediates between all sorts of cultural, social, and political activities. Because judgment attempts to take into account the various perspectives toward a given situation or object, it is a free activity. While all specialized practices and perspectives have specific standards, compelling within the confines of each activity, the faculty of judgment treats none of these standards as absolute. The judge is free from "the coercion that each specialty imposes upon us," free to "choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as the past." 131

128

Ibid., 218. 129 Ibid., 221. 130 Ibid., 220. 131 Ibid., 222.

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Judgment is not considered a moral faculty at this stage of Arendt's work. The standards of beauty and greatness are primary to judging as a cultural activity. We should, however, notice that judgment is here involved in "choosing one's company," which Arendt will later characterize as a fundamental moral activity. In my mind, Arendt's account of judging in "Crisis in Culture" is compatible with her later emphasis on moral judgment. We will return to the issue of moral judgment in Chapters 2 and 5 in more depth and detail.

Action, Freedom and the Will Free will is the last theme to explicate in Arendt's pre-Eichmann writings. Arendt refers to the will only briefly in a few passages of Human Condition, and in most of those passages, the main points revolve around modern interpretations of the will to power, which are not relevant here. 132 Arendt was less concerned in that work with the philosophical problems of the will than she was with reflecting on human freedom as a worldly reality in action. Arendt dismisses most "modern discussions of freedom" precisely because they focus on freedom as "an unsolvable problem of subjectivity, of an entirely undetermined or determined will" and cannot countenance the objective difference between being free and "being forced by necessity." 133 A better resource for Arendt’s view of the will in this period of her work is an essay, entitled “What is Freedom?,” written shortly after the Human Condition in 1961. 134 This essay elaborates on Arendt’s views of action in Human Condition, but with a much more intense focus on the issue of freedom. Arendt's main goal is to distinguish the freedom of action from several historical alternatives, most importantly the phenomenon of free will. The problem facing Arendt in Human Condition was the distortion of the vita activa by the philosophical tradition, which resulted in a misunderstanding of action

132 133

Arendt, Human Condition, 203, 245. Ibid., 70-71.

134

"What is Freedom?" was originally a public lecture that has been published as "Freedom and Politics," in Freedom and Serfdom: An Anthology of Western Thought, ed. Albert Hunold (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1961), 191-217. 44

and politics. Her account of action was formulated in light of this distortion. In "What is Freedom?," Arendt continues that project by pinpointing the traditional conceptions of freedom that have displaced the freedom of action in the history of thought. Arendt claims that politics assumes freedom axiomatically, 135 because, although we do not always consciously enter politics to achieve freedom, “The raison d'être of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action.” 136 The public realm of plurality, as the space of appearance for action, is ultimately for the sake of freedom: If, then, we understand the political in the sense of the polis, its end or raison d'être would be to establish and keep in existence a space where freedom as virtuosity can appear. This is the realm where freedom is a worldly reality, tangible in words which can be heard, in deeds which can be seen, and in events which are talked about, remembered, and turned into stories before they are finally incorporated into the great storybook of human history. 137 Most of this is familiar from the Human Condition. The concept of virtuosity indicates that freedom does not consist in making, which is defined by products distinct from the process of production. Instead, freedom is characterized by greatness in performance. What is crucial for Arendt is that while one is acting, one is free, not before and not after. 138 Since reality is constituted only within plurality and great performance is definitive for freedom, action requires a space of appearance and spectators who confirm and remember the stories, ultimately turning those stories into lasting worldly products. Human action must respond to the world and to others, taking advantage of the opportunities provided for freedom and appearance, but an individual cannot create one's own situation for action or control its meaning. 139 For Arendt, "Freedom as a demonstrable fact and politics coincide." 140 The spontaneity of freedom permeates all human activities, but its clearest manifestation is in the realm of politics because the "source of freedom"—i.e. the individual human person—appears in politics as in no other activity.141

135

Arendt, "What is Freedom?," 142. Ibid., 145. 137 Ibid., 153. 138 Ibid., 151. 139 Ibid., 147. 140 Ibid. Emphasis added. 141 Ibid., 167. 136

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Political freedom, unlike, for example, the spontaneity of the creative artist whose product is the oblique sign of his individuality, is directly personal. In politics, human beings are the novel entities that appear in the world. It is noteworthy that Arendt does not exclude freedom from non-political activities, and does she not restrict freedom only to the most public arenas. New beginnings are possible in all sorts of situations in which persons address each other and discuss a common world. 142 The main factor is merely the degree of reality that freedom can achieve, given the publicity of the initial space of appearance. Also, political freedom has the greatest importance because its existence may protect other realms of freedom by maintaining the public sphere. So, political freedom is synonymous with power, the ability to perform, and the ability to begin something new, and in all these aspects the actor depends upon the world of plurality. Arendt admits that this conception of freedom runs counter to much of Western thinking, in which freedom is located inside the human being: “Every attempt to derive the concept of freedom from experiences in the political realm sounds strange and startling because all our theories in these matters are dominated by the notion that freedom is an attribute of will and thought much rather than action.” 143 One of Arendt's main contentions of the essay is that the phenomena of freedom has been "obscured" by this dominant assumption and the concomitant demotion of political freedom in human life. The philosophical problem of free will arises from the very attempt to locate freedom within the human individual in isolation from the world of plurality: "the philosophical tradition...has distorted, instead of clarifying, the very idea of freedom such as it is given in human experience by transposing it from its original field, the realm of politics and human affairs in general, to an inward domain, the will, where it would be open to self-inspection." 144 Because freedom was first discovered in politics, and our conceptions of freedom rely on that original experience to at least some extent, individual introspection gives misleading and paradoxical results.

142

I credit Elizabeth Brient with this insight. Dr. Brient's example was the world of the graduate philosophy seminar: a student or teacher can, at a decisive moment, say something that radically changes the course of the discussion. 143 Ibid., 153. 144 Ibid., 144.

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Introspection is divorced from the historical political realities that gave rise to our understanding of freedom. Arendt writes: “We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves." 145 Historically, this claim is supported by the fact that freedom did not become a philosophical problem until the Christian era. Greek philosophy was not concerned with freedom because it knew of freedom only in terms of the earlier polis experience. In its attempt to distinguish itself from the ideals of the polis, philosophy disparaged political freedom without offering a positive alternative conception. 146 Only when a specific kind of freedom was discovered—one divorced from politics and plurality and available to the individual in one's singularity—could freedom be integrated in the philosophical tradition. 147 The philosopher, depending on solitude for his thinking activity, could more easily affirm inner freedom than the earlier Greek version of political freedom. Arendt traces the assumption that freedom is inward back to the end of antiquity and the beginning of Christianity, when public life in the Roman republic was waning. The Stoic Epictetus and the early Christian writer Paul are clear examples of the new emphasis on inner freedom. On Arendt's account, Paul discovers free will, which was unknown in antiquity, in the first century, and Augustine's thinking integrates that phenomenon into the philosophical tradition for the first time. 148 Since Augustine, the concept of free will has dominated the landscape of Western thinking and ultimately determined modern notions of politics and political freedom. Arendt is suspicious that the first philosophical theories of inner freedom were derivative of human relationships in the world: Whatever its legitimacy may be, and however eloquently it may have been described in late antiquity, it is historically a late phenomenon, and it was originally the result of an estrangement from the world in which worldly experiences were transformed into experiences within one's own self. The experiences of inner freedom are derivative in that 145

Ibid., 147. In Arendt's conception, if there is a "freedom" of contemplation in Greek thought, it should be understood merely negatively: it is a freedom from public life and interaction. 147 Ibid., 156. 148 When we come to later works and especially Life of the Mind, where Arendt develops these historical claims, I will explicate the details of Arendt's readings of Epictetus, Paul, and Augustine. 146

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they always presuppose a retreat from the world, where freedom was denied, into an inwardness to which no other has access. 149 Paul's discovery of free will occurred during an era where political freedom had been lost and the permanence of the world became suspect. Epictetus, who was a contemporary of Paul and a slave, insisted that even one who is enslaved in the world can be free in his mind, over which he has complete control. These two examples together support the notion that political circumstances can be a main impetus for the theories of inner freedom. Certainly, we must recognize other factors at play in the specifics of each theory, such as religion in the case of Paul, but the decisive shift toward inner freedom coincides historically with the loss of political freedom. This is the substance of Arendt's claim about this historical period, and I would suggest that Arendt thinks of these theories as psychological compensations for worldly disappointments. On Arendt's account, the modern age, determined heavily by earlier Christian thinking on the issue of freedom and further removed from the political experiences of antiquity, is plagued by a problematic conception of human freedom modeled on the faculty of free will. Modern liberalism understands public life as an intrusion on freedom, so that "freedom begins where politics ends." 150 In this conception, politics is essentially for the sake of private life, taking care of basic necessities so that the individual can experience freedom in isolation from others. 151 The free will tradition and modern liberalism both reject freedom as public virtuosity and promote the ideal of freedom as sovereignty over oneself. 152 For Arendt, this ideal is unrealistic since the basic fact of human plurality implies that no human individual—and no human group, for that matter—can ever be sovereign. To insist on one's sovereignty in the inner recesses of the mind or the soul is to speak of a purely private freedom, an experience of

149

Ibid., 145. Ibid., 148. 151 Ibid., 154. 152 Ibid., 161-162. See also Arendt, "Freedom and Politics," 204: “But now that the emphasis had shifted so decisively from ability to volition, the being-in-a-state-of-freedom, as an ideal, could no longer be regarded as that virtuosity which displays itself in corporate action with others; the ideal became, rather, an idealization of sovereignty, of independence from all others and of the ability, if necessary, to assert oneself against them.” 150

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being only with oneself that lacks the reality of worldly appearance. This ideal forces us into a dilemma between plurality and freedom: “Within the conceptual framework of traditional philosophy, it is indeed very difficult to understand how freedom and non-sovereignty can exist together or, to put it another way, how freedom could have been given to men under the condition of non-sovereignty.” 153 As an alternative to inner freedom, Arendt characterizes freedom as the capacity to begin something new. Human freedom is manifest when the normally automatic processes of history and nature are interrupted by new beginnings. It is only against the backdrop of normalcy that freedom can be experienced and acknowledged as real. 154 Inner freedom, in its various versions, has the distinct disadvantage of being unreal, for it lacks the recognition of others and the necessary contrast with the predictable workings of the shared world. If there is freedom in the inner life, it is questionable precisely because it is deprived of appearance in the world. The inner life is "a very dark place," the experiences of which do not constitute reality, resembling more the flux of the life process than any definitive occurrences. In the inner life, any newness and freedom is known only by analogy with the world, and inner freedom dissolves unless it is transformed into an appearance that can be identified publicly. On the most general level, Arendt's criticisms are aimed at any version of inner freedom, but free will, because of its historical dominance, claims the center of her attention. Arendt straightforwardly contrasts the will with political freedom in a telling passage: Freedom as related to politics is not a phenomenon of the will. We deal here not with the liberum arbitrium, a freedom of choice that arbitrates between two given things, one good and one evil, and whose choice is predetermined by motive which has only to be argued to begin its operation...Rather it is...the freedom to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which therefore, strictly speaking, could not be known. Action, to be free, must be free from motive on one side, from its intended goal as a predictable effect on the other. This is not to say that motives and aims are not important factors in every single act, but they are its determining factors, and action is free to the extent that it is able to transcend them. Action insofar as it is determined is guided by a future aim whose desirability the intellect has grasped before the will wills it, whereby the intellect calls upon the will, since only the will can dictate action...to recognize the aim is not a matter of freedom but of right or wrong judgment. Will, seen as a distinct and separate human

153 154

Ibid., 163. Ibid., 168.

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faculty, follows judgment, i.e., cognition of the right aim, and then commands its execution. The power to command, to dictate action, is not a matter of freedom but a question of strength or weakness. 155 Here, Arendt identifies the freedom of the will exclusively with the liberum arbitrium conception, the freedom of choice. In Willing, as we shall see, this identification is not a matter of course, and Arendt attempts to articulate a view of the will distinct from the liberum arbitrium. The common denominator between the two accounts is the position that free will qua liberum arbitrium is distinct from, and often in tension with, political freedom, the freedom of action. In the passage above, the goal is simply to distinguish the will's role in the process of acting from what makes action free. As Arendt sees it, the newness that characterizes political freedom cannot be ascribed to the freedom of choice. The will is a "determining factor" of action that is driven by psychological motives and desires and has no element of novelty. The will's ability to command is "not a matter of freedom, but a question of strength or weakness." On the liberum arbitrium account, the intellect is also not free. It is either coerced by truth and knows what is right, or it is dysfunctional and cannot recognize the truth that it should know. The operations of will and intellect determine whatever can be determined about action beforehand, whereas action's freedom comes precisely from the unexpected novelty that transcends these determining factors. Freedom, then, does not relate to given and known options or predictable features of a situation, but to that which is precisely not given, not known, and not predictable. Continuing the contrast, free action "springs from...principles [which] do not operate from within the self as motives do...but inspire, as it were, from without." These principles of action do not determine any particular action as do intellect or will, for "they are much too general to prescribe particular goals, although every particular aim can be judged in the light of its principle once the act has been started." Principles do not precede action but become manifest only with action: "the appearance of freedom, like the manifestation of principles, coincides with the performing act." The determinations of intellect and

155

Ibid., 150.

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will are limited to particular persons and situations, but principles are "not bound to any particular person or to any particular group" and "can be repeated time and time again." 156 For Arendt, principles act as general standards for judging action after it is undertaken. As such, it appears that these principles are publicly available, not possessions of the self in its isolation. Arendt locates these principles within the interaction of the public sphere. They cannot be objects of knowledge accessible by intellect, for that would locate them on the side of the self and the determinants of action. But this raises the question: How does one come to recognize these principles when they appear? This question is left unanswered in the essay. In tune with Arendt's later work, and especially with her ideas about judgment, the answer is contained in the generality of principles, that they are not bound to any particular time, place, or person. While the standards of judgment are not strictly knowable, they are, one might say, "familiar" from the past and applicable to new actions. Arendt mentions a few examples of the principles she has in mind: "Such principles are honor or glory, love of equality...distinction or excellence...but also fear or distrust or hatred." It is unclear whether all these principles are associated with free action, however, for she writes: "Freedom or its opposite appears in the world whenever such principles are actualized." 157 The rest of the discussion treats all principles and freedom as coincident, but here the possibility of principles that are unfree is acknowledged. Arendt could, I think quite plausibly, envision fear, distrust, and hatred as essentially natural and automatic responses to external events, and as such they would manifest the opposite of freedom. In that case, however, it is difficult to call them principles of free action: "Action insofar as it is free...springs from...a principle." On the other hand, if hatred, for instance, is a principle of free action, inspiring action from without, then its appearance coincides with freedom as much as any other principle. Now, perhaps Arendt might assert that hatred undermines the public space of appearance for further action, upsetting the in-between of human relationships. But this does not imply that the initial action done out of hatred was unfree, only that its principle is inconsistent with continued action.

156 157

Ibid., 151. Ibid. Emphasis added.

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The ambiguity in this passage points to the problems associated with how the free act comes to be. 158 As Arendt sets up the contrast, the determining factors that precede action have no element of freedom, while freedom is associated with novelty and the appearance of principles. We may want to distinguish further between principles that manifest freedom and those that manifest the opposite of freedom as Arendt does, but then we must distinguish types of freedom. One type of freedom regards ongoing political existence in relation to which principles can either be edifying or destructive. The other relevant type of freedom is what we may call the freedom of responsibility, which is the basis for our attribution of an act to a person. In this sense of the word, when we say that hatred is a principle of free action, we must mean that the actor has chosen the principle, or has aligned himself with the principle. Arendt does not suggest this distinction in her discussion of principles and action. The account remains incomplete and ambiguous. Given her presentation, I question how it is that an actor can align herself with her act and particularly its principle. If action is spontaneous and something new begins that could not be foreseen, then freedom emerges as something surprising even to the person who acts. Likewise, if principles coincide with the element of freedom in action, but principles are not known, accessible or related in any way to the actor before the action occurs, then the principles that inspire are also surprising to the actor. However, even if there is an element of novelty in action, present in the act itself or in the events and consequences that follow the act, I think we should not claim that the actor is completely surprised by the action's principle. For instance, if hatred inspires an act of murder, the murder itself or the fact that hatred could inspire murder may surprise the murderer, but the hatred itself cannot be utterly new to him. Arendt claims that principles inspire "from without," but this external source of inspiration undermines the actor's relationship to his own deeds. How can one be individually responsible for an act whose principle inspires solely from without?

158

For another example of this ambiguity, we could look again at Origins, where Arendt explains how, just as virtue inspires action in a proper republic, terror is the principle that inspires action in a totalitarian regime. See Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 467.

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For a moment, let us look for clarification to a passage from On Revolution. In the context of explaining the paradoxes involved in the act of founding a new kind of government, for which there can be no precedent, Arendt writes: What saves the act of beginning from its own arbitrariness is that it carries its own principle within itself, or, to be more precise, that beginning and principle are not only related to each other, but are coeval. The absolute from which the beginning is to derive its own validity and which must save it, as it were, from its inherent arbitrariness is the principle which, together with [the beginning], makes its appearance in the world. The way the beginner starts whatever he intends to do lays down the law of action for those who have joined him in order to partake in the enterprise and to bring about its accomplishment. As such, the principle inspires the deeds that are to follow and remains apparent as long as the action lasts. 159 Arendt acknowledges the arbitrariness that must accompany any first appearance of any principle—in that appearance, the principle is novel and has no precedent. Once the action has been initiated, and the principle of action has appeared, then the principle can inspire others to act in a similar manner. It is "the way the beginner starts" that holds the power of inspiration—it can become a "law of action" for others. Arendt seems to be focusing her attention on explaining how a group or a political body can be inspired by an individual actor. Clearly, the problems associated with action as beginning are entangled with her ideas about principles. Principles are not eternal, they have beginnings in historical time and in human action, and their arbitrariness comes from these characteristics. Arendt does not think this arbitrariness is fatal, for principles can help unify and stabilize the public sphere of action if they can endure. This passage does not help us answer questions about how the individual comes to recognize a principle, or how one may begin to align oneself with it. These questions apply to the initial actor, to those who may join in, and to those who may judge the action without participating. These issues of individual agency and judgment are not treated here, but accounts of them are sorely needed—in short, the externality of inspiration is a problem. From the above passage, it is possible a group could be inspired to act on a principle in the mode of mere imitation, which should compromise the freedom of the action. Arendt needs to explain not just how an individual beginner can inspire others, for we want to

159

Arendt, On Revolution, intro. Jonathon Schell (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 205.

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understand how the individual beginner is "inspired" to begin in the first place, and how those who follow the beginner can be free while participating in action. Arendt's treatment of principles in "What is Freedom?" and On Revolution are perhaps incomplete in respect to certain questions about responsibility and individual agency. Nevertheless, what is clear from Arendt's presentation is that, at this stage in her corpus, the will as an element of the inner self is distinct from freedom of action and the principles that inspire action. The will qua liberum arbitrium is not free and does not produce the free act or the principles by which the act is judged. In the parts of "What is Freedom?" we have discussed so far, the will has been understood as the freedom of choice, a faculty that executes action on behalf of the self. The will "dictates" action, "commands its execution." 160 This description portrays a smooth functional relationship between the will and the other parts of the self, such as the intellect. Arendt uses this description to highlight freedom of action, but makes no explicit critical remarks on this account of the will. Other parts of Arendt's essay treat interpretations of the will as a capacity in conflict, and of these accounts Arendt is much more critical. According to Arendt, in the tradition the will has been conceived to be in conflict with other human capacities. The will, "as Christianity discovered it, had so little in common with the well-known capacities to desire, to intend, and to aim at, that [the will] claimed attention only after it had come into conflict with them." 161 The intense focus on the will in Christian and modern thought has led to the denigration of other faculties, such as reason. The identification of the will with power is the main source of the problem: "In other words, will, will-power, and will-to-power are for us identical notions; the seat of power is to us the faculty of the will as known and experienced in his intercourse with himself. And for the sake of this will-power we have emasculated not only our reasoning and cognitive faculties but other more 'practical' faculties as well." 162 Before the discovery of the will, Greek philosophy had no trouble

160

Arendt, "What is Freedom?," 150. Ibid., 156. 162 Ibid., 158. 161

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attributing a measure of power to a variety of human capacities. 163 This attribution has become more and more difficult, according to Arendt, because the will is now the exclusive possessor of power. Every source of power external to the will compromises its sovereign freedom. Because the will is envisioned as the singular source of human power and freedom, "the faculty of will and will-power in and by itself, unconnected with any other faculties, is an essentially nonpolitical and even anti-political capacity." 164 Political reality is built upon the condition of plurality, and the ideal of the will as sovereign is antithetical to that condition. In addition, when the will is understood as sovereign, it has a problematic relationship to power: "The fact that the I-will has become so power-thirsty, that will and will-to-power have become practically identical, is perhaps due to its having first been experienced in its impotence." 165 The will was discovered by Paul in the experience of its impotence to produce action, the "experience that what I would, I do not, that there is such a thing as I-will-and-cannot." 166 This impotence comes about when one is prevented from doing what one wills: The necessity which prevents me from doing what I know and will may arise from the world, or from my body, or from an insufficiency of talents, gifts, and qualities which are bestowed upon man by birth and over which he has hardy more power than he has over other circumstances; all these factors, the psychological ones not excluded, condition the person from the outside as far as the I-will and I-know, that is, the ego itself, are concerned; the power that meets these circumstances, that liberates, as it were, willing and knowing from their bondage to necessity is the I-can. Only where the I-will and I-can coincide does freedom come to pass. 167 Arendt here envisions the will as a condition for action that must be supplemented by other conditions. The conditions for power lie outside the self and the will, and the will confronts these conditions whenever it wishes to achieve something and finds resistance. In this way, one only becomes aware of

163

Ibid. For example, self-control, which had played a pivotal role in Greek thought, has since been associated with the will, and more specifically will-power. 164 Ibid., 162. Arendt's reformulation of the will in Willing is an attempt to think about willing in relation to the other human faculties. There, the will remains problematic in its isolation but becomes less so when it is integrated with thinking and judging. 165 Ibid., 161. 166 Ibid., 157. 167 Ibid., 158-159.

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one's will in its impotence, whereas when power is present there is no awareness of the will at all.168 While the will is associated with necessity, power (the I-can) arrives from the outside to liberate the will from itself. Without the advent of power, the will is pitted against the world that will not yield to its goals. Furthermore, the experience of the I-will-and-cannot initiates a struggle within the self. Without the power to achieve what one wills, the self is divided "between a willing and a performing self" so that "the I-will can never rid itself of the self." 169 Augustine describes this conflict as the "simultaneous presence of an I-will and an I-will-not," as a conflict within the will, as a faculty divided against itself. Whether Arendt agrees with this view is a bit difficult to gauge because Arendt claims that the description is "already an interpretation by Augustine." 170 With these words, Arendt subordinates Augustine's view of the conflict to the non-coincidence of will and power. 171 This is significant, for Arendt is less dismissive of the will's self-conflict as a genuine phenomenon in her later works. In Willing, the will's reflexivity, its self-relation, becomes a major element in Arendt's account. In "What is Freedom?," the experiential correspondence of will and impotence creates a situation that is nearly unbearable for the self. To will while lacking the power to do is to enter into a relation of self-torture, as one attempts to excise those elements that impede action. The French Revolution serves as Arendt's main example of how a theory of the will, when taken as the model of human power and freedom, can lead to extensive problems in the political realm. Arendt's On Revolution investigates the American and French Revolutions and compares their political successes and failures. Arendt praises the fact that the American Revolution was aimed at founding a permanent structure for freedom to abide in the world. The main problem with the French Revolution is that the central driving forces and ideas of the revolution reduced plurality and introduced violence into the political process. Well-meaning leaders tried to alleviate the suffering of the masses with political means, 168

Ibid., 160. Ibid., 161. 170 Ibid., 157. 171 In Willing, Arendt dedicates more space to the experience of the will and is more sympathetic to Augustine's interpretation, allowing for the possibility that the will creates its own self-conflict when the power to act is in doubt. There, the experience of the will is directly related to power, but not necessarily through any evident lack of power. The problem arises simply when power is uncertain. 169

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but instead unleashed the biological forces of the life process into the public realm. The merely biological species-being of humans became the focus of the revolution, and this had the advantage of isolating a singular interest for all humanity. Following Rousseau's conception of power, the revolutionaries thought of the body politic in the image of a person with a single will. The unity of the "general will" requires that every citizen have the same interest, and power is only achieved when the people are united in purpose and there is no division. Power requires unity and unity can only be achieved by violence and oppression of the dissenting voices. If there is resistance, it must be squashed to restore unity and power. 172 The notion of "political will" has the disturbing implication that only complete unity can bring power. In Arendt's mind, a political body without plurality is one without power, one that will have need of perpetual violence to enforce unity. For this reason, the American Founding Fathers' conception of political power, of power as separated and divided amongst a plurality, has the "great practical merit of bypassing the faculty of the will—the trickiest and the most dangerous of modern concepts and misconceptions." 173 Arendt's polemic against inner freedom and free will and her passionate defense of worldly freedom in "What is Freedom?" is the basis on which some commentators draw strong comparisons between Arendt and Nietzsche. The ideal of virtuosity is reminiscent of Nietzsche's glorification of individuality and power, and her notion of freedom as inherently personal has some similarity to Nietzsche's affirmation of life in the world. For Honig, Nietzsche and Arendt are both committed to a notion of the self as a "multiplicity"—the self is "discontinuous, a self fundamentally divided." 174 Personal identity is attained only through action, and is not present in the inner life or produced by any

172

Arendt, On Revolution, 68-69. On Revolution is a fascinating work that deserves more attention than I can give it in this dissertation. I am confident the themes of that work that are relevant to my project can be addressed through Arendt's other works. On Revolution embodies Arendt's method of dealing with particular events, using them as grounding examples for her conceptual reflections. When we come to her account of judging in her later work, we should keep the American and French Revolutions in mind as examples that Arendt used to guide her own moral judgment. 173 Ibid., 217. 174 Honig, "Arendt, Identity and Difference," 82, 86.

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inner workings of the self. 175 This means that each person is not in control of themselves, for the "who" of the actor is revealed first in the world and is not available for the individual prior to that revelation.176 Self-knowledge is impossible for both thinkers, Honig asserts. 177 On all these points I think Honig is correct, and he has pinpointed Nietzsche as a crucial influence in Arendt's work. However, Honig resists Arendt on crucial points, siding with Nietzsche instead. In her discussion of forgiveness, for instance, Honig thinks that Arendt is somewhat confused because she attributes responsibility for action to the actor. In Arendt's conception of forgiveness "the attribution of responsibility is unnecessary," she claims. 178 However, if forgiveness did not require responsibility, it is unclear how one could forgive a person for her deeds. For Arendt, forgiveness frees the person from the deeds that she is responsible for, even if she is not in complete control of the aftermath of those deeds. If there is no responsibility, forgiveness would seem to be the automatic and natural reaction, not an unexpected response that frees the actor from the past. While Honig is right that Nietzsche would never allow the separation of the agent from the act, it appears that Arendt's account of forgiveness assumes this separation. Arendt avoids thinking of this separation in the problematic terms of the maker and his product, but she is committed to this distinction because every person is perpetually capable of new beginnings. In forgiveness, we are freeing the person from the past for the sake of the future. Honig's main opponent is Jacobitti, who argues that Arendt's theory of action requires a "strong concept of self—a self that is the agent of all its mental and worldly activities, a self that has continuity over time, which lives with its past actions, which is capable of commitment, and which can be responsible, judged, and forgiven." 179 Jacobitti insists it is "difficult to find a coherent account of the self in Arendt's work," and this charge is correct if we are looking for, as Jacobitti is, an account of the "self

175

Villa also interprets Arendt on these lines: "Only the performing self knows freedom, and only through performance can an otherwise dispersed and fragmented self be gathered together and display its uniqueness." See Villa, "Beyond Good and Evil," 282. 176 Honig, "Arendt, Identity and Difference," 83. 177 Ibid., 85. 178 Ibid., 84. 179 Suzanne Jacobitti, "Hannah Arendt and the Will," Political Theory 16 (1988): 66.

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firmly in charge of all mental, psychic and bodily capacities." 180 The point at issue between these two commentators is whether or not action implies a unified self as the source of action. In my mind, the problem with this debate is that neither side entertains the possibility that Arendt might not be committed to the assumed notion of responsibility. The common ground in the debate is an understanding of responsibility as being "in charge" and in control. This assumption goes against the grain of Arendt's main commitments and her relentless critique of the notion of self-sovereignty. Honig, despite his insights into Arendt's work, holds onto a notion of responsibility that pits her against Arendt at key moments. Arendt diverges from Nietzsche on another related issue. Arendt claims that freedom, although fully manifest only in the common world, has a "hidden source" and can therefore survive periods of political disintegration. 181 In Origins, Arendt claimed that freedom was an inner capacity to begin, and here in the essay the hidden source of freedom is presumably the human person as a natal being: "Because he is a beginning, man can begin; to be human and to be free are one and the same." 182 As much as Arendt eschews the notion of inner freedom, she does acknowledge that freedom has an element that is not reducible to what appears publicly in action. In my mind, the consistent Nietzschean thinker should not appeal to a hidden source of freedom at all. Action needs no source, i.e. no agent, on Nietzsche's account. One might argue that the will-to-power may be a candidate to serve as the source of freedom in Nietzsche's thought. However, it is unclear how the will-to-power could be a hidden source in Nietzsche since it is so directly tied to metaphors derived from the life process. I might even suggest that Nietzsche's characterization of will-to-power in quasi-biological terms is motivated by the need to ground freedom in the world of appearances and factuality, in which case, the will-to-power is the exact opposite of a hidden source. On this reading, the desire for power inherent in all life is the grounding appearance for Nietzsche's account. Regardless, Arendt's strong distinction between life and action renders the will-to-

180

Ibid., 62, 65. Emphasis added. Arendt, "What is Freedom?," 167. 182 Ibid., 166. 181

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power unhelpful for her purposes. If the will-to-power were the source of freedom, it would carry necessity into the experience of freedom. Honig's disagreements with Arendt seem to indicate Arendt's distance from a strictly Nietzschean perspective. Arendt is particularly non-Nietzschean in regards to the will. Arendt is nowhere suspicious of the experience of the will per se, only whether that experience is constitutive of human freedom. As I will argue in the second chapter, Arendt's moral leanings in her later writings motivate her to address personal responsibility in a more direct way, creating an even greater distance from Nietzsche. 183 Of course, the lack of explicit treatment of the issue of responsibility in "What is Freedom?" creates a tension in her account. One is left wondering how the actor is responsible, and what the source of freedom might be. I think Arendt's presentation of the will in "What is Freedom?" is not completely clear, especially from the perspective of her later work. Some of the confusion can be attributed to the short length of the essay, but there are several phenomena connected with the will that are not cleanly separated. The first description was of the will as an executive organ of the soul that dictates action according to motive. Arendt is right to think that there is no real element of individual freedom involved in motive. Motives are typical and act as determining causes of action. The second description is of the will in self-conflict, wrapped up in a self-relation that has little to do with action and the world, except in its negative relation to power. Arendt's concern about the tension between this self-relating, unworldly faculty and real political freedom is important, but it remains unclear from her presentation why there is no kind of freedom or spontaneity associated with the will on this account. Due to the main thrust of the essay, the two accounts are connected loosely through their distinction from power and political freedom, but many questions are not answered that arise within the larger context of Arendt's early work. In Life of the Mind, Arendt views the will as the source of freedom's spontaneity, but there the will is distinct from the liberum arbitrium. The liberum arbitrium conception appears early in the Willing

183

As I will argue later, Honig (and others) are wrong to dismiss the shift in Arendt's later work. I will challenge Honig's claim that "Arendt's late focus on the life of the mind does not signal a change in her rigorously dismissive approach to the inner life of the self." See Honig, "Arendt, Identity and Difference," 78.

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volume but is quickly left behind, while the main problem becomes how the will in its self-relation (its impotent self-conflict) can produce action in the world. For Arendt, the liberum arbitrium conception avoids the problem by ignoring the reflexive and autonomous character of willing.

Conclusions The main themes within Arendt's early, pre-Eichmann work revolve around the existential condition of plurality, and how that condition is distinct from—and at times in tension with—other conditions of human life. Plurality is intimately connected with natality, the capacity to begin something new, and worldliness. Arendt continually addresses the tension between human spontaneity and the need for a stable common world. Spontaneous action is the activity through which individuals appear in the world, and the reality of the world depends on the interaction between these appearing individuals. However, spontaneous action has the potential to destroy the very world on which action depends. Without some stabilizing permanence in the world, action itself is self-defeating because what it achieves cannot last even long enough to be distinguished from cyclical and necessary life processes. In the next chapter, we will see that Arendt's concern with worldly stability is less pronounced, but it shows up at key moments when she emphasizes the need for paying attention to reality. Moral theory must negotiate worldly facts and events and avoid falling into traditional platitudes and customs. In her early works, Arendt criticized the moral tradition for failing to appreciate the unique aspects of human action. In her post-Eichmann writings, Arendt criticizes the moral tradition by pointing to contemporary experiences that explode traditional moral categories, making them irrelevant to important factual realities. In this early period of her work, Arendt presents a thoroughgoing critique of the concept of sovereignty and its application to politics and action. Sovereignty is experientially grounded in the activity of making, where the craftsman is isolated and in control of himself and his product. Action, which can occur only under conditions of plurality, should neither be understood on the model of making nor measured by instrumental ideals. For Arendt, many moral systems fail to recognize the non61

instrumental nature of human relationships, and thus evaluate action by an alien standard. As we saw, Arendt's critique of making applies specifically to the traditional conception of the will as liberum arbitrium, and this is one of her main motivations for separating freedom from the faculty of the will at this stage in her thinking. As I will argue, Arendt's approach to the will changes after the Eichmann trial because Arendt begins to address moral issues directly. Her interest in individual moral responsibility motivates her to rethink how the will relates to action.

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CHAPTER 2: THE EICHMANN TRIAL AND MORAL ISSUES In this chapter, we will consider Arendt's encounter with Eichmann and her writing in response to that experience. Where certain moral questions and themes were absent—at times, one might say, conspicuously absent—in her earlier work, many of Arendt's writings in the post-Eichmann period take on moral questions explicitly. While Eichmann in Jerusalem is not itself a treatise on morality, it is a report on a trial process that raised questions of morality to the forefront of her and the public's awareness. In many of her works following the Eichmann trial, Arendt attempts to formulate an account of morality and our moral faculties that is consistent with her experience of Eichmann and the connected problems of totalitarianism. I will demonstrate that there is considerable fluidity in her ideas about these faculties and their interrelationships during this post-trial period. As her writing matures on the subject, more distinctions come into play and her positions shift as she tries to deal with the diverse phenomena of moral life. 1 We will begin with Eichmann in Jerusalem, especially Arendt's description of Eichmann's character and the problems that he posed for the trial process. From there, we shall consider several texts that were written immediately after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem. The book created an intense public controversy, and in these subsequent texts, Arendt is directly responding to her critics and clarifying her positions on a range of issues. In the postscript to Eichmann in Jerusalem, written in 1964, Arendt explains the purposes and the limits of her initial report. Another piece, "Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship," 2 which was written in the same year, reiterates and expands on those concerns. I will use the two works in tandem to summarize the moral implications that Arendt first drew from the trial experience and the related controversy that thrust Arendt into the public spotlight.

1

I will try to avoid repeating those ideas that show up in multiple texts, focusing instead on the original ideas and why they are being introduced. Check footnotes for additional passages that communicate the same ideas. 2 Arendt, "Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship," in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (Schocken Books: New York, 2003): 17-48.

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Next, I will consider Arendt's first account of the basic moral faculties. In the process of responding to the critics of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt had been unable to focus on broader theoretical questions regarding our moral capacities. In a pair of lectures in 1965-6, Arendt presented for the first time her views on thinking, willing, and judging, the three mental faculties that were to become the foci of Life of the Mind. Thinking is clearly the most well-developed of the three at this stage of her work, and I will treat it first. Toward the end of the 1965-6 lectures, Arendt begins to conceive the faculty of willing in a new light. Some of the material on willing in the lectures is reminiscent of her critical remarks in "What is Freedom?," but Arendt frames the discussion in such a way that the moral aspects of the will become central. I will show that Arendt has arrived at new insights about willing and has encountered new moral problems related to willing, problems which force her to reconsider the nature of willing itself. Furthermore, Arendt's lectures hint at an intimate connection between the faculties of willing and judging. Although the connection is not fleshed out in extensive detail, I will focus on it because, as I will argue later in chapters 4 and 5, Arendt changes her mind about how willing and judging are related. This shift is crucial to my interpretation of the Willing and Judging volumes. On the whole, the ideas I will outline in this chapter prepare Arendt for her project in Life of the Mind. Some ideas in Life of the Mind are very similar to those in earlier works of the post-Eichmann period, others are reformulated, and still others are entirely new. It will be important to draw out these distinctions when we consider that final text. The original ideas will clue us into the main arguments—i.e. they will help us cut through the complexity of Arendt's historical presentation in order to clarify her final reflections on specific issues and formulate her arguments in the strongest possible manner. Furthermore, the original ideas will help us isolate the moral concerns that permeate Life of the Mind.

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Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Initial Report Arendt attended the Eichmann trial in 1961 as a reporter for The New Yorker magazine. Eichmann in Jerusalem, initially a five-part report of the trial, appeared as a single volume in 1963. 3 In the role of journalist, Arendt had intended to capture the trial with factual accuracy and maintain a high level of objectivity in her presentation. Many responses to the book have been pre-occupied with pinpointing Arendt's social and philosophical prejudices in writing the report, as though her descriptions and judgments could be quickly dismissed. Other writers have come to Arendt's rescue, perhaps defending her too unequivocally. I will not focus my energy on either defending or critiquing Arendt's report. As I outline the central claims of Eichmann in Jerusalem in this section, I will offer very few critical or evaluative remarks. I grant a general level of accuracy in Arendt's report while admitting errors in details and specific emphases that have little bearing on my purposes. My main interest lies in articulating the influence of Arendt's experience with Eichmann on her later work. Let us begin with Arendt's general portrait of the accused, Adolf Eichmann. In his official capacity within the Nazi Party, Eichmann was an expert on the Jewish population, and was also in charge of organizing and negotiating the transportation of the Jews out of German territory, a task he achieved with a high level of efficiency. 4 Until quite late in the war, Eichmann was a convinced Zionist, and he imagined a "political solution" that would provide the Jews with their own territory. At the beginning, Eichmann viewed the expulsion of the Jews as a means toward that end. He thought of himself as an "idealist" for the Zionist cause, which meant that he "lived for his idea...[and] was prepared to sacrifice for his idea everything, and especially, everybody." 5 When Eichmann's idealism was disappointed as the Nazi program turned from expulsion to extermination, he did not cease his role in organizing transportation or ask for a reassignment to a task unconnected with the extermination program, either of which he easily could have done. Instead, he became more and more dedicated to his job, despite its

3

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, intro. by Amos Elon (New York: Penguin, 2006). Ibid., 45. 5 Ibid., 41-42. 4

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intimate connections with the horrific extermination practice. By the end, he was a perfect "law-abiding citizen" and followed through on his duties with the utmost zeal and consistency. 6 Important for the trial proceedings was the fact that Eichmann knew what was happening in the death camps and elsewhere. Eichmann learned of the preparations of the gas chambers, saw the boarding of Jews into mobile gas vans and the later disposal of the bodies, toured the mass graves, and also witnessed shootings near the Eastern front. 7 This knowledge made him legally responsible and guilty in the eyes of the court. From Eichmann's perspective, he was always only "an accessory to murder" whose crime was a "crime only in retrospect." 8 Technically, on these points, he was quite correct: his deeds were not only legally permissible in the Third Reich, but followed the official Nazi program, and he had not directly killed anyone. The judges condemned Eichmann due to the fact that, in the Nazi organization, responsibility increases with the distance from the actual killing. 9 Arendt praised this observation about responsibility within the regime as well as the judges' willingness to condemn Eichmann despite his actions being legal under the laws of the Third Reich. Such horrific deeds cannot be excused simply because they were legal at the time—we can and must expect more of human beings than mere compliance to positive law. In Arendt's eyes, the court understood the need to condemn and punish Eichmann, but it misunderstood Eichmann himself. The court never quite faced up to the facts concerning Eichmann's character. Everyone expected a monster, someone with a deep-seated vicious personality and sadistic motives. Throughout the trial, Arendt could find no evidence that such a monster existed in Eichmann. Without any obvious manifestation of profound wickedness in Eichmann's character, Arendt came to agree substantially with Eichmann's own characterization of himself. Eichmann maintained that he had never acted from "base motives," like the desire for cruelty, or even from any Anti-Semitic convictions. 10 Eichmann joined the party without knowing the specific party platform and he held no convictions in 6

Ibid., 135. Ibid., 87-90. 8 Ibid., 24. 9 Ibid., 247. 10 Ibid., 24, 26. 7

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Nazi doctrines. His participation in the Nazi Party was partly an effort to avoid a dull and inconsequential life—joining the movement was a way of achieving historic importance. 11 Eichmann appeared to be more concerned about his own career prospects than he was about the party's goals and ideas. In one instance, when discussing a key Nazi conference about the implementation of the Final Solution, Eichmann seemed to mostly remember it as a rare opportunity for him to mingle with influential party leaders. 12 Although not born into a highly respected family and only marginally successful in his own right, Eichmann always believed in "success, the chief standard of 'good society' as he knew it," 13 and he cherished his opportunities to associate with those who were considered respectable. Arendt concludes about Eichmann: "Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all." 14 The court psychiatrists agreed that Eichmann was "normal" and they found none of the expected vices in him. 15 Instead of monstrous vice, Arendt discovered, in Eichmann's pre-trial testimony and in his court appearances, a "total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow's point of view." 16 Numerous instances illustrate how Eichmann never took into account the Jewish perspective on what was happening and what he himself was doing. Eichmann lamented his own hardships and failures as though his life were as difficult as those of the Jewish victims. 17 At times, Eichmann spoke as if he grasped the enormity of his deeds, but Arendt attributes these moments to Eichmann's tendency to cheer himself up, either by bragging about his responsibility or with clichés that he believed (quite mistakenly) would engender sympathy from others. 18 For Arendt, Eichmann's main deficiency was his thoughtlessness, a deficiency evidenced most clearly in his general use of language:

11

Ibid., 33, 35. Ibid., 113-114. 13 Ibid., 126. 14 Ibid., 287. 15 Ibid., 25. 16 Ibid., 48. 17 Ibid., 50-51. 18 Ibid., 46-47. 12

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To be sure, the judges were right when they finally told the accused [i.e. Eichmann] that all he had said was “empty talk”—except that they thought it was feigned, and that the accused wished to cover up other thoughts which, though hideous, were not empty. This supposition seems refuted by the striking consistency with which Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards [i.e. his mechanical language] against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such. 19 In this passage, Arendt elaborates on Eichmann's deficiency, connecting his inability to think with his inability to recognize reality. Eichmann's inability to think from the standpoint of somebody else shielded him from the reality of his own deeds, or at least from the moral aspects of his deeds. From his own individual perspective, it was simply a matter of doing his job, of obeying orders, of following through on career pursuits. He was blind to the way his deeds might appear to anyone else: "He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing." For Arendt, "It was precisely this lack of imagination" that allowed him to say so many ridiculous things during the trial as well as act in such a terrible capacity without realizing it. 20 Thoughtlessness is not an intellectual deficiency or lack of factual knowledge—it is a moral deficiency. Within the Nazi organization, Eichmann and others were subject to certain mechanisms that promoted thoughtlessness and undermined their sense of reality. In particular, the Nazis used "language rules" to transform a person's understanding of what was happening around them. The language rules were lies to cover over the immoral aspects of the regime's practices. In place of normal terms, such as murder, the Nazis used what were effectively code words, such as "final solution," "special treatment," or "to grant a mercy death." 21 The power of the language rules were best illustrated during the trial when the defense attorney, a German citizen, chose to characterize the extermination program as a "medical matter" 19

Ibid., 49. Ibid., 287. 21 Ibid., 85, 108. 20

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to dodge the moral implications of the program. 22 For Arendt, "The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, 'normal' knowledge of murder and lies." 23 For the Nazis, the language rules were a point of pride: the terms used were more "objective" and "scientific"—at least within the ideological framework—cleansed of all subjective and moral connotations. 24 Another aspect of Eichmann's thoughtlessness regards his memory. In general, Eichmann's memory was faulty when it came to facts, especially dates and events that were of historic importance. He was much more adept at remembering events of significance for his own career and personal life, but his memory failed him on any wider plane of political events. 25 Additionally, Eichmann always remembered the clichés and stock phrases that had cheered him up in the past. Eichmann's language, full of factual errors and inconsistencies, and never quite responsive to context or to other people, fulfilled one primary function: it gave "him a 'sense of elation.'" 26 Apparently, this sense of elation could be achieved with no connection to reality and no overall coherence. In Arendt's eyes, Eichmann was an absurd person, "not a 'monster', but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown." 27 The combination of normality and thoughtlessness in Eichmann posed a difficulty for the court: there was an incongruence "between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them." For Arendt, the judges took the easy way out by assuming Eichmann was simply lying to cover up some truly sinister motives, and that his inconsistencies were the result of lying. 28 Arendt writes: And the judges did not believe him...[and could not] admit that an average, "normal" person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong. They preferred to conclude from occasional lies that he was a liar—and missed the greatest moral and even legal challenge of the whole case. Their case rested on the assumption that the defendant, like all "normal persons," must have 22

Ibid., 69-70, 108. Ibid., 86. 24 Ibid., 69. 25 Ibid., 53. For discussion of specific instances that displayed Eichmann's faulty memory, see ibid., 77-82. 26 Ibid., 53. 27 Ibid., 54. 28 Ibid. 23

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been aware of the criminal nature of his acts, and Eichmann was indeed normal insofar as he was "no exception within the Nazi Regime." However, under the conditions of the Third Reich only "exceptions" could be expected to act "normally." This simple truth of the matter created a dilemma for the judges which they could neither resolve nor escape. 29 The importance of the Eichmann case, in Arendt's eyes, was that it challenged our conventional ideas about evil and the persons who commit evil. The phrase that sparked much of the public controversy over the book, "the banality of evil," was meant to capture this paradoxical situation in which the evils committed were so great but the doer was so empty and ordinary. According to Arendt, the judges failed at "the task of understanding the criminal whom they had come to judge:" They knew, of course, that it would have been very comfortable indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster, even though if he had been Israel's case against him would have collapsed or, at the very least, lost all interest...The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the view point of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied...that this type of criminal...commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong. 30 Arendt seems to admit that, while justice had been done even though the judges avoided the hardest aspects of the case, understanding the person of Eichmann is a pressing task because we ought to be able to give an account of Eichmann's guilt. Under the traditional moral and legal assumptions, Eichmann could not be held responsible and should not be considered guilty. He had followed the law and, as Arendt says, did not realize what he was doing. On what basis could we expect Eichmann to act differently? One traditional reply to this question Arendt was careful to refute in the initial report. Some might claim that we can condemn Eichmann because every human being has a conscience that alerts her to the moral aspects of a situation, telling her what is right and wrong, good and evil. For Arendt, this reply could not possibly be adequate. Given the enormity of the moral collapse in German society, the appeal to

29 30

Ibid., 26. Ibid., 276.

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conscience simply did not take into account the facts of the situation. The ability to tell right from wrong, while perhaps present in a small minority, cannot be assumed to have existed in every person at all times during this period. Arendt spends considerable efforts in several chapters to analyze what kind of conscience Eichmann might have had. Arendt's account of Eichmann's conscience is closely tied to her concerns about the surprising lack of moral resistance to the Nazis. Eichmann became a test case for how conscience did or did not function in Nazi society. In the initial report, Arendt situates the question of conscience as a moral issue, as opposed to a legal one, that would determine his responsibility. 31 While it is not strictly relevant to the legal proceedings, Arendt suggests that “it was of great political interest to know how long it takes an average person to overcome his innate repugnance toward crime, and what exactly happens to him once he has reached that point. To this question, the case of Adolf Eichmann supplied an answer that could not have been clearer and more precise.” 32 Ultimately, Eichmann's conscience goes through a radical transformation over a short period of time: "yes, he had a conscience, and his conscience functioned in the expected way for about four weeks, whereupon it began to function the other way around." 33

One

episode in particular provides evidence that Eichmann's conscience had worked "in the expected way." While Eichmann was primarily a reliable follower of orders and rules, he had clearly taken an initiative contrary to orders to save lives on this one occasion. The incident came after Eichmann had been informed that the Final Solution would be implemented and after he had visited some of the "killing centers" in Eastern Europe. 34 Seemingly repulsed by this new information and these experiences, Eichmann redirected a shipment of Jews to a ghetto that lacked extermination capacities, an act for which he was severely reprimanded. In his testimony, Eichmann reduced the action to a mere choice of equally good means (which was clearly false), but it may be seen (as Arendt suggests) as evidence of Eichmann’s

31

Ibid., 91. Ibid., 93. 33 Ibid., 95. 34 Ibid., 94. 32

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limited experience with a "normal" conscience. 35 Eichmann did not resist orders again until the final days of the regime, but instead became more and more dedicated and obedient to the official program. Arendt's essential claim is that Eichmann's conscience undergoes a reversal not long after this incident of initiative. While his conscience temporarily objected to the notion of killing innocent people, it later became fused with his official duties so that he went "beyond the mere call of obedience and [identified] his own will with the principle behind the law." 36 Eichmann carried out his part of the Final Solution with extraordinary zeal, accelerating the process of deportation, allowing no exceptions to be made (as others had done for personal gain), and even at times going against orders that would have shut down the Final Solution as the war was ending. At this point, Eichmann would have had a bad conscience only if he did not follow through with the Final Solution. 37 That Eichmann had at all times done his best to make the Final Solution final was therefore not in dispute. The question was only whether this was indeed proof of his fanaticism...For the sad and very uncomfortable truth of the matter probably was that it was not his fanaticism but his very conscience that prompted Eichmann to adopt his uncompromising attitude during the last year of the war, as it had prompted him to move in the opposite direction for a short time three years before. 38 For Arendt, the reversal of Eichmann's conscience is evidence that we cannot trust there to be "an unequivocal voice of conscience" in the midst of a regime in which systematic killing is legalized. If in normal circumstances conscience helps us not kill our fellow human beings, in the conditions in which Eichmann operated, conscience could push us in the exact opposite direction. What were the factors that led to his reversal of conscience? Eichmann explained that the soothing of his initial bout with a "normal" conscience was a result of the fact that everyone around him—both Nazi and Jewish leaders, with whom he had to interact on a regular basis—cooperated, "that he could see no one, no one at all, who was actually against the Final Solution."39 The general atmosphere of cooperation demonstrated "the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European

35

Ibid., 94-95. Ibid., 137. 37 Ibid., 25. 38 Ibid., 146-147. 39 Ibid., 116. 36

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society—not only in Germany but in almost all countries, not only among the persecutors but also among the victims." 40 One experience in particular crystallized this fact for Eichmann. While at the Wannsee Conference—a meeting of Nazi officials designed to coordinate efforts in regards to the Final Solution— Eichmann saw that everyone he admired in the organization had no qualms with the program. 41 Eichmann's admiration for successful members of society along with the general moral collapse set his own conscience at ease, for he did not think he had a right to judge the situation when the most admirable members of his society agreed. 42 In the context of Nazi German society, the soothing of Eichmann's conscience reflected the broader moral situation. Arendt was struck by the glaring lack of resistance to the Nazis, which showed that conscience is not so powerful a political force as might be expected. Most of the active resistance happened too late to be effective, and it was hardly ever driven by moral motivations but by selfish, nationalistic or Eurocentric political interests. There were some who would not participate in the regime for moral reasons, but they had no real political impact because they remained invisible and silent. Their abstention from participation only saved them from being morally guilty. 43 The general populace of the Third Reich became less and less concerned with the regime's killing as the war went on, and even in the end began to acquiesce to the fact that they may die. Arendt shows that the long period of war drained people’s willingness to live on—in particular, the German people did not care about dying as much as about avoiding extra suffering. In the late years of the regime, Eichmann had adopted nearly the same attitude to the killing: "the unforgivable sin was not to kill people but to cause unnecessary pain" in the process. 44 The party's language rules transformed the natural aversion to witnessing pain by redirecting the focus of this human reaction from others to each individual's personal pain and distress. According to Arendt, the language rules reinterpreted the innate repugnance to suffering so as to play on the vanity of the individual: 40

Ibid., 125-126. Ibid., 126. 42 Ibid., 114. 43 Ibid., 96-105. 44 Ibid., 109. 41

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Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick...was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders. 45 Eichmann was able to function in his role partly because he was most often buffered from the suffering by his bureaucratic post, and partly because his few direct experiences of suffering were transformed, through the language rules, into evidence that he was "involved in something historic, grandiose, unique...which must therefore always be difficult to bear." 46 Eichmann interprets his own extreme commitment to the Final Solution in the last days of the regime in terms of Kantian moral philosophy. When he was defying orders to help guarantee the success of the Final Solution in the last days, he thought of himself as the good moral agent who does not allow exceptions to the universal law, not even when he would have personally benefitted. He was certain that "a law was a law, there could be no exceptions...No exceptions—this was the proof that he had always acted against his 'inclinations,' whether they were sentimental or inspired by interest, that he had always done his duty." 47 The trouble, of course, was that Eichmann had substituted the "law of the Fuehrer" for Kant's rational moral law, not paying heed to Kant's emphasis that every individual must be a legislator for humanity and must not simply obey the law of the land. Eichmann's conscience, which was once troubled by the killing, had adapted to the new law in such a way that he was now being tempted to do what he once thought was right. And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody "Thou shalt not kill," even though man's natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler's land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: "Thou shalt kill," although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably the overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off

45

Ibid., 106. Ibid., 105. 47 Ibid., 137. 46

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to their doom...and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefitting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation. 48 In the initial report, Eichmann's conscience switches its moral direction completely: conscience has no inherent limits and it can adapt to any moral code whatsoever. In other words, Eichmann exchanges one set of moral rules for another. The reversal of Eichmann's conscience is consistent with Arendt's claim that Eichmann did not realize what he was doing. For a great part of his career, Eichmann had no capacity to recognize the evil character of his deeds, and was literally unaware of what he was doing. Arendt is critical of the traditional conception of conscience in which a person always knows what is right and wrong, even if they choose to act against that knowledge. Eichmann did not merely act against his moral knowledge, but he instead illustrates how one's "knowledge" of right and wrong can be subject to rapid and extreme fluctuation. For this reason, Eichmann's reversal is central to Arendt's critique of the traditional notion of conscience. The traditional conception is unhelpful for Arendt's overall purpose of determining a basis for Eichmann's guilt because it simply does not capture the relevant facts. If conscience is adaptable to any set of rules or laws, conscience cannot be relied upon to help us recognize good and evil in any significant sense. If conscience is reversible, it is merely the subjective side of socially conforming behavior. Conscience could not be the basis on which we could expect Eichmann to refrain from participating in the Nazi extermination program. The inability to think and the easy reversal of conscience are implicitly connected moral failures in Arendt's report on Eichmann. In her later works, Arendt reinterprets the phenomenon of conscience by linking it directly to the more reliable moral faculties of thinking and judging. Although she undermines the traditional, absolutist notion of conscience in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt does not provide an alternative conception to ground her judgment of Eichmann's guilt. In fact, Arendt concludes that, despite not having a detailed and coherent theory for how he is responsible and why he is guilty, Eichmann should be hanged. While there is no precedent for a criminal like Eichmann, political reality required that the court convict and punish him. In her eyes, the

48

Ibid., 150.

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implementation of justice was necessary despite the fact that legal and moral theory did not have established categories that were adequate to understand the case. While she defended the court's final verdict, Arendt's own judgment of Eichmann is distinct from the judgment of the court. The judges were unwilling to admit that the case was unprecedented, and that the basis for their judgment was therefore also unprecedented. While they succeeded in reaching a just verdict, they "buried" the novelty of the case under irrelevant precedents. 49 The novelty of the case consisted partially in the fact that the crimes under scrutiny occurred within a legalized system of murder that had no further ostensible goal. 50 The court had used the notion of "crimes against humanity" with some sense that the term itself marked the unprecedented nature of the crimes. However, the court never quite clarified the term, for at times the crimes were described as primarily crimes against the Jewish people. This slippage was not without reason: the Jewish judges had precedents for crimes against their own people. 51 For Arendt, the crimes were against humanity in the sense that humanity as a whole suffers from the loss of plurality, and this would be the case whether the Jews or any other group within the human race were targeted. Nazi totalitarianism was an "attack on human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the 'human status' without which the very words 'mankind' or 'humanity' would be devoid of meaning." 52 In her judgment, Arendt explicitly appeals to a conception of moral law that was not yet represented in any formal institutions in the world. The best way for Eichmann's crimes to be seen as "crimes against humanity" would be to try him in an international court that represented more than the

49

Ibid., 262-263. Arendt was particularly critical of the judges who wrote the decision after the appeal, for they did not acknowledge any of the difficult features of the Eichmann case. 50 Ibid., 135. 51 Arendt was convinced that Hitler's ultimate goal was not just to kill Jews, but used the Anti-Semitism of his day as a means to initiate a program of killing that was then to be used on any inferior group of his choice. An overemphasis on the choice of Jews as the main target, Arendt thought, would distract people from the fact that Hitler's ideas were even bigger than what he achieved and that humanity itself was being threatened. 52 Ibid., 268-269. The evaluation of the crimes against humanity echoes Arendt's earlier characterization of totalitarianism as a threat to human plurality.

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Jewish community. 53 Just as any crime is a crime against a community of some sort, and is punished for the sake of the community and not for the sake of the victim only, "crimes against humanity" assumes a human community that includes all human beings. The ideal response to these crimes would have been to organize an international court to represent that community in the necessary way. 54 Arendt recognized that this ideal was still unreal, and that there was no international law to judge Eichmann at the time, but she thought that this trial could motivate the foundation of a new international system of law. 55 Just as every system of organized law is built upon precedents, each of which, at one time, was itself unprecedented, so too could this novel incident with Eichmann become the precedent for an international criminal court. 56 In Arendt's mind, the verdict given by the court actually required a great deal of independence from ideology, law, tradition, and precedents of every kind. 57 A novel phenomenon requires independent judgment, for no existing rules apply to what is truly new. Eichmann represented a "new type of criminal" and could not be judged according to the conventional rules. According to Arendt, Eichmann's guilt rests on his active participation in the totalitarian regime; the "objective," factual "great crime" is more important than any of Eichmann's specific subjective, psychological features. In the case of Eichmann, the assumption that "intent to do wrong is necessary for the commission of a crime" is illegitimate. Persons like Eichmann threaten the human community regardless of whether they realize what they are doing or not. Eichmann's main intentions may have been merely obedience to the law and to Hitler, but Arendt does not think obedience is a valid justification for the conduct of a human adult.58 Politics and the judiciary in particular assume that an individual is free not to obey, or at least free not to put oneself in a position where one would have to obey an immoral order or unjust law. 53

The other postwar trials had the same flaw: they did not represent humanity but merely those countries who had won the war. 54 Ibid., 261, 272. 55 Ibid., 273-274. 56 Arendt was dissatisfied with the Nuremburg trials and the Eichmann trial on the same grounds: neither recognized all of humanity as the community that was threatened by totalitarian crimes. Nuremburg was merely a court of the victors, and the Jerusalem court was merely a court of the victims. 57 Ibid., 262. 58 Ibid., 278-279.

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Responding to the Eichmann Controversy: Moral Responsibility and Moral Judgment Let us now turn from the initial report to the controversy that arose after its publication. Arendt's book was met with many different reactions, the most disturbing of which was the general condemnation of all those who were willing to judge without precedents. Some critics realized that the deeds were unprecedented and were consequently convinced that no one could or should judge Eichmann and that he should go free. Others expressed the similar sentiment that "no one has the right to judge somebody else"—if you were not involved, you cannot judge. 59 This general hostility was significant because it questioned the very capacity of humans to judge the past in "hindsight," a capacity that is central to criminal trials and to the very practice of historiography as well. 60 Arendt's willingness to judge the unprecedented pitted her against the prevailing public sentiment. Many critics preferred large-scale historical interpretations of the events instead of attending to the individual Eichmann and judging his specific deeds. In Arendt's mind, there were many problematic theories that blamed "all deeds and events on historical trends and dialectical movements, in short on some mysterious necessity that works behind the backs of men and bestows upon everything they do some kind of deeper meaning." 61 Arendt thought that these interpretations were "devoid of all risk" because the implication of these theories is that everyone would have done the same thing in the same circumstances. The key advantage of a trial situation is that a particular person is being called to account, and the trial presupposes that criminal actions were free and need not have happened. 62 Arendt was pleased that the court overcame the tendency of characterizing the events and historical background of the case in overly deterministic schemes. Despite the wishes of the prosecution, the trial could not judge all the events of the era or of world history. If the focus rose to those broader levels of analysis, the deeds of Eichmann would have been treated like instances of an unavoidable trend of human society. Any appeals

59

Ibid., 296. Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," 19. 61 Ibid., 20. 62 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 290. 60

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to necessity could not be heeded if Eichmann was to be tried as an individual. 63 For Arendt, legal and moral judgment of particular deeds requires that one avoid metaphysical or historical explanations that make individual deeds appear necessary. In the waves of opposition to the book, Arendt discovered a "reluctance evident everywhere to make judgments in terms of individual moral responsibility." 64 Unfortunately, what the trial demanded of those in the position of judging the accused—independent moral judgment of individual responsibility— was precisely what the public at large were unwilling to do. In this context, Arendt's judging of Eichmann could be considered an instance of public action. Arendt never explicitly characterizes herself as an actor in judging Eichmann, but her book initiated a series of new events over which she exercised no control. On her own account of action in Human Condition, Arendt became an actor during this period of time, however reluctantly. Much of the opposition arose over her judgments of some of the Jewish leaders during the years of the Final Solution. Arendt criticized the leaders for their willingness to cooperate with the Nazis and to make trades to save some prominent Jews at the expense of many others. 65 These opinions effectively cut Arendt off from a portion of the Jewish community who did not think—or were unwilling to admit the possibility—that any of their own people had done wrong. Arendt's action, her willingness to judge in a public way, left her open to intense scrutiny, and she was occupied for years with the task of responding to criticisms of her book. The Eichmann controversy is one of the decisive events of Arendt's life, and it presents us with Arendt's person, her "who," as clearly as any other single event. As we move forward, we should remember that Arendt, through her writing, demonstrates how making judgments publicly can be a mode of action. 66

63

Ibid., 291. Arendt is also explicitly concerned that by focusing on larger historical trends and interpretations of the events in question, Eichmann could become a scapegoat for all Nazi crimes because the court would lose sight of his individual actions. See also, Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," 31. 64 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 297. Emphasis added. 65 For the details of her analysis and judgment of the Jewish leaders, see Ibid., 115-126. 66 In multiple essays in the posthumous volume Responsibility and Judgment, Arendt admits she is a judge, but not that she is an actor. Arendt's reluctance to use herself as an example of public judging might be rooted in her recognition that reflection and judgment must be impartial, and that using oneself as an example would compromise that impartiality. She preferred to use her teacher and friend Karl Jaspers as the model for public judgment. See "Karl Jaspers: A Laudatio" and "Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?," which are both in Arendt, Men in Dark Times

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If the trial itself raised important moral issues regarding guilt, responsibility, conscience, and so forth, the controversy over Eichmann in Jerusalem spurred a distinct line of inquiry in Arendt's later works. The very ability to judge others in retrospect had been called into question by observers of the trial and particularly by Arendt's critics. We should remember, therefore, that the issue of moral judgment does not just apply to Eichmann, but to everyone who, looking back at the past, was willing to condemn his actions. How is it possible that human beings can make judgments concerning good and evil when the actors themselves did not interpret the situation in those same terms? In the initial report, Arendt claims that judgment "presupposes precisely that we have a common humanity with those whom we accuse and judge and condemn." 67 What this common humanity amounts to is a question at the very heart of Arendt's later works. 68 The controversy often centered around the single phrase, used only twice, once in the body of the report (in the last sentence, in fact) and once in the subtitle, "the banality of evil." Problems arose because some people thought that Arendt was making a general conceptual statement with this provocative phrase, even though the book was not intended as "a theoretical treatise on the nature of evil." 69 For Arendt, the book was only a report of a single instance in which our preconceptions of evil did not match an observed factual reality: "I had pointed to a fact which I felt was shocking because it contradicts our theories concerning evil, hence to something true but not plausible." 70 The implication of this one instance was that there could be many more like Eichmann, but she never claimed (in Eichmann or thereafter) that all evil was banal. 71 In Arendt's works that follow the Eichmann trial, her attention shifts from the single

(New York: Harcourt, 1968). Of course, the concern about impartiality does not apply to us as readers of Arendt. We can use Arendt's judgment as a example of action to illustrate her theoretical claims. 67 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 251-252. 68 Some commentators have been concerned with whether Arendt's account of judgment can incorporate the perspectives of both the "actor" and "spectator." A whole volume of commentary has been committed to this issue: The Judge and the Spectator, ed. Joke J. Hermsen and Dana Villa (Leuven: Peeters, 1999). We will dwell on the issues discussed in this volume in the final chapter. 69 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 285. 70 Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," 18. 71 A related concern of some was that Arendt had departed from her early conception of totalitarian evil as "radical evil" when she spoke of Eichmann's banality. Personally, I am convinced that the two notions are very much compatible: radical evil addresses the objective features of totalitarianism, while the banality of evil concerns

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instance of Eichmann toward more general theoretical concerns about the nature of evil, individual responsibility, conscience, judgment and freedom, but the facts of the trial remain fixed points of reference that her theorizing intends to negotiate. These facts block certain lines of argument and narrow the possibilities for her reflections. A profound sense of surprise permeates Arendt's reaction to the trial and the ensuing controversy: the trial had forced her and others to deal with moral problems that had never been raised before. The result of the trial was that "general moral questions, with all their intricacies and modern complexities, which I would never have suspected would haunt men's minds today and weigh heavily on their hearts, stood suddenly in the foreground of public concern." 72 The "controversy invariably raised all kinds of strictly moral questions, many of which had never occurred to me, whereas others had been mentioned by me only in passing." 73 In another striking passage, we catch a sense of Arendt's concern about moral confusion: "What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality—as if an instinct in such matters were truly the last thing to be taken for granted in our time." 74 These passages and others like them motivate my interpretative strategy: Arendt is clearly aware of her own focus on moral questions after her experience with Eichmann, and we should read her texts with this in mind. Her reflections do not develop from strictly internal concerns and problems, and her thinking is not ruled primarily by the criterion of consistency. Arendt is first and foremost responsive to events and experience. In this case, the Eichmann trial directed her attention to moral issues unexpectedly, forcing her to think about subjects she had not considered. Hence, the Eichmann experience plays a dual-role for Arendt's later work: it provides fixed factual points of reference for Arendt's theorizing and, at the same time, ignites the questions that Arendt will continue to pursue. The two roles should not be separated, for Arendt is careful not to give answers to

the subjective factors of the criminals who commit those great crimes. For a thorough argument on this question, see Richard J. Bernstein, "Did Hannah Arendt Change Her Mind? From Radical Evil to the Banality of Evil," in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 127-146. 72 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 283. 73 Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," 17. 74 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 295.

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her queries that go against the factual experiences. Certain traditional answers to her moral questions would dissolve the very experiences that gave rise to her reflections. Her implicit advice is that thinkers must resist theorizing in such a way that they evade the realities of experience. One of the more salient questions that the Eichmann trial and controversy raised regarded individual responsibility: what is the basis of Eichmann's responsibility and guilt? In particular, how do we understand his responsibility given the extreme circumstances of Nazi totalitarianism? As we consider how Arendt understands his responsibility, some of her initial ideas about moral judgment will come to light as well. A key assumption of Arendt's theorizing after the experiences with totalitarianism and the Eichmann trial is that "morality is not a matter of course." Having grown up in an "atmosphere where nobody paid much attention to moral questions" because moral behavior was taken for granted, the moral collapse of German society came as a shock to Arendt. The most surprising aspect of the moral collapse was not the "bestial behavior of the storm troopers" or the "speeches of Nazi bigwigs," but the ease with which ordinary people were willing to cooperate with the Nazis: "In brief, what disturbed us was the behavior not of our enemies but of our friends, who had done nothing to bring this situation about. They were not responsible for the Nazis, they were only impressed by the Nazi success and unable to pit their own judgment against the verdict of History, as they read it." 75 That so many respectable people could so easily be "coordinated" with a monstrous regime illustrates the state of conventional morality at the time: "It was as though morality, at the very moment of its total collapse within an old and highly civilized nation, stood revealed in the original meaning of the word, as a set of mores, of customs and manners, which could be easily exchanged for another set with no more trouble than it would take to change the

75

Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," 24.

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table manners of a whole people." 76 The German people made a similar exchange after the war, reverting to traditional moral standards as quickly as they had initially discarded them. 77 For Arendt, the moral disintegration across all classes of society was the source of her main moral concerns. While there have always been criminal elements in any society and even a few severe villains as well, the real moral problem concerns the unprecedented reversal of morality among average persons. 78 The trial assumed that Eichmann was responsible for his deeds despite his being rather normal in character and motivation, and in general Nazi totalitarianism relied on the participation of normal persons to operate the functions of the complex bureaucracy and party institutions. While not all of these public participants are legally responsible for crimes like Eichmann's, each of them has moral responsibility for his or her own specific role in the regime. 79 Several excuses were offered for the general participation in the Nazi system. The Nazis operated in such a way that each individual person within the regime was treated as merely a replaceable "cog" in the bureaucratic machine. This approach gave rise to the perception that results could not ultimately be affected by individuals' decisions, since another person could and would do the same thing in the same circumstances. 80 It was argued that no one can be responsible for something that would have happened even without that individual's participation. Arendt was pleased that the judges dismissed all appeals to the "cog theory," as the court fulfilled its purpose by attending to the specific deeds of Eichmann, treating him as a person and not as a cog. 81 Legal and moral standards have one very important thing in common—they always relate to the person and what the person has done; if the person happens to be involved in a common undertaking as in the case of organized crime, what is to be judged is still this very person, the degree of his participation, his specific role, and so on, and not the group...Whether the defendant was a member of the Mafia or a member of the SS or 76

Ibid., 43. See also Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003), 50. 77 Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," 54-55: "[W]e must say that we witnessed the total collapse of a 'moral' order not once but twice, and this sudden return to 'normalcy,' contrary to what is often complacently assumed, can only reinforce our doubts." 78 Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," 24. 79 Ibid., 33. 80 Ibid., 29-30. 81 Ibid., 31.

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some other criminal or political organization, assuring us that he was a mere cog who acted only upon superior orders and did what everybody else would have done just as well, the moment he appears in a court of justice he appears as a person and is judged according to what he did. It is the grandeur of court proceedings that even a cog can become a person again. And the same seems true to an even higher degree for moral judgment. 82 The cog theory confused the system and its overall results with the individual's participation in the system. In the trial of Eichmann, for instance, the issue was not whether Eichmann's participation affected the overall success of the Final Solution—surely someone else could have fulfilled his role just as effectively. Eichmann's guilt rests on his participation, not on his unique ability to accomplish results. Even though the system functioned in an automatic, machine-like way, Eichmann was still capable of not participating in his particular role and fulfilling his specific duties. His options within the system were indeed limited, for there was no possibility of reforming the system, but he could have been reassigned to a less objectionable post without any trouble. 83 Most importantly, Eichmann always had the option of not participating within the regime in any capacity. 84 Eichmann had become a cog, unable to change the system of which he was a part, but he was responsible for becoming a cog and continuing to be a cog throughout the war years. 85 A similar excuse was made in terms of obedience. In the postwar trials, many of the criminals insisted that their deeds were a result of obeying orders and should therefore not be punished. In any political or social system, it was argued, obedience is a prime virtue that maintains order and smooth functioning. In response, Arendt insisted on the distinction between obedience and support. Obedience is proper only in a relationship of unequal parties, and while obedience might belong to "the nursery," it does not belong in politics, where it is assumed that all adults who participate have chosen to do so. When

82

Arendt, "Collective Responsibility," in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003), 148. See also, Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," 22. 83 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 92. 84 On a strictly moral level, Arendt entertains the idea that suicide would have been a superior option to participation in the case that other more palatable alternatives were not present. "It is the grandeur of court proceedings that even a cog can become a person again. And the same seems true to an even higher degree for moral judgment, for which the excuse: My only alternative would have led to suicide, is not as binding as it is for legal proceedings." See Arendt, "Collective Responsibility," 148-149. 85 Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," 58.

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one participates in a political enterprise, one is not obeying some superior party as a child obeys a parent. Hence, political participation is active support of an enterprise. 86 Arendt expresses the same idea in terms of consent: "An adult consents where a child obeys; if an adult is said to obey, he actually supports the organization or the authority or the law that claims 'obedience'...If I obey the laws of the land, I actually support its constitution, as becomes glaringly obvious in the case of revolutionists and rebels who disobey because they have withdrawn this tacit consent." 87 Arendt applies the same argument to all moral matters as well: "The reason, however, that we can hold these new criminals, who never committed a crime out of their own initiative, nevertheless responsible for what they did is that there is no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters." 88 Insofar as morality is a domain of human activity and responsibility, obedience is not a proper concept, not even obedience to God. In religion, obedience may be proper because the relationship between humans and God is one of strict inequality. But in the human world, where we must hold persons to account for their actions, obedience is never a legitimate appeal. Obedience to God, while perhaps a significant motivation from the individual's point of view, does not excuse one from responsibility for deeds in the human world. A religious defense of one's nonparticipation may be legitimate, but obedience to God can never be accepted as a moral (or legal) defense for one's actions. In line with her critique of obedience, Arendt insists on the difference between political and personal responsibility. Political responsibility is based on the fact that each generation inherits a complex world of circumstances to which it must, in one manner or another, respond. The inherited good and bad together pose challenges and create opportunities for everyone—no one is singled out because we all inherit the same world. 89 All public action takes place in the shadow of the past, so that anyone who enters the public space is taking responsibility (but not blame) for what others have done. In Arendt's earlier work, she had diagnosed a loss of dignity for politics in the Western tradition and in modernity in

86

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 279. Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," 46-47. 88 Ibid., 48. Emphasis added. 89 Ibid., 27-28. See also, Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 298; and "Collective Responsibility," 149. 87

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particular. The world depends upon our participation in it—the world and human identities and relationships take on their reality only through the interaction of human plurality. Arendt was concerned that modern life has isolated persons from the world and the public realm and essentially destroyed our sense of responsibility for the common world. Political responsibility does not assume that each of us can control the outcomes of events or the trajectory of history. By entering the public realm, we respond to the world and care for it, and through our action, we affirm the basic principles of the political enterprises in which we participate. Personal responsibility, on the other hand, is individual and is the basis of guilt. Guilt, both legal and moral, addresses the individual agent and what he or she has done. According to Arendt, the notion of "collective guilt"—popular in postwar discourse—is essentially confused because guilt, and its opposite, innocence, apply only to individuals. 90 As Arendt was fond of saying, "Where everybody is guilty, no one is." 91 Thinking in terms of collective guilt is a "highly effective whitewash" of every actual, historical crime. If people feel guilty for deeds they did not commit, then they are implicitly admitting that they are no different than the real actors. Conversely, under the notion of "collective guilt," those who consciously did not participate in the regime are assumed to be as guilty as someone like Eichmann for the monstrous events. Instead, we should insist on the crucial moral difference between those who participated and those who did not, between what one actually did and what most or all people are capable of: "Guilt, unlike responsibility, always singles out; it is strictly personal. It refers to an act, not to intentions or potentialities." 92 Many people may have been capable of acting like Eichmann, but only Eichmann himself perpetrated the specific deeds. Another argument defending participation appealed to the importance of political responsibility. It was claimed that some were able to prevent greater evils by being involved in the Nazi regime, while those who did not participate were irresponsible and only cared about themselves. In a case where there is

90 91

Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," 29. Ibid., 21, 28. See also, Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 278; and Arendt, "Collective Responsibility,"

147. 92

Arendt, "Collective Responsibility," 147.

