© Roger M Tagg 2012
Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web" . This website is under continuing development.
This posthumous work (Hannah Arendt - HA - died in 1975) was edited by her friend (and novelist) Mary McCarthy. It was intended as 3 volumes, each representing Arendt's division of the human mind into Thinking, Willing and Judging. She hadn't written any words for the third of these, so 'Judging' is now only represented by some edited extracts from a lecture she once gave on that subject, and a few other sources.
I actually read 'Men in Dark Times' prior to 'Life of Mind', but didn't find it worth writing up by itself; so I have added the few highlights I gleaned from it to the bottom of the main table.
A previous note I had made about HA was that she blamed Plato for his Theory of Ideals, because it led people to think they had found them (or could). I think this relates to the term 'two-world theory' - see 1.1 p23 below.
Elizabeth Young-Bruehl (obit December 2011), biographer of Hannah Arendt, has some reflections on this work accessible on the web (via a library with a JSTOR subscription).
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Intro | 4 | "Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct [,] have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim of our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence." HA added that Eichmann clearly didn't experience any such claim. |
| 9-10 | Kant thought that "men will surely return to Metaphysics 'as one returns to one's mistress after a quarrel' ". | |
| 10 | What is 'dead' (e.g. God, Metaphysics) is just "the traditional thought of" (God or Metaphysics - or even Philosophy). It's the notion that "whatever is given to the senses [RT: on reflection?] ... is more real, more truthful, more meaningful than what appears". And hence "the world of appearances as understood for so many centuries, is also annihilated". And even the sensory as understood by Positivists - that's annihilated too. | |
| 15 | "Truth and meaning are not the same." We shouldn't "interpret meaning on the model of truth". | |
| 1:1 | 'Appearance' | |
| 19 | "In this world ...Being and Appearance coincide." Anything 'exists' because someone can perceive it. | |
| 20 | Descartes' 'cogito' is no good because 'someone else' needs to hear him say it. | |
| 21 | "To appear always means to seem to others." | |
| 23 | So, what about thinking? We don't want to revive a "two-world theory", i.e. Visible (appearances) versus Intelligible (mind, 'being'). | |
| 26 | "The 17th century idea of unlimited progress ... the most cherished dogma of all men living in a scientifically oriented world ...". | |
| 27-8 | "... the enormous variety of animal and plant life ... [such] sheer functional superfluity" (over what's needed for functionality). | |
| 29 | Adolf Portmann: "The urge to self-display". | |
| 31 | Locke didn't like the use of metaphors - including many that use features of the body to try and explain 'mind'. | |
| 32 | "Thought and Speech anticipate one another." | |
| 32-3 | "Every emotion is a somatic experience." | |
| 33 | "Chiasmata" - between 'body of the mind' and 'mind of the body' - were suggested by Merleau-Ponty (M-P) but rejected as a bad model. For more on this, try this web page. | |
| 36 | 'Self presentation' (consciously chosen) versus 'self-display'. | |
| 37 | Socrates: "Always appear as you wish to appear to others", even if you are alone. | |
| 38 | "Error is the price we pay for truth, and semblance ('seems like') is the price we pay for the wonders of appearance." | |
| 41 | "Thoughts also 'are' ." | |
| Kant's 'theological bias' was "to make the arguments favour the existence of an intelligible world". [RT: surely that 'intelligible' is time-dependent?] | ||
| 45 | Philosophical errors are due less to logical mistakes than to the inauthenticity of semblances, e.g. when caused by dogmatic beliefs, arbitrary assumptions or the "paradoxical condition of a living being ... trying to withdraw from the world" (of appearances). | |
| 46 | Husserl: What's important is what we are directing our perception towards (his 'intention'). | |
| Merleau-Ponty's 'perceptual faith' - "our certainty that what we perceive has an existence independent of the act of perceiving". | ||
| 49 | M-P's riposte to Descartes: "To reduce perception to the thought of perceiving ... is to take out an insurance against doubt whose premiums are more onerous than the (possible) loss". | |
| 50 | 'Common sense' was coined by Aquinas - as a combination of the 5 localizable and identifiable senses. | |
| 52 | "Thinking ... subjects everything it gets hold of to doubt", but doesn't destroy "the feeling of realness arising out of the sixth sense" (i.e. 'common sense'). | |
| 53 | "The 'thinking ego' asserts itself only temporarily." | |
| 54 | The decision as to what is worth knowing cannot be scientific. | |
| 59 | Leibniz distinguished 'truths of fact' from 'truths of reason' - the latter deal only with 'thought things' and need no witnesses; they are 'necessary', not 'contingent'. | |
| 60 | Grotius: Even God cannot make 2 times 2 not equal to 4. | |
| 62 | HA talks about "...the unanswerable questions of meaning". | |
| "The need to think can never be stilled by the insights of 'wise men'." | ||
| 1.2 - | 'Mental Activities in a World of Appearances' | |
| 69 | "Thinking, willing and judging ... cannot be reduced to a common denominator." | |
| "How to apply the general to the particular is an additional 'natural gift'." | ||
| 71 | 'To think' means "to speculate meaningfully". | |
| 72 | To HA, 'soul' means "things we suffer passively". | |
| 73 | [RT: So, is mental activity just 'invisible' use of our body's facilities?] | |
| 75 | "The thinking ego, of which I am perfectly conscious so long as the thinking activity lasts, will disappear as though it were a mere mirage when the real world asserts itself again." This is like Orpheus and Eurydice (see also page 86). | |
| 79 | Valéry: "Tantôt je pense, et tantôt je suis". | |
| 81 | A meaning of Plato's 'cave' allegory: the guy leaves the 'city of men' and sees the world minus all the current prejudices and biases [RT: and 'stories'?]. | |