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a choice of evils, it is better to choose the "lesser evil" than to not take part at all. 93 This argument underscores the tension between Arendt's notions of political and personal responsibility: those who participate are taking up their responsibility for the world, even if that means that they must commit some immoral acts—"get their hands dirty"—and take on some level of moral guilt as a result. For Arendt, the argument depends on its abstract formulation: in general, it may be better to participate in order to secure the lesser evil. The task of maintaining the human world against evil often requires that one not remain a saint. However, in the case of Nazism, the very idea of lesser evil is absurd. Within the Nazi regime, there was no real way to reform the regime from within—there was no possible way to participate and prevent horrific evil from occurring. Mass participation in the functions of the regime allowed greater evil to be achieved—i.e., without the help of many, many average people the Nazi regime would have been unable to succeed in its worst schemes. 94 In Arendt's mind, the attitude of accepting the lesser evil led to many being conditioned to accept evil as such. In fact, this was the Nazi strategy. While in most circumstances, participation in public affairs is necessary for the integrity of the world and nonparticipation is politically irresponsible, in the extreme situation of Nazi totalitarianism, nonparticipation is justified. The lesser evil defense did not apply in these circumstances, and the crimes of the Holocaust cannot realistically be considered lesser evils. 95 The charge of political irresponsibility leveled against those who refused to participate overlooked the fact that, in the Nazi system, individuals were powerless. Arendt defends the nonparticipants on this basis: "Impotence or complete powerlessness is, I think, a valid excuse. Its validity is all the stronger as it seems to require a certain moral quality even to recognize powerlessness, the good will and good faith to face realities and not to live in illusions." 96 All of the prevalent excuses, which were constructed to deflect personal responsibility, denied that nonparticipation was a viable and morally superior alternative. For Arendt, they illustrated the general "moral confusion" of the public discourse and

93

Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," 34-36. Ibid., 47. 95 Ibid., 36. 96 Ibid., 45. 94

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the related inability to recognize that the normal rules of moral life did not apply to the novel circumstances under consideration. Nonparticipation was the only good alternative in such a situation. The personal responsibility and guilt of Eichmann and other participants rested on the possibility of nonparticipation. It appears that Arendt uses the nonparticipants as moral examples by which to judge others: refusing to be involved is what she and the courts expected of Eichmann and the Nazi criminals. These exemplary individuals differed from the rest because each recognized that they could not follow the new morality of the regime. The nonparticipants, called irresponsible by the majority, were the only ones who dared judge by themselves, and they were capable of doing so not because they disposed of a better system of values or because the old standards of right and wrong were still firmly planted in their mind and conscience. On the contrary, all our experiences tell us that it was precisely the members of respectable society, who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval of the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield. They simply exchanged one system of values against another. I therefore would suggest that the nonparticipants were those whose consciences did not function in this, as it were, automatic way. 97 Here, the key contrast is between the independent judgment of the nonparticipants and the automatic behavior of respectable society. In times of crisis, those who "cherish values and hold fast to moral norms and standards" will be unreliable because they will adapt and conform to the new situation with little difficulty. The only reliable ones will be those who, instead of bowing to the expectations of the social order, care about their own personal responsibility. The nonparticipants relied on their own ability to judge right and wrong in the new, unprecedented circumstances. According to Arendt, this capacity for independent judgment arose from "the disposition to live explicitly with oneself, to have intercourse with oneself, to be engaged in that silent dialogue with me and myself which, since Socrates and Plato, we usually call thinking." 98 The line of thought in the passage above highlights how Arendt understands the moral collapse in Nazi Germany. The predominant absence of independent judgment was ultimately a result of a failure to

97 98

Ibid., 44. Ibid., 45. Emphasis added.

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think, which is a failure to pay attention to what is happening in the world. The nonparticipant's conscience, because it was grounded in thinking, was not automatic and reversible, but attuned to reality. Arendt claimed that Eichmann's "sheer thoughtlessness" had "predisposed him" to his great crimes and that his "remoteness from reality" had made him unaware of the moral aspects of his actions. This particular case illuminated the possibility that thoughtlessness is a greater problem than those criminals who have deeply "evil instincts." 99 It is one thing to condemn the few sadists and rabid Anti-Semites in the Nazi regime according to our normal preconceptions about evildoers, but it is much more crucial that we understand the unthinking participation of the vast majority. Eichmann may be an especially gross example of thoughtlessness, but his moral failure is indicative of a general problem. Arendt's characterization of the moral collapse has the dual effect of exacerbating the moral problem for the average person—thoughtlessness is a common phenomenon—while at the same time placing the solution within the grasp of everyone—each person has the ability to think and is expected to use that ability. At this stage of her reflections, Arendt addresses the phenomena of conscience, judgment, and thinking without exactly explaining how they are different or how they interact. Thoughtlessness seems to be the root problem, but most often in Arendt's reflections on the trial and the related moral issues, the emphasis falls on the faculty of judgment. As we approach Life of the Mind, Arendt creates more conceptual distance between thinking and conscience, on the one hand, and judgment, on the other. One may wonder why judgment receives the most attention at this earlier stage. Judgment is central at this point, I would submit, because it connects the two salient aspects of the Eichmann controversy. Arendt is exploring the moral expectations implicit in her specific judgment of Eichmann as well as the very practice of judging as a spectator. Judgment is the common thread between Eichmann, the actor, and Arendt, the spectating judge. If, as Arendt claims, the very act of judging another person presupposes a common humanity, and if the spectator can judge in an independent manner, so can the actor. In the

99

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 287-288.

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postscript to Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt explains what the trial has illuminated about "the nature and function of human judgment": What we have demanded in these [postwar] trials, where the defendants had committed "legal" crimes, is that human beings be capable of telling right from wrong even when all they have to guide them is their own judgment, which, moreover, happens to be completely at odds with what they must regard as the unanimous opinion of all those around them...Those few who were still able to tell right from wrong went really only by their own judgments, and they did so freely; there were no rules to be abided by, under which the particular cases with which they were confronted could be subsumed. They had to decide each instance as it arose, because no rules existed for the unprecedented. 100 Just as the Jerusalem judges and Arendt herself judged independently of any rules, laws or social protocols, we expect every human being to be able to judge in the same manner, and act accordingly. The instances of nonparticipation prove independent judgment was indeed possible during the Nazi period despite all appeals to the contrary. In the controversy over the book, Arendt had learned that the general public was unwilling to judge in this independent, spontaneous manner. Arendt's judgment of Eichmann implied that individuals are free to not obey the law of the land or the codes of society, and she was suspicious that the unwillingness to judge was motivated primarily by a fear of human freedom. 101 If I judge without rules and precedents, this means that others can judge me in the same way, and that I do not have the luxury of falling back on rules or precedents to justify my conduct. Moral judgment assumes that anyone can be singled out from the crowd and called to account for his or her actions. In considering Eichmann, few were willing to make claims that addressed Eichmann's specific, contingent actions. Most instead relied upon overarching theories and traditional rules that were hardly relevant or adequate to the factual circumstances. Appealing to familiar theories and rules in the evaluation of others' conduct is advantageous because it relieves one of the responsibility to face the specific realities of experience and one's individual freedom in particular situations. It is much harder, as Arendt writes, to "learn from experience...to start thinking and judging instead of applying categories and formulas which are deeply

100 101

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 295. Emphasis added. Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," 19.

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ingrained in our mind, but whose basis of experience has long been forgotten and whose plausibility resides in their intellectual consistency rather than in their adequacy to actual events." 102 As we noted above, Arendt contrasts the automatic, rule-based systems of social morality with independent judgment. Those who were most attached to the old moral rules were unable to resist taking up the new rules of Nazi society, not because they were especially malicious, but primarily because they were not in the habit of paying attention to what was actually happening. For Arendt, the practice of rulefollowing is problematic because, as the moral collapse illustrates, rule-followers have a tendency to forget the content of the rules they adopt. The habit of having rules becomes dominant, and the adequacy and moral content of those rules can become less and less important. In the worst cases, any rules will do. 103 Rule-followers will be unable to recognize important moral realities in unprecedented circumstances, where the normal rules break down and immoral rules are put in their place. In contrast, the nonparticipants did not possess an objective set of moral rules that guided their conduct: they "refused to murder, not so much because they still held fast to the command 'Thou shall not kill,' but because they were unwilling to live together with a murderer—themselves." 104 Having been in the habit of thinking, consistently engaged in dialogue with themselves, the nonparticipants knew "only one thing for certain: that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves." 105 To think regularly is to habitually encounter oneself and to rely on oneself, and the thinker must decide what kind of person she is willing to live with. The criterion for nonparticipation was ultimately subjective, for it depended on what kind of person one was willing to be. Arendt is careful to not overstate the impact of nonparticipation. Those whose consciences would not let them participate did not create power and did not necessarily change or save the world. There is at least one potential counterexample to this claim. In Denmark, the Nazi goals of deportation and extermination were thwarted almost completely because many sectors of the Danish population were

102

Ibid., 37. Ibid., 45. 104 Ibid., 44. 105 Ibid., 45. 103

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simply unwilling to do what the Nazis asked them to do. 106 While on one level, the case of Denmark might appear as an instance of conscientious nonparticipation, Arendt does not choose to characterize it in that way because there was an additional, more directly political element involved. Arendt writes: It was the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, and the result seems to have been that those who were exposed to it changed their minds [about Nazi policies]. They themselves apparently no longer looked upon the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course. They had met resistance based on principle, and their "toughness" had melted like butter in the sun, they had even been able to show a few timid beginnings of genuine courage. 107 Arendt's emphasis on "open" is very telling: when nonparticipation is public and political, joining together various individuals for the sake of a common principle, it ceases to be a matter of individual morality and conscience. 108 In Denmark, this open resistance had a powerful impact—even on the Nazis, surprisingly enough. Nonparticipants in other countries were unwilling or unable to join together to mount such political resistance. By itself, nonparticipation merely saved individuals from moral responsibility for evildoing. Instead of bowing to History or conforming to social pressure, the few nonparticipants were willing to judge independently for the sake of their own mental wellbeing. The nonparticipants were not normal heroes who acted in great and public ways, but they did preserve a measure of human dignity by not bending to the forces that threaten human plurality. 109 Throughout her late works, Arendt maintains that human dignity is based on the individual ability to judge and act without concern for historical or social success. Let me summarize some key conclusions of this section while also pointing forward to more problems in Arendt's later works. From Arendt's presentation, it appears that moral judgment is the capacity to judge particulars without relying on rules and accepted knowledge, and this capacity for judgment requires the "disposition" to think. In this context, individual moral responsibility assumes that all human beings are capable of thinking and judging independently, even if everyone else is actually not

106

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 171-175. Ibid., 175. 108 For further discussion of the distinction between moral nonparticipation and political resistance, see Arendt, "Civil Disobedience," in Crisis of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, 1972), 49-102. 109 Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," 48. 107

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doing so. If others are not thinking and not paying attention to the world, the individual must rely on himself and trust his own experience and judgment of reality. From Arendt's argument, we could conclude that everyone is responsible to pay attention to reality, and not just to adopt the opinions of people around them. We may wonder if, in a scenario where no one else is thinking, the individual's access to reality is compromised. If human reality depends on the interaction of plural perspectives, then how can the lone thinker apprehend reality the way that Arendt is expecting? This question will stay with us until the end of the dissertation, but I will briefly hint at the solution Arendt proposes. While interaction with others is central to one's sense of what is real, continued worldly interaction with differing perspectives is not absolutely necessary. In Arendt's later works, the mental capacities of thinking and judging are structured on analogy with worldly activities that occur between plural participants, so that the individual's mental life incorporates the plurality that is essential to worldly life with others. In times when worldly interaction has ceased or diminished, thinking and judging can maintain (at least for some time) the multiplicity of perspectives that constitute reality. Our moral responsibility rests on the power of imagination to mentally represent others' perspectives, and thus to maintain a sense of reality. Arendt's commitment to the factuality of newness is closely related to her rejection of moral rulefollowing. Anything truly new will not fall neatly into a moral category or conform easily to a moral rule, which implies that the habit of thinking is an important moral habit, perhaps the primary moral habit. The habit of thinking keeps all other habits in check, for thinking guarantees that other habits are not "blind" habits operating without a grounding in reality. Independent judgment is not needed at every moment of every day, but it is needed in the moments of novelty and crisis. In crisis, those in the habit of thinking will be prepared to do what is necessary not to participate in evil.

The Beginnings of Arendt's Moral Philosophy We must now work through Arendt's first full-fledged account of the moral faculties, for this will allow us to deal with the questions that remain unanswered in Arendt's initial report on Eichmann and her 93

first responses to the trial controversy. Judgment and thinking have been seen to be prescribed activities that Eichmann was expected to undertake, but neither of these has been developed or clarified in much detail. Arendt has accounted for what we might call the "objective" difference—i.e., the publicly observable difference—between the nonparticipants and individuals like Eichmann, but Arendt has had very little to say about the inner, "subjective" workings of the mind. Furthermore, the difference has been presented in primarily negative terms: Eichmann lacked the ability to think and was unwilling to judge. The positive, subjective characteristics of these moral faculties have not yet been discussed, and thus the differences between these faculties are not clear. As Arendt begins to treat the moral faculties as mental faculties, the distinctions between them become more precise. Arendt's first robust presentation of the moral faculties appears in the two lecture series, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy" and "Basic Moral Propositions," given in 1965-6. 110 Nearly half of this lecture material is devoted to issues of conscience and thinking, which were the first among the moral faculties to be thoroughly developed in Arendt's work. What is striking is that no substantial changes were ever made to this early account of thinking and conscience in her subsequent works. In Thinking, where the concern is not exclusively moral issues, Arendt supplements her original account with more depth and an analysis of broader problems, but does not alter it. By contrast, the topics of judgment and willing arise only in the final third of these lectures and in a rather tentative form, evidenced by Arendt's presentation itself as well as the fact that there are extensive revisions in Willing of several central claims made in the lectures. Willing and judging receive more attention as Arendt approaches Life of the Mind. Just as the 1965-6 lectures primarily function as a venue for Arendt's reflections on thinking and conscience, two lecture courses that Arendt gave in 1970-1 play the same role for her formulations of willing and judging. The first course, "Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy," is focused on the faculty of judgment. The second course, "A History of the Will," traces the development of the concept of the will in the Western tradition. Both 1970-1 lecture series have a much stronger affinity to Life of the Mind

110

In Responsibility and Judgment, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy" is the focal text, and "Basic Moral Propositions" is referenced only in footnotes.

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than do the 1965-6 lectures—they appear to be the first public versions of that final work. Due to this affinity, I will discuss the 1970-1 lectures only in later chapters when we have arrived at Life of the Mind. "A History of the Will" will not be discussed directly—its content is very similar to that of Willing. The Kant lectures, however, will be central to my treatment of the faculty of judging, since they are the main source material for any speculations about what Arendt might have written in Judging. "Thinking and Moral Considerations," 111 presented in 1971, plays a role similar for the Thinking volume as the 1970-1 lectures do for Willing and Judging, as many passages in that piece appear in Thinking in exactly the same form. Due to its resemblance to parts of the Thinking volume, I will also not treat it independently, but only for very select purposes in the chapter on Thinking. The lectures of 1965-6 are explicitly structured as a confrontation with the history of moral philosophy from the perspective of contemporary facts and experience. Arendt was concerned that twentieth century experiences had called into question the conviction that morality is more than a set of mores, customs and habits that are relative and arbitrary. While there certainly are and have been philosophers who conceive of morality primarily in terms of custom and habit, Arendt thinks moral philosophy, if it is a distinct discipline within the Western tradition, aims at explicating moral precepts that are absolute in character. When we examine moral philosophy, [w]e deal, rather, with the assertion, upheld by all philosophers who ever touched the matter, that, first, there is a distinction between right and wrong, and that it is an absolute distinction, unlike distinctions between large and small, heavy and light which are relative; and that, second, every sane human being is able to make this distinction. It would seem to follow from these assumptions that there can be no new discoveries in moral philosophy—that what is right and what is wrong has always been known. 112 While Arendt will not ultimately agree with the first assumption above, she will retain her own version of the second, that everyone is capable of telling right from wrong. Arendt wishes to approach the moral faculties from the perspective of moral philosophy in order to establish a basis for morality that is precisely non-conventional.

111

Arendt, "Thinking and Moral Consideration" in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003), 159-191. 112 Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," 75.

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Another important requirement of moral philosophy for Arendt is that it does not rely on divine commands, and it must not defend its precepts by appeals to revealed religion. For Arendt's project, this requirement narrows the field of thinkers considerably—or, if religious thinkers are relevant to her endeavor, they are relevant despite their religious appeals. Kant is Arendt's primary representative of moral philosophy in the modern period, and Kant seems to think of his own project in nearly the same terms. His moral philosophy is an ambitious and rigorous attempt to establish universally binding moral laws that are not derived from human custom or from revealed religion. Arendt provocatively claims: "In this unequivocal sense, until Kant, moral philosophy had ceased to exist after antiquity...Whether or not moral philosophy has existed since Kant is at least an open question."113 While Arendt respects Kant's approach, she also finds several serious problems that plague his moral system. In "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," and especially in the first of the four lectures, Arendt uses Kant's insights and problems as a springboard for her own reflections. Following Kant allows Arendt to pursue the traditional aim of moral philosophy—explicating what is right and wrong and how we know right from wrong— while her criticisms of Kant show us how she is departing from that tradition in interesting ways. Arendt frames her lectures around three central questions, each of which arose from her recent experiences with the Eichmann trial and controversy. The three questions also allow her to introduce Kant's moral philosophy along with its problems. The first question could be put this way: What is the character of moral knowledge? This question is motivated by the fact that "no one in his right mind can any longer claim that morality is a matter of course." The traditional assumption that every person automatically carries "within himself a voice that tells him what is right and what is wrong" makes no sense in the post-Eichmann context. 114 Arendt is seeking a basis for our ability to tell right from wrong, but the basis will not consist in any sort of innate or necessary feature of the human being. As shown in the case of Eichmann, humans' ability to recognize moral phenomena can be severely compromised.

113 114

Ibid., 67. Ibid., 61.

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For Kant, the categorical imperative is meant to express the formula, located within the rational mind, by which we distinguish right and wrong. In other words, it expresses the form of all moral knowledge, and from this form human beings can rationally determine right and wrong. Kant is clear that everyone possesses moral knowledge, while he admits that human beings do not always act according to practical reason. The inclinations that arise from the non-rational parts of the human being lead one to immoral conduct. On this line of reasoning, Kant is not a very unique moral thinker except perhaps for the fact that he locates the form of moral knowledge in pure, a priori reason rather than in some other emotive, intuitive, or spiritual faculty. 115 The assumption that moral knowledge is universal is something Kant shares with much of the tradition, but it is precisely this assumption that must be rejected given the Eichmann trial. Eichmann was an instance where moral knowledge could not be taken for granted, and his immoral conduct could not be attributed to devious inclinations that subverted his moral knowledge. The second question of the lectures concerns the role of obedience in moral philosophy. Obviously motivated by Eichmann's appeal to obedience, Arendt spends considerable efforts in the lectures to remove any hint of obedience from the operation of our moral faculties. The trouble is that many moral philosophers have incorporated obedience, as a virtue of the good agent, into their moral systems. Again, Kant is her main example. Prima facie, it is surprising that Arendt detects a misplaced emphasis on obedience in Kant's moral writings. After all, Kant rejects appeals to religious foundations and he calls on each individual to become a moral legislator using one's own reason: "I am the legislator, sin or crime can no longer be defined as disobedience to somebody else's law, but on the contrary as refusal to act my part as legislator of the world." 116 Where obedience arises in Kant—through a "selfmisunderstanding," as it were—is in his reliance on the concept of the moral law. In Kant, the moral law has the connotations of political legality: the law is something that every citizen must obey. From this, Arendt argues that Kant's characterization of the moral law as the "'law of freedom' is a contradiction in terms." To suggest that the good moral agent obeys his own moral law is a confused idea—to "obey

115 116

Ibid., 62. Ibid., 69.

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oneself" is, at best, a bad metaphor for the inner workings of the self. Either you are free to legislate the moral law and do not obey, or you obey and are not free to legislate. On a similar note, Arendt claims, obedience is encoded into the very idea of the categorical imperative. Insofar as Kantian practical reason must speak in the form of an imperative, reason is understood as a commander of the will, and this implies that the primary virtue of the good will is obedience. So, even though moral reasoning is a matter of self-legislation in Kant, obedience to reason is the primary role of the will. Arendt elaborates on the perplexities that face Kant on this issue: Does reason command the will? In that case the will would no longer be free but would stand under the dictate of reason. Reason can only tell the will: this is good, in accordance with reason; if you wish to attain it you ought to act accordingly. Which in Kant's terminology would be a kind of hypothetical imperative, or no imperative at all. And this perplexity does not grow less when we hear [from Kant] that "the will is nothing else than practical reason" and that "reason infallibly determines the will," so that we must either conclude that reason determines itself, or as with Kant, that "the will is a faculty of choosing only that which reason...recognizes as...good." It would then follow that the will is nothing but an executive organ for reason. 117 Arendt suggests Kant's primary obstacle, and the root of his strange reliance on obedience, is the "problem of making moral propositions obligatory." Kant's transformation of moral propositions into moral imperatives is an attempt in this direction, but he then runs into the "additional difficulty of how to persuade the will to accept the dictate of reason." 118 If the will can refuse to obey reason and still possibly be a good will, then the universal moral law is not itself the ultimate moral standard. From another perspective, we might say that, if the moral law is absolute and we always know what is right and wrong, the will has no other redeeming role than to obey. I emphasize "redeeming" because some thinkers have often appealed to the will primarily in order to explain immoral conduct or the existence of evil. The will's spontaneity is seemingly needed to explain moral failures but it is superfluous to the good will. In these cases, as in Kant, it is quite unclear what the will could contribute to morally acceptable conduct other than mere obedience. 119

117

Ibid., 71. Ibid., 72. 119 On this point, I think first of Augustine's Free Choice of the Will, a work that is dominated by the question of evil and its theological implications. The will is primarily postulated as an explanation of evil and sin as 118

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The third and final basic question of the lectures is a question about evil: There is, finally, the most shocking perplexity which I merely indicated before: the evasion, the sidestepping, or the explaining away of human wickedness. If the tradition of moral philosophy...is agreed on one point from Socrates to Kant and, as we shall see, to the present, then that is that it is impossible for man to do wicked things deliberately. 120 This tenant of moral philosophy is also confirmed, according to Arendt, by the Western tradition of religious thought and literature as a whole. All villains and evildoers do not decide to become evil but their wickedness is always understood as due to common human weaknesses, weaknesses that often allow for empathy and even forgiveness. Eichmann's banality had called into question this strange convergence in literature, religion, and philosophy in which even the most evil individuals retain their dignity as full human persons. Arendt wishes to challenge the tradition on precisely this point: That all radical evil comes from the depths of despair we have been told explicitly by Kierkegaard...There has always been some kind of nobility about the real evildoer, though of course not about the little scoundrel who lies and cheats at games. Claggart and Iago act out of envy of those they know are better than themselves; it is the simple Godgiven nobility of the Moor that is envied, or the even simpler purity and innocence of a lowly shipmate whose social and professional better Claggart clearly is. I don't doubt the psychological insight of either Kierkegaard or the literature which is on his side. But is it not obvious that there is still some nobility even in this despair-born envy, which we know to be utterly absent from the real thing? According to Nietzsche, the man who despises himself respects at least the one in him who despises! But the real evil is what causes us speechless horror, when all we can say is: This should never have happened." 121 Arendt detects a general inability to understand the evildoer without, at the same time, humanizing and dignifying him. Arendt had fought this tendency in her confrontation with Eichmann, and she had refused to give Eichmann more dignity than he deserved. Eichmann's banality implies that the worst evil can be committed by very average individuals who lack immoral motives. Eichmann has shown how the worst evil can be done without any dignity whatsoever, not even the minimal dignity of "despair-born envy." Arendt interprets Kant as another instance of this general trend. Wickedness is not deliberate but a result of faltering in the face of temptation, a variation of human weakness. The immoral agent makes deviations from knowledge or commands from God. Augustine's arguments that the will is needed to do good are not very convincing. 120 Ibid., 72. 121 Ibid., 74-75.

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an exception of herself in regards to a rule that she holds to be valid otherwise. The result is self-contempt in the realization that she has contradicted her own reason, but self-contempt reveals a healthy respect for the moral law from which the self-contempt is born. 122 Here, evil retains a measure of human dignity. Furthermore, for Kant, the will that gives in to temptation is not a free will but one determined by inclinations toward external things: "And since freedom is defined as not being determined by external causes, only a will free from inclination can be called good and free...the will cannot be free and wicked at the same time." 123 On Arendt's interpretation of Kant, evil is not a result of human freedom or human choice, but a result of embodied human nature, which is essentially external to the moral self. While Kant's moral philosophy fails to provide satisfactory answers to the questions above, we should also locate those aspects of Kant's moral philosophy that Arendt finds promising. One of the promising aspects is Kant's emphasis on the self. In Kant, the ultimate sanction of the moral law is the fear of self-contempt: "Moral conduct...seems to depend primarily upon the intercourse of man with himself. He must not contradict himself by making an exception in his own favor, he must not place himself in a position in which he would have to despise himself." 124 To put it in positive terms, morality is a matter of self-respect: one must respect the human dignity within oneself, a dignity that Kant thought was grounded in the capacity to stand against the whole of the mechanical, physical universe through the use of one's reason. 125 Kant's emphasis on the self is also echoed in various moral traditions: The very few moral prescriptions which supposedly sum up all special precepts and commands, such as "Love you neighbor as thyself," "Don't do unto others what you don't want to be done to yourself," and, finally, Kant's famous formula: "Act in such a way that the maxim of your action can become a general law for all intelligible beings," all take as their standard the Self and hence the intercourse of man with himself. 126 The focus on the self in moral philosophy is not without its problems, but Arendt ultimately thinks it derives its plausibility from the experiences of thinking and conscience. Here, we see that Arendt is beginning a new line of reflection on the subject of conscience, one distinct from her critique of

122

Ibid., 62-63. Ibid., 82. 124 Ibid., 67. 125 Ibid., 68. 126 Ibid., 76. 123

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conscience in Eichmann. From this new perspective, conscience arises from the self and its self-relation in the activity of thought. Arendt also finds praiseworthy Kant's belief that moral propositions are self-evident. The moral law within each human being is the source of moral self-evidence, and no "proofs or demonstrations" can be given—one can only provide "elucidation and clarification" as Kant admits in the Groundwork. 127 The fear of self-contempt is generated by the self-evidence of the moral proposition—reason coerces or necessitates assent. If moral propositions are self-evident and coercive, however, then there is no need to appeal to a moral "imperative." Unlike the moral proposition, the imperative itself (the "Thou shalt not") is not self-evident. Appeals to obligation in moral philosophy are grounded in external sanctions, whether it be punishment or a threat of another kind. These obligations do not rest on the self-evidence of reason, but appeal to human inclination. When Kant employs the notion of moral imperatives, he is introducing a non-rational consideration into his moral psychology, going against his initial conviction that the moral law is self-evident and necessitating. 128 According to Arendt, those who find moral propositions self-evident are essentially those who engage in the activity of thinking, and these individuals will be the most reliable morally speaking. Arendt returns to the non-participants to illustrate: If you examine the few, the very few, who in the moral collapse of Nazi Germany remained completely intact and free of all guilt, you will discover that they never went through anything like a great moral conflict or a crisis of conscience...they never doubted that crimes remained crimes even if legalized by the government, and that it was better not to participate in these crimes under any circumstances. In other words, they did not feel an obligation but acted according to something which was self-evident to them even though it was no longer self-evident to those around them. Hence, their conscience, if that is what it was, had no obligatory character, it said, "This I can't do," rather than, "This I ought not to do." 129 Here, Arendt is explicitly linking the self-evidence of moral propositions with the experience of "I can't," which excludes the possibility of being tempted to do wrong and also the possibility of choosing against a moral obligation. Self-evidence is coercive and irresistible—there is no choice to be made. The self127

Ibid., 77. Ibid., 78. 129 Ibid. 128

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evident moral proposition is analogous to a self-evident mathematical truth: "I can't murder innocent people just as I can't say, 'two and two equal five.'" 130 Consequently, it is no surprise that Kant devises a test for moral maxims that relies on the criterion of logical non-contradiction. And just as the criterion of logical non-contradiction does not determine what is true but only eliminates candidates for possible truth, so too the moral "I can't" is entirely negative; it does not prescribe action or tell us what is good, only what is impermissible. Within Kant's system, the most plausible moral duties are the "perfect" duties, which are entirely negative and correspond to the experience of the "I can't." Arendt understands the categorical imperative as an interpretation of the experience of conscience. Key aspects of conscience are represented in the categorical imperative, although perhaps in an overly formalized manner: moral propositions are self-evident in the self-relation of reason, and the dictates of the moral law are primarily negative. Kant's systematic approach obscures the experience of conscience in unhelpful ways, which leads to many of the tensions in his moral theory. Arendt will offer a phenomenology of conscience in contrast to Kant's transcendental-logical approach. Let us return to the question of moral knowledge. Because Kant conceives of the categorical imperative as the universal and objective formula of practical reason, moral knowledge is taken for granted and the case of Eichmann—of one being unaware of right and wrong—is simply impossible under Kant's system. To account for Eichmann, conscience needs a subjective element that will explain why some have moral knowledge and some do not. For Kant and Arendt, we should not appeal to another objective difference between human beings—upbringing, social class, intelligence, etc.—to explain why some know and others do not. First of all, any objective difference would eliminate the role of individual freedom, effectively undermining responsibility. I would argue the following: Eichmann's moral responsibility makes sense only if he had an active role in his own moral ignorance. Kant has no obvious way to explain how this could happen. Secondly, the difference between the nonparticipants and the participants in the Nazi regime did not follow any objective pattern: "Those who resisted could be found

130

Ibid., 79.

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in all walks of life, among poor and entirely uneducated people as among members of good and high society." 131 Arendt suggests that the main difference between participants and non-participants is that the latter were in the habit of thinking, but that difference cannot be reduced to any objective factors.

Thinking and Conscience in the Lectures Let us now turn directly to how Arendt understands the activity of thinking and its relation to conscience. To find an account of conscience that is more adequate to the experience of conscience than Kant's and one that avoids the problems of his overall moral approach, Arendt looks back to Plato's Socratic dialogues. In particular, the dialogue Gorgias contains a compelling account of conscience. As a so-called "middle dialogue," the more recognizably Platonic elements are intimately mixed with the Socratic. In her exposition of Gorgias, Arendt attempts to extract the Socratic elements, leaving behind the Platonic ones, most of which lead back into problems related to the three main questions of the lectures. 132 By contrast, the Socratic elements provide—or at least allow for—satisfactory answers to those central questions. Throughout the whole text of Gorgias, Socrates attempts to persuade others of several paradoxical moral statements, the most important of which is the claim that "it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong." By the end of the dialogue, Socrates has failed to convince anyone to believe these paradoxical statements. As in other dialogues, it appears that these moral claims ultimately cannot be demonstrated by argumentation, and the concern arises that moral standards like justice are ultimately arbitrary and conventional, a mere product of those who hold power. At the end of the dialogue, after Socrates has failed to convince his interlocutors, he tells a myth about hell and the punishment that awaits evildoers in the afterlife.

131

Arendt, "Basic Moral Propositions," in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003), 278. 132 I am not concerned here with a critical evaluation of Arendt's reading of Gorgias, although I do find Arendt's Socratic reading of the text to be quite persuasive, for it gives the text a unity that is difficult to achieve otherwise.

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According to Arendt, the myth in Gorgias is an especially Platonic element, and it illustrates Plato's solution to the failure of reason to convince others. For Plato, moral truths are grasped only by passively beholding the invisible forms with the eyes of the mind. The experience of truth is an experience of being compelled by what one "sees," and since only some people adhere to the truth, it must be the case that others simply cannot see it. Those with the right kind of soul ("noble nature") to see the forms will be committed to moral truths even though there are no complete arguments to support them, and those who have the wrong kind of soul will have to be compelled by appeals to their animal nature— i.e. threats of physical punishment. The truth beheld with the eyes of the mind cannot be communicated to others, and therefore it cannot convince those who do not see it for themselves. For Plato, the self-evident truth of morality is accessible to only the few good souls, whereas punishment is the only way to make the many bad-natured souls behave in acceptable ways. 133 Within the context of Platonic thought, the myth is a viable solution to the failure of reason. In opposition to the Platonic elements in Gorgias, Arendt emphasizes the Socratic solution that is embedded reflexively in the progression of the dialogue. On this reading, Socrates does not believe the myth, as evidenced by his earlier argument that humans should not be motivated by any appeals to pleasure and pain, which the myth clearly is. 134 But if the myth is not a solution, the whole process of the dialogue appears to have been pointless. If we expect to gain results or definitive knowledge, Socrates' commitment to dialogue and reasoning seems paradoxical. As in all the Socratic dialogues, reason cannot establish truth because the process is potentially unending, with every answer provoking a new question and new quandaries. The process ends only because the participants tire of asking and answering questions, not because unassailable answers have been found—and, at times, the dialogues only proceed to a new subject because the interlocutors do not object or ask enough questions. For Arendt, this demonstrates that, within the reasoning process, "we shall never find an iron rule by which to determine what is right and what is wrong with the same certainty with which we determine—to use again Socratic

133 134

Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," 88. Ibid., 82-84.

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or Platonic examples—what is small and big through number, what is heavy and light through weight, where the standard or measurement is always the same." 135 For Socrates, the wholesomeness of dialogue lies not in any certain results to be achieved, but in the activity itself. By entering into dialogue, Socrates expects that his fellow citizens have become better persons, even though their original opinions have been undermined by his questioning. Arendt's reading of Gorgias rests on the idea that the entire dialogue between Socrates and his interlocutors illustrates the activity of thinking. Thinking is essentially a dialogue with oneself in which one both asks questions and provides answers. Like the dialogue, thinking does not terminate on an answer that is beyond scrutiny, but ends only when one arrives either at an opinion or has come to exhaustion. 136 An opinion, which is an agreement with oneself on the matter at issue, is a provisional answer that can always be taken up and scrutinized at another time. For Socrates, who was committed to discussing important questions with anyone who would join him, the activity of thinking—of having a dialogue with oneself—is universal. Thinking is not the province of any particular kind of person, and one does not need a special kind of soul in order to take part. Something closer to the opposite is the case: one who has entered into the activity of thinking will have a better soul as a result. The moral effect of the thinking activity is conscience. At a key juncture in Gorgias, when Socrates' failure to convince the interlocutor Callicles has become apparent, the connection between thinking and conscience is subtly intimated. Callicles' claims have been shown to be contradictory, and Socrates suggests that Callicles contradicts himself because he cares primarily about what other people believe. By contrast, even though no one agrees with him, Socrates claims that what is most important to him is that he remain in harmony with himself, that he must not contradict himself. Prima facie, the immediate context might suggest that Socrates is only concerned with logical consistency—i.e. he is making sure Callicles' opinions are non-contradictory. However, if we consider the larger problematic of the dialogue, his claim can be interpreted as a defense

135 136

Ibid., 86-87. Ibid., 91-92.

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of his proposition that it is better to suffer than to do wrong. What is at issue is moral consistency, or moral harmony with oneself. Here is Arendt's analysis of this key moment in the text. The possibility of disharmony with oneself presupposes that "even though I am one, I am not simply one, I have a self and I am related to this self as my own self." The experience of thinking proves that "[t]his self is by no means an illusion; it makes itself heard by talking to me—I talk to myself, I am not only aware of myself—and in this sense, though I am one, I am two-in-one and there can be harmony or disharmony with the self." 137 In Gorgias, whenever Socrates arrives at a point of deep disagreement with others, he asks them if they are friends with him, as he is convinced that the dialogue cannot continue unless the participants are agreeable to one another. Analogously, the activity of thinking requires that the two in the two-in-one are also on good terms. To translate this insight into explicitly moral terms, we could say: if I am a wrongdoer, I will be unable to live with myself in the dialogue of thought. The "proof" of Socrates' moral proposition (it is better to suffer than to do wrong) comes from the experience of thinking. The thinker cannot escape himself, he is witness to his own deeds: "If I do wrong I am condemned to live together with a wrongdoer in an unbearable intimacy; I can never get rid of him." Arising from the intimacy of the thinking relationship, conscience is the awareness that, as long as I take part in the activity of thinking, I will need to be in harmony with myself; I must not do anything that would spoil the relation I have with myself. Conscience is the knowledge that if I commit wrong, I will have to live with a wrongdoer. 138 On Arendt's reading, Socratic conscience is neither the passive beholding of truth nor is it demonstrated by argument. Instead, the dictates of conscience are generated through discourse with oneself, but not as conclusions to a line of reasoning. The self-evidence of the moral proposition is not objective, for it arises within the self-relation of thinking. No moral proposition can be proven to anyone who does not have the requisite experience. On the other hand, Arendt is hopeful that this account of conscience captures our common sense expectation that everyone can tell right from wrong and can heed

137 138

Ibid., 90. Ibid.

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conscience. Conscience is not a special ability of an elite group: "If the moral precept arises out of the thinking activity itself, if it is the implied condition of the silent dialogue between me and myself, on whatever issue, then it is rather the prephilosophical condition of philosophy itself, and a condition therefore which philosophic thought shares with all other, nontechnical ways of thinking." 139 Since conscience depends on the activity of thinking as its "implied condition," the completely thoughtless individual will be unaware of the need for self-harmony, and will therefore also be unconcerned with doing wrong. As I mentioned in the discussion of Kant above, I think Arendt's condemnation of Eichmann implies that she thinks he had an active role in his own moral ignorance. With this implication in mind, let us clarify how the activity of thinking and its connection with Socratic conscience might apply to Eichmann. Thinking is necessarily active, but if Eichmann did not think, did he actively not think? While Arendt speaks of Eichmann's thoughtlessness as an inability to think in Eichmann in Jerusalem, I do not interpret that claim to mean he never possessed the ability. His single act of initiative is evidence in this regard. His initiative could plausibly have arisen from his thinking about what was going on around him and having an experience of conscience's "I-can't." One interpretation of Eichmann's inability to think might posit that Eichmann, by the time of the trial, had lost the ability to think, had become unable to think. If self-harmony is the condition of thinking, as Arendt suggests, then Eichmann's conscience could be weakened by every evil act that he performed. From this perspective, we might say that Eichmann's inability to think was due to his evil deeds: his self-harmony was fatally compromised as he became fully dedicated to the extermination process. We might also understand his initial participation in the extermination program as a result of a degree of thoughtlessness that preceded the deeds, and the deeds subsequently reinforced his habit of not thinking. At any rate, we ought not treat thoughtlessness as an absolute notion—either you have the ability or you do not—for that would absolve Eichmann of responsibility. In my mind, it is better to understand thoughtlessness as a habit that is more or less engrained at different stages of an individual's life. Arendt points to this kind of consideration

139

Ibid., 93.

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when she appeals to those with the "disposition" to think as the most morally reliable. To be sure, the habits to think or to not think are not completely automatic, they are the result of a series of free initiatives. As we move forward, Arendt will supplement her notion of Eichmann's "inability to think" with the active characterization, "refusal to think." Socratic conscience is entirely negative: it only indicates what not to do. The "I can't" is generated from the thinking activity as a limit to harmonious self-relation. What positive actions to take, what is best, good and the like, falls completely outside the purview of conscience. Arendt supplements this account with some considerations on the role of remembrance in the thinking activity. The issue of remembrance allows Arendt to rightfully complicate how conscience functions, and especially with regard to how conscience can change over time. Consider the passage below: Thinking as an activity can arise out of every occurrence; it is present when I, having watched an incident in the street or having become implicated in some occurrence, now start considering what has happened, telling it to myself as a kind of story, preparing it in this way for its subsequent communication to others, and so forth. The same is of course even truer if the topic of my silent consideration happens to be something I have done myself. To do wrong means to spoil this ability; the safest way for the criminal never to be detected and to escape punishment is to forget what he did, and not to think about it anymore. By the same token, we may say that repentance first of all consists in not forgetting what one did, in 'returning to it,' as the Hebrew verb shuv indicates. This connection of thinking and remembering is especially important in our context. No one can remember what he has not thought through in talking about it with himself. 140 Here, Arendt outlines the possibility of a return to the thinking activity after committing wrongdoing. The key point is that the return is not seamless, but comes with the pain of self-reproach and repentance. The pain of self-reproach may deter some from ever reflecting on their deeds at all. From this viewpoint— after the fact of wrongdoing—conscience is tied to the awareness that thinking will require, if it is even possible, a difficult return to self-harmony. For Arendt, remembering depends on the activity of thinking: only that which has been thought about can be remembered. Not actively thinking about and remembering one's own deeds may be a welcome escape from the pain of a bad conscience, but it also opens up the possibility of evildoing. Clearly with Eichmann in mind, Arendt explains the connection between evildoing and remembering: 140

Ibid., 93-94.

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No doubt I can refuse to think and to remember and still remain quite normally human. The danger, however, not only for myself, whose speech, having forfeited the highest actualization of the human capacity for speech, will therefore become meaningless, but also for others who are forced to live with a possibly highly intelligent and still entirely thoughtless creature, is very great. If I refuse to remember, I am actually ready to do anything—just as my courage would be absolutely reckless if pain, for instance, were an experience immediately forgotten. 141 One who refuses to think about and remember one's own deeds in order to avoid the pain of self-reproach will be willing to do anything. The "I-can't" of conscience will have no force because the agent will not have experienced the pain of remembering past wrongs. The sanctions of conscience, which are based on who I will have to live with, will be non-existent if I do not actively remember who I have been. Like thinking and conscience, remembering has the moral function of creating limitations for the individual. Remembering creates limits by grounding the self in the past. When one refuses to think and remember, one has also lost the basis for any moral inhibitions. In clear reference to her emphasis on radical evil in Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt elaborates on the evil that can result from not thinking and not remembering: I am certain that the greatest evils we know of are not due to him who has to face himself again and whose curse is that he cannot forget. The greatest evildoers are those who don't remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back. For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world. 142 Totalitarian evil may have been extreme in its worldly scope, but it is precisely non-radical in its depth and its origins. The totalitarian criminals were unlike the villains of the tradition, who act in evil ways out of despair, knowing who they are and what they have done. The despairing villain is not forgetful, but precisely out of self-awareness of his past despises himself and his failures. Eichmann and other Nazis like him did not show even this capacity for despair, but simply recognized that the rules had changed and they fell in line with the new rules and played their part. 143

141

Ibid., 94. Ibid., 95. 143 Arendt, "Thinking and Moral Considerations," 159: "[Eichmann] functioned in role of prominent war criminal as well as he had under the Nazi regime; he had not the slightest difficulty in accepting an entirely different 142

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Arendt argues that human personhood is grounded in the thinking activity or, more precisely, in the habits of thoughtfulness and remembering: "Thinking and remembering, we said, is the human way of striking roots, of taking one's place in the world into which we all arrive as strangers. What we actually call a person or a personality, as distinguished from a mere human being or a nobody, actually grows out of this root-striking process of thinking." 144 If to be a person means to think and remember, in its moral aspect to be a person is also to have limits that one cannot transgress. The claim is not that persons always follow the moral standards they espouse for themselves—those standards are at times difficult if not impossible to consistently achieve. More importantly, the key idea is that all persons are engaged in a self-relation that builds limits for the more extreme situations of human life. Thankfully, the "I can't" does not necessarily arise in everyday life, but the thinking activity builds this conviction for when it is relevant. In "rootless" evil, there is no person because the human being behind the deeds has refused to undertake the activities of thinking and remembering. The trouble with the Nazi criminals was precisely that they renounced voluntarily all personal qualities, as if nobody were left to be either punished or forgiven. They protested time and again that they had never done anything out of their own initiative, that they had no intentions whatsoever, good or bad, and that they only obeyed orders. To put it another way: the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons. Within the conceptual framework of these considerations we could say that wrongdoers who refuse to think by themselves what they are doing and who also refuse in retrospect to think about it, that is, go back and remember what they did (which is teshuvah or repentance), have actually failed to constitute themselves into somebodies. By stubbornly remaining nobodies they prove themselves unfit for intercourse with others who, good, bad, or indifferent, are at the very least persons. 145 In this light, Eichmann's banality is his profound lack of depth, definition, and limitation: he could have become anything that circumstances needed him to be. Since Eichmann had refused to constitute himself as a full person, he was unfit to interact in the web of human relationships. Eichmann's rootless evil was unforgiveable because there was no person behind the deeds to be subsequently forgiven.146

set of rules. He knew that what he had once considered his duty was now called a crime, and he accepted this new code of judgment as though it were nothing but another language rule." 144 Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," 100. 145 Ibid., 111-112. 146 Ibid., 95.

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Arendt's explication of the moral aspects of thinking and remembering provides compelling answers to the three main questions of the lectures. On the question of moral knowledge, Arendt has accounted for the self-evidence of moral propositions without, however, claiming that they are universally known or absolute. The validity of the Socratic moral formula can "be maintained only for man insofar as he is a thinking being, needing himself for company for the sake of the thought process." 147 Ultimately, morality has a subjective basis: the self-relation of the thinking person. Conscience is a relative standard for morality, but it is not utterly indeterminate: there are inherent limits to what the thinking activity can abide. Even though the capacity to think and to generate a conscience is universal, the moral limits of conscience are not the same for everyone: "These limits change considerably and uncomfortably from person to person, from country to country, from century to century; but limitless, extreme evil is possible only where these self-grown roots, which automatically limit the possibilities, are entirely absent." 148 In this context, the focus on the self in moral philosophy appears very plausible. Morality is the domain of self-created limitations on behavior and action. Morality concerns the individual in his singularity. The criterion of right and wrong, the answer to the question, what ought I to do? depends in the last analysis neither on habits or customs, which I share with those around me, not on a command of either divine or human origin, but on what I decide with regard to myself. In other words, I cannot do certain things, because having done them I shall no longer be able to live with myself. 149 Morality, unlike legality, has no room for obedience: the limits inherent in the "I-can't" of conscience "will not be imposed on him from the outside, but will be self-set." 150 Furthermore, because reason does not arrive at moral truths which it could then command the will to follow, morality cannot be considered a matter of obeying oneself. The motivations for conceiving of the will as a faculty that obeys reason have been undermined. The tradition on the whole has failed to imagine evil that is committed by non-persons, by agents with no depth or definition. Arendt finds a lone and somewhat indirect reference to this kind of evil in the

147

Ibid., 100. Ibid., 101. 149 Ibid., 97. 150 Ibid., 101. 148

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teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. On her reading of Luke 17, Jesus makes the distinction between "sins which in one way or another can be explained by human weakness" and "skandala, disgraceful offenses." 151 The former, "transgressions," can be overcome "either through punishment or through forgiveness," while the latter are "stumbling blocks [that] cannot be removed from our path as can mere transgressions." 152 Skandala are offenses that "should never have happened" because humans are powerless to overcome them. Jesus claims that it is better for the doer of skandala "that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he cast into the sea." Arendt interprets this claim to mean that "the agent of the offense, the nature of which is only indicated as an insurmountable obstacle, had extinguished himself." 153 On this reading, Jesus' distinction is used to reinforce Arendt's earlier claim that some evil is committed by non-persons, by nobodies. Here, I think Arendt has arrived at the most complete explanation of her concept "banality of evil." Arendt believes Eichmann and other Nazi criminals like him are proof that this type of evil exists: "this newest species of criminals is beyond the pale even of solidarity in human sinfulness." 154 It is evil with no dignity, not due to basic human weakness, but due instead to a basic refusal to be a person and take up personal responsibility. The pain of self-reproach is an important moral phenomenon, but we must also recognize that some evil may be inconsistent with even the dynamics of self-reproach. In an echo of many of her earlier writings, Arendt claims that totalitarian evil (the "horror itself in its naked monstrosity") is "something which should never have happened for men will be unable to either to punish or to forgive it." 155 This claim is primarily aimed at the public realm and how any political response to these deeds must be understood. Arendt's emphasis on the political inability to forgive or adequately punish the horrific deeds dovetails nicely with her ideas on the failure of the agent of such deeds to maintain the self-relations of thought and conscience, the failure to maintain one's personhood.

151

Ibid., 73. Ibid., 109. 153 Ibid., 110. 154 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 459. 155 Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," 55. Emphasis added. 152

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One might think that Arendt's blame of Eichmann only makes sense if he remains a person through the trial process. It might be argued that, just as one cannot forgive Eichmann because he is a non-person, to morally blame a non-person for deeds is impossible as well. A response to this objection could go one of two ways. Arendt could insist that her blame is directed not so much at the non-person who appeared in the Jerusalem courtroom as it is aimed at the Eichmann who stopped engaging in the thinking activity. If we think that, at the time of the trial, Eichmann was unable to think and had lost all the capacities that would make him responsible, then Arendt is condemning the active refusal to think which eventually led to his final inability. The main issue with this response is that the inability to think can never be proven decisively: Eichmann may have simply continued to refuse to think until his final days. The other response would be that Arendt expects Eichmann to think during the trial and to respond to other people and to reality in a thoughtful manner. This response entails that the "nobody" is always in the position to become a person again and that the refusal to be a person is always ongoing. The problem with this second response is simply that we cannot tell if Eichmann is actively refusing to think. Textually, I do not see an easy way of resolving the tension between these two potential responses. As we shall see at the end of her lectures, Arendt oscillates between the language of "refusal" and "inability," an ambivalence that is quite revealing. Both responses assume that Eichmann was a thinking person at some point in his life and that his deeds are due to his deliberate thoughtlessness. In the lectures, Arendt insists on the nobody's refusal to be a person, as though in essence the loss or lack of personhood is an active endeavor for which one is responsible. Even the first response assumes Eichmann is responsible for his own moral disintegration, from which he subsequently cannot extricate himself. In the end, the issue is empirically unsolvable. From my point of view, the reason to retain the language of "inability" with regard to Eichmann is not so much that it is the "correct" view, but that it points to the extreme possibility that a person can lose his personhood through his own activity or lack of activity. The fear is that human beings can lose their capacities, that our ability to think can undergo a kind of atrophy over time: by consistently refusing to think, we can eventually lose the ability altogether.

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In the lectures, conscience, properly conceived in the Socratic vein, is not susceptible to the type of reversal that she chronicled in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann's conscience, in this new context, is not simply prone to reversals based on changing circumstances, but it is lost over time. As if to clarify her change in perspective, Arendt offers a distinction between feelings of guilt and innocence and a conscience based in thinking. Let me come back once more to the problem of conscience, whose very existence has become questionable through our more recent experiences. Conscience supposedly is a way of feeling beyond reason and argument and of knowing through sentiment what is right and wrong. What has been revealed beyond doubt, I think, is the fact that such feelings indeed exist, that people feel guilty or feel innocent, but that alas, these feelings are no reliable indications, are in fact no indications at all, of right and wrong. Guilt feelings can, for instance, be aroused through a conflict between old habits and new commands—the old habit not to kill and the new command to kill—but they can just as well be aroused by the opposite: once killing or whatever the "new morality" demands has become a habit and is accepted by everyone, the same man will feel guilty if he does not conform. In other words, these feelings indicate conformity and nonconformity, they don't indicate morality...[Conflicts of conscience] are actually nothing but deliberations between me and myself; they are not resolved through feeling but through thinking. Insofar, however, as conscience means no more than this being at peace with myself which is the condition sine qua non of thinking, it is indeed a reality. 156 On this line of reflection, Eichmann was subject to shifting feelings of guilt and innocence as the circumstances changed around him, but his supposed "crises of conscience" were actually products of his habits coming into conflict with new rules. In many of her post-Eichmann writings, Arendt shows direct concern that these feelings of guilt can be easily manipulated and abused. In fact, it appears that Arendt believes that the reversal of morality in Nazi society—which she described as reversals of "conscience" in Eichmann—was primarily a reversal of feelings and the habits associated with them. As evidenced by the lecture material, Arendt's thoughts about conscience have clearly shifted. Her more thoroughgoing investigations into the moral faculties seems to have motivated this shift. Arendt admits that the "most objectionable" aspect of her reflections on conscience is that the criterion for morality and evil are ultimately subjective, that "there comes a point where all objective standards—truth, rewards and punishments in the hereafter, etc.—yield precedence to the 'subjective'

156

Ibid., 107-108.

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criterion of the kind of person I wish to be and live together with." 157 In place of the traditional emphasis on moral rules, Arendt conceives of moral standards primarily in terms of persons. What counts in moral matters is "the definition of the agent, and how he did it rather than [the definition] of the act itself or its final result"—the "objective what somebody did" is subordinate to the "who of the agent." 158 Arendt infers from this subjective emphasis on the who of the agent that some persons are allowed to do things that others are not: On a popular level, you find the same attitude in the Roman proverb "Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi"—what is permitted to Jove is not permitted to an ox. In other words, what somebody does, depends upon who he is. What is permitted to some is not permitted to others, from which it follows that many things may be permitted to an ox that are not permitted to Jove. 159 From what we know about Arendt's view of personal identity in Human Condition, I think Arendt's point is that when we make moral judgments about action we should not abstract from the person who is doing the deeds, which means that we must take into account, as best as possible, the life-story of the agent. The ultimate moral status of the deeds depends on our evaluation of the person as a whole. 160 Arendt quotes Cicero and Meister Eckhart to support the idea that morality is ultimately subjective. 161 What is interesting about Cicero and Eckhart's ideas is that they do not refer to a merely internal self-relation. Both authors are actually discussing a type of friendship with others, which

157

Ibid., 111. Ibid. 159 Ibid., 125. 160 Of course, legally the situation might be different—the objective what of the deeds and their place in the world may count more than the who of the agent. 161 Here is the key passage, ibid., 111: "Today let me only mention to you, as it were in self-defense, two statements which essentially express the same thought, even though they originate from entirely disparate sources and types of men; they may give you perhaps an indication of what I am driving at. The first of my statements comes from Cicero and the second from Meister Eckhart...Cicero discusses the conflicting opinions of philosophers on certain issues...And when he comes to deciding which of them is right and which is wrong, he suddenly and quite unexpectedly introduces an altogether different criterion. He dismisses the question of objective truth and says that given the choice between the opinions of the Pythagoreans and of Plato, 'By God I'd much rather go astray with Plato than hold true views with these people.' And he lets his partner in the dialogue once more emphasize the point: he too would not mind at all going astray and erring with such a man. Even more surprising than this statement, which is only polemical, is the statement by Eckhart which is frankly heretical...Eckhart is supposed to have met the happiest man, who turns out to be a beggar. The argument goes back and forth until finally the beggar is asked if he would still think himself happy if he should find himself in hell. And the beggar who has based his arguments on his love of God and the assumption that I have present with me whatever I love, answers, Oh, yes, 'I'd much rather be in hell with God than in heaven without Him.'" 158

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intimates a strong connection between the self-relation of conscience and how friendship functions in the realm of plurality. However subjective the criterion of conscience may be, it must always be cashed out in terms of human relationships, so that whatever I decide with regard to what kind of person I can live with ultimately reflects how I understand the world of human relationships and what it requires of persons. That even the most subjective and self-relating activities actually point to the human world is evidenced by the fact that the thinking self exists only as a plurality: "But this two-in-one, looked upon from the standpoint of human plurality, is like the first trace of company—even when being one by myself, I am or can become two—which becomes so very important only because we discover plurality where we would least expect it." 162 The very idea of living with oneself that we found in Gorgias is a metaphor taken from experience with others and applied to the self-relation of thinking. On a similar note, the subjectivity of conscience may also help to account for the relatively indeterminate nature of the dynamics of repentance. The complexity of these dynamics mirrors the difficult and unpredictable nature of human relationships in general. The resolution of good relations with oneself after repentance may be considered a kind of forgiveness: one must forgive oneself to resume a harmonious self-relation. In Human Condition, forgiveness was considered a basic form of human action that begins something new by attempting to interrupt an otherwise automatic and unending process of revenge. In that context, Arendt claims that "the extent and modes of being forgiven and being promised determine the extent and modes to which one may be able to forgive himself or keep promises concerned only with himself." 163 If repentance is part of the process of forgiving oneself, and forgiving oneself depends on the possibilities for forgiving others or being forgiven by others, then repentance will be subject to the same limitations as interpersonal forgiveness. One may not be able to define the exact conditions under which repentance can help reestablish self-harmony, but repentance will only be possible for actions that can be forgiven in the web of human relationships. If radical, rootless evil cannot be forgiven, as Arendt insists, then it also cannot be repented. The possibility of forgiving Eichmann

162 163

Ibid., 106. Arendt, Human Condition, 238.

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depended on his being capable of becoming a person again and taking responsibility for his past misdeeds. This reemergence of Eichmann's personhood would have required that he thought about and repented of his past. Whether this was possible for him to do in those court proceedings remains an open question. According to Arendt, the thinking person is not necessarily a saint with perfect character or a hero of any sort. Thinking and remembering cannot directly generate good actions, and they cannot protect us from all wrongdoing. Politically, because conscience can only protect us against extreme evil, it will only become relevant when emergencies and crises arise—"the self as the ultimate criterion of moral conduct is politically a kind of emergency measure." 164

Willing in the Lectures Up to this point in the lectures, Arendt has not addressed the issue of freedom or free will directly, although it seems that we have encountered certain ideas that could be understood in terms of the will. For instance, she introduced the notion that we can refuse to think, which appears to be act of volition. As we consider Arendt's treatment of willing, we should pay attention to how the activities of thinking and remembering are related to the will. Throughout her presentation of conscience, thinking and moral philosophy in general, Arendt is fully aware of a paradoxical aspect of her account. On the one hand, moral propositions are essentially self-focused, with the standards of conduct arising from self-relating activities. On the other hand, the most common examples of good individuals are characterized by their selflessness, while vice is often assumed to be equivalent to selfishness. 165 Arendt has explained one aspect of this paradox, namely why morality is so often centered on the self. In order to at least make sense of how the paradox is generated, Arendt must also explain how goodness and selflessness are connected in the tradition and in experience.

164 165

Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," 104. Ibid., 76.

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Since conscience is entirely negative, it cannot be the source of good action. But the question remains: what human faculty could account for good actions? Interestingly, this question initiates a new train of inquiry for Arendt that also leads directly into the issues of willing: "The two phenomena that will chiefly claim our attention are actually interconnected. The first is the phenomenon of the will, which, according to our tradition, stirs me into action, and the second is the question of the nature of the good in an entirely positive sense, rather than the negative question of how to prevent evil." 166 With these two issues in mind, Arendt begins with ancient and Stoic views, and then focuses on three thinkers: Paul, Augustine, and Nietzsche. In ancient thought, before the discovery of the will by Paul, which we will discuss in more depth shortly, the primary relationship within the human soul was the conflict between reason and desire. Decisions of conduct were supposedly determined by which of these forces held more sway over the person, but "no element of freedom can possibly reside in either reason or desire." 167 Instead, freedom corresponded to the "I can" as a political fact: if a human is free, she can do what she wants to do. The self-controlled person, whose reason keeps her desires in order, is free in the sense of being able to accomplish her goals and not being overcome by desire, but the freedom involved is not a product of reason itself being a "free" faculty. Reason and desire are both coercive and deterministic in character. The primary human faculties of reason and desire are both unfree for the ancients, and thus freedom was not a "philosophical issue." Freedom only became a philosophical problem when humans began to think about freedom as an aspect of mental life. After the will is discovered, it is "inserted" into the classic conflict between reason and desire, where it becomes a mediating faculty that decides the course of conduct without being determined by either reason or desire: I can decide against the deliberate advice of reason as I can decide against the mere attraction of objects of my appetite, and it is will rather than reason or appetite that decides the issue of what I am going to do. Hence I can will what I do not desire and I

166 167

Ibid., 112. Ibid., 114.

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can nill, consciously stand against, what reason tells me is right, and in every act this Iwill or I-will-not are the decisive factors. 168 The will is free in its role as an arbiter between reason and desire, and freedom is no longer understood as a fact about action in the world. With the discovery of the will, freedom was instead ascribed to a faculty within the human mind. In "What is Freedom?" Arendt had discussed both Epictetus and Paul as thinkers who explicated theories of inner freedom which were in direct contrast to the ancient political notion of freedom in action. Arendt was highly critical of Epictetus and Paul because their theories appeared at a time when political freedom was waning. In that context, these notions of inner freedom are tainted by their antipolitical origins, and their application to politics leads to serious and dangerous misunderstandings, especially in the modern age. In the lectures, Epictetus and Paul appear again, the former only briefly and the latter as a main figure. How Arendt treats Epictetus in the lectures is quite different from how she interprets his ideas in Willing. In the lectures, Epictetus is introduced as a simple contrast to the ancient position, a contrast that does not contain any insights about willing. Her prime example is that of the paralyzed man: while the ancients would have been certain that the paralyzed man is unfree to move about, Epictetus insists that the paralyzed man can be "just as free as anybody else, if he only would stop wanting to use his limbs." Arendt claims that this "by no means signifies a shift from desire to will, or from the I-can to the I-will, but only a shift in the objects of my desires." It appears that Arendt understands Epictetus' ideas about freedom in terms of the ancient dichotomy between reason and desire, with perhaps a new emphasis on eliminating desire to the utmost extreme. Self-control is internalized in Epictetus, but that phenomenon "has little to do with our question." 169 On the other hand, in Willing, Epictetus is interpreted as an early theorist of the will along with Paul, which indicates a major departure from Arendt's earlier works. To foreshadow the main claims in Willing, Epictetus' internalization of freedom, because it requires a complete abstinence from desire, is achieved only by an unrelenting and torturous effort of willing. 168 169

Ibid., 113-114. Ibid., 114-115.

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In "What is Freedom?" Arendt also gave little credence to the religious experiences of Paul that led to the discovery of the will, subordinating those experiences to historical considerations. In the 1965-6 moral lectures, Arendt approaches Paul from a completely different angle. Given the post-Eichmann perspective of the lectures, it is not surprising that Paul's discovery is framed in its moral context. While Arendt still maintains that the will was first discovered in its impotence, she is careful to stress the specifically moral impotence that was central to Paul's experience. This shift to moral impotence in defining Paul's role in the history of the will is reinforced in Willing. Arendt's goal in "What is Freedom?"—to show the loss of the meaning of political freedom in the Western tradition—may have kept her from appreciating the diversity and validity of experiences connected with willing. Her later concern with moral issues, I would submit, explains her increased interest in the phenomena of willing, and consequently in Paul's role in the history of the will. The teachings of Jesus in the New Testament Gospels constitute the crucial moral context of Paul's discovery of the will. For Arendt, Jesus' commands are not restatements or mere radicalizations of the prior Jewish law, which always contain, in one way or another, a concern for the self. The key distinction of Jesus' new teachings is that they disregard any concern about "the self and the intercourse between me and myself." For instance, to love your enemy in the ways that Jesus recommends is to be utterly unconcerned with yourself. When doing good to others, the "only criterion is indeed the other."170 Arendt suggests that the "curious selflessness, the deliberate attempt at self-extinction for the sake of God or the sake of my neighbor" demanded by Christian ethics derives from Jesus' teachings. However, in the Gospels, the emphasis on selflessness is counteracted by Jesus' own "solid conviction...that no man can be good." 171 Arendt, as in Human Condition, argues that the impossibility of being good rests on the fact that "no doing good is possible if while doing so I am even aware of it...I must be, as it were, absent from myself and [must] not be seen by me." 172 Unlike thinking, which depends essentially on the intercourse

170

Ibid., 116. Ibid., 116-7. 172 Ibid., 117. 171

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between me and myself, doing good precludes any reflective self-relation as the deed is happening: "To put it a bit extremely: If I wish to do good I must not think about what I am doing." 173 The implication of Arendt's reasoning is that Paul felt his own moral impotence in relation to Jesus' teachings because he took them seriously as rules for human conduct. In trying to follow these extreme commands as one would follow the Jewish law, Paul arrives at the same conclusion as Jesus: no human being is good. Paul wills to do good, but that very act of willing reveals his own impotence to do good. Arendt tracks Paul's reflections through the crucial passage in Romans 7: Paul explains [the fact that no one is good] by taking himself as an example: what happens is that he knows that "he consents (synphemi) unto the law that it is good," and what is more, he desires to act accordingly, and still "I do that which I would not." "What I would, that I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do." From which he can only conclude: "for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good [and which I will, we may add] I find not." Since Paul believes that the reason why he cannot perform what he wills is the dichotomy of carnal and spiritual man, that is "another law in my members, warring against the law of the mind," he still can believe that "with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin." 174 Arendt dismisses Paul's conclusion that the conflict is one between two "laws," two contradictory parts of human nature. Paul's dichotomy too closely mirrors the basic ancient dichotomy of reason and the passions, and Arendt thinks Paul covered over his own insights with the two-laws explanation. What is crucial for Arendt in Paul's experience is that "even if I know and withhold consent to my desires, I am still in a position in which I must say, 'I cannot.'" The will can decide freely whether to align itself with reason or desire, but it cannot guarantee conduct. "[Carnal man] is not free" because he "is not strong enough to do what he wills"—but this inability to do what one wills does not undermine the mental freedom of the will as an "arbiter" between reason and desire. 175 Arendt claims that a similar impotence—one that is often unrecognized—may appear in the will's relation to reason. Because reason coerces with truth analogously to the way desire coerces with attraction

173

Ibid., 123. In this context, "not thinking" should not be confused with Eichmann's thoughtlessness as though the person who does good deeds is simply unwilling to think about what is happening in the world. The good act is done in such a way that the self is not the center of consideration. See also Arendt, Willing, 67: "The trouble is that whatever good you do, by the very fact of its appearing either to others or to yourself becomes subject to selfdoubt." 174 Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," 118. 175 Ibid., 119.

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to external objects, it is not the case that impotence is only felt in relation to desire. One may also not be strong enough to overcome the force of truth by merely willing: "If the I-can alone is free, both [intellect and desire] are unfree. If carnal man's cannot is forced by desire, the intellect cannot do wrong because forced by truth." 176 To will against what one knows can be as difficult as willing against what one desires—the intellect does not bend to the will's command. For instance, to will that two and two equal five will reveal the will's impotence with regard to the necessity of mathematics. Historically speaking, Arendt's main claim about Paul is that "the will, this supposedly mighty instrument that gives all the impulses to act, was discovered in its impotence." 177 Thus, Paul's discovery is paradoxical and philosophically problematic. Here is what Arendt wants to retain from her discussion of Paul. Action is not compatible with willing if what one wills is impossible. In Paul's case, if I will to be completely good, I cannot do it. Thus, to will is to be split into a two-in-one, into an "I-will-and-cannot." This split is a not a peaceful dialogue between two friends like thinking—to will is to begin a "merciless struggle that lasts until death." 178 Arendt views Augustine's philosophy as a "second stage" in the history of the will. Augustine essentially reinterprets the conflict of willing in a more satisfactory manner: "The decisive step he took beyond the formulations in Paul is the insight that the trap in which the will is caught does not arise out of the dual nature of man, who is both carnal and spiritual." 179 The main problem with Paul's analysis is that it contradicts the common experience in which the body obeys the mind's commands with no trouble at all. For Augustine, while the mind "has absolute power" over the body, the mind creates its conflict when it tries to command itself: "It is in the very nature of the will 'partly to will and partly to nill,' for if the will were not resisted by itself, it would not have to utter commands and demand obedience." 180 For Augustine, the will does not resist itself only with regard to choices between good and evil, but the split in the will arises in any case of deliberation. In a case of more than two alternatives, the "will itself is now 176

Ibid. Ibid., 118. 178 Ibid., 119. 179 Ibid., 120. 180 Ibid. 177

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divided into three, four, and more parts, and becomes paralyzed." 181 The I-cannot, even if momentary or if related to trivial things, arises from the essential structure of the willing activity. Arendt neatly summarizes her interpretation of Augustine's depiction of the will at the end of the third lecture. Like thinking, the will is "another human faculty that is split in two" by its own inherent activity. The will is split within itself because it commands itself—if it were not split, it would have no one to command. Also, if it were not split, it would not be impotent, for it would simply initiate action. "Hence the most important manifestation of the will is to give orders," which implies that the split in the will is "between one who commands and one who obeys." But, "since no one likes to obey, and since the will, split only within itself, wields no power outside or above itself to enforce its commands, it seems only natural that it will always be resisted to the utmost." The split in the will cannot but be contentious, "a contest and not a dialogue." 182 So, while thinking and willing are both self-relating mental activities, each has its own distinct tenor: thinking is peaceful and willing is riddled with strife. It appears that Augustine's account captures the basic experiences that motivate the philosophical problem of free will. The will is supposed to move us into acting, and for this purpose we must emphatically be One. In other words, a will divided against itself is less adequate for the task of acting, whereas a mind divided against itself is more adequate for the task of deliberation. If that is the way the will is, what good can the will do? And yet without willing, how could I ever be moved to act? 183 Thinking's two-in-one showed no penchant for initiating action, but willing, which is seemingly so closely connected with doing, exhibits a profound inability to produce action. For Arendt, the debate about free will receives its impetus from the above predicament, from the "brokenness of the will which at the same time wills and wills not." The fact that willing something does not entail the power to do it raises the difficult question: am I free, "uncoerced by others or by necessity, if I do what I will not, or, conversely, am I free if I succeed in doing what I will?" 184 If I cannot control my actions by willing, could

181

Ibid., 121. Ibid., 121-122. 183 Ibid., 122. 184 Ibid., 128. 182

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it be that I am always determined by external causes and therefore unfree? My actions appear completely arbitrary from the perspective of willing and its brokenness, but they appear caused from the perspective of worldly events. In order to preserve freedom of the will, Augustine—and much of the tradition following his lead—attempted to overcome this problem by appealing to the fact that "all men tend to be happy, gravitate as it were, toward happiness." So, while man is free to arbitrate between reason and desire in every particular instance, there is a broader overriding concern with happiness that helps guide the will in its choices, and this gravitation towards happiness helps explain human behavior. "Hence, in this interpretation, the will, though not determined by any specific cause, rises out of this ground of gravitation which supposedly is common to all men." 185 The gravitation toward happiness leads the will toward what is right over time—as it is assumed that happiness is only achievable by morally upright persons—but does not necessitate any particular action. For Augustine, the moral implication of this theory is that "the man acting against the gravitational pull towards happiness loses the power of being either happy or unhappy." Arendt is severely critical of Augustine's solution because it appears that deliberate wickedness would be impossible: "[the claim that one can act contrary to happiness] is difficult to maintain if happiness is actually the gravitational center of one's whole being." 186 Furthermore, this theory implies that no one could be both evil and happy, which is "no more than an assumption," and an unrealistic assumption at that: "The happiness of the wicked in their success has always been one of the more uncomfortable facts of life which it would do no good to explain away." 187 Likewise, Arendt adds, we should be suspicious of those individuals who "do good or are decent because they want to be happy." 188 Those who are focused on their own happiness are willing to do wrong when the situation dictates it. As we shall see, Arendt

185

Ibid., 129. Ibid., 130. 187 Ibid. 188 Ibid., 131. 186

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remains critical of Augustine's appeal to happiness in Willing, but she reinterprets the relation between willing and gravitas in order to bypass the issue of happiness altogether. Let us turn to an extremely important passage that indicates Arendt's understanding of the problem that gravitas is meant to solve, for by doing so we will better understand Arendt's own response to the problem. Now this question of whether or not men are free when they start to act cannot be demonstrably resolved, for the act itself always falls into a sequence of occurrences in whose context it appears to be caused by other occurrences—that is, it falls into a context of causality. On the other side it has been said, over and over again, that no precept of either a moral or a religious nature could possibly make sense without the assumption of human freedom, which is true and obvious enough; but it is a mere hypothesis. And the most we can say about it is what Nietzsche stated: There exist two hypotheses, the hypothesis of science that there is no will, and the commonsense hypothesis that the will is free...the moment we start to act, we assume we are free, no matter what the truth of the matter may be. This, it seems, would be fine and sufficient proof [of the existence of free will], as it were, if we were only acting beings. But the trouble is that we are not, and that the moment we stop acting and start considering what we have done with others, or even how this specific act fits into the whole texture of our life, the matter becomes again highly doubtful. In retrospect, everything seems explicable by causes, by precedents or circumstances, so that we must admit the legitimacy of both hypotheses, each valid for its own field of experience. 189 Here Arendt outlines the conflicting evidence of two different perspectives. The first perspective is that of action and the common sense sentiment that we are free. On the opposing side is the perspective of the thinker and scientist who wishes to understand what has happened. Thinking approaches human deeds "in retrospect," as past events to be explained. This explicit emphasis on thinking's temporal perspective implies that the opposing perspective, that of action, has a distinct temporal character of its own, or a different "field of experience" that is not the past. While Arendt elaborates no further in the lectures, I cannot overstate the importance of this temporal distinction for Arendt's project in Willing. In that work, Arendt develops the relationship between thinking and willing as one of conflicting temporal perspectives, a conflict between past and future. Arendt, by introducing these two temporal perspectives, begins to explain the origin and the longevity of the free will debate, and simultaneously resists the impulse to resolve the debate on its own

189

Ibid., 128-129. Emphasis added.

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terms. For Augustine, the appeal to happiness was meant to explain how a free will could arbitrate freely—i.e. not being determined by any particular reasons, desires, or causes—without, at the same time, arbitrating in a completely arbitrary manner. Happiness is meant to bridge the two perspectives: humans act out of concern for happiness and this concern explains much of human behavior, but it does not attempt to explain the particulars of conduct. Due to the speculative character and moral implications of Augustine's solution, Arendt addresses the impasse in a different manner. Also, instead of siding with one of the two perspectives against the other, Arendt introduces a third perspective—that of judging—to mitigate the problem. In the lectures, Arendt is ambiguous about the status of judging in relation to the other faculties. Consider the following passage: Until now we have spoken indiscriminately about these two functions of the will, its instigating and its arbitrating powers. All our descriptions drawn from Paul and Augustine about the two-fold brokenness of the will, the I-will-and-cannot in Paul, the Iwill-and-will-not in Augustine, actually apply only to the will insofar as it prompts into action, and not to its arbitrating function. For this latter function is in fact the same as judgment; the will is called upon to judge between different and opposite propositions, and whether this faculty of judgment, one of the most mysterious faculties of the human mind, should be said to be the will or reason or perhaps a third mental faculty, is at least an open question. 190 It appears that Arendt is uncomfortable making any definitive claims about the existence of a third faculty distinct from thinking and willing, even though she is confident about the distinction between the two functions of instigation and arbitration. In Life of the Mind, Arendt has no hesitations about treating what is here the arbitrating function of the will as its own autonomous faculty. A key implication of Arendt's maneuver is that willing is stripped of the arbitrating function and subsequently identified solely with the instigating function. Arendt acknowledges in the above passage that the main theoretical problems with free will attach to the will's instigating function—i.e. to the will as the spontaneous source of action. Arendt's account of judgment in Life of the Mind depends heavily on the distinction between willing and judging: the former corresponds to the perspective of the actor, and the latter corresponds to the perspective of the spectator. 190

Ibid., 131. Emphasis added.

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In the lectures, Nietzsche appears as the primary historical source for the distinction between the will's two functions, a distinction that the tradition often did not fully acknowledge. Although Nietzsche did not have much to say about arbitration, Arendt is "grateful that [Nietzsche] at least made the distinction between two factors which, in the traditional as well as in the modern discussions of the will, are left in confusion, namely, its commanding function and its function as arbiter." 191 Nietzsche focused his attention on the instigating function, of which he developed "two curiously unconnected and, as we shall see, contradictory descriptions," one that "follows the traditional, that is, Augustinian understanding" and one that is more original. 192 Nietzsche's first account centers on the concept of command: to will is to give orders to oneself, so that one part of the self is experienced as powerful and the other part as subservient. As in Augustine, the will is split and impotent insofar as commanding is necessary at all. Nietzsche's interpretation of the experience of willing "deviates decisively from [the traditional one] only in that it believes it detects within the inner household of the will a kind of tricky device, by virtue of which we are enabled to identify ourselves with the commanding part, and to overlook as it were the unpleasant, paralyzing sentiments of being coerced and hence of being called upon to resist." 193 Thus, the brokenness of the will is used, through an act of "self-delusion," to make one feel powerful, at least internally. However, this mental trick does not change the fact that the will is powerless to perform what it wills. Because the will remains split as long as the power to act is not supplied, the activity of willing can turn into a process of self-enslavement. "Or, to put it into Nietzschean terms: 'The will wants to be master of himself'...[which] means that I make a slave of myself—that I drag, as it were, the master-slave relationship, whose essence is the denial of freedom, into the intercourse and the relationship which I establish between me and myself." 194 While one gains the pleasure of having power over others (over oneself), it is also necessary that one experiences the displeasure of being coerced and enslaved.

191

Ibid., 136. Ibid., 131. 193 Ibid., 132. 194 Ibid., 133. 192

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Nietzsche's assumption in this first account is that power, and the pleasure associated with it, requires obstacles and resistance in order to be felt at all. The will commands because power is the will's goal to be achieved through struggle. Arendt explains that this "description of pleasure [relies] on the experience of being released from pain, and neither on absence of pain nor on the sheer presence of pleasure." 195 Arendt offers an example: "No doubt, the pleasure of drinking the most exquisite wine cannot be compared in intensity to the pleasure felt by a desperately thirsty man who gets a drink of water." 196 Pleasure and its necessarily accompanying pains are here conceptually connected to the necessities of the life process, and thus the will's self-conflict is analogous to the tensions within automatic and cyclical biological experiences. Nietzsche's second account rests on an opposing account of power and pleasure: "In the equation of will with will-to-power, power is by no means that which the will desires or wills, it is not its aim and not its content! Will and power, or feeling of power, are the same." On this account, the feeling of power that accompanies all experiences of willing derives from that fact that willing itself is a "phenomenon of abundance" that transcends all the necessities of life. Accordingly, pleasure does not need to be tied up with pain and desire. To take the other side of the above example: "the joy in drinking a glass of wine is independent of and unrelated to the feelings of thirst and the pleasure of quenching it," so much so that "you can enjoy a good glass of wine only when you are not thirsty." 197 The joy of willing, to keep with the analogy, does not depend on the displeasure of being subservient to the commanding self. The will enjoys its own "overflow of strength," its own creativity that transcends any forces of coercion and necessity. Both Nietzschean accounts have an experiential basis, but Arendt believes only the second account is sufficient to "explain why the will is seen as the source of spontaneity that prompts into action," as it avoids the dialectical entanglements of the first account, which inevitably ends in paralysis

195

Ibid. Ibid., 134. 197 Ibid. 196

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and self-conflict. This second instance of the will-to-power is not a two-in-one, and thus it can be the source of action in a way the first cannot be. The connection between selflessness and good action, then, derives from the fact that good action (like action in general) is not a self-relation, and the will that is inherent in good action is not the divided, conflicted will of Paul and Augustine. Strange as it may sound at first, Arendt sees our moral exemplars as clear instances of Nietzsche's second version of the will-topower: And it is of course also this abundance of strength, this extravagant generosity or "lavish will" that prompts men in wanting and loving to do good...What is most obvious in those few men we know of who devoted their whole lives to "doing good," like Jesus of Nazareth or St. Francis of Assisi, is certainly not meekness but rather an overflowing strength, maybe not of character but of their very nature. 198 The best moral examples are examples of moral power—although not always coupled with political power—of unexplainable goodness that transcends any necessities of life or society. 199 In regards to our earlier paradox between the self-focus of moral propositions and the selflessness of our moral examples, Arendt has given us a final clue by linking Nietzsche's will-to-power with Jesus' actions. I think Arendt is suggesting that the strength and power to perform good actions is only possible when one abandons the self-relation of willing. Unlike Socratic morality, which only keeps us from doing evil, "The ultimate criterion for positively doing good, on the other hand, we found to be selflessness, the losing of interest in yourself." 200 The will qua commanding self-relation is essentially self-interested even when one wills to do good. I must relinquish the possibility of reflectively witnessing my good deeds if they are to occur at all. Or, to put the same point in terms of command, good deeds require that I do not command myself to do them—they must flow from my "nature" without being forced. In "What is Freedom?," Arendt had spoken of an "inner source" of freedom but did not elaborate on her meaning. In

198

Ibid., 135. Emphasis added. In Chapter 1, I claimed that Arendt is not completely in line with Nietzsche's account of the will-topower because it is often cashed out in terms that indicate quasi-biological necessity. I find no reason to revise that claim. Arendt, in the lectures, reads Nietzsche's second account of will-to-power as a spontaneity that transcends the life process, and so Arendt is not linking the spontaneity of the will to the categories of life and labor. Even if Nietzsche made those connections at different points in his work, she takes his observations in a piecemeal fashion to avoid problems with his overall approach. 200 Ibid., 123. 199

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the lectures, Arendt's treatment of—and her general favor for—Nietzsche's second account of the will can be construed as a development of her thinking on the issue of freedom. Freedom's inner source is the will conceived as "abundance," "creativity," and "overflow of strength." What is "inner" about this source is that—following the quote about Jesus and Francis above—it defines the "very nature" of the person. 201 Arendt describes Jesus as a person who, more than anything else, "loved doing good." 202 Jesus' love of goodness could be contrasted with Paul's concern for being good. Paul's emphasis on Jesus' commands as moral rules to be consciously followed actually undermines doing good. The desire to be good generates the will's self-conflict. By trying to be perfect, the will encounters its own impotence and becomes paralyzed. Jesus' love of goodness is free of this concern for the moral status of the self, so that he responds in action to the needs of others without getting tangled up in himself. In this line of reflection, Arendt has uncovered an insight that will become central in the Willing volume. Here in the lectures, Arendt sees an affinity between love and the will's spontaneity in the example of Jesus, and Jesus' love of goodness is hinted as the source of his good deeds. Similarly, in Willing, what one loves is reflected by one's actions. A key limitation of Nietzsche's second account of the will-to-power, however, must be acknowledged: it lacks any element that would determine which actions—good, bad, or otherwise—are taken. This is the morally significant concern that Nietzsche tends to overlook, downplay, or even attack in his own philosophy. For Arendt, it is not enough to account for the spontaneity of the will in its instigating function, we must also determine how the spontaneity of the will is harnessed and directed. This problem is nearly identical to a difficulty I raised earlier in Chapter 1, where the question was how one "aligns with" principles in action, particularly if action is spontaneous and principles only appear once action has begun because principles inspire "from the outside." I chiefly claimed that the externality of inspiration is a problem for Arendt's account of action. In the lectures, Arendt frames the problem in a 201

I might argue that goodness cannot be expected of others in the same way as "right" conduct can be, mainly because goodness is much more deeply connected to the nature of the person. Goodness requires a nearly superhuman strength and selflessness that most people cannot achieve. Arendt makes no direct reference to this kind of reasoning in the lectures. 202 Ibid., 116.

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new way, again citing a passage from Nietzsche. The will's spontaneity is likened to dynamite as "a quantity of surplus strength that only waits to be used up no matter in what form or with what content." 203 The dynamite cannot direct itself—it is pure force waiting to be released, so the question remains: how does one direct the force of the will to good and right actions and avoid evil and bad ones? This question is not directly answered in the lectures, but we can infer two general and complementary (although perhaps not completely developed) answers from the text. As we have seen, conscience should keep us from committing extremely evil deeds as long as we are in the habit of thinking. Conscience constructs limits to the pure spontaneity of the will; hence, her emphasis on the experience of the "I-can't" in the contexts of both thinking and willing. The other answer is intimated by the structure of the final section of the lectures. Immediately after she poses of the question of how the will is directed, Arendt turns to the faculty of judgment. Although the transition between the two issues is somewhat indefinite, it is at least clear that Arendt views judgment as the faculty that orients and directs the will's spontaneity. To this point in the lectures, Arendt has built up an array of tensions. Arendt has juxtaposed the negative morality of conscience with the morality of goodness. Conscience limits action but does not promote it—it generates the "I-can't" out of concern for oneself. The two-in-one of thinking and the connected need for self-harmony are the basis of conscience. By contrast, good action emerges from the spontaneity of the will and a certain disregard for oneself and a focus on the other. The good will enjoys its own abundance without regard for knowing that one is good. Doing good requires that one not engage in any self-relation—i.e. that one avoid being a reflective two-in-one as one acts. Arendt's treatment of judgment is meant to smooth over these tensions. To put it almost too simplistically, judgment synthesizes the concern for oneself that arises from the thinking activity with the concern for others that is central to good action and the will's spontaneity.

203

Ibid., 135.

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Looking forward to Life of the Mind, we can see where Arendt felt her argument in the lectures was inadequate with regards to willing. The key problem that Arendt develops in the lectures is the "brokenness" of the will, that willing is a self-conflict that paralyzes action. Augustine becomes a major figure because of his insights on this issue. The same problem is central to Willing, where Arendt investigates the problem in even more detail, especially in regards to Augustine's work. Arendt's response to the problem in the lectures is minimal. While she marks out the two functions of the will, and argues that the second, instigating function does not involve the same brokenness as the first, it is still mysterious exactly how these two functions belong to the same faculty. Why are the two functions both assigned to the will? Arendt's ambivalence about the independence of arbitration—i.e. whether judgment is its own faculty or a mere function of the will—shows that her reflections are incomplete at this stage. In Willing, the historical aspect of Arendt's treatment of the will is expanded to include Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Aquinas, and Heidegger along with the thinkers from the lectures, Paul, Epictetus, Augustine, and Nietzsche. In the broader historical presentation, Duns Scotus emerges as the "hero" who is best able to respond to the phenomena of willing. In retrospect, Duns Scotus' absence from the lectures is further evidence that Arendt's reflections mature in the years following the lectures.

Judging in the Lectures Within the context of the lectures, Arendt's focus on judgment in the final pages provides some solutions to certain problems she raised about morality. But it also provides another way for us to understand how she is appropriating Kant. In regards to Kant's moral philosophy, Arendt is sympathetic to some elements but heavily critical of others at the same time. By contrast, Arendt overwhelmingly affirms Kant's account of judgment. These general stances toward Kant's critical project are sustained through Life of the Mind. As we have seen, Arendt rejects Kant's account of the will in his moral philosophy because, for Kant, the will functioned merely as a element of reason and lacked the spontaneity to instigate action. However, Arendt turns to Kant to explain the arbitrating function of the will, which the tradition "usually 132

discussed under the title of liberum arbitrium." 204 Arendt introduces judgment as the "true arbiter between right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, true and untrue," which indicates that Arendt will use Kant's account of judgment in a way he never intended. 205 For Kant, the kind of judgment with which Arendt is concerned would never apply to morals. To be clear, Kant distinguishes between two kinds of judgment, both of which decide "the relation between a particular instance and the general, be the general a rule or a standard or an ideal or some other kind of measurement." In determinant judgment, as in "all instances of reason and knowledge, judgment subsumes the particular under its appropriate general rule." 206 Thus, moral judgment in Kant, as the application of the moral law through reason, is a version of determinant judgment: humans know exactly what the moral law dictates, and we must apply it consistently and universally. Reflective judgment, by contrast, comes into play "where no fixed rules and standards are applicable, as in questions of taste, and where, therefore, the 'general' must be seen as contained in the particular." 207 In Kant, this kind of judgment was needed especially in matters of aesthetic discrimination: "No one can define Beauty; and when I say that this tulip is beautiful, I don't mean, all tulips are beautiful, therefore this one is too, nor do I apply a concept of beauty valid for all objects. What Beauty, something general, is, I know because I see it and state it when confronted with it in particulars." 208 Arendt defends her extension of Kant's reflective judgment into the moral realm by restating the concerns that prompted her foray into moral issues. The collapse of the moral tradition, along with the unprecedented occurrences of totalitarianism and her own experience with Eichmann, have demonstrated the need for dealing with moral phenomena the way that Kant treated aesthetics. She writes: Kant himself analyzed primarily aesthetic judgments, because it seemed to him that only in this field do we judge without having general rules which are either demonstrably true or self-evident to go by. If therefore I shall now use his results for the field of morality, I assume that the field of human intercourse and conduct [i.e. morality] and the phenomena we confront in it are somehow of the same nature...Kant was outraged that the question of 204

Ibid., 136. Ibid., 137. 206 Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," 137. 207 Ibid., 138. 208 Ibid. 205

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beauty should be decided arbitrarily, without possibility of dispute and mutual agreement, in the spirit of de gustibus non disputandum est. More often than not, even in circumstances which are very far from any catastrophic indication, we find ourselves today in exactly the same position when it comes to discussions of moral issues. 209 Arendt aims to defend the ability to make judgments about good and evil, right and wrong, without pretending that moral judgments are based on universal rules or on objective knowledge.210 In moral matters, Arendt thinks we can arbitrate freely without "arbitrating arbitrarily." Arendt is attracted to Kant's notion of reflective judgment for another reason: only in the realm of aesthetics did Kant conceive of humanity as essentially plural. Socratic morality and conscience has limited relevance—remember, its relevance is restricted to emergencies and crises—because it potentially pits the individual against all others by making self-harmony the ultimate criterion. Kant's moral philosophy has the same limitation. Only when it comes to these judgments of taste does Kant find a situation in which the Socratic "It is better to be at odds with the whole world than, being one, to be at odds with myself" loses some of its validity. Here I can't be at odds with the whole world, though I may still find myself at odds with a good part of it. If we consider morality in more than its negative aspect—the refraining from doing wrong, which may mean refraining from doing anything—then we shall have to consider human conduct in terms which Kant thought appropriate only for aesthetic conduct. And the reason why he discovered moral significance in this seemingly so different sphere of human life was that only here did he consider men in the plural, as living in a community. 211 For Arendt, judgment overcomes the egoism of Kantian moral thinking by shifting the frame of reference from the individual in isolation to the community and the human world of plurality. Kant's reflective judgment, when applied to moral issues, allows the moral agent to be informed by more than just selfconcern and autonomy. On Arendt's account, judging is closely tied to our ability to think from the perspectives of others. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt once portrayed Eichmann's thoughtlessness as an inability to think from the perspectives of others, as a lack of imagination as to the way others see the world. In the

209

Ibid., 138-139. Cf. Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," 41: "Hence, the rather optimistic view of human nature, which speaks so clearly from the verdict not only of the judges in the Jerusalem trial but of all postwar trials, presupposes an independent human faculty, unsupported by law and public opinion, that judges in full spontaneity every deed and intent anew whenever the occasion arises." Emphasis added. 211 Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," 142. 210

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lectures, considering the perspective of others is not considered a function of thinking, for thinking is primarily self-focused and self-relating. To think is to try to understand reality on one's own. By contrast, judging is the faculty that puts our mental life in more direct relation to others. As Arendt explains, the other-related character of judgment is dependent on common sense and imagination: Common sense for Kant did not mean a sense common to all of us, but strictly that sense which fits us into a community with others, makes us members of it and enables us to communicate things given by our five private senses. This it does with the help of another faculty, the faculty of imagination...Common sense, by virtue of its imaginative capacity, can have present in itself all those who actually are absent. It can think, as Kant says, in the place of everybody else, so that when somebody makes the judgment, this is beautiful, he does not mean merely to say this pleases me (as if, for instance, chicken soup may please me but may not be pleasant to others), but he claims assent from others because in judging he has already taken them into account and hence hopes that his judgments will carry a certain general, though perhaps not universal validity. 212 Imagination, by taking into account the perspectives of others, builds common sense between people because each one has an "enlarged mentality" which enables communication about the world that is shared between them. The validity of one's judgments "will reach as far as the community of which my common sense makes me a member,"

213

and will be valid only for those who participate in this

imaginative activity. Those who "refuse to judge"—i.e. refuse to consider the perspective of others— should not dispute the validity of my judgment. While imagination must, in this way, precede genuine interaction with others, it is also strengthened and sharpened by continued interaction: "The validity of common sense grows out of the intercourse of people." Judgment's common sense, then, is "neither objective and universal nor subjective, depending on personal whim, but intersubjective or representative." 214 Crucially, judgment is not the same as sense perception because when I judge I must represent something which is not directly sensed, the perspectives of others, in order for my judgment to have anything but subjective validity. Arendt gives an excellent example: "Let me illustrate this: suppose I look

212

Ibid., 139-140. Ibid., 140. 214 Ibid., 141. 213

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at a specific slum dwelling and I perceive in this particular building the general notion which it does not exhibit directly, the notion of poverty and misery. I arrive at this notion by representing to myself how I would feel if I had to live there, that is, I try to think in the place of the slum-dweller." 215 Certain phenomena, Arendt suggests, are not directly sensed but are perceived only by representing in an imaginative way how others experience them. In this case, "poverty" is not a strictly objective feature of the slum, which anyone with correctly functioning eyes can see. In fact, Arendt admits, many people may not perceive the situation in the same way: The judgment I shall come up with will by no means necessarily be the same as that of the inhabitants whom time and hopelessness may have dulled to the outrage of their condition, but it will become an outstanding example for my further judging of these matters. Furthermore, while I take into account others when judging, this does not mean that I conform in my judgment with their's. I still speak with my own voice and I do not count noses in order to arrive at what I think is right. But my judgment is no longer subjective either, in the sense that I arrive at my conclusions by taking only myself into account. 216 Here, we see that judging takes into account the perspectives of others, but it is also directly responsive to reality—in this case, the slum. Let me highlight this important aspect of Arendt's account: the judge, although considerate of others and the way others might see the world, retains her independence in relation to reality and experience. Even if certain others do not "see" the poverty of the slums, the judge trusts her own common sense in relation to the phenomena. In instances when others are refusing to judge, this aspect of independence becomes even more important. When judgments are communicated, they can be seen as a call to others to pay attention to reality and address the relevant aspects of the common world. On issues that require judgment, then, it is essential that one be concerned with others' opinions but still remain independent. Judgment is a self-relation, but also an activity where the self is positioned—or, we might even say, positions itself—as a member of the shared world. One must address others and the common world without denying the validity of one's own experience. For Arendt's moral reflections, judgment brings together the concern for self, which we found prevalent in moral philosophy

215 216

Ibid. Ibid.

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generally and in the experience of conscience, with the concern for others' perspectives that is so important to action and particularly good action. Judging partially bridges two distinct modes of existence, acting and thinking: "The main distinction, politically speaking, between Thought and Action lies in that I am only with my own self or the self of another while I am thinking, whereas I am in the company of the many the moment I start to act." 217 By representing a number of perspectives, judging prepares the self for entrance into the realm of plurality and action. As far as judging is merely a mental activity, it simulates the interaction of human relationships. If we consider judging as a worldly activity in which the judge publically addresses the world with his opinions about particular events and persons, then judging can at times be equivalent to action. I believe Arendt's judgment of Eichmann is a perfect example: by giving an unwelcome judgment of events, the judge can initiate something new. Even in instances like these, the distinction between acting and judging can be maintained by delineating what events constitute the frame of reference. The judge is the spectator of events in which she was not an actor, even though a judgment may initiate new events in which she plays an active role. In other words, in judging the past events independently, one may be simultaneously acting, bringing about a novel future. If judgment is meant to arbitrate non-arbitrarily, as Arendt suggests, then there must be some standards by which to do so. Arendt is concerned "whether there is really nothing to hold onto when we are called upon to decide that this is right and this is wrong, as we decide this is beautiful and this is ugly." For the most part in everyday life, Arendt admits, we behave "without much thinking and without much judging in Kant's sense" and we "actually subsume particular cases under general rules without ever questioning the rules." 218 In that sense, each of us behaves according to the conventional morality of our society. But, if we are to participate in judging, conventional rules cannot be our standards. Instead, the

217 218

Ibid., 106. Ibid., 143.

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standards of judgment are examples: "We cannot hold onto anything general, but to some particular that has become an example." 219 In Kant, reflective judgment utilizes examples somewhat analogously to the way that determinant judgment requires schematic concepts. Arendt explains the comparison: In a way, this example resembles the schematic building I carry in my mind to recognize as buildings all structures that are housing something or somebody. But the example, in contradistinction to the schema, is supposed to give us a difference in quality. Let me illustrate this difference with an instance outside the moral sphere, and let us ask what is a table? In answer to this question, you either call upon the form or the (Kantian) schema of a table present in your imagination, to which every table must conform in order to be a table at all. Let's call this the schematic table...Or you can gather together all sorts of tables, strip them of their secondary qualities, such as color, number of legs, material, etc., until you arrive at the minimum qualities common to all of them. Let us call this the abstract table. Or you can finally choose the best among all tables you know of or can imagine, and say this is an example of how tables should be constructed and how they should look. Let us call this the exemplary table. What you have done is to single out, eximere, some particular instance which now becomes valid for other particular instances. There are many concepts in the historical and political sciences which are arrived at in this way. Most political virtues and vices are thought of in terms of exemplary individuals: Achilles for courage, Solon for insight (wisdom), etc. Or take the instance of Caesarism or Bonapartism: you have taken Napolean or Caesar as an example, that is, as some particular person exhibiting qualities that are valid for other instances. 220 For my present purposes, I wish to emphasize two points in the above passage. First, Arendt mentions that the exemplary table could be one that is imagined and not directly experienced. In the moral sphere, this holds as well: "We judge and tell right from wrong by having present in our mind some incident and some person, absent in time or space, that have become examples. There are many such examples. They can lie far back in the past or they can be among the living. They need not be historically real."221 Imagination is not just important in thinking from the perspective of others, but also in creatively imagining examples that can become a common basis for judging. 222 Secondly, the use of examples requires an exercise of choice. In moral judgment, I choose among given instances and isolate the best or the worst as the measure of right and wrong conduct. Examples are chosen for their quality, but the

219

Ibid. Ibid., 143-144. 221 Ibid., 145. 222 In this context, literature may play a very crucial role in moral judgment because the moral realities of the narrative depend heavily upon imagination, both of the writer and of the reader. 220

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validity of the qualitative judgment is not automatic. The schematic table is, like the exemplary table, a product of imagination, but it is not chosen amongst alternatives and "singled out" as the standard of quality. A schematic concept is automatic—a "default" measure of objectivity—and it does not require choice and is not qualitative. A main advantage of examples being "the guideposts of all moral thought," as Arendt describes, is that the emphasis falls again on persons as opposed to formulas or rules. Arendt quotes Nietzsche for support: It is a denaturation of morality to separate the act from the agent, to direct hatred or contempt against the 'sin' [the deed instead of the doer], to believe that an action could be good or evil in itself...[In every action] all depends upon who does it, the same 'crime' may be in one case the highest privilege, and in another the stigma [of evil]. Actually, it is the self-relatedness of him who judges that interprets an action or rather its actor with respect to...resemblance or 'non-affinity' between the agent and the judge (Will to Power, no. 292). 223 The judge does not evaluate an action in regard to its most general objective characteristics, but in light of who in particular is doing the deed. The morally relevant qualities of a person are not gleaned from a single isolated incident—they are disclosed as one thinks through the story of who the person is. But, importantly, the judgment of another person—how the spectator-judge "interprets" and evaluates the actor—reflects how the judge thinks of herself. If the judgment is negative, this means that the judge claims a sort of incompatibility ("non-affinity") between herself and the agent. If the judgment is positive, the judge affirms the agent as one with whom she has an affinity. Hence, in the activity of judging, I choose my company, and I also determine indirectly who I wish to be as well. From our discussion today about Kant, I hope it became clearer why I raised, by way of Cicero and Meister Eckhart, the question of whom we wish to be together with. I tried to show that our decisions about right and wrong will depend upon our choice of company, of those with whom we wish to spend our lives. And again, this company is chosen by thinking in examples, in examples of persons dead or alive, real or fictitious, and in examples of incidents past and present. 224

223 224

Ibid. Ibid., 146.

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By referring back to her earlier treatment of Cicero and Eckhart, Arendt presents us with a link between conscience and judging: both ultimately depend on our choice of company. In this context, as Arendt is discussing mental and not worldly activities, "choosing company" is a metaphorical notion that is meant to capture the idea that moral judgments are generated by the process of selecting examples of persons. In the lectures, Arendt's explanation of the relation between conscience and judgment is limited to this single, tantalizing insight. We will return to this connection in the later chapters. To close the lectures, Arendt reiterates her concerns about the banality of evil in terms of how we choose our company. The "greatest danger" is that people will be indifferent, that "any company will be good enough" for them. And connected to this, only a bit less dangerous, is another very common modern phenomenon, the widespread tendency to refuse to judge at all. Out of the unwillingness or inability to choose one's examples and one's company, and out of the unwillingness or inability to relate to others through judgment, arise the real skandala, the real stumbling blocks which human powers can't remove because they are not caused by human and humanly understandable motives. Therein lies the horror and, at the same time, the banality of evil. 225 Using Arendt's earlier language, the claim is that nobodies do not choose their company at all, and by accepting whatever company comes their way, they fail to constitute themselves as definite persons. From this passage, I would suggest that the subjective criterion of conscience depends on judging, and particularly on our choice of negative or immoral examples. If I have not thought through any examples of wrong or evil conduct, and mentally rejected them as company, I will be unable to recognize when I should not participate in certain wrong or evil actions. In other words, if I am unwilling to judge and condemn any examples of others' conduct, I will not constitute limits for myself as to what I am willing to do. I wish to briefly consider how Arendt understands the function of moral concepts—good, bad, evil, right, and wrong—in the activity of judgment. In the lectures, the concept of evil is consistently linked to the claim that "this should never have happened," or in terms of persons, "he should never have been born." In judging some event or person to be "evil," I speak an "unqualified no to a particular event 225

Ibid.

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or to one particular person." 226 Arendt also repeatedly states that extreme evil is that which cannot be overcome by human means, by either punishment or forgiveness. Arendt provides only isolated hints at the meaning of other moral terms. In one key passage, she begins by discussing the difficulty of judging the "horrors" of recent history. Arendt explains that, as "I think back," the traditional "moral categories" seem completely inadequate to the new phenomena of evil. Then Arendt continues, mentioning the notions of good and bad: "We shall not be able to become reconciled to it, to come to terms with it, as we must with everything that is past—either because it was bad and we need to overcome it or because it was good and we cannot bear to let it go."227 In this passage, judging appears as oriented to the past and is connected to the task of reconciliation. Reconciliation does not take a single form, but is done in relation to the good and the bad in different ways. In contrast to evil, with which we cannot be reconciled, "bad" are those events and deeds we wish to overcome and we deem to be within our power to forgive and punish. I might suggest that we speak a "no" to those bad things but not an "unqualified no"—we need not utterly reject the person involved and we are not powerless in the face of the events. Those things we deem morally "good" are those we feel compelled to remember so they are not lost to time. Remembrance plays a key role in our task of judging the past, just as it does in thinking and conscience. The bad needs to be remembered as that which must be overcome, for it belongs to the context of meaningful action. Throughout the lectures, Arendt is also adamant that we must think about and remember the evil of totalitarianism even if we cannot be reconciled to it. Remembering evil reminds us of our human finitude and our inability to be completely reconciled to the world as it is. We must at least admit that horrific evil has occurred, and be strong enough to admit our impotence in regard to it. In these lectures, when Arendt is discussing morality on her own terms—as opposed to interpreting other thinkers' positions—it appears that moral concepts, at least in their most general

226 227

Ibid., 126. Ibid., 55.

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meanings, are defined in respect to time. As we continue, I will insist on the temporal elements of moral judgment, for Life of the Mind is explicitly structured around issues of temporality. For Arendt, goodness and evil are both anti-political. Arendt mentions "the simple fact that people are at least as often tempted to do good" as they are tempted to do evil, a fact that illustrates the political importance of avoiding the inclination to do good in the public realm. When someone is tempted to do good, she wants to do it but recognizes the inappropriate nature of the good act in the realm of politics. Arendt finds support in both Machiavelli and a story about Kant. For Kant, the problem with good deeds is that they cannot be universalized. For some time Kant, as Arendt tells the story, had the habit of giving money to the poor on his daily rounds and had enjoyed it. He ended his habit only because it "could in no way be reconciled with his moral formula, the categorical imperative." 228 Stepping out of Kant's moral philosophy, the insight is that good acts cannot be justified politically, because politics demands a level of universality. Good acts cannot be expected of others (or even of oneself), and therefore goodness cannot function as a political principle. In Machiavelli, learning "how not to be good" is the key requirement for the politician: "For Machiavelli, the standard by which you judge is the world and not the self—the standard is exclusively political—and that is what makes him so important for moral philosophy." 229 Morally good actions cannot be demanded of others and cannot be the basis of politics. 230 For Arendt, both good and evil are extremes, rare in the course of human life. By contrast, I wonder if Arendt—although she never addresses the issue as far as I know—would grant that the concepts of "right" and "wrong" are moral standards that are amenable to everyday human affairs. In other words, right and wrong fall within the capacity of all human beings and can be public standards in a way that good and evil cannot be.

228

Ibid., 80. Ibid. 230 Canovan introduces a helpful distinction between the "good man" (goodness in Jesus and Paul's sense) and the "good citizen" (virtue in the public sphere) to clarify the relation between morality and politics in Arendt's work. See Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 178. 229

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The failure to judge opens up the possibility for extreme evil to become pervasive. At the beginning of the lectures, Arendt mentions how her book on Eichmann had ignited a controversy that revealed a serious crisis of judgment in contemporary public life, "an odd tendency to take the side of the culprit whoever he might be at the time" and condemn those "who dared to sit in judgment." 231 Arendt had been criticized for her willingness to judge Eichmann, and we can now see how the lectures respond to the criticism. For Arendt, those who merely side with the accused at every turn do not choose the company they keep. The failure to judge is a failure to confront reality and make decisions about who you wish yourself and others to be in the world. The judge is taking on the basic human responsibility of becoming a person, and choosing one's place in the shared public world.

Conclusions Let me summarize some of the problems that remain and gesture towards Arendt's project in Life of the Mind. First of all, the moral faculties of thinking, willing, and judging are themselves mental activities, but Arendt has not directly addressed the nature of the mind. This issue drives Arendt's method in Thinking and Willing, and would have been crucial to Judging as well. In the lectures, the relationships between the mental faculties are either ambiguous or left completely undetermined. Arendt admitted as much about the relation between willing and judging. The relation between thinking and judging is also ambiguous at this stage. Arendt claims that conscience is a relative and subjective standard, varying widely between different persons. In other words, on Arendt's Socratic view, there is no inherent content to conscience; the content is subjectively determined. Arendt's appeal to "choosing one's company" seems to suggest that the content of conscience depends on the faculty of judgment. This connection between the conscience and judgment needs to be fleshed out in more detail. Also, the simple opposition between thinking and willing in the lectures is developed into a central theme of Life of the Mind.

231

Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," 59.

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A potentially objectionable feature of Arendt's discussion of the mental faculties is her reliance on metaphor, especially in working through the historical accounts. The Socratic account of thinking and conscience depends on the metaphor of friendship, and many accounts of the will include descriptions of the will as a "commander" within the household of the soul. Metaphor, one might think, has no place in a rigorous investigation into the human mind. In the lectures, the use of metaphor is undefended and Arendt shows no signs of being bothered by the significant role the metaphors are playing. In Thinking, Arendt will explicitly defend metaphorical descriptions of the mental faculties; in fact, Arendt will argue that metaphors are necessary to communicate about the invisible workings of mental life. In the lectures, the two central metaphors of friendship and command carry important moral connotations. Thinking is subject metaphorically to the same requirements and limitations as friendship in the world of plurality. Thinking also operates according to the same moral principles as friendship: equality, communication, and cooperation. Likewise, the will in its commanding mode operates on the principles of sovereignty and obedience. In the lectures, the problematic of obedience takes central stage: Arendt goes in search of a description of the will that avoids the implications of obedience and command. In Willing, Arendt's historical approach is aimed at this same goal. While the description of the will as a commanding faculty is phenomenologically accurate, Arendt wants to supplement this description with others that effectively combat or restrict the problematic connotations of the metaphor. In the lectures, judging is associated with the position of the spectator: "The arbiter was originally the man who approached (adbitere) an occurrence as an unconcerned spectator, an eyewitness, and because of this unconcern was held to be capable of impartial judgment." 232 Given the argument of the lectures, impartiality is judging's crucial moral aspect. The judge is not merely self-interested as the thinker is. The judge is also not concerned with doing, which allows him to avoid the difficulties of willing.

232

Ibid., 137.

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Let us return to the issue of individual moral responsibility. In the context of the lectures, every person is responsible for setting limits to what she is willing to do. Through the habitual practice of thinking, the self builds an awareness of what she cannot do if she wants to maintain the activity of thought. By responding to reality and remembering the past, the self becomes grounded and fully formed as a person who is not swept away by changes in the world. These issues of conscience illustrate how moral responsibility is not based on "controlling" our actions as a maker controls his products. Moral responsibility is instead based on our ability to limit our actions by deciding when we will participate and when we will not. In this choice between participation and nonparticipation, each person is individually responsible. The choice reflects our judgments about who we are willing to keep as company, who we wish to share the world with. At this stage in Arendt's thought, there are still some unanswered questions about responsibility, the most important of which revolve around freedom's relation to the mental faculties. Thinking, willing, and judging are mental faculties that make us capable of moral responsibility in the eyes of others because these mental faculties have a role in deciding what we do and what we do not do. However, are we free in our mental life? Are we free to think or not to think? Are we free to judge or not to judge? From Arendt's presentation in the lectures, it is unclear how to begin answering these kinds of questions. In Life of the Mind, Arendt investigates the freedom and spontaneity of the mental faculties.

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PART II: ARENDT'S MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN LIFE OF THE MIND To this point, we have covered much of Arendt's corpus as a preparation for Life of the Mind, but now we can begin to dig into that wonderfully complex and illuminating text. In each of the following three chapters, I will examine one of the three volumes of Life of the Mind, beginning with Thinking. In working through the text, we will need to remain focused on two distinct sets of issues. The first set are the moral issues, and the second set are the questions about the nature of the mind in general. While my reading of the text is informed heavily by my understanding of her earlier work, my main goal is to be fair to the text itself, to read it on its own terms. At times, I will use several of Arendt's other works to explain difficult sections of Life of the Mind, but for the most part my energies will be spent unraveling the intricate reflections that Arendt has given us.

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CHAPTER 3: THINKING Method and Questions I will dwell first on Arendt's introduction to the Thinking volume for two key purposes. First, the introduction validates my methodological approach to Life of the Mind as a whole. To an extent, Arendt frames the work as a response to the moral questions raised by the Eichmann trial, questions which we began to deal with in the last chapter. Second, the introduction reveals Arendt's reasons for dealing with the mental faculty of thinking in more depth and detail than she had previously achieved. Particularly, it is the nature of thinking as a mental activity that interests Arendt. Arendt placed an epigraph on the title page of the introduction. The epigraph is significant for its content, which foreshadows some of Arendt's main arguments in Thinking, and because of its author, her former teacher, Martin Heidegger. It reads: Thinking does not bring knowledge as do the sciences. Thinking does not produce usable practical wisdom. Thinking does not solve the riddles of the universe. Thinking does not endow us directly with the power to act. 1 Arendt's epigraph immediately indicates what thinking cannot do and, by consequence, distinguishes thinking from other human activities that possess different goals and purposes. In her analysis of Life of the Mind, Elizabeth Young-Breuhl claims that Arendt's method is to build a "via negativa" through which to "reveal the autonomy of the thinking faculty." 2 The epigraph clues us into the via negativa approach and hints at the central questions of the text: What is thinking? What does thinking do? What does thinking achieve? Why do we think if thinking does not reach these other goals? The difficulty with Arendt's main question "what is thinking?" is that it is a reflexive question—any answer will be procured only through the activity of thinking itself. In other words, the text is a result of Arendt's thinking about

1

Arendt, Thinking, 2. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, "Reflections on Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind," in Political Theory 10 (1982): 280. 2

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thinking, and her treatment needs to tell us how it is possible to do so. Arendt is aware of this sort of problem throughout Life of the Mind. Her via negativa approach shows she is careful to avoid giving quick, definitive conclusions about the nature of thinking and the mind in general. In the introduction, Arendt explains that her "preoccupation with mental activities has two rather different origins, the first of which came from my attending the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem." 3 In Eichmann, Arendt had been confronted with a new phenomenon, the banality of evil, that was contrary to the traditional conceptions of evil. [W]hat I was confronted with was utterly different and still undeniably factual. I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer—at least the very effective one now on trial—was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. 4 Eichmann's "only notable characteristic" was "something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness." 5 As in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt stresses how Eichmann's thoughtlessness appeared in his use of language: Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardizes codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence. If we were responsive to this claim all the time, we would soon be exhausted; Eichmann differed from the rest of us only in that he clearly knew of no such claim at all. 6 Arendt suggests that the absence of thinking is commonplace, at least to a certain degree, and is connected to our conventional uses of language. Eichmann's banality appeared in his complete remoteness from reality during the trial, a situation of extreme importance for which his usual mode of expression did not suffice. He could not comprehend what was happening to him because his own use of language kept him from dealing with the new circumstances.

3

Arendt, Thinking, 3. Ibid., 4. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 4

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As I have stressed in earlier chapters, Arendt insisted throughout her work that theorizing should operate with close attention to facts and experience. The above passage expresses the reason for that conviction: reality makes a "claim" on every human being; reality demands to be thought about. At this point in the text what constitutes this claim is not fleshed out, and Arendt does not use this same phrasing again. In relation to legal and moral issues, I think the claim of reality is closely connected with the issue of responsibility. For Arendt, the court rightly held Eichmann culpable for not thoughtfully attending to what was going on and what he was doing. Reality makes a claim on our thinking attention primarily in the context of our worldly relationships with other people—i.e. in the midst of plurality. In the case of Eichmann, he seemed to have lost his ability to recognize this claim in any circumstance (or least those circumstances that mattered to the court), so that he was simultaneously out of touch with the world and with others. But, since we cannot think about all events and facts due to the limits of our mental energy, the questions arise: when and to what should we thoughtfully attend? If we cannot reflect on everything, what should we attend to in thought? These questions point to thinking's relationships with the other faculties, willing and judging. It is only in discussing those faculties that we can understand how we choose what to think about. 7 Given the combination of Eichmann's evil deeds and his thoughtlessness, the "question that imposed itself was: Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or attract attention, regardless of results or specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually 'condition' them against it?" 8 To this question, Arendt had given a preliminary answer in her lecture courses. Thinking, by virtue of generating the moral limits of conscience, is able to keep us from participating in extreme evil. The introduction hints to the same answer—which is only addressed much later in the text—by referencing the common

7

Later in Thinking, Arendt will insist on the "need" of human beings to think about reality and discover the meaning of facts and events. This terminology is the closest correlate to the "claim" of reality that we find in the introduction. The need to think is general and does not specify what thinking will attend to, just as the claim of reality is made by all facts and events. The claim of reality and the need of reason are closely connected phenomena, the former carrying an objective, worldly emphasis and the latter carrying a subjective, mental emphasis. 8 Ibid., 5.

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idea that conscience is only experienced as a negative phenomenon: morally decent people experience a bad conscience, and evil ones lack a conscience altogether and are unbothered by their deeds. Even though the activity of thinking does not aim for any particular moral outcomes or effects, it "results in conscience as its byproduct." 9 The second impetus for Arendt's study of the mind came from concerns that were left over from Human Condition. The moral questions surrounding Eichmann "were apt to renew in me certain doubts that had been plaguing me" about the relationship between theory and practice, between the mind and the world. Just as Arendt had been suspicious that our understanding of the vita activa was distorted by the philosophical prejudice for the vita contemplativa, she was also concerned that the life of the mind might be distorted by philosophers as well. For the philosophers, the differences between labor, work, and action had been insignificant in comparison to the basic contrast between thinking and doing. Arendt suspects that this basic contrast has been at play in the opposite direction as well: the differences between the many mental capacities have not been carefully attended to. One reason the tradition does not offer many good answers to the question "What is thinking?" is due to the fact that thinking's active nature is obscured by its ties to the usually more highly favored capacity for contemplation, which "is not an activity but a passivity." 10 The more important difference between worldly activities and the life of the mind is not that the mind is inactive but that the mental activities do not appear to the senses. To close the Human Condition, Arendt had referenced a quotation from Cato that captured this idea: "Never is he more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself." Arendt repeats Cato's expression in the introduction to frame her basic questions: "What are we 'doing' when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow-men, are together with no one but ourselves?" 11 Part of the urgency for her questions comes from the way Arendt understands the status of philosophy and metaphysics in the twentieth century. In the post-metaphysical context of Life of the 9

Ibid., 192. Ibid., 6. 11 Ibid., 8. See also, Arendt, Human Condition, 325. 10

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Mind, her questions appear unimportant because they seemingly belong to the traditional, metaphysical mode of philosophy. Arendt aims to distance herself from metaphysics without, at the same time, validating positivism. Arendt is clear that her reflections are not primarily a defense of thinking against positivism. The debate between positivists and metaphysically-minded philosophers, she claims, is misguided because each side is too simplistic, relying on the traditional dichotomy between the "sensory and the supersensory." 12 The positivist denies the meaningfulness of philosophical questions, and the philosopher denies the primacy of sense perception in human knowledge. 13 The difficulties of her questions "are caused not so much by those to whom they are 'meaningless' anyhow as by the party under attack." 14 Thus, for Arendt, the "crisis of philosophy and metaphysics" is a crisis internal to the discipline of philosophy, triggered by philosophers' recognition that the tradition is over and not by anything unique to positivism. Arendt believes the crisis does not indicate the end of thinking per se, but the end of a certain mode of thinking. Traditional ways of thinking are no longer plausible but the traditional questions are not now suddenly meaningless as positivism would have it. Those questions just need to be reframed and re-answered. 15 Positivism and metaphysics are both nonsensical outside the bounds of the tradition. What has come to an end is the basic distinction between the sensory and the supersensory, together with the notion, at least as old as Parmenides, that whatever is not given to the senses—God or Being or the First Principles and Causes (archai) or the Ideas—is more real, more truthful, more meaningful than what appears, that it is not just beyond sense perception but above the world of the senses. What is "dead" is not only the localization of such "eternal truth" but also the distinction itself. 16 The loss of the "two world" distinction means that, while the older metaphysical claims have become implausible, so too has positivism. The meaning of the sensory world relies on its distinction from the supersensory, so that the complete rejection of the supersensory is actually self-negating. 17

12

Ibid., 10. Ibid., 8. 14 Ibid., 9. 15 Ibid., 10. 16 Ibid. 17 Here, Arendt is following Nietzsche's argumentation from Twilight of the Idols, especially "How the 'True World' finally became a fable." 13

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Thus, a proper beginning point is the fact that "our ability to think is not at stake; we are what men always have been—thinking beings," which means "no more than that men have an inclination, perhaps a need, to think beyond the limitations of knowledge, to do more with this ability than use it as an instrument for knowing and doing." 18 Arendt's project is conceived as an attempt to investigate the mental faculties without the traditional framework of metaphysics. However, while the traditional systems of thought have become implausible, we cannot begin completely anew when it comes to questions about the mind. Arendt believes we must use the tradition because it is the "only record we possess" of what the activity of thinking means. It is the mistakes of the tradition—the "metaphysical fallacies"—that are most telling. None of the systems, none of the doctrines transmitted to us by the great thinkers may be convincing or even plausible to modern readers; but none of them, I shall try to argue here, is arbitrary and none can be simply dismissed as sheer nonsense. On the contrary, the metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues to what thinking means to those who engage in it. 19 As in Human Condition and elsewhere, Arendt's method in Thinking is to use the resources of the tradition to pinpoint experiences that were covered over or misinterpreted because of philosophy's goals—to search for descriptions of the mental activities within a tradition that has often forgotten them. Philosophy, by seeking to achieve knowledge and truth, often overlooked the basic human need to think about the world and experience. In its most basic mode, the activity of thinking is the natural response to the "claim" of reality on our attention. Thinking arises from our need to understand the meaning of events and experiences. For Arendt's project, the crisis of philosophy presents two key advantages with regard to the past. The first is that the past can now be viewed in new ways, without the weight of tradition. While the tradition was intact, it restricted the ways in which the past could be interpreted. With its collapse, the threat is that we will be unable to understand the basic human experiences of the mind, and that the experiences of others in the past will have no meaning for us. Arendt aims to overcome "the growing

18 19

Ibid., 11-12. Ibid., 12.

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inability to move, on no matter what level, in the realm of the invisible," so that we might retain the "treasures" of the past. 20 No matter how implausible the metaphysical fallacies may be, they still link us to the thinkers of the past and can illuminate our own experiences of mental activities. The second advantage of the end of metaphysics is that the distinction between the philosophical few and the thoughtless many has lost its plausibility as well. Thinking is no longer considered a vocation of professionals but can be expected of everyone, which is morally significant: "If, as I suggested before, the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to 'demand' its exercise from every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be." 21 Arendt is not defending a specialized mode of thinking, attainable only by a certain class of people, but the most common and basic form of thinking as a search for meaning. Hence, "Crucial for our enterprise is Kant's distinction between Vernunft and Verstand, 'reason' and 'intellect,'" 22 which "coincides with a distinction between two altogether different activities, thinking and knowing, and two altogether different concerns, meaning, in the first category, and cognition, in the second." 23 Kant's position arose from the insight that reason can ask questions to which the mind is incapable of giving definitive answers. Kant's focus was the "'ultimate questions' of God, freedom, and immortality," subjects which lie beyond the limits of human knowledge, but are "justified by Kant on the ground that the matters they deal with, though unknowable, are of the greatest existential interest to man." 24 For Arendt, thinking is not restricted to only the classic topics of metaphysics, however, for "man's need to reflect encompasses nearly everything that happens to him, things he knows as well as things he can never know." Thus, "reason's need to think" is justified existentially insofar as human beings seek meaning, no matter the object of concern. The quest for meaning is justified on its own terms, and it need not aim to acquire knowledge or truth: "To anticipate, and put it in a nutshell: The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but 20

Ibid. Ibid., 13. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 14. 24 Ibid., 14-15. 21

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by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same." 25 The most fundamental of all the metaphysical fallacies is to ignore the distinction between truth and meaning, "to interpret meaning on the model of truth," and thus to hold thinking to a standard that is only proper to matters of knowing. 26 This fallacy is not restricted to any particular philosophical approach, and even parts of Kant's thought show that he ignored his own distinction in this way. Arendt's emphasis on Kant's insight is motivated by the inability of philosophers to consistently heed the distinction, especially in the era of modern science. The crisis of philosophy since the collapse of the tradition is partly due to philosophy mistakenly conceiving its basic activity as one aimed at cognition. The main problem, therefore, is that philosophers do not understand their own activity and do not defend it on its own terms. In Kantian terms, we might say that many philosophical problems arise from failing to recognize the limitations of reason. In the introduction, Arendt is outlining an approach that could help the reader embrace and affirm the thinking activity in a new way. While philosophy and metaphysics have fallen into disrepute, Arendt's approach attempts to disentangle the experiences of thinking from the mistakes of the tradition. Arendt's broad historical approach—taking insights from sources of any time period and any philosophical persuasion—allows her to use the resources of the tradition in a nontraditional way. Arendt offers a phenomenology of the thinking activity that is constructed from the philosophical insights and mistakes of past philosophers. Since the professional philosophers were often not concerned to describe their own experiences of thinking, those experiences must be reconstructed by looking at how philosophers committed the metaphysical fallacies, how they overreached in trying to secure metaphysical knowledge. Arendt's two motivations for Thinking are not equally present in the text. In the first two sections, "Appearance" and "Mental Activities in a World of Appearances," the moral issues involved with thinking are discussed only in a piecemeal fashion and only briefly, while Arendt develops her phenomenological account. The main problems of these early sections revolve around the relationship of thinking, which is invisible by its very nature, to the world of appearance and sense experience. Arendt

25 26

Ibid., 15. Ibid.

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must validate her own investigation by showing how it is possible to determine anything about an activity that essentially does not appear. The moral concerns become central only in the third section, "What Makes Us Think?" As I will argue, Arendt structures this section as a basic catalogue of historical views on how and why the thinking activity begins, how thinkers have understood the impetus for starting and continuing the activity. At one point, Arendt phrases her question in a helpful way: "what is thinking good for?" 27 Since Arendt is clear that thinking's pursuit of meaning has no direct worldly purpose, the historical answers do not focus on pragmatic uses for thinking, but instead explain how thinking can be "existentially" justified. Arendt finds moral problems with each of the historical answers except one. In addition to being phenomenologically illuminating, Socrates' basic approach to thinking is morally superior, for it provides the tight link between thinking and evildoing that Arendt is looking for. Arendt's Socratic account of conscience arrives at the end of the section as an answer to her moral inquiry into how thinking can help prevent evil. Looking at "What Makes Us Think?" as a whole, we can see that the question is not framed in a purely historical or objective manner: implicit in the presentation are questions and claims about how thinking ought to be conducted. The fourth and final section of Thinking—entitled "Where Are We When We Think?"—is dedicated to issues of temporality. According to Arendt, thinking's "location," its specific "where," is best captured in terms of temporality, or temporal metaphors. Thinking inhabits the present, which is a gap between past and future. To structure her description, Arendt revisits the Kafka parable that she first discussed in Between Past and Future. Arendt's discussion of thinking's temporal characteristics also acts as a segue to the Willing volume, where willing's futural orientation occupies a central place. Arendt's description of thinking's time experience is an extension of her prescriptive program in the previous section, as it forges an intimate connection between thinking and judging.

27

Ibid., 173.

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Mental Activities and the World of Appearance Echoing her earlier works in a straightforward manner, Arendt begins with the claim that the basic condition of life is plurality. Unlike in earlier works, however, Arendt does not focus solely on the plurality of human life. In this world which we enter, appearing from a nowhere, and from which we disappear in a nowhere, Being and Appearing coincide. Dead matter, natural and artificial, changing and unchanging, depends in its being, that is, in its appearingness, on the presence of living creatures. Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator. In other words, nothing that is, insofar as it appears, exists in the singular; everything that is is meant to be perceived by somebody. Not Man but men inhabit this planet. Plurality is the law of the earth. 28 Because the world is a world of appearance, sentient creatures are "never mere 'subjects'" but are always also objects for other perceivers. All living creatures are "of the world," they are perceiving beings and meant to be perceived by others. 29 Even though the world, in the "almost infinite diversity of its appearances," is perceived differently by each of the many species of living beings, all "sense-endowed creatures" share the world in common as a place for each of them to appear and witness the appearance of other beings. 30 Life has an "urge towards self-display which answers the fact of one's own appearingness": creatures are not "mere appearances" but they "make their appearance like actors on a stage set for them." But each being does not completely control the way it appears because its appearance relies on the perspectives of other perceivers, the spectators. Since the world is a world of appearances and plurality, "Seeming—the it-seems-to-me, dokei moi—is the mode, perhaps the only possible one, in which an appearing world is acknowledged and perceived. To appear always means to seem to others, and this seeming varies according to the standpoint and the perspective of the spectators." 31 However, even given the plurality of perspectives, "our criterion for what a living being essentially is remains the same." The

28

Ibid., 19. Ibid. 30 Ibid., 20. 31 Ibid., 21. 29

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criterion for living, appearing beings is the "completeness and perfection" that is seen in the mature "epiphany" of the creature. 32 Given the "primacy of appearance" for all life, the mental activities of human beings raise serious problems. Chiefly, the problems revolve around the fact that each mental activity requires a basic "withdrawal from the world as it appears." If human beings were only spectators, then mental withdrawal from appearance would be expected and unproblematic. But, because we are also appearances—"We are of the world and not merely in it"—and equipped for the world of appearances, the "problem concerns the fitness of thought to appear at all, and the question is whether thinking and other invisible and soundless mental activities are meant to appear or whether in fact they can never find an adequate home in the world." 33 The mind is defined by its not appearing in a world constituted by appearances. So, how do we adequately describe an activity that does not appear? For Arendt, the two-world theories of the philosophers could maintain their plausibility in the tradition only if they have some basis in experience—in other words, the fallacy is not a simple logical fallacy. The experience that underpins the two-world metaphysical fallacy is the experience of thinking's withdrawal from the world of appearance. The experience of withdrawal gives the sensation of "leaving" the world of appearances, which implies another "realm" towards which to leave. But, as Arendt argues, even the traditional dichotomy of Being and Appearance depends on the primacy of appearance. The philosopher leaves the sensible world to seek unchanging truth, a departure that ultimately depends on the original appearances: "he takes his clues from the [world of the senses], looking for something to be revealed to him that would explain its underlying truth. This truth...can be conceived only as another 'appearance'...Our mental apparatus, although it can withdraw from present appearances, remains geared to Appearance." 34 The two-world theories are expressions of a mistake generated by thinking's withdrawal.

32

Ibid., 22. Ibid., 22-23. 34 Ibid., 23-24. 33

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Arendt's emphasis on the primacy of plurality and appearance for all life functions to critique the metaphysical hierarchy of Being and Appearance. Traditionally, it is assumed that there is a ground of appearances that is not itself an appearance—an assumption that is not entirely without warrant. 35 Arendt thinks the distinction between ground and appearance is drawn from observing the growth of living beings, where each life emerges into the world from darkness, from a hidden source. However, the metaphysical assumption is that the ground possesses "a higher rank of reality" than the appearances—it is "the age-old theoretical supremacy of Being and Truth over mere appearance, that is, the supremacy of the ground that does not appear over the surface that does." 36 The concept of cause has carried nearly the same evaluative assumption: the cause, which is hidden, is of higher rank than the effect that is experienced. Arendt states that the fallacy involved is not a "sheer arbitrary error," but arises from the basic fact that all appearances "never just reveal; they also conceal" other aspects. 37 Logically speaking, there is no way to defend the low rank given to appearances, especially when you consider that any initially hidden grounds or causes will become appearances of one sort or another once they are discovered. There is no known cause that is not also an appearance. Besides the logical problems, there is an important "existential" fallacy involved: there is no way to live as a human being among non-appearing causes. In the sciences, causes that are not directly experienced but are detected by technical instruments are ultimately justified by being translated into common sense language and the practical uses of everyday life. The primacy of appearance asserts itself and holds truth-seeking to the standards of appearance: "The everyday common-sense world, which neither the scientist nor the philosopher ever eludes, knows error as well as illusion. Yet no elimination of errors or dispelling of illusions can arrive at a region beyond appearances." 38 The metaphysical hierarchy of Being and Appearance is present in the sciences of biology, sociology, and psychology in the theory of functionalism, which interprets "all appearances as functions

35

Ibid., 24. Ibid., 25. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 26. 36

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of the life process." On this view, outer surface appearances are seen as "necessary conditions for essential processes that go on inside the living organism." 39 Arendt challenges the functionalist approach, especially because it operates in the sciences that directly treat human beings. She asks, "Could it not be that appearances are not there for the sake of the life process but, on the contrary, that the life process is there for the sake of appearances? Since we live in an appearing world, is it not much more plausible that the relevant and the meaningful in this world of ours should be located precisely on the surface?" 40 The functional hypothesis does not explain the "urge to self-display," which is "entirely gratuitous in terms of self-preservation." Self-display is "a spontaneous activity: whatever can see wants to be seen, whatever can hear calls out to be heard, whatever can touch presents itself to be touched." 41 The living being does not "express" (literally, "press out") something "inner," which exists on its own but does not need to appear. The urge to self-display is the urge to "appear as an individual" in the world amidst the plurality of other appearances. 42 For Arendt, the primacy of appearance implies that what is ultimately most meaningful is on the "surface," which undermines so many traditional philosophical approaches. Most importantly for human life and conduct, it shows that "our habitual standards of judgment, so firmly rooted in metaphysical assumptions and prejudices—according to which the essential lies beneath the surface, and the surface is 'superficial'—are wrong, that our common conviction that what is inside ourselves, our 'inner life,' is more relevant to what we 'are' than what appears on the outside is an illusion." 43 Individual human beings are defined by their appearance in the world: who someone is does not attach to an inner, private reality, but to the person that appears in the world in the midst of others. While Arendt thinks that all sentient life has an urge to self-display, humans have a specific and complex mode of doing so, and the relation of human beings to their appearing world is complicated by the mind. Arendt takes considerable effort to delineate the differences between the mind and the soul in 39

Ibid., 27. Ibid. 41 Ibid., 29. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 30. 40

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order to isolate what is essential to the specifically human mode of appearing. Let us begin with the characteristics of the soul. The soul is the source of our idea of "inner life," as it relates most intimately to the life processes that occur inside the body. The soul's experiences are so closely tied to the body that "[e]very emotion is a somatic experience; my heart aches when I am grieved, gets warm with sympathy...and similar physical sensations take possession of me with anger, wrath, envy, and other affects." 44 Thus, the soul can be best expressed in "a glance, a sound, a gesture" than in any spoken or written language, because the latter always adds a layer of interpretation or selection to the direct experience. No conceptual or metaphorical language is needed to describe soul experiences because the "language of the soul in its mere expressive stage...does not depart from the senses and uses no analogies when it talks in terms of physical sensations." 45 The human soul, like the inner organs and functions of the life process, is defined by sameness—and the science of psychology depends on this fact. But as a science of the inner life, psychology is much less meaningful than is commonly believed: it misses the differentiation of individuals that takes place on the surface, "the enormous variety and richness of overt human conduct." 46 And just as the inner organs of living beings appear ugly when they "inauthentically" appear, so too the examination of the soul reveals the ugliness and darkness of our psychic life. The experiences of the soul are passive or "suffered" in that we are aware of them but cannot directly change them, much like the functions of our inner organs. 47 By contrast, the mind is entirely active, and it liberates the living being from the passivity of the soul. Without a mind, the creature is "at the complete mercy of its inner life process, its moods and emotions." 48 The human soul does not appear of its own accord, but is only deliberately shown. The experiences of the soul are transformed by the activity of the mind: "Every show of anger, as distinct from the anger I feel, already contains a reflection on it, and it is this reflection that gives the emotion the highly individualized form which is meaningful 44

Ibid., 32-33. Ibid., 33. 46 Ibid., 35. 47 Ibid., 72. However, as we shall see, the mind's activity does indirectly affect the soul. A prime example is the practice of Stoic self-control, where one attempts to subdue the soul's emotions and passions by habitually following certain trains of thought. 48 Ibid., 32. 45

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for all surface phenomena." 49 In trying to describe the soul, our speech always reflects "whatever we think" about an experience of the soul, but not the experience itself. The mind has a much more intimate connection with language: "Our mental activities, by contrast [to the soul], are conceived in speech even before being communicated [to others]...Thought without speech is inconceivable." 50 Unlike the movements of the soul, the speech of mental activities, while initially silent, is meant to be heard by others. In other words, that speech is constitutive of the mind indicates the mind's central role in communicating with others. Just as a creature who sees wants to be seen, so too a creature whose mind thinks in words wants to speak and be heard and understood. Speech is essential to the human mode of self-display, which Arendt calls "self-presentation," and speech depends directly upon the activities of the mind. Each of the mental activities requires a withdrawal from the world of appearances, but they do not withdraw into the soul or into any other inner region. Mental activities are not experienced somatically, but are characterized by an absence of overwhelming feeling or passion—the mind requires a level of stillness in the soul. Even though the mind is constituted partially by language, since the mind is not tied to bodily processes and organs or to the senses, the description of mental activities requires the use of metaphor: "Thought with its accompanying conceptual language, since it occurs in and is spoken by a being at home in a world of appearances, stands in need of metaphors in order to bridge the gap between a world given to sense experience and a realm where no such immediate apprehension of evidence can ever exist." 51 We will return to the pivotal issue of metaphor in a later section. The distinction between the mind and the soul helps makes sense of the mind's peculiarities in relation to the world of appearance. Arendt outlines the common characteristics of thinking, willing, and judging: autonomy, invisibility, reflexivity, and withdrawal. 52 The three basic mental activities are autonomous because "each of them obeys the laws inherent in the activity itself." Even though it is

49

Ibid., 31. Ibid., 32. 51 Ibid. 52 Withdrawal—willing and judging withdraw but come back. 50

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"always the same person whose mind thinks, wills, and judges," philosophers have been wrong to try to reduce the mind to a single principle. Arendt writes, "What is so remarkable in all these [philosophical] theories and doctrines is their implicit monism, the claim that behind the obvious multiplicity of the world's appearances and, even more pertinently for our context, behind the obvious plurality of man's faculties and abilities, there must exist a oneness—the old hen pan, 'all is one'—either a single source or a single ruler." 53 While the mental activities are related to one another, the mind is irreducibly plural, just like human life in the world. Autonomy also implies being "unconditioned": the conditions of human life in the world do not apply directly to the mental activities. The objects of the mental activities "are given in the world," but mental activities are not caused or necessitated by any existential conditions. Arendt elaborates: Men, though they are totally conditioned existentially—limited by the time span between birth and death, subject to labor in order to live, motivated to work in order to make themselves at home in the world, and roused to action in order to find their place in the society of their fellow-men—can mentally transcend all these conditions, but only mentally, never in reality or in cognition and knowledge, by virtue of which they are able to explore the world's realness and their own. They can judge affirmatively or negatively the realities they are born into and by which they are also conditioned; they can will the impossible, for instance, eternal life; and they can think, that is, speculate meaningfully, about the unknown and the unknowable. And although this can never directly change reality—indeed in our world there is no clearer or more radical opposition than that between thinking and doing—the principles by which we act and the criteria by which we judge and conduct our lives depend ultimately on the life of the mind. 54 This passage is very revealing for its straightforward claim that the mind has an influence on how we act and judge in the world. As opposed to acting and judging, social behavior and convention is predicated on an "absence of thought," as most of the time we rely on "custom and habit, that is, on prejudices [i.e. prejudgments]." 55 In their autonomy, the mental activities interrupt the automatic process of social life and allow us to act and judge independently. Thus, the mind's autonomy is a condition for freedom and moral responsibility.

53

Ibid., 70. Ibid., 70-71. 55 Ibid., 71. 54

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The activities of the mind are invisible in the world of appearances. They do not appear "properly speaking": the "full actuality" of thinking occurs invisibly, but the mind primarily appears in the world in the negative sense of absentmindedness. Another person cannot see what is occurring in the mind, but only that one is not present. Due to their invisibility, the tradition has often mistakenly identified the mind with other invisible features of the human being, with the soul or with consciousness. As we have seen, the mind is active and the soul is passive and the mental activities are not suffered as passions or emotions; they are entirely active, and "can be started and stopped at will." 56 Consciousness, as traditionally conceived, is also not identical to any of Arendt's mental activities. Consciousness is not an activity at all, but the "sheer self-awareness" that I-am which accompanies all my activities, mental and worldly, so that I am assured of the "identical continuity of the self" in my many diverse experiences over time. Unlike Arendt's mental activities, which occur only in language, consciousness is "silent" and requires no language whatsoever. As the minimal awareness of continued existence, consciousness is the potentiality for the mental activities, which "can be understood as the actualization of the original duality or the split between me and myself which is inherent in all consciousness." 57 By actively transcending the merely given self-awareness of consciousness, mental activities reveal their inherent reflexivity. All mental activities "testify by their reflexive nature to a duality inherent in consciousness; the mental agent cannot be active except by acting, implicitly or explicitly, back upon himself." Mental activities do more than just reveal intentional objects of consciousness—i.e. what is given in consciousness—because mental activities are self-relations: "to be by myself and to have intercourse with myself is the outstanding characteristic of the life of the mind." 58 The reflexivity of the mind necessitates that I am aware, not just of the I-am, but of my activity—the mind is never

56

Ibid., 72. Ibid., 74-75. 58 Ibid., 74. 57

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"unconscious." 59 For Arendt, reflexivity does not imply "a place of inwardness" where mental activities occur on analogy with the "outward space" of worldly activities. The analogy is a fallacy because it lends itself to the idea that the mental activities can be studied through introspection as one studies and objectively observes activities in the world. When we speak of mental "faculties," we must be careful not to impute this meaning upon them: "For I am aware of the faculties of the mind and their reflexivity only as long as the activity lasts. It is as though the very organs of thought or will or judgment came into being only when I think, or will, or judge." 60 Lastly, only through a "deliberate withdrawal from appearances" do the mental activities come into being. The mind withdraws from the "world's being present to the senses. Every mental act rests on the mind's faculty of having present to itself what is absent from the senses." 61 Thus, the basic capacity that each mental activity relies upon is "re-presentation" or "imagination." The mode of withdrawal for each activity is distinct in important ways, but what is common to them all is the withdrawal from the senses, from desires and practical concerns, and from the urgency of the present moment. 62 All mental activities require that doing and worldly activity cease; they require a "withdrawal from involvement and from the partiality of immediate interests that in one way or another make me part of the real world." 63 Due to the fact that withdrawal is common to all mental activities, thinking has priority in regards to willing and judging in one regard. Thinking, in its basic mode of re-presentation and attending to what is not directly sensed, must precede willing and judging. Thinking "prepares the particulars given to the senses" so that the mind can deal with them when they are not present—"it must, in brief, de-sense

59

Psychological arguments for the unconscious rely on positing an activity of the mind that is not experienced in order to explain certain behaviors or worldly facts. The main problem is that, by definition, this unconscious activity cannot appear. The moment it is allowed to appear, it either becomes a conscious activity of the mind or it becomes an objective process that does not belong to the mind at all. 60 Ibid., 75. 61 Ibid., 75-76. 62 Willing and judging, as mental activities, are not focused on the present moment. As worldly activity— when a judgment is spoken, for instance—this is not necessarily the case. To say, "this is wrong" is to address the present, but I do not think we should confuse this act of worldly judgment with the mental activity. 63 Ibid., 92. I think Arendt overstated the relevant point in this passage, when she claims that the mental activities require an "absence of any doing or disturbances." Arendt is correct that thinking cannot be done when one is involved in action or activities that require concentration, but thinking can be coupled with routine and menial tasks quite easily.

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them." 64 Imagination de-senses the object of sense by re-presenting it as an image to be "stored in memory." These images stored in memory are the basis for any subsequent, active remembering process. In the act of remembering, a new thought-object is produced from the stored image that can then be transformed through the thought process. So, the original image stored in memory does not change, even though thinking has "gone further" than the image itself in its search for meaning: "Hence, the thoughtobject is different from the image, as the image is different from the visible sense-object whose mere representation it is." While the collecting of images in memory is more or less automatic, re-collecting those images for the purposes of thought is deliberate. Thought-objects only "come into being when the mind actively and deliberately remembers, recollects, and selects from the storehouse of memory whatever arouses its interest sufficiently to induce concentration." 65 Thinking's priority among the mental activities, due to its practice of de-sensing through memory and imagination, means that the content of every mental activity comes from the past. Thinking always begins with an act of remembering that takes us from the present into the past: "Every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought." I cannot think about a present object qua present: I must disengage the attention of the senses in order to think about the present object, but then I am really thinking about the object as something remembered. Thinking's remembrance of the past is necessary for the anticipation of the future. When I think about a possible future, I must take what I have experienced from the past and rearrange it—just as so-called "productive imagination" takes images from memory and creatively combines them. Even in its more speculative endeavors, thinking still requires remembrance: "Before we raise such questions as What is happiness, what is justice, what is knowledge, and so on, we must have seen happy and unhappy people, witnessed just and unjust deeds, experienced the desire to know and its fulfillment or frustration. Furthermore, we must repeat the direct experience in our minds after leaving the scene where it took place." 66

64

Ibid., 77. Ibid. 66 Ibid., 87. 65

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If the mind does not de-sense the objects of experience and repeat them in imagination, the only intellectual operation that is available is "sheer logical reasoning," which is unconnected to all "living experience" because it merely deduces consequences from an unexamined premise. Arendt's stress on remembrance and imagination reinforces the primacy of appearance, and it keeps thinking and the other mental activities tied to the world of appearances. The de-sensing process of imagination is the crucial step which guarantees that the objects of thought have their root in worldly experience. Philosophical concepts have their origin in experience as well: "All the metaphysical questions that philosophy took as its special topics arise out of ordinary common-sense experiences; 'reason's need'—the quest for meaning that prompts men to ask them—is in no way different from men's need to tell the story of some happening they witnessed, or to write poems about it." 67 However, even though thinking always begins from experience, the meaning that is sought in telling a story or thinking through concepts is not reducible to experience: "All thought arises out of experience, but no experience yields any meaning or even coherence without undergoing the operations of imagining and thinking." 68 As I mentioned above, the mind's activities create the possibility for self-presentation, the human mode of self-display in which the person "decide[s] what is fit for appearance." 69 The diversity of human appearance is produced, not by the outward expression of the inner life of the soul, but by each person's "deliberate choice between what pleases and displeases" in appearance. How humans "present themselves in deed and word" reveals how "they wish to appear," and this wish is not a necessary expression of the soul or of basic life functions. 70 The choice involved in self-presentation is not a psychic pathos to be suffered—it is a decision actively made and depends on the mind interrupting the automatic operations of the soul. Self-presentation requires "self-awareness—a capability inherent in the reflexive character of mental activities and clearly transcending mere consciousness." 71 As Arendt describes it, the mental

67

Ibid., 78. Ibid., 87. 69 Ibid., 31. 70 Ibid., 34-35. 71 Ibid., 36. 68

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aspects of self-presentation are what distinguishes it from merely animal self-display and allows it to be associated with action and speech. Arendt offers an example that shows how self-presentation operates with regard to moral virtues and character. The courageous man is not one whose soul lacks [fear] or who can overcome it once and for all, but one who has decided that fear is not what he wants to show. Courage can then become second nature or a habit but not in the sense that fearlessness replaces fear, as though [fearlessness], too, could become an emotion. Such choices are determined by various factors; many of them are predetermined by the culture into which we are born— they are made because we wish to please others. But there are also choices not inspired by our environment; we may make them because we wish to please ourselves or because we wish to set an example, that is, to persuade others to be pleased with what pleases us. Whatever the motives may be, success and failure in the enterprise of self-presentation depend on the consistency and duration of the image thereby presented to the world. 72 Self-presentation is always a matter of choice, and it forms our habits over time, whether they are singularly personal habits or common social habits. The choice involved in self-presentation is not an act of thinking, although it requires thought as a precondition. For example, thinking about the meaning of courage is necessary for presenting courage in my action in any form, but my thinking about courage will not determine precisely how I present myself courageously. The choice in self-presentation is actually a matter of judgment. Judging is the mental activity by which I directly choose what pleases and displeases me and thus how I wish to appear. We will return to this capacity of judgment in the following chapters. Of course, we may not be able to achieve the appearance we wish for: "Up to a point we can choose how to appear to others" but there are limits to what we can choose and how we well we can execute our choices. 73 The choices are limited by what options the world has provided, and our ability to appear the way we wish also depends on the natural gifts and talents with which we are endowed. Arendt stresses that self-presentation does not imply that "man...has created himself." 74 While character arises from our deliberate acts of self-presentation as something distinct from our biological and social being, we do not create our existence or "make" ourselves who we are. Nevertheless, the proper "epiphany" of

72

Ibid. Ibid., 34. 74 Ibid., 37. 73

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the human being is not just the appearance of a mature biological specimen; it is the appearance of a unique person, who has had an active role in their own manner of appearing. Only because self-presentation is an active choice, and not an automatic reaction to stimuli, does it contain the possibilities for hypocrisy, pretense, and willful deception. The only way to tell pretence and hypocrisy from reality is to see if it lasts—someone's character is defined by what endures in his appearance. All virtue begins with a compliment paid to it, by which I express my being pleased with it. The compliment implies a promise to the world, to those to whom I appear, to act in accordance with my pleasure, and it is the breaking of the implied promise that characterizes the hypocrite. In other words, the hypocrite is not a villain who is pleased with vice and hides his pleasure from his surroundings. 75 Pretense and hypocrisy occur because the person does not or cannot maintain the appearance that she initially presented to others. Deception in matters of self-presentation, by contrast, occurs when the person has chosen deliberately to mislead others. The uncovering of these forms of "semblance" in human character does not reveal an unchanging identity underneath the appearances. Character and identity can only be established by a consistency of worldly appearance over time, and can never be grounded on an "inner self" that appears only to the individual. The inner life of the soul, which is often mistaken for the self, is defined by its constant change from mood to mood and from feeling to feeling, and is therefore incapable of appearance because it never stays the same long enough to be identified and become real. 76 In other words, soul experiences are always in flux, and the defining characteristics of these processes are obtained by the soul's relation to outer appearances. For Arendt, the nature of personal character and self-presentation highlight the way in which semblance is built into the world of appearances: any appearance "may by disappearing turn out to be mere semblance," just as hypocrisy is discovered only by the disappearance of the original presentation.77 Some semblances are errors, which "dissolve of their own accord or can be dispelled upon closer inspection." Error is essentially linked to truth: "error presupposes truth," and it is only through 75

Ibid., 36. Ibid., 39-40. 77 Ibid., 37. 76

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discovering a new truth that error can be eliminated. But, on the other hand, every truth is also possibly an error to be uncovered by further observations. Other semblances are not correctable errors because they are due to our basic human conditions and modes of perception. For example, "the movement of the sun, its rise in the morning and setting in the evening, will not yield to any amount of scientific information, because that is the way the appearance of sun and earth inevitably seems to an earth-bound creature." 78 These "unavoidable" semblances, which are inherent in the world of appearances, are the best evidence against "the simpleminded positivism that believes it has found a firm ground of certainty if it only excludes all mental phenomena from consideration and holds fast to observable facts, the everyday reality given to the senses." 79 Human beings, like all perceiving beings, are subject to "authentic illusions" that are generated by their existential position in the world. In this section, we have developed Arendt's characterization of life in the world of appearances and the relation of the mental activities to it. The mind is essential to the way human beings appear in the world, but the mind itself does not appear and its main characteristics put it at odds with everyday life in the world.

Thinking and Reality Imbedded in Arendt's account of biological life is an attempt to illuminate the phenomena that are the source of the metaphysical dichotomy between Being and Appearance. The dichotomy itself is not arbitrary, but the hierarchical assumption is misguided: "In other words, the common philosophical understanding of Being as the ground of Appearance is true to the phenomenon of Life, but the same cannot be said of the evaluation of Being versus Appearance which is at the bottom of all two-world

78 79

Ibid., 38. Ibid., 39.

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theories." 80 The source of the problematic assumption is not a worldly phenomenon, but it arises from the experience of thinking. Arendt uses Kant as an example of this particular metaphysical fallacy. We should note that, for Arendt, Kant's fallacy is due to his keen awareness of many important and curious features of the thinking ego. First, "The thinking ego is sheer activity and therefore ageless, sexless, without qualities, and without a life story...For the thinking ego is not the self." The thinking ego qua activity can only be defined negatively: it is grasped in an intuition, but an intuition like no other. It is only an awareness "that I am," and this ego has no content. 81 Kant also testifies to the immateriality of the thinking ego. Unlike the self and its worldly activities, thinking does not meet material resistance—the distinctive "swiftness" of thought is due to its being noticeably unencumbered by the body and by matter. 82 Kant's "notion of a 'thing in itself,' something which is but does not appear although it causes appearances," 83 reveals the evaluative fallacy as a mistake arising from the experience of thinking. Kant reasonably argues that "what causes something to appear must be of a different order from the appearance itself," as this insight corresponds to observations of living organisms. 84 In regards to the thinking activity, I can deduce that "something" exists that does not appear but is somehow the "cause" of my thoughts: "The thinking ego is indeed Kant's 'thing in itself': it does not appear to others and, unlike the self of self-awareness, it does not appear to itself, and yet it is 'not nothing.'" 85 From the thinking perspective, the non-appearing ego possesses priority over the particular moments and objects of the thought process—the ego lasts through the entire experience and establishes the continuity of the process. Kant's metaphysical fallacy occurs when he "conclude[s] from this experience that there exist 'things in themselves' which, in their own intelligible sphere, are as we 'are' in the world of appearances." 86 The

80

Ibid., 42. Ibid., 43. 82 Ibid., 44. 83 Ibid., 40. 84 Ibid., 41-42. 85 Ibid., 42-43. 86 Ibid., 44. 81

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traditional hierarchy of Being over Appearance takes root when this experience, which is only valid for mental life, is generalized to all worldly experience. Kant's fallacy, like all the metaphysical fallacies, is not merely logical. The fallacies are "usually caused by semblances, unavoidable for beings whose whole existence is determined by appearance." Kant's fallacy, then, does not arise with his descriptions of the thinking activity, but the speculative conclusions he drew from them. At this point, Arendt poses a central question of her inquiry: Hence, in our context the only relevant question is whether the semblances are inauthentic or authentic ones, whether they are caused by dogmatic beliefs and arbitrary assumptions, mere mirages that disappear upon closer inspection, or whether they are inherent in the paradoxical condition of a living being that, though itself part of the world of appearances, is in possession of a faculty, the ability to think, that permits the mind to withdraw from the world without ever being able to leave it or transcend it. 87 The main non-moral problem of Thinking is the issue of thinking's relation to reality. If the thinking activity itself does not appear, and reality is constituted by appearance, then thinking by definition will be unreal. However, the thinking activity is experienced and therefore is an "appearance" in some sense of the term. The difficulty is to explain and characterize this activity in a non-arbitrary way. Here Arendt is owning up to the problem I posed earlier: how is it possible to think about thinking? The question "what is thinking?" has whiplashed upon itself, and Arendt needs to explain what thinking is in an "authentic" way that avoids dogmatic claims. To answer her question, Arendt turns directly to outlining how reality is constituted. First of all, reality is that which stays the same long enough to be seen as an object by a subject. In Husserlian terms, "Objectivity is built into the very subjectivity of consciousness by virtue of intentionality." 88 Arendt also stresses the converse, that subjectivity is built into objectivity by virtue of appearance, that the reality of objects implies the recognition of perceiving spectators. In the world of appearances, objects become real in the midst of plurality. Other perceivers confirm the existence of objects, which allows the individual to trust their senses. Secondly, reality "is guaranteed by [the] worldly context" of what I perceive. In its context, each "appearance carries with it a prior indication of realness"; sensations carry with them the 87 88

Ibid., 45. Ibid., 46.

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additional "sensation of reality," which comes from perceiving appearances in their interconnections with other appearances. 89 Each of our five senses is private in that only the individual perceiver has access to what the sense perceives—reality is not sensed by any of the five senses in isolation. Reality is sensed or felt by "common sense," whose duty it is to coordinate the five private senses and "guarantee that it is the same object that I see, touch, taste, smell, and hear." However, since reality only emerges in the midst of plural perceivers, common sense also guarantees that the object I perceive is the same as that perceived by others—it fits me "into a common world shared by others." The common world is the shared context for each of our private perceptual experiences. 90 Common sense is not physically located in a bodily organ like the five senses; however, it is still tied to our "biological apparatus." By this, Arendt is suggesting that common sense plays an important role in the life process in which we operate as members of the same species. 91 When Arendt speaks of the "sense" of reality and the "feeling" of realness that common sense achieves, she is indicating that common sense is not a faculty of the mind—it involves the faculties of perception and their unity. Mental activities, and thinking in particular, have a tension-laden relationship with reality and common sense. Thinking, in its withdrawal from the world of appearances into solitude, undermines the sensation of reality that common sense establishes. Solipsism, in all its historical manifestations, makes sense only from the perspective of the thinking ego, while it is hopelessly out of touch with common sense and our everyday lives: "For while, for whatever reason, a man indulges in sheer thinking, and no matter on what subject, he lives completely in the singular, that is, in complete solitude, as though not men but Man inhabited the earth." 92 The activity of thinking can raise doubts about the reality of the world and of the self, neither of which can be regained without a return to the

89

Ibid., 49-50. Ibid., 50. 91 Ibid., 52. 92 Ibid., 47. 90

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world and to common sense. Reality is taken for granted in thought, but it "cannot be derived; thought or reflection can accept or reject it." 93 For Arendt, Cartesian doubt is an example of a systemic rejection of reality. Every thought that would point to the world of appearances and to reality was sacrificed by Descartes in his search for certainty, which left him with nothing except the thinking activity itself, stripped of all of its objects. Arendt's notion that the mind can either reject or accept reality indicates how thinking's basic characteristics can be utilized for vastly different purposes. As we shall see, the rejection and acceptance of reality is not a function of thinking, even though thinking plays a role in the execution of rejection or acceptance. In the language of Willing, it is the will that either affirms or negates reality. Thinking doubts everything and has "no natural, matter-of-fact relation to reality." Husserl's epochē—the suspension of reality in thought—is part of the thinking activity, not a specialized method of the professional thinker. Due to its withdrawal from reality, thinking implies absentmindedness: while one is thinking, she is absent from the present and from sense experience. Even though professional thinkers are more absentminded than others, this does not imply that they partake in a special method or activity. No matter how dedicated to thinking and how absentminded a person may be, the loss of common sense is temporary, and the thinker returns to the world again when thought is finished. 94 From the perspective of common sense, the withdrawal from the world of appearances inherent in thinking gives the impression that thinking is unnatural, especially when it does not serve practical ends and the desire for knowledge as it can do in the sciences. "All thinking demands a stop-and-think," which means that when I am thinking my attention is not on appearances and my fellow human beings, and I am not attending to worldly activities. From the perspective of the thinker, however, common sense seems troublesome and unimportant, and the urgencies of everyday life are mere interruptions to the thinking activity. The conflict between thought and common sense has been interpreted as an interpersonal conflict between the few (philosophers) and the many (those grounded in common sense), with each group hostile

93 94

Ibid., 49. Ibid., 52-53.

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to the other. According to Arendt, the conflict is better understood as a conflict within the individual human being, within one person who possesses both common sense and the capacity to think.95 The philosopher knows his activity is unnatural because he also lives in the common world and he can anticipate the objections and ridicule that come from common sense. The traditional response has been to flip the common sense values on their head. For instance, in "the Phaedo [thinking] reverses all relationships: men, who naturally shun death as the greatest of evils, are now turning to it as the greatest good." 96 The philosophical tendency to reverse common sense is evidence that the conflict between thinking and common sense is intramural: The whole history of philosophy, which tells us so much about the objects of thought and so little about the process of thinking and the experiences of the thinking ego, is shot through with an intramural warfare between man's common sense, this sixth sense that fits our five senses into a common world, and man's faculty of thought and need of reason, which determine him to remove himself for considerable periods from it. 97 The conflict also has a temporal aspect. In its withdrawal, thinking makes the present disappear—the body and the affairs of the world become absent to our awareness—in order for the absent, the past and the future, to become present to the mind of the thinker. Since remembrance is the "most frequent and also the most basic thinking experience," thinking "inverts all ordinary relationships" in its withdrawal from the present and re-presentation of what is absent. Space and time, which structure our common sense experience, do not encumber the mind: "Thinking annihilates temporal as well as spatial distances. I can anticipate the future, think of it as though it were already present, and I can remember the past as though it had not disappeared." 98 Unlike the very direct opposition between thinking and common sense, science and common sense have a more complicated relationship. Science, in its search for new knowledge, uses thinking to undermine common sense, but only temporarily. Thinking disrupts common sense, in the form of the current scientific consensus, in order to formulate new and better methods to observe and unify phenomena. But the goal of science is cognition, and thus the validation of new methods requires an 95

Ibid., 83. Ibid., 84. 97 Ibid., 81. 98 Ibid., 85. 96

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appeal to common sense for evidence. In this way, science is an "enormously refined prolongation of common-sense reasoning" in which illusions and errors are systematically overcome. Common sense asserts its force in the scientific enterprise through its demand for evidence; thinking does not dictate the criteria for knowledge, but plays "the role of a means to an end." 99 In science, all new evidence displaces past evidence and there is no guarantee that the present evidence will hold up to further scrutiny. Truth in the context of modern science is provisional: every verity is expected to be overturned by new research. The notion of "unlimited progress" in modern science is based on a common-sense principle: all appearances are subject to become semblances on the acquisition of new evidence. 100 Even the most sophisticated of scientific experiments, which attempt to detect phenomena that will never appear to the naked human senses, relies on common sense for their validity. With the use of ever-increasing technological means, modern science "forces the non-appearing to appear" in seeking to verify the existence of the causes it postulates. The reality of these scientific findings is possible only through technology and its practical applications, which make the evidence accessible to common sense and to the general public. 101 Thinking, while often used for the sake of cognition in the realm of science, can also be done for its own sake. Arendt addresses Kant's distinction between intellect and reason to specify how thinking as an autonomous activity is distinct from the search for knowledge. In Kant, the intellect is the faculty of cognition and truth, and truth is "located in the evidence of the senses." Cognition is based on sense perception, whose "testimony is self-evident, that is, unshakeable by argument and replaceable only by other evidence." 102 Reason, the faculty of thinking, does not aim to grasp the truth of sense evidence, for it "does not ask what something is or whether it exists at all—its existence is always taken for granted— but what it means for it to be." 103 The questions of the intellect regard "what something is" and the existence of objects, and these questions relate to truth. However, thinking asks its own questions about 99

Ibid., 54. Ibid., 55. 101 Ibid., 56-57. 102 Ibid., 57. 103 Ibid. 100

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meaning, which should not be confused with truth. Arendt writes, "The distinction between truth and meaning seems to me to be not only decisive for any inquiry into the nature of human thinking but also to be the necessary consequence of Kant's crucial distinction between reason and intellect."104 Unfortunately, Arendt claims, this distinction between truth and meaning is not consistently maintained by any thinker in the tradition, not even Kant, who never quite freed reason from needing to provide truth and produce results. Kant intended to free reason to speculate, without the need for cognition, about the "ideas of reason"—God, Freedom, and Immortality—but did not realize that reason can extend to everything that exists or occurs in the world as well. For Arendt, his distinction did not make "room for faith" as much as it made "room for thought" about anything that human beings find significant. Kant "constantly compared" reason and intellect, and therefore undermined his own discovery and generated a number of contradictions. Arendt picks out only one example: Kant claims both that reason is purposive in its use of the ideas for the sake of other ends and that reason is for its own sake, concerned with "nothing but itself" and its speculation. Arendt insinuates that Kant's desire to make reason purposive is due to his desire to satisfy common sense expectations. 105 To broaden the implications, Arendt is suggesting that the philosopher often has a desire to prove that thinking is useful or can obtain truth. This basic desire shows that the philosopher has common sense goals and is part of the world of appearance. As we have seen, the desire to know can be satisfied by science, and questions about the world's reality can be answered by appealing to sensible evidence. Science aims for "irrefutable truth, that is, propositions humans beings are not free to reject—they are compelling." The only qualification is that different kinds of truth have different ranges of compulsion. Mathematics and logic have been the paradigm for truths that cannot be rejected—they are necessary and their force is universal for all those with adequate "brain power." The force of contingent facts, no less compelling, is simply limited to eyewitnesses. The moment testimony is required to establish facts, the force of truth is diminished because

104 105

Ibid., 57-58. Ibid., 63-64.

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contingent facts are always open to intentional deception.106 The intellect—which is constituted by the "senses plus common sense and the extension of it" through science, logic, and mathematics—is "under the sway of nature" and the necessities of organic life. Hence, "truth is what we are compelled to admit by the nature either of our senses or of our brain." 107 Truth's compulsion cuts across the traditional distinction between contingency and necessity. Truths of necessity, whose opposite is impossible, have traditionally been given "higher ontological dignity" than what is contingent, "whatever is but could also not be." 108 This hierarchy is plausible only if one is also committed to the existence of absolutely necessary truths, and not just truths that are necessary in relation to other things. Arendt denies the existence of these absolutes: "Everything that appears to human eyes, everything that occurs to the human mind, everything that happens to mortals for better or for worse is 'contingent,' including our own existence." 109 The claim is that all truths are contingent in the traditional absolutist sense, but they also carry a degree of necessity for situated human experience. Truths can be necessary—i.e. carry compelling force—and still be contingent facts, and even the most universally compelling truths are contingent in the absolute sense: "In other words, there are no truths beyond and above factual truths: all scientific truths are factual truths, those [of mathematics and logic] not excluded, and only factual truths are scientifically verifiable." 110 The questions of meaning raised by thinking are unanswerable by science and common sense, and are deemed "meaningless" from that point of view. Positivism rejects thinking, but only on grounds that are improper to thinking anyhow—positivism begs the question against the thinking perspective. Meaning does not compel with the force of truth; it does not carry necessity. Arendt gives as an example the proposition "I was meant to be," which she claims "is not a truth" and is easily refutable from a 106

Ibid., 59. Arendt wrote two essays—"Lying in Politics" and "Truth and Politics"—in the post-Eichmann period that were devoted to the relation of truth and politics. Central to both of these essays is her emphasis on the opposition between truth and lying in place of the common distinction between truth and illusion or error. For Arendt, the former is much more important to human reality than the latter because reality is intersubjectively constituted, and deception undermines the publicity of worldly appearance. 107 Ibid., 60-61. 108 Ibid., 59. 109 Ibid., 60. 110 Ibid., 61.

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scientific perspective. Any unique individual's existence is a contingent fact with no scientific explanation—only the universal characteristics of one's existence are explainable. However, the proposition is "highly meaningful," and its certainty "will survive refutation intact because it is inherent in every thinking reflection on the I-am." 111 Arendt's presentation here is somewhat obscure, but I think the key implication is that there are propositions that thinking can find meaningful even in the face of scientific evidence to the contrary. The "I was meant to be" is an authentic semblance, analogous to our conviction that the sun moves as it rises and sets. These conclusions will have no sensible proof, no proof that can be provided to others to convince them. The certainty of the I-am arises only because the individual undertakes the thinking activity on his or her own. Unlike science, which leaves behind a storehouse of tangible knowledge, thinking by itself leaves nothing tangible behind for others to use as proof. The insights of thinking will need to be experienced first-hand by each person within the thinking activity. That meaning lacks the characteristic force of truth should signal to us that it is intimately connected with freedom. Arendt gives only one short hint in this direction: "The opposite of necessity is not contingency or accident but freedom." 112 The opposition between intellect, which is tied to the life process and to our species being, and reason, which is free from bodily necessities, also reinforces the connection between freedom and the mind in general. However, as we have seen from her earlier works, freedom should not be ascribed primarily to mental activities, for mental freedom lacks the ability to appear and remain stable. Arendt has positioned her own inquiry into the nature of the thinking activity as a search for meaning, for "what thinking means for those who engage in it." 113 Her reflections are not scientific, and they are not aimed at truth. Defending Kant's distinction liberates the inquiry from certain expectations that Arendt believes are unwarranted. Although Arendt appeals to certain facts of mental experience, her

111

Ibid. Ibid., 60. 113 Ibid., 12. 112

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overall project is an exploration of the meaning of these thinking experiences. 114 Arendt has carved out space for the next stage of the text, a consideration of the power of metaphor to help thinking and its objects appear.

Thinking, Meaning, and Metaphor Human beings, as thinking beings who belong to the world of appearances, "have an urge to speak" because only in speaking are the mental activities made manifest in the world. The kind of communication that is necessary for the life process does not require the "intricate complexity of grammar and syntax" that is characteristic of human language—"it is not our soul [or our biological needs] but our mind that demands speech." 115 Speech can be meaningful without aiming to communicate truth or falsity, which indicates that the quest for meaning is "implicit in the urge to speak." The search for meaning is satisfied in mental life only with discursive thought, a silent dialogue between me and myself. Thinking requires words that are already meaningful—full of meaning—and the meaning is accessed only by actively thinking through those words in mental dialogue. Through this solitary dialogue, humans try to "come to terms with" experiences and events in the world, not for the sake of truth but for the sake of meaning. Speech and thought are tied so closely that there is no priority of one over the other: "In any case, since words—carriers of meaning—and thoughts resemble each other, thinking beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think." 116 While all mental activities occur only in and through language, there is no language specifically suited for the invisible aspects of the mind. Thinking, which is invisible and searches for invisible meanings, must use words that are borrowed from everyday experiences and use them metaphorically. A metaphor does not just mark out a "similarity present in otherwise dissimilar objects but a similarity of relations" between objects and experiences. In the case of thinking, the metaphor illuminates invisible

114

I believe Arendt's distinction between meaning and truth should itself be considered a meaningful reflection and not a truth or fact, although it is developed in reference to certain facts of experience. 115 Ibid., 98. 116 Ibid., 99.

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relations with the help of sensible ones, allowing the activity of thought and its objects to enter the world of appearances. Referencing Kant, Arendt writes, "The metaphor provides the 'abstract,' imageless thought with an intuition drawn from the world of appearances whose function it is to 'establish the reality of our concepts' and thus undo, as it were, the withdrawal from the world of appearances that is the precondition of mental activities." With speculative concepts—ideas that transcend the world of appearances—the metaphor "achieves the carrying over—metapherein—of a genuine and seemingly impossible...transition from one existential state, that of thinking, to another, that of being an appearance among appearances." 117 Philosophical concepts are "frozen analogies," metaphors drawn from experience and fixed in place through tradition. The meaning of these concepts can be found by considering the original context in which they were first used by philosophers, and reconstructing the metaphors from the everyday meanings of the terms. For example, the Greek nous is a metaphor borrowed from the experience of seeing and applied to the mind: "Nobody, we can assume, thought that the eye, the organ of vision, and the nous, the organ of thinking, were the same; but the word itself indicated that the relation between the eye and the seen object was similar to the relation between the mind and its thought-object—namely, yielded the same kind of evidence." 118 When metaphors are utilized to communicate about the invisible, "to illuminate an experience that does not appear," they cannot work in reverse. The experience drawn from the world of appearances illuminates the invisible mental experience or thought but not vice versa. The metaphor's essential function is to turn "the mind back to the sensory world" in order to compensate for the lack of independent language for the invisible. Thus, the irreversibility of metaphor does not necessarily apply to those "figures of speech" in which the "transference moves within the same realm, within the 'genus' of visibles." 119 With its utilization of metaphor, language bridges "the gulf between the realm of the invisible and the world of appearances." Thinking "actualizes those products of the mind" that have found a "home 117

Ibid., 103. Ibid., 104-105. 119 Ibid., 107. 118

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within the audible world"—i.e. thinking unfreezes the previously frozen analogies that we find in our everyday and philosophical speech. Metaphor allows us to illuminate "what cannot be seen but can be said." Language, then, has the means to keep the mind in contact with the world even when the mind has withdrawn from it. The metaphorical power of language "guarantee[s] the unity of human experience;" it proves that the "mind and body, thinking and sense experience, the invisible and the visible, belong together." But, even given this kind of unity, the fact that the true metaphor—i.e. between visible and invisible—cannot be reversed points to the "absolute primacy of the world of appearances." 120 The absentmindedness of thinking in its radical withdrawal is mitigated by the fact that the "thinking ego obviously never leaves the world of appearances altogether." The two-world theory derives its plausibility from thinking's withdrawal from the world, but, because language through metaphor allows a relation between the visible and the invisible, it is a fallacy: "There are not two worlds because metaphor unites them." 121 Arendt's argument regarding metaphor overcomes the problem of how an inquiry into an invisible activity is possible. From the beginning, the primacy of worldly appearance seemed to block any discussion of the thinking activity and its thought-objects. However, equipped with the power of metaphor, Arendt is able to pursue her project further, going beyond just negative descriptions of the mind. But, while Arendt embraces metaphor as the unifier of the mind and the world, she also insists on certain limitations of its use. One key limitation of metaphor tracks the distinction between truth and meaning: metaphors are vehicles of meaning only and should not be used in the search for truth. When they "intrude" on the practice of science, the strength of metaphors can overcome the need for real data and evidence—as in the "consciousness theory of psychoanalysis, where consciousness is seen as the peak of an iceberg" that points to the hidden unconscious inevitably beneath the surface, something which in principle cannot be proven. 122 Similarly, in philosophical speculation, metaphors can be problematic when philosophers treat their reflections as systematic knowledge. Metaphors, because of their ties to 120

Ibid., 109. Ibid., 110. 122 Ibid., 113. 121

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sense experience and the cognitive aspects of the senses, can give philosophical systems great intuitive plausibility. The thinkers that avoided this danger warned that there was "something [in the thinking experience] that refused to lend itself to a transformation that would allow it to appear," as the objects of sense appear and ground cognition. 123 In other words, by insisting on "the ineffable" aspects of thinking, these philosophers heeded, however slightly, the difference between thinking and knowing, meaning and truth. For Arendt, the need to appeal to something ineffable in the thinking experience is due to the "unquestioned priority" of visual metaphors for the thinking activity in the tradition.124 Using metaphors of sight to model the thinking activity has its advantages. Sight "establishes a safe distance between subject and object," so that neither is the object interfered with, nor is the subject affected. This distance is the basis of the traditional concepts of objectivity and theory. Sight also allows the subject to be free in selecting its objects from many equally present options, for no seen object forces itself on the subject more than any other. Additionally, sight has objects that can, at least potentially, last over significant periods of time—in contrast to hearing, for example, whose sounds are always instantaneous and fleeting—so that the perceiver can return to them or meditate on them continuously. 125 For Arendt, the sight metaphors have dominated the philosophical tradition because thinkers have believed they were seeking knowledge like the scientist—because they identified their need for meaning with the desire to know. Now, if we follow the sight metaphor a bit further, we can isolate the reason for truth's ineffability within the traditional framework. Although none of our senses can be translated into one another, common sense guarantees that the senses are addressing the same object. But, none of the singular immediate sensations "can be adequately described in words"; language can only help us name the objects common to the different senses and make comparisons between different sensations. We can only say, "Something smells like a rose, tastes like pea soup, feels like velvet," but we cannot describe the 123

Ibid., 114. Ibid., 102. 125 Ibid., 111-112. 124

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sensation directly. Thus, just as the immediate sensations cannot be described directly, the "seeing" of philosophical truth evades description as well: "All this, of course, is only another way of saying that truth, in the metaphysical tradition understood in terms of the sight metaphor, is ineffable by definition." 126 The priority given to nous through the sight metaphors has engendered a level of hostility to the written and spoken word. In the tradition, metaphysical truth carries the force of necessity "because it relied on the same imperviousness to contradiction we know so well from sight experiences." The experience of truth is un-free on the metaphor of sight: the self-evidence of the seen object is compelling. Speech is unnecessary for truths based on sight: "Truth as self-evidence does not need any criterion; it is the criterion, the final arbiter, of everything that may follow." 127 For the tradition, there is an inherent tension between logos, "our necessity to give an account and justify in words," and nous or theōria, the "seeing" that is essential to all truth. 128 The key incompatibility is between "intuition—the guiding metaphor for philosophical truth—and speech—the medium in which thinking manifests itself: the former always presents us with a co-temporaneous manifold, whereas the latter necessarily discloses itself in a sequence of words and sentences." 129 Thus, when philosophers have pursued truth qua intuition, they have been characteristically disappointed with the thinking activity itself, which does not yield truth at the end of its sequence. In other words, meaning does not stay put like the object of contemplation and intuition—the sequence of sounds through which meaning is disclosed does not allow for it to be treated like an object of sight. Logos lacks the compelling force of nous: "For no discourse...can ever match the simple, unquestioned and unquestionable certainty of visible experience." 130 While philosophers have always relied on speech for thinking, speech has often been treated as "a mere instrument" for the pursuit of truth. The ideal of truth as intuition in the sciences means that speech plays, at best, a secondary role, as "confirmation of any scientist's theory comes about through sense evidence" and not through any form 126

Ibid., 119. Ibid., 120. 128 Ibid., 102, 120. 129 Ibid., 118. 130 Ibid., 120. 127

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of language. 131 So, philosophy, if it follows the model of science and seeks intuition of the truth through a "seeing" of the mind, will also not need speech except perhaps as an instrument. If one rejects the traditional priority of vision and the related conception of truth, the alternative is to conceive thinking in terms of hearing metaphors, but those will have their own problems. While sight is not adequate to the essential need for speech in the thinking activity, the experiences of hearing are characteristically passive, so that the metaphors of hearing do not capture the very active nature of thinking. The central issue is that metaphors, while they function well enough to illuminate particular concepts and trains of thought, are misleading when used to capture the thinking activity itself. Here is how Arendt expresses the problem: In other words, the chief difficulty here seems to be that for thinking itself—whose language is entirely metaphorical and whose conceptual framework depends entirely on the gift of the metaphor, which bridges the gulf between the visible and the invisible, the world of appearances and the thinking ego—there exists no metaphor that could plausibly illuminate this special activity of the mind, in which something invisible within us deals with the invisibles of the world. All metaphors drawn from the senses will lead us into difficulties for the simple reason that all our senses are essentially cognitive, hence, if understood as activities, have an end outside themselves; [the senses] are not energeia, an end in itself, but instruments enabling us to know and deal with the world. 132 Thinking, in contrast to the senses, does not aim at anything outside itself—it produces no results "that will survive the activity." Without an adequate metaphor from the five senses, Arendt resorts to the metaphor of life, the "only possible metaphor" that could illuminate the activity of thinking. The life process is essentially cyclical, has no end result beyond itself, and it does not cease between birth and death. So it is with thinking: it is cyclical (often returning to the same questions and concerns) and produces no cognitive results, and it must be done regularly, for "without thinking the human mind is dead." 133 However, Arendt admits, the life metaphor "remain[s] singularly empty" in the sense that it does not tell us why we engage in thinking. Life is not lived for a distinct purpose that could help us understand

131

Ibid., 121. Ibid., 123. 133 Ibid. 132

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why we live, and the same goes for thinking. 134 To use other terms, the only "reason" for thinking is that it actualizes meaning, and meaning is sought only because it is meaningful. On its own terms, without referring to any other mental or worldly activities, the life metaphor does not illuminate the thinking activity unless one has already experienced the need for meaning and the activity that satisfies that need.

What Makes Us Think? In the third section of Thinking, Arendt aims to avoid the question "Why do we think?" by asking a different question "What makes us think?" This slight but important variation is meant to avoid looking for "causes or purposes" of the thinking activity. The human need to think is not necessary for the sake of some end external to thinking—it is done for its own sake and not for any tangible result or product. The what question is posed in order to avoid excessive speculation about why thinkers engage in the activity and to avoid the tendency to posit a single answer. By focusing her attention on several historical answers to the question, Arendt obliquely illuminates our inability to demonstrate that thinking is done for a single, decisive purpose. The best we can do is explore the various historical accounts of thinking experiences within the tradition of philosophy, and trace out the implications of these experiences. Arendt aims to separate the genuine experiences of thinking from the metaphysical and philosophical extravagances that have been motivated by this experiences. If you look at her chapter titles in this section, it would seem Arendt outlines only four basic accounts: the pre-philosophical Greek, the Platonic, the Roman, and the Socratic. However, there are two others that appear in the text, those of Greek philosophy and modern philosophy. In the case of the former, what is slightly confusing is that several Greek philosophers, including Plato, are referenced both as support for the Greek philosophical position and for the view attributed to Plato. The confusion is unproblematic for Arendt's purposes and my own. The organization serves the crucial function of separating the experience of wonder as the impetus for thinking, which is explicit only in Plato, from the more prevalent Greek notion that thinking about Being bestows immortality on the thinker, which is often 134

Ibid., 124-125.

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expressed by Plato as well. Even if these ideas are interconnected in Plato's work, Arendt wishes to treat them as distinct answers to her question that have their root in very different experiences. As for the modern perspective, it is built upon experiences that appear to be both in direct opposition to the experience of wonder and a later variation of the Roman attitude. As Arendt threads the modern attitude into the discussion in two different sections, it is formulated in such a way that it does not constitute an original answer to "what makes us think?"—the modern perspective centers on the same experiences as the Roman perspective. As Arendt explicates these historical accounts, she is very interested in the role of spectatorship, the various ways of being a spectator within the thinking activity. The thinker, no matter whom you ask, is always a spectator of one sort or another—the thinker must withdraw from worldly activity. These issues are particularly relevant to the larger question of how thinking and judging are related. As we follow Arendt's presentation, it will helpful to keep this connection in mind. While Arendt believes that thinking's withdrawal can be used in many different ways, as evidenced by the historical accounts themselves, she ultimately aims to show that each mode of thinking has its own moral implications. For some modes, the implications are quite dangerous, especially if each mode is taken as the only way to think or the only way one ought to think. For others, the implications are beneficial for moral life and moral judgment. Prior to the rise of philosophy, the "basic Greek attitude to the world" is defined by its "passion for seeing." For the Greeks, all that exists is meant to be "looked at and admired," and human virtue is determined "only by the performance—by how [the actor] appeared while he was doing." 135 The divinity of the gods was due to their position "outside all human affairs," which allowed them to enjoy all good things as immortal spectators of the world. Human beings, unable to achieve the deathlessness of the gods, could become immortal only through great action. The poets' role in the world was to help the actors achieve immortality by telling the stories of their great deeds, something the actors were unable to do for themselves: "A distinction is made between a thing done and a thing thought, and this thought135

Ibid., 131-132.

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thing is accessible only to the 'spectator,' to the non-doer." 136 Without spectators, "the world would be imperfect," for no particular action or thing would have any meaning. In other words, "The meaning of what actually happens and appears while it is happening is revealed when it has disappeared; remembrance, by which you make present to your mind what actually is absent and past, reveals the meaning in the form of a story." 137 The spectator is privileged to understand the meaning of events because being a spectator requires "Scholē...the deliberate act of abstaining, of holding oneself back...from the ordinary activities determined by our daily wants." 138 The nobility of the spectators rests on the fact that "they do not participate in what is going on but look on it as a mere spectacle." The spectator enjoys the ability to understand what the spectacle is about only because she withdraws from participation and occupies a position from which she can see the whole, while the actor is required to play her part and is thereby unable to pay attention to the whole. The privilege of judging is also granted to the spectators: the actor depends on the spectators for fame and recognition in the form of the spectators' opinions—"he must conduct himself in accordance with what spectators expect of him, and the final verdict of success or failure is in their hands." 139 However, while acting and spectating depend on one another, "it was axiomatic in pre-philosophical Greece that the only incentive worthy of man qua man is the striving for immortality" through the performance of great deeds. 140 The poet-spectator, despite his privileges, could not attain the immortality of the actor. By not participating in action and relinquishing the possibility of immortality, the poet allows for the immortality of others. For Arendt, the poet is the pre-philosophical thinker, whose withdrawal from action is the prerequisite for grasping the meaning of human affairs, and also the judge who evaluates what is worthy of remembrance. In the pre-philosophical Greek view, thinking and judging are easily compatible and nearly imply one another.

136

Ibid., 132. Ibid., 133. 138 Ibid., 93. 139 Ibid., 94. 140 Ibid., 134. 137

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Arendt detects a crucial shift in these ideas with the advent of Greek philosophy. The Greek gods, being deathless but not birthless, had a flawed immortality. The Greek philosophical concept of Being was formulated to overcome this flaw—Being is not just everlasting but un-generated as well. 141 The main advantage of philosophy, as opposed to action, was that one did not need to rely on posterity to achieve immortality. By thinking, the philosopher could become immortal by living in the region of the divine Being, which is "the object of our thoughts that bestows immortality on thinking itself." 142 Instead of participating in human affairs or looking on as a spectator, the philosopher became the spectator of the whole universe, "seeing" its invisible harmony through nous, the divine element of human nature. Additionally, because Being is un-generated and everlasting, Being "cannot be otherwise than it is, and cannot not be"—it is necessary in the strongest possible sense. 143 Philosophy, since its Greek beginnings, has always focused on knowing those things that are always the same and necessary, while "all matters concerning human affairs, because they were contingent" have been deemed unworthy of philosophy's attention. 144 The pre-philosophical notion that the human world was meant to be seen and admired was undermined by the philosophical occupation with Being. The few philosophers who considered human history worthy of study did so only on the assumption that history was itself ruled by necessary laws—it was not the particular events of history that were interesting but the laws that connected and explained them. While Greek philosophy preserved the pre-philosophical goal of immortality in its own way, with the advent of Christianity, philosophy no longer had any role in making humans immortal, for that was accomplished solely by faith. At that point, the goal of philosophy became solely to contemplate and uncover what is necessary. As a spectator of the universe and its necessary structure, the philosopher is not a judge who evaluates particular deeds and events in the realm of human affairs.

141

Ibid., 134. Ibid., 136. 143 Ibid., 136-137. 144 Ibid., 139. 142

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Arendt locates a different impetus for thinking in Plato's Theaetetus, one distinct from the quest for immortality that pervaded Greek thought. For Plato, wonder is the beginning of philosophy. Thinking is aroused by wonder, which is a pathos: "[W]hat sets men wondering is something familiar and yet normally invisible, and something men are forced to admire." 145 This admiration proceeds to speech and argument (logos) to glorify and praise the unseen harmony of the world. The wonder that arouses thinking and speaking regards not particulars but "the whole, which, in contrast to the sum total of entities, is never manifest." The whole is "the meaning and meaningfulness of all the particulars acting together," which is accessible only to "a beholder in whose mind the particular instances and sequences are invisibly united." 146 From the basic experience of wonder in the face of meaning's invisibility, Plato formulated some of his key metaphysical claims. The invisible unity of all particular beings is Being, and the intuition of Being prompts admiration because, even though Being itself is mysterious and unexplainable, its opposite, Non-Being, is utterly impossible. In modern thought, Plato's admiring wonder often gave way to despair. The basic metaphysical question "Why is there anything at all and not, rather, nothing?" highlights the incomprehensible nature of absolute existence and Being's logical connection to nothingness. And since Being cannot be explained, thinking about Being discloses the lack of a ground or reason for existence itself, and thus leads inevitably to thinking about nothingness: "nobody can think Being without at the same time thinking nothingness, or Meaning without thinking futility, vanity, meaninglessness." 147 For the moderns, the "scandal of Being" was this "abyss of nothingness," the experience of "nausea at the opaqueness of sheer existence, at the naked thereness of the factually given." 148 The inability to explain existence, instead of eliciting a positive response as it had for Plato and other Greek thinkers, led to despair at the gulf between thought and reality. Modern thinkers struggled to admire and praise anything they did not know or understand. 149

145

Ibid., 143. Ibid., 144. 147 Ibid., 149. 148 Ibid., 147. 149 In her treatment of the modern attitude to thought, Arendt quotes from Leibniz, Schelling, Sartre, and Nietzsche. 146

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Perhaps, Arendt suggests, the modern predicament of despair might be solved with a simple logical move. Since "the very activity of thinking...already presupposes existence," namely the thinker's existence and that of the object of thinking, thinking is protected against the abyss of nothingness. But, for Arendt, "such merely logical solutions are always treacherous" and unconvincing. Heidegger offers a better approach, an "existential, meta-logical solution." For Heidegger, the affirmation of Being is implied in the very act of thinking, for "to think and to thank are essentially the same." 150 Arendt seems to believe this Heideggerian response to despair speaks to the same experiences that led Plato to claim that philosophy begins in admiring wonder: thinking, although it can speculate about the incomprehensibility of Being or the impossibility of nothingness, always begins with the affirmation of existence. For Arendt, Plato's insistence on universal affirmation (and Heidegger's insistence on thankfulness) is problematic, but not on purely logical or phenomenological grounds. The main problem is aesthetic and ethical: "Admiring wonder conceived as the starting point of philosophy leaves no place for the factual existence of disharmony, of ugliness, and finally of evil." 151 Arendt utilizes a line of argument from the Parmenides to spell out the difficulty, which even Plato seems to acknowledge. If the theory of Forms is correct, and all sensible things owe their reality to an unchanging "supersensory entity," then even the worst things have a Form in which they participate. Evil and ugliness would have a necessary and eternal existence in the realm of Forms. In other words, the Being that compels admiring wonder is the whole that unifies all beings, even those it is difficult for humans to affirm. 152 Thus, within this framework, either the thinker learns to affirm Being in its totality, losing her aversion to evil and ugliness, or she cannot approach the fundamental questions of philosophy. Another problematic aspect of Platonic wonder, which Arendt does not explicitly address as a problem, is its passivity. Even though thinking is an activity for Plato, Being forces me to start thinking,

150

Ibid., 150. Ibid. 152 Ibid., 151. 151

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which means I am not responsible for thinking or for not thinking. 153 By itself, the passivity of wonder would undermine the personal responsibility to think. The passivity of wonder must be combined with a recognition of our capacity to actively respond to the realities that arouse wonder. In Arendt's language, even though reality makes a claim on our thinking attention, we have the ability to respond by thinking or by simply ignoring reality. In the context of Arendt's distinction between truth and meaning, the experience of wonder speaks to the fact that metaphysical and philosophical questions do not lead to demonstrable truth. Wonder expresses our lack of knowing, and perhaps even our inability to overcome that lack. Although Plato was concerned with our inability to comprehend Being, Arendt believes it is a much more common experience to be confronted with our inability to define everyday concepts, like justice and beauty. Even more important, concepts like justice and beauty can be a source of admiration. Arendt hints that "the notion of ideas occurred to Plato because of beautiful things, and would never have occurred to him" were there only ugly and mundane objects. 154 To avoid the problems of universal affirmation, Arendt shifts the focus of wonder from Being, as the unity of all existence, to the invisible unity of particular concepts. In addition, in her later discussion of Socrates, Arendt insists that thinking can be prompted by anything that exists in the world, even the worst things. The universal affirmation of Being that is implied in Plato's doctrine dismisses the existence of ugliness and evil. While Arendt finds universal affirmation morally problematic, she would admit that it appeals to thinkers who are willing or eager to ignore moral issues and moral phenomena altogether. Arendt's worry is that the thinker who is concerned primarily with Being will be unable—because of the need to affirm all existence in thought—to make or even allow the distinction between good and evil. In the person of Heidegger, who is quoted throughout the section on wonder as the main proponent of wonder since modern times, Arendt sees an example of the moral dangers that accompany classical metaphysical concerns. Heidegger's moral failures during the Nazi era have a strong connection in 153

Plato infers from this lack of responsibility that there are some good natured souls who are destined to think and there are those who are incapable of thinking. 154 Ibid.

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Arendt's mind to his philosophical preoccupation with Being. I will discuss Heidegger in the Willing chapter and develop this connection in more detail. Arendt attributes the modern shift from admiration to despair not to "the loss of wonder or perplexity" but to a lack of "willingness to affirm in thought," and she also calls the shift a "turning from admiration to negation." According to Arendt, to affirm is "to say 'yes' and confirm the factuality of sheer existence," and since this affirmation relates to Being and not to particular beings, it is "the need to reconcile thought and reality." 155 In this context, negation also relates to Being: it is to say "no" to reality as a whole. Both universal affirmation and universal negation make judgment impossible: to affirm or negate Being as a whole does not allow for the basic distinctions between good and evil, ugly and beautiful, or right and wrong. Where the admirer of Being can only affirm, the one who despairs can only negate. In our earlier discussion of thinking's withdrawal from reality, we came across the idea that the mind can accept or reject reality. Despite the change in terminology, I think Arendt has returned to the same distinction here. The attitudes of affirmation and negation are embedded in the philosophical concepts of Being and nothingness, but they do not appear to be acts of thought per se. By itself, thinking is "neutral" in its speculations and it cannot help considering both sides of any issue. Instead, affirmation and negation are better understood as stances taken toward reality by willing, with thinking being utilized in both cases to realize and solidify these stances. Arendt's prime example of a philosopher who uses thinking for the purposes of negation is Epictetus, the Roman Stoic philosopher. The Roman conception of the philosopher was "the wise man whom nothing can touch," for the "usefulness [of philosophy] was to teach men how to cure their despairing minds by escaping from the world through thinking." The attitude of the Romans was precisely opposite of Platonic wonder: "do not be surprised at anything, admire nothing." 156 As has been mentioned before, Arendt attributes the Roman approach primarily to the political conditions of the time, to the decline of the public realm. For the

155 156

Ibid., 148-149. Ibid., 152.

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Romans, "thinking does not arise out of reason's need [for meaning] but has an existential root in unhappiness...Thinking then arises out of the disintegration of reality and the resulting disunity of man and world, from which springs the need for another world, more harmonious and more meaningful." 157 In late Roman antiquity, and especially with the Stoics, spectating took on a new significance. Instead of considering spectating a god-like activity, as it was for the Greeks, the Romans saw only negative value in it: to be a spectator was to be free from worldly troubles and misery, to see the "shipwreck" from a distance instead of suffering it. Arendt signals a decisive shift in this period: "What is lost is not only the spectator's privilege in judging...and the fundamental contrast between thinking and doing, but also the even more fundamental insight that whatever appears is there to be seen, that the very concept of appearance demands a spectator, and that therefore to see and to behold are activities of the highest rank." 158 The loss of these pre-philosophical notions in the Roman period minimizes the dignity of spectatorship for the subsequent history of philosophy. This impulse to think for the sake of escaping the world only becomes a "consistent philosophical system" in the work of Epictetus, where the emphasis on the "use and application" of philosophy is central. Thinking and meaning are not enjoyed or sought for their own sake, but thinking trains us to use our imagination for its practical effects. For Epictetus, philosophy is a mode of making, and the product is not an external physical object but the self. In order to mold himself as the craftsmen mold their products, it is necessary for the philosopher to refuse "to react to whatever good or evil might befall him" 159—he must be sovereign over himself and exercise complete self-control. This level of self-control requires a "radical withdrawal from reality" in which the thinker "strengthen[s] the original absentminded of thought to such an extent that reality disappears altogether." If I am to always be absent from the world so that it 157

Ibid., 153. Simon Critchley expresses that the same impetus drives his own thinking: "Philosophy does not begin in an experience of wonder, as ancient tradition contends, but rather, I think, with the indeterminate but palpable sense that something desired has not been fulfilled, that a fantastic effort has failed. Philosophy begins in disappointment." The directness and succinctness of Critchley's formulation shows that the Roman attitude to thought is still very much alive. Interestingly enough, Critchley also agrees with Arendt that modern philosophy begins in disappointment: "Although there might well have been precursors, I see this as a specifically modern conception of philosophy." Critchley, Infinitely Demanding Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2007), 1. 158 Ibid., 140. 159 Ibid., 154.

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will not affect me, I must utilize the power of imagination to make what is present to the senses disappear and lose its reality for me. Since thinking withdraws radically from reality, normally independent sense objects can be treated as mere "impressions," over which Epictetus believes we have sovereign power: "Whether what affects you exists or is mere illusion depends on your decision whether or not you will recognize it as real." 160 Arendt claims that Epictetus expresses systematically a key discovery for the history of philosophy: "Wherever philosophy is understood as the 'science' that deals with the mind sheerly as consciousness—where therefore the question of reality can be left in suspense, bracketed out altogether— we encounter in fact the old Stoic position." 161 Thinking, due to its reflexive recoiling upon itself, allows the thinker to "bracket" reality. I can choose to focus on my perception instead of the perceived object, and in this shift of concentration, the original object is changed into a mere impression of consciousness. The impression is not a remembered image or thought-object but a present sensation deprived of its objectivity and its reality: The trick discovered by Stoic philosophy is to use the mind in such a way that reality cannot touch its owner even when he has not withdrawn from it; instead of withdrawing mentally from everything that is present and close at hand, he has drawn every appearance inside him, and his "consciousness" becomes a full substitute for the outside world presented as impression or image. 162 The transformation of consciousness in the Stoic practice allows the world to be "stripped of its 'existential' character, of its realness that could touch and threaten me in my own [realness]." 163 The Stoic practice is always a temptation for philosophers, for it provides a way for the thinker to escape the world and its vicissitudes. According to Arendt, bracketing reality is not solely an act of thinking; it requires an effort of the will. Existentially speaking, Parmenides was wrong when he said that only Being manifests itself in, and is the same as, thinking. Non-Being is also thinkable if the will commands the mind. [Thinking's] withdrawal is then perverted into an annihilating power, and 160

Ibid., 155. Ibid. 162 Ibid., 156. 163 Ibid. 161

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nothingness becomes a full substitute for reality, because nothingness brings relief. The relief, of course, is unreal; it is merely psychological, a soothing of anxiety and fear. I still doubt that there ever was anybody who remained master of his "impressions" when roasted in the Phalarian Bull. 164 So, for Arendt, the Stoic practice is only possible because thinking is commanded by the will to realize its most extreme potential, the annihilating power of radical withdrawal. This practice is done not for the sake of meaning, but for the sake of its psychological effects. In this mode, thinking is a tool for the will to subdue the soul's natural reactions to the world. The problem is that reality can only be bracketed in thought, and thought has limited power to "imagine away" our experiences of pain and pleasure. Nothingness is not the only concept or thought that can give psychological relief from reality. Arendt uses Cicero and Boethius to illustrate the power of particular "thought-trains by which one could take one's way out of the world." In Cicero's "Dream of Scipio," the reader is invited, along with Scipio, to take a position in heaven and look upon the earth from a universal standpoint. If one takes the "right perspective," all particular things appear meaningless and all events and deeds appear futile, and one can learn to "despise human affairs." 165 The story is an example of how "certain trains of thought actually aim at thinking oneself out of the world, and by means of relativization...Here thinking means following a sequence of reasoning that will lift you to a viewpoint outside the world of appearances as well as outside your own life. Philosophy is called upon to compensate for the frustrations of politics and, more generally, of life itself." 166 Thinking's imaginative power is here recruited for psychological compensation, as it was in Epictetus. Boethius' On the Consolation of Philosophy is another example of thinking's ability to bring comfort. Instead of merely relativizing human concerns in order to minimize their associated psychological effects, Boethius' thought-train attempts a "violent annihilation" of human reality, and especially the existence of evil. Even though evil appears to be real to the unthinking person, Boethius argues, it is ultimately an illusion that thinking can overcome: all that exists is good, and what appears to

164

Ibid., 157. Emphasis added. Ibid., 159. 166 Ibid., 160. 165

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be evil is justified by its place in the whole. Traditionally, of course, this argument is often employed in theological contexts for the sake of theodicy, for defending God against the existence of evil. This line of thinking, for Arendt, is another version of Epictetus' method: "It is the old Stoic advise: What you negate by thought—and thought is in your power—cannot affect you. Thinking makes it unreal." 167 Epictetus's importance in the history of philosophy is that "he discovered that consciousness makes it possible for mental activities to recoil upon themselves." The will, by calling on thinking to negate reality, acts on the self and changes it. This kind of thinking is "centered exclusively on the self." Annihilating reality does not only change thought-objects into impressions, it affects the person who thinks in this way: "[U]ndeniably there is an element of willing in this kind of thinking. To think along these lines means to act upon yourself—the only action left when all acting in the world has become futile." 168 Likewise, the comforting thought-trains of Cicero and others are not merely neutral thought experiments, but they contribute to the character and sentiments of the person thinking them. The Platonic and Roman answers—admiring wonder and despairing negation—are close to being opposites of one another, but they contain some common features. The withdrawal of thinking is utilized by both perspectives, either in order to escape from the world or to admire Being. Both perspectives also emphasize the self-sufficiency of the thinking activity, that it enjoys itself without the need for anything external, neither resources nor obstacles. The thinker needs nothing qua thinker, although as a human certain needs will occasionally disrupt the thinking activity. A distinct pleasure attends the activity of thinking, and this pleasure is unconnected to bodily pleasures. While thinking, one is unaware of the body, which lends some power to the mind to subdue the appetites and some discomforts. This more basic experience is the root of the Stoic practice. 169 Another commonality between these two uses of thinking is that they require an act of the will. Just as the negation or annihilation of reality is dependent on a command of the will, it appears that the affirmation that is essential to wonder is also an act of the will. Arendt is not explicit on this point, but she 167

Ibid., 161. Ibid., 161-162. 169 Ibid., 163-164. 168

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does claim that wonder was lost because modern thinkers were "unwilling" to affirm in thought. In her discussion of Platonic wonder, she may have avoided the terminology of "willing" due to it being anachronistic to Greek thought in general. As I mentioned above, Arendt is concerned about interpreting Platonic wonder as a pathos that forces one to think about Being. Perhaps only to the metaphysician who habitually thinks about Being has wonder taken on the force of necessity. Throughout this section, Arendt's presentation, and especially her attention to the moral implications of the historical accounts, suggests that how thinking goes about its business ultimately depends on the activity of willing. Various potentialities of thinking are utilized and radicalized depending on how the activity is directed, and to which objects and thought-trains it is directed. What makes us think depends on willing. In contrast to the Platonic and Roman answers, Arendt does not point to any moral problems that might arise from thinking in the pre-philosophical mode, which is generally in line with Arendt's own views of judgment. Universal affirmation and universal negation are both incompatible with making distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong. By taking a position outside the world—i.e. radically withdrawing from the world—the philosopher's attention is not directed to the differences between particulars but only to Being. The pre-philosophical spectator, however, takes a position in the world and can discriminate and evaluate between competing phenomena. Although Arendt does not explicitly mention any shortcomings of the pre-philosophical mode, one of its key limitations is that it does not ask questions about the meaning of concepts, as it only considers the meaning of events and formulates narratives. It lacks the more traditionally philosophical interest in ideas and does not attain the moral benefits that come with that interest. Philosophical thinking has the advantage of creating independence from the spectator's immediate worldly context. Without a critical reflection on ideas, the spectator is relegated to the contemporary opinions and categories of judgment. Arendt turns to Socrates to motivate the need to think philosophically about even the most basic concepts that we employ.

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Arendt's Socratic Answer The Platonic and Roman answers are those of professional philosophers, and, for Arendt, they are "dubious for precisely that reason." The problem is that professional thinkers give answers that are "always too general and too vague" to apply to everyday life. The common thread is "the confession of a need" for thought, but these accounts of the need do not help the thinking ego appear in the world, so its activity remains hidden and obscure. Arendt wants to bring the thinking activity "out of hiding, to tease it, as it were, into manifestation" by turning to Socrates as a model of "a thinker who was not a professional, who in his person unified the two apparently contradictory passions, for thinking and acting," so as to "represent for us the actual thinking activity" in the world of appearances. 170 Arendt's "transformation of a historical figure into a model" is not aimed at being factually precise. Instead, the construction of an "ideal type" is a process of purifying a historical character for the sake of "representative significance," in which historical precision is only of secondary importance. 171 For Socrates, the essence of thinking is to "examine the invisible measures by which we judge human affairs," to ask about the nature of "courage, piety, friendship, sōphrosynē, knowledge, justice, and so on." 172 Socrates always ends his thinking aporetically, without formulating definitive doctrines or answers to these conceptual questions. Arendt summarizes her understanding of thinking's aporetic character for Socrates: [A]dmiring wonder at just or courageous deeds seen by the eyes of the body gives birth to such questions as What is courage? What is justice? The existence of courage or justice has been indicated to my senses by what I have seen, though they themselves are not present in sense perception, and hence not given as self-evident reality. The basic Socratic question—What do we mean when we use this class of words, later called "concepts"?—arises out of that experience. But the original wonder is not only not resolved in such questions, since they remain without answer, but even reinforced. What begins as wonder ends in perplexity and thence leads back to wonder: How marvelous that men can perform courageous or just deeds even though they do not know, can give no account of, what courage and justice are. 173

170

Ibid., 166-167. Ibid., 168-169. 172 Ibid., 165. 173 Ibid., 166. 171

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Here, Arendt describes how Socrates combines admiring wonder with a focus on human standards of judgment. In Socratic thinking, the focus of wonder has shifted from Being to particular everyday moral concepts, bypassing the ethical dangers of Platonic wonder. Implied in Socratic wonder is an affirmation of particulars, the particulars that exemplify the concepts of justice, beauty, and so on. Thinking, while it does not lead to knowledge, remains bound to examples of its concepts in aporetic wonder. For Arendt, Socratic thinking can concern any of the abstract nouns that occur in everyday speech. Arendt gives an example of a "noun which to us no longer sounds abstract at all": the concept "house." While it can be applied to a huge number of very different things, the concept also has a limit to its application: to call the tents of nomads "houses" is a bad use of the term. The difficulty is that the limit cannot be defined, or, in other words, the measure remains unknown even after thinking about it. The word "house" stands in for a number of particulars; it is the "shorthand" that thinking utilizes for its normal operation. The meaning of a concept is normally presupposed: "The word 'house' is something like a frozen thought that thinking must unfreeze whenever it wants to find out the original meaning." 174 Thinking in this aporetic mode has its positive effects, which can be gleaned from a number of similes and associated metaphors that Socrates himself and others used to characterize his mode of thinking. First, Socrates is like a gadfly who arouses his fellow citizens to start thinking. His famous phrase, "The unexamined life is not worth living," indicates nothing more than that "life deprived of thought would be meaningless." The activity of thinking is done for its own sake and not for any results. "To think and to be fully alive are the same," which means that thinking accompanies our lived experience and fleshes out its meaning. 175 "Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers:" they are active in the world even though they lack a basic awareness of what they are doing and what is happening in the world. 176

174

Ibid., 171. At times, Arendt seems to rely too heavily on returning to the "original" meaning of our concepts, as though the meaning lies only at the beginning, exclusively in the origin. Most often, however, she does not seem to restrict our approach to meaning in this way. 175 Ibid., 178. 176 Ibid., 191.

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Socrates is also like a midwife who purges his fellow citizens of their unexamined opinions, revealing their ignorance without teaching them anything new to replace it. In the Socratic dialogues, the concepts and opinions that are first examined are common, those that everyone normally takes for granted. Socrates' questions help others give birth to their opinions, bringing them out into the open. Once the opinions have been made explicit, they are subject to the "wind of thought." Just as a strong wind is invisible but still produces tangible and destructive effects, disregarding what objects stand in its gale, thinking's invisible force has a "destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values, measurements of good and evil, in short, on those customs and rules of conduct we treat of in morals and ethics." 177 Thinking is not just destructive of commonly held opinions, it is "self-destructive," unable to establish any of its thoughts without running into perplexities, and often unable to satisfy its need for meaning without rethinking the same ideas. Like the activity of Penelope: "it undoes every morning what it has finished the night before." 178 The meaning of a concept is not a fixed product that, once gained by an effort of thinking, can be experienced without thinking again. When thinking is over, the concept refreezes and its meaning returns to being a presupposition, even if it refreezes in a different way. Finally, Socrates is like an electric ray that paralyzes everyone he confronts with his own perplexities, making them stop their worldly business and start thinking. Thinking always implies a "stop and think," a worldly paralysis while it searches for meaning. The paralysis can often have a lingering "dazing after-effect," so that once thinking has undermined common opinions, rules and standards, one does not know what to do. Returning to her "house" example, Arendt explains this effect: "Once you have thought about its implied meaning—dwelling, having a home, being housed—you are no longer as likely to accept your own home whatever the fashion of the time may prescribe; but this by no means guarantees that you will be able to come up with an acceptable solution to what has become 'problematic.'" 179 Thinking, then, does not always allow a seamless return to worldly life, especially with regard to ethical concepts and standards. 177

Ibid., 175. Ibid., 88. 179 Ibid., 175. 178

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Since thinking destroys our established ethical standards without providing any new standards to replace them, it may seem to invite a nihilistic attitude that leads to immoral behavior. Many fear or reject thinking for precisely this reason. The quest for meaning, which relentlessly dissolves and examines anew all accepted doctrines and rules, can at any moment turn against itself, produce a reversal of the old values, and declare these contraries to be "new values."...What we commonly call "nihilism"...and ascribe to thinkers who allegedly dared to think "dangerous thoughts"— is actually a danger inherent in the thinking activity itself. There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking is itself dangerous, but nihilism is not its product. Nihilism is but the other side of conventionalism; its creed consists of negations of the current so-called positive values, to which it remains bound. 180 Nihilism is possible only because of thinking's destructive force, but nihilism is not proper to thinking per se. If one stops the thinking process with the initial negation of conventions that is necessary for any critical thought, then the result is the mere reversal of values. But, properly speaking, thinking should not simply reverse convention and be done—the negation of common opinion cannot be taken as a stable body of knowledge either. The root of nihilism is the desire to find results from the thinking process, to develop a creed that can be followed as people normally follow convention. Socratic thinking requires something altogether different: "Practically, thinking means that each time you are confronted with some difficulty in life you have to make up your mind anew." 181 Non-thinking is often prescribed as a way to avoid nihilism, but it has its own dangers: "[I]t teaches [people] to hold fast to whatever the prescribed rules of conduct may be at a given time in a given society. What people then get used to is less the content of the rules, a close examination of which would always lead them into perplexity, than the possession of rules under which to subsume particulars." Ardent rule-following means treating rules as principles of knowledge (as common sense truths), which require no thought or reflection to be applied. Ethical conventions and rules are like "table manners": they are subject, under certain conditions, to rapid fluctuation and complete reversal. When the changes

180 181

Ibid., 176. Ibid., 177.

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occurred in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, there was no shortage of rule-following, but no one was thinking. In terms of Arendt's new metaphor, "everybody was fast asleep." 182 Socrates believed that thinking was good for the city, but he did not undertake thinking for strictly moral purposes. For Socrates, philosophy, the love of wisdom, begins from the fact that humans are not wise: "Love as Eros is primarily a need; it desires what it has not...By desiring what it has not, love establishes a relationship with what is not present." The philosopher speaks to "bring this relationship into the open, make it appear." Since philosophy is borne of "desirous love, the objects of thought can only be lovable things," the implication of which is that ugliness and evil cannot be objects of thought. 183 It seems Socrates denies the reality of evil in much the same way as the tradition that follows him. Arendt suggests that concepts like evil and ugliness are revealed to be meaningless under examination: "If thinking dissolves positive concepts into their original meaning, then the same process must dissolve these 'negative' concepts into their original meaninglessness, that is, into nothing for the thinking ego." However, Arendt does not agree that this implies that evil does not exist, i.e. that it is a mere semblance that thought can correct. 184 In fact, for Arendt, Socratic thinking can begin from the experience of evil or ugliness. The existence of evil is established by experience, and thought's inability to find meaning in the concept of evil only exacerbates the memory of the original experience. Thus, despite the strengths of Socratic thinking, the question of the connection between evil and thoughtlessness has not been answered in a satisfactory manner. Socratic erōs—because it is tied to affirmation of particulars—implies only that people who love "positive" concepts like justice, beauty, and wisdom are incapable of doing evil. Arendt claims that this logic reduces to Plato's theory of "noble natures"—those who love the positive concepts are naturally inclined to avoid evil—and is inadequate: "Yet the implied and dangerous conclusion, 'Everyone wants to do good,' is not true even in [noble natures'] case. The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good." The idea that some people are naturally inclined to avoid evil is a 182

Ibid. Ibid., 178-179. 184 Ibid., 179. 183

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dangerous moral claim. In addition to the moral problems with Socratic erōs is its inconsistency with the Socratic practice of thinking, which engaged all subjects (not just the positive concepts) and all types of people, not just the noble natures. If we remember Arendt's aims from the introduction, it is clear that Arendt is wary of any theory that would limit the moral effects of thinking to any particular class of people or would limit the activity of thinking to any particular subject matter: "If there is anything in thinking that can prevent men from doing evil, it must be some property inherent in the activity itself, regardless of its objects." 185 Arendt's inquiry has yielded no answer which would allow for a connection between thoughtlessness and evildoing. At this point, her account of Socratic conscience is put forward as the most viable answer to "What makes us think?" I will not repeat the intricacies of Arendt's reading of Gorgias— the reader can return to the second chapter for those details. I will focus mainly on what is important in the context of Thinking's overall trajectory. Socrates' moral claim, "it is better to suffer than to do wrong," is only a moral by-product or sideeffect of the thinking experience. Socrates does not aim to discover this moral insight directly, as an answer to an explicit question—his questions revolve around other subjects and those questions are not resolved. Therefore, the claim is not a result of cognition or demonstration, but a subjective claim, based only on the "insights of experience." Socrates' confidence in his moral claim arises from his intimacy with the thinking experience generally, and not from any particular train of thought or inquiry. Therefore, the validity of the claim is restricted to those who have acquired the habit of thinking. Socrates' moral claim is explained by the need for self-harmony, which is a condition for the thinking activity. In Thinking, Arendt's account includes her new ideas about consciousness and conscience and their interrelation. The very possibility of either harmony or disharmony in thinking requires a difference, and this difference is made possible by consciousness. I have an identity in the world with others, where I am always only one, but I am also "for myself" and in this way I am never just one. Consciousness is the condition for my being more than one: "A difference is inserted into my 185

Ibid., 180.

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Oneness." 186 The self-awareness of consciousness is the difference, given as a brute fact, that allows me to be for myself. In contrast to consciousness, thinking is a two-in-one that transforms this merely given selfawareness into an activity. The difference that is given in consciousness is "actualized" into a true duality, where I am reflexively engaged with myself. The thinking ego is never singular, but "actually exists only in duality." 187 The unity of the two-in-one is not supplied by the thinking activity; it is borrowed from the oneness of worldly life. In other words, human identity is present only in the world and conferred by others upon the individual—it is not found in thought. Arendt presents an interesting insight in this regard: "Our modern identity crisis could be resolved only by never being alone and never trying to think." 188 To think is to exist by oneself as a duality. Thinking is done in solitude, the "human situation in which I keep myself company," whereas loneliness is a state of deprivation in which I do not have the company of others and I am unable to keep myself company in thought. The horror of real loneliness, combined with the fact that thinking requires duality, "indicates more strongly [than anything else] that man exists essentially in the plural." 189 As a dialogue, thinking is predicated on speech, and this fact makes thinking a specifically human activity. Consciousness is "humanized" by the actualization of speech in the thinking activity. While consciousness is always consciousness of an object, thinking is always about something, and this is possible only through language. Thinking's dialectical search for meaning—asking and answering "the basic Socratic question: What do you mean when you say...?"—explicates the differences that are inherent in the world and in speech: Everything that exists among a plurality is not simply what it is, in its identity, but it is also different from others; this being different belongs to its very nature. When we try to get hold of it in thought, wanting to define it, we must take this otherness (altereitas) or difference into account. When we say what a thing is, we must say what it is not or we would speak in tautologies: every determination is negation. 190 186

Ibid., 183. Ibid., 187. 188 Ibid. 189 Ibid., 185. 190 Ibid., 183. 187

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By actualizing difference in the form of speech, thinking remains connected to the world and its differences. In this way, thought, whose condition is speech, belongs to the world. Arendt highlights how the Socratic mode of thinking helps to mitigate the tensions that arose from thinking's relationship to the world of appearances. If some of its basic characteristics—autonomy, invisibility, reflexivity and withdrawal—alienate thinking from the world and interaction with others, the elements of dialogue, speech, and difference work in the opposite direction. Arendt writes: "As the metaphor bridges the gap between the world of appearances and the mental activities going on within it, so the Socratic two-in-one heals the solitariness of thought; its inherent duality points to the infinite plurality which is the law of the earth." 191 Here the Socratic elements are presented as essential to the basic mode of thinking. The tradition, driven by its pursuit of knowledge and the desires of professional thinkers, has taken certain characteristics of thinking to the extreme and forgotten about the Socratic aspects. Arendt's general critique of the metaphysical tradition is that it has lost touch with the experience of thinking and the limits that attach to that experience. While engaged in thinking, a dialogue between me and myself, I am both the one who asks and the one who answers. Truth is the criterion of intuition, the apprehension of sense evidence, and logical reasoning, for they both compel with force. However, "The only criterion of Socratic thinking is agreement, to be consistent with oneself," and to avoid "becoming one's own adversary." 192 This criterion should be distinguished from the purely logical doctrine of non-contradiction, which disregards the selfrelation inherent in the thinking activity: "To Socrates, the duality of the two-in-one meant no more than that if you want to think, you must see to it that the two who carry on the dialogue be in good shape, that the partners be friends." 193 Friendship and thinking have a natural affinity—the self-relation of the thinking dialogue is like the dialogue one can have with friends. Arendt wants to stress, however, that the "guiding experience in these matters is, of course, friendship and not selfhood; I first talk with others

191

Ibid., 187. Ibid., 185-186. 193 Ibid., 187-188. 192

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before I talk with myself." 194 This priority of friendship over self-hood is also required by the use of metaphor: to describe the thinking activity as a dialogue is to rely on an interpersonal experience in the world to illuminate an unseen and inaudible mental activity. The main difference between worldly friendship and thinking is that I cannot replace the partner I have when I begin to think, and I must beware not to do anything that would not allow me to live together with myself. To remedy this difference, Arendt introduces a variation on the theme of friendship with another metaphor: my partner in thought awaits me when I "go home." In other words, when I leave the company of others and return to thinking, I will encounter myself again. I will be alone (not with others) but I will not be lonely, for I will be there to keep myself company. The condition of keeping myself company is harmony, the agreement that is required to "live under the same roof" with anyone. 195 Conscience has commonly been thought to be an ever-present sense of right and wrong, but, Arendt argues, this assumption comes from identifying conscience and consciousness. Unlike consciousness, conscience is not always present—to follow the metaphor, I have left my thinking partner "at home." I am aware of conscience as "something that is absent"; I fear the return to thinking that will reveal my crimes or my "unexamined opinions," any of which may undermine the friendship I have with myself. This fear affects what I can say and do: "What causes a man to fear [conscience] is the anticipation of the presence of a witness who awaits him only if and when he goes home." 196 The way to avoid this anticipatory fear is to "never start the soundless solitary dialogue we call 'thinking,' never go home and examine things." The non-thinking person will not feel the need to be consistent with himself, nor will he "mind committing any crime," since he will not have to return to himself in thought. 197 Thinking's need for meaning is accompanies the life process, and as such it is present in everyone and has no specific subject matter. Conversely, not thinking is a danger for everyone also. In her lectures, Arendt characterized non-thinking as a "refusal to think," indicating the active opposition that is required,

194

Ibid., 189. Ibid., 188. 196 Ibid., 190. 197 Ibid., 190-191. 195

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which is echoed here in her insistence on thinking's origin as the need for meaning. To carry the analogy with the life process a step further, let us compare the need for thought and the need to eat in order to live. Normally, I respond to the need to eat with regularity and little mental effort; it is one habit of daily life. But, even though I have this need, I can refuse to eat through my own efforts—it carries only limited necessity. Likewise, the need to think, while perhaps not as strong as the need to eat, exerts force on us. To be sure, it does not strictly necessitate that thinking will occur or what thinking will be about. The need to eat does not dictate what one eats either, except in extreme cases when only one option is available. The key point, here, is that the refusal to think requires effort, at least until it is transformed into a habit that holds its own kind of necessity over our behavior. The habit of thinking is the default, and non-thinking requires effort and active resistance to the need for meaning, and this resistance is ultimately provided by the activity of willing. Along with how one thinks, whether or not one thinks depends on the choice of the will. In the introduction, Arendt mentioned that facts and events make a "claim on our thinking attention" and that Eichmann never responded to that claim. The moral responsibility to think was tied to this claim of reality, but throughout the rest of Thinking, Arendt never fleshed out how reality makes a claim on our thinking attention. I think she may have adopted the "need" terminology for this purpose. Although the "need for meaning" seems to focus on what one might call the "subjective" side of the relation between thought and world, it does capture—especially if we keep in mind the Socratic view of thinking that Arendt advocates—how thinking begins from concrete facts and events. Perhaps we could say that the concrete experience of a just act, for instance, makes a claim on my thinking attention to seek out the meaning of the concept "justice." Minimally, the connection I am drawing here between the need for meaning and the claim of reality is warranted because it reemphasizes the responsibility to think that is central to Arendt's overall project. The structure of "What makes us think?" presents one interpretative difficulty. We might ask whether conscience is implied in every mode of thought Arendt has considered or whether it is a byproduct of the Socratic mode only. If dialogue is the basis for conscience, do the other modes contain 207

the dialectical element? My sense is that, for Arendt, the Socratic mode is basic to all the others, but it is not definitively stated. If I am right, then conscience is implied in all thought processes. If I am wrong, then the differences between the various approaches to thought have even greater moral significance. My reading echoes Arendt's treatment of conscience in her earlier lectures, where she admitted that conscience was extremely variable from person to person, epoch to epoch, and place to place. In Thinking, this point is not made, but Arendt does repeat her earlier thought that conscience is most important in emergencies, where extreme evil needs to be limited. Conscience is one common reflexive byproduct of all modes of the thinking activity. But, each mode of thought will have additional distinct reflexive effects on the self who thinks. Conscience is implicitly generated from the dialogue of thinking. Or, in the language of the lectures, thinking builds moral limits and constitutes the person; the practice of memory inherent in thinking about the world "strikes roots" in the past, anchoring the person for emergency situations. The Stoic mode of thought is explicitly reflexive, intentionally shaping the self and its psychological states by use of imagination. In this case, the effects of thinking are not byproducts but the very goal of thinking's withdrawal. Let us focus now on the final pages of "What makes us think?" where Arendt introduces some very important connections between thinking, willing and judging. As we have seen, thinking is done for the sake of meaning, and conscience is the unintended moral by-product of thinking: "Its criterion for action will not be the usual rules, recognized by multitudes and agreed upon by society, but whether I shall be able to live with myself in peace when the time comes to think about my deeds and words." 198 This criterion for action becomes politically relevant only in emergencies—Jaspers' "boundary situations"—where thinking necessarily becomes involved with willing and judging: In Jaspers, the term gets its suggestive plausibility less from specific experiences than from the simple fact that life itself, limited by birth and death, is a boundary affair in that my worldly existence always forces me to take account of a past when I was not yet and a future when I shall be no more. Here the point is that whenever I transcend the limits of my own life span and begin to reflect on this past, judging it, and this future, forming

198

Ibid., 191. Emphasis added.

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projects of the will, thinking ceases to be a politically marginal activity. And such reflections will inevitably arise in political emergencies. 199 Thinking, because it holds priority over willing and judging by preparing sense objects for mental activities when they are absent, opens up the possibility for the more directly political activities of willing and judging. Emergencies, Arendt is suggesting, force us to reflect about the past and future because they put us in a position where we must choose what kind of persons we will be, but only those who have been thinking will be capable of making thoughtful decisions. In emergencies, those who are in the habit of thinking stick out because they do not participate; they become actors by refusing to be swept along. In this way, thinking "is political by implication." 200 Arendt elaborates on the implications of thinking for the activity of judging. Thinking "has a liberating effect" on judgment by undermining the conventional rules and values of social life. When in effect, the rules of convention serve to pre-judge particulars, grouping phenomena into familiar categories and evaluating them according to general standards. By destroying those rules and not replacing them with any new ones, thinking opens up the possibility for the particulars to be treated independently. In Arendt's language, the faculty of judgment deals with "particulars without subsuming them under general rules which can be taught and learned until they grow into habits that can be replaced by other habits and rules." 201 In place of rules, judgment is "the ability to say 'this is wrong,' 'this is beautiful,' and so on." Thinking's liberating effect on judgment should not be taken to mean that thinking and judging are the same. Most importantly, Arendt notes, thinking "deals with invisibles, with representations of things that are absent," while judging "always concerns particulars and things close at hand." 202

199

Ibid., 192. Ibid. 201 Ibid. 202 Ibid., 193. Arendt's formulation of the distinction between thinking and judging here is quite opaque. We must be careful with the phrase "close at hand" here. If we read it to be referring to time, as "present" to the senses, then we will be led into some inconsistencies with other passages. Arendt often speaks of judging's orientation to the past, and does not focus on judging the present. Instead, I think the emphasis should fall on particularity: what is judged is "close at hand" in the sense that it appears now in the world or it appeared in the past and it is not an invisible meaning. Of course, if judgment says "this is wrong," it is difficult not to understand the this as anything other something present to the senses. The central issue here is the temporality of judging, a discussion of which I will have to postpone until the final chapter. For Arendt's emphasis on particularity, see ibid., 213, 215. 200

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For Arendt, thinking and judging are related in a way that is analogous to the relationship between conscience and consciousness. Thinking is a condition for judging, but they are not identical, for judging requires its own operations that cannot be reduced to the dialectical aspects of thought, just as conscience cannot be reduced to the ever-present self-awareness of consciousness. Arendt writes: If thinking—the two-in-one of the soundless dialogue—actualizes the difference within our identity as given in consciousness and thereby results in conscience as its by-product, then judging, the by-product of the liberating effect of thinking, realizes thinking, makes it manifest in the world of appearances, where I am never alone and always too busy to be able to think. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge; it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And this, at the rare moments when the stakes are on the table, may indeed prevent catastrophes, at least for the self. 203 In this passage, thinking is situated as the condition for both conscience and judging. We ought to point out a crucial disanalogy between the two cases, however. On the condition of thinking, conscience happens automatically because it is directly implied in the structure of the thinking activity. Thinking is a sufficient condition for conscience. Judgment, on the other hand, is merely liberated by thinking but does not follow it automatically—thinking is only a necessary condition for judging. Allow me to further complicate things here by introducing some distinctions between types of judgment. First, we might say that inherent in conscience is an act of judgment. Returning to Arendt's earlier formulations in her lecture courses, to say "I cannot do that" is to judge a particular without rules or precedents. But this judgment is only a judgment about myself and what I cannot do. Conscience implies a judgment of a particular that has only subjective validity, and this kind of judgment is generated automatically from the thinking activity. At times in her post-Eichmann works, Arendt verged on the identification of conscience and judgment, and now I think we can see why that identification was tempting—there is something like an act of judgment implied in conscience. On the other hand, judging as a distinct and autonomous mental activity is not implied in conscience, for it aims for general validity and not just subjective validity. Also, judging need not be solely negative, as conscience appears to be. In other words, even though thinking necessitates conscience as an independent evaluation of particulars, thinking liberates a very different mental activity. For simplicity's sake, and for the sake of continuity 203

Ibid., 193.

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with Arendt's terminology, I will stick to the distinction between conscience and judging and avoid talking about conscience as a type of judging. For the larger problematic of Thinking—how does a non-appearing activity appear in the world?—Arendt offers her most definitive answer in the above passage. Judgment, because it requires thought to liberate it, is the manifestation of thinking in the world. It is the concrete, worldly proof for the thinking activity. As a mental activity, judging is non-appearing by definition and could not manifest thought in the world. Therefore, Arendt must consider judging as a worldly activity in the above context. In political emergencies, when "those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join in is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action," judgment appears in the world minimally in the subjective form of conscientious nonparticipation. 204 In some contexts, then, conscience is a form of action when it forces one to confront the social order. Judging, in its more robust autonomous mode as claiming general validity, can appear in the world in a different way. Nonparticipation does not require public speech, but judging "this is wrong" and seeking the agreement of others certainly does require communication with others. Also, judging does not require an emergency to draw the thinker out of hiding; it can be (and perhaps ought to be) present in all public discourse. To heed Arendt's own distinction between mental and worldly activities, we must also insist on the distinction between judging as action and judging as a mental activity. As Arendt discovered with her own judgment of Eichmann, this difference is crucial. To judge publicly might potentially initiate new events and unforeseen consequences. Conscience, for Arendt, only prevents or limits political disasters, but it does not improve one's character or habits in any positive sense. But, if thinking liberates judgment, it also opens up the possibility for the improvement of moral character and moral judgment. Arendt provided an example 204

In the 1970 essay, "Civil Disobedience," Arendt makes the distinction between conscientious nonparticipation (conscientious "objection") and civil disobedience. This distinction mirrors the two types of judgment I just outlined: the former concerned only with self-harmony while the latter attempts to take into account the perspectives of others. This distinction between conscientious nonparticipation and civil disobedience highlights the tension between the independence of judging from public opinion and judging's ability to contribute to consensus and general validity. See Arendt, "Civil Disobedience" in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, 1972): 49-102.

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parallel to what I mean. In the context of aporetic wonder, Arendt claims that the person who has "pondered the meaning of 'house' might make his own [house] look better," although not because thinking has resolved, once and for all, the meaning of the concept. 205 In this passage, the word "might" is quite telling. Thinking does not entail that a person will improve anything in regards to whatever she has been thinking about; it only opens up the possibility for such improvement. And the liberation of judgment is restricted to those concepts that have become objects for thought. Thinking about dwelling will not allow me to make my clothes look better, but like all other instances of thinking, it will generate conscience. Likewise, by thinking about justice, I am liberated from my preconceptions about justice that heretofore delimited how I could conduct myself justly, but I am not liberated from my preconceptions about courage, unless I discover some connection between the two so that thinking about justice leads me to think about courage. Unlike conscience, which automatically anticipates those moral limits that thinking generates and does not need liberation, improving one's moral conduct will depend upon thinking about moral subjects. A person cannot be liberated from conventional morality unless one examines it directly. 206 Arendt has offered a few different ways in which the thinking activity can appear. First, the thinking activity can appear via the use of metaphor. Second, Socrates was chosen as a historical representative to embody the thinking activity. And, finally, concrete acts of judgment should be seen as proof that thinking actually occurs. We must not conclude that thinking itself appears in these acts, for judging is indirect proof for thinking as the movement of leaves is evidence of the wind. Arendt has two sets of metaphors for the thinking activity. First, she offers the life metaphor and associated metaphor of sleep. The unthinking person is not fully alive and is not awake. These metaphors 205

Ibid., 171. In the literature on Arendt's account of judging, there is much confusion about the meaning of "liberation." For example, Bernstein believes that Arendt contradicts herself by insisting, first, that thinking does not produce moral knowledge and, second, that judging is liberated by thinking. Bernstein seems to conflate moral knowledge with judgment, as though judgment were merely the application of cognitive results. See Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Boston: MIT Press, 1996), 173. I think Bernstein is illustrative of a more general and prevalent interpretative mistake: not allowing thinking and judging to be autonomous mental faculties. The mistake is understandable insofar as it flows from the desire to complete Arendt's moral theory by looking solely to the activity of thinking, while avoiding any speculation about Arendt's incomplete reflections on judging. 206

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highlight the aspects of thinking that make it an autonomous activity done for its own sake. Thinking is a reflexive self-relation, a process that has no external purpose or directly intended products. Also, the life and sleep metaphors do not directly point to the thinker's relations with other people—they only help us understand the thinker qua thinker. The other set of metaphors appears only in the section on Socratic conscience. These are the metaphors of friendship and living together that help explain conscience as a moral by-product of thinking. Through its duality by analogy to friendship, thinking generates basic moral limits to what the thinker is willing to do. The life metaphor provides no such moral content. The friendship metaphor in particular points to the intimacy of thinking's self-dialogue, that one cannot get rid of their thinking partner to overcome conscience. The notion that thinking requires "living together" connotes the general need for agreement and harmony in human relationships. This set allows thinking to point back to the common world: it illuminates the thinker as a person who shares the world with others. As you can now see, Arendt's treatment of appearance and metaphor proves crucial in setting the stage for her discussion of conscience. Without an understanding of the need for metaphorical descriptions of the mind, Arendt's account of Socratic thinking and conscience may appear absurd. However, the use of metaphor is precisely what we should expect. When we turn to Arendt's accounts of willing and judging, we will need to use metaphors liberally as well. Arendt's use of Socrates to represent the thinking activity illustrates one of her own basic principles: examples establish the reality of concepts in the world. The life of Socrates, as an example of a person devoted to the thinking activity, grounds the concept of "thinking" in the world of appearance. Of course, many of the worldly features of Socratic thinking are entirely negative—e.g. paralysis—which means that thinking's dialogue does not appear directly. Socrates' investigation of the meaning of abstract concepts, of words that have do not have any sensory correlates, helps the thinking activity appear. These "thought-words," when you realize that they cannot be linked to simple sensory experiences, are evidence for thinking, an activity that deals with invisible and indefinable meanings. 207 Thus, when judgments are

207

Arendt, Thinking, 52.

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made—for instance, "this is just"—abstract concepts take on reality as they illuminate particular instances. "What makes us think?" outlined the needs that philosophers believe thinking satisfies, but it did not tell us how we select or choose the objects of thought. Arendt has insisted that the moral by-product of thinking, conscience, is not limited by which objects are thought about. The activity of thought is the source of conscience. But, certain objects of thought or trains of thought have moral side-effects as well, so that one becomes better or worse, morally speaking, by thinking about certain things or in certain ways. We will keep this issue alive as we move forward. It is ultimately about how we freely use the capacity for thought, how we direct it and for what purposes.

Time and Thinking Thinking, as it opens up the possibility of judging the past and willing the future, attains its worldly relevance in its connections with the other faculties and their temporal dimensions. In the closing section, Arendt asks "Where Are We When We Think?" What appears to be a question of space and location is actually a question about time. The question is framed in terms of thinking's withdrawal, which is a withdrawal from the here and now that implies that reality can be "temporarily suspended," and that time and space can lose their influence while one is thinking. Instead of being caught up with reality, thinking finds meaning in the "distillations, products of de-sensing" that were "once called 'essences.'" While particulars can be located in space and time, meaning is general and cannot be located, but meaningful essences do not constitute a second world different from the ordinary one. In its search for meaning, thinking is "nowhere" and "homeless." 208 In a way, the nowhere is also an "everywhere," since thought is not bound spatially and can traverse vast distances. The nowhere is a "limiting boundary concept," which by "enclosing our thought within insurmountable walls," indicates our finitude. Even though the world loses its reality for the thinking ego, the finitude of human life remains intact while thinking. Temporal finitude "constitutes the 208

Ibid., 199.

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infrastructure, as it were, of all mental activities." 209 Spatially, thinking is nowhere, but temporally there is more to say about the thinking experience. In its withdrawal into a nowhere, the thinking ego becomes keenly aware of time. Time structures the order of our thoughts into a sequence, for our thinking is composed of "thought-trains." We could use a linear metaphor for the temporality of thinking, but that still relies on our normal experience of time to an inordinate degree—it relies on succession in only one direction. To better capture the experience of thinking and the related experience of time, in order to "locate" the thinking ego in time, Arendt turns to Kafka's parable, which we briefly discussed in the first chapter. In that earlier context, the parable was seen as a representation of the contemporary situation for thinking. In the present context of Arendt's investigations into the nature of thinking, the parable is meant to illuminate general characteristics of the activity, and not just its contemporary aspects. Let us start by considering the parable itself, entitled "HE." He has two antagonists; the first presses him from behind, from his origin. The second blocks the road in front of him. He gives battle to both. Actually, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment—and this, it must be admitted, would require a night darker than any night has ever been yet—he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other. 210 For Arendt, the parable "describes the time sensation of the thinking ego." The time sensation arises obliquely when we focus our attention on the activity of thinking instead of being totally engrossed in the objects of thought. Equally absent to the senses, past and future become present to thought: "The nolonger of the past is transformed by virtue of the spatial metaphor into something lying behind us and the not-yet of the future into something that approaches us from ahead." The past and future are engaged in battle, and the thinker is at the center of the conflict. The thinker, by standing his ground against these forces, creates the battle, and therefore it is emphatically "his" battle. Time, in its tenses of past, present

209 210

Ibid., 201. Ibid., 202.

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and future, depends on thinking. Without thinking, time is merely a continuum of everlasting change. The human being, who lives always between life and death, also thinks between past and future. 211 To supplement the insights of the Kafka parable, Arendt recites a short allegory from Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra: Two paths meet here; no one has yet followed either to its end. This long lane stretches back for an eternity. And the other long lane out there, that is another eternity. They contradict each other, these roads; they offend each other face to face—and it is here, at this gateway, that they come together. The name of gateway is inscribed above: "Now" ["Augenblick"]...Behold this Now! From this gateway Now, a long eternal lane leads backward; behind us lies an eternity [an another lane leads forward into an eternal future]. 212 Here, time becomes a conflict between past and future only for the thinker who stands at the gateway, in the "Now." Any bystander, who is not thinking, only sees time pass as we are accustomed to it. As Arendt understands it, the "insertion of man" into the time continuum "produces a rupture" that is "extended to a gap." This gap is the present of the thinking ego. The present, instead of being a merely passing moment, becomes a kind of habitat for the thinker. The division of time depends on the thinker, and in his solitude, the past and future become "his past and his future," and the gap of the present is his present. The fight against past and future affects his soul: "Man lives in this in-between, and what he calls the present is a life-long fight against the dead weight of the past, driving him forward with hope, and the fear of a future (whose only certainty is death), driving him backward toward 'the quiet of the past' with nostalgia for and remembrance of the only reality he can be sure of." 213 To fight time is to take on the psychological strain of being torn between hope and fear. The Kafka parable and Nietzsche's allegory do not apply to everyday experience but only to thinking. Time in the everyday mode is a continuum due to the "thoroughgoing spatiality of our ordinary life." But, when space is suspended in the thinking activity, time is no longer beholden to the spatial continuity of everyday life. Time can appear as a force or entity in its own right only because the thinker resists the normal flow and succession of time, i.e. "because he is no longer carried along by the 211

Ibid., 203. Ibid., 204. 213 Ibid., 205. 212

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continuity of everyday life." Thinking's time experience places it in tension with common sense experience. Thinking is "out of order" because it "draws these absent 'regions' [of past and future] into the mind's presence; from that perspective the activity of thinking can be understood as a fight against time itself." 214 One difficulty here is that the thinking ego is not the self that appears in the world—it is an anonymous "he" that thinks. "[T]ime is the thinking ego's greatest enemy," for time destroys the "presence" of all things and it interrupts the "the immobile quiet in which the mind is active without doing anything." 215 Since the world and life often interrupt thinking, we should also say that the self, with its particular cares and concerns, interrupts the thinking ego's quest for general meaning. For Arendt, Kafka's "dream" of jumping outside the tension between past and future is both significant and problematic. The thinker desires to become a spectator, an umpire, a judge who has the privilege of distance to understand the whole of his existence. But, this is not possible: the thinker is too involved in his own life between birth and death to confer meaning on it, to make it an intelligible whole. This dream of jumping outside of time is nothing "but the old dream of Western metaphysics," the desire to become solely a spectator of the world and no longer an appearance among appearances, active and engaged in the world. 216 Arendt wants to revise the dream aspect of the parable so that the desire to be a spectator is not a desire to escape time altogether. Instead of the thinker "jumping out of the fighting line," it is better to see the thinker bringing about a "deflection" in the direction of the temporal forces. The thinker is not a passive object at the center of the temporal stream, but a fighter who does battle with past and future. So, the activity of the thinker allows the two temporal forces to "meet at an angle" and not head-on, which would destroy them both. A better image is a "parallelogram" of forces, the advantage of which is that thinking does not take place "beyond and above the world and human time." Time exists only by the insertion of man into the continuum of change by way of thinking, which explains why time is normally defined by the present but the present itself remains undefined: "In other words, the location of the thinking ego in time would be the in-between of past and future, the present, this mysterious and 214

Ibid., 206. Ibid. 216 Ibid., 207. 215

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slippery now, a mere gap in time, toward which nevertheless the more solid tenses of past and future are directed insofar as they denote that which is no more and that which is not yet." 217 In the activity of drawing the past and future into the present, thinking extends the now from a mere point to a gap with its own "space," but the extension is only possible by borrowing content from past and future. When we normally consider thinking abstractly—without any of its specific thought-trains, objects, imaginings or remembrances—the now cannot help but appear empty. In Arendt's parallelogram image, the clash of past and future brings about the deflection of a third force, which begins at the point the first two meet and stays on the "same plane" perfectly equidistant from past and future. The first two have indefinite origins but a "terminal ending" in the present. The third force has a definite origin in the present but, because it results from two infinite forces, it has no definite ending: "This diagonal force, whose origin is known, whose direction is determined by past and future, but which exerts its force toward an undetermined end as though it could reach out into infinity, seems to me a perfect metaphor for the activity of thought." 218 This apparently infinite trajectory of thought is not beyond the world and time, but "enclosed" within it. Thinking remains "rooted" in the present, which is always an "entirely human present" that interrupts life in the world. The present is actualized only in the thinking process, and it provides a more quiet and peaceful resting place in the midst of human life. From this position, "sufficiently removed" from past and future, the thinker can become the spectator within the world, the "arbiter and judge over the manifold." The thinker must have an impartial distance in which to grasp the meaning of what occurs in the world, but the thinker must also remain in the world as well, an appearance among appearances. 219 Here, Arendt is stationing the thinker within the world and within historical time so that the thinker can also be an actor and a judge, a fully human person. 220 The two-

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Ibid., 208. Ibid., 209. 219 Ibid. 220 Jacques Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger, trans. Michael Gendre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 210: "Whatever the image, the point is that, described in this way, the activity of thinking escapes the temptation of an ultimate contemplation of a higher realm of pure meanings...Only in this way can the persisting threat of an intramural warfare between thinking and judging 218

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world theories of traditional metaphysics do not allow thinking, in its necessary withdrawal, to keep its connection with the world and historical time. Arendt's image helps to connect the insights that she gleaned from the historical perspectives in "What Makes Us Think?" The Platonic interest in seeing the whole that connects worldly particulars is balanced with the pre-philosophical Greek emphasis on the spectator as judge over human affairs, as opposed to Being or Totality. The Socratic interest in the meaning of concepts, represented by the indefinite terminus of thinking's trajectory, is combined with an emphasis on worldliness. By enclosing the conceptual realm within past and future, Arendt anchors the thinking spectator in the historical human world. The timelessness of thinking is not eternity—i.e. not the "collapse of all temporal dimensions"— but the present that is filled with the past and future. For the thinking ego, this means that the "continuity of the I-am" appears to be in complete opposition to the ever-changing world. The thinking ego—which, for Arendt, is only an activity—is not subject to time, an experience that leads to the illusion that the whole of one's being can be gathered together in thought, that the meaning of one's life is present in thought. The thinking ego feels itself to be the center of the activity, perhaps its purpose or aim. Early on in Thinking, Arendt claimed that the proposition "I was meant to be" was irrefutable from the perspective of the thinker, even though it is not, strictly speaking, true.221 The experience that grounds this proposition is the thinking ego feeling itself to be the indispensible focal point of the thinking process and of time generally. The gap between past and future is, in Arendt's preferred language, "the path paved by thinking, the small inconspicuous track of non-time beaten by the activity of thought within the time-space given to natal and mortal men." Thought saves what it thinks about from the "ruin of historical and biographical time," by creating a "small non-time space in the very heart of time." No one can show another person how to inhabit this space; each person must "pave anew the path of thought" in her own way, directing the be avoided, because, according to the corrected image proposed by Arendt, thinking is nothing but a preparation for judging." 221 Arendt, Thinking, 60-61.

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forces of past and future on a new trajectory. 222 Arendt claims that "the basic assumption" of the whole investigation into thinking is that "the thread of tradition is broken," that it is an historical fact that tradition has lost its authority. The destruction of metaphysics and the tradition does not destroy the past, but it leaves us with a "fragmented past" that lacks the continuity and consistency that the tradition once provided. The meaningfulness of this fragmented past—i.e. that the past can be meaningful without tradition—is due "to the timeless track that thinking beats into the world of space and time." 223 The metaphysical fallacies, while not authoritative or even plausible anymore, can still give us hints into the experiences of thinking. Without those hints from the past, we may lose our ability to speak meaningfully about an essential human activity. The treasures of the past are available only to those who are willing to think independently from the tradition. Arendt admits that we cannot transcend time and history, but this does not mean that we are determined by our specific "location" in historical time either. The freedom of thought is captured negatively in Kafka's parable: the continuity of historical time is suspended and the present is the site where past and future can be gathered together. The past is meaningful because we have the freedom to "move" within time in the thinking activity. Similar to the way that imagination can move us freely from place to place, conceptual thinking can allow us to move freely in time. However fragmented the past may be, it is the freedom of thought that allows us to return to the past to recover and rethink the meaning of our concepts. In an essay praising her teacher Karl Jaspers, we can find some helpful supplemental comments about thinking's relationship to time and to the past. Arendt writes, "Jaspers' thought is spatial because it forever remains in reference to the world and the people in it, not because it is bound to any existing space." By engaging the great thinkers of the tradition, Jaspers created a space where he could relate his thought to others, on analogy with the public space where opinions are exchanged. The thinkers of the past, used by Jaspers for his own reflections, have transcended their own historical locations, and have

222 223

Ibid., 210. Ibid., 211-212.

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"become everlasting companions in the things of the mind." To create such a space, it requires "freedom, independence of thought" to break with the chronology of tradition and use the past in new ways. This space allows all thinkers to be contemporaries: "Jaspers converted the succession of time into a spatial juxtaposition, so that nearness and distance depend no longer on the centuries that separate us from a philosopher, but exclusively on the freely chosen point from which we enter this realm of the spirit." 224 Jaspers' realm of the spirit, Arendt emphasizes, is not otherworldly or utopian: "it is of the present and of this world." Jaspers broke with the authority of tradition so that the "great contents of the past" could be freely "placed in communication with each other in the test of communicating with a present living philosophizing." 225 For Jaspers, the existing individual enters the realm of the spirit in the worldly present, which guarantees thinking's link to the world. Earlier, when discussing Arendt's lectures on moral issues, we noted that moral judgment would be based on the person's choice of company. In Arendt's interpretations of Jaspers, we can see a similar idea take shape. In philosophical matters, the non-traditional thinker, bounded by past and future, creates a space for communication with those thinkers that have been chosen for company. In this enlargement of one's historical perspective, one becomes better able to appreciate the validity of different methods and points of view. The Thinking volume exhibits her own attempts in this direction, as she pulls insights from contemporary phenomenologists and existentialists, Greek and Roman thinkers, and many other diverse perspectives. Thinkers who enter into communication with diverse historical perspectives have the ability to transcend their own historical location, finding meaningful ways to think about their own experiences. Arendt's appropriation of the spatial metaphors found in Kafka and Nietzsche portrays how the past can be meaningful for thinking. The metaphor allows for contemporaneity, as it breaks with the exclusivity of worldly temporality, so that even the most distant historical thinkers can be made relevant. The relevance, however, is determined by the present concerns of the individual—these are the points of 224

Arendt, "Karl Jaspers: A Laudatio," in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 79-80. Emphasis added. 225 Arendt, "Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?," in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 84.

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entry into the realm of spirit. Crucially, these concerns are freely chosen. Although the meaning of the past is not utterly arbitrary—as though one could meaningfully say absolutely anything about Plato's views, for instance—the questions and concerns of the thinker bring freedom into the activity. As the freedom of physical movement requires space, thinking can enter into the "space" of historical thought where it can "move" as it wishes. For Jaspers and Arendt, the freedom of thought applies to meaning but not to truth. Meaning is only revealed in the process of thinking. Meaning, as distinct from scientific truth, is built on communication, and communication can occur across traditions and peoples. Thinking, in this mode of communication with plural perspectives, is a preparation for worldly interaction, and therefore is intimately connected with judgment.

We must admit that Arendt's reflections on the "location" of

thinking are to an extent normative, for they seem to prescribe a mode of thinking distinct from the morally suspect modes she critiqued in the previous sections of the text. Given her descriptions of thinking's time experience, Arendt appears to believe that the search for meaning is unending. The thinking activity "actualizes difference" continually in its dialectical process, which never results in any conclusive answers. Meaning is "experienced" in the process of explicitly bringing out the various connections within language that are normally frozen in our unexamined concepts, but that meaning can never be reduced to a definition that is adequate to all the relevant experiences. However, Arendt does not glorify the unending search for meaning in isolation from the other mental activities. Arendt's emphasis on memory, which ties thinking back to the world of appearances, does not allow thinking to be solely wrapped up in itself. However tempting it is to isolate thought from reality, thinking is never engaged in mere self-reference. As we shall see, Arendt's accounts of the activities of willing and judging also emphasize how thinking is dependent on our interaction with and evaluation of worldly particulars. One of the main issues that remains unexplained in Thinking is how we go about choosing what to think about. Thinking itself does not select the objects of its attention. This act of selection, which I think is morally significant, belongs to the will and reflects one's judgments, and it is in this act that we 222

shape our moral and aesthetic tastes—i.e. what pleases and displeases us. Arendt's Kantian distinction between meaning and truth must apply to her own project, so that the question arises: "Do Arendt's reflections on thinking amount to truth claims or merely meaningful thought-trains?" This formulation of the question might be inadequate, for at times Arendt is engaged in meaningful speculation and, at other times, she is making factual or phenomenological claims that are not speculative. However, in general, Arendt's project is an exploration of the meaning of thinking, and thus cannot be the lone definitive account of the truth about thinking. Her preference for certain approaches, metaphors, and descriptions are express Arendt's judgments about the issues.

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CHAPTER 4: WILLING As we now enter into an investigation of Willing, which I consider to be among the least well understood of Arendt's works, it will be helpful to look back. Let us briefly review Arendt's two earlier texts that have directly addressed the faculty of the will. In "What is Freedom?" Arendt was heavily critical of free will theories, due primarily to their anti-political implications and their emphasis on the inner life in opposition to the life of action in the world. She argued that the idea of free will entails a notion of sovereignty that is inimical to the basic condition of human plurality. On a similar note, theories of free will center on the self and its concerns, as opposed to the common world and shared interests. These critical elements are still present in Willing to some extent, although they are counterbalanced carefully by other aspects of Arendt's overall project generated by new concerns and questions. The early critical essay shows no recognition of the need for the will as the locus of moral responsibility, and its inattention to moral issues is problematic. With Arendt's growing interest in morality after the Eichmann trial, her later works show an appreciation for the role of the will in moral life and action. In her 1965-6 lectures, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy" and "Basic Moral Propositions," Arendt was not preoccupied with free will's anti-political aspects. At this later stage, the will is approached in the context of moral concerns, where the will's freedom is necessary for independent judgment and spontaneous action. Thus, the lectures prepare us for Willing's central moral arguments, and link the text back to Arendt's reflections about Eichmann. Some material from the lectures is repeated in an expanded form in Willing: Paul, Epictetus, Augustine, and Nietzsche all reappear, and Aristotle is chosen to represent the position earlier attributed to Greek philosophy in general. However, a few key thinkers emerge in Willing for the first time: Hegel, Bergson, Duns Scotus, and Heidegger. The latter two thinkers will be essential in drawing out Arendt's central arguments about the will's relationship to time and contingency. The lectures were not structured as an historical inquiry or as an inquiry primarily about

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mental faculties, whereas the larger structure of Life of the Mind brings both of these endeavors to the forefront. I wish to offer a terminological clarification before we begin. In Life of the Mind, when Arendt speaks of "the Will" or "the will," she indicates a mental faculty or "organ" with multiple functions. As Mary McCarthy points out: "And the will is 'Will' when it is a concept and "will" when it is acting in a human subject." 1 Arendt capitalizes "Will" when the faculty is treated in abstract and logical speculations, whereas "will" refers to the concrete human faculty that is described in phenomenological analyses. By contrast, the term "willing" refers to a mental activity that is reflexive and autonomous. I will follow this terminological distinction in what follows, and as we proceed the significance of the distinction will become clearer.

Arendt’s Method in Willing Arendt seems to have had profound difficulties in writing Willing. Many of Arendt’s friends and colleagues admit that the subject matter challenged her beyond the usual measure. Mary McCarthy tells us that Willing had been the hardest of the sections of Life of the Mind. 2 Young-Bruehl echoes this sentiment with some of Arendt’s own words: “She was not on the familiar territory of thinking, where she could ‘simply trust my instinct and my own experience.’” 3 While there may be a personal element to Arendt’s difficulties, I would insist on the obstacles within the subject matter itself. In the "Postscriptum" to Thinking, Arendt reveals her plans to “follow the experiences men have had with this paradoxical and self-contradictory faculty.” 4 Arendt’s distrust of her own experience and instincts should not be separated from her own critical investigation of the faculty of willing. As we shall see, Arendt's guiding suspicion is that thinking and willing are in tension with one another, so that thinking about willing is essentially a very difficult task. The persistent question in the text is whether human thinking is capable of giving an 1

Mary McCarthy, "Editor's Postface" in Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1978), 253. Ibid., 243. See also John Glenn Gray, "The Abyss of Freedom—and Hannah Arendt," in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn Hill (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979), 225-244. 3 Elizabeth Young-Breuhl, For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982), 454. 4 Arendt, Thinking, 214. 2

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accurate account of the willing activity. Thus, Arendt's "personal" difficulties with the material should be seen as a manifestation of common problems that she is diagnosing in the tradition. Arendt clearly conceives of her project in Willing as a departure from the normal philosophical approaches to the problem of free will. While she includes, for historical context, the familiar arguments in the debate about free will and determinism, Arendt is more concerned with uncovering and faithfully describing the experiences that have led us to believe we possess free will. Her avoidance of the traditional debate is propelled by her suspicion that the “phenomena we have to deal with are overlaid to an extraordinary extent by a coat of argumentative reasoning, by no means arbitrary and hence not to be neglected but which parts company with the actual experiences of the willing ego in favor of doctrines and theories that are not necessarily interested in ‘saving the phenomena.’” 5 It is not that Arendt doubts the coherence of the logic employed by the different parties in the debate, but that the logic has no basis in experience or is too far removed from the experiences that are appealed to as premises. I especially agree with Arendt on this point: the "academic" nature of the debate has often distracted from the experiential or existential importance of the issue. Arendt's "history of the will" is designed to free up space for new ways of approaching the experiences of willing. In her introduction to Willing, Arendt delineates the major obstacles to her project. The central challenge to be confronted is the rocky reception of the will within the philosophical tradition: “The greatest difficulty faced by every discussion of the Will is the simple fact that there is no other capacity of the mind whose very existence has been so consistently doubted and refuted by so eminent a series of philosophers.” 6 While one might take this fact as a sign to avoid an investigation of willing altogether, Arendt instead considers that philosophers may have a professional aversion to the experience of willing itself. Many opponents of free will testify to the experience of the “I-will,” but then proceed to argue that the experience does not indicate anything real, claiming the experience is an illusion or, in the modern

5 6

Arendt, Willing, 3. Ibid., 4.

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version, a “phantom of consciousness.” 7 What is curious about this line of argumentation is that it could be leveled against the faculty of thinking, the existence of which rests on nothing more than the consciousness of the “I-think,” but the same philosophers do not doubt the experience of thinking. Arendt formulates her suspicion: It is in the nature of every critical examination of the faculty of the Will that it should be undertaken by ‘professional thinkers’ (Kant’s Denker von Gewerbe), and this gives rise to the suspicion that the denunciations of the Will as a mere illusion of consciousness and the refutations of its very existence, which we find supported by almost identical arguments in philosophers of widely differing assumptions, might be due to a basic conflict between the experiences of the thinking ego and those of the willing ego. 8 Here Arendt announces one of her main contentions, and she develops the evidence for this basic conflict between thinking and willing throughout her historical investigation. Arendt’s suspicion, if taken seriously, allows us to confront the experience of willing with new eyes. In Thinking, the metaphysical fallacies were seen as clues to the nature of the thinking activity, as speculations that arose from genuine experiences and not simple logical errors. The metaphysical fallacies originate in the conflict of the thinking ego with the world of appearances and the corresponding faculties of cognition and common sense. 9 Similarly, in Willing, Arendt will use the various theoretical arguments against the reality of willing as evidence for the basic conflict between thinking and willing. Ironically, for Arendt, the arguments illuminate and reinforce the very experiences that they are meant to explain away. The tradition, however flawed, is the only record we have of the mind's activities, so we must use it creatively in order to deal with willing. Fundamentally, Arendt's approach is phenomenological: "I propose to take the internal evidence—in Bergson's terms, the 'immediate datum of consciousness'—seriously." 10 However, the phenomenological approach must be supplemented in some way, since Arendt’s suspicion of a basic conflict between willing and thinking calls into question her own access to the phenomena. One may

7

Ibid., 23. Ibid., 4. 9 Ibid., 55. 10 Arendt, Thinking, 214. 8

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wonder how her own investigation overcomes the biases of thinking: how does Arendt methodologically buttress her account against those biases? The historical aspect of Arendt’s investigation provides the necessary critical check on the biases of thinking. Each of the thinkers that Arendt discusses describes various aspects of the willing experiences, and the agreement of these descriptions helps to reinforce the immediate “internal evidence” of willing. The two methodological emphases relate to each other dynamically: to critically illuminate the evidence of first-person conscious experience (the phenomenological task), one must work through the historical renderings of these experiences (the historical task). By carefully distinguishing the speculative projects of philosophers from the experiential descriptions, Arendt hopes to be able to make very basic phenomenological claims about the nature of willing. The historical aspect of the project is crucial because it creates a critical distance that can purify the phenomenological method. For Arendt's readers, the difficulty of interpreting her historical treatment lies in isolating the descriptions of the willing experience from the many speculative theories that build upon these experiences. The intricacy of her readings of historical authors, which is often overlooked or dismissed by commentators, is required by her method. In other words, just as the historical aspect keeps in check the phenomenological aspect, the phenomenological method is also critical in dealing with the historical sources. As we have seen, Arendt’s method is both deconstructive and phenomenological simultaneously. The deconstruction of traditional views helps to reveal key distinctions that illuminate experience. Arendt deconstructs certain speculative extravagances of the philosophical tradition, while at the same time preserving the experiential insights of each thinker. What Arendt retains is often signaled by “echoes” of those same insights in later thinkers, reiterations that reinforce the reality of the phenomena. The historical perspectives allow us to mitigate our prejudices for the sake of inquiry and to curb our own speculative impulses by seeing how others have extrapolated beyond the same experiences. Arendt’s method also allows her to probe the history of philosophy for a conception of the will that is not plagued by traditional philosophical biases. Arendt’s “history of the will” is certainly not meant to be exhaustive—her preference is for depth of analysis instead of historical breadth—but it does include 228

thinkers of various philosophical orientations. The truncated history draws our attention to diverse ways in which the freedom of the will has been evaded by philosophers. The thinkers included in the history all testify to the experience of willing, but only one, Duns Scotus, does not evade it through speculation. One could say that Arendt has also created a history of evaluations of the will and its freedom. Duns Scotus stands out as the lone thinker who unequivocally affirms the freedom inherent in willing, despite the existential and moral consequences of that freedom. According to Arendt, the proof of Duns Scotus’ commitment to freedom is found in his treatment of both contingency and temporality. With some minor exceptions and qualifications, Duns Scotus’ reflections are very close to Arendt’s own philosophical conclusions. Arendt's historical approach also serves another important function: to show how the discovery of the will affected human self-understanding. Unlike thinking, which is an activity that has been attested to by all periods in the Western tradition with relative uniformity, willing was unknown to the ancient Greeks and was discovered only in the early years of Christianity. Willing, then, has its own history in a way that the activity of thinking—as distinct from philosophy and any particular concepts and systems— does not. But, one might ask: how can a mental faculty be discovered? On this question, Arendt wants to avoid two basic responses. The first is the view that the will is a wholly artificial concept. If we mistake the "the Will for a mere 'idea,'" the will would be a product of the mind, a mental artifact "invented to solve artificial problems." On this view, it might be said that all such ideas have histories, and we can trace the development of those ideas over time. The "history [of ideas] presupposes the unchanging identity of man the artificer," whose nature can be studied by empirical means. 11 Since the idea of the will is a mental artifact, humans are not obligated to preserve it and could just as well eliminate it from our thought processes. As a potter destroys a pot she made but does not now like, the idea of the will can be thrown out if we do not have a use for it.

11

Arendt, Willing, 5.

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The other response Arendt wishes to avoid would simply assume that the Greeks had the same experiences and faculties as those eras that acknowledge the will. If a faculty is discovered, then was it not already "there" to be found even when humans did not realize it? This position assumes that the mind cannot change, and it motivates attempts to find the will hidden within Greek thought. The only results of this endeavor would be to interpret new experiences in terms of old ones, forcing post-classical thought into the mold of its predecessors, or to introduce something altogether alien into Greek thought. It is impossible to know whether the Greeks had the experiences that Arendt associates with willing. According to Arendt, the will is not just an idea; it is not an independent product fashioned by the human mind and easily eliminated. For Arendt, the mind is reflexive, and its "products" and "ideas" have an influence on the mind's self-understanding: "But the mind of man, its concerns and its faculties, is affected both by changes in the world, whose meaningfulness it examines, and, perhaps even more decisively, by its own activities." 12 Upon the discovery of the experiences of willing, the mind acts on itself in such a way that the meaning of those experiences influences all the other ways in which the mind understands itself and the world. The so-called "idea" of the will enters into a complex context of meaning, and it whiplashes back upon human self-understanding, challenging certain modes of thought previously taken for granted. Since their discovery, the experiences of willing remain facts to be negotiated through philosophical reflection. To be sure, the mind's reflexivity does not imply that there are no limits to how the mind can understand itself. Ideas of past epochs are meaningful only on the assumption that those ideas stem from commonalities in our human experience. The continuity of human experience is guaranteed by our physical nature and the conditions of human life, which the mind must negotiate as limits: "In other words, what changes throughout the centuries is the human mind, and although these changes are very pronounced, so much so that we can date the products according to style and national origin with great precision, they are also strictly limited by the unchanging nature of the instruments with which the human

12

Ibid., 56.

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body is endowed." 13 So, while our bodily nature has remained much the same through human history, the mind is much more subject to change due to its reflexive character. There is no definitive explanation for why the will was discovered when it was, but Arendt gives some indication of the obstacles that impeded its discovery. Importantly, the Greek concept of time did not allow the discovery of the will. For the Greeks, time is circular, following the cyclical processes of nature. In Aristotle, the concept of "potentiality" captures the same cyclical pattern, in which the species being emerges from the potential inherent in the seed. Universalizing this cyclical time concept implies the impossibility of novelty and contingency: "The view that everything real must be preceded by a potentiality as one of its causes implicitly denies the future as an authentic tense: the future is nothing but a consequence of the past." 14 Only under the assumption of rectilinear time, in which the future is not a mere repetition of the past, is the will conceivable. The will is the "mental organ for the future," dealing with things that have never existed, with projects that do not form a cyclical pattern. 15 The discovery of the will destroys the ancient view of time and undermines what to some thinkers are its existential advantages. In Life of the Mind, the conflict between thinking and willing is a psychological conflict: “Thinking and willing are antagonists only insofar as they affect our psychic states.” 16 The activities of thinking and willing create opposing moods in the psyche based on their distinctive temporal orientations. Thinking is characterized by a mood of “serenity” because thinking is oriented to the past, to what is and cannot be otherwise. By contrast, willing is oriented to the future, where there is ineradicable uncertainty, and its mood is “tenseness.” Thinking’s mood makes the activity enjoyable, and one might even wish that it could endure forever, that the gap between past and future could be infinitely extended. Willing’s tenseness makes the activity hard to endure, and thus willing anticipates its own termination. Every volition, although a mental activity, relates to the world of appearances in which its project is to be realized; in flagrant contrast to thinking, no willing is ever done for its 13

Ibid. Ibid., 15. 15 Ibid., 13. 16 Ibid., 35. 14

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own sake or finds its fulfillment in the act itself. Every volition not only concerns particulars but—and this is of great importance—looks forward to its own end, when willing-something will have turned into doing it. 17 The two activities of willing and thinking each require a “temporary paralysis” of the other and a shift between the two corresponding moods. The will's tenseness, however, is not wholly extinguished in this shift to the thinking activity. The tenseness subsides completely only in the performance of action, when the I-will has found the power to do something in the world. In Arendt’s deconstruction of philosophical theories of the will, special attention is given to those speculations that (implicitly or explicitly) function to soothe away the psychic tenseness produced by willing. We have already encountered some of these theories in Epictetus, Cicero, and Boethius. In these speculations, thinking comes to the aid of the psyche by transforming the uncertainty of the future into the certainty and stillness of the past, “abolishing the future tense by assimilating it to the past.” 18 In Willing, Arendt locates various forms of fatalism that attempt this assimilation. With the loss of a true future, the contingency of free acts also disappears, and with the loss of contingency, we also lose a precondition for moral phenomena. The problematic speculations, then, are not just theoretically ungrounded, but they oppose a tenable view of moral life. In attempting to soothe the soul through the speculations of thinking, one is evading the realities without which morality ceases to be meaningful. We might then add another, specifically moral aspect to the psychic tension: the experience of being free and morally responsible collides with the desire for personal happiness and psychological comfort. The conflict between thinking and willing revolves around the will’s contingent freedom, and it is for this reason that philosophers have always had difficulty coming to grips with the contingency of action. As we have seen, Arendt consistently defines freedom in opposition to necessity, and in Willing it is no different: "the touchstone of a free act is always our awareness that we could also have left undone what we actually did—something not at all true of mere desire or of the appetites, where bodily needs, the necessities of the life process, or the sheer force of wanting something close at hand may override any

17 18

Ibid., 37. Ibid., 36.

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considerations of either Will or Reason.” 19 For the first time in her corpus, Arendt identifies free acts with “willed acts”: “There can hardly be anything more contingent than willed acts, which—on the assumption of free will—could all be defined as acts about which I know that I could as well have left them undone.” 20 Given this identification, the experiences of the I-will must be elaborated as evidence for the reality of contingent freedom. The problem—indicated here in the very phrase “willed act”—is the relation between the mental activity of willing and the action that follows and appears in the world. The willing experience, with its anticipation of a contingent project, grounds the futural aspect of human temporality. Arendt’s concern is to preserve this aspect without thereby destroying our orientation to the past, which is crucial for both thinking and judging. We need not resolve the conflict between willing and thinking by nullifying either faculty or either temporal dimension; the difficulty lies in negotiating the psychic tension between the two. The temptation to use thinking to eradicate the contingency of the future arises from the fact that the will cannot will backwards. The free act was contingently performed, even though the act is no longer contingent once it occurs, and it cannot be undone. While everything in human experience is contingent in some regard, even if humans have not contributed to these contingencies, a free act is contingent in the special sense that the agent could have abstained from performing it. The act, after being performed, becomes an accomplished fact, and a necessary and unchangeable part of the past. The traditional arguments for determinism tend to commit a common temporal fallacy. Take, for instance, the "so-called idle argument" from Cicero: "When you were sick, whether you would recover or not recover was predestined, hence why [would you] have called a doctor; but whether you called a doctor or did not call him was also predetermined, and so on. In other words, all your faculties become idle once you think along these lines without cheating." 21 This argument assumes that past events must have happened as they did and that the person involved had no power to change or influence them. The attraction of the argument is that the events are beyond the power of the agent qua past events, and the 19

Ibid., 5. Emphasis added.. Ibid., 14. Emphasis added. 21 Ibid., 105. 20

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argument relies on forgetting the fact that the agent could have acted differently. The contingency that accompanies the events when they are being contemplated as future projects is not remembered or given any credence. If one applies the same reasoning to future events for the sake of prediction, a similar problem occurs. In thinking that a future event is determined, the person must assume that they have no power to change that event, for the moment the person even considers a course of action that would make the event impossible, that future event becomes doubtful and the prediction is undermined. For Arendt, the central fallacy involved in deterministic theories is that they require the thinker to be an external observer with idle faculties and not a possible actor in any regard. However, to be only a pure observer is not possible for human beings who are "part and parcel of the temporal process" and "cannot jump out of the temporal order." 22 The distinction between the will and the faculty of free choice, the liberum arbitrium, becomes central to Arendt's historical project. If we reconsider the objections raised by philosophers against the Will—against the faculty's existence, against the notion of human freedom implicit in it, and against the contingency adhering to free will, that is, to an act that by definition can also be left undone—it becomes obvious that they apply much less to what tradition knows as liberum arbitrium, the freedom of choice between two or more desirable objects or ways of conduct, than to the Will as the organ for the future and identical with the power of beginning something new. 23 One difficulty in reading the Willing volume is following this distinction through the various historical figures. Arendt is looking primarily for descriptions of the will as the power of beginning something new that can be combined with her theory of action. As was clear from Human Condition, natality is a fact of the human condition by which every person is a new beginning by virtue of birth, and therefore endowed with the power of beginning. Only in the realm of action, which corresponds to this condition, are there truly individual persons with unique narratives as opposed to numerous biological human specimens. As the spring of action, the will is the "principium individuationis." 24

22

Ibid. Ibid., 28-29. 24 Ibid., 6-7. 23

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In relation to natality and action, the conflict between thinking and willing can be posed slightly differently: "The question is how this faculty of being able to bring about something new and hence to 'change the world' can function in the world of appearances, namely, in an environment of factuality which is old by definition and which relentlessly transforms all the spontaneity of its newcomers into the 'has been' of facts—fieri; factus sum." 25 Willing's conflict with the world of appearances is a conflict between the new and the old, the contingent and the necessary. Although thinking withdraws from appearances in its search for meaning, thinking's orientation to the past through remembrance means that it is not completely at odds with what is and cannot be otherwise. The contingency and newness of willed acts is difficult to pin down: "In the perspective of memory, that is, looked at retrospectively, a freely performed act loses its air of contingency under the impact of now being an accomplished fact, of having become part and parcel of the reality in which we live." 26 The accomplished act or event appears as necessary since it cannot be undone by the mind. The many arguments against contingent freedom rely on the factuality of past events, universalizing the necessity that attaches to the past to conclude that freedom is not real. However, from the perspective of the willing ego, "it is not freedom but necessity that appears as a delusion of consciousness." 27 Arendt believes that this insight never adequately entered into the debates on free will, so that the prejudice of thinking against willing was not held in check. The most important theorists for Arendt are those who do not allow thinking's orientation to the past to overrule the experience of willing and of novelty. Duns Scotus fully affirms the contingency of freedom, and Augustine and Kant do so at times in their work. Bergson is correct when he claims that philosophers are rarely capable of admitting that novelty is real. In most cases, the freedom to begin something new is considered contrary to the laws of causality which supposedly tell us that everything is necessary. Arendt reformulates her suspicion: "Could it be that professional thinkers, basing their speculations on the

25

Ibid., 7. Ibid., 30. 27 Ibid., 31. 26

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experience of the thinking ego, were less 'pleased' with freedom than with necessity?" 28 To be sure, free acts are rare and most human conduct can be explained by habits on analogy with causal laws, but, the almost universal dismissal of novelty and contingent freedom in the tradition points to a possible prejudice of professional thinkers. In like fashion, philosophers have also consistently evaded the reality of evil in the world. 29 In her earlier lectures, Arendt puts the point straightforwardly, referencing Nietzsche: To justify evil in the two-fold sense of wickedness and misfortune has always belonged among the perplexities of metaphysics. Philosophy in the traditional sense, which is confronted with the problem of Being as a whole, has always felt obligated to affirm and find an appropriate place for everything that is…"Nothing that happens at all can be such as to be rejected; one should not want to eliminate it, for everything is so intimately connected with everything else that to reject one thing means to reject all. One outcast action, that means an outcast world." 30 The metaphysical tradition's justification of evil illuminates the existential tension between the mental activities of thinking and willing. While the willing ego may wish to overcome evil through action or at least negate a given reality, the thinking ego can be drawn to affirm everything in an attempt to be in harmony with the world as it is. On the other hand, the willing ego's desire to change the world cannot be allowed to be absolute either, for that would mean that everything that is or will be ought to be negated by another project. An overemphasis on novelty and spontaneity implies that everything must be overcome, and it spells an end to what is meaningful and good in the past. On this issue, Arendt attempts to balance the needs of the mental faculties. As I will argue in the next chapter, Arendt's conception of judgment contributes to the goal of temporal balance.

The Historical Origins of the Will: Aristotle, Paul, Epictetus Now that I have introduced the various issues at play in Willing—mainly by following Arendt's introduction (her Part I)—let us turn to Arendt's history of the will. Parts II and III of Willing concern primarily the "post-classical and pre-modern literature" that testifies to the experiences of willing and the 28

Ibid., 33. Ibid., 33-34. 30 Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 126. 29

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implications of those experiences: "Our guiding question therefore will be: What experiences caused men to become aware of the fact that they were capable of forming volitions?" 31 The first thinker Arendt discusses is Aristotle, who illustrates how Greek thought dealt with issues of freedom and action before the will was discovered. Aristotle’s faculty of choice, proairesis, is an important Greek “forerunner” to the will, and Arendt chooses Aristotle as her representative of ancient Greek thought for two reasons. First, Aristotle had a strong influence on the medieval tradition that developed full-fledged theories of the will. Second, Arendt believes Aristotle comes closest of all Greek thinkers to dealing with the problem of freedom philosophically. 32 Arendt uses Aristotle to set up the problem that subsequent theories of the will are designed to solve. In Aristotle's early thought, as in Plato, reason is the commanding faculty of the soul, and it ought to rule in human life over the blind desires. But, to his credit, Aristotle recognized that reason, even though it commands, does not initiate movement in the soul because the dictates of reason are not followed necessarily. Likewise, desire can be resisted as well, so that neither reason nor desire initiates movement necessarily. Movement originates in desire primarily, but since desire can extend to objects that are not present as well as to objects close at hand, immediate desires can be resisted for the sake of future goals. Practical reason comes to the aid of desire to achieve its end: the movement originates in desire and is completed by practical reason’s calculation of means to achieve it. 33 Under this early schema, incontinence is a result of a person’s desires for things close at hand overruling his future goals and moral ambitions. The bad soul disobeys his own reason and therefore is in conflict with himself, unable to have tranquility of mind. But the incontinent person appears to be a contradiction on this theory because that person is acting both voluntarily and involuntarily. With regards to reason, he is acting involuntarily, and with regards to desire, he is acting voluntarily. If conduct is determined by the outcome of the struggle between reason and desire, then both continence and incontinence are equally voluntary and involuntary, depending on the side of the conflict with which the 31

Arendt, Willing, 55. Ibid., 57. 33 Ibid., 57-58. 32

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agent identifies. In fact, Arendt claims, neither reason nor desire are free: both are compelling forces vying for primacy in the soul. This early theory is revised by Aristotle in order to determine more precisely how actions can be wholly voluntary. 34 In Aristotle’s mature ethical theory, virtuous action is not simply a matter of obeying the dictates of reason and avoiding the lures of desire. The virtues originate in a desire for an activity that is its own end, meaning that the “desire is not for an object, a ‘what’ that I can grasp, seize, and use again as a means for another end; the desire is for a ‘how,’ a way of performing, excellence of appearance in the community—the proper realm of human affairs.” 35 The desire for excellence in appearance is coupled with acting for a purpose, which requires deliberation, or a choosing between alternative means to reach that purpose. The ultimate end of action is set by the universal human desire to be happy, to live well as a human being (eudaimonia). Deliberation determines the means, from among the available alternatives, to achieve this universal end that itself is beyond deliberation or choice. Because eudaimonia is not simply a single end to be achieved, but is an activity that can be achieved through many different courses of action, humans need a faculty that will determine which specific course of action each will take. Proairesis is this faculty of deliberation, and it allows one to choose between the various alternative goods proposed by reason and desire for the sake of achieving happiness: “Choice is a median faculty, inserted, as it were, into the earlier dichotomy of reason and desire, and its main function is to mediate between them.” 36 Without a faculty to mediate between reason and desire, human action would deterministically follow the stronger of these two forces: Proairesis, the faculty of choice, one is tempted to conclude, is the precursor of the Will. It opens up a first, small restricted space for the human mind, which without it was delivered to two opposed compelling forces: the force of self-evident truth, with which we are not free to agree or disagree, on one side; on the other, the force of passions and appetites, in which it is as though nature overwhelms us unless reason "forces" us away. 37

34

Ibid., 59. Ibid., 60. It is clear that Arendt approves of Aristotle's notion of action in one specific regard: it does not completely subordinate virtuosity, the how of performance, to the ends to be achieved. 36 Ibid., 60. 37 Ibid., 62. 35

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Choice places the resolution of the contest between reason and desire within the power of the individual. The "ought" of practical reason always implies the power to do it, the "I-can" that can settle the contest between truth and desire. For Arendt, the problem with Aristotle's theory is that proairesis lacks freedom. In regards to the means of action, it operates as a deliberative faculty informed by what is compelling: "We deliberate only about means to an end that we take for granted, that we cannot choose…[The] means, too, not just the ends are given, and our free choice concerns only a 'rational' selection between them; proairesis is the arbiter between several possibilities." 38 While Aristotle recognizes the need to explain how humans voluntarily determine the outcome of the contest between reason and desire, proairesis is merely another kind of reasoning which forces us to the most logical choice. In the case in which the rationale for each of two alternatives would be equal, the agent could not possibly decide which alternative to pursue. 39 In Kant's moral theory, the same problem arises. The will, as practical reason, "borrows its obligatory power from the compulsion exerted on the mind by self-evident truth or logical reasoning." And just as the mind always has the power to recognize the truth, so too the will always has the power to do what it ought to do. As in Aristotle, Kant's "ought" implies "can," and the power to control one's conduct is not in question. The medieval liberum arbitrium also takes on the central features of Aristotle's proairesis. With her critique of Aristotle, she attempts to leave the liberum arbitrium behind and focus on the problems that arise from a will that is a spontaneous and autonomous (i.e., non-rational) mental faculty. For this reason, Arendt omits Kant's version of the will from her historical presentation. 40 The faculty of choice avoids the crucial problems associated with willing by being an executor of reason in relation to given possibilities, all of which imply the power to achieve them, the I-can. As we 38 39

Ibid., 62. For a somewhat humorous but instructive example of indecision, see Arendt’s portrayal of Buridan’s ass,

ibid. 40

Arendt confirms this later when she comes to modern theories of the will: "The only great thinker in these centuries who would be truly irrelevant to our context is Kant. His Will is not a special mental capability distinct from thinking, but practical reason, a Vernunftwille not unlike Aristotle's nous practikos...Kant's Will is neither freedom of choice (liberum arbitrium) nor its own cause; for Kant, sheer spontaneity, which he often called 'absolute spontaneity,' exists only in thinking. Kant's Will is delegated by reason to be its executive organ in all matters of conduct," ibid., 149.

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learned in her earlier lectures: “Freedom becomes a [philosophical] problem, and the Will as an independent faculty is discovered, only when men begin to doubt the coincidence of the Thou-shalt and the I-can, when the question arises: Are things that concern only me within my power?” 41 The will, which is normally thought to hold supreme power in the inner life of man, is discovered in its impotence by the Christian Apostle Paul. Paul’s writings are marked by the preoccupation with individual eternal life that was common in the first century Roman world. Arendt attributes this general orientation to the decline of public life in the empire at the time, “the experience of a declining, perhaps a dying, world.” 42 Some of the appeal of Paul’s teaching in that context is its insistence on the individual’s opportunity to conquer death and survive the end of the world itself. The central concern of Paul’s teaching is with the self and its eternal destiny, as opposed to any public or worldly achievements. If one could only attain righteousness, one could secure eternal life. Individual salvation is problematized by the extreme new law, taught by Jesus of Nazareth, that requires a seemingly impossible selflessness. The means to achieving eternal life, doing good deeds, is blocked by Jesus’ teaching that no one can be good, that no one can fulfill the law that demands that humans love their enemies. Sin is also made more extreme in Jesus’ teachings: no longer is sin equated with the external deed itself, but with the state of the inner life, as when Jesus preaches that hating one’s neighbor is morally equivalent to murder. So, in Paul’s understanding of Jesus’ teaching, informed by his own concern with individual salvation, righteous living is impossible, and Paul's teaching centers instead on belief in God’s grace to overcome human limitations and grant eternal life. 43 In this context, Arendt believes the central problem that leads to the discovery of the will is that the New Law demands “a voluntary act of submission, an I-will of agreement,” and not simply external adherence to commands. Arendt expounds on the novelty of this experience: The Old Law said: thou shalt do; the New Law says: thou shalt will. It was the experience of an imperative demanding voluntary submission that led to the discovery of the Will, and inherent in this experience was the wondrous fact of a freedom that none of the 41

Ibid., 63. Ibid., 66. 43 Ibid., 67. 42

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ancient peoples—Greek, Roman, or Hebrew—had been aware of, namely, that there is a faculty in man by virtue of which, regardless of necessity and compulsion, he can say “Yes” or “No,” agree or disagree with what is factually given, including his own self and his existence, and that this faculty may determine what he is going to do. 44 The command that one should not merely conform one’s actions to the law but conform the inner life to the law illuminates the will as a distinct faculty of the mind. The law as a command “puts me before a choice between I-will and I-will-not,” revealing the sinfulness that makes complete obedience and agreement to the law impossible. In other words, if I were wholly good, I would not have a will and I would not have to choose to affirm what is good. 45 Because my awareness of the law initiates an internal resistance to the law, I am hopelessly torn between the two alternatives. This is the paradox of the will in Paul: the will is necessary to obey the New Law (the New Law demands the I-will of obedience), but the will is always accompanied by a “counter-will” so that I cannot obey wholeheartedly. 46 In other words, for every "Yes" said by the will, there is also an accompanying "No." The will appears in Paul as a distinct and autonomous mental faculty precisely because it hinders itself reflexively. The law commands first, which incites the will to command itself: “the point is that every I-will arises out of a natural inclination towards freedom, that is, out of the natural revulsion of free men toward being at someone’s bidding." As the "will always addresses itself to itself” by commanding Thou shalt will as the law says, it immediately resists its own command as well, bringing about a stalemate. 47 In trying to will the good that the law commands, Paul finds that he cannot possibly will it completely: “In brief, the will is impotent not because of something outside that prevents willing from succeeding, but because the will hinders itself. And wherever, as in Jesus, it does not hinder itself, it does not yet exist.” 48

44

Ibid., 68. Ibid., 68-69. 46 Ibid., 69. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 70. 45

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Paul reinterprets the will's self-conflict as one between flesh and spirit in which humans are powerless to overcome their carnal desires. 49 This reinterpretation is logically connected to many of Paul’s theological claims. It raises questions about why God would create human beings to live in such a state of internal conflict, making us incapable of living according to God’s law, and how God could expect human beings to be responsible for their sin. The traditional theological problems regarding the existence of evil and the compatibility of freedom and foreknowledge have their root in Paul’s formulations. As for the question of why God allowed sin to exist in the world, Paul suggests that God’s grace requires the existence of human sin, and humans could not be aware of God’s grace had they not known sinfulness first. For Arendt, these theological questions are not satisfactorily answered or even fully pursued by Paul, who appeals in the end to the inscrutable will of God who is sovereign over all creation. 50 In the sweep of Arendt's reflections, Paul is significant because he discovers the will as a reflexive faculty that produces its own self-conflict and impotence. Greek antiquity did not know of such a mental faculty that interrupted its own activity. Paul's significance also lies in the fact that his discovery is born out of moral impotence: it is his ambitious moral aspirations that trigger the will's self-conflict. To generalize, whenever a person wills to conduct himself in such a manner that he is uncertain of his ability to follow through with that mode of conduct—either because of past failures or the fact that no one is or has been capable of such conduct—the self-conflict of willing arises. Whatever his significance, it is important to remember that the will's freedom for Paul is severely limited: the will cannot determine conduct and it cannot resolve its own self-conflict. Paul’s dichotomy of flesh and spirit does not correspond well to the experience itself, and is reminiscent of the ancient dichotomy between reason and desire, with human beings being caught between two opposing forces.

49

Ibid., 70-71. Arendt provocatively suggests that “’flesh’ in Paul’s reasoning (as in the later disguise of ‘inclination’) becomes the metaphor for an internal resistance,” implying that Paul’s interpretation already evades the issue of the will’s reflexive conflict. Of course, Arendt is also suggesting that Kant evades the issue when he pits inclination against reason. 50 Ibid., 70-73.

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While Paul discovers the experience of reflexive willing, he resists dealing philosophically with the questions it provokes. 51 If you remember from Arendt's lecture courses on moral issues, she claimed that Epictetus' Stoicism had little to do with genuine willing. As we discussed in the last chapter, Epictetus appeared in Thinking as a key example of how thinking's withdrawal can be used to bracket reality, an operation that was performed by the will. These reflections about thinking appear to have motivated Arendt to reconsider Epictetus' role in the history of willing. In Willing, Epictetus appears as a contrast to Paul insofar as he emphasizes the omnipotence of the will. In the practice of bracketing reality, Epictetus locates the mind's power over itself, and in his descriptions of this practice, Epictetus illuminates crucial aspects of willing's reflexive nature. Epictetus shares with Paul a basic reluctance to speculate philosophically. Paul was not first and foremost a thinker or philosopher and was concerned less with speculation than with religious belief and practice. Epictetus also has a clear practical bent: his attention is paid exclusively to the will’s ability to provide human happiness and protect human beings from strife and worry. In the thought of Epictetus, the will is the commander among the mind’s faculties, especially with regard to logical reasoning, which can be used as a means to the pursuit of happiness. 52 Reason is recruited by the will to pursue arguments that will calm the soul's struggle and uneasiness, and reason is prohibited from pursuing speculative philosophical questions precisely because they pertain to things that are practically useless. 53 Furthermore, since it is assumed that the objects of metaphysical speculation are necessary and beyond human control, the will feels powerless in relation to them.

51

Arendt is somewhat equivocal about Paul's lack of philosophizing about his experiences. On the one hand, she is appreciative that Paul described the experiences directly, but she also indicates that his minimal explanations are not very thoughtful and insightful, and that more thinking should be done on the matter. In my mind, Jacobitti wrongly condemns Arendt for her "apparent sympathy with St. Paul's refusal to philosophize," Suzanne Jacobitti, "Hannah Arendt and the Will," Political Theory 16 (1988), 71. This accusation does not do justice to the way in which Arendt careful situates Paul as the discoverer of the will. 52 Arendt, Thinking, 155. 53 Arendt, Willing, 78.

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While Epictetus assumes that all humans wish to be happy, he shares the general Stoic understanding of happiness as primarily a lack of pain and fear. Philosophy’s purpose is to teach one to have arguments ready for times of suffering, so that one can minimize, and hopefully completely negate, the affects of sensible experience. Epictetus’ main thought-train concerns fear: the things that we fear, like death, are beyond human control, but the fear itself is within our control; we need only learn to eliminate our fear of what we cannot control in order to be free of misery. 54 This argument can be adapted to any particular situation to overcome fear and discomfort, and is applied for the purpose of soothing the soul’s anxiety over particular concerns. In Epictetus, these arguments are part of the technē of philosophy: by eliminating fear and psychological pain, one is acting upon oneself, trying to produce peace in one’s soul. To review, thinking is a powerful tool for this psychological purpose because its withdrawal allows the reality of the world to be “bracketed” or ignored. In the basic process of thinking, one withdraws from direct contact with sensible objects into relation with the images and invisible meanings of these objects as afterthoughts. The reality of thinking’s subject matter is borrowed from the object from which thinking withdraws—as an afterthought, it is defined by its relation to an "external" object. In contrast, the Stoic exercise treats the image as essentially internal to what we now call “consciousness,” negating its basic connection to independent entities. In this way, by focusing on the act of perception itself as opposed to the object of perception, the mind transforms the object into a mere “impression” that belongs to the mind. Once reason has discovered this inward region where man is confronted only by the "impressions" outward things make on his mind rather than by their factual existence, its task has been accomplished. The philosopher is no longer the thinker examining whatever may come his way but the man who has trained himself never to "turn to outward things," no matter where he happens to be…This turning away from reality while still in the midst of it, in contrast to the withdrawal of the thinking ego into the solitude of the soundless dialogue between me and myself, where every thought is an after-thought by definition, has the most far-reaching consequences. 55

54 55

Ibid., 75. Arendt, Willing, 75.

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Bracketing brings everything inside the mind, and the impressions as an interconnected whole are meant as a substitute for reality itself. 56 A sustained focus on these internal impressions keeps one in control of oneself because nothing exists externally that can threaten the self. Essentially, the bracketing process is intended as a negation of reality, and this negation brings relief to the soul. While thinking’s withdrawal can be “perverted” for the negation of reality, negation takes concerted effort on the part of the thinker. The bracketing of reality is not a mere exercise in thinking, but an exercise of will directed against the external world and the normal human reactions to it, in which argumentative reason is treated solely as a means. The challenge of this Stoic practice is that the body and the senses will always infringe on the power of the mind to ignore reality, so one must constantly prove one’s strength of will in experiences of pain and suffering. 57 While Paul discovered the power of the will to agree or disagree with factual reality, Epictetus discovered that “everything that seems to be real, the world of appearances, actually needs my consent in order to be real for me.” 58 Arendt repeats this "for me" to emphasize that the "Will's power to assent or dissent, say Yes or No" is limited to those matters in which only I am concerned. The will can aim to change the world, it can affirm what exists, or it can "deny reality to anything and everything by virtue of an I-will-not." 59 Epictetus assumes the will has no power to change the external world, but the will can negate the reality of external things and become master of them as inner impressions. Here is another angle on Epictetus's central idea: “What bothers men is not what actually happens to them but their own ‘judgment’ (dogma, in the sense of belief or opinion): ‘You will only be harmed when you think you are harmed. No one can harm you without your consent.’” 60 Epictetus seems to think that even though one cannot avoid physical pain and suffering in the world, one can disengage from experience and become invulnerable by withholding evaluation. By dismissing the reality of things in the

56

Ibid., 75. See also Arendt, Thinking, 156. Arendt, Willing, 79. 58 Ibid., 78. 59 Ibid., 83. In Thinking, Arendt had given Descartes as an example of a thinker who practices this type of willful negation of the world. 60 Ibid., 79. 57

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world, including the body, natural and habitual evaluative responses to events are undermined. At the extreme, the possibility of suicide is evidence of the will’s power to reject the body and reality as a whole. Thus, “The power of the will rests on the sovereign decision to concern [oneself] only with things within man’s power, and these reside exclusively in human inwardness." In terms of willing, this means that "the will’s first decision is not-to-will what it cannot get and to cease nilling [saying No or willing against] what it cannot avoid—in short, not to concern itself with anything over which it has no power.” 61 As with Stoicism generally, the stated goal is to be invulnerable and apathetic to reality. What is curious is that, while this doctrine seems to imply that one should simply stop willing and nilling altogether, Epictetus goes further and demands that one must say Yes to whatever happens in the world, consciously affirming everything as it is. Arendt suspects that this addendum to the original doctrine is rooted in a goal more difficult to achieve than invulnerability: "There is first the question of why a will should be necessary in order not to will, why it should not be possible simply to lose the faculty under the sway of the superior insight of right reasoning...it ought not to be necessary to repeat the not-willing over and over." 62 If indifferent invulnerability were the only thing at stake, the recommendation would be to train oneself not to will at all. The person who pursues the Stoic goal of invulnerability should not need to will once she has built up the habit of employing reason’s arguments and thinking’s withdrawal to negate reality. Arendt suggests that Epictetus' true goal is more ambitious: Closely connected with the foregoing, and even more puzzling, is the fact that Epictetus is by no means content with the will’s power not-to-will. He does not just preach indifference to everything that is not within our power; he consistently demands that man will what happens anyhow…Epictetus is interested in what happens to him [the self]: “I will a thing and it does not happen; what is there more wretched than I? I will it not and it happens; what is more wretched than I?” In short, in order to “live well” it is not enough to “ask not that events should happen as you will”; you must “let your will be that events 61

Ibid., 78. To overcome the difficulty of correctly communicating the sense of “nilling,” I here introduce the phrase “willing against.” The phrase is found nowhere in Arendt’s writings, but I think it captures the sense of active resistance that is implied. This choice of phrasing is supported by Arendt’s later explication of the Latin nolle in Augustine: “This nolle has nothing to do with the will-not-to-will, and it cannot be translated as I-will-not because this suggests an absence of will. Nolle is no less actively transitive than velle, no less a faculty of will: if I will what I do not desire, I nill my desires; and in the same way I can nill what reason tells me is right. In every act of the will, there is an I-will and I-nill involved,” ibid., 89. See also Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," 114, where to nill explicitly means to "consciously stand against." 62 Arendt, Willing, 80-81.

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should happen as they do.” It is only when will power has reached this climactic point, where it can will what is and thus never be “at odds with outward things,” that it can be said to be omnipotent. 63 Thus, the will pursues power and not mere invulnerability. For Epictetus, power is felt when what is willed actually happens. By saying Yes to what happens of its own accord, the will is assured of this feeling of power, which can be sustained only so long as the mind remains focused on impressions and not on objects as independent entities. In deliberate isolation from the world in consciousness, the self realizes its own ability to say Yes or No, but it is only in the Yes that it can feel powerful. So, why does Epictetus insist on universal affirmation, on saying Yes to everything that happens? Since the impressions of consciousness belong to the self, the only way to achieve harmony with oneself is to affirm every single one of those impressions. So, Epictetus insists on constant affirmation because the self, with the world as a whole drawn into the self as impressions, is the center of Stoic concern. 64 In essence, there is a fundamental tension between the doctrines of apathy and omnipotence. The former might be better achieved by an utter selflessness, while the latter requires an all-encompassing selfinterest. The process of negating reality allows the self to be apathetic in relation to the external world. From the side of the world, apathy is an apt description of the Stoic goal, but in the negation of the world, the self enters into an intense self-relation that reinforces itself and its desire for happiness that is anything but apathetic. One might think that suicide is an absolute negation of reality that could bring omnipotence in the Stoic sense. Arendt claims that the complete negation of reality is not possible for human beings: [Cosmic rebellion] is unthinkable because even an absolute negation depends on the sheer inexplicable thereness of all that is, including myself…Hence, as Augustine will later argue, those who believe they choose non-being when they commit suicide are in error; they choose a form of being that will come about one day anyhow and they choose peace, which of course is only a form of being. 65 For Arendt, any negation or nilling implies the affirmation of some mode of being. Any attempted negation of reality as a whole is futile because the self cannot be negated while willing—the self is 63

Ibid., 81. Ibid., 76: “The point is that you don’t have to go outside yourself if your concern is wholly for the self. Only insofar as the mind can draw things into itself are they of any value.” 65 Ibid., 82. 64

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choosing a different mode of being. If a complete negation of reality is not possible—i.e. if one cannot avoid affirming something given in the world—then the only way to harmonize one’s mental life is to affirm everything that happens. Because Epictetus assumes that reality is constituted as real by the will’s power of affirmation, he can claim to be omnipotent over reality when he affirms everything. For Arendt, this “implied No in every Yes”—that reality depends on the will—constitutes the “one decisive discovery that no argument can eliminate and that at least explains why the feeling of omnipotence as well as of human freedom could come out of the experiences of the willing ego.” 66 Unfortunately, “the price paid for the Will’s omnipotence is very high,” because nothing but the will itself can hinder the universal affirmation that constitutes omnipotence. Epictetus thinks that the Stoic must remain constantly suspicious of herself in order to make sure that she maintains such universal agreement with her impressions, with the world drawn into consciousness. This struggle of the willing ego with itself is necessitated by the awareness that every Yes indicates the possibility of saying No. As Paul had discovered that obedience of the human will to the Law of God is never whole in the inner life, and hence the human heart was essentially torn, so Epictetus had discovered that the will’s Yes to the world can never be guaranteed beyond a doubt within the inner life. If one continues willing in accord with whatever happens—as opposed to becoming apathetic by not willing at all—one will always be caught between the Yes and No of one's own freedom. For Arendt, it is crucial that Epictetus has denied, following traditional Stoic fatalism, any possibility of human beings altering the course of the world. This assumption determines the rather narrow limits of Epictetus’ thinking, but it is faulty as a general claim, informed as much by Epictetus’ own experience as a slave and the mood of his era than by proper insight about human action. Arendt hints that Epictetus’ universal affirmation might be merely the result of the “willing ego’s last and deepest resentment of its existential impotence in the world as it factually is.” Early in Willing, Arendt stated that “the Will’s need to will is no less strong than Reason’s need to think.” 67 In our present context, this means

66 67

Ibid., 83. Ibid., 14.

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that the will seeks the power to act in one form or another, whether in the world or, as a last resort, within the mind. If the will cannot accomplish anything in the world, humans “would have been given a truly 'montrous' faculty (Augustine), compelled by its nature to demand a power it is able to exercise only in the illusion-ridden region of sheer phantasy.” 68 While one may wish to achieve harmony with one’s impressions through the Stoic practice, the only power the practice provides necessitates a continuous conflict within the willing ego. As it turns out, the omnipotence and harmony sought by Epictetus is impossible to achieve. I should emphasize the fact that Epictetus is only the first of many figures in Arendt’s historical treatment that explicitly holds to a doctrine of universal affirmation. In a very suggestive (but ultimately hyperbolic) passage, Arendt writes, This power [i.e. the will’s power to say No] must have had something awful, truly overpowering, for the human mind, for there has never been a philosopher or theologian who, after having paid due attention to the implied No in every Yes, did not squarely turn around and demand an emphatic consent, advising man, as Seneca did in a sentence quoted with great approbation by Master Eckhart, “to accept all occurrences as though he himself had desired them and asked for them.” 69 This passage is hyperbolic because Arendt herself acknowledges Duns Scotus’ exceptional reflections on the willing faculty as well as his avoidance of any form of fatalism or universal affirmation. The point is well taken, however, in its conservative form: thinkers of many different stripes have tended to some form of fatalist doctrine after reflecting on willing. In Arendt's treatment, Epictetus’ fatalism is echoed in the modern period by Nietzsche. I wish to point out an important temporal shift that occurs in Epictetus' theory of the will. In relation to the world, Epictetus’ will is actually more similar to Arendt’s judging faculty because it has been denied the ability to do, to realize a project in the world. The power of affirmation and negation relates less to the future as a project as to the past, to things as they have come to be and cannot now be otherwise. The shift from the doctrine of apathy to that of universal affirmation implies a shift from the focus of the will toward the future to the judgment of things that already exist. If the self feels powerless 68 69

Ibid., 83-84. Ibid., 83.

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in relation to the future, the mind can focus on the past to soothe its troubling feelings. For Arendt’s project, then, what is most important is that the desire to act, which is fraught with uncertainty in being oriented to a future that is not yet, has been abandoned by Epictetus. To be sure, Epictetus does not align with Arendt’s position on the judging faculty either: for Arendt, judging requires dealing with particulars as real entities in the world shared with others and discriminating between particulars, claiming that some are beautiful, good, and right, while others are ugly, bad, and wrong. Stoic affirmation, while it must be exercised in relation to each particular as it is experienced, does not discriminate between particulars, but ignores the differences between things for the sake of harmony with the world. If the will has any futural orientation left in Epictetus’ thinking, it is only in a relation to the self that continues to experience time. By actively barring any futural outlook to the world—i.e. by concentrating on the past and affirming everything—one will never be disappointed by how things actually happen, but this activity cannot negate the ongoing experience of time within mental life. The future is preserved in the reflexive relation of the will to itself; one is essentially acting on oneself, attempting to create peace for the future of the self. This inner future is fraught with a new uncertainty in which one cannot guarantee the next moment's affirmation. In the end, Epictetus’ goal of inner tranquility is impossible because the self cannot stop time.

Augustine: Arendt's First Philosopher of the Will Epictetus was not a philosopher per se, as he was more interested in practical matters than in the traditional philosophical pursuit of truth and clarity. For Arendt, Augustine is the first philosopher of the will because he did not hesitate to wrestle with the difficult philosophical problems that free will posed. The organization of Arendt’s treatment of Augustine is prima facie rather odd, and one’s first approaches to this section of the text can be very difficult. Part of Arendt’s strategy is to organize the insights chronologically, in order to show how Augustine’s thoughts about willing developed. Arendt’s critiques of Augustine have mostly to do with the insufficiency and incompleteness of his earlier works—i.e. that

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his insights create problems that are not solved or mitigated in the original context. Thus, Arendt presents Augustine’s corpus as a developing series of reflections on the human will. Arendt begins with Augustine’s Free Choice of the Will, whose first part formulates many of the insights we have already encountered. Aristotle implicitly acknowledges the need, if humans are understood to be free, to conceive of a mediating faculty between reason and desire, even though his own proairesis does not fulfill this function successfully. For Augustine, the will is distinct from reason and from desire, which are both compelled by external things, truth in the case of reason and sensible objects in the case of desire. For Augustine, the will is not compelled, but is the source of its own movement. Augustine’s will is also distinct from proairesis in another way: “The faculty of Choice, so decisive for the liberum arbitrium, here applies not to the deliberative selection of means toward an end but primarily—and, in Augustine, exclusively—to the choice between velle and nolle, between willing and nilling.” 70 The activity of willing relates not to means but to ends, and its freedom consists in the power to affirm or negate those ends, irrespective of the power to achieve those ends in the world. Thus, the will is the inner power of affirmation and negation whereby one can say Yes or No to ends without being compelled or determined by them. As in Epictetus, “proof of the freedom of the Will draws exclusively on an inner power of affirmation and negation that has nothing to do with any actual posse or potestas— the faculty needed to perform the Will’s commands.” 71 Like Paul, Augustine realizes that will and the ability to act are not the same, even though the will is free. While the will is free in regards to affirmation and negation, there remains the fact that both willing and nilling are inextricably linked: "In every act of the will, there is an I-will and I-nill involved.” The coincidence of the I-will and I-nill constitutes the selfconflict of the will for Augustine, and the conflict is the source of the will's impotence to act, as it was in Paul. However, Augustine's conflict is not between two laws, flesh and spirit, but between two wills in the same mind. 72

70

Ibid., 89. Ibid., 88. 72 At ibid., 87, Arendt insinuates that Paul’s formulation of the two laws, one spiritual and one carnal, lends itself to the Manichean heresy that Augustine made sure to avoid. 71

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The discussion of the will’s freedom in Free Choice of the Will raises the obvious question: “What is it then that causes the will to will?” Augustine’s answer is that the will is its own cause, for if you insist on a cause for the will, you will initiate an infinite regress. Although she believes Augustine is right on this point, Arendt does not approve of speaking of the will as a "self-cause": the “Will is a fact which in its sheer contingent factuality cannot be explained in terms of causality.”73 To think of the will as a cause invites the natural misunderstanding that the will, like every other cause, also itself has a cause of which it is an effect. As we saw in Thinking, Arendt is suspicious of the philosophical prejudices involved in the notion of causality. Causality should not be applied to non-scientific matters, such as mental phenomena, that can only be treated by thinking and not by the intellect, and that concern meaning and not truth. The experience of the will is factual, and the experience itself indicates that the will is free in bringing about its own activity. In other words, if the will were not responsible for willing, then the phenomena of willing's self-conflict would not be intelligible. We have one last thread to follow in this first stage, one that connects Augustine’s early work and Epictetian Stoicism. As we found, “What was actually scandalous in [the Stoic] doctrine was not that man could will to say ‘No’ to reality but that this No was not enough; in order to find tranquility, man was told, he had to train his will to say ‘Yes’ and to ‘let your will be that events happen as they do.’” 74 For Augustine, this “willed submissiveness presupposes a severe limitation of the willing capacity itself…the freedom of the faculty is limited because no created being can will against creation, for this would be— even in the case of suicide—a will directed not only against a counter-will but against the very existence of the willing or nilling subject.” 75 Even suicide is not really a choice of non-being since “your own existence prevents you from either thinking or willing absolute non-existence.” Arendt suggests that Augustine’s observations are an "effective refutation” of Stoicism’s attempted escape from reality.76 While the Stoic sought omnipotence by bringing the world’s appearances into the mind, Augustine’s

73

Ibid., 89. Ibid., 90. 75 Ibid., 90-91. 76 Ibid., 92. 74

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position is that the willing self has no power over the very fact that one exists. And if existence is granted to the self from an external source, the self is always already entangled with a world independent of it. In Augustine, the proper response to the basic givenness of human existence is praise, an attitude echoed in Heidegger's claim that the thinking activity itself implies a basic gratitude for Being. As I argued in the last chapter, the universal affirmation of Being is morally problematic because it precludes the possibility of admitting the reality of evil. Although Arendt does not directly state it, I think she is uncomfortable with the proximity of Augustine’s equation of Being and goodness to the universal affirmation found in Epictetus and other thinkers. 77 Despite her misgivings about Augustine's views, Arendt is committed to the above limitation on the will's power: the self's existence is always given externally and taken for granted by the willing ego. Therefore, the will cannot negate absolutely. Augustine’s most original contributions to the history of the will are found in the Confessions, a very personal work in which Augustine explores the intricacies of the conflict within the willing activity. Importantly, Augustine rejects Paul’s formulation of the will’s conflict as a conflict of two laws with a simple observation: the body does not resist the will, but immediately responds to the will’s commands. Instead, only when the will commands itself does the conflict arise: “The split occurs in the will itself; the conflict arises neither out of a split between mind and will nor out of a split between flesh and mind.”78 The will splits because it commands itself, and in commanding itself incites its own resistance. The will realizes its own incompleteness—that it does not will anything entirely—for the command would not be necessary if the will were already complete in willing one project. So, whenever one wills, there arises a self-conflict in which one identifies with each of the wills in the conflict: “Since it is in the nature of the will to command and demand obedience, it is also in the nature of the will to be resisted.” 79

77

A hint in this direction is found in Arendt's choice of phrasing in a comment about praise in Christian theology: "Where we find [the notion of praise] in a strictly Christian context, it already has an uncomfortably argumentative flavor, as though it were simply a necessary inference from the unquestioned faith in a Creator-God, as though Christians were duty-bound to repeat God's words after the Creation—'And God saw everything...and...it was very good.'" See ibid. 78 Ibid., 94. 79 Ibid., 95-96.

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Augustine’s earlier description of the conflict as one between willing and nilling seems too narrow to encompass all the possibilities. The dual-conflict between willing and nilling was formulated on analogy with the contest between reason and desire, as if willing reason’s advise implied nilling desire’s impulse, and vice versa. The question, in this earlier framework, is which otherwise compelling force will be affirmed, and which will be denied, but it is certain that both velle and nolle must each align with one force or the other. In a sense, then, the will’s conflict, in this early description, borrows its structure from the conflict between reason and desire. In the Confessions, Augustine recognizes that the conflict of the will can be manifest in various ways, on occasion independently of any conflict between reason and desire. First of all, the conflict may be a conflict between more than two wills. Augustine presents as an illustration a situation in which there are four equally desired projects in conflict, only one of which can be enacted at a single moment. 80 Unlike the deliberations of proairesis and the liberum arbitrium, Augustine's conflicted will is torn in relation to ends and not just means. In his example, the possibilities that are considered are all given and the power to achieve each of them in isolation is not in question. Also, none of the alternatives would necessarily constitute a substantially new series of events. The key phenomenon in the example is that each of them is contingent: whatever I do, I could have left it undone. In its self-conflict, willing reveals the contingency of future action. No matter what, I end up doing something, even if I merely follow my routine and do not start anything new. Secondly, Augustine's new description captures the fact that “we find the same conflict of wills where no choice between good and evil is at stake, where both wills must be called evil or both good.” 81 The key theological implication of this observation is that grace cannot possibly be called upon to resolve the conflict in the will: “Divine grace would not help once he had discovered that the brokenness of the Will was the same for the evil and for the good will; it is rather difficult to imagine God’s gratuitous grace 80

Ibid., 94. This slight variation in the description is interesting in that it amounts to an implicit admission by Arendt that there is no one single description that is adequate to all the phenomena of willing. In the end, I think Arendt abandons any attempt to definitely describe the will's self-conflict, as she tends to favor Duns Scotus’ emphasis on the awareness of contingency involved in all acts of willing. 81 Ibid.

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deciding whether I should go to the theater or commit adultery [both immoral options for Augustine].”82 Thus, Augustine uncovered the fact that the conflict within the will is “independent of the content that is willed,” and that the will's split is not always a moral conflict. 83 Without falling back to the Pauline position that divine grace heals the will's split, Augustine is left with an obvious problem. How does the resolution of the will's conflict occur and a decision get made? Within the framework of the Confessions, no solution to the riddle of this "monstrous" faculty is given; how the will, divided against itself, finally reaches the moment when it becomes "entire" remains a mystery...except at the very end of the Confessions, when he suddenly begins to speak of the Will as a kind of Love, "the weight of the soul," but without giving any account of this strange equation…Actually, as I will show later, what looks like a deus ex machina in the Confessions is derived from a different theory of the Will. 84 This further theory, formulated in On the Trinity, will be our next subject, but it is important to realize that Arendt is clear that Augustine has failed in the Confessions to give a satisfactory explanation of how the will resolves its self-conflict. In a strange transitional passage, Arendt elaborates—and simultaneously veils—her critique of Augustine by locating the same deus ex machina line of reasoning in John Stuart Mill. Mill describes the conflict in the will much as Augustine did, in which the ego is torn between multiple wills. The resolution occurs, he suggests, because one of the wills is a “more permanent state of my feelings than the other.” 85 Supposedly, the more permanent will would eventually solve the stalemate and assert itself in action, overcoming the conflict with the other will(s). By appealing to permanence, Mill “suggests the intervention of something, called ‘conscience’ or ‘character,’ that survives all single, temporally limited, volitions or desires.” The problem here is that what eventually becomes the character of the individual— the “enduring I”—is actually engaged in the will’s conflict, and it is not certain that it will triumph while the conflict ensues. The will that wins can only be considered one’s character or truly permanent after the conflict is over; thus the appeal to character offers no explanation as to how the conflict is resolved. The 82

Ibid., 97. Ibid., 95. 84 Ibid., 96. 85 Ibid. 83

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deus ex machina of Mill lies in his assumption that, as Arendt says, “it is possible to teach one of the parties [in the conflict] to win…an unexamined assumption—such as moral philosophers often adopt with great confidence and which actually can be neither proved nor disproved.” 86 The critique of Mill applies equally well to Augustine’s position in the Confessions. Here is Arendt’s explication of Augustine’s appeal to love: Love is the “weight of the soul,” its law of gravitation, that which brings the soul’s movement to its rest. Somewhat influenced by Aristotelian physics, he holds that the end of all movement is rest, and now he understands the emotions—the motions of the soul— in analogy to the movements of the physical world. For “nothing else do bodies desire by their weight than what souls desire by their love.” Hence, in the Confessions: “My weight is my love; by it I am borne whithersoever I am borne.” The soul’s gravity, the essence of who somebody is, and which as such is inscrutable to human eyes, becomes manifest in this love. 87 Love in this description assumes that each soul has a particular character assigned to it, and that the conflict of the will is actually resolved ahead of time, although the outcome is unknown to the willing subject and other human spectators. I stress Arendt's criticism of Augustine to further ground my claim that he is not the main "hero" of the historical presentation. Augustine is certainly a central figure, but we cannot reasonably conclude he is the central thinker of Willing. In summary, Arendt has a mixed evaluation of the Confessions: the descriptions of the will’s self-conflict are accurate and illuminating, but the conflict cannot be reasonably resolved by love, at least on analogy with the gravity of physical bodies. The metaphor of gravity portrays the resolution as inevitable and necessary, and essentially evades the tension and uncertainty that resides in the willing activity. The conflict arises when the will considers future action, and from that perspective, I cannot assume that what I will do is an inevitable outcome. In the Confessions, the metaphor makes sense only as a means of unifying one’s lifelong pursuits, and particularly in Augustine’s case, the pursuit of God. But Augustine’s appeal to love as the weight of the soul occurs long after he has completed the momentous actions in his own life. In other words, in retrospect, from the position of the thinker's

86 87

Ibid., 97. Ibid., 95.

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reflection on the past, love may be an illuminating concept to capture the character of the person one has become. 88 A more satisfactory theory of the will's resolution is found in On the Trinity, which Arendt calls "the most profound and the most articulated development of his own very original philosophical position." 89 In that work, following the paradigm of the divine trinity, Augustine envisions the mind as a three-fold substance consisting of memory, intellect, and will, and “What interests Augustine is merely that the mental ‘I’ contains three altogether different things that are inseparable and yet distinct.” And while each of the three is equal and relates to the other two, the unity of the three in one mind “is due to the Will.” The will is the center of activity in the mind in that it directs the other faculties to their objects: “The Will tells the memory what to retain and what to forget; it tells the intellect what to choose for its understanding.” 90 In sense perception, Augustine finds the same uniting function of the Will as it brings together the object and the sensory capacity. Without the [attention of the mind], a function of the Will, we have only sensory "impressions" without any actual perceiving of them, an object is seen only when we concentrate our mind on the perception. We can see without perceiving, and hear without listening, as frequently happens when we are absent-minded. The "attention of the mind" is needed to transform sensation into perception. 91 The will, then, not only relates to the world of appearances in sense perception, but it directs the other mental faculties in their withdrawal from appearances—i.e. memory and intellect do not deal with real 88

The temptation to take Augustine as the central figure of Willing is especially great because Arendt wrote her dissertation on Augustine's conception of love. However, this kind of interpretation ignores the discontinuities in Arendt's work and the distinct effects of historical events on her thought and method. For instance, Kampowski's reading of Life of the Mind relies on an assumption of continuity in Arendt's work from beginning (dissertation) to end (Willing). For example, see Kampowski, Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning, xix: "We can safely make the general affirmation that in Arendt's dissertation, many of her later ideas are already present in rudimentary form." The dissertation material, which I have left out of consideration altogether, is of little interest for her later work because it precedes her experiences with totalitarianism and with Eichmann. Likewise, Swayne-Barthold argues for an Arendtian "ethics of love," interpreting Arendt's thematic emphasis on Love as a return to ideas in her dissertation. However, the distance between the two works is hardly acknowledged and Swayne-Barthold imputes to Arendt something akin to what I have called universal affirmation, running against the general current of Willing. She ignores not just Arendt's criticism of Augustine but also the numerous other moral issues and claims in the Willing volume. See Lauren Swayne-Barthold, "Towards an Ethics of Love: Arendt on the Will and St. Augustine," Philosophy and Social Criticism 26 (2000): 1-20. 89 Arendt, Willing, 85. 90 Ibid., 99. 91 Ibid., 100.

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objects but with invisibles, mental images and concepts. Thus, the will unites mental life with the world of appearances: “In other words, the Will, by virtue of attention, first unites our sense organs with the real world in a meaningful way, and then drags, as it were, this outside world into ourselves and prepares it for further mental operations: to be remembered, to be understood, to be asserted or denied.” 92 In Thinking, Arendt relied on Augustine's descriptions of de-sensing, imagination, and remembrance, and in Willing, Arendt favors Augustine's theory that these activities are initiated by the will. Arendt explains the importance of this theory within Augustine's work: “This Will could indeed be understood as ‘the spring of action’; by directing the senses' attention, presiding over the images impressed on memory, and providing the intellect with material for understanding, the Will prepares the ground on which action can take place.” In contrast to Augustine’s early descriptions, the will here is related more to the world and the other faculties of the mind than to itself. The problem with the will’s self-conflict—that the will’s self-relation hinders action—is mitigated in On the Trinity because Augustine conceives of the will as already intimately related with basic activities of perception as well as the other activities of the mind: “This Will, one is tempted to say, is so busy preparing action that it hardly has time to get caught in the controversy with its own counter-will.” 93 The will can be active without engendering its self-conflict as long as it is concerned with the world and not solely selfconcerned: "the solution of the Will’s inner conflict comes about through a transformation of the Will itself, its transformation into Love.” 94 The attention of the mind in perception and thinking binds together the mind with its object just as love binds together lover and beloved. While willing prepares for action and is extinguished when the action is performed, love does not end with the achievement of a goal or the performance of a single action, but it is aimed at an ongoing “steadfast enjoyment” that can be experienced only when the object of love can be perpetually present to the mind. “Restlessness” is essential to willing insofar as willing is always interested in achieving something distinct from willing, a project that is always uncertain. In the transformation of willing into love, the activity of the mind ceases 92

Ibid. Ibid., 101. 94 Ibid., 102. 93

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to be focused on achieving an external project, but is drawn instead to those things that have become part of the mind’s self-understanding: The emphasis here is on the mind thinking of itself, and the love that stills the will’s turmoil and restlessness is not a love of tangible things but of the “footprints” “sensible things” have left on the inwardness of the mind…In the case of Love the lasting “footprint” that the mind has transformed into an intelligible thing would be neither the one who loves nor his beloved but the third element, namely Love itself, the love with which the lovers love each other. 95 Love overcomes the transience of the willing activity through the practice of consistently thinking about and attending to the same objects, which are not sensible objects, but “intelligible things” that have been drawn from sense experience. Since human thinking cannot persist indefinitely in its focus on the things it loves, it is crucial that memory take hold of them so that the mind may return to them later and resume thinking about them again. In this paradigm, love is the continuity of attention over the life of the mind: “What Love brings about is lastingness, a perdurance of which the mind [and particularly the will] otherwise seems incapable.” 96 Through memory and imagination, thinking makes possible a lasting affirmation of things. As memory is basic to all thinking processes qua afterthoughts, thinking strengthens memory that can grow into love through continued affirmation. It is not that all memory is affirmation, but to love (in this context) is to remember something because one affirms it and wants it to last. In her earlier lectures on morality, the thinking process was described as "striking roots" in order to anchor the self against the winds of change, particularly in emergencies. Memory played the role of shaping the person and her limits in a way analogous to conscience, and this position was confirmed in Thinking's presentation of conscience. In Life of the Mind as a whole, thinking does not just strike "defensive" or anchoring roots, but adds "weight" to the mind that can prepare one to act. Arendt's emphasis on memory in Willing indicates how memory is intimately tied up with the will's direction of thinking's attention. As Arendt made clear in Thinking, active remembrance is required for thinking: "thought-objects come into being only when the mind actively and deliberately remembers, recollects and selects from the storehouse of 95 96

Ibid., 103. Ibid., 104.

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memory whatever arouses its interest sufficiently to induce concentration." 97 The will initiates the thinking ego's search for meaning by selecting the objects that will be attended to in thought, and this selection helps to form the person's character. Only then can thinking begin the process through which love is strengthened and nourished. But, thinking must be accompanied by affirmation for thinking to play the preparatory role that Arendt outlines. Thinking in other ways—for instance, in the Stoic mode, where the particulars are ignored and the self is of primary concern—does not prepare the will to initiate action. 98 In On the Trinity, Augustine’s solution to the brokenness of the will consists essentially in shifting the emphasis away from the will in isolation. To summarize: this Will of Augustine’s, which is not understood as a separate faculty but in its function within the mind as a whole, where all single faculties—memory, intellect, and will—are “mutually referred to each other,” finds its redemption in being transformed into Love. Love as a kind of enduring and conflictless Will has an obvious resemblance to Mill’s “enduring I,” which finally prevails in the will’s decisions. Augustine’s Love exerts its influence through the “weight”—“the will resembles a weight”—it adds to the soul, thus arresting its fluctuations. Men do not become just by knowing what is just but by loving justice. Love is the soul’s gravity, or the other way round: “the specific gravity of bodies is, as it were, their love.” What is saved, moreover, in this transformation of his earlier conception is the Will’s power of assertion and denial; there is no greater assertion of something or somebody than to love it, that is, to say: I will that you be—Amo: Volo ut sis. 99 This description of how love solves the problem of the will’s self-conflict requires that we "reverse" the gravity metaphor from the formulation in the Confessions. Here, the metaphor suggests that the mind obtains its gravity over the course of time through its own activities, adding weight to itself as it attends to its objects. This avoids attributing any sort of inevitability to love. The trick to using the metaphor properly is to recognize that it is an ex post facto claim, on par with a narrative told about the meaning of past events. We must preserve the contingency of the will's resolution by undermining the problematic necessity that the original metaphor suggests. 97

Arendt, Thinking, 77. Of course, this does not imply that thinking in the Stoic mode, for example, does not shape one's character. Nor does it imply that one cannot still be involved in action without preparing for it. But, in that case, the action happens to the individual and is not really initiated by him. Eichmann's situation could be construed on these lines: he stumbled into action without paying attention to or loving the principles of the Nazi movement. His selfconcern was so extreme that he did not care to notice what was happening. 99 Ibid., 104. 98

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The affirmation that is preserved in love is crucial to Arendt's position regarding the resolution of the will's self-conflict. Affirmation allows the will to feel powerful in uniting the mind with its objects harmoniously: "And this power of the mind is due not to the Intellect and not to Memory but only to the Will that unites the mind's inwardness with the outward world." 100 The impotence of the will in its selfconflict is identical with the inability to act, but the mind can regain a sense of power by shifting the its attention from future projects to be achieved to past objects that can be thought about and affirmed. The shift in attention avoids the uncertainty and impotence that accompanies the futural outlook, but the affirmation of the past allows the will to exercise its mental power. In the Stoic practice, universal affirmation required a similar shift for the sake of omnipotence, although it engendered the reflexive conflict in the will due to its extreme demand for self-control. Since Arendt is heavily critical of all theories of universal affirmation, her favored version of Augustinian love entails a rejection of his earlier notion of praise for all existence. For Arendt, attention does not entail affirmation—certainly, we can mentally attend to things that we do not affirm, such as totalitarian evil and Eichmann's banality in Arendt's case. Also, affirmation need not relate to Being as a whole. In the context of Willing, love must be the affirmation of particulars. Following the metaphor, if love adds "weight to the soul" in such a way that it will have a "place" in the world, love must affirm particular things and not every being. To love all things—if that is even possible given the existence of evil and ugliness as well as human limitations—does not help prepare for action, which is only possible as a particular initiative. At this juncture, I wish to pose a question about the relation between thinking and love: if thinking deals primarily with invisible meanings and concepts, how can thinking prepare for action in the world of appearing particulars? In Thinking, Arendt warned that general statements made in politics "degenerate into empty generalities. Action deals with particulars, and only particular statements can be valid in the field of ethics or politics." 101 Furthermore, Arendt claims that thinking does not give us

100 101

Ibid., 101. Arendt, Thinking, 200.

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knowledge that could thrust us into action: “How marvelous that men can perform courageous or just deeds even though they do not know, can give no account of, what courage and justice are.” 102 And, to repeat Arendt's claim above: "Men do not become just by knowing what is just but by loving justice." How are we to conceive love as the link between thinking and action? In the context of On the Trinity, thinking about the meaning of justice helps prepare the person to act in just ways. For Arendt, even when thinking is pondering the meaning of invisible concepts like "justice," thinking is tied to the world of appearance through memory. Past particulars must be transformed by thinking into "intelligible things," but the meaning of these concepts are still tied to the many particulars that inspire reflection—e.g. "justice" depends on the many just acts that I have seen or heard about from others. Although thinking will ultimately undermine all definitions of justice, the meaningfulness of the concept of justice is rooted in particular acts of justice that have caught the mind's attention. The reflexivity of thinking appears here in the influence that memory exerts over the self: by remembering the particular just acts, even though one does know what "justice" is, the self can come to love the many particulars. And, for Arendt, actions cannot be abstracted from the agents who perform them: the story that communicates the worldly context and identity of the agent holds the meaning of the deeds. Loving justice entails choosing "heroes" of justice and reflecting upon the meaning of their stories. In the end, the assumption is that loving justice in this way will inspire one to act justly. The particular acts that are remembered and thought about become examples of how to act justly, examples that inspire further just actions. On Arendt's reasoning, affirmation is necessary to prepare for action because the will cannot overcome its self-conflict except by transformation into love. Love unifies the will's split by attaching the will to things that are not in question, i.e. not future projects. Thinking enters here because love needs to relate to something that can last, so that the will is assured of its ongoing activity of affirmation and the feeling of power that accompanies that affirmation. The mind's affirmative attention can achieve the

102

Ibid., 166. 262

gravity that is needed to overcome the will's duality. Thinking in the mode of universal negation does not give definition to the mind, but only reinforces the will's reflexive focus on the self in isolation. 103 Arendt's analysis does not address the phenomenon of hate, and one may wonder whether hate could not also prepare us for action and overcome the will's split as much as love does, in which case affirmation would not be as singularly important as Arendt claims it is. Given her argument that universal negation is impossible—that every negation implies an affirmation of some other mode of being—Arendt might understand the hatred of one thing to imply the affirmation of something else. On this line of reasoning, love is present in hatred and is doing the work of shaping one's character. To hate injustice, for instance, means to love justice and will it to be in the world. Alternatively, Arendt could also be thinking that hatred may not imply the love of something external to the self (e.g. justice), but rather it could imply a form of self-love. To habitually hate at least means to affirm the act of hating and the way hatred affects the self, the feeling of power or pleasure in an act of negation. At any rate, hate that is not linked to an affirmation of something other than the self has no specific character or orientation—it could hate anything to achieve the power or pleasure that the self enjoys. By itself, hate may prepare us to act, but it will not prepare us to act in any particular way. Hate without affirmation is unable to exercise discriminating judgment. Using Augustine, Arendt is able to transform Socratic erōs in a way that avoids problematic ethical implications. Erōs carries a connation of necessity, of being a need for something external. Thinking's quest for meaning is erotic only on the most general level: human beings have a need for meaning that is satisfied only in thought. But the need for meaning does not specify which objects will be the focus of thinking's attention. On this more specific level, love cannot be erotic, as though certain 103

On Arendt's reasoning, theories of consciousness in which the mind is isolated from the world are as much indebted to the experiences of willing's self-conflict than to the experiences of thinking's search for meaning. In the latter the mind is not focused on itself but on the objects of thought, which are independent of the self and the mind. In the former, the will relates to itself explicitly without being determined by external things. The concept of "consciousness" assumes the mind relates only to itself—its impressions—and not to independent objects. This is reinforced by the claim that the practice of "bracketing" reality requires an effort of the will. In other words, Arendt's view of thinking as inherently related to independent objects through memory and imagination is meant to describe the "default" mode, and bracketing is a willful negation of this default mental relation to the world. Descartes' insistence on the effort required to perform his Meditations is one example that confirms this idea.

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objects force human beings to think about them. For instance, only the person already in the habit of thinking about justice will feel the "need" to think about justice again. Justice itself does not force humans to think about it; the mind must attend to just acts in order for justice to have any erotic effect on the mind in the future. Love, in Arendt's revised sense, is her answer to the brokenness of the will. In a very important passage, Arendt reinterprets Augustine’s insights from On the Trinity into her own terminology, pointing ahead to her treatment of Duns Scotus and showing her affinity with Bergson as well: Here is the first intimation of certain consequences that Duns Scotus much later would draw from Augustinian voluntarism: the Will’s redemption cannot be mental and does not come by divine intervention either; redemption comes from the act which—often like a “coup d’état,” in Bergson’s felicitous phrase—interrupts the conflict between velle and nolle. And the price of the redemption is, as we shall see, freedom…and I pay for this freedom by the curious fact that the Will always wills and nills at the same time: the mental activity in this case does not exclude its opposite…In other words, the Will is redeemed by ceasing to will and starting to act, and the cessation cannot originate in an act of the will-not-to-will because this would be but another volition. 104 Hence, the will does not resolve itself by willing, but by initiating an action that spells the end of willing. Actions are crucially different from willing: they exclude their opposite by being performed, and thus cannot contain the reflexive conflict that arises from willing. The will can indirectly add weight to its gravitational center through mental attention and affirmation, but mental love only brings the will "closer" to action and it does not cause action to occur. A gap remains between the mental preparations for action and the action itself—you cannot "think yourself" into action. The act is not constructed in the mind first and then placed fully-formed into the world. However much one prepares for action by thinking, there is irreducible contingency involved. In an earlier passage, Arendt supports this reading: "The tension [involved in willing] can be overcome only by doing, that is, by giving up the mental activity altogether; a switch from willing to thinking produces no more than a temporary paralysis of the will, just as a switch from thinking to willing is felt by the thinking ego to be a temporary paralysis of the thinking activity."105

104 105

Arendt, Willing, 101-102. Ibid., 38.

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So, while the thinking activity causes paralysis in the will's self-conflict and prepares for action through attention, it does not extinguish the basic need of the will to bring about a project. For Arendt's conception of love to "solve" the problem of the will's split, the will in its function as mental attention must be free. Most often, Arendt insists on the freedom of action because it is worldly: the novelty of particular events and actions objectively proves the reality of human freedom. But, if love has any meaning as the resolution of the will's self-conflict through consistent attention, then attention must be free as well. The revision of the earlier gravity metaphor is crucial to indicating this freedom. Just like worldly action, the attention of the mind is contingently performed as well; the mind could have thought otherwise than it did. For the most part, the freedom of attention goes unnoticed in the performance of the mind's activities, and it has the advantage of not being seen by others. Just as the identity of a person is only a worldly reality and not a product of the mind, the mind's love does not attain reality until action allows love to appear in the world: “The soul’s gravity, the essence of who somebody is, and which as such is inscrutable to human eyes, becomes manifest in this love.” 106 Of course, what a person loves becomes clearer the longer the person lives, as the person's life-story develops and becomes further defined. In death, love becomes complete because the person loses the ability to act contrary to her past. The will, in its functions of affirmation, unification and attention, is not directly manifest to the world, but it still affects the way we act and the decisions we make—it is how the self freely contributes to who it will be in the world. To understand love as the "enduring I" is correct from the perspective of mental life as a whole, even though this "I" is not equivalent to the worldly "who" of the person. However, it must be possible for the enduring I of mental life to resemble one's worldly identity to such an extent that personal responsibility for action does not appear arbitrary to the actor. Only if a person does not pay attention to how others might view her actions will she be completely surprised by who she has become through action. Although a person cannot perfectly control her own actions or the outcomes of those actions, she can be held accountable for the general manner of her action and the principles that inspire her initiatives. Arendt suggests this kind of restricted autonomy in her treatment of 106

Ibid., 95.

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self-presentation: "Up to a point we can choose how to appear to others...I am making an act of deliberate choice among the various potentialities of conduct with which the world has presented me. Out of such acts arises finally what we call character or personality." 107 The distinction between how one appears and the projects one aims for is found in Willing as well. The achievement of projects is always dependent upon the actions and reactions of others in the world, but character is much more within the power of the individual to determine. A person's character will reflect what she loves, what she pays attention to, and what she affirms or rejects in mental life. And, unlike action, which always requires power to be supplied externally for the project to be successful, mental attention is more easily achieved by a simple act of will. In Arendt's overall project in Life of the Mind, although difficult to detect in her discussion of Augustine, love is closely connected with judgment. There is a common element in willing and judging: contingency. The contingency in judgment lies in the choice between affirmation and negation, and it should not be mistaken for the contingency of action, which attaches not just to the evaluation of the action, but to the action itself, to the action's very existence. Within the context of Willing, where the emphasis is on the individual in isolation from others, Arendt consistently uses the language of "will" and "love." In the context of judging, affirmation and negation are referenced to the perspectives of others, and so love and will reflect how we position ourselves in the world with others. By following Augustine in On the Trinity, Arendt envisions the possibility for the mental activities to work together in relative harmony. In an ideal situation, the will's self-conflict gives way to a love that unifies the three faculties of the mind, while also pointing to the unification of the mind with the life of action. However, the appeal to love does not causally explain how action emerges from the will and from the mind generally. The concept of love is most accurately applied to the past as we reflect on the patterns of action and conduct in a person's life as a whole. The gap between willing and acting is narrowed by the appeal to love but not eradicated. In any particular instance, we cannot explain how an action emerges. In principle, the spontaneity of action cannot be explained. All we can do is reflect on the implications of this factual spontaneity. 107

T, 34.

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Let us now turn to Augustine's view of the will in City of God. The crucial passage, which is quite short, was the inspiration for Arendt’s conception of natality. 108 In relation to theological issues, Augustine is attempting to account for the creation of human beings as temporal creatures, so that the question is why an eternal God would create human beings who are "as it were, time's essence." In this speculative theological context, Augustine is investigating "the 'purpose of the Will' as the 'purpose of Man.'" 109 In Augustine's reflections, the creation of humans as temporal creatures is equivalent to the creation of time as we know it and the creation of beings with the power to begin something new: "that there may be novelty, a beginning must exist." 110 The will, as the power of beginning something new, distinguishes human beings as individual persons from other creatures who are always only multiplications of biological species. With the creation of humans something altogether different arrived in the world: "It is Man's character of individuality that explains Augustine's saying that there was 'nobody' before him, namely nobody whom one could call a 'person'; this individuality manifests itself in the Will." 111 Arendt’s reading of City of God connects two primary functions of the will: its role in initiating novelty and its role as the principium individuationis. The human individual is the new beginning that comes into being through the exercise of the will. A person not only initiates new events in the world but also becomes a unique individual in the process, for one is ultimately defined by those actions that no one else can claim and are unique to the narrative of one’s life. Arendt sees that in Augustine's work, time is made possible by the will in very interesting ways. In the Confessions (in particular, book eleven) Augustine establishes the will as the faculty most intimately related with the mental experience of time. In short, time is unified by the will qua the mind's attention. Only because the will retains the past and expects the future, directing the mind to what is not immediately present, is time experienced at all. The mind "temporalizes" through attention, binding 108

Kampowski, Arendt, Augustine and the New Beginning, 46. Arendt references this passage in many of her works, beginning with articles written in 1953. 109 Ibid., 87. 110 Ibid., 108. 111 Ibid., 109.

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"together the tenses of time into the mind's present." Time passes through the present—the future comes to be past by passing through the now—but this passing does not occur without attention "stretching" the present into past and future. For the individual person, self-identity is constituted into a whole through this temporalizing activity. But, this mental activity is inadequate to solely account for historical temporality. The mind needs worldly events that can be distinguished from one another and can be organized into a rectilinear structure, a compilation of stories with beginnings and ends. If there were only sempiternal or cyclical change, there would not be distinct events that could pass successively from the future into the past. In other words, such sempiternal change does not amount to humanly experienced time, which is unintelligible without novelty in the world. Thus, the human experience of time depends upon the will, namely as the source of novel action. The capacity for action corresponds to the condition of natality: "[e]very man, created in the singular, is a new beginning by virtue of his birth." 112 In Human Condition, Arendt claimed: "the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something new, that is, of acting." 113 The significance of human birth, as the beginning of a person's life-story, is ultimately dependent on the unpredictable actions that are expected to come from that new person. Hypothetically, if humans were only to behave and never to act, birth would lose its specific meaning and be reduced to generic biological reproduction. Augustine's account of the "purpose of Man" in the City of God goes against some deep-seated philosophical prejudices: "If Augustine had drawn the consequences of these speculations, he would have defined men, not, like the Greeks, as mortals, but as 'natals,' and he would have defined the freedom of the Will not as the liberum arbitrium, the free choice between willing and nilling, but as the freedom of which Kant speaks in the Critique of Pure Reason"—i.e. the freedom to begin a new series of events. Arendt believes that the tradition has not embraced this human capacity because spontaneity and novelty

112 113

Ibid. Arendt, Human Condition, 9.

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create a difficulty for human rationality. Kant spells out the difficulty in this manner: a new act occurs in time, and so is relative to the time that preceded it, but the act is also an absolute beginning in the sense of "causality," insofar as nothing preceding it can account for its novelty. Arendt concludes: And had Kant known of Augustine's philosophy of natality he might have agreed that the freedom of a relatively absolute spontaneity is no more embarrassing to human reason than the fact that men are born—newcomers again and again in a world that preceded them in time. The freedom of spontaneity is part and parcel of the human condition. Its mental organ is the Will. 114 Here, for the very first time in her entire corpus, Arendt identifies the freedom of the will with the capacity for action. In terms of the world of appearances, the freedom of the will does not reside in the choice between willing and nilling. The freedom to begin something new in an already existing world is the true freedom of the will. As I suggested earlier in the introduction, Arendt's conception of natality relies on the metaphor of birth. Action cannot be reduced to being born and it is not necessitated by birth; action is like birth, the emergence of a new being into the web of human relationships. In addition to the aspect of novelty, the metaphor of birth undermines any connotations of autonomy and sovereignty. Many of the problems that arise in the traditional accounts of the will are related to the dominant metaphor of command and the desire for control inherent in that metaphor. The actor, like the newborn, does not control her entry into the world shared with others, and the new person emerges without having the option of not appearing. The metaphor of birth has a key limitation, however, because the actor, unlike the newborn child, contributes to the manner of her appearance in the world. While no one can abstain from being a new beginning—freedom is a fact of existence—the manner of our appearance in the world is partly determined by our choices. Together Augustine's two accounts of the will in On the Trinity and City of God provide the basis for individual moral responsibility. Natality, the capacity to begin something new, is not by itself sufficient to ground responsibility. In order for action to be adequately continuous with mental life, so that an action is not a complete surprise to the person who performs it, there must be some mental processes 114

Arendt, Willing, 110.

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that can "prepare" for action and help the will move closer to acting in a specific way. Arendt utilizes Augustine's On the Trinity to outline these preparatory processes. However, responsibility does not imply sovereignty over action and its consequences. In part, the will's self-conflict arises because the will cannot guarantee the power to do what it wills to do. The will's self-conflict testifies to the lack of control, to the uncertainty of the future. Loving something through mental attention prepares one to take an irreducible risk for the sake of what one loves. The mental activity of willing testifies to the contingency of the action to be performed: that it could as well be left undone. The best evidence for contingency arises within the activity of willing itself, and this evidence is necessary for moral responsibility.

Duns Scotus' Defense of the Will The third section of Willing deals with a medieval debate between Aquinas and Duns Scotus over the relation between the will and the intellect. In Arendt's historical presentation, Aquinas appears primarily as a foil for her favored thinkers, the earlier Augustine and the later Duns Scotus. Many elements of Aquinas' philosophy put him in a poor position to appreciate the will as a human faculty. First of all, for Arendt, Aquinas was an overly systematic thinker whose method relied heavily on the sheer power of logical demonstration. Coupled with the force of logic was the appeal to other authoritative authors, which often meant that experiential, phenomenological insights were not given much weight.115 The experiences of willing as a mental activity—as a kind of intercourse of me with myself—could not be granted their due in a context where logic and authority were primary. Aquinas deals with the will only in its relation to the other mental faculties and is uninterested in the "problematic structure of the Will" in its self-relation. On a similar note, there is a certain inattention to the temporal character of the mental faculties in Aquinas, perhaps due to his inattention to the willing experiences, which bring temporal issues to the forefront. 116

115 116

Ibid., 114-116. Ibid., 117.

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In Aquinas, the will is treated in relation to three other mental faculties: intellect, reason, and free choice. The intellect is the faculty for receiving truth via contemplation or passive intuition; it knows universal and self-evident truths, or first principles. Reason, the faculty of discursive reasoning, depends upon the intellect because its task is to know particular truths by beginning from the first principles, drawing "particular conclusions from universal propositions as in syllogisms." The will is the "appetitive" faculty that corresponds to the Intellect, which is to say that the object of the will, the good, is actually the same as that of the intellect, truth. Truth and the good are the same reality, Being, seen from two different perspectives. The intellect apprehends the universal truth of Being and the will desires the universal good of Being. The intellect apprehends Being as a whole in its universality and eternality, and the corresponding desire in the will is to last forever, a desire that is necessary and not chosen. This "higher appetite" of the will—which is equivalent to the desire for happiness—takes primacy over the appetites for particular things and keeps them in check. Just as reason begins from the first principles given by the intellect in its dealings with particulars, the fourth faculty, the liberum arbitrium, begins from the will's desire for the universal good and chooses the means to achieve it. 117 In this schema, intellect and will appear to be equals, given that their objects are the same. For Arendt, the "really distinctive line separating higher and lower faculties" lies between the universal faculties, intellect and will, and the particular, "subservient" faculties of reason and free choice. In other words, the ranking follows the assumed primacy of the universal over the particular. 118 But, under quite different considerations, Aquinas gives priority to the intellect over the will, the reason being that every volition proceeds from a prior knowing provided by the intellect—one cannot will what one does not know. Arendt is keen to point out that Augustine had the opposite position: the will provides the intellect with its objects, even in sense perception, so that will's activity precedes the intellect's knowing. Arendt claims that the two positions are "equally plausible": "Who would deny that no one can will what he does not somehow know or, on the contrary, that some volition precedes, and

117 118

Ibid., 116. Ibid., 120.

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decides upon, the direction we want our knowledge or our search for knowledge to go?" 119 Given that the issue cannot be decidedly phenomenologically, Arendt argues that it ultimately hinges on the speculative and moral implications of the two views. Aquinas gives primacy to the intellect due to his view of human happiness, or what is, in theological terms, the eternal life of blessedness. For Aquinas, the will is essentially appetitive, a kind of desire that seeks to possess what it lacks. As an activity of the will, love can only be erōs, a restless desire for what one does not possess. Therefore, the ultimate happiness of human beings could not be love, not even if it is loving God, for God would need to be absent. Instead, knowing God perfectly through the intellect is blessedness. In the passive contemplation of God, the human being overcomes the predilection for all kinds of activity. 120 In this state of blessedness, the will is put "to rest, so that the ultimate end of the Will, seen in reference to itself, is to cease willing—in short, to attain its own non-being." Happiness requires that willing give way to contemplation, the passive enjoyment of the divine. Just as the will looks forward to its own end, love is performed only as a means to know God, and once that knowledge is possessed, love is extinguished. 121 For Arendt, Aquinas' speculations follow from faulty assumptions. The main problem lies in his conception of love: "For [Aquinas], a love without desire is unthinkable." To love God only makes sense so long as God is absent; God's presence makes love impossible. The will cannot be blessed because the moment it attains its object is "precisely the moment that the Will ceases to will." But, Arendt suggests, if love can be conceived in such a way that it is not erotic, then love can endure even when the object of love is present, and the will can continue its activity without lacking anything. The transformation of Will into Love—in Augustine as well as in Duns Scotus—was at least partly inspired by a more radical separation of the Will from appetites and desires as well as by a different notion of "man's last end and happiness." Even in the hereafter man still remains man, and his "ultimate happiness" cannot be sheer "passivity." Love could be invoked to redeem the Will because it is still active, though without restlessness, neither pursuing an end nor afraid of losing it. 122

119

Ibid., 122. Ibid., 122-124. 121 Ibid., 124-125. 122 Ibid., 123. 120

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Aquinas is unable to imagine an activity that lies "outside the means-ends category" so that willing could be seen to persist in the presence of its object. Only the passivity of contemplation transcends the meansend relation in Aquinas. The implication, subtly suggested above in the phrase "man still remains man," is that the blessed life of contemplation extinguishes the human being by putting an end to all human activity. As opposed to Augustine's reflections—those regarding the reason for God creating humans with a will that makes them both active and temporal creatures—Aquinas' position suggests that the will is only something to be overcome, and that time ideally gives way to timelessness. In this sense, Aquinas' blessedness is not recognizably human. In Arendt's eyes, Scotus is ultimately a superior thinker to Aquinas. For one, Scotus occupies the opposite position in relation to Aquinas, giving primacy to the will over the intellect. But it is not only Scotus' particular views but his overall philosophical method that gives him favor. Although working within the common Scholastic procedures, Scotus exhibits an ability to produce original arguments and especially keen observations about the mind and its operations. For Arendt, Scotus' "critical turn of mind" sets him apart from many in the philosophical tradition. 123 Scotus uses reason to illuminate the limitations of reason, and his insistence on the limitations to the power of the human mind resembles Arendt's own commitment to the distinction between truth and meaning. Arendt's admiration for Scotus is nearly boundless in the text, establishing his role as the clear "hero" in the history of the will. Arendt believes that Scotus' original thinking has been lost within the usual "history of ideas" and his insights have not been fully appreciated. The problem is that Scotus is too often simply placed in opposition to Aquinas, or since he does not fit neatly into a philosophical school—he has no "comfortable niche" in the history of philosophy—he is overlooked. For Arendt, Scotus is not just a "bookish" philosopher who takes up contrarian positions, artificially reversing classical oppositions. His original ideas are supported ultimately by "down-to-earth" observations that arise from close attention to experiences of the mind. While these experiences cannot be demonstrated by mere logic or proved by sense evidence, their "evidence can be denied only by those who lack the experience, as a blind man 123

Ibid., 127.

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would deny the existence of color." While his original thought-trains on issues related to the will "go against the grain of our philosophical and theological traditions," his argumentation depends on brilliant flashes of experiential insight. 124 Arendt's presentation of Scotus focuses on the issue of contingency and his defense of freedom: "the simple truth is that for his quintessential thought—contingency, the price gladly paid for freedom—he had neither predecessors nor successors." 125 Let us begin with Scotus' basic views of the will before we address the issue of contingency directly. While the intellect is finite, essentially "attuned" to nature and the factuality of the world of appearances, the will possesses the power to "transcend whatever is given to [human beings]." Truth and desire both exert force on the will, and for the most part the will does not resist. The non-resisting "natural will" follows these two forces and functions like gravity in the soul, drawing us to what is universally beneficial. As with the liberum arbitrium in Aquinas, the natural will does not decide which ends to pursue because those are given by human nature; it merely decides the means to achieve those given ends. "Free will," properly speaking, relates to ends and not only to means, and it can resist the influence of reason and desire altogether. The free will can also deliberately "suspend" itself, making itself "indifferent" to all objects and all truths. 126 For example, Scotus denies the traditional claim that all humans will to be happy, and instead maintains only that humans cannot will to be unhappy. Happiness is an end given by human nature, and for the most part we seek this end out of natural inclination. But, the will has the power to "transcend nature" and suspend itself in relation to this end: "there is a difference between man's natural inclination to happiness and happiness as the deliberately chosen goal of one's life; it is by no means impossible for man to discount happiness altogether in making his willed projects." 127 If the will were necessitated to seek the end of happiness, its autonomy would be restricted to the choice of means to achieve happiness. For Scotus, despite the capacity for indifference, one cannot will unhappiness as its project. In line with

124

Ibid., 134. Ibid., 133. 126 Ibid., 132. 127 Ibid., 131. 125

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her revision of the gravity metaphor in Augustine, Arendt believes Scotus is correct in recognizing that happiness is not a necessary project for the will. According to Scotus, the will "cannot deny Being altogether"—it can nill particulars but not existence as such. 128 The basis of this claim is "the fact that sheer nothingness, that is, a negation that does not negate something specific and particular, is unthinkable." 129 Thus, the will's transcendence does not relate to Being as a whole, because Being's contrary, nothingness, is inconceivable. The willing ego's indifference consists in the awareness of being able to will and nill the same end, that whether it wills or nills, the opposite is equally possible by a subsequent volition. 130 For Scotus, this freedom to "revoke" a volition and will the opposite is the primary freedom of the will. It is also the source of the will's brokenness, its being torn between willing and nilling. Mired in self-conflict as long as it remains in the willing activity, the will can redeem itself by initiating action: "Man's normal way of escaping from his freedom is simply to act on the propositions of the will." 131 While every volition is accompanied by the awareness that the opposite volition is equally possible for the will to perform, the performance of an action necessarily excludes its opposite. This transition from willing to acting redeems the will from its brokenness, its being open to contrary possibilities. In Paul, Epictetus, and in parts of Augustine's thought, the will's inability to act was the central problem—it was the "monstrosity" that made the will and its inner freedom appear a great misfortune. Experientially, the "switch [from will to action] is possible because there is an I-can inherent in every Iwill, and this I-can sets limitations on the I-will that are not outside the willing activity itself." 132 Scotus' will does not just get stuck in its mental self-conflict; it enjoys its ability to perform actions, and can even anticipate the power to act while forming volitions. Aware of its being open to contraries, the will also has the power to act on (at least some) of those contraries. If the will was unable to act, there would be no

128

Ibid., 130. Ibid., 51. 130 Here, Scotus offers a different description from Augustine, who insisted on the simultaneity of I-will and I-nill. 131 Ibid., 141. 132 Ibid., 142. 129

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point in entering into the activity of willing at all—it would be better to let necessity take its course, with the natural will following the inclinations of desire and the truths of reason. However free it is in the activity of willing, "The will is by no means omnipotent in its actual effectiveness: its force consists solely in that it cannot be coerced to will." Action is externally restricted by nature and circumstance, even though internally the will is not restricted by reason or desire. The intellect may apprehend a truth that is rationally compelling, but it can never necessitate the will to affirm that truth. The intellect indicates the necessities that cannot, in fact, be overcome in action, but it cannot make one willingly submit to those necessities. A person can knowingly will the impossible. For example, the intellect tells us that a person who jumps from a cliff will necessarily fall, but [w]hile the man is necessarily falling, compelled by the law of gravity, he remains free to continue "to will to fall," and can also of course change his mind, in which case he would be unable to undo what he started voluntarily and would find himself in the hands of necessity...No law of gravity can have power over the freedom guaranteed in interior experience; no interior experience has any direct validity in the world as it really and necessarily is according to outer experience and the correct reasoning of the intellect. 133 The will is connected to the world in its awareness that it can enact a project to end its self-conflict. But this requires that the project be possible: to will the impossible does not overcome the reflexivity of willing, but only reinforces it. The will is aware of its ability to act even though that ability is ultimately limited by what is possible. Of course, the limits of the possible are not always definitively known. In the above example of falling, we are dealing with the law of gravity, a demonstrable truth about the physical world where the possible and impossible are clearly delineated. In the realm of human affairs, however, what is possible is not a matter of cognition. Our apprehension of possibilities for human action comes primarily from our memory of the past, even though our imagination can creatively envision possibilities that have never existed by combining the various contents of memory. What has been sets our expectations for what is possible. However, new events have no precedent in the past and can shatter our expectations. If I will an end that has already been achieved before, I can have some confidence that I can achieve it, although my

133

Ibid., 132.

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ability to achieve it is certainly not beyond doubt. If I will something new and unprecedented, I will be confronted directly with uncertainty: the past does not give any indication that what I will to do can be done. For Arendt, all future action contains some level of uncertainty, and the more intense the uncertainty the more likely I am to initiate the self-conflict of willing. I can release myself from this conflict only by acting on a perceived possibility, however uncertain it may be. Whether the will gets caught in its own reflexivity or initiates a project in the world is directly related to what it wills, i.e. the content of its volitions. For Arendt, the power to act is restricted to particular projects. Universal, totalizing projects are not possible insofar as humans exist in the plural and share a common world. To will universally—for instance, in accordance with utopian aspirations or perfectionistic moral goals—is likely to end in the will's impotence and self-conflict. In Scotus, the primacy of the will over the intellect implies the primacy of particulars: "The great and lonely distinction of John Duns Scotus is to have questioned and challenged [the assumption that the universal is nobler than the particular]: Being in its universality is but a thought, what it lacks is reality; only particular things...can be said to be real for man." Theologically, the primacy of particulars is rooted in the notion of God as a person, a notion that is meaningful only if God is also a particular. Likewise, human beings, created by God in His own image, are individual persons, and "the Will is the mental organ which actualizes this singularity; it is the principium individuationis." 134 For Scotus, contingency should not be considered a merely derivative mode of Being; it is fully real in its own right: "Scotus is the only thinker for whom the word 'contingency' has no derogatory association." 135 Within his thought, the commitment to contingency occupies a central place. To distinguish "a free act of will from an overwhelming desire" requires the internal evidence of contingency, the experience that what I will need not be willed. Because the willing ego is simultaneously aware of the contingency of its volitions and the power to act on its volitions, the contingency of willing

134 135

Ibid., 120. Ibid., 134.

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carries over to the willed act: I am aware that I am the source of an action that need not happen. It is this experience that is the basis of personal and moral responsibility. Arendt follows two lines of argument for the reality of contingency in Scotus' work: the first is theological and the second is more strictly philosophical. Scotus believed that the central truths of the Christian narrative—e.g. creation and the resurrection of Christ—were contingent facts, believed on the basis of testimony but not ultimately explainable by rational argument. 136 For Scotus, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo means that the universe owes its existence and its particular characteristics to God's free decisions. Thus, God acts contingently and the creation itself is contingent: "everything that is might possibly not have been." 137 The necessities of the natural world hold only in relation to each other within the realm of appearances but never absolutely, as if natural laws could not have been otherwise. For Scotus, contingency is also essential to Christian anthropology. Humans, being created in God's image but also being finite and thus not endowed with the power of creation, have "the mental capacity to affirm or negate freely." Whereas all nonhuman created beings "naturally follow[s] the laws laid down by divine Fiat," humans are unique in that they have been granted the freedom to resist these natural laws. The freedom of the will "consists in freely affirming or negating or hating whatever confronts it. It is this freedom of the will mentally to take a position that sets man apart from the rest of creation." The fact that the will "transcends everything" proves the human likeness to God. And, just as God loves his creation without being compelled to do so, the human will is capable of loving in a manner that transcends the compulsion of desire and reason. The willing ego, when it says in its highest manifestation, "Amo: Volo ut sis," "I love you; I want you to be"—and not "I want to have you" or "I want to rule you"—shows itself capable of the same love with which supposedly God loves men, whom He created only because He willed them to exist and whom He loves without desiring them. 138 The transcendence of the will accounts for the Christian notion of a love that is freely and contingently given.

136

Ibid., 128. Ibid., 135. 138 Ibid., 136. 137

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As in the modern era, for Scotus the main philosophical challenge to the freedom of the will was "the law of causality." In the "Aristotelian version" that Scotus assumed, a complete chain of causality explains motion and change by assigning a single prior cause to every event, so that the chain as a whole can be traced, at least hypothetically, back to an uncaused first cause, an unmoved mover. Each cause in the chain is necessary and sufficient to explain the subsequent effect, and the first cause itself exists necessarily. Under this perspective, actions cannot be free because they are not contingent. Scotus, in considering how the will relates to causality, rejects the "assumption that no more than one cause is sufficient to explain why something should be rather than not-be." If the will is to be free, the will surely cannot be caused to will by something else. However, the idea that the will is the sole cause of events cannot be true either, because "[the will] cannot account for all the consequences that follow a volition." In other words, the will is not omnipotent: intended goals and outcomes, if they are achieved at all, are always accompanied by unexpected consequences and events. In any action, the will is only one of many causes: "all change occurs because a plurality of causes happens to coincide, and the coincidence engenders the texture of reality in human affairs." 139 Causal processes are themselves "ruled by Contingency"—they should not be viewed as a necessarily unfolding linear development. A contingent event, even though it may be caused, is one whose opposite could have happened at the same time. While this insight goes against the grain of the tradition—"Nothing indeed could be in greater contradiction to every philosophical tradition than this insistence on the contingent character of processes"—Arendt believes it makes perfect sense in the realm of history, politics, and human action. Where human beings, who are capable of spontaneously beginning new events and becoming "causes" of worldly events, are concerned, contingency is the rule, not the exception: it is "precisely the causative element in human affairs that condemns them to contingency and unpredictability." In light of the multitude of causal stories that have been written to explain the two World Wars, Arendt concludes that

139

Ibid., 137.

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"nothing seems more plausible than that it was a coincidence of causes, perhaps finally set in motion by one more additional cause, that 'contingently caused' the two conflagrations." 140 The experiences of the willing ego, which is sure of its own freedom to be "uncoerced by its aims to act or not to act in their pursuit," are opposed to the experiences of common sense and the intellect that indicate "we live in a factual world of necessity." The reason for the opposition is rooted in human temporality. Arendt elaborates: A thing may have happened quite at random, but, once it has come into existence and assumed reality, it loses its aspect of contingency and presents itself to us in the guise of necessity. And even if the event is of our own making, or at least we are one of its contributing causes—as in contracting marriage or committing a crime—the simple existential fact that it now is as it has become (for whatever reasons) is likely to withstand all reflections on its original randomness. Once the contingent has happened, we can no longer unravel the strands that entangled it until it became an event—as though it could still be or not be. 141 Every worldly event undergoes a transformation from being a future uncertainty to being a fixed fact of the past. The past always appears as necessary because "there is no substitute, real or imagined, for existence as such...In Scotus' words, 'everything that is past is absolutely necessary.'" Even though past realities were themselves contingently caused, the past "has become the necessary condition of my own existence, and I cannot, mentally or otherwise, conceive of my own non-existence." What is now factually necessary, for myself and for my mind, was itself contingent: "the ground of necessity itself depends on a contingency." 142 For Arendt, causal necessity in human affairs arises only from the activity of thinking, which, in its search for a meaningful story about past events, requires that the randomness and contingency of the original events be eliminated: That [i.e. necessity] is the necessary condition of the existential presence of the thinking ego pondering on the meaning of what has become and now is. Without an a priori assumption of some unilinear sequence of events having been caused necessarily and not contingently, no explanation of any coherence would be possible. The obvious, even the only possible way, to prepare and tell a story is to eliminate from the real happening the 140

Ibid., 138. While Arendt is clearly in agreement with Duns Scotus on the contingency of human affairs, it is unclear whether Arendt thinks it plausible to apply contingency to causal processes outside the realm of human action. For her treatment of the will, this question is unimportant. 141 Ibid. Emphasis added. 142 Ibid., 139.

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'accidental' elements, a faithful enumeration of which may be impossible anyhow, even for a computerized brain. 143 Thinking's search for meaning assumes causal necessity and essentially isolates from the plurality of real causes a single chain of causality in order to tell a story or formulate a theory. Arendt seems to be emphasizing that factual events must be interpreted and organized in order to be meaningful. Meaning arises from the synthesis of facts, from seeing the whole that is distinct from the many particulars. But, the thinking ego's synthesis of the whole can never include all the elements that contribute to reality; every narrative or theory requires a selection of phenomena to consider, and this selection is itself a contingent act of the will. In the passages to which I have just referred, Arendt's formulations extend beyond those of Scotus, whom she otherwise diligently follows in close detail. For one, Arendt uses her own vocabulary of "thinking ego" and "willing ego" in place of Scotus' "will" and "intellect." Furthermore, in a footnote, Arendt points the reader back to her presentation of Bergson's ideas in the introduction. Arendt's high praise for both Scotus and Bergson should signal to us that this section of the text is crucial to her own conception. As I understand it, Arendt is arguing that the primary form of necessity belongs to the factuality of past events, the necessity of truth qua fact, which is acquired through appearance and its extension in common sense. Causal necessity borrows its explicatory punch from the fixedness of past facts, connecting them together in a necessarily unfolding temporal sequence. The primary phenomenon is simply that we cannot "unthink" the past facts and their temporal order. Unilinear causality is "added" by the thinker who, looking at the past, wants to explain some facts in terms of others. It is all too common to forget the contingency that accompanied the act as it was being willed, or not to recognize the plurality of events and causes that have been left out of account. In this manner, thinking can bury the original experience of contingency by producing a coherent causal story. In an early essay, written in 1954, Arendt stated the matter in a much more unequivocal manner: Causality, however, is an altogether alien and falsifying category in the historical sciences. Not only does the actual meaning of every event always transcend any number 143

Ibid., 140.

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of past 'causes' which we may assign to it...but this past itself comes into being only with the event itself. Only when something irrevocable has happened can we even try to trace its history backward. The event illuminates its own past; it can never be deduced from it...Whoever in the historical sciences honestly believes in causality actually denies the subject matter of his own science. 144 This passage puts the temporal issue at the forefront: it is only in retrospect that we can assign causes to events and it is a fundamental mistake to assume that the necessity we assign in retrospect to a cause was present from the beginning. To avoid this confusion, it is best to avoid the categories of causality in the historical sciences, lest we forget that claims of causal necessity are always retrospective and conditional on the choices and narrative designs of the storyteller or theorist. For Scotus, the desire to "reconcile" freedom and necessity is misguided because "freedom and necessity [are] two altogether different dimensions of the mind." Arendt's formulation of Scotus' position indicates that it is also her own: "if there were a conflict at all, it would amount to an intramural conflict between the willing and the thinking ego." This language is unmistakably her preferred way of describing the conflict: the tensions regarding necessity and contingency are inextricably connected to the mind and the differing temporal orientations of the mental activities. Arendt's overall approach to the life of the mind is to stress these tensions and "reconcile" them only in ways that save the original phenomena. By revising the traditional concept of causal necessity, relegating necessity to the perspective of thinking about the past, Arendt aims to make space for our experience of contingency. Assumed in the preceding discussion is an important limit to the will's freedom: "the will, as Nietzsche was later to discover, is incapable of 'willing backwards.'" Even though the will is capable of acting through its volitions, the actions, once accomplished, cannot be undone by any further act or volition. It is out of this absolute limit to the will's power, Arendt suggests, that the mind is so interested in creating causal narratives: "The intellect, trying to provide the will with an explicatory cause to quiet its resentment at its own helplessness, will fabricate a story to make the data fall into place. Without an assumption of necessity, the story would lack all coherence." 145 The necessity of the past causes

144 145

Arendt, "Understanding and Politics," in Essays in Understanding, 319. Ibid., 140.

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resentment for the will, which is incapable of undoing what it has done. This resentment assumes the will is capable of initiating action in the first place. If the will could not be a source of change in the world, its resentment could not be directed to its own past actions. The mind may prefer to view the past as necessary and not admit the original contingency, especially if past actions elicit psychological pains like regret or guilt. As you remember, Arendt clearly stated that the conflict between thinking and willing is due to the psychological effects of these two mental activities. Looking forward, Arendt believes that Nietzsche and Heidegger's repudiation of the will hinges on the psychological advantages of denying the contingency of action. Let us now turn to Scotus' view of the afterlife, which highlights his role as a defender of the primacy of the will over the intellect. The meaningfulness of his speculations lies in their implications for how we evaluate the freedom of the will and its importance in human life. For Scotus, the earthly human intellect is finite, bound to the senses and to memory—"the natural limitation of an essentially limited creature whose finitude is absolute." Scotus wondered why the notion of an infinite God is at all attractive to such a finite creature, and he concluded that the will is the faculty that pursues the infinite and allows humans to transcend their finitude in pursuit of the divine. 146 As we saw above, Scotus views happiness as a natural inclination, but not as a necessary end. Humans can reject happiness and even hate God, and derive pleasure in doing so. Even though hating God will not lead to complete blessedness, "some pleasure (delectatio) attends every volition." 147 The function of the will is to enjoy itself in its activity: "An inherent delight of the will in itself is as natural to the will as understanding and knowing are to the intellect, and can be detected even in hatred; but its innate perfection, the final peace between the two-in-one, can come about only when the will is transformed into love." 148 Unlike desire, which is satisfied and terminated in the possession of its object, and unlike the intellect that enjoys the passive intuition of truth, the will enjoys its activity for its own sake. If the will is to attain perfection, it must remain an activity even when its object is perpetually 146

Ibid., 128. Ibid., 136. 148 Ibid., 143. 147

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present. In the "hoped-for transformation of the will into love with its inherent delectatio," in which the highest being, God, is present and all human needs and desires are met, the will need not cease its activity: "What the will in a state of blessedness, that is, in an after-life, no longer needs and is no longer capable of, is rejection and hatred, but this does not mean that man in a state of blessedness has lost the faculty of saying 'Yes.'" In considering the meaningfulness of the Christian view of an embodied afterlife, Arendt hints at the advantages of Scotus' speculations: The test for countless facts whose trustworthiness we constantly take for granted is that they must make sense for men as they are constituted. And in this respect, the dogma of resurrection makes much more sense than the philosopher's notion of the soul's immortality: a creature endowed with body and mind can find sense only in an after-life in which he is resurrected from death as he is and knows himself to be. The philosophers' "proofs" of the soul's immortality, even if they were logically correct, would be irrelevant. To be existentially relevant for the "viator," the wayfarer or pilgrim on earth, the after-life must be a "second-life," not an entirely different mode of being as a disembodied entity. 149 An afterlife without willing is unrecognizable and existentially irrelevant to human life in the world. As the belief in bodily resurrection is existentially superior to the doctrine of the soul's immortality, Scotus' view of blessedness has the advantage of preserving the activity of willing in a way that is familiar to human beings. 150 For Scotus, human beings have an "intimation of such future blessedness in [the mind's] experience of sheer activity, that is, in a transformation of willing into loving." 151 The experience of loving something or someone for its own sake, as opposed to desiring an object or willing a project, points to the possible future perfection of the will. Where Aquinas envisioned the ideal afterlife as a passive existence of rest and contemplation, freed from the struggles of life and the restlessness of the will, Scotus envisions the possibility for the limitations of the human will to be transcended so that willing can become an everlasting activity. For Scotus, the earthly human will needs to proceed to action "only because man as a limited and conditioned creature is unable to continue [the mind's activities] indefinitely." The will is a faculty—in Scotus' Latin 149

Ibid., 129. To be sure, the intellect is also preserved in Scotus' conception of the after-life: God is known perfectly as one knows an object of the senses in earthly life. See ibid., 144. 151 Ibid. 150

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factivum—because it seeks an end outside itself, an action to be performed, and is restless until it acts. In the state of perfection, humans will lose their mental faculties and be capable of perpetual activity, uninterrupted by the needs of human life and never terminated by the achievement of an external end: "for Scotus, the experiential ground of love's everlastingness is that he conceives of a love that is not only, as it were, emptied, purified of desires and needs, but in which the very faculty of the Will is transformed in sheer activity." 152 In Thinking, Arendt avoided characterizing thinking as a faculty, for she was confident that experience dictated that thinking be conceived as an activity with no results or intended product. Early on in this chapter, I insisted on the distinction between "willing" and "will." Throughout the Willing volume, Arendt consistently speaks of the faculty of "the will" and less often addresses "willing" as an activity. The reason is embedded in her discussion of Scotus: only he is able to conceive of willing itself as a pure activity that can be enjoyed for its own sake. Arendt's oscillation between the will qua faculty and willing qua activity points to her recognition of the limits of the willing activity. While human willing seeks its own termination in action, it is Scotus' hope that willing could be transformed into pure affirmation in the afterlife, a kind of love that can perpetually say "Yes" without feeling the need to accomplish an end. In this train of thought, Scotus has formulated an original notion: "The idea that there could be an activity that finds its rest within itself is as surprisingly original—without precedent or sequel in the history of Western thought—as Scotus' ontological preference of the contingent over the necessary and of the existent particular over the universal." 153 Arendt ends her discussion of Scotus like she ended the Augustine section, by bringing Kant to bear on the issue of freedom. In an interesting passage from the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant—whom Arendt calls the only philosopher who "can equal Duns Scotus in his unconditional commitment to freedom"—echoes Scotus' view of necessity. Kant recognizes that reason is drawn to infer something that necessarily exists, something that would explain the contingently existing world. However, he also claims

152 153

Ibid., 145. Ibid.

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that this necessary being is only assumed and can never be proven rationally. Kant concludes: "absolute necessity is a necessity that is to be found in thought alone." 154 In Scotus, the important phenomenon is that "absolute nothingness" is unthinkable, given that the human thinker cannot think beyond Being and the limits of her own existence. Absolute necessity is only a thought, an idea whose possibility is undermined by the contingent existence of the thinker on whom the idea depends. Hence, necessity should not be allowed to overrule the experiences of contingent freedom, even if those experiences run contrary to the needs and assumptions of the thinking ego. A difficulty lingers underneath Arendt's opposition of thinking to willing. If thinking's need to find meaning assumes necessity, how is it possible to speak meaningfully about the contingency of past actions? What allows us to testify to the prior contingency of our actions after they have been accomplished? I think Arendt has the framework to provide a satisfactory answer. One might insist on the difference between thinking's search for meaning and memory's power of preserving the past. It is possible to remember experiences without trying to explain how they came about about. Memory can preserve the experience of contingency and withstand the assumption of necessity that enters with reflections about meaning. Any story one might tell, and any explanation one might give, will not eliminate the factual experience of contingency if one is willing to remember. In addition, the necessity that thinking assumes in its activity need not be the typical brand of metaphysical necessity that is opposed to contingent freedom. It is temporally relative, retrospective necessity that Arendt is delineating. Thus, as long as we make the crucial temporal qualification that a past action was contingent, that it could have been otherwise, then we will avoid pitting thinking against freedom in an impossible manner. 155 In Scotus, the resolution of the will's self-conflict is possible because self-interest can be overcome by love. In Paul, Epictetus, and even at times in Augustine, the impotence of the will is tied to a prevailing interest in the self and its happiness. As Scotus opens up the possibility of interest in things

154

Ibid., 146. Young-Breuhl addresses the same idea when she writes in "Reflections on Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind," in Political Theory 10 (1982): 292: "If thinking forgoes the equation of Necessity and meaningfulness, then the Will, the seat of contingency, will not seem its mortal enemy." 155

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other than the self, he avoids the vicious reflexivity that can come from a pursuit of personal happiness. For Arendt, the world of particulars as the realm of action becomes the center of interest and relieves the willing agent from the problematic solipsism of willing. The will as a faculty of power, although limited power, allows the self to become an individual person that is defined by her role in the world of plurality, by actions that are unequivocally real, completed and beyond the reflexive range of willing. Somewhat paradoxically, the love of particular others is the only way to become an individual. As Arendt reflected in her earlier lectures, the good will is one that is not focused on itself—the good will is directed to others and, in a certain sense, unaware of itself. If the self wishes to seek individuality in the mind alone, the worst aspects of willing's self-conflict result. Mainly because Scotus avoids the problems of self-interest, his philosophy shows the possibility of the mind being pleased with freedom—his thought-patterns exhibit a basic affirmation of the will.

Modern Repudiations of the Will: Nietzsche and Heidegger After reading Arendt's praise for Duns Scotus' championing of the will, it is easy to think that the positive momentum will continue. However, the fourth and final part of Willing, entitled "Conclusions" takes the reader into the modern era, which is marked by a deep resentment of the will's freedom. Nietzsche and Heidegger are chosen as two representatives of this modern trend because, even though they recognize the phenomena of willing and are critical of simplistic solutions to the related problems of contingency and temporality, they ultimately fall prey to an escapist mentality. Each undergoes a "'conversion' to the philosophy of antiquity," attempting to return to a framework that is not plagued by the problems of modernity. 156 For Arendt, Nietzsche and Heidegger's confrontation with the modern concept of Progress is at the heart of their escapism. Progress emphasizes the future as the primary tense of time, and its optimistic connotation comes from the assumption that the future will be better than the past and the present, and that the past and the present are for the sake of the future. The subject of Progress is Mankind as a whole, 156

Arendt, Willing, 6.

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not individual human beings, for each individual life is too short and limited to experience the most important advances in knowledge and society. Only Mankind as a collective (as a species) can obtain the truth, and of course, only always in a distant unknown future. Thus, modern "optimism did not apply to men in the singular; it applied only to the succession of generations, that is, to Mankind as a whole." Often, when modern thinkers turned their attention directly to human beings qua individuals—as in Existentialism, for instance—such progressive optimism is markedly absent. It appears that the notion of Progress is irrelevant to individual human persons, whose agency and particularity are to be subsumed in Mankind, who is the sole "actor" in the realm of human history. [T]he notion of 'all men together' [i.e. Mankind]...of course a thought, not a reality, was immediately construed on the model of "man," of a "subject" that could serve as a noun for all kinds of activities expressed in verbs. This concept was not a metaphor, properly speaking; it was a full-fledged personification such as we find in the allegories of Renaissance narratives. Progress became the project of Mankind, acting behind the backs of real men—a personified force that we find somewhat later in Adam Smith's "invisible hand," Kant's "ruse of nature," Hegel's "cunning of Reason," and Marx's "dialectical materialism." 157 Since the project of Progress as a whole is always accidental from the perspective of the individuals who contribute to it—that is, the results of action always bring about unexpected events and consequences—it was assumed that the real subject of such a project would have to be "Mankind, rather than man or any verifiable human community." In essence, the notion of Progress incited speculations about Mankind and History—a "veritable orgy of sheer speculation" in which traditionally static concepts were personified and infused with vitality. With German Idealism in particular, the Will became a central personified concept. In both Schelling and Schopenhauer, for instance, the Will is clearly identified with Being in its totality; and thus Being is assumed to have projects and purposes, to initiate movement and change. According to Arendt, the main "inspiration" for German Idealism was the desire to return to the Greek world, where all the problems of the modern age, and of the will as a human faculty, did not exist. They were "homesick" for a world that could only be returned to in speculative thought, which meant that concrete human

157

Ibid., 153.

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experience and factual history were superseded by the quest for a world in which the thinker could feel at home. Arendt rejects this fundamental motivation: I do not believe in a world, be it a past world or a future world, in which man's mind, equipped for withdrawing from the world of appearances, could or should ever be comfortably at home. Moreover, at least in the cases of Nietzsche and Heidegger, it was precisely a confrontation with the Will as a human faculty and not as an ontological category that prompted them first to repudiate the faculty and then turn about to put their confidence in this ghostly home of personified concepts which so obviously was "built" and decorated by the thinking, as opposed to the willing, ego. 158 Here, Arendt once again clarifies her own response to the problems created by the will. Instead of escaping into metaphysical speculations that might ease the tensions inherent in human freedom and temporality, Arendt wishes to faithfully elucidate those tensions without ultimately resolving them. The thinking ego may wish to resolve them for the sake of its own activity, but its concerns ought not to supersede the realities of human experience. Arendt subtly hints, in the emphasis on "then" in the above passage, that Nietzsche and Heidegger react to the will in two separate maneuvers. The first is repudiation, and, on its own, this step is only an evaluative response to the experiences and does not contain any fallacious speculation or theoretical flaws. This act of repudiation, akin to the "rejection" and "negation" that we have seen in other thinkers, is an act of the will towards its own activity—a resentment of the will towards it own limitations. Although not theoretically ungrounded, this resentment has serious existential and ethical consequences that one may wish to avoid. The second maneuver, which highlights the deep-rootedness of the resentment, is speculative escape. At distinct moments in their work, the two thinkers, who had each provided illuminating treatments of the will, no longer attempt to be faithful to the experiences of willing. On Arendt's analysis, Heidegger gives up phenomenology for historical speculation in the ilk of German Idealism with his own personification of Being, and Nietzsche reverts to a pre-Christian, pre-modern cyclical concept of time.

158

Ibid., 158.

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Let us now turn to Arendt's reading of Nietzsche. Several of his descriptions of willing are familiar from her earlier lectures. 159 First, Nietzsche's will is not desire but the "master" of desire by virtue of its commanding function. Since the will commands itself to obey, the will is split, and the ego feels itself to be both the commander and the one who is supposed to obey at the same time. This activity of commanding produces pleasure, the pleasure of "superiority" over another person, in those moments when the one who wills can identify himself with the commander and ignore the feeling of being the subordinate who is called upon to obey. The pleasure of commanding is only momentary and never completely independent of the pain of inferiority. In other words, in its commanding function, the will feels powerful as it contemplates overcoming its own resistance, and without the resistance there is no feeling of power. 160 Willing qua commanding is ruled by the "pleasure-pain principle," which means that pleasure requires pain and a "release from pain." 161 This is Nietzsche's version of the will's self-conflict. However, Arendt suggests, Nietzsche's emphasis on the feeling of power over the negative feeling of subjection is built on a different experience altogether. The will's oscillation between pleasure and pain is tilted in favor of pleasure by the anticipation of an I-can, the will's awareness that it can do what it commands. The feeling of power is primary, not because it is tied to commanding and the illusion that one is only the commander, but because "there is indeed an I-can inherent in every I-will." Thus, the "Nietzschean shift from the I-will to the anticipated I-can" is a shift from the paradigm of pleasure, which arises from satisfying the needs of the life process, to "joy," which is experienced only in "abundance," when all the needs of life have been

159

Along with the sections on Paul and Augustine, Arendt's treatment of Nietzsche follows the 1965-6 lecture material most closely. At times, she even repeats word for word her original phrasing. Arendt's apparent dependence on her earlier lecture material illustrates the continuity of her concerns. However, there are moments in the text where Arendt is unclear about the connection between her older ideas and the new ones—in other words, she appears to jump from one interpretative context to the other without clearly explicating the transition. The "rough" character of the Nietzsche section makes me wonder whether Arendt had planned further editing. 160 Ibid., 160-161. 161 Ibid., 162.

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met. 162 This abundance has no inherent content or goal; abundance is the goal and is experienced as a "surplus of strength" that "transcends the sheer givenness of the world." 163 Joy is the Dionysian aspect of the life process that reaches beyond necessity and anticipates the future. Nietzsche's joy arises from the will identifying itself with the life principle, speaking "an unqualified Yes to Life...[and elevating] Life as experienced outside all mental activities to the rank of supreme value by which everything else is to be evaluated." 164 In other words, power is experienced in the surplus that is not accounted for by necessity or by the past and the present. For Nietzsche, life constantly exceeds its basic necessities, producing power and abundance from within itself. Likewise, the will is itself a surplus and essentially "generates power by willing," and in this sense, "the concept 'will-topower' is redundant." 165 In her lectures, Arendt was sympathetic to Nietzsche's interpretation of the will as an unnecessary surplus, which she identified as the source of (among other things) morally good action. In Willing as well, she is clear that the will is an autonomous faculty that cannot be explained by any worldly phenomena or by any other mental activity. The will's spontaneity—both as a mental faculty that owes its activity only to itself and as the source of new beginnings in action—is an abundance beyond any biological or social necessity. However, Nietzsche's "identification of will with living, the notion that our urge to live and our will to will are ultimately the same" is problematic. 166 In brief, the will qua life principle carries implications of necessity and destruction. Let us consider the problem by comparing Nietzsche's position with Scotus. Nietzsche's joy is different from Scotus' delectatio in several ways. First, for Scotus, the will's anticipation of its I-can does not entail the anticipation of destruction: "Scotus was still unaware of the annihilating (nihilistic) aspect of the phenomenon, that is, of the power generated by negation. He

162

Ibid., 163. Ibid., 169. 164 Ibid., 163. 165 Ibid., 168. 166 Ibid., 164. 163

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does not yet look upon the future as an anticipated negation of the present." 167 In Nietzsche, the anticipation of the I-can incorporates the negation of the present, just as life requires death for its inevitable productive movement towards abundance. The will senses its I-can when it identifies itself with the life principle, with the cyclical process of change that "constantly produces and destroys." 168 I think Arendt sides with Scotus (and Augustine) because she admits the compatibility of futural action and worldly endurance in her conception of love—the will's futural activity can be maintained in relation to something that lasts. Arendt is also confident that memory can allow the past to be preserved even though the present passes away (becomes past) with the advent of the future. Modeling the will on the life principle means that power is inherently destructive, and that everything present must be sacrificed for the sake of the future. Arendt's appropriation of Augustinian love, the idea that the will can be active in remembrance and not only in action, drives in the opposite direction of Nietzsche's Dionysian will. Second, if the urge to live and the will to will are the same, then willing itself is not performed contingently as it was in Scotus. The awareness of contingency inherent in willing—that the will is aware that it does not need to will—is incompatible with Nietzschean will-to-power. Similarly, Scotus' anticipated I-can is tied to the actual performance of actions, whereas Nietzsche understood the I-can as an illusion. Nietzsche describes a "feeling of strength" inherent in the very activity of willing, a feeling that arises from the "experience of an I-will which is followed by an effect...the fact that man is conscious of himself as a causative agent even before he has done anything." 169 While Arendt believes this experience to be valid evidence that we are capable of acting in the world, Nietzsche dismisses it as an illusion built upon the faulty association of events in the world with our feeling (or consciousness) of being a cause. Thus, in Nietzsche, the feeling of power is severed from action in the world by means of a quasi-Humean skepticism about causality. Nietzsche's distrust of the internal evidence for our power to initiate action cannot be separated from his critique of causality per se. At times, Nietzsche experiments with the idea that our attribution of 167

Ibid., 142-143. Ibid., 163. 169 Ibid., 167. 168

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causality to physical things consists in a fundamental anthropomorphism: causality in the world is itself an illusion modeled on inner experience that the mind creates for its own purposes. Arendt cites an extended metaphor from The Gay Science that illustrates Nietzsche's anthropomorphic tendencies. In "Will and Wave," Nietzsche describes the violent repetitive action of the waves as analogous to the volitions of the will: "Thus live waves—thus live we who will." On Arendt's conception of metaphor, which prioritizes the world of appearance as the locus of meaning, it would be the phenomena of the waves that helps us understand our inner experiences of willing: The relation of the waves to the sea from which they erupt without intent or aim, creating a tremendous purposeless excitement, resembles and therefore illuminates the turmoil the Will excites in the household of the soul—always seemingly in quest of something till it quiets down, yet never extinguished, always ready for a new assault. The Will enjoys will as the sea enjoys waves, for "rather than not will, man even wills nothingness." 170 However, for Nietzsche, the metaphor does not indicate a similarity of relations between two dissimilar things. Instead, "Will and Wave are the same," and "the appearances of the world have become a mere symbol for inward experiences." The privileged side of Nietzsche's metaphor, then, is "man's soul apparatus," whose experiences are imposed on the world, giving meaning to what would otherwise be meaningless. For Arendt, the metaphor attempts an impossible reversal, and it collapses because even the description of the waves is now an entirely subjective construction authored by the willing ego. On its own terms, there is no common world to which the metaphor is referring—the communication of its meaning depends on the waves being objects of common experience. In this metaphor, Nietzsche's similarity to Epictetus is striking. First, the two authors privilege the inner self over the world's reality. Thinking is recruited to bracket the reality of appearances, so that worldly objects become mere impressions of consciousness. Nietzsche's anthropomorphizing of the wave requires a transformation of the outer phenomena into inner impressions, which are then seen as under the control of the mind. Thus, Nietzsche aims for a Epictetian omnipotence of the mind over itself: abstaining from willing altogether in order to avoid pain and misery is not sufficient. Nietzsche seems to recognize that the will can only feel powerful if it continues to will. We might take the metaphor's function in this 170

Ibid., 165.

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way: the willing ego can feel powerful if it can imagine the waves are an expression of its own volition. As such, the metaphor is an experiment of the will with itself to see just how far it can extend its power. At its climax, the feeling of power occurs when the will can affirm everything that is, saying: "Everything suits me, for everything suits you so well, and I am so well disposed toward you for everything." 171 Nietzsche's "superman" has become a master of such mental experiments: he treats all factual existence as if he had willed it to be. The superman's project is one of "overcoming" himself, which means overcoming the natural tendency to negatively judge worldly occurrences. Nietzsche's superman celebrates the future as such, no matter what it brings, willing the destruction of his past self for the sake of feeling the power of overcoming. This creative self-overcoming is the authentic goal of the will, but it is only a mental exercise and not a worldly project. 172 Nietzsche's prescription is "not to change the world or men but to change their way of 'evaluating' it, their way, in other words, of thinking and reflecting about it." The philosophers "must be taught how to cope" with a world that cannot be changed, learning to say the world is as it ought to be. For Arendt, Nietzsche's thought-trains could be considered a "kind of greatly enriched Epictetian doctrine...whose psychologically powerful trick consists in willing that to happen which happens anyhow." 173 The further step that Nietzsche takes past Epictetus' "mental omnipotence" is to cleanse our understanding of any notion of causality and purpose by which we might critique the world as it is. For Arendt, the thought of "Eternal Recurrence" neatly encapsulates this maneuver. As a mere thoughtexperiment, Eternal Recurrence imagines being in the position to know that all of life's events repeat themselves eternally. From this hypothetical position, the question becomes whether you will affirm or negate the cyclical repetition, whether this knowledge will incite a feeling of power in you or simply "crush" you under its incredible weight. 174 The superman is so "well-disposed" to life that he can affirm

171

Ibid., 165. Ibid., 169. 173 Ibid., 170. 174 Ibid., 167. 172

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such a scenario; his "Yes" to Life is an affirmation of the cyclical eternal sameness of the life process, which has no definite purpose and aims at no "final state" that would justify its course of change. 175 For Arendt, Nietzsche's repudiation of the will consists first of all in his unwarranted denial of the will's ability to initiate action, and second, in his experimentation with Eternal Recurrence. The thought of Eternal Recurrence is "an experimental return to the ancient cyclical time concept...[and is] in flagrant contradiction with any possible notion of the Will, whose projects always assume rectilinear time and a future that is unknown and therefore open to change." 176 The central contradiction in Nietzsche's work is this temporal one between his conception of will-to-power, which requires a future tense, and his experimental affirmation of cyclical time. Despite his attention to the experiences of willing, Nietzsche turns against the will in favor of cyclical time. What leads to this contradiction? For Arendt, one of Nietzsche's most important insights is that "'the Will cannot will backward'; it cannot stop the wheel of time." In stark contrast to its feeling of power in anticipating the future, when "willing backward" the will feels completely impotent in the face of what are now facts. In light of this limit to the will's power, Nietzsche's "repudiation of willing liberates man from a responsibility that would be unbearable if nothing that was done could be undone." The willing ego resents its inability to undo what it has done, and thus it might "prefer looking backward, remembering and thinking, because, to the backward glance, everything that is appears to be necessary." 177 The search for causes of actions in the past might just be driven by the will's impotence in relation to the past and its desire to escape responsibility by creating explanations for why events must have happened as they did. To deny the will's ability to act is to eliminate any sense of guilt or responsibility for the past or for the future. Eternal Recurrence redeems the temporal sequence by proclaiming "the 'Innocence of all Becoming' (die Unschuld des Werdens) and with that its inherent aimlessness and purposelessness, its freedom from guilt and responsibility." The phenomenological grounding of this ontological innocence is 175

Ibid., 171. Ibid., 166. 177 Ibid., 168. 176

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"the indisputable fact that we indeed are 'thrown' into the world (Heidegger), that no one has asked us if we wished to be here or wished to be as we are." 178 The willing ego, aiming for omnipotence, runs into its fundamental limits with the realization that its very existence has been given externally. The self's existence and the past as a whole lie beyond the power of the will. As Arendt has repeatedly stressed, the will cannot will nothingness because the very act of willing assumes the existence of the self; the will's negation is restricted to particulars. For Nietzsche, much like Epictetus, the will would be truly omnipotent if it could negate existence as such, but given its limits the will must settle for the universal affirmation of what is. Eternal Recurrence also mitigates the destructive aspect of the will-to-power. The experience of power in the will's orientation to the future requires the destruction of the past. In purely temporal terms, it is the inevitability with which the future will become past that is ultimately troubling: Just as every I-will, in its identification with the commanding part of the two-in-one, triumphantly anticipates an I-can, so expectation, the mood with which the Will affects the soul, contains within itself the melancholy of an and-this-too-will-have-been, the foreseeing of the future's past, which reasserts the Past as the dominant tense of Time. The only redemption from this all-devouring Past is the thought that everything that passes returns, that is, a cyclical time construct that makes Being swing within itself. 179 Eternal Recurrence attempts to save the past without relying on human thinking and memory: the very structure of existence saves everything in its eternal repetition. If the rectilinear time sequence is granted, then the passage of time will devour everything. The modern, usually optimistic ideal of infinite Progress contains the pessimistic implication that nothing deserves to last. According to Arendt, Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence is especially modern in that it is a version of speculative theodicy. Modern philosophers, unable to "regain the simple admiring and affirming wonder" of the ancients, turned to justifying God or Being. Eternal Recurrence justifies the process of temporal change by allowing it to repeat. 180 Just as Life needs no justification—no answer can be given to the question "why do we live?"— so too cyclical time needs no justification.

178

Ibid., 170. Ibid., 171. 180 Ibid., 21. 179

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Here, if we remember Arendt's introduction to Willing, the argument is that it is not the willing ego but the thinking ego that cannot abide such an all-devouring Past. Thinking is in conflict with time, and it battles the passage of time by creating an enduring present that saves the past from oblivion. Eternal Recurrence is a speculative thought-experiment, created for the needs of the thinking ego that attempts to incorporate temporal becoming. Nietzsche is a professional thinker, and his affinity for the thinking activity leads him to seek a cyclical time concept that will mitigate the destruction inherent in the will's futural projection. This destructiveness manifests itself in the Will's obsession with the future, which forces men into oblivion. In order to will the future in the sense of being the future's master, men must forget and finally destroy the past. From Nietzsche's discovery that the Will cannot "will backwards," there follow not only frustration and resentment, but also the positive, active will to annihilate what was. And since everything that is real has "become," that is, incorporates a past, this destructiveness ultimately relates to everything that is. 181 At times in Nietzsche's writing, especially when he emphasizes the value of forgetfulness and the related disadvantages of reflection, memory, and thinking, the futural aspect of the will is directly affirmed. However, in the end, Nietzsche repudiates the will in order to satisfy the thinking ego. Epictetus' fatalism, which guaranteed that all existence is necessary, is mirrored in Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence and his amor fati, and both positions side with the experiences of thinking against those of willing. Nietzsche's thought-experiment attempts to overcome the contingency of action and of human existence by escaping into a cyclical time construct in which all appears necessary. To his credit, Nietzsche consistently follows out the moral implications of his position: if the will's power to act is an illusion, and the will's "intentions" or "purposes" have no relation to worldly events, then morality and meaning are also illusions. 182 Moral responsibility does not exist, and thus "there are no moral facts at all." 183 Likewise, Nietzsche concludes: "The total value of the world cannot be evaluated." 184 The affirmation of Life and Becoming in Nietzsche's philosophy disqualifies all moral claims whatsoever: we must move "beyond good and evil." 181

Ibid., 178. Ibid., 167. 183 Ibid., 170. 184 Ibid., 172. 182

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Nietzsche is correct that, from the perspective of Being or the world as a whole, moral distinctions could not apply. A critique or a justification of the world as a whole would require a standard outside the world by which to measure it. Arendt's commitment to human finitude and plurality means that she is unwilling to posit such standards. However, Arendt rejects Nietzsche's claim that we cannot judge individual actions or events. The standards by which we judge particulars need not be otherworldly standards. Judging is not absolute in Arendt; it is a kind of discrimination between events, things, and persons in the human world that does not rely on transcendent standards. Unlike Nietzsche, Arendt wants to revive our moral terminology but shed its transcendent status. The moral consequences of Nietzsche's reflections have their psychological advantages: guilt and all negative judgment are abolished. Famously, Nietzsche argued that free will was a concept created by those who resented others and wished to punish them. We might respond that the denial of freedom is repeated again and again by those who are not willing to admit that they are free. Nietzsche's denial of freedom and moral responsibility derives from his desire for omnipotence, for sovereignty over himself. In the world of appearances and plurality, such sovereignty is incompatible with freedom, which is always unpredictable and uncontrollable. As in Epictetus, sovereignty can only be obtained by fleeing reality into the confines of consciousness and affirming every impression. Epictetus' universal affirmation, instead of redeeming the brokenness of the will, actually reinforces the will's self-conflict by forcing the self to be forever suspicious of whether its affirmation will be continued in the future. It appears that any sustained attempt to be a Nietzschean "Yes-sayer" would end in the same torturous situation. We must now deal with Arendt's critical reading of Heidegger's work, which highlights some of her key ideas about the tension between thinking and willing. As most Heidegger scholars will admit, it is important to examine how Heidegger's work changes over his career, with special attention to the differences between his early and later work. The nature of Heidegger's "Kehre," his "reversal" or "turning-about" that divides his early and late work, is difficult to understand because Heidegger imbeds

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his own interpretation of the Kehre within his later texts. Arendt aims to separate the actual Kehre from Heidegger's interpretation of the event. Arendt believes the actual Kehre lies in his repudiation of the will as a human faculty. In Being and Time, the future was considered the primary tense of time, and the concept of Sorge stood in for the willing faculty as "care" for the self and its future projects. For Arendt, Heidegger’s later work amounts to a protest against modernity’s (and his earlier) preoccupation with the will. His notion of the "Will-not-towill" is a speculative escape from the factual experiences of willing and their implications. 185 Heidegger falls into the speculative mold of German Idealism, conceiving the Will-to-will and Will-not-to-will as activities of Being, personifying Being by analogy to human willing. 186 This idealistic maneuver is further developed into Heidegger's History of Being (Seinsgeschichte), which attempts to unify the whole of history as the activity of a single agency or mind, mirroring the general intent of Hegel's theory of World Spirit. Earlier in Willing, Arendt explains the attraction of these speculations: Moreover, the plausibility of the [Hegelian] hypothesis depends entirely on the assumption of one World Mind ruling over the plurality of human wills and directing them toward a "meaningfulness" arising out of reason's need, that is, psychologically speaking, out of the very human wish to live in a world that is as it ought to be. We encounter a similar solution in Heidegger, whose insights into the nature of willing are incomparably more profound and whose lack of sympathy with that faculty is outspoken and constitutes the actual turning (Kehre) of the later Heidegger: not "the human will is the origin of the will to will," but "man is willed by the Will to Will without experiencing what this Will is all about." 187 Heidegger's Seinsgeschichte is his version of universal affirmation, as it purifies the course of world history by attributing it to the agency of Being, which is unaffected by human action and judgment. Hegel’s World Spirit and Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence are speculative hypotheses to reconcile the world as it is with how it ought to be. Heidegger's late work denies the possibility of negatively evaluating the world as a whole or the particular beings in it. Arendt argues that the Kehre was partly inspired by Heidegger's confrontation with Nietzsche's ideas, but that it also corresponded with key events in his own life. The "two volumes of [Heidegger's] 185

Ibid., 22. Ibid., 156-157. 187 Ibid., 49. 186

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Nietzsche...are in certain respects the most telling; they contain lecture courses from the years 1936 to 1940, that is, the very years when the 'reversal' actually occurred and therefore had not yet been subject to Heidegger's own reinterpretations." 188 The reversal can be considered a "concrete autobiographical event" between the two volumes of Nietzsche because the first volume is sympathetic to Nietzsche's reflections on will-to-power, while the second is strongly critical of those same ideas. Arendt highlights Heidegger's very personal confrontation with the will and his subsequent evasion of its implications: "The relevance of this dating seems evident: what the reversal originally turns against is primarily the will-to-power. In Heidegger's understanding, the will to rule and to dominate is a kind of original sin, of which he found himself guilty when he tried to come to terms with his brief past in the Nazi movement." 189 His Seinsgeschichte retrospectively denies the contingency of his own participation in the Nazi movement: his immoral behavior was a result of Being's activity, for which he cannot be considered personally responsible. In the first volume of Nietzsche, the phenomenological analyses of willing are consistent with Being and Time's treatment of Sorge. Willing is self-focused, a kind of encounter with oneself. However, the self is not a fixed entity with static features but a project that is always in the midst of becoming. The first volume also follows Nietzsche's descriptions of willing, and interprets them in terms of the "ontological difference." The will-to-power is the "isness (Seiendheit) of entities," a function of the life process that governs all living beings. Eternal Recurrence corresponds to the Being of Being in which "time's transient nature is eliminated and Becoming, the medium of the will-to-power's purposiveness, receives the seal of Being." 190 In other words, the will-to-power is goal-directed and future-oriented, but the life-process as a whole (Life) is itself purposeless and meaningless. Eternal Recurrence is the absolute affirmation of Life, the "Yes" to Life that itself is not dictated by the life instinct. This affirmation is the negation of time's original negation—to affirm cyclical time is to negate the transience of rectilinear time.

188

Ibid., 172. Ibid., 173. 190 Ibid., 175. 189

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According to Heidegger, there is a fundamental contradiction in Nietzsche's reflections: "The will-to-power finally 'evaluates' an eternally recurring Becoming as the sole way out of the meaninglessness of life and world." 191 Eternal Recurrence is an act of affirmation towards the world by the will-to-power. Thus, Eternal Recurrence is subject to the standards of the will-to-power—perhaps even being a mere means for the will to feel powerful. In other words, Nietzsche's attempt to evaluate Becoming (even in terms of complete affirmation) is nothing more than a desire of the subjective will. A more truthful, non-evaluative response to the world would remain open to a completely valueless Becoming without feeling the need to impose values upon it. Heidegger's second volume of Nietzsche takes this critique in a radical direction. Nietzsche's willto-power is seen as the strongest expression of the subjectivism of modernity, an attitude which has led to the domination of reality by human technique. Heidegger generalizes the will's self-conflict in Nietzsche—of will (command) and counter-will (resistance)—to every human encounter with objects. Even to conceive of beings as "objects" suggests they are understood as obstacles to be overcome by human making. Here, Heidegger's Will is not tied to the biological characteristics of the life process as much as it is directly tied to power in the sense of domination. The Will exists only insofar as power is its goal, and this goal is unlimited. Thus, striving for power, which can only be felt in the futural outlook, requires the destruction of everything that is. Being master of the future means to destroy the past, to bring about "oblivion." 192 In more abstract terms, the past (the "it was") is revolting to the will because it is beyond the power of the will. But, the will wills things to happen and become past. As such, the will wills everything to pass away. The will suffers from everything (every particular) it wills because each one then becomes part of the past that it cannot change. The will's only resort is to destroy everything that endures. 193 For Heidegger, and I think Arendt agrees, modern subjectivism contains this logic of destruction and oblivion. Heidegger's Kehre turns against the destructive element of willing, the "self-assertion of 191

Ibid., 176. Ibid., 177-178. 193 Ibid., 178. 192

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man" in the world. 194 In practical terms, "technology's very nature is the will to will," inherently aiming at the domination and destruction of the entire world, in contrast to which Heidegger prescribes "letting be" as an activity of thinking that does not impose purposes or goals on Being, but "obeys the call of Being." The "letting be" corresponds to "a thinking that is not a willing," a thinking not driven by the desire to dominate objects and not geared to causal explanations, which Heidegger interpreted as an expression of the technical attitude and the will-to-power. 195 In contrast to Arendt's interpretation, Heidegger understands the Kehre as a turning against the "subjectivism of Being and Time and the book's primary concern with man's existence, his mode of being." In Being and Time, the approach to the question of Being required an analysis of human existence, but in his later work, Heidegger insists that the priority lie with Being instead. Thinking is not subjective, not willed or directed by human subjects. Thinking obediently responds to the call of (from) Being to think about Being. In fact, thinking has no human subject at all, as it is "a function of Being" itself. Thinking is the "only authentic 'doing' (Tun) of man" because it corresponds to Being's essence, as opposed to everyday human activities, which deal with worldly particulars that distract humans from thinking about Being. 196 Thinking, in this framework, is certainly "not a willing." Heidegger's originality is that he interprets the two opposing activities of thinking and willing as opposing functions of Being, over which humans have no agency: 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

194

Ibid., 173. At ibid., 89, in the context of discussing Augustine, Arendt explains Heidegger's take on causal thinking: "[T]o anticipate a late suggestion of Heidegger's—since the will experiences itself as causing things to happen which otherwise would not have happened, could it not be that it is neither the intellect nor our thirst for knowledge (which could be stilled by straightforward information), but precisely the will that lurks behind our quest for causes—as though behind every Why there existed a latent wish not just to learn and to know but to learn the know-how?" 196 Ibid., 174-175. 195

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destinies and reveals itself to the thinking ego if the latter can overcome willing and actualize the letting be. 197 The "Will-not-to-will" is the letting be of thinking that reveals Being to the thinking ego. But, this Willnot-to-will is not determined by human beings, but by the movement of Being in History. The thinker is called to express gratitude for Being and cease evaluating the world and himself—thinking is essentially thanking. Heidegger's History of Being appears similar to other speculative constructions like Providence, Progress, or capitalism's invisible hand, which assume that the events of history can only be understood as the work of some hidden force or agency existing "above" the fray of human activity. Their purpose is to eliminate the accidental and contingent aspects of history in favor of a unified, absolute History. While Heidegger’s History of Being resembles Hegel's World Spirit, there is a key difference. For Hegel, the actors of history are decidedly unaware of being the instruments of World Spirit's development, but in Heidegger, the thinker who thinks about Being is fully aware of his connection to Being's historical agency: "it is Being itself that, forever changing, manifests itself in the thinking of the actor so that acting and thinking coincide." 198 Heidegger’s Being is not an unchanging and stable reality beyond appearance; Being has a History and cannot be separated from that History. But, the History of Being also coincides with the history of thought, so that Being is "fully incarnated" in the individual thinker who "acts out" the meaning of Being. 199 Heidegger's authentic "action" is really only thinking. For Arendt, Heidegger's dual identification of thinking and thanking, on the one hand, and thinking and acting, on the other, reveal his ultimate philosophical convictions. Arendt traces these ideas back to the text of Being and Time in order to show that, despite the differences between his early and late work, Heidegger is consistently hostile to human plurality, action, and morality. In Being and Time, the Self is the unique "who" of human existence as opposed to the mere "what," which is defined by general human qualities. The "authentic" Self is defined in opposition to "the

197

Ibid., 179. Ibid., 180. 199 Ibid., 187. 198

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They" (das Man), so that one exists as an individual only in "existential solipsism," divorced from interaction with others. Care individuates Dasein from the They by virtue of being "man's organ for the future." As such, Care resembles the Will within the tradition generally, and in the first volume of Nietzsche, Heidegger switches his terminology to "willing" to agree, as it were, with that tradition. Willing is a self-encounter that individuates oneself from the They and establishes one's authenticity. 200 In Being and Time, the Self is manifest only when one hears the "call of conscience" through which Dasein is revealed as "guilty." Guilt attaches to the factuality of human existence and not to particular acts as such; by existing in the human mode, one is always already guilty. Guilt arises from two sources, from two limits to human willing. First, every action performed simultaneously eliminates other possibilities of existence. Second, and for Arendt "more important," Dasein "owes its existence to something that it is not itself," being always "indebted" to an external something that allows it to be. In other words, Dasein does not create itself, does not bring itself into existence. Conscience calls one to accept this existential guilt, and by doing so, one is capable of existing in an authentic way. The analysis of conscience and guilt in Being and Time "contains the first hint of [Heidegger's] later identification of thinking and thanking." 201 By heeding conscience, the Self is recovered from the "They" and the concerns of everyday life and can then turn its attention to being thankful for existence as such. For Arendt, there are several troubling aspects to this line of reflection on the Self. Even though the Self is actualized in Care (willing), Care gives way to the call of conscience that demands that the self disengage from the public "They" into solitary thinking. Action in the realm of plurality compromises the authentic individual; there is no way to be an individual with others in the world. Arendt's entire corpus resists this implication of Heidegger's thought: action in concert with others does not undermine but instead reveals human individuality. Furthermore, echoing her earlier writings, Arendt claims that Heidegger's conception of guilt amounts to a proclamation of "universal innocence: where everybody is

200 201

Ibid., 183. Ibid., 185.

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guilty, nobody is." 202 With this proclamation, Heidegger tries to avoid the responsibility for his actions in the public realm, leveling all persons to the same moral status. The identification of thinking and thanking in Heidegger's work is less radical—perhaps because it has historical precedents in almost every age and not only in the Western tradition—than his equation of thinking and acting. Whereas the authentic Self of Being and Time listens to the call of conscience, in the later work, the thinker listens to the call of Being. The call remains a call to stop willing and to start thinking. The key change is that the thinker's significance has been enlarged to encompass the activity of Being. The thinker has ceased to will in favor of letting be, enacting Being's "counter-current of wholesomeness," which hides under the public world of will-to-power. The activity of thinking is fused with the History of Being, so that "now the fate of the world, the History of Being, has come to depend on him," the solitary thinker. 203 Heidegger's Seinsgeschichte radicalizes both the conflict between thinking and willing and the function of the personified concept. Thinking, in its coincidence with Being, is directly opposed to willing, whose destructiveness characterizes the "They" and the everyday attention to particulars. But, this opposition does not strip the thinker of his ability to act and affect the world. By personifying Being, imbuing it with agency, Heidegger grants thinking the dignity of giving a helping hand to the History of Being. 204 Through his speculative maneuvers, Heidegger aggrandizes the thinking activity and gives it power over the course of the world. Although Heidegger does not follow Epictetus and Nietzsche in treating the world as a product of consciousness, his identification of Being's historical agency with the thoughts of the philosophers seems to play the same emotional function. The Will-not-to-will resembles Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence in that it is an attempt to extend the feeling of power over the course of time and history. The main difference is that Heidegger preserves rectilinear time in his History of Being; Being is no longer static or cyclical but initiates novelty in its historical becoming. What really matters, the meaning of History, lies 202

Ibid., 184-185. Ibid., 187. 204 Ibid., 187. 203

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in the thinker's "power," as opposed to the historical particulars, which only arise from erring human action and remain meaningless in themselves. Human beings, who cannot hope to control their actions and the outcomes of those actions, can regain control over their existence only by thinking about Being. In Thinking, Heidegger's influence was unmistakable, which indicates that Arendt agreed with many of his insights about the thinking activity. Thus, we should not overlook the strengths of Heidegger's philosophy from Arendt's perspective. Heidegger's phenomenological method and insights are illuminating even if many of his speculations are unwarranted and morally problematic. To his credit, Heidegger's philosophy directly confronts the contingency and temporality of human existence. Even in his Seinsgeschichte, Heidegger preserves the futural dimension of time and the contingency of history, which are key implications of the experiences of willing. On Arendt's reading, he does not make the traditional deterministic or fatalistic moves; Being's "agency" is contingent. Unfortunately, Heidegger preserves the future only by assimilating it to Being's essence as historical becoming, stripping it of its humanistic aspects. History is contingent but it is ultimately not a result of human activity or initiative. Arendt's treatment of Heidegger in Willing amounts to a strong criticism of his philosophy as a whole. Although he recognizes and elucidates key features of willing—the will's futural orientation, the limits with regard to competing possibilities, the impossibility of self-creation, the reflexive focus on the self in the willing activity, and the inability to control the outcome of actions—his speculations consistently turn against willing in favor of thinking and its existential solitude. Even in Being and Time, where willing (Care) appears to be affirmed as the basic structure of Dasein, the authentic individual does not act in the world or bring about any particular projects. Dasein's authentic activity consists in thinking about one's existential guilt and the contingency of being thrown into the world. Dasein is inauthentic to the extent that it needs or desires to act. Arendt's criticisms of Heidegger can be found even in Thinking, where she characterized his equation of thinking and thanking as a modern version of Platonic wonder. Her critique of Plato—that admiring wonder at the sheer givenness of existence entails a denial of evil and ugliness, and thus a denial of judgment—applies to Heidegger as well. In light of that discussion, I suspect that the central problems 306

with Heidegger's philosophy stem from his preoccupation with Being. While he avoids many of the problematic tendencies of traditional metaphysics, his commitment to the "question of the meaning of Being" does not allow him to escape all of the downfalls of metaphysical thinking. To focus solely on Being as a whole, no matter how that whole is understood and explicated, is to ignore or downplay the meaning and value of particular beings in the world. Heidegger's interest in human historicity and facticity is curiously divorced from actual history and concrete facts. The danger of trying to think about the totality of Being is that one becomes insensitive to reality and the particulars of experience. Arendt's critique also addresses Heidegger's personal actions and responsibility. Heidegger's refusal to publicly apologize for his participation in the Nazi party—and his other related moral failures of that period, like his treatment of Husserl—is mirrored in his Seinsgeschichte, which attributes his actions to the historical movement of Being and implies that he could not have done otherwise. On Arendt's view of the mental faculties, what is the source of Heidegger's moral failures? It certainly could not be the case that he was thoughtless and therefore had no conscience. Remember, conscience only rules out the most extreme immoral possibilities (radical evil), and Heidegger was not involved in the Nazi killing programs, as Eichmann was. The most plausible conclusion is that Heidegger's judgment was poor, that he was unwilling to adequately imagine how his actions appeared from others' perspectives. Although a powerful and insightful thinker, Heidegger's hostility to human plurality undermined his own personal ability to appreciate others' points of view. Thus, his great affinity for solitary thinking conflicted with the very real need to develop the ability to make judgments about particulars in the context of the common world. Heidegger entered the public realm of action without developing this most political of human mental capacities. Heidegger remains a prime example of the dangers of being a "professional thinker."

Arendt's "Abyss of Freedom" and its Implications We have one last section of Willing to attend to, a section that clarifies Arendt's understanding of her overall project and also points ahead to her intentions for Judging. To set up some of the key claims, let us first revisit the "Postscriptum" to Thinking, where Arendt lays out two main trajectories for her 307

history of the will. The first theme is the "paradoxical and contradictory" experiences of willing that follow from the will's reflexive self-conflict. The second theme is the will’s role as the principium individuationis: At the same time I shall follow a parallel development in the history of the Will according to which volition is the inner capacity by which men decide about "whom" 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 is projects, not objects, which in a sense creates the person that can be blamed and praised and anyhow held responsible not merely for its actions but for its whole "Being," its character. 205 In the "Postscriptum," Arendt offers no explanation of how these two themes relate to each other. As we worked through her treatments of Augustine and Duns Scotus, I believe the connection became clearer. The self-conflict is generated from willing's orientation to future projects, which are always uncertain and contingent. This self-conflict is only resolved by the will's power to act, the initiation of something new. Through these spontaneous actions, the human person becomes a unique individual person, clearly manifested to others who hold her responsible for the manner of her appearance. As we saw, Arendt emphasizes that there can be no complete explanation of how the will resolves its self-conflict. The contingency with which the will initiates action is necessary to understanding the self-conflict: if action could be controlled or easily predicted, then the inner struggle of willing would be mere delusion. Her favorable reading of Augustine's On the Trinity suggested a partial solution. Love, which arises from the mind's consistent attention and affirmation, "prepares" the will to initiate action. This partial solution helps to narrow the gap between willing and action without explaining the transition causally. A person's love only becomes manifest, to oneself and others, in retrospect. Arendt confirms this partial solution in the final section of Willing by referring back to Augustine's "enduring I": "Just as thinking prepares the self for the role of spectator, willing fashions it into an 'enduring I' that directs all particular acts of volition. It creates the self's character and therefore was sometimes understood as the principium individuationis, the source of the person's specific

205

Arendt, Thinking, 215.

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identity." 206 Along with confirming her quasi-Augustinian account of love, Arendt recapitulates the findings of her historical presentation: Of all the philosophers and theologians we have consulted, only Duns Scotus, we found, was ready to pay the price of contingency for the gift of freedom—the mental endowment we have for beginning something new, of which we know that it could just as well not be. No doubt the philosophers have always been more "pleased" with necessity than with freedom because for their business [of thinking] they needed a tranquillitas animae (Leibniz), a peace of mind, which...could be effectively guaranteed only by an acquiescence in the arrangement of the world. 207 The contingency of free action has been difficult for philosophers to acknowledge and affirm. The hostility of philosophers towards the will is understood as a result of the inherent tension between thinking and willing. "The will with its projects for the future challenges the belief in necessity, the acquiescence in the arrangement of the world which it calls complacency," and thus the will undermines thinking's tendency to accept the world as it is, to identify what is with what ought to be. The general hostility toward the will is due to the fact that individual responsibility for one's character is psychologically troubling: The individual, fashioned by the will and aware that it could be different from what it is (character, unlike bodily appearance or talents and abilities, is not given to the self at birth) always tends to assert an "I-myself" against an indefinite "they"—all the others that I, as an individual, am not. Nothing indeed can be more frightening than the notion of solipsistic freedom—the "feeling" that my standing apart, isolated from everyone else, is due to free will, that nothing and nobody can be held responsible for it but me myself. 208 The various theories of necessity that have been forwarded by philosophers are plausible primarily because they "fulfill the same emotional function," releasing the individual from responsibility for action. Some contemporary scientific theories that insist on necessity also play this same role. Ignoring the distinction between truth and meaning—blending experiential facts with speculations that are in principle impossible to demonstrate—these theories transform the notion of the free individual into a "myth," subsuming the activities of concrete human persons under some mode of natural necessity. Arendt draws the following conclusion from her historical inquiry: "Professional thinkers, whether philosophers or scientists, have not been 'pleased with freedom' and its ineluctable randomness; they have been unwilling 206

Arendt, Willing, 195. Ibid., 195. 208 Ibid. 207

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to pay the price of contingency for the questionable gift of spontaneity, of being able to do what could also be left undone." 209 Is this displeasure with freedom solely a problem for professional thinkers? Do men of action show a more favorable view of spontaneity and contingency? These are the questions that begin Arendt's final line of argument in Willing. For Arendt, even men of action have difficulties being pleased with human freedom. The groundlessness and arbitrariness of novel action is disquieting even to those who are not primarily concerned with the activity of thinking. As she shifts her attention from the professional thinkers to the men of action, Arendt emphasizes the fundamental distinction between mental activities and worldly activities, and between willing and action in particular. Because willing is a self-relation, and political action only occurs in the realm of plurality, involvement in political action requires a fundamental shift from "I" to "We," which is "the true plural of action." The freedom of the will—"philosophic freedom" as Arendt calls it here—is not the same as political freedom: [P]olitical freedom is distinct from philosophic freedom in being 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. 210 In the sphere of political freedom, an individual never achieves a project without the assistance of others who help carry it through or allow it to succeed. The power of the I-can is guaranteed only by contingent human agreements, built on the implicit or explicit consent of citizens, that structure a community. Once a political body is established, power is simultaneously delimited and guaranteed by these agreements. Politically, the I-will is only relevant if power is also present and the project of the will is enacted. The will's ability to act points to the common world, where power is always limited by others.

209 210

Ibid., 198. Ibid., 200.

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The We of community "arises wherever men live together." Unlike thinking and willing, the We is not a two-in-one, but a community that encompasses plurality within it. In addition to the plurality within a community, each community is also a member of human plurality per se, a community in the midst of many other communities with which it shares the world. As such, the community of action is always a definite We. While the willing ego tends to pit the Self against the "faceless 'They'" of humanity as a whole, to act politically is to become involved in a community, to participate with others that share the world in terms of a common history, memories, customs, or principles of judgment. Arendt claims that "it is only as a member of such a unit, that is, of a community, that men are ready for action." 211 Arendt's formulations in this section are reminiscent of her early articulations of political action in The Human Condition and Between Past and Future. What is strange about her presentation is that it reinstates a stark division between willing and action that her history of the will actually undermines. Consider the following passage: "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." 212 Arendt rightly insists that political freedom always entails limits on the freedom of the will. Living in political communities always implies external constraints on the individual will, so that no community is truly governed by a will or multiple wills, but by laws and agreements between a plurality of persons. If this is all Arendt means, I can agree. However, to claim that freedom of the will is irrelevant to political communities is an overstatement. If individual responsibility is based on the spontaneity of the will, and if political participation is a matter of individual responsibility, then the will is directly relevant to politics when we confront matters of personal responsibility. In light of Eichmann's situation, the decision to participate in public affairs is one of immense importance, and the contingency of that decision has direct political relevance. For the healthy political body, it is important that political

211 212

Ibid., 201. Ibid., 199.

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participation is contingent and not coerced, and that citizens recognize that contingency. Willing is relevant to these issues because it testifies, as well as anything else, to the contingency of action and responsibility. From the perspective of the individual, the will's self-conflict can revolve around the question of political participation. That is, it can arise when a person questions the realm of political action as it is presently constituted. In such a scenario, one must decide whether (and in what ways) to continue with the status quo, to attempt to initiate political change, or to disengage from public life altogether. In the first case, the power to act is certain; in the second, the power to change the world is manifestly uncertain; and in the third, power is relinquished. Willing's intimate connection with power—that its characteristic self-conflict occurs when the I-can is uncertain—ties willing to the particular political circumstances in the world, to the constellations of power in the web of human relationships. In this light, Arendt's claim that humans are only ready for action insofar as they are members of a community needs to reconsidered as well. If human beings must be objectively recognized members of communities (citizens) before they are ready for action, then it is unclear how new communities can be formed or how persons who live outside communities could ever enter into public life at all. Arendt clearly acknowledges that all existing human communities had a contingent, historical beginning, and these communities must begin from the initiatives of individual persons. But, if belonging to a community is a condition for action, then a community cannot possibly begin through human action. Given this problem, I propose that we revise Arendt's claim in the following way: to prepare for political action and to participate in public life, one must shift mentally from the I-perspective to the We-perspective. Political action requires a shift of attention from self-concern to concern for others and for the shared world. The We-perspective allows one to disengage from the vicious reflexivity of willing's self-conflict and begin preparing for action. To put the point negatively, as long as one only considers "what I will do" in isolation from or opposition to world events and what others are doing, action appears to be a daring leap into a indefinite future, whereas, to contemplate action in terms of "We" links the will to the power present in human relationships. 312

An Arendtian political community depends partly on the participants in the community undergoing a certain kind of mental transformation. Participation in community implies a choice to participate, so that membership in the We of action is contingent and not a necessary, objective or default status. Legal citizenship or official membership may be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for political participation in some circumstances. Surely, community is not simply chosen, as if I could choose to be part of any community whatsoever. At times, participating in community may be tightly restricted or not allowed at all. The above qualifications appears essential to Arendt's line of inquiry in this section, for she is focused on the problems involved with political beginnings. The beginning of a community is the foundation of a political body within which action can take place, the foundation of freedom as a lasting institution, as a space of appearance. Arendt's quintessential men of action, the leaders of the French and American Revolutions, were looking to establish new communities, and they turned to the "foundation legends" of the Western tradition in order to understand their own attempts at founding a new political order. The revolutionaries looked to antiquity for "paradigms to guide their own intentions," but all they found were perplexities. Each of the key foundation legends contains "a hiatus between liberation from the old order and the new freedom." The hiatus indicates that there is no necessary connection between the two, that the character of the new community cannot be deduced from the ills of the old order and cannot be guaranteed by the act of liberation alone. In other words, the hiatus indicates "that the notion of an all-powerful time continuum is an illusion," that, while time flows continuously, the events of history do not follow necessarily from one another. 213 The perplexities of political foundation mirror those related to willing, and Arendt's emphasis on the hiatus between liberation and foundation reinforces her partial solution to the will's self-conflict. There is an ineradicable gap between the old and new political orders, just as there is between the mental activity of willing and the free worldly act that the will initiates. The act of liberation resembles the spontaneity of the will to begin something new—in Nietzsche, the abundance of the will beyond 213

Ibid., 204-205.

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necessity—while the attempt at founding a lasting political institution that embodies one's ideals and principles resembles the will's concern about its power to succeed at a particular goal. Arendt describes the perplexing features that accompany political beginnings: When men of action, men who wanted to change the world, became aware that such a change might actually postulate a new order of the ages, the start of something unprecedented, they began to look to history for help...[in solving] the problem of beginning—a problem because beginning's very nature is to carry in itself an element of complete arbitrariness. It was only now that they confronted the abyss of freedom, knowing that whatever would be done now could just as well have been left undone and believing, too, with clarity and precision, that once something is done it cannot be undone, that human memory telling the story will survive repentance as well as destruction. 214 Ironically, the men of action, consciously aiming to initiate a new beginning, looked to the past for justification even when they were aware that such justification was impossible. This puzzling fact—that men of action, so focused on the future, would be drawn to the ancient past for a precedent—reinforces Arendt's suspicions about the difficulties surrounding the novelty and spontaneity of free action in the world. They were quite aware of course of the bewildering spontaneity of a free act. As they knew, an act can only be called free if it is not affected or caused by anything preceding it and yet, insofar as it immediately turns into a cause of whatever follows, it demands a justification which, if it is to be successful, will have to show the act as the continuation of a preceding series, that is, renege on the very experience of freedom and novelty. 215 The futural perspective motivates actors to look to the past for justification of what they will do, but before the deeds are done and the consequences have unfolded, there is no guaranteed justification. For better or for worse, the meaning of the deeds is manifest only to the backward-glance of the historian. Adding to the paradoxical situation of the revolutionaries was the fact that even the ancient foundation legends themselves failed to solve the problem of foundation. In the Roman version, the foundation of Rome was seen as a mere repetition of an earlier age, not an absolute beginning or a break in the time continuum. Virgil spoke of the foundation of Rome as the return of a prehistoric Golden Age, a "utopian fairy-tale land outside of history" modeled on the cyclical structure of the life process. This appeal attempts to ground the foundation of Rome in the necessity of nature, something "beyond the 214 215

Ibid., 207. Emphasis added. Ibid., 210.

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scope of human action" and therefore not in need of justification. 216 The utopian ideals of modern political theories—Arendt mentions Marx explicitly here—while they announce the prospects of something altogether new, are often modeled on a similar return to a prehistoric past. This utopian past is always an unknown and idyllic past in which the troubles of human life could be imagined not to exist.217 These ideals provide a speculative escape from the problems of historically situated human freedom, but they do not solve the difficulties. As with the many philosophical theories that aim to escape the problems of the will, political theories and narratives have often obscured the contingency of political foundation. When we directed our attention to men of action, hoping to find in them a notion of freedom purged of the perplexities caused for men's minds by the reflexivity of mental activities—the inevitable recoil on itself of the willing ego—we hope for more than we finally achieved. The abyss of pure spontaneity, which in the foundation legends is bridged by the hiatus between liberation and the constitution of freedom, was covered up by the device, typical of the Occidental tradition...of understanding the new as an improved re-statement of the old. 218 Arendt's discussion of the revolutionary men of action highlights the abyss of freedom, the unsolvable problems of spontaneity, novelty, and contingency. Thus, there is a fundamental tension between the reality of freedom and the desire for harmony in mental life. This tension does not arise solely for the philosophers and professional thinkers but for human actors who wish to understand what they are doing when they act freely. In other words, the abyss of freedom not only applies to the I-perspective of the single individual—the shift to the We-perspective of political community does not eliminate the abyss of freedom either. Even action taken in concert with others carries the arbitrariness of beginning. To close the Willing volume, Arendt reiterates what she calls her own "tentative alternative" to the traditional speculations about freedom. As we have seen, many thinkers in the philosophical tradition have opted for fatalism, which, in its denial of freedom, attempts to sooth away the human urge to act and change the world. On the other extreme, as it were, the modern utopian dream of pure freedom always implies, in its disdain for the known past and the limited freedom of human life, the destruction of the 216

Ibid., 212-215. Ibid., 215-216. 218 Ibid., 216. 217

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world and humanity as we know them. Against these alternatives, Arendt places her own Augustinian notion of natality: "The very capacity for beginning is rooted in natality, and by no means in creativity, not in a gift but in the fact that human beings, new men, again and again appear in the world by virtue of birth." 219 Arendt's emphasis on the factuality of birth and beginnings is meant to be contrasted with the wholly speculative theories of necessity in the tradition, theories that ignore or attempt to explain away our experiences of freedom. For Arendt, even though she has defended the mental ("subjective") experience of contingency within the willing activity, the best proof of human freedom lies in the world, in the "objective" unique persons who are themselves beginners. The mental experience of contingency would be insufficient to prove the reality of free action if it were not accompanied by the factuality of new beginnings in the common world. The denial of freedom requires not just a repudiation of the mental experience of willing; it also requires an interpretation of the world that ignores the numerous factual instances of human natality and novelty. In addition, it denies human plurality by undermining the basis for human personhood, individuality, and uniqueness. Of course, Augustine's claim that beginning something new is the purpose of human beings is itself speculative, and Arendt would certainly admit that no fact supports it absolutely. However, Augustine's claim, with its theological underpinnings, implicitly affirms the factuality of human freedom and temporality in a meaningful way. Although she never explicitly mentions it, Arendt's own affirmation of freedom is built into the overall presentation of Willing and especially her various agreements with Augustine and Duns Scotus. Although Arendt herself has given certain reasons for her affirmation of freedom, her final paragraph admits that the issue cannot ultimately be decided by arguments and speculations; it is a matter of judgment: I am quite aware that the argument even in the Augustinian version is somehow opaque, that it seems to tell us no more than that we are doomed to be free by virtue of being born, no matter whether we like freedom or abhor its arbitrariness, are "pleased" with it or prefer to escape its awesome responsibility by electing some form of fatalism. This impasse, if such it is, cannot be opened or solved except by appeal to another mental faculty, no less mysterious than the faculty of beginning, the faculty of Judgment, an

219

Ibid., 217.

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analysis of which at least may tell us what is involved in our pleasures and displeasures. 220 The point is that if human beings are "fated" for anything, they are fated to be free. 221 Human freedom is a fact that cannot be undone by the will; it can only be judged affirmatively or negatively. Although the will has been ascribed the power of affirmation and negation throughout the Willing volume, in the above passage that power is related to judgment. Arendt inserts judgment into the reflexive relation of the will to its own freedom. Given the impasse between affirmation and negation, if we appeal to the will to answer the impasse, then we are immediately thrown back to the same issues of spontaneity and contingency. For Arendt, the evaluation of human freedom is one instance of judgment's activity. In Thinking and Willing, Arendt outlined some of the key implications of negating human freedom. Given the passage above, we should assume the Judging volume would have included Arendt's reflections on how the faculty of judging is connected to the affirmation of human freedom. We may conclude that Arendt's history of the will is a history of evaluations or judgments regarding the fact of contingent freedom. In a sense, the many philosophical positions each contain an evaluative response to the facts of experience. Again, Duns Scotus proved to be a rare thinker in that his philosophy unequivocally affirms human freedom and temporality. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger directly confront human freedom, but their speculative repudiations of the will demonstrate their ultimate judgments. Following Arendt's line of thinking, we must conclude that to affirm the will's contingent freedom is inconsistent with universal affirmation, which disregards the moral differences between particulars in the world for the sake of mental tranquility. Arendt's faculty of judgment affirms or negates 220

Ibid. In this passage, I cannot help but hear an echo of Sartre's claim that human beings are "condemned to be free," Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 567. An investigation of both Arendt and Sartre on this point is certainly an intriguing prospect. Arendt hints to a potential crucial difference between them: "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, even though it is clear that nobody has 'made' himself or 'produced' his existence; this, I think, is the last of the metaphysical fallacies, corresponding to the modern age's emphasis on willing as a substitute for thinking," Arendt, Thinking, 215. I think Arendt has Sartre in mind in this passage. His thought leans toward the idea of self-making, which has implications that Arendt is unwilling to accept. In addition, Sartre's attraction to Marxism betrays his inability to accept anything in the world as it is, to seek a utopian vision of political community. For an early essay on this subject, see Arendt, "French Existentialism," in Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt, 1994), 188-193. 221

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contingent particulars that originate in spontaneous human action. Arendt's faculty of judgment relates properly to particulars, not to Being or to the world as a whole. For Arendt, to affirm the will's contingent freedom is not necessarily to affirm every free act. Immoral actions need not undermine our ability to affirm our basic capacity for freedom.

Conclusions: Morality and Responsibility To close this chapter, it is necessary to consider how my interpretation of Willing addresses lingering issues from Arendt's earlier work. In chapter 1, I raised the problem of responsibility, asking how it is that the actor, who acts spontaneously and is always surprised by what occurs, can "align" with the principles that are embodied in her own action. While certain commentators have read Arendt as dismissing responsibility due to the uncontrollable nature of action, I have insisted that Arendt attempts to retain responsibility despite the lack of control. In Willing, the existential coincidence of spontaneity and responsibility is a central fact that motivates all sorts of speculative maneuvers in the tradition. Ultimately, the basis of responsibility—how persons can be responsible for the principles that their actions embody—is the will's role in directing the mind's attention. Attention forms the habits of the mind and contributes to the character of the person. If there is no mental activity, as in the case of Eichmann's thoughtlessness and lack of judgment, then there is also no definite character in the person. The mind's inactivity is one's responsibility as well: the responsibility to think, will and judge is a duty of anyone who acts. It is essential that the actor has chosen his or her principles, not necessarily through a single process of deliberation, but through the consistent activity of mental life. In my mind, Arendt's conception of love adequately captures this process of choosing one's principles. No actor controls what will follow from his action, neither the actions and reactions of others nor the consequences that will follow for the world. But, the principles that are embodied in the action are within the power of the individual. Arendt acknowledges this distinction between principles and consequences in On Revolution: "[the men of action] knew at most the principles that inspired their acts,

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but hardly the meaning of the story which eventually was to result from them." 222 Of course, for the actor, the choice of principles will have an effect on his own fate and the fate of his project. Principles are easily sacrificed for the sake of securing the desired consequences, and in times of moral crisis the principled actor may not have the power to succeed in any of his projects. However, for Arendt, success and failure are not the ultimate moral criteria for action. One may wonder whether Arendt's appeal to love to solve the will's self-conflict does not have an undesired implication. Does not love for one's principles too heavily curtail the spontaneity of action? I think not. Love can be compatible with free action so long as it does not exclude the possibility of principles appearing in new ways. Love essentially implies thinking about, remembering, and affirming past examples—it establishes ties to what has been. But, to love justice is not to stubbornly stick to a single vision or definition of justice, as though one knew the definition of justice. Loving justice requires being open to the appearance of new particular just actions in a human world that is continually changing and never entirely the same. As we will discuss in the next chapter, Arendt's notion of "exemplary validity" is geared to tie the judge to the past without negating the possibility of future novel action. In the introduction to Thinking, Arendt diagnosed Eichmann's banality as the inability to recognize the "claim of reality" on our thinking attention. While all of reality makes this claim, we are incapable of attending to everything—we must choose what we will think about and what we will ignore and thus understand in a merely default manner. For Arendt, these choices about how we "spend" our mental energy ultimately reflect our judgments of particulars, and in the broader scope, they reflect what we love (and hate). The activity of thinking, besides its negative role in constructing the limits of conscience, also aids in the positive constitution of character. The person attaches herself to concepts and ideas that catch and hold her attention. While Arendt's Socratic thinking undermines results and fixed definitions of its concepts, it is an activity that seeks the meanings of the particulars that exemplify those concepts. So, even though thinking is destructive, it preserves the particulars of experience and history in active remembrance. 222

Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963), 73.

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To be sure, thinking liberates judgment but does not itself make judgments. However, once thinking liberates our capacity for judgment, our habits of thought and mental attention begin to reflect our judgments about what deserves our attention. At first, thinking may begin from prejudices (default pre-judgments), but thinking in its critical mode undermines those prejudices, opening up the space to reevaluate the particulars of worldly experience. New events may prompt this process of reexamination, although thinking may also begin simply from a desire to remember and rethink the meaning of the familiar past. We noted that one of the key limitations of conscience as a moral faculty is its inherent variability from person to person. This variance is now explained by the will's role in mental attention. The exact limit of the "I-cannot" is determined not by thinking in isolation, but by love and judgment. While the structure of conscience is constituted by thinking, the specific "content" of conscience is provided by these other mental faculties. In the function of supplying thinking with its subject matter, the will and judgment seem to overlap. In Willing, Arendt claims the mind's attention is directed by the will, but when we consider that mental attention is directed to the past and to particulars that spark the activity of thinking, then it appears to be also a function of judgment. These appear to be two aspects of the same activity. On the one hand, Arendt's account of love as the unity of the mind's attention and affirmation would appear to make the will the source of all mental spontaneities. If we take Arendt's account of love as central, we should conclude that the will is the unifying faculty of the mind. While each faculty is autonomous, each operating within its own structures and temporality, the will is the source of the spontaneity of the mind as a whole. The activity of willing focuses our moral attention on the question "what will I do?" Willing points to the contingency of my action; only in willing do we recognize the existential weight of individual responsibility. As Gray writes, “At stake for [Arendt] throughout [Willing], it seems fair to observe, is the endeavor to justify the principle of individuation, whose very core is the freedom each of us experiences daily when we rise from sleep and decide what to do or refuse to do with the approaching

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hours.” 223 The "I" under consideration, the identity of the actor, is not accessible within the mental activities—there is no ultimate definition to the "I" that can help decide what I should do. What I have done and who I have been does not determine what I will do and who I will be. My identity is to be decided by worldly events and how others respond to those events. On the other hand, when we understand mental attention as a function of judgment, we focus on the objects of the mind and not the individual thinking person. The focus shifts from the self to the world which is the context for those objects. Willing isolates and individuates, while judgment places the person back into the world shared with others. What one attends to in the mental activities will form the position that the person takes in the world, how one appears and who one associates with. Judging, however, has the important limitation of being oriented to the past—it cannot be called upon to guarantee the success of future action. The attitudinal shift from willing to judging brings the mind's attention to the past, to things that are more certain than the projects of the will. In this shift, the mind's equanimity is bolstered insofar as the contingency of freedom is not the center of attention.

223

John Glenn Gray, "The Abyss of Freedom," in Recovery of the Public World, 231.

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CHAPTER 5: JUDGING Having discussed Thinking and Willing in detail, we must now turn to Judging, the unwritten third volume of Life of the Mind. To this point, my interpretation of Arendt's corpus has clarified the need to carefully consider how Arendt would have written the Judging volume. The original aspects of Thinking and Willing force us to rethink Arendt's views on judgment. Arendt's dramatic change in approach to the will from her early work to Life of the Mind gives us reason to suspect her approach to judgment had also evolved from her early to her late work. In her pre-Eichmann writings, Arendt aimed to reinvigorate our understanding of, and attitude toward, political action. Threats to politics and the common world of appearances, arising especially in the modern age, were the main targets of her criticisms and the impetus for her rethinking of key political phenomena. Among these threats was the traditional notion of free will and its ideals of sovereignty and control, which are antithetical to plurality and political activity, and the related focus on inwardness and isolation. In this early context, Arendt envisioned judgment as closely aligned with action, an activity in the public world that is focused on the maintenance of political culture, a caring for the world and what appears in it. By implication, free will and judgment were opposed to one another at this early stage. In her post-Eichmann writings, however, Arendt rethinks the relations between action, free will, and judgment. Her reflections on moral responsibility after the Eichmann trial are crucial in this shift, and she revives and revises the notion of free will, which traditionally has been understood as the locus of moral responsibility. In Willing, Arendt deconstructs the history of the will in order to understand how free will could be compatible with her conception of action and responsibility. Consistent with her early work, Arendt sheds the will's traditional aspects of control and sovereignty, particularly with regards to the achievement of projects (ends). However, Arendt allows the will more influence over the formation of character than she had previously. In addition to the spontaneity with which the will initiates action, the will directs the mind's attention and reflexively shapes the person's character, preparing her to act or not 322

act in particular ways. Arendt's revision of free will—especially the will's ability to be transformed into love—points directly to the role of judgment in the preparation for action and the formation of character. In other words, Willing necessitates an investigation of judgment as a mental faculty that precedes action and public judgment. Perhaps the most important distinction in Arendt's work as a whole, and one that is central to Life of the Mind, is the distinction between mental and worldly activity. For the activities of thinking and willing, this distinction is not very difficult to maintain—few are tempted to confuse thinking or willing with worldly action. However, it appears that some commentators on Arendt's work have overlooked this distinction when it comes to judging, with the result that the mental activity is indiscriminately merged with action. The governing assumption is that judgment is essential to all political deliberation, and is therefore present in all public action. This overly political reading relies too heavily on Arendt's earlier writings in which she is concerned primarily with the public aspects of judgment in sustaining the world as a space of appearances, but it does not fully appreciate the problems and questions that accumulated after Arendt's encounter with Eichmann, especially those related to the independence of the mind. After Eichmann, Arendt's reflections on judgment contain a growing emphasis on spectatorship as opposed to active political involvement, an emphasis that leads to the consideration of judging as a mental faculty withdrawn from the world. 1 One of the most repeated criticisms of Arendt's work is that it does not follow an Aristotelian conception of judgment, in which the particulars of worldly life are situated in a substantive ethicopolitical context that helps gauge their meaning and worth. For instance, Beiner argues that "Arendt would have done well to consult Aristotle, for he situates judgment firmly within the context of the

1

Villa carefully and convincingly argues that Arendtian judgment is not primarily a form of action. In Arendt's work, judgment can be action at times, but it is most often ascribed to the onlooker, the spectator that is not involved and has a privileged perspective outside the space of political action. The main mistake, according to Villa, in conflating judging and acting is to construe Arendt's "representative thinking" as the actual public deliberation of political actors. Instead, we should understand representative thinking and the "enlarged mentality" of the judge as necessary preparations for public deliberation. See Dana R. Villa, "Thinking and Judging" in The Judge and the Spectator, ed. Joke J. Hermsen and Dana R. Villa (Leuven: Peeters, 1999), 11.

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substantive ends and purposes of political deliberation, rhetoric, and community." 2 In her early essays on judgment, like "Crisis in Culture," Arendt appears at times to be giving her own quasi-Aristotelian version of phronesis as she emphasizes the worldliness of judgment in the realm of active politics. But even in her early work, Arendt is aware that the loss of tradition makes it very difficult to rely on any substantive context for phronesis, and she shows her favor for Kantian reflective judgment. As Fine rightly suggests, Kant's formal conception of judgment is more compelling in an age of instability: "If Aristotelian phronesis is the virtue which allows the thinker to move from general theories to a judgment of this particular situation, it is Kant’s notion of reflective judgment that Arendt looks to when the world has gone mad." 3 Given the historical circumstances, we should not pretend we inhabit the kind of ethos that is necessary for phronesis. The collapse (and multiple reversals) of traditional morality in the twentieth century show that we live, at best, in what Bernstein calls a "fragile" ethos—we must be wary of how moral codes and patterns of judgment can be dangerous when new circumstances emerge. 4 It is the novelty of action that requires a more spontaneous faculty of judgment than phronesis. 5 In this chapter, I will stress this distinction between judgment qua action and judging qua mental activity. Although the mental activity of judging may prepare one to communicate judgments in public, it is not itself acting. Communicating one's judgments may, at least in certain cases, start a new series of events in the world or reveal a unique person, and in these cases we must admit that judging is an instance of acting. In addition, if one is considering communicating one's judgment in public and entering the realm of action, then one will experience the existential self-conflict of willing. But, judging as a mental activity is neither action nor willing.

2

Ronald Beiner, "Hannah Arendt on Judging," in Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 138. In a related vein, Jacobitti stresses how Arendt needs to confront Aristotle in order to provide a stronger version of the self and the self's continuity. See Jacobitti, "Hannah Arendt and the Will," 65, 74. 3 Robert Fine, "Judgment and the Reification of the Faculties: A Reconstructive Reading of Arendt's Life of the Mind," in Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (2008), 167. 4 Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Boston: MIT Press, 1996), 165. 5 Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, "Reflections on Hannah Arendt's 'Life of the Mind'," in Political Theory 10 (1982): 293-4. Aristotle's placement in Arendt's history of the will supports the assertion that his framework is unable to absorb the problems of the will, its novelty and contingency. In a parallel fashion, proairesis and phronesis do not fit with Arendt's emphasis on spontaneity and novelty.

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This final chapter will undertake three main tasks. The first task is to survey what Arendt has claimed about the faculty of judgment in Thinking and Willing. From this material, we can begin to outline the basic characteristics of judging as a mental faculty. The second task will be to investigate Arendt's "Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy" for elements that can further complete our understanding of judging and its basic operations. At this stage, I will also revisit Arendt's 1965-6 lectures at points where I think the earlier ideas can help us complete her arguments. The last task is to consider the broader implications of Arendt's conception of judging and her reflections on the mind in general. As I do so, I will also consider some important challenges to her moral philosophy. Much of this chapter, but especially the final section, will require some measured speculation on my part, as I extrapolate certain of Arendt's ideas and commitments into the context of judging as a mental faculty. While I do not pretend to speak for her, I do wish to argue for the direction I think is most plausible to take her thought—a direction that is not just consistent but is in the spirit of her main philosophical motivations.

Judging in Life of the Mind In the Thinking volume, Arendt outlined the common features of all mental activities: reflexivity, withdrawal, autonomy, invisibility, freedom. Let us now specify these features in regard to the activity of judging. As judging is reflexive, to judge is to have intercourse with oneself and to "act" upon oneself. Like thinking and willing, which were conceived as reflexive self-relations modeled on certain forms of interpersonal relationships—friendship and command, respectively—the faculty of judging will incorporate plurality into its reflexive structure. 6 I propose that we understand the interpersonal model for the activity of judging as the community of "world citizens" or "world spectators." Judging is autonomous in that it is not reducible to either thinking or willing, that it has its "own modus operandi, its own way of proceeding." 7 The specific task of judging is to bring together "the

6 7

Arendt, Thinking, 74. Ibid., 216.

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general, always a mental construction, and the particular, always given to sense experience." For Arendt, this operation is always somewhat "mysterious," even in cases of knowledge where one recognizes a particular as being an instance of a given category or rule (Kant's determinant judgment). 8 A common interpretative mistake in the literature on Judging is to conflate thinking and judging in one way or another, despite Arendt's insistence that judging as a mental faculty is autonomous from thinking. As an example, Steinberger claims that judging is "a particular species of thinking." 9 Likewise, Birmingham writes: "Thinking (theorein) as she understands it, is a reflection upon others and their taste, and therefore is always the exercising of judgment." 10 Claims of this kind confuse the distinct characteristics of thinking and judging and overemphasize the primacy of thinking, going precisely against the grain of Arendt's distinction between the autonomous mental faculties. Arendt is keen to establish the autonomy of judging so that we are not tempted to conclude that thinking necessarily leads to judging. Certain philosophical modes of thinking are incompatible with the judging activity. To be fair, Arendt invites this misunderstanding in a few isolated contexts. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she speaks of "thinking in the place of somebody else," which turns out to be the activity of judging in her more systematic writings on the mind. Also, her treatment of the Kafka parable in Thinking, where she places thinking's search for meaning in the same context as judging, tempts one to treat judging as a mere modification of thinking. However, for the most part, and especially in Life of the Mind, her lectures on morality in 1965-6, and her "Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy," Arendt does not treat judging and thinking as identical or one as a mode of the other. Thinking liberates judging as a distinct mental activity. In her 1965-6 lectures on moral issues, Arendt was unsure how to characterize the relation between the faculties of will and judgment. Arendt was confident that the will's spontaneity could not be captured by the traditional conception of the liberum arbitrium, which she identified with judgment due 8 9

Ibid., 69. Peter J. Steinberger, "Hannah Arendt on Judgment," American Journal of Political Science 34 (1990):

812. 10

Peg Birmingham, "Hannah Arendt: The Spectator’s Vision" in The Judge and the Spectator: Hannah Arendt Political Philosophy, ed. Dana R. Villa and Joke J. Hermsen (Leuven: Peeters, 1999), 36.

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to its impartiality. However, she left it open whether judging was a third autonomous faculty or simply another function of the will, the "arbitrating" function. In Life of the Mind, it is clear that Arendt treats judging as a third autonomous faculty. As we continue, we must keep in mind how Arendt is distinguishing judging from willing. As a mental faculty, judging is invisible, and appears only indirectly in the world when the judge speaks her mind or acts according to her judgment. 11 Since judging is invisible to the world of appearances, we need metaphors to communicate about it. For Arendt, the appropriate metaphors are drawn from our sense of taste. The peculiarities of these metaphors are a focus of Arendt's reading of Kant's Critique of Judgment. As we shall see, the metaphors must be carefully interpreted so as not to ascribe certain aspects of sensual taste to the judging activity. All mental activities necessitate a withdrawal from immediate appearances and a representation of what is absent through imagination. Thinking always withdraws from the present to reflect on the meaning of the past, and willing withdraws from immediate desires in order to consider future projects. Willing's withdrawal is specifically "inner," as one becomes tangled up with oneself in considering future projects and action. Thus, willing is intensely self-interested, for it comes with the awareness that what one does affects the identity of the self in the world. By contrast, judging withdraws from action and the partiality of action: "And judgment, finally, be it aesthetic or legal or moral, presupposes a definitely 'unnatural' and deliberate withdrawal from involvement and the partiality of immediate interests as they are given by my position in the world and the part I play in it." 12 While thinking, especially in certain philosophical modes, can withdraw from reality in a radical way into the "nowhere" and "everywhere" of general meanings, willing and judging withdraw in a less extreme manner, "for their objects are particulars with an established home in the appearing world." Thinking by itself has no penchant to return to the world of particulars, but willing and judging—with the exception of extreme versions like Stoicism—require an interest in the world of particulars.

11 12

Arendt, Thinking, 71. Ibid., 76.

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Thinking's search for general meaning allows the mind to see the whole in which particulars exist, but it is judging's duty to evaluate those particulars in reference to the human world of plurality. Liberated by thinking from default categories and conventional standards, and informed by the broader view of the whole that thinking provides, judging freely evaluates particulars in their broader worldly context. Thinking and judging have an advantage over willing because they are both withdrawn from action and the desire to act, oriented as they are to the fixed past and not to the contingent future. Since action always results in unintended events and consequences, history is comprised of stories about actors initiating events over which they exercise no control. Actors rely on spectators to decide the meaning of their actions: "it is not through acting but through [spectating] that...the meaning of the whole, is revealed. The spectator, not the actor, holds the clue to the meaning of human affairs." 13 Due to their essential withdrawal, the mental activities comprise a different mode of existence than action. For instance, thinking cannot coincide with worldly action because "we act only 'in concert,' in company and agreement with our peers, hence in an existential situation that effectively prevents thinking." 14 Furthermore, since politics and action deal with particulars, the generalities of thought are inadequate in practice. General statements in politics "degenerate into empty generalities...Action deals with particulars, and only particular statements can be valid in the field of ethics or politics." 15 While judging must also disengage from action, it is not strictly opposed to the realities of action. First, judging ultimately evaluates particulars without relying completely on the general meanings and narratives that thinking generates. Second, rooted in the world of appearances, the judge remains connected to his fellow spectators through imagination, while the thinker, in his radical withdrawal, is only by himself. On Arendt's account, following Kant, the judging "spectators exist in the plural," overcoming the existential solipsism of the mere thinker. 16

13

Ibid., 96. Ibid., 91. 15 Ibid., 200. 16 Ibid., 96. 14

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For Arendt, spectatorship plays a crucial role in satisfying what Arendt called in Thinking the "urge to self-display," the human need to appear, to be seen and to be heard by others. Human reality is constituted by appearances, and appearances by their very nature require spectators to perceive them and confirm their existence. From the perspective of history, spectators have the responsibility of evaluating the past and paying attention to events and persons so that they can be remembered and achieve lasting meaning. The proper attitude of the judge is to be interested in the spectacle of human affairs, although from an impartial distance. The Epictetian spectator, who negates the world by bracketing the reality of particulars, is solely interested in the self. The Stoic becomes a spectator not because she is interested in the human world but so that she can be unaffected by the world and its vicissitudes. The Stoic spectator does not honor the dignity of others' appearances in the world. So, while "thinking prepares the self for the role of spectator" in its withdrawal from the world, thinking by itself cannot provide the interest in the world that is required of the judge. 17 For Arendt, judging can bridge the self-concern of the solitary thinker or willer with the concern for others and the world inherent in responsible action. Arendt overwhelmingly identifies judging with spectatorship in Thinking, but there is one important context in which she addresses the role of judging for the appearing actor. Judging is involved in each act of "self-presentation," in which a person chooses how he wishes to appear in the world, and this choice indicates what pleases and displeases him: Such choices [in self-presentation] are determined by various factors; many of them are predetermined by the culture into which we are born—they are made because we wish to please others. But there are also choices not inspired by our environment; we may make them because we wish to please ourselves or because we wish to set an example, that is, to persuade others to be pleased with what pleases us. 18 Character results as these choices accumulate into a pattern of self-chosen conduct. The choice in selfpresentation is concerned with the how of conduct and not the consequences or achievement of goals or projects. Even if we do not have complete control over the ends we wish to achieve in action, the manner of our appearance is a result of our "deliberate choice" between modes of self-presentation, or "ways of

17 18

Arendt, Willing, 195. Arendt, Thinking, 36. Ibid.

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performing," regardless of consequences. 19 Unlike ends, the achievement of which is always subject to the actions and reactions of others, self-presentation is much more within the power of the individual. The habits of character can be learned from others by example and built up through repetition in relatively predictable circumstances, while a novel project cannot be "simulated" or practiced before it begins. In the carrying out of novel action, the habits of character often meet their ultimate test, and the world sees exactly how strong a person's character is in the midst of uncontrollable events. Judging's choice in selfpresentation should be strictly contrasted with willing's conflicted futural projection. Judging chooses from known possibilities and it is not oriented toward projects, which allows it to avoid the reflexive conflicts of willing. So, even if judgment is involved in action, its involvement is related only to that which is relatively predictable and known. To revisit terminology from the Human Condition, the self is not the author of its own life-story: the choice is related to one's character but not to the narrative in which that character is embedded. There are a few crucial passages from Thinking that address the relation of judging to the other cognitive and mental faculties. In her "Postscriptum," Arendt writes about her planned account of judgment: "I shall show that my own main assumption in singling out judgment as a distinct capacity of our minds has been that judgments are not arrived at by either deduction or induction; in short, they have nothing in common with logical operations—as when we say: All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, hence, Socrates is mortal." 20 Judging's dealings with particulars is not dictated by the universals and rules that determine logical relationships. As with all mental activities, no necessity or coercion is present in the judging activity. Judgments do not appeal to cognitive standards, but are persuasive. At the end of "What makes us think?", Arendt claimed that thinking, in its Socratic mode, liberates judging by destroying rules, prejudices, and established opinions, and thereby opens up the possibility for particulars to be treated without general assumptions that pre-judge their meaning and worth. Judging requires thinking as a liberating condition, but it is not reducible to thinking's search for

19 20

Arendt, Thinking, 34-37; Arendt, Willing, 60. Arendt, Thinking, 215.

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general meaning. Judging may utilize general meanings to contextualize the particular phenomena under consideration, but judging's autonomy from thinking lies in its ability to treat particulars as particulars— as unique persons, events and actions. As Arendt stated repeatedly since Eichmann, to exercise moral judgment is not to make claims about the universal nature of good, evil, right, and wrong, but to conclude "this is good" or "this is wrong." This capacity to judge particulars as particulars is related to a basic impasse about the nature of human history and the role of the historian. In the passage below, Arendt outlines the problem, foreshadowing the basic motivations for Judging. And [the autonomy of judgment] 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 in the perspective of History and on 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 is 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. Here we shall have to concern ourselves, not for the first time, with the concept of history, but we may be able to reflect on the oldest meaning of this word, which, like so many other terms in our political and philosophical language, is Greek in origin, derived from historein, "to inquire in order to tell how it was"—legein ta eonta in Herodotus. But the origin of this verb is in turn Homer (Iliad XVIII), where the noun histōr ("historian," as it were) occurs, and that Homeric historian is the judge. If judgment is our faculty for dealing with the past, the historian is the inquiring man who by relating it sits in judgment over it. If that is so, we may reclaim our human dignity, win it back, as it were, from the pseudo-divinity named History of the modern age, without denying history's importance but denying its right to be the ultimate judge. Old Cato, with whom I started these reflections—"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 aptly sums up the political principle implied in the enterprise of reclamation. He said, "Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni" ("The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the defeated one pleases Cato"). 21 Arendt clearly emphasizes the moral implications involved, not just in our theories of judgment, but in our conceptions of history. For Arendt, if we think of human history as a unified necessary process that progresses towards what is better (History), then all moral criteria are dependent upon the direction of History in the future. Under this perspective, individual human beings cannot independently judge the

21

Ibid., 216.

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world as it has come to be, for the justification of the past and present is always beyond the reach of the individual. For Arendt, to be a historian and to tell "how it was" requires that one partake in the activity of judging, evaluating particulars in history without knowing the ultimate outcome of the historical process. As we have seen from Arendt's discussion of Duns Scotus in the previous chapter, the experiences of willing undermine the notion of necessity that is often assumed in causal explanations. The modern theories of History and Progress rely on a similar notion of necessity. A person who conceives of History as a necessary causal development—or, like Heidegger, as a process untouched by human initiative—overlooks his own ability to act and affect change in the world, and must think of his own judgments as products of the historical process. Only if events and actions, as well as mental activities, are actually contingently initiated by human beings does independent judgment make any sense. The experiences of willing are evidence for denying historical necessity and for viewing history in such a way that independent judgment is possible. On Arendt's interpretation of the modern assumption of Progress, the direction of History as a totality determines the worth of all particulars, and it is impossible to judge the particular independently of the trajectory of the future—historical success is the sole criterion of ethics. By contrast, Arendt's independent judge takes into account the historical context of events and actions without allowing the success or failure of those actions to be the ultimate criterion. The judging historian does not treat History as a totality, but reflects on finite narratives about particular persons and events. For Arendt, the historian cannot defer to History or Progress; to do so is to pretend that history has come to an end and that the historian himself has a complete view of the single historical development. In other words, to resort to notions of History and Progress is to jettison reality and the limits of human experience for the sake of speculative unity. Arendt often wrote as a judging historian, and Cato's principle is clearly at work in her reflections on the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. 22 Arendt affirmed the principles of the Revolution despite the fact

22

Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 480: "As I write this, more than one year has passed since the flames of the Hungarian revolution illuminated the immense landscape of post-war totalitarianism for twelve long days.

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that it failed to achieve any of its goals. While Arendt believes that ideally action should seek to secure a "foundation of freedom" in lasting political institutions, success remains secondary to principle. 23 The Revolution, like many others before and since, was a brief instance where freedom emerged into historical time in a brilliant and unmistakable way. The moral principles embodied in rare action are not diminished by the failure of political projects. Morally speaking, it is how the revolutionaries acted, as opposed to what they achieved, that is most meaningful. In light of these reflections about the historian, we can further appreciate Arendt's use of Kafka's parable in Thinking. The thinker and judge cannot transcend historical time completely and cannot evaluate the whole of history. The human mind is free to move within the "space" of historical time, seeking general meaning and coming to judgments about particular historical actions and events. From the perspective of mental life, the past and the future are opposing forces that meet at the self: time is centered on the self that is willing to enter into the gap between past and future for the sake of reflection. The dignity of human beings does not lie in Mankind's future Progress, which could never be experienced by any particular individual. Dignity is achieved by the judge who, although finite and situated in historical time, does not defer to these speculative maneuvers or try to escape to an eternal perspective. Arendt places metaphysical, universal standards (History, Progress, Success) in opposition to standards embodied by particular phenomena. The standards of judgment have no absolute basis: they rely on historically contingent appearances that do not force the mind to adopt them. In addition to the above problem regarding judging and history, Arendt posed two other central problems in Willing that Judging would have surely addressed. First, Arendt developed the fundamental temporal conflict between thinking and willing. Thinking's orientation to the past is threatened by the will's futural projection, and thinking's ability to impute necessity into its reflections challenges the will's freedom. The tendency in the philosophical tradition has been to grant thinking absolute precedence over

This was a true event whose stature will not depend upon victory or defeat; its greatness is secure in the tragedy it enacted." 23 For Arendt, the common phrase "being on the right side of history" is a dangerous one, for it implies that historical success is the moral justification for an opinion or perspective.

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willing, promoting necessity and universal affirmation and denying novelty, human freedom, and the contingency of historical events. Similarly, when willing is elevated to an absolute position in the mind and its limits are not recognized—as in Nietzsche, for instance—willing's futural orientation leads to the destruction of the past. When conceived as absolute, each faculty is incompatible with any ethical distinctions between particulars: thinking would affirm all existence due to its need for mental tranquility and willing would negate everything for the sake of the feeling of power. In this dichotomy between thinking and willing, it appears we must either deny novelty and freedom to save the past, or we must sacrifice the past to our impetus for novelty and power. This temporal problem between thinking and willing is mitigated by judging's capacity to incorporate aspects of past and future. Judging evaluates past particulars as contingent facts. Even though the past cannot now be undone by human initiative, judging recognizes that the past could have been otherwise, that actions and events need not have happened as they did. On the other hand, by being oriented strictly to the past, judging avoids the anxious, futural reflexivity of willing. But, by treating the past as a result of human initiative, judging confirms and helps to preserve our experiences of willing and contingency. Second, at the end of our investigation of Willing, we encountered the issue of whether we will affirm or reject our natality, our freedom to begin something new. Judgment was introduced as the faculty involved in deciding one's pleasures and displeasures, and it is called upon to decide "whether we like our freedom or abhor its abhor its arbitrariness, are 'pleased' with it or prefer to escape its awesome responsibility by electing some form of fatalism." 24 For Arendt, allowing History to be the judge is one form of fatalism that portrays displeasure with freedom and attempts to escape it. In the activity of judging, we implicitly affirm the freedom of human action by treating past particulars as not determined or necessitated by historical forces. Judgment is built on this affirmative recognition of our futural temporality and the reality of historical novelty. Although the judge occupies a place in history, the judge's pleasures and displeasures are not merely a passive product of history. The judge also affirms her own mental freedom in deciding her pleasures and displeasures. 24

Willing, 217.

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As I have argued, Arendt's Willing volume is a defense of human freedom and the validity of certain mental experiences that testify to the reality of free action. By clarifying the paradoxes and limits of the human will, Arendt has distanced herself from traditional conceptions of moral judgment. The consistent denial of spontaneous freedom in the tradition problematizes personal responsibility and individual agency, giving primacy to the analysis of historical trends and social forces instead of individual initiatives and the collective action of definite groups. On this view, the only possible contingency in human affairs is that of history and society, forces which are seen to undermine or utterly determine individual agency. As Arendt argues, moral responsibility rests on the human capacity of free will. A tenable view of free will requires a commitment to contingency and the complex temporality of human experience. Since we are temporal and worldly creatures, our moral claims cannot be absolute. The reality of freedom implies that we are not mere spectators of the world but that we are, at least in distinct moments, appearing actors as well. As such, human beings are always already involved in the world and cannot take an absolute position outside it. And, due to the futural dimension of our experience, we also cannot take an absolute position within the temporal order, as though our position in history allows us to grasp necessity in the historical process as a whole. For issues of moral judgment, we must acknowledge our temporality and the limits of our moral claims. Judgment is infused with a measure of contingency—to reject this contingency is to renege on the reality of freedom and moral responsibility. In line with the arguments of Willing, Arendt's response to the realities of freedom, contingency, and temporality is to offer an account of how we can arrive at generally valid judgments as opposed to absolute ones. Since judging cannot appeal to universal truth to coerce consensus, freedom is built into the activity of judging as well. The freedom of judging is a freedom from egoism, which is due to the power of imagination, in particular the ability to imagine other persons' perspectives.

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Arendt on Reflective Judgment in Kant's Third Critique Some of the best source material we have for what would have been written in Judging is found in a posthumously published volume entitled Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy. 25 The lectures at the heart of the volume were taken from a course Arendt taught in the fall of 1970. Although several prior courses had touched upon many of the same issues to varying degrees, the 1970 course is the most developed account. 26 By the early 1960's, Arendt was turning to Kant's Critique of Judgment in almost all contexts where issues of judgment arose. In the first chapter, we surveyed Arendt's 1961 essay "Crisis in Culture," where Arendt briefly appealed to Kant's notion of "enlarged mentality" to motivate her view that culture and politics both depend upon the human capacity to reflect from the perspectives of others. Arendt's appropriation of Kant's theory of judgment needs to be put in the context of her assessment of the first two Critiques. In a revealing footnote in Thinking, Arendt admits that her "chief reservations about Kant's philosophy concern precisely his moral philosophy, that is, the Critique of Practical Reason." 27 In her 1965-6 lectures, Arendt distanced herself from Kant's moral philosophy due to its reliance on notions of obedience and absolute moral knowledge, but her Socratic account of conscience also affirms many features of Kant's approach. For Arendt, conscience is only negative in that it constitutes moral limits for action, but it does not help us to act in any particular, positive manner. By stripping Kant's moral system of its absolutism and relegating its relevance to issues of individual conscience, Arendt opens up space for a different kind of moral faculty, modeled on reflective judgment in the third Critique. In Thinking, Arendt's distinction between truth and meaning is her adaptation of some of Kant's main commitments in the Critique of Pure Reason. The distinction aims to legitimate thinking, in its speculative and narrative modes, while conceding that thinking does not produce knowledge. In the Willing volume, Kant's version of the will is fundamentally flawed because he identifies it with practical

25

Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 26 Beiner, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, vii-viii. 27 Arendt, Thinking, 222-223, fn. 83.

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reason. However, Arendt affirms several of Kant's isolated statements about freedom's spontaneity from the first Critique, indicating the validity of Kant's antinomies about freedom and necessity insofar as they help us appreciate the conflict between willing and thinking. Arendt sees in Kant's philosophy her own concerns about the factuality of freedom as well as the difficulties that philosophers face in trying to understand freedom's spontaneity and contingency. Like her interpretations of the first two Critiques, Arendt approaches the Critique of Judgment with her own purposes in mind, and not for the sake of merely explicating the Kantian system. 28 This is demonstrated by the narrow scope of her investigations: Kant's treatment of teleological judgment plays only a minor role in Arendt's lectures, and she mainly ignores Kant's views of the sublime. 29 Arendt's departure from Kant is also clear when she applies aesthetic judgment to morality. While Arendt states that she is inquiring into Kant's unwritten political philosophy, her project simultaneously concerns the status of moral judgments. Although Kant's mature critical system separated reflective judgment from pure practical reason, Kant's early work had not yet done so. For example, his early plans for a moral philosophy were "announced under the title Critique of Moral Taste." Arendt thinks that, as Kant's thought developed, "two things happened: behind taste, a favorite topic of the whole eighteenth century, Kant discovered an entirely new human faculty, namely, judgment; but at the same time, he withdrew moral propositions from the competence of this new faculty." 30 In her Kant lectures, Arendt follows Kant's original plan, as it were, and consistently refers to judgment as a moral faculty, the ability to tell right from wrong, good from evil. 31 By going against Kant's later separation of reflective judgment and morality, Arendt is poised to address the moral issues that she first pondered in the aftermath of the 28

Arendt spends a considerable amount of energy at the beginning of her lectures trying to legitimate her project of outlining Kant's unwritten political philosophy. I am not concerned with the legitimacy of Arendt's project in this regard, and I will not focus my attention on how well she interprets Kant's work. I am more interested in how she understands her own adaptation of Kantian ideas. 29 There are certainly good reasons for Arendt to avoid the issues of the sublime. In Kant, the experience of the sublime points us to the infinite and to the moral dignity of the individual rational being. Thus, the sublime is connected to our transcendence, and therefore cannot play a key role in the activity of judging, which is oriented to the common world. By contrast, beauty is an experience of harmony with the world through finite particular appearances. Beauty reveals the compatibility of our sensibility and our understanding, whereas the sublime reveals the inadequacy of our sensibility in light of our rational ideals. 30 Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 10. 31 For examples, see ibid., 64, 65, 68, 84.

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Eichmann trial. After the collapse of traditional morality and the realization that moral judgment cannot be taken for granted, Arendt wants to investigate how moral judgment could function without following pre-established rules or conventions. As we have seen, her earlier lectures in 1965-6 exhibit this same approach to Kant's work. For Arendt, one of Kant's most important insights about human interaction is that the individual human mind depends upon the "public use of reason," interacting with others and communicating one's opinions. To examine one's own thoughts critically requires interaction with others who challenge one's ideas. Kant's position on this matter is quite noteworthy because it is not the position of the political man but of the philosopher or thinker. Thinking, as Kant agreed with Plato, is the silent dialogue of myself with myself (das Reden mit sich selbst), and that thinking is a "solitary business" (as Hegel once remarked) is one of the few things on which all thinkers were agreed. Also, it is of course by no means true that you need or can even bear the company of others when you happen to be busy thinking; yet, unless you can somehow communicate and expose to the test of others, either orally or in writing, whatever you may have found out when you were alone, this faculty exerted in solitude will disappear. 32 However, the public exchange of ideas is dependent on the capacity of each person to be impartial, to not consider only one's own opinions. Kant thought that, through the power of imagination, individuals could achieve an enlarged mentality that would take into account the perspectives of others. 33 The enlarged mentality is open to the views of others because it can represent them in imagination. Impartiality does not require an absolute standpoint, "some higher standpoint that would then actually settle the dispute by being altogether above the melée." 34 An enlarged mentality overcomes self-interest by thinking from other standpoints, and the more extensive the reach of imagination, the more generally valid our opinions will be. In the third Critique, Kant is less concerned with human beings in the singular, as cognitive subjects or rational moral agents, but is treating human beings as essentially plural, depending upon each other to some extent for the functioning of their judging faculty.

32

Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 40. Ibid., 42. 34 Ibid. 33

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For Kant and Arendt, imagination is active, not passive. To be passive in one's opinions is to rely on one's prejudices without interacting with other perspectives. Prejudices are like habits of behavior, for they are the everyday, routine ways in which we evaluate and react to the world. Just as willing interrupts our normal default modes of behavior and considers novel action, judging interrupts our prejudicial framework and allows our evaluations to be active and deliberate. By the use of imagination, one "moves in a space that is potentially public, open to all sides," and Kant's ideal is the world citizen who "trains [his or her] imagination to go visiting." 35 Having an enlarged mentality is not to merely "exchange" one's prejudices for those of others. Imagination allows one to reflect in such a way that multiple perspectives can influence one's own judgment, but the other perspectives do not strictly determine the judgments to be made. Arendt's point about impartiality is that reflection and imagination allow us to transcend our subjective conditions to an extent but never absolutely. 36 In the end, no matter how extensive the enlarged mentality becomes, a judgment remains a contingent choice made by the judge herself. The number of perspectives that I consider in reflection is not all that counts in making good judgments. There is also the quality of my imagination, how well I can imagine the way others might see and react to particular situations and phenomena: "The more people's standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion." 37 For Arendt, judging, like thinking, requires that we strive to reach a level of depth in our reflections. A cursory survey of everyone's opinions—e.g. a public opinion poll— does not lead to good judgments, for it ignores the qualitative element of imagination altogether. To be sure, the qualitative factor can only be tested in real communication, when I learn how well I have imagined others' perspectives. But, to repeat, Arendt's enlarged mentality is a mental activity and is not

35

Ibid., 43. Villa, "Thinking and Judging," 3. 37 Arendt, "Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1977), 237. 36

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reducible to the process of public debate and deliberation. This is a solitary activity in which others' possible judgments are made present through imagination. Throughout her work, Arendt insisted that reality for human beings is constituted by the plurality of perspectives from which it is experienced. One of Eichmann's deficiencies was the lack of imagination, his inability to "think from the perspectives of others." He failed to imagine how others would understand certain actions and events, and consequently he was unable to apprehend the moral aspects of what he was doing. One needs to achieve an enlarged mentality in order for moral phenomena to appear as real, to appear as part of the human world as opposed to being merely subjective fantasy. In this light, Arendt's interest in Stoicism resonates with her evaluation of Eichmann. One of Arendt's concerns is that self-interest—in Eichmann's case, interests in career success and being part of something historic and grandiose—can blind one to reality. The Stoic deliberately denies the reality of moral phenomena for the sake of personal tranquility. Eichmann focused his mental energy on bolstering his own selfish interests and protecting himself from disappointment and pain. His sense of "elation," which arose from his own absurd and inaccurate testimony, seems to point in this direction. For Arendt, the responsible judge does not sacrifice reality to self-interest, taking account of even the most unwelcome facts and perspectives. In her response to the Eichmann controversy, Arendt vacillated between the language of "inability" and "refusal" in describing Eichmann's deficiencies. Arendt complicated her analysis even more by introducing the notion that reflection moves in a "dimension of depth," "striking roots" so as to anchor the individual from merely following the winds of change. In our present context, I want to suggest that one aspect of reflective depth involves our ability to achieve an enlarged mentality. To achieve depth takes effort and time to think and imagine from perspectives that are not our own. Of course, I can refuse to [represent others] and form an opinion that takes only my own interests, or the interests of the group to which I belong, into account; nothing, indeed, is more common, even among highly sophisticated people, than the blind obstinacy that

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becomes manifest in lack of imagination and failure to judge. But the very quality of an opinion, as of a judgment, depends upon the degree of its impartiality. 38 On one level, depth of reflection is gained by looking at phenomena from many perspectives. The refusal to think and judge is a refusal to move in the dimensions of depth that contribute to the plurality of the human world. This is why Arendt insisted in her earlier lectures that those who refuse to judge are not those who should dispute others' judgments. 39

The Activity of Judging: Withdrawal, Reflexivity, and Taste For Kant, the task of evaluating human life on earth is a task for every person. But the question is, on what basis do we evaluate it? Within Kant's work, Arendt sees multiple distinct and even seemingly contradictory answers to this question. The first is the standard of Progress, under which particular events and facts are evaluated by how they contribute to future civilization and culture. This standard applies only to the human species, and "is thus of little avail to the individual" who cannot experience the larger whole in which his life is granted its meaning. 40 Arendt believes this idea of Progress is inhuman, for it assumes that the future justifies the past and present, and human individuals have worth insofar as they contribute to the species' improvement. This runs counter to Kant's notion of human dignity, that every human being has intrinsic moral worth and should not be treated only as a means to an end. Kant's second standard is this notion of human dignity, which is developed primarily in his moral philosophy. Due to the capacity for autonomous moral legislation, each person is an end-in-itself and the ground of all moral worth. From this perspective, human life is worthwhile by definition, no matter the conditions of the world. Unfortunately, this perspective only takes into account the individual in isolation from the common world shared with others. Since the moral law is complete within the individual rational mind, the human condition of plurality has no part in human dignity. Plurality, from the perspective of the moral law, is unessential and perhaps even a hindrance to achieving moral autonomy. 38

Ibid. Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy" in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 141. 40 Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 26. 39

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Arendt suggests a possible third answer found in Kant's Critique of Judgment. For Kant, the experience of beauty contains a kind of pleasure that justifies human life in the common world. Unlike sensual pleasures, which always require pain to accompany them, the contemplative pleasure of beauty has no inherent connection to pain. 41 In this way, the love of beauty is distinct from mere desire and the enjoyments that accompany the life process. The experience of beauty shows that human beings are at home in the world, at least in a limited fashion. On this note, Arendt once wrote that it is "the sense of beauty, or taste, with which we love the world." 42 And since the experience of beauty depends on the interaction of human plurality, the pleasure of beauty indicates that we are at home in the world only under the condition of human plurality. According to Arendt, along with the moral dignity of the human being, the factuality of beauty would have been a central element in any Kantian defense of human existence. 43 In much the same way, Arendt would appeal to beauty and human dignity to justify human life. While Arendt denies that we can be at home in the world in a complete way—remember her rejection of German Idealism's goal of complete reconciliation—there are particulars that give us an intimation of being at home in the world. Arendt locates human dignity in our faculty for moral and aesthetic judgment, as opposed to autonomous moral reason. Dignity is not a privilege of the isolated rational being; it belongs to the judge who shares the world with others in order to appreciate the beautiful and good things in the world. Even in the judgment of evil, bad or ugly things, the judge's dignity is exhibited. By not merely acquiescing to factual reality, the judge demonstrates her freedom from any supposedly necessitating forces. For Kant, the impartiality of the enlarged mentality requires that judgment does not prescribe a course of action. Judgment's contemplative pleasure is available only to the spectator, one who is not called upon to perform or to achieve an end. Arendt writes, "This general standpoint we spoke of earlier as impartiality; it is a viewpoint from which to look upon, to watch, to form judgments, or, as Kant himself says, to reflect upon human affairs. It does not tell one how to act. It does not even tell one how 41

Ibid., 30. Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 13. 43 Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 31. 42

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to apply the wisdom, found by virtue of occupying a 'general standpoint,' to the particulars of political life." 44 Arendt follows Kant in separating the perspective of the actor from that of the spectator. For judgment of the particular—This is beautiful, This is ugly, This is right, This is wrong—has no place in Kant's moral philosophy. Judgment is not practical reason; practical reason "reasons" and tells me what to do and what not to do; it lays down the law and is identical with the will, and the will utters commands; it speaks in imperatives. Judgment, on the contrary, arises from "merely contemplative pleasure or inactive delight." 45 Kantian practical reason is the perspective of the rational actor who is reflecting on "what I ought to do." By contrast, reflective judgment is defined from the perspective of the spectator. For Arendt, the focus is not on the self who acts but on the world in which action takes place, and only the spectator can be trusted to assess actions in their worldly context. The actor, who is focused on and committed to her specific project, does not have the ability to "step back" to consider alternative perspectives—the actor's impartiality is compromised by her involvement. In the realm of art, the artist stands in the same relation to spectators as the actor does in the realm of politics. For Kant, genius is the creative capacity through which beautiful art is produced. But even though genius is needed to produce beautiful art, taste is primary for deciding whether artworks are beautiful or not. Without taste, genius is simply lawless creative freedom. The artist needs both genius and taste in order for the content of the artwork to be understood and enjoyed by spectators. Taste allows the content to transcend idiosyncratic preference and be "permanently and generally assented to." The spectators, by contrast, must have taste even though they do not need to possess any creative genius— "taste or judgment is not the privilege of genius." 46 In sum, the public realm of art depends on spectators even though the objects of consideration are produced solely by artists. The condition for beauty is communicability, whether a work can be appreciated from the standpoint of an impartial spectator. The actor operates under the same conditions as the artist, needing to make his action intelligible to the observing public. Like the artist must think of her audience, the actor must try to anticipate how his

44

Ibid., 44. Ibid., 15. 46 Ibid., 63. 45

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actions will be received by others: "And this critic and spectator sits in every actor and fabricator: without this critical, judging faculty the doer or maker would be so isolated from the spectator that he would not even be perceived. Or, to put it another way, still in Kantian terms: the very originality of the artist (or the very novelty of the actor) depends on his making himself understood by those who are not artists (or actors)." 47 While genius operates primarily in the singular individual, judgment functions only in reference to a community of spectators: "Spectators exist only in the plural. The spectator is not involved in the act, but he is always involved with his fellow spectators...the faculty they have in common is the faculty of judgment." 48 In the mental activity of judging, this community of spectators is imagined, or represented, by the judging individual. For Arendt, the dignity of humanity lies in our ability to share the world with others. Just as the artist depends on spectators to judge and enjoy her work, so too action depends on spectators to make his action meaningful. Action is not the sole source of human dignity. The moral criteria of action—i.e. the measures of "dignified" human action—is determined from the perspective of the spectators, not that of the actors. In Kant, "common sense" is the ability to judge as spectators, and its meaning is opposed to merely "private sense." 49 Strangely, for Arendt, Kant's common sense is modeled on the sense of taste, a markedly private sense. Out of the five senses, sight, hearing, and touch can be considered objective or public: their objects can be easily identified, described, and represented in memory and imagination. Taste and smell, by contrast, are subjective or private. The sensations of taste and smell are "inner" sensations, not directly communicable and not as easily represented in memory. Most importantly, it is entirely possible to withhold judgment in cases of the three objective senses, while it is impossible with taste and smell. Taste and smell are essentially "discriminating" senses—pleasure and displeasure are inherent to them, and the affects are "immediate and overwhelming." From these considerations, we often conclude that issues of mere taste are not open to debate or dispute. Given these distinctive 47

Ibid. Emphasis added. Ibid. 49 Ibid., 64. 48

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characteristics, why is taste the model of judgment and common sense? And, how can the experiences of such a "private sense" be communicated to others? For Arendt, the above "riddle" in Kant's account is solved by the capacity of imagination. Through imagination we shift our attention from direct perception of an object to its representation: "Imagination, the ability to make present what is absent, transforms the objects of the objective senses [i.e. sight, touch, hearing] into 'sensed' objects, as though they were objects of an inner sense [like taste]. This happens by reflecting not on an object but on its representation. The represented object now arouses one's pleasure or displeasure, not direct perception of the object." 50 Imagination makes it possible for us to experience a kind of pleasure and displeasure that is distinct from an "empirical interest" in an object present to the senses. Through imagination we focus our attention on the representation of the object and how it affects us, and we remove ourselves from any overwhelming sensual affects of the object. 51 For Arendt, this aspect of Kant's theory of judgment is the basis for her conception of judging's mental withdrawal. By dealing only with the past—with representations and not with present objects—judging can mediate its affective responses through an activity of reflection. For Arendt, the metaphor of taste captures the way imagination "internalizes" the object so that it is necessarily accompanied by pleasure or displeasure, but the pleasure or displeasure is now of a "reflective" and not a merely sensual nature. With this use of the imagination, matters of idiosyncratic taste, which are entirely subjective and indisputable by definition, can become issues of judgment: One then speaks of judgment and no longer of taste because, though it still affects one like a matter of taste, one now has, by means of representation, established the proper distance, the remoteness or uninvolvedness or disinteredness, that is requisite for approbation and disapprobation, for evaluating something at its proper worth. By removing the object, one has established the conditions for impartiality. 52 Imagination creates a reflective distance from the object so that we can bring the perspective of others to bear on our pleasures and displeasures. Unlike sensual desires, which are satisfied by the private possession or consumption of the object by the individual, beauty is only enjoyed in reference to others. 50

Ibid., 65. This does not mean that we are free from very strong pleasures and displeasures elicited by the imagined representation. 52 Ibid., 67. 51

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Beauty is experienced when the object is shared with others, when it is enjoyed together from an impartial position. For Kant, "egoism" is overcome by taking others into account: "We must overcome our special subjective conditions for the sake of others. In other words, the nonsubjective element in the nonobjective senses [i.e. taste] is intersubjectivity." 53 Despite the prima facie concerns about modeling judgment on the sense of taste, Arendt defends Kant's use of taste metaphors. In particular, Arendt thought Kant was right that "the true opposite of the Beautiful is not the Ugly but 'that which excites disgust.'" 54 The connotations of "disgust" go beyond those of "ugliness": there is an inherent displeasure in disgust that is not necessarily part of our experiences of what is merely ugly. Likewise, in beauty, the pleasure of reflection is inseparable from the experience. The validity of taste metaphors is that they communicate the pleasure or displeasure essential to judgment. The sense of taste discriminates, and the activity of judging discriminates as well, although from an mediated perspective. Arendt isolates two distinct operations required for judgment in Kant's account. The first is the "operation of imagination," the use of the imagination to represent the object. Judging can only occur as an "afterthought," when the object of the senses has been removed through imagination. This use of the imagination establishes a condition for impartiality by creating distance from the object to be assessed. Imagination allows one to see the object as the impartial spectator, but as the imagination represents the object, it is made available to one's "inner sense," where one is immediately affected by the representation. The second—"the actual activity of judging something"—is the "operation of reflection." In this activity, the judge must assess his own immediate experiences of pleasure and displeasure: "The operation of imagination has made the absent immediately present to one's inner sense, and this inner sense is discriminatory by definition: it says it-pleases or it-displeases. It is called taste because, like taste, it chooses. But this choice is itself subject to still another choice: one can approve or disapprove of the

53

Ibid. In this context, Arendt repeats an earlier example of how taste can be intersubjective: "you need company to enjoy a meal." The enjoyment of a meal with others is distinct from sensual, private pleasure—it depends on our imagination to bring others' thoughts, feelings, and opinions into contact with our own. 54 Ibid., 68.

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very fact of pleasing [or displeasing]." 55 Thus, the immediate fact of pleasure (or displeasure) in the operation of imagination is subject to a subsequent evaluation: does the pleasure (or displeasure) please or displease me? Do I approve or disapprove of my imaginative affection? These questions are decided by the operation of reflection. The pleasure of approval and the displeasure of disapproval are selfconstituted: "The very act of approbation pleases, the very act of disapprobation displeases." Whereas all bodily and psychological pleasures and displeasures are passively suffered, judging is an activity of choosing whether to be pleased or displeased. According to Arendt, judging requires that we imagine the perspectives of others, but in her presentation of the two operations of judgment, it is unclear in which of the two the perspectives of others come into play. The importance of this issue is that it is doubtful whether the choice of approbation or disapprobation is possible without a prior consideration of the perspectives of others. In other words, if I rely only on my imagination of the object, I am still operating in a merely subjective way—I only have my way of sensing and responding to the object. The perspectives of others open me up to other affective and perceptive possibilities with regard to the object and they influence my opinions. In her discussion of approbation and disapprobation, Arendt has pinpointed the reflexive moment in the judging process. The reflexivity of judging is found in the free choice regarding whether to be pleased or displeased. Kant's account appears to offer a notion of reflexive pleasure and displeasure that is uncommon—or perhaps non-existent—in the philosophical tradition. 56 Pleasure and displeasure are almost always understood as passive affections. Kant's notion of "free favor" in the Critique of Judgment breaks with his usual insistence that pleasures are always entirely passive, "inclinations" that bring us out of ourselves and undermine our integrity as persons. The reflexivity of judging in the operation of 55

Ibid., 69. Diprose claims that Arendt bypasses Nietzsche's emphasis on "corporeal and affective self-relation": "What [Nietzsche] would protest though is how Arendt explicitly excludes emotion, affect and feeling from judgment and conscience." See Rosalyn Diprose, "Arendt and Nietzsche on Responsibility and Futurity," Philosophy and Social Criticism 34 (2008): 619, 624. However, Diprose does not appreciate that Arendt's operation of reflection is an affective, although not corporeal, reflexivity. Affection is not excluded from judgment, but it is mediated by reflection. I think Arendt does bypass Nietzsche's emphasis on the corporeal for its conceptual ties to necessity and the life process—the mediation of reflection is meant to undermine those conceptual ties without excluding the affective element altogether. 56

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reflection allows judging to be more than an act of mere imagination. In the end, after I have been affected, pleased or displeased in the process of imagination, I ultimately decide the worth of those affections. The affective elements of judging—how the representation affects me and how I am affected by others' thoughts and feelings—is counterbalanced by the reflexive act of approbation or disapprobation. The independence of judging requires that I am not only receptive of others' perspectives, but that I choose how to position myself in response to them. In turn, the perspectives of others allow me to reevaluate myself and my pleasures and displeasures. In Arendt's analysis, we should distinguish between three operations in the judging process, not just two: the imagination of the object, the reflection on the perspectives of others, and the reflexive choice between approbation and disapprobation. These distinctions are crucial for noticing the ways in which the other faculties are contributing to the process. It also helps us clarify the ideal order of these operations. Imagination, the first of the three operations, re-presents past objects for the mind to consider. The imagination of an object seems to be an operation necessary for both thinking's search for meaning and judging's consideration of others' perspectives in relation to the object. Thinking is concerned with the meaning of the whole, and it provides the worldly context of meaning in which particulars are judged, but it has no inherently intersubjective aspect. Judging is concerned with the evaluation of particulars and the representation of others' perspectives. The second operation, the reflection on others' perspectives, is the only operation unique to judging—it belongs to judging's autonomy from the other faculties. The third operation, the reflexive choice between approbation and disapprobation, seems almost identical to the will's spontaneous affirmation or negation of a particular, the only difference being that it is preceded by and informed by the perspectives of others. I think it best to attribute this third operation to the will. In the process Arendt outlined, the will's affirmation and negation needs to follow the reflection on others' perspectives in order that the will's spontaneity can be performed impartially. Conversely, without the spontaneity the will provides, judging would only be able to consider what others think and never be able to "make up its mind" in an independent fashion. Later, we will return to issues regarding the autonomy of the faculties and consider what is at stake in these distinctions. 348

Judging and the Sensus Communis The choice between approbation and disapprobation is the will's autonomous choice between affirmation and negation. However, in the context of judging, it is not completely autonomous, for it requires, in addition to the representation of an object, the representation of other persons' perspectives. "I judge as a member of a community," as a human being on earth with others, not as a purely rational being legislating the moral law. Judging takes others' "possible judgments into account," anticipating as far as possible how others will judge the same objects. 57 Judgment is not an "enormously enlarged empathy through which one can know what actually goes on in the mind of all others." 58 In the judging activity, as I actively represent objects and others' perspectives to myself, I open myself to be affected in new ways.59 I overcome my narrow, egoistic self-interest actively by expanding my mentality. My choice between approbation and disapprobation is informed by how I imagine others will respond to the same particulars and how they will respond to my feelings of pleasure and displeasure. Thus, the criterion of [judgment is] communicability or publicness. One is not overeager to express joy at the death of a father or feelings of hatred and envy; one will; on the other hand, have no compunctions about announcing that one enjoys doing scientific work, and one will not hide grief at the death of an excellent husband. The criterion, then, is communicability, and the standard of deciding about it is common sense. 60 The traditional liberum arbitrium shares with Arendtian judgment its characteristic impartiality—in some versions, as is often criticized, the liberum arbitrium is seen as completely indifferent—but here judgment also explicitly references other persons and their points of view. In Kant, reflective judgments are in need of communication in a way that both bodily sensations and the moral law are not. Bodily sensations are private and cannot be directly communicated, and the moral law is universal and absolute, and therefore it does not require communication to be known or to function in its characteristic manner. 61 A similar claim can be made about scientific knowledge as well. In

57

Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 67. Emphasis added. Ibid., 43. 59 Marshall echoes this idea nicely when he claims that judging is an activity of "receptive listening." See David L. Marshall, "The Origin and Character of Hannah Arendt's Theory of Judgment," Political Theory 38 (2010): 378. 60 Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 69. 61 Ibid., 70. 58

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the Thinking volume, Arendt argued that common sense was the basis for experiencing reality qua reality, and that thinking, which withdraws from appearances in search of meaning and is performed in solitude, tends to undermine our sense of reality. In contrast to thinking, science, the "enormously refined prolongation of common-sense reasoning," is tied closely to reality through its dependence on sense perception. 62 Common sense in science and matters of the intellect does not need communication in the same manner that judging depends on it. The scientific process of verification functions on the assumption that evidence is the same for all human perceivers, and that perception has the force of necessity to coerce assent. Communicating results and evidence facilitates the overcoming of illusion and error, but the goal is to achieve consensus by submitting the different viewpoints to the coercive test of evidence. Although sense evidence may need to be expressed in language to be shared with others who are not present to perceive it directly, the truth of the evidence does not depend on communication between different points of view. Science assumes a homogeneity of perception and measurement that is not present in matters of reflective judgment. 63 Thus, for Arendt, the common sense involved in judging cannot be the same as that which is needed for the perception of objective reality and the scientific enterprise. The distinction between truth and meaning demands that common sense functions differently in matters that do not possess the coercive force of cognition. As if to emphasize judging's dependence on difference and communication, Arendt focuses on Kant's use of "sensus communis" in the Critique of Judgment. Sensus communis is not merely a "sense common to all" in each person's private experience, like the sense of sight, for instance. The sensus communis "fits us into a community," making possible the specifically human forms of communication and speech about a world constituted by differences of perspective. Insanity is the loss of this sensus communis, which deprives one of the reality of the common world and relegates one to merely

62

Arendt, Thinking, 54. Of course, at the level of theory (as opposed to experimentation and observation), debate is an integral part of the scientific enterprise. But, at that level, science seems to be involved in an activity of interpretation that is not subject to the same standard of evidence as the immediate data that are being interpreted. In the scientific enterprise, however, the theory is not for its own sake but as an instrument for the sake of achieving further evidence in the world of appearances, for furthering our common sense understanding of the world. 63

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private experience. 64 The operation of reflection creates the space for such a sensus communis. The operation of imagination establishes impartial distance from the object of perception and the operation of reflection represents others' perspectives in the mental activity. The judge can achieve a "general standpoint" by actively reflecting from the standpoints of particular others. By reflecting on others' particular viewpoints, judging contains an implicit acknowledgment that some aspects of human reality are not determined by the universal sameness of the human sensory apparatus. To demand scientific objectivity in the realm of human affairs is to treat all persons as perceivers only and to ignore the activities of the mind that contribute to human difference. The sensus communis of judging requires that we imagine the viewpoints of persons, those beings who are capable of free action and free judgment. For Kant, taste is the ability to communicate the feelings that are arrived at through reflecting from a general standpoint. This sensus communis is what judgment appeals to in everyone, and it is this possible appeal that gives judgments their special validity. The it-pleases-me-or-displeases-me, which as a feeling seems so utterly private and noncommunicative, is actually rooted in this community sense and is therefore open to communication once it has been transformed by reflection, which takes all others and their feelings into account.65 For Kant, the validity of judgments lies in their ability to be communicated to others in the world. In addition to communicability, Arendt stresses that the validity of judgments is their ability to be persuasive. Judgments do not just communicate objectively about reality. Due to its inherently discriminating character, judgments cannot help but affect the judgments of others. Judgments are not scientifically objective claims or truth claims: they cannot coerce consensus. Agreement on matters of judgment is achieved only by persuasion: judgment "woos" or "courts" the agreement of others. 66 In the mental activity of judging, we simulate the dynamics of persuasion that inevitably occur in our worldly interactions with others. For Arendt, the persuasive element of judging gives it its political character.

64

Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 70. Ibid., 72. 66 Ibid. 65

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Kant understands impartiality as a kind of "disinterestedness," which in aesthetics is the "disinterested delight in the beautiful." 67 The delight in beauty is, ironically, a kind of interest in disinterestedness. "Interest" is normally understood as the usefulness of an object, and it ultimately refers back to the subject who has a purpose or desire in mind. But in the case of beautiful things, they are definitively useless, good for no other purpose than to appear. Kant writes, "The beautiful prepares us to love something, even nature, without interest." 68 Kant's disinterested delight is an "interest" in things (or at least those aspects) that transcend use. To judge that something is beautiful is to experience pleasure in the mere existence (mere appearance) of an object and to love something without a desire for the object or a purpose in mind for its use. Likewise, to judge that something is morally good requires that I do not see its worth in relation to a purpose I or others have for it. The enlarged mentality of the sensus communis allows us to overcome our own private, merely subjective points of view: "Private conditions condition us; imagination and reflection enable us to liberate ourselves from them and to attain that relative impartiality that is the specific virtue of judgment." 69 While we can never attain an absolute impartiality—as though we were only a spectator of the world—the impartiality of judgment is necessary for the existence of a public realm that is not ruled by merely private interests. The worldly reality of aesthetic and moral phenomena depends upon our capacity for an enlarged mentality. At this point, Arendt's treatment of Kant intersects her conception of the will's capacity to be transformed into love. The "amo: volo ut sis" of Augustine and Duns Scotus is nearly identical to the love of beauty in Kant insofar as they are both based on an interest in the mere existence of something without reference to utility, need, or desire. Willing is transformed into love when the will's need to accomplish a project gives way to the activity of affirming something independent of the self. Judging's disinterested delight in worldly particulars is the manifestation of the will's free affirmation in the context of

67

Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 73. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge, 2001), 5: 268. 69 Ibid., 73. 68

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intersubjectivity. The impartiality of judging is inherent in the distance of the spectator, which guarantees that the judge's interest in the beloved is non-possessive and non-egoistic. 70 But, in both judging and love the self remains active and free—affirmation does not extinguish the self, but allows for self's continued enjoyment of the beloved. 71 Judging represents others' perspectives and cannot be performed in a dualistic self-relation, and the disinterested delight in beauty is possible only in communication with others. In merely social and economic relations, humans are interdependent for the sake of the life process, for satisfaction of needs and wants through labor and consumption. On issues of judgment, we depend upon our fellow human beings for the very functioning of our minds. Arendt writes: "We find here, on the contrary, sociability as the very origin, not the goal, of man's humanity; that is, we find that sociability is the very essence of men insofar as they are of this world only...Kant stresses that at least one of our mental faculties, the faculty of judgment, presupposes the presence of others." 72 Arendt's presentation is somewhat ambiguous about the nature of "sociability" and how she is appropriating it from Kant. 73 Does the mental activity of judging depend on worldly interaction with others, the actual sharing of opinions and debate? Or, does worldly communication depend upon the mental activity of judging, imagination, and the sensus communis? Certainly, Arendt would not deny that we must communicate with real others in the world before we are capable of judging—we cannot imagine diverse perspectives if we have not first encountered some in the world. But, while the sensus communis depends on interaction with others by which we learn how others think and judge, genuine 70

Arendt, "Crisis in Culture," 210. In this respect, Villa is mistaken when he claims that Arendtian judgment requires a de-centering of the self—a forgetting about the self for the sake of the world. See Villa, "Beyond Good and Evil," 298. Only if we take the self in a very narrow sense, as a solipsistic self unconnected to others or to the world, is Villa's assertion valid. But, Arendt's treatment of the enlarged mentality conceives of the self as capable of overcoming solipsism in its mental activities. 72 Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 74. Here is another point at which Eichmann becomes a helpful example: he was involved in a political body, but was unable or unwilling to really communicate with others. 73 Goldman notices some places in Arendt's lectures where she slides between notions of the imagined community in the enlarged mentality (potential viewpoints) and notions of an actual political community. See Avery Goldman, “The Antinomy of Political Judgment: Kant, Arendt, and the Role of Purposiveness in Reflective Judgment,” Continental Philosophy Review 43 (2010): 337. I think these passages are not fatal to Arendt's case, as Goldman seems to suggest. 71

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communication with others also depends upon the preparatory work of mental judging by which we anticipate others' perspectives: "one can communicate only if one is able to think from the other person's standpoint; otherwise one will never meet him, never speak in a way that he understands." 74 It seems best to say that Arendt's account requires a level of interdependence between the mental operations of judging and worldly interaction with others. Even when there is a vibrant public realm in which one can engage in communication about the common world, the mental activity of judging is indispensible. At times when the space for public interaction is lacking, the individual will need to imagine the views of others without the benefit of hearing those others voice their actual opinions. To an extent—and only to an extent—the mind can operate without depending on real others for communication. The mind will have to rely on memory and imagination in order to generate the plurality of views needed for the enlarged mentality. The independence of judging is not simply the ability to make an autonomous choice in evaluating a particular; it is also tied to the capacity to generate the sensus communis through imagination. Plurality is always given first in the world, but in times of crisis it must be maintained solely by the mind. Even when the worldly conditions are favorable for worldly communication with others, the imaginative capacity of judging can represent possible perspectives that are not explicitly represented in contemporary public discourse. Judging is free to imagine alternatives to the given categories and standards of evaluation of the present period. Arendt consistently critiques rule-based, conventional morality because it tends to contribute to a level of stagnation in communication. Independent judgments infuse public discourse with new and challenging perspectives, forcing others to confront reality and reevaluate their opinions about it. Thus, the independence of the judge—in contrast to the isolated selfrelations of thinking and willing—is not fundamentally opposed to the conditions of political community. The judge enters into communication with diverse perspectives without deferring to them or allowing her opinions to collapse into them. The independence of judging from present worldly conditions is due to a certain kind of spontaneity within the activity. In an early essay, Arendt linked the capacity for beginning with the ability 74

Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 74.

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to judge without depending upon conventional morality: "Even though we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, a being whose essence is beginning may have enough of origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is [conventional] morality." 75 Arendt's affinity for Kantian reflective judgment comes from its independence from cognitive criteria and established social and moral rules. In matters of taste we exercise freedom from the constraint of rules. While there is no freedom in either desire (inclination) or in reason by themselves, judging is a free relation to particulars and to others. The reflexive approbation or disapprobation in the operation of reflection is freely given: as Kant says, "favor is the only free satisfaction." 76 For Arendt, judging's freedom lacks the tense reflexivity of willing because the self is not the center of concern. The position of the imagining spectator is impartial, while that of the willer is inherently interested in the performance of action, of her own historical appearance and the success of her venture. In Arendt's view of conscience as well, the self remains the primary object of concern, and conscience demands that one cannot be at odds with oneself, even if one is at odds with everyone else. By contrast, judging requires that we find agreement with at least some others. The judge cannot be at odds with the whole world, but takes a position that puts her in anticipated agreement with others. In Arendt's account of the mind, there is a fundamental need to affirm something and to find a community of agreement. Universal negation is impossible to perform and terrible to attempt, and one cannot achieve a total indifference to the world either. The need for agreement (even if only imagined agreement) is a limit to judging's freedom. The criterion of reflective judgment is communicability, and the greater the scope of communicability, the greater the worth of the object. Thus, the ideal judging community includes all of humanity, and the idea of humanity living in peace "is the necessary condition for the greatest possible

75 76

Arendt, "Understanding and Politics," in Essays in Understanding, 321. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:210.

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enlargement of the enlarged mentality." 77 No matter what other definite communities one belongs to, one is always part of the human community and capable of incorporating any other person's perspective into the enlarged mentality. One judges always as a member of a community, guided by one's community sense, one's sensus communis. But in the last analysis, one is a member of a world community by the sheer fact of being human; this is one's "cosmopolitan existence." When one acts in political matters, one is supposed to take one's bearings from the idea, not the actuality, of being a world citizen and, therefore, also a Weltbetrachter, a world spectator. 78 For Arendt, as in Kant, the scope of the sensus communis is potentially universal. Judgments can be made from the perspective of the world spectator, appealing to all human beings and attempting to persuade everyone, regardless of differences. These judgments do not naively contain a belief that all will in fact agree, but they operate on the assumption that agreement is possible and that agreement would increase the worth or importance of the judged particular. 79 Arendt made such a judgment of Eichmann, as she tried to communicate the significance of Eichmann's banal evil for the world as a whole, and she failed to achieve much consensus at all on the matter. While an individual's character is due to the will qua principium individuationis, one's common humanity is due to the activity of judging. For Arendt, humanitas is the willingness to judge as member of the human community, to expand one's mental life beyond an egoistic or any narrowly defined point of view. The transcendental regulative idea of humanity in Kant is, for Arendt, derived from examples of humanitas in particular persons, in examples of people judging from the perspective of humanity. Thinking back to Arendt's judgment of Eichmann, we remember her insistence that judgment assumes a 77

Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 74. Ibid., 75-76. 79 Goldman raises the concern that reflective judgment, lacking a concept under which to subsume particulars, needs a regulative idea "that directs its inquiries by promising that for which it searches." He continues, "Kant is arguing that judgments of the beautiful presuppose the purposiveness of that which they judge." For Goldman, the idea of humanity is such a regulative idea that can supply the purposiveness that can direct the practice of reflective judgment. This purposiveness, he claims, is essential to the coincidence of morality and politics in Kant. Goldman critiques Arendt for getting rid of this element of Kant's conception. See Goldman, "An Antinomy of Political Judgment," 334, 337, 345. Goldman is correct that Arendt does not follow Kant by appealing the idea of humanity as a regulative idea. She is not interesting in establishing in transcendental presuppositions. The lack of regulative ideas in Arendtian reflective judgment means that we have no guarantees about the purposiveness of the judging activity—it may not lead to any political ends. For Arendt, the idea of humanity is not a regulative idea but one that is grounded in examples of historical persons judging from an enlarged mentality. Arendt herself could be considered an example of this activity in the world. 78

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common humanity shared between actor and judge. Eichmann could be judged precisely because he was assumed to share the same capacity for spontaneous judgment. Eichmann's actions were evil because he was involved in the active destruction of human plurality. His character was banal because he failed to take any responsibility for his actions, as though he could not have done otherwise. Although Eichmann did not judge, he was capable of making a judgment and abstaining from participation. Arendt's ultimate condemnation of Eichmann assumes that there was a possibility for Eichmann to agree with his victims and his accusers to some extent, to judge his own actions as wrong or evil. During the war, Eichmann was isolated from anyone who thought the Nazi programs were wrong or evil, but Arendt still expected him to be able to judge independently. He should have been able to imagine how others would view his actions, even if he was not confronted with an explicit opinion on the matter. Even though one cannot work through every possible perspective in the process of judging, the idea of humanity acts to curtail the intentional exclusion of particular viewpoints as irrelevant for consideration. In the end, judging requires a selection of perspectives to represent in reflection, a selection that determines the scope and composition of the sensus communis. Whose perspectives we represent in reflection, and how we respond to those perspectives with pleasure or displeasure, will ultimately determine our interactions with others and decide our place in the world: "By communicating one's feelings, one's pleasures and one's disinterested delights, one tells one's choices and one chooses one's company." 80 Even in the wholly mental activity of judging, we decide what company we keep, and we prepare for worldly communication.

Exemplary Validity: Moral Reality, Inspiration and Persuasion From what we have outlined so far, the standards of judgment are communicability and persuasion. But, in another respect, the standard of judgment is based on the examples that we choose. Arendt places a great deal of emphasis on this aspect of Kant's view of reflective judgment. According to Arendt, Kant's "chief difficulty" is that judgment needs to be a manner of reflection on the particular. But, 80

Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 74.

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all reflection is built on a process of generalizing, so the difficulty is to map out how the particular and the general are related in any form of judgment. In determinant judgment, the general concept is given beforehand and applied to a particular that appears in experience. The schematic or "formal" concept operates as a rule to cognize particulars in experience. 81 If we wish to think of cognitive concepts as abstract concepts, the case is much the same. The abstract concept acts as the lowest common denominator for particulars of a specific kind. In reflective judgment, there is no general concept known or given beforehand that can act as a rule for cognition; the general must be generated through active reflection on the particular. Arendt believes Kant's notion of "exemplary validity" is crucial to understanding the relation between particular and general in the judging activity. Reflective judgment functions by attending to examples, which are considered for their meaning from the general standpoint of the enlarged mentality. While examples do not function as schematic rules by which we cognize particulars, Arendt does make an analogy between examples and schema. Just as the schematic concept "table" allows us to recognize a table as a table, so too examples guide us in our recognition of non-cognitive phenomena. We utilize the schematic concept without being able to make the schema itself an object of cognition—the schema lies in the "back of our minds," as the invisible image that allows us judge. In a similar way, examples exert influence on judgment even at moments when they are not being consciously reflected upon. Examples can lie in the "back of our minds" like the schema, influencing how we perceive particulars and how they affect us. 82 Which examples populate our mind is determined partly by the range of our experience, but they are also a product of our mental activity and mental attention. Examples must be remembered and then attended to in reflection in order for them to influence our judgments. Examples are the basis of validity concerning issues of meaning, morality, worth, and beauty. For Arendt, "This exemplar is and remains a particular that in its very particularity reveals the generality that

81 82

Arendt, Thinking, 100. Arendt, "Imagination," in Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 84.

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otherwise could not be defined. Courage is like Achilles." 83 Examples do not merely tell us what things are, but they are chosen to show how things ought or ought not to be. In moral judgment, examples single out and illuminate what is good, bad, evil, right, and wrong about particulars in the world—they embody differences in quality that cannot be derived from merely objective features. An example needs to be given to ground the moral concept that can then be used to compare and contrast other particulars. Arendt’s discovery of the novel phenomenon of the “banality of evil” in her experience with Eichmann illustrates the process of dealing with particulars in reflective judgment. When confronted with a novel phenomena that challenges traditional and conventional definitions, the judge must reflect on the particular without being able to subsume the particular under a known universal concept. The traditional views of evil needed to be suspended to comprehend the phenomenon of Eichmann as he really appeared. 84 Reflective judgment begins with attention to the particular and then proceeds to formulate a new concept that accurately illuminates and communicates the relevant phenomena. This new concept does not become a universal rule under which to subsume all subsequent particulars; it is meant to communicate what is general about the particular that can then be applicable in other specific instances. A novel judgment may force us to revisit our prior evaluations of other particulars, looking to see if the general in the new example is valid in past cases. In this process, our conventional and traditional definitions and concepts are not completely forgotten or put out of mind, as they stand as the background against which the distinctiveness of the novel phenomenon can be apprehended. As Marshall argues, past examples and traditional definitions contribute to the "topos" of judgment: "Arendt was, in effect, arguing that judgments about the judgments of others are able to establish what the Greeks referred to as topoi—common places, points of shared reference, exemplars around which communities of interpretation accrete." 85 Marshall is right: it is in the interplay of old and new that the relevant differences are revealed.

83

Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 77. Villa, "Thinking and Judging," 27. 85 Marshall claims that Arendt has "a willingness to conceptualize the topoi brought into being by judgment, sensus communis, and imagination as spaces of appearance," Marshall, "The Origin and Character of 84

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Within the bounds of the sensus communis, historical examples establish the reality of our moral and aesthetic concepts. By picking out indisputably real particulars that I judge to embody moral principles, virtues, and vices, I aim to ground morality in reality and the world of appearance. 86 The factuality of the particulars does not necessitate (determine) the moral judgments, however. The reality of moral concepts is tied to intersubjectivity; they depend on the interaction of human plurality, and without some agreement on moral examples, moral judgment is severed from reality. Historical imagination, then, must preserve the past as a reservoir for examples that can ground our moral discriminations. Conversely, history as a practice—if it is to capture the moral aspects of human life—also depends on reflective judgment: "Most concepts in the historical and political sciences are of this restricted nature; they have their origin in some particular historical incident, and we then proceed to make it 'exemplary'—to see in the particular what is valid for more than one case." 87 The historian-spectator, by taking the retrospective stance, can see the meaning of the past, but the judgment of the particular is not strictly determined by the historical narrative. As Beiner rightly surmises, Arendt's emphasis on exemplary validity is the crucial point at which her conception of judgment is centered on particulars and not universals. 88 The historian should not be concerned with deciphering History and its universal laws. The concern is with carefully discriminating between particulars within the shared context of the world. Arendt's judging historian is attentive to finite narratives that contain and contextualize examples of human action. In her earlier 1965-6 lectures on morality, Arendt outlined the role of literature in the development and exercise of moral judgment, insisting that the examples we use to judge need not be Arendt's Theory of Judgment," 383. According to Marshall, Arendt needs to further address the topoi of judgment to fully determine the "space of appearance" in which judging operates. For the rhetorical elements of judging to be effective, there must be some definite common topos. It appears that Marshall wishes to push Arendt to more clearly define the rhetorical sources upon which judging draws. I think it goes against the grain of Arendt's project to circumscribe too precisely the sources on which judging can draw. With the loss of the tradition, Arendt sees the entirety of the past as resources for judging, no matter who the judge may be. Her commitment to the possibility of universal agreement means that she is unwilling to restrict these resources to any particular group or culture. Her writing, especially in Life of the Mind, is an attempt to contribute to a topos for judgment that is available to the whole of humanity. 86 Arendt, Thinking, 103. 87 Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 85. 88 Beiner, "Hannah Arendt on Judging," 79.

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historically real. Literature can supply fictional examples that allow us to judge the world in a new way, due to its powerful ability to distill and concentrate certain aspects of moral phenomena. Literature exercises our moral imagination in a very helpful way, and it often acts as a medium of communication by which we consider how others judge the world. The role of literature in moral imagination does not mean that the writer-artist can simply create new values a la Nietzsche, for the artist is still beholden to the taste of others. The validity and communicability of fictional examples is still tied to experience and the common world. The creative mental process of the writer, if she is going to communicate her ideas to others about the common world, is still bound to historical, worldly examples for inspiration. 89 For Arendt, examples do not only provide a standard for judging as a spectator, for they can also be a vehicle for inspiring action. Let us consider two passages prior to Life of the Mind that emphasize this aspect of inspiration. In a 1967 essay, "Truth and Politics," Arendt argued for the "impotence of philosophical truth" in politics. Philosophical truth has no special power in public discourse—it becomes an opinion among other opinions. As with all other opinions, philosophical truth can only have worldly (political) validity if it is persuasive, either through speech or through deeds, when one acts on their philosophical tenet, setting an example for others. Arendt elaborates: Socrates decided to stake his life on this truth—to set an example...And this teaching by example is, indeed, the only form of "persuasion" that philosophical truth is capable of without perversion or distortion; by the same token, philosophical truth can become "practical" and inspire action without violating the rules of the political realm only when it manages to become manifest in the guise of an example. This is the only chance for an ethical principle to be verified as well as validated. Thus, to verify, for instance, the notion of courage we may recall the example of Achilles, and to verify the notion of goodness we are inclined to think of Jesus of Nazareth or of St. Francis; these examples

89

Zerilli criticizes Arendt for restricting the freedom of imagination in reflective judgment: "[Arendt] never really considered the imagination in its freedom, for she never thought of it as anything more than reproductive." Linda M. G. Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 130. Zerilli's criticism is overstated. Zerilli is right to think that imagination in reflective judgment cannot simply "reproduce" the past if it is going to generate a judgment about something that is radically new. Arendt's "banality of evil" illustrates how judgment must creatively combine familiar ideas in order to illuminate novel phenomena. However, if Zerilli wants "productive" imagination to create new concepts and values without regard for the past, then I think she is ignoring Arendt's argument. The creative process of the artist and the freedom of the judge is beholden to a shared world and a shared past—the so-called "productive" imagination is always to some extent also "reproductive." Due to this fact, we may want to jettison the distinction altogether.

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teach or persuade by inspiration, so that whenever we try to perform a deed of courage or of goodness it is as though we imitated someone else. 90 By setting an example for others, the actor is aiming to persuade others to act on the same principle. Of course, the imitation of others does not actually result in a repetition of the exact action: the meaning of the inspired act will be affected by the novel circumstances in which it is performed and by the unpredictable responses of others. However, the intention of the inspired actor is to embody the same principle that she sees in the past example. In On Revolution, one of the dominant themes is the arbitrariness of beginning, how beginning something new can never be justified by appeals to the past. The new, by definition, cannot be known until it appears, and its justification is only possible if it embodies a principle of which others approve. A beginning can overcome its arbitrariness only if it can become an example that inspires others to act as well. What saves the act of beginning from its own arbitrariness is that it carries its own principle within itself, or, to be more precise, that beginning and principle are not only related to each other, but are coeval. The absolute from which the beginning is to derive its own validity and which must save it, as it were, from its inherent arbitrariness is the principle which, together with [the beginning], makes its appearance in the world. The way the beginner starts whatever he intends to do lays down the law of action for those who have joined him in order to partake in the enterprise and to bring about its accomplishment. As such, the principle inspires the deeds that are to follow and remains apparent as long as the action lasts. 91 The responsible actor knows he needs others to participate and he must therefore aim to inspire others with "the way" he begins, with how he performs his deeds. He must exhibit the virtues that persuade others to keep the principle of action alive—he must aim to become an example for others to imitate. Although action is only validated from the retrospective viewpoint of the spectator, the actor must try to anticipate how others will respond to his action. Responsible action is not just performed with the present moment in mind; it is done with an eye to the future and the way the action will be remembered. In this way, judging prepares the individual for responsible action. Acting would be meaningless if specific deeds and principles were always forgotten and did not leave some trace of their existence in historical

90 91

Arendt, "Truth and Politics," 243. Arendt, On Revolution, 205.

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memory or in the deeds of others that follow. The judgments of others are needed to save action from oblivion, and through the activity of judging, actors can anticipate (but can never guarantee) their legacy in the eyes of others. Action can give birth to principles that the actors themselves were not previously aware of, but the actors can only communicate their intentions in reference to past principles, virtues, and examples. In her early work, "What is Freedom?", Arendt insisted on the externality of inspiration: principles inspire from "without." In our present context, this means that a person never inspires herself to act, for she always depends on the past actions of others for inspiration. With her discussion of the role of examples in moral judgment, Arendt has now supplemented the externality of principles with an account of how we choose our principles. Principles are grounded by past examples, and those examples are given to the would-be actor from a past that they did not make—the actor does not create her own principles out of nothing. By reflecting on principles and examples, the mind allows itself to be affected and influenced in specific ways. Importantly, to be inspired is not to be coerced, nor is it a form of obedience. Inspiration is persuasive but not coercive—principles are not objects of cognition that coerce the mind to assent to them. To be inspired by a principle, one must affirm some particular external to the self. The principle that inspires, along with the specific examples that ground the principle, are chosen as external influences. For Arendt, moral examples are meant to be world-historical, open to all of humanity, relevant to anyone who has the opportunity and chooses to consider them. In this sense, past examples do not belong exclusively to any particular group, culture, tradition, or historical age—they are the subject of universal consideration and potential universal agreement. Each individual is free to judge; no can dictate another person's choice or evaluation of examples. If I follow a tradition or group or party in my choice of examples, it is my judgment to do so. Responsible actors must stretch back into the past for their inspiration, but no single aspect of the past has absolute precedence over the others. Arendt is careful not to glorify the historical origin (of a people, a principle, or an idea) to such an extent that other past examples have negligible significance. The origin has no special privilege in the activity of judging. The judge can move freely within the vast space opened up by historical memory. 363

The imaginative space of judgment is populated with persons in two respects: with examples of actors and with the perspectives of spectators. According to Arendt, the Kantian idea of humanity regulates "not just our reflections on these matters but actually [inspires] our actions." 92 It unites the perspectives of the actor and the spectator, and can give the actor guidance for action. If I allow the idea of humanity to regulate how I choose my examples and my inspiration, I am preparing myself to act in ways that are responsible to all human spectators. For Arendt, acting according to the idea of humanity means acting in ways that promote communication and interaction—i.e. acting with the intention of promoting continued action. On the other hand, the idea of humanity excludes those actions that will stunt or impede human interaction. One implication of Arendt's use of the idea of humanity is that the community of judgment present in imagination need not correspond to a definite, verifiable community ("We") in the real world. In the activity of judging, I prepare to persuade others, and in so doing, I project (will) a future community, either as the continuation or reiteration of a past or present community or as a novel community. On this point, Beiner writes: "Judgment is the mental process by which one projects oneself into a counterfactual situation of disinterested reflection in order to satisfy oneself and an imagined community of potential collocutors that a particular has been adequately appraised." 93 If such judgments are to be translated into political power and action, then the community of judgment will have to become a definite We in the historical present. The community of judgment is generated by imagination, whereas the We of action must be real in the world of appearances. Let us now return to the reflexive aspect of the judging activity. By choosing my examples and my company, I act upon myself and I choose who I wish to be. This reflexive activity forms my character, and prepares me to discriminate morally when I am involved in action. The metaphor of taste is helpful here. Our sense of taste always begins from the affections of pleasure and displeasure in experience, but we can choose to transform our sense of taste by exposing ourselves to new experiences (new flavors,

92 93

Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 75. Beiner, "Hannah Arendt on Judging," 120.

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spices, and so on). So-called "acquired" tastes develop in this way, and so does a refined and discriminating palate. My taste is transformed by my choices of what to expose myself to. But, an affective aspect remains—I cannot "make" myself enjoy something. At every particular moment, my taste has been developed to react in certain ways that I cannot change right then and there by an act of sheer will. By analogy, moral judgments begin from prejudices (pre-judgments) that are passive and affective. But, the activity of reflective judgment shifts the ways in which one is immediately affected by actions and events. I am able to transform my past prejudices into deliberate judgments. When I judge in the present moment of action, I do not have the opportunity or time to reflect as a spectator, but my past reflections have shaped my moral "taste." I am now primed to discriminate between particulars in certain ways, able to react to a developing and novel historical situation in a discriminating way. I have prepared myself—to whatever extent, with whatever level of mental effort, and in relation to whichever particular issues—to make moral decisions even though I do not have time to stop and think. The more nuanced my judgments and the more perspectives I have taken into account, the more sensitive my reactions will be to the many factors in a particular situation. In this light, we can again appreciate Arendt's post-Eichmann emphasis on how the mental activities "strike roots" in the past, achieve "depth" of understanding, and shape character. Judging uniquely contributes to these changes by putting the mind in explicit relation to other persons, both in terms of examples of action and the perspectives of spectators. The reflective depth of judging comes from our choices in both of these respects, and these choices become an essential part of our character. We discovered this notion back in Arendt's 1965-6 lectures: From our discussion today about Kant, I hope it became clearer why I raised, by way of Cicero and Meister Eckhart, the question of whom we wish to be together with. I tried to show that our decisions about right and wrong will depend upon our choice of company, of those with whom we wish to spend our lives. And again, this company is chosen by thinking in examples, in examples of persons dead or alive, real or fictitious, and in examples of incidents past and present. 94

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Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," 146.

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In Life of the Mind and the Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, Arendt has given us a more complete understanding of this process of choosing one's company, and it is this process that constitutes the very essence of Arendtian moral judgment. Moral judgment's focus is primarily on persons, which distinguishes it from other types of judgment, such as aesthetic judgment. Moral examples focus our attention on the possibilities for how persons can act within complex and novel historical situations. Thus, moral examples are not atomistic snapshots of an isolated deed. Narratives are the form through which to communicate principles and virtues embodied in human action. The unique who of the person and the how of performance (virtuosity) is completely revealed only in the retrospective narrative that is told about the person's actions, in the person's life-story. The dignity of judging corresponds with the importance of narrative in human life. For Arendt, narrative is the most basic form of meaning: "No philosophy, no analysis, no aphorism, be it ever so profound, can compare in intensity and richness of meaning with a properly narrated story." 95 In narrative, our moral concerns and the basic desire for meaning are directly addressed. The world is humanized in narrative, understood as a place for human dwelling and a stage for human action. On this note, Beiner writes: "[J]udgment has the function of anchoring man in a world that would otherwise be without meaning and existential reality: a world unjudged would have no human import to us." 96 Narrative exercises our moral judgment by forcing us to discriminate, to hope and fear for particular outcomes, to praise and blame certain persons, and to be interested in the events of the story. Good stories may be impartial, considering the many perspectives within a situation, but they are never completely neutral or objective. It is due to the basic condition of human plurality that we find ourselves enmeshed in a web of narratives and meaning that communicate the worldly relationships between unique persons. We can abstain from the mental activities of thinking and judging, but we can never abstain from choosing our company in the web of human relationships. Benhabib is correct when she states: "Moral

95 96

Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 22. Beiner, "Hannah Arendt on Judging," 152.

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judgment is what we 'always already' exercise in virtue of being immersed in a network of human relationships that constitute our life together." 97 To use Arendt's language from the end of Willing: "we are doomed to be free by virtue of born" into the world shared with others. 98 Even Eichmann, the unthinking and unjudging criminal, is responsible for how he acts in the human world—his not-judging is his responsibility, and he prepared himself to be adaptable to the Nazi cause.

The Relations between the Mental Faculties In Arendt's treatment of the mind, we find an emphasis on the plurality of the faculties and the plurality inherent within each of the mental activities. Each mental activity, although it is undertaken by the individual in isolation from real other persons, is not devoid of plurality—its structure points to the plurality of the human world. Each activity is structured on analogy to a relation between plural persons. Arendt's metaphors for the mental activities—friendship and dialogue for thinking, command and birth for willing, choosing our company for judging—rely on the meaning of interpersonal relationships in the world. Due to its plurality, the mind can never achieve a simple unity or identity. Mental harmony is possible, but this harmony is always achieved between the plural activities of the mind, not in any single activity by itself. The harmony of each is affected by the harmony of the whole. In Thinking, Arendt emphasized the autonomy of the mental faculties in order to avoid a monistic view of the mind, the idea that "behind the obvious plurality of man's faculties and abilities, there must exist a oneness—the old hen pan, 'all is one'—either a single source or a single ruler." 99 The mental activities are related to one another, but the mind is irreducibly plural. 100 Thinking, willing, and judging are autonomous because each activity operates according to its own internal "laws." However, the presence of these laws implies that there are also limits for each faculty in regards to the others, and these 97

Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992): 125. 98 Arendt, Willing, 217. 99 Ibid., 70. 100 Even if the relations between the mental faculties depends on the continuity of consciousness, consciousness cannot itself explain the plurality of the mental faculties. The activities of the mind cannot be derived from the simple fact of conscious awareness.

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limits are the source of potential conflicts between the faculties. On one level, autonomy guarantees the plurality that helps us to understand how these conflicts arise. Arendt has provided the phenomenological evidence for the tensions between the faculties, and these tensions must be preserved in our theorizing about the mind, not dissolved for the sake of speculative goals. Young-Breuhl offers an illuminating interpretation of Life of the Mind as a theory of a "republic" of faculties, where each faculty must check and balance the others on analogy to the way that political structures ought to check and balance one another. 101 Each faculty in isolation from the others is lacking elements that are essential to meaningful human life, indicating a fundamental interdependence between them. The problems of each faculty are mitigated by what the other faculties can provide. Each faculty must participate in the republic in its own way, but inevitably, the faculties must defer to one another and allow the others to perform—no single faculty is sovereign. Of course, Young-Breuhl's interpretation only communicates the ideal relationship between Arendt's faculties. The well-functioning republic of faculties is dependent on how the faculties are utilized, how the activities are undertaken. Some ways of thinking or willing or judging undermine the other faculties. Arendt's account not only shows how the faculties can work together, but how they can fail to work together. According to Taminiaux, Arendt's attraction to Kant comes from the fact that his "entire critical project presupposes the acknowledgment of several antinomies which point to basic conflicts—notably between knowing and thinking, between knowing and willing, not to mention between willing and the inclinations of the soul." 102 While she appropriates in her own way many of the mental tensions involved in Kant's critical project, Arendt's account of judging aims to ease some of these tensions. Judging is a faculty of relative peace at the center of the conflicts between thinking and willing, but it is not a perfect synthesis of those activities. The temporal conflict between past and future, between thinking and willing, gives way to a degree of temporal balance in the judging activity—as Taminiaux writes, "Only in the activity of judging

101 102

Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, For Love of the World (Yale University Press, 2004), 458. Jacques Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker, 214.

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do the three tenses [of time] get an equal right." 103 Thinking is relegated to the past in the search for meaning, and it tends to overlook freedom for the sake of necessity. The past remains the focus of judging as well, although it treats the past as the result of human freedom and human action, recognizing the contingency of the past and allowing for future events and action. Judging does not directly attend to the future, but it operates in a mode that does not pit itself against futural orientation of willing or the novelty of action in the world. By consequence, Arendt's conception of judging cannot be separated from her view of human history, in which history is full of new and unpredictable beginnings. 104 Exemplary validity plays a crucial role in judging's temporal balance. In relation to temporality, examples are the right kind of moral standard because they incorporate aspects of past, present and future. Examples are of past actors that prepare us to discriminate in the present and inspire us to future action. The power of examples connects persons across vast temporal distances, and it helps ground the sensus communis across historical periods. Actors can aim to inspire others in the future and judges can be inspired by reflection on past action, and there is no necessary limit to this process of inspiration. Exemplary validity points to the value of history for human self-understanding, moral discrimination, and the inspiration for action. Even though judging helps to address the temporal tension between thinking and willing, its activity can also come into conflict with the other two faculties. Thinking's quest for meaning, on its own without the counterbalancing of the other faculties, can become preoccupied with an apprehension of the whole, of Being, of the universal. Thinking also assumes necessity in order to unify phenomena into a coherent whole. Judging's attention to contingent particulars can run counter to thinking's aims in both of these regards. In relation to willing, the central tension is that between the focus on the individual in willing and the focus on the perspectives of others in judging. The will can resist the influence of others (and of reality) on its activity, or it can allow judging to inform its own affirmation and negation of

103 104

Ibid. Beiner, "Hannah Arendt on Judging," 131.

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particulars. Likewise, the judging activity, without the will's spontaneous choice between approbation and disapprobation, may simply defer to others' opinions without making an independent decision. 105 Another tension between judging and willing is captured in the tension between acting and spectating. In the will's futural projection—in its impetus to do, to act, to appear—there is a dissatisfaction with being merely a spectator, and judging's impartiality is undermined by the will's projects. The mental activity of judging can help the will prepare for action by shaping the individual's character through its reflections, but it can never initiate the spontaneous act. A gap remains between the mental preparations for action in judging, in which I reflect on imagined others and their perspectives, and action itself, where I interact with real others who may be very different than how I imagined them. Judging can help us prepare ourselves for action, but it cannot guarantee the success of projects or even the constancy of individual character, and thus does not move us into action. Willing's spontaneity is needed to initiate action in the face of a contingent future. In her treatment of Augustine's On the Trinity in Willing, Arendt assigned the will the role of directing the mind's attention. Arendt was drawn to Augustine's account because it allowed her to understand how I can be held responsible for the activities of my mind, for thinking or not thinking, for judging or not judging. The responsibility for action is centered on the will, but if the mental activities of thinking and judging prepare me for action and shape my character, I must also be responsible for how I perform those activities or how I refuse to perform them. The will's ability to initiate action must be unified with its ability to initiate mental activities and its ability to refuse to perform them. The will is responsible for the mind's attention, but its power is limited in this role. At times, I can willfully not pay attention to what is going on around me, but events and particulars can also "catch" my attention—in Arendt's terms, reality makes a "claim" on our attention—and it is not always my choice to begin attending to them. The will is not able to resist all the external influences on the mind—although it 105

As I suggested earlier in this chapter, Arendt's analysis of judging in Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy actually incorporates the contributions of the other activities without clearly distinguishing them. The main limitation of using Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy to decipher the argument of Judging is that Arendt's goals are quite different in the two works. A key subject of Life of the Mind, the relation of the faculties, is not present in her Kant lectures.

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can try, as in Epictetus's striving for omnipotence—but even if my attention has been drawn to a certain phenomenon, I am very often able to resist thinking about it or judging it. While the will is responsible for the mind's attention, it needs the other faculties to prepare for action. It is not by the activity of mental willing that the mind shapes the individual's character. The will must supplement its own autonomous activity, willing, with thinking and judging to prepare for action in the world. Without the other faculties, the will would either be trapped in its own self-conflict or busy doing worldly activities in an arbitrary way. Thinking's autonomy lies in its ability to consider the meaning of a larger whole, to synthesize particulars into a narrative or theory or to analyze the meaning of a concept. Judging's specific role in the life of the mind is to connect the individual to the perspectives of others, creating an inter-subjective space for agreement and difference. The will needs these faculties in order to overcome its otherwise arbitrary and sometimes torturous freedom. Earlier in this chapter, I proposed that we understand the reflexive approbation and disapprobation in judging as an act of the will. The choice to be pleased or displeased shares the spontaneity of the will's other abilities. However, it is characteristically different than the spontaneous initiation of action. An action is irreversible, but a judgment as a mental choice can be reversed, for a different or opposing judgment is possible in a subsequent act of approbation or disapprobation. These singular mental acts are never stable, permanent realities that others can hold me accountable for. Conversely, reflective judgment allows us to practice loving in relation to others' perspectives, to begin enjoying things and persons in their independent existence. But, the reality of love and a person's character depends on action in the world. The will cannot achieve a stable identity within the mind alone. Despite its many responsibilities within mental life and the provisions of the other faculties, the will is unable to overcome the contingency of its free action. No matter how much one prepares, acting is always beginning something new that is irreducible to what preceded it.

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Actor, Spectator and Community In this section I wish to consider some of the implications of Arendt's view of moral judgment for worldly life with others. Let us begin with a problem Arendt raised in her 1965-6 lectures. In that context, Arendt conceived judgment as a faculty that could generate a morality that occupied a middle space between a morality based solely on the self (conscience) and a morality based solely on the other (Arendt's "goodness"). Conscience's focus on the self is antagonistic to worldly life with others—it only says "no" for the sake of the self and is unable to affirm anything or join others in action. The morality of goodness creates the opposite problem: by extinguishing the self and acting solely for the other, it does not allow for any reflection and cannot discriminate. The morality of goodness thrusts us into action for the sake of the other—it cannot help but say "yes" and has no limits. For Kant, the experience of beauty is the enemy of egoism, putting the self into relation with others and enjoying the world impartially. In a parallel fashion, the experience of, and reflection on, good actions overcomes moral egoism. Reflective judgment requires a free act of discrimination by the judge, but that act is performed in the imagined company of others. The self is not extinguished, nor is its self-relation the central concern. Arendtian moral judgment is capable of saying both "yes" and "no," of providing limits to action and also of affirming particular modes of action. As I argued in Part I, goodness, understood as an utter selflessness in action, is an impossible moral ideal: selflessness per se can never appear and become real in the world. Good deeds can appear, but they cannot be completely selfless, for we assume that the agent is aware of how she might be perceived by others. Her self-awareness is enough to compromise her goodness—even in her own eyes, the suspicion of self-interest cannot be eliminated. No person can apprehend her own good deeds as good. That good deeds require impartial and independent spectators is a lesson that pervades Arendt's work. Art needs spectators for beauty to become a worldly reality. Without them, there would only be the subjective enjoyment of the artist. Likewise, good deeds are only real if there are spectators who are willing to judge them as good. In other words, good deeds require a life lived with others. We can only really "see" the good clearly through the acts of others, and we rely on others to confirm our own moral character. 372

In Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, Arendt gives us one passage that is helpful to explain how she is thinking about the difference between conscience and judgment. According to Arendt's analysis, Kantian reflective judgment has its own autonomy from the moral law, giving us two basic perspectives: that of the spectating judge and that of the rational actor. In considering the French Revolution, Kant found himself torn between these two perspectives. Kant knew he himself could not have rebelled against the government due to his moral convictions, what he believed the moral law dictated universally for the actor. But, as a spectator, Kant was enthusiastic about the Revolution and what it meant for the future of Europe and the world. Even though Kant would always have acted for peace, he knew and kept in mind his judgment. Had he acted on the knowledge he had gained as a spectator, he would, in his own mind, have been criminal. Had he forgotten, because of this "moral duty," his insights as a spectator, he would have become what so many good men, involved and engaged in public affairs, tend to be—an idealistic fool. 106 Following this line of reasoning, we could conclude that Arendt thinks conscience and judgment need not always agree with one another. Conscience determines the moral limits of my action: "I cannot do that." However, it does not necessarily imply "that is wrong," or "that is bad," or "that is evil" in the sense that I aim to generalize my aversion to the action. Conscience need not rest on reflective judgments about the perspectives and actions of others. Insofar as I consider only myself and what I am willing to do, conscience comes into play by restricting my actions. But, if I take into account others' perspectives from the standpoint of the spectator, I may arrive at a different assessment. What I myself am unwilling to do I may not find morally problematic in the actions of others. The difference between conscience and moral judgment is perhaps easier to grasp in relation to action. Conscience is transformed into judgment when the person aims to persuade others. It is useless to try to persuade others by relying solely on the subjective "I cannot do that." I must appeal beyond the subjective to the sensus communis and common examples, or I must act in such a way that others are persuaded to do the same or to affirm my action. Others may respect my abstinence from action, but their moral evaluation of my abstinence cannot be based solely on my subjective conscience. They must 106

Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 54.

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recognize in what I do and say a general principle that is worthy of respect. Moral terms—good, bad, evil, right, wrong—always reference an intersubjective reality and are never based solely in conscience. As we have seen, conscience has a particularly important role in emergency situations, when it is unlikely that any type of persuasion will be effective or when it is difficult to take on the risk of trying to persuade others in public. In the public sphere, judgment seems to play two functions. First, it can lead to agreement, and second, it can illuminate differences between various phenomena and differences people's opinions. In both of these functions, judgment protects the public realm and the reality of worldly appearances. We could not live together without some level of agreement on certain issues, but, on the other hand, a single vision of the world would destroy the plurality of human life. Arendt's theory has motivated the responsibility of choosing our company in the mental activity of judging. We are also responsible for choosing our company in the realm of action, deciding which communities we will participate in and which we will avoid. This decision about choosing your company should not be performed only from the perspective of a single community, tradition, or culture. Morally, it is from the perspective of humanity, of the world-spectator, that we are called to choose our company. Responsible participation in a community is decided from a perspective outside that community, which means that a responsible moral community is not insulated from the views of others or from the common world. The individual actor cannot excuse his action with appeal to the community of which he is apart— humanity can hold him responsible for his participation. When it comes to Arendt's work on judgment, a false dilemma is too often posed between the Neo-Aristotelian emphasis on particularity and the Neo-Kantian concern for universality. 107 We need not insist on one of these two perspectives and to the exclusion of the other. Arendt is aiming to bring them together in a dynamic way to illuminate an important tension between judging and acting. It is difficult to be committed to action and still take into account the perspectives of others. In Aristotle, action and judgment are too easily married together. This close connection depends on the continuity of local custom 107

Benhabib, Situating the Self, 124

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and tradition, but does not allow us to extend the enlarged mentality outside the narrowly defined community of action. Arendt wants to conceive of communities that are responsible not just to themselves and their own immanent standards, but are responsible to other communities and to the whole of humanity. Communities need to be both open to the perspectives of others outside the community and committed to their own existence, willing to commit to the goods embodied in their own institutions and practices. In this respect, Arendt's expansion of the sensus communis serves an important function: it provides the basis for critical reflection within the community itself. Arendt's identification of judging with spectatorship shows her insistence on attaining a level of critical distance from any immanent consensus in the political body. From her reflections in Human Condition, it is evident that Arendt believes critical distance is also necessary for theorizing about worldly and political life in the contemporary world. Arendt's example of genuine political action are drawn from the distant past, especially the Greek polis experience. The historical range of the faculty of judgment is necessary for any viable critique of contemporary life, and it captures the worldliness of her critique of modernity—i.e. how it is possible to critique the development of the modern world without transcendent ideals. Arendt herself is an estranged theorist who is critical of the relative absence of genuine political life in modernity, not a thinker who settles for the worldlessness of contemporary life. For Arendt, past examples of political action and political community give us a basis to mourn the present circumstances. These past examples do not provide us with a structure that can be directly applied and replicated in the present, but they can still inspire us to revive principles of human interaction that are not present in our current circumstances. In much of Arendt's work, her concerns about the anti-political elements of the modern age lead her to take a tragic stance toward the contemporary world. Arendt thinks it is important to recognize the powerlessness of contemporary politics in order to accurately understand ourselves. If we are not to be deluded, we must at least admit when the space of appearance is limited, restricted, or nonexistent. While Arendt often defended the dignity of action, she admits that human dignity is not restricted to action alone. The judge retains dignity even when acting is rare or seemingly impossible, when the world is 375

marked by "dark times." On this theme, Arendt once wrote that our humanness depends on our relation to reality, even the harshest and most unwelcome facts. Our impotence with regard to the past is tragic—we must remember and consequently suffer the evils of the past. But in our "knowing and enduring this knowledge" of the past, recognizing evil as evil, we retain our dignity by not letting reality (History) dictate our judgments. 108 By enlarging our mentality to include many perspectives from the past, we can generate a critique of history that is not simply an expression of contemporary fear or unhappiness. In addition to the tensions between the mental faculties, we must add the tension between the life of the mind and the life of action, a tension which is inescapable insofar as the mental activities withdraw from the world and establish their independence. Independent thinking, willing, and judging is not easy: there is real and irreducible risk involved in examining and challenging traditional or common sense categories or in aiming to change the world through action. Mental independence upsets what can otherwise be a peaceful acquiescence to the world as it is, and to speak one's judgments in the public sphere threatens one's relations with others. The judge's independence often comes at the cost of being a pariah, unable to find a contemporary community in which their judgments are shared and embodied in action. Arendt does not rule out the possibility of principled action with others—i.e. that the thoughtful judging person will find a community in which to actively participate. Judgment can lead to new agreements on moral and political matters, but there is no guarantee of consensus with one's contemporaries. For the most part, responsible action is episodic in Arendt. To care for the common world requires a level of independence from political action. To simply immerse oneself in action is to weaken one's ability to resist or abstain from immoral action. In other words, action must be discriminating and limited—we must choose carefully when and how to be involved in action. A certain cleavage between politics and morality remains at the heart of Arendt's work. It could be seen in the Human Condition, where, in her defense of the public realm of action, she has little room for moral restraints on politics. This early separation of morality and politics rested on a limited definition of morality in terms of 108

Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 20, 23.

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convention or tradition. When, in her later work, she turns to moral questions directly, Arendt insists that moral judgment must be independent of political action. In the context of Judging, this persisting cleavage between morality and politics is rooted in the difference between the imagined community of mental judging and the actual community of worldly plurality. One way to get rid of this difference is to stop judging independently and allow the present political constellation (whatever it is) to define our moral standards. The loss of moral judgment's independence from politics would endanger the plurality of political life. It is from the activities of the mind that we bring out the meaningfulness of the world, allowing it to be experienced in its many aspects and in its "depth." Our reflective activities maintain and enrich the differences of perspective in human interaction. Another way to remove the above difference is to resort to totalitarian measures that directly aim to eliminate the plurality and spontaneity of human beings. Arendt aims to retain moral categories because they connote a sense of seriousness and impartial concern that she is unwilling to relinquish. The Nietzschean project of venturing "beyond good and evil," although, like Arendt, it gives up the metaphysical dreams of the philosophical tradition, is not necessary to reinvigorate contemporary life and the realm of political action. Nietzsche celebrates the power and the futural perspective of the will to the detriment of worldly stability and our relation to the past. Nietzsche would lead us into an amoral future, while Arendt would rather we realize our reliance on the past as a reservoir for moral thinking and judging and for moral inspiration. The recognition and affirmation of novelty in action does not force us to give up moral categories. The impartial affirmation of past particulars is accompanied by pleasure. In dark times, this pleasure can help to compensate for the inability to act in the world. However, the feeling of pleasure in affirmation cannot completely replace the need for a space of appearance, a community of action. Human beings have a basic desire to appear in the common world and to be seen as an individual. The reality of moral phenomena requires a space of appearance where actors can perform in the sight of others. A person who wants to do something good must take into account those who will provide the power to accomplish the deed and those who will appraise it in retrospect. The actor must always count on others 377

to preserve the deed in memory and keep the moral principle alive in further action. Acting and judging are fundamentally interdependent, and no individual can simultaneously play both roles (in regards to a single situation) and not rely on others. In Human Condition, Arendt argued that forgiveness and promising were the two moral precepts inherent in a commitment to the realm of human action. Forgiveness and promising are actions that explicitly link the actor and spectator to one another. These moral precepts operate between plural persons to make the irreversibility and the unpredictability of action existentially palatable. Forgiveness can save the individual from the repercussions of past actions. In terms of the will, forgiveness saves the will from its impotence toward the past, allowing for a potential new beginning in the person's relations with others. The prospect of forgiveness can ease the will's resentment toward the irreversibility of its own future projects. But, the expectation of forgiveness requires a trust in others—the will does not possess the power to ease its own tensions in this regard. Forgiveness diminishes the risk the actor takes insofar as he cannot guarantee the judgments of spectators, but it does not eliminate it. Likewise, promising aims to establish predictability in a person's action. A promise commits to a future course of action without being able to guarantee it, asking others to trust in the promiser to do all he can to fulfill it. Promising and forgiving are not "magical" solutions to the problems of action, as though these activities will inevitably promote a thriving political realm. Careful discrimination in our performance of forgiving and promising is crucial to their essential but restricted role in human affairs. The faculty of judgment is crucial to both activities, and if they are performed universally we negate their significance. We must not promise everything by ignoring the limits of our capacities. We must not forgive everything, for in doing so, we refuse to care for the world and what happens in it. In light of the risk that is inherent in acting into the human web of relationships, and especially in dark times when the public space of appearance is inhospitable, there may be a desire to retreat into smaller spheres of action. By emphasizing the common world and our basic responsibility to judge as a world spectator, Arendt would have us resist the temptation to ignore or withdraw from political issues of

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the highest order. There is a danger in the retreat to smaller and more intimate communities if it keeps us from caring for, or being attuned to, the world as a whole. However, within Arendt's framework, there are elements which could justify a defense of all spaces of appearance, whatever their scope of publicity. In On Revolution and elsewhere, Arendt defends a federalist approach to politics in which the smallest political bodies are connected to the national body politic through various levels of representation. Arendt's federalism seems to affirm a plurality and diversity of public spaces within a political structure, but the principle can be extended outside of official politics as well. As I argued in chapter 1, Arendt's conception of action and plurality is valid at any level of interpersonal interaction where different perspectives can interact. The human world contains smaller "worlds" within it; the human community is composed of many smaller communities. A person may participate in many different communities from day to day or month to month, being part of multiple joint projects at the same time. Arendt does not often address the different levels of publicity and the multiplicity of communities that a person may be part of, but it seems incredibly relevant to the problems of the will. To recognize the plurality of communities and the various levels of publicity is significant because it helps us to avoid positing an overly simplistic dichotomy between the isolated individual and the political realm writ large. The difference between worldly political activity and the mind is central to Arendt's work and legitimate in its own right, but there can be more than just a single space of action. The inability to act at the highest level of publicity is not to be taken lightly—historically, of course, this has been a serious problem—but it does not imply the inability to act per se. In numerous works, Arendt claims that the I-can liberates the will from bondage to necessity, that the coincidence of I-will and I-can is the essence of freedom in action. For Arendt, there is no I-can that is totally solipsistic and interiorized: power comes from outside the will. However, it is important not to assume that the will, in considering future action, always confronts a single space of appearance in which the power to act is either present (I-can) or not. Power and the lack of power is as multiple as the spaces of appearance.

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In Arendt's reading of Duns Scotus, she stresses how the will's self-conflict in confronting an uncertain future project is overcome by willing the possible, something that the will "knows" it can do. In our present context, we could take this to mean that acting in a smaller sphere may be a solution to the will's self-conflict. The will's impotence in relation to one level of public life does not necessarily restrict the will's ability to act in another space, at another level. The will can find power in many spaces and we should not discount the importance of smaller communities as spaces for human action. These are spaces where individuals can practice for public life at larger levels, building up one's character and practicing one's ability to imagine the perspectives of others—they allow individuals to be part of a real common world. But, to be clear, all communities are plagued with problems of action, no matter the size and composition, and, for the individual, the responsibility to choose one's company is not dissolved even in these smaller spheres. 109

The Contingency of Moral Judgment and Moral Philosophy In this final section, I will consider some implications of my interpretation of moral judgment for the practice of ethics and philosophy in general. Let us start by considering a common criticism of Arendt's work. Steinberger is critical of Arendt's account of judging because she offers no cognitive criterion for what constitutes a good judgment. 110 He thinks that, on Arendt's view, the criterion of judging can only be successful persuasion: "My judgment is valid if I can persuade others to subscribe to it." 111 While this may be true in the political realm where power is tied to some level of agreement, it becomes more complicated when we consider judging as a mental faculty. My judgment may be valid even when my contemporaries do not agree with me—validity is not bound to others' opinions in the present. For Arendt to keep judgment tied to intersubjectivity but also allow for it to be independent, she must envision a form of intersubjectivity that is not historically immanent. This is especially important 109

Arendt consistently distinguishes between intimate relationships and political relationships, and she is critical of theorists who conceive ideal political life as an extension of intimacy. For example, see her critical comments on Jaspers and Buber in Willing, 200. 110 Steinberger, 816. 111 Steinberger, 813.

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given her concern that people often refuse to judge. In those cases, the fact that my contemporaries are not convinced by my judgments does not undermine their validity from other perspectives, even it does render them politically impotent. Likewise, Beiner criticizes Arendt for severing theory and practice by refusing to give any cognitive criteria for moral judgment. 112 To demand that Arendt provide a cognitive criterion of good judgment is a mistake: there is no way to transcend all judging communities to posit a criterion that would determine what makes any judgment good per se. A non-formal criterion of judgment cannot be abstracted from particular judgments. Judgments are only subject to other judgments, not to a rule of cognition that could tell us how to make judgments the right way. The Kafka parable in Thinking points to the traditional desire to assume a metaphysical or eternal standpoint from which we could provide the one criterion for judgment, but Arendt's reformulation explicitly resists that temptation. For Arendt, theory and practice cannot be unified due to the mind's independence. On a slightly different note, Bernstein finds Arendt's moral reflections lacking because there is no direct attention given to the meaning of moral terms. 113 For Arendt, the difficulty of explaining the meaning of moral terms is that you will need to work through a multiplicity of examples, but there is no single meaning that is arrived at through this process. To judge something is not to subsume a particular under a given universal schema, but instead it is to affirm a particular without being able to give an objective reason why it is good. I cannot give the definition of the moral concept to demonstrate the validity of my judgment—I only have a concept with various meanings and many examples to illustrate those meanings. If Bernstein wants Arendt to define moral terms, he is asking for something that Arendt is unwilling to provide. The activity of thinking is aporetic by nature and does not give us definitive answers. Judgment must come to thinking's aid to decide any non-cognitive matter: questions about the meaning of concepts are decided only by our choice of examples. 114

112

Beiner, "Hannah Arendt on Judging," 137. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, 175. 114 Young-Bruehl, "Reflections on Hannah Arendt's 'Life of the Mind'," 301. 113

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With the help of Arendt's account of the mental faculties, we can more easily appreciate the temporal connotations of our moral terminology. Every judgment contains an implicit reference to past and future. In her 1965-6 lectures, Arendt hinted at the temporal meanings of moral terms. To judge something is "good" is to express your desire that it would last, to single it out as something worthy of remembrance and worldly permanence. We wish to "hold onto" good things because they reconcile us with our worldly existence, much like Arendt believes beautiful things help us feel at home in the world. This wish can motivate acting on a past example to keep the principle of action alive in the world. To participate in action is an implicit affirmation of the principle embodied in the action. Good actions inspire us to act ourselves and give us hope in human potential, but they are exceptional and we know that everyone is not capable of doing them consistently. A illuminating insight in Nietzsche's work is the identification of "good" with abundance, with that which is more than necessary and beyond coercion. In the intersubjective context of Judging, abundance is an aspect of good actions insofar as they free and they invite others to freely participate in the shared principle. Good actions promote future interaction between human beings. "Right" and "wrong" indicate those deeds that we can expect anyone to perform or abstain from, respectively. Temporally, "right" and "wrong" indicate moral regularity and consistency. "Bad" actions or events are those that we wish to overcome and that we have the power to overcome through further action—forgiving and punishing are two primary modes in which we attempt to overcome the past and release the future from its effects. By contrast, evil is that which, although we want to overcome it, we cannot. Evil deeds are those we are incapable of forgiving, punishing, or being reconciled to. We are impotent in the face of past evils, and they reveal the limits of human power. It is important, for Arendt, to retain the term "evil" for this reason. She is not willing to go "beyond good and evil"—we must not forget the limits of human power in relation to the past. Totalitarian evil was predicated on a disregard for these limits in the belief that "everything is possible."

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For Arendt, it is impossible to be completely neutral or objective towards political life and action, as though human interaction could be studied like the rest of nature.115 If judgment had cognitive standards, we would need to deny the basic distinction between truth and meaning in relation to morality. This distinction safeguards human plurality and freedom. In the realm of truth or objectivity, plurality and freedom are obstacles to be eliminated. Objectivity is inhuman, demanding that we conform our opinions to what is universal. For Arendt, the intersubjective criteria of judgment trumps in existential importance the oft-presumed objectivity of traditional philosophy and of science. 116 Judgment operates in the inbetween of human relationships, and it acknowledges the human condition of plurality. Philosophy cannot be neutral or objective toward human life without giving up on the meaningfulness of moral phenomena. Abstaining from judging particulars is still an act of judging the realm of human affairs and human freedom: it rejects the human world and defines one's place in it (even if this response leads the person out of the public sphere). In Arendt's historical treatment of willing, the refusal to judge communicated a disdain for human plurality and human finitude, and a despair about human history. Our moral judgments can be more or less generally valid, but we can never achieve an absolute moral standard. Judging needs to mediate between the various ethical systems and perspectives, but is not compelled to accept any of them as absolute. Ethical systems can be helpful insofar as they allow us to think through concepts and practice judging particulars by dealing with examples. Each system can illuminate certain aspects of a moral situation but none of them can be taken as rules to be applied without judgment. Furthermore, every ethical system or perspective must enter into public discourse in order to exhibit its limited validity. Arendt's philosophical approach gives up the traditional metaphysical projects and treats its subjects as matters of meaning and not truth per se. Her investigation of the mind is a search for meaning, and Arendt treats the history of philosophy as a collection of insights to be negotiated through thinking

115

Arendt, “’What Remains? The Language Remains:’ A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” Essays in Understanding, ed. by Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), 2. 116 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 28-29.

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and judging. Arendt explicitly aims for intersubjective persuasion on these issues by bringing historical and contemporary thinkers' perspectives into her thought process. Arendt makes certain choices about what ideas to preserve in the tradition and what to try to reenvision or re-thematize. These choices are made by appeals to factual experiences and to the choices of examples that ground the relevant concepts and distinctions. The tradition is not authoritative: it does not dictate what we should think about or how we should think about it. In reference to Jaspers, but in perfect agreement with him, Arendt wrote: "it was essential above all to abandon the chronological order hallowed by tradition." 117 Our minds can move freely in relation to the past; we are not chained to our historical position, nor are we subservient to the origin of any school or movement of thought. The insights of the past are available for us, and we must choose our philosophical company. Arendt's often claimed not to be a philosopher, but a political theorist. This claim was based on a traditional understanding of what "philosophy" is and does. Her departure from the tradition is well motivated, but it is not essential that we concede "philosophy" in the process. Arendt's arguments against the traditional practice could just as well help us to begin doing philosophy in a new way. Life of the Mind is a collection of historical insights about a way of doing philosophy that is in line with Arendt's commitments. Arendt's moral philosophy asks us to be willing to operate in a dimension of depth and diversity in our mental life, to take on tensions of thinking, willing and judging without jettisoning any of the mental activities. In Life of the Mind, we find a deep commitment to the contingency of judgment. No guarantees can be given that can eliminate that contingency. General or universal agreement is a hope, but it cannot be guaranteed. We choose our community, our examples, and we make our judgments without an ultimate justification. Contingency is the price of freedom: we cannot overcome the contingency of our actions or the contingency of our judgments.

117

Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 79.

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