| 82 | "... warfare between thought and common sense." | |
| 93 | "As a spectator you may understand the 'truth' of what the spectacle is about; but the price you have to pay is withdrawal from participating in it." | |
| 94 | A philosopher leaves "the company of his fellow-men and their uncertain opinion; their 'doxai' that can only express an 'it seems to me' ". Spectators are not as solitary as this though. | |
| 95 | "Assuming that history is nothing but the miserable story of mankind's eternal ups and downs, the 'spectacle of sound and fury' (Kant: 'may perhaps be motivating for a while, but the curtain must eventually descend ... even if the actors do not tire of it the spectator does)." | |
| 96 | "The spectator, not the actor, holds the clue to the meaning of human affairs." | |
| 99 | "Implicit in the urge to speak is the quest for meaning, not necessarily the quest for truth." | |
| 100 | We "suspect that no speechless thought can exist". [RT: So it's got to be expressible in words, to ourselves if not to others? But what about China, where symbols are a higher priority?] | |
| 109 | Language is "a token, of man's being naturally endowed with an instrument capable of transforming the invisible into an appearance". | |
| 110 | Most metaphors for Thinking come from sight; for Will, from hearing and feeling; for Judgment, from taste. [RT: I think that's pushing it!] | |
| 114 | Aristotle: "All men begin by wondering". | |
| 115 | Wittgenstein: "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by language". HA: "The trouble is of course that this battle can be re-fought only by language". | |
| 119 | "Truth is ineffable by definition" [RT: i.e. it's not puttable into words]. We can only say 'looks like', 'sounds like', 'smells like', 'tastes like' or 'feels like'. | |
| 120 | Does 'truth' mean just "impervious to contradiction"? [RT: which might be implied by Aristotle?] | |
| 122 | In this respect, Kant talked about "the negative touchstone of truth". | |
| 125 | It may be best [RT: sometimes? often?] to suppress the question "why?". | |
| 1.3 - | 'What Makes Us Think?' | |
| 133 | "... The participant, absorbed as he is in particular things and pressed by urgent business, cannot see how all the particular things ... fit together and produce a harmony ..." | |
| 134 | For pre-Plato Greeks, to think was to become more like the gods, and strive for immortality. | |
| 137 | For scientists, "God created man in his own image ... with only one Commandment: 'Now try to figure out for yourself how all this was done and how it works' ". | |
| 139 | For Hegelians, "the goal of philosophizing was not immortality but necessity, because 'the course of human affairs is subject to laws' ". | |
| 142 | For Plato, it was 'wonder' at the 'harmony' of things. | |
| 144 | 'Logos' (i.e. reasoned speech) distinguished the Greeks from the barbarians. | |
| 148 | Is 'it all' meaningless, as Sartre implied? [RT: and so we have to make our own meanings?] | |
| 150 | "Admiring wonder as the starting point of philosophy leaves no place for the factual existence of disharmony, of ugliness, and finally of evil." | |
| 152 | Cicero's advice was "do not be surprised at anything". | |
| 152-3 | Maybe philosophizing is triggered by disasters, e.g. the Peloponnesian War, the French Revolution? Hegel thought so. | |
| 153-4 | To the Romans, thinking was "essentially practical". | |
| 154 | Epictetus (a Stoic) thought that it's about the "art of living". | |
| 157 | "Bracketing of reality" ... by treating it as "nothing but a mere 'impression', has remained one of the great temptations of the 'professional thinkers' " - and Hegel went even beyond this. | |
| 170 | Socrates showed that there's a big problem with abstract nouns like 'happiness', 'courage', 'justice' - even 'house'. We can't define them in a watertight manner without going round in circles. [RT: so is local consensus the best we can hope for?] | |
| 171 | But discussing them does help. | |
| 172 | Socrates: "It isn't that, knowing the answer myself, I perplex other people; I infect them with the perplexity I feel myself". | |
| 175-6 | The danger in Socrates' answer is in concluding "if we can't define it, why bother about it at all?". That leads to a sort of nihilism [RT: like Postmodernism?], and that's really just the "opposite dogma". | |
| 177 | Thinking may have its perils, but non-thinking has more. | |
| It was no harder to convert Germans back to sense after WW2 than to convert them to Nazism. | ||
| 179 | What's the relationship between 'non-thought' and evil? Socrates thought of evil as arising from deficiency, or ignorance. | |
| 180 | Plato concluded his 'Gorgias' with the solution of "a myth of a hereafter of rewards and punishments". [RT: that counts as 'pragmatic', surely?] | |
| 185 | When thinking, we have the 'Two-in-one' of 'itself' and 'for itself', but "when the outside world intrudes on the thinker" ... he is One again. | |
| 187 | "Consciousness is not the same as thinking." | |
| 189 | Aristotle said that a friend is another 'self'; Socrates thought that 'self' itself is a kind of friend you can discuss silently and invisibly with. [RT: and maybe lose the argument?] | |
| 'Base people' are at variance with themselves, e.g. Shakespeare's Richard the Third. | ||
| 191 | "Bad people ... are 'not full of regrets' ". | |
| "Thinking ... is not a prerogative of the few but an ever-present faculty in everybody. ... Inability to think is not a failing of the many who lack brain power, but an ever-present possibility for anybody ... scholars not excluded." | ||
| "Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers." | ||
| "Conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home." [RT: i.e. Socrates' 'friend' as on page 189.] | ||
| 1.4 - | 'Where Are We When We Think?' | |
| 198 | "The thinking ego, whatever it may achieve, will never be able to reach quality qua quality, or convince itself that anything actually exists, and that life, human life, is more than a dream." | |
| 199 | "During the thinking activity" what now "become meaningful are distillations, products of de-sensing. ... They were once called 'essences'. Essences cannot be localized". | |
| 200 | "The everywhere of the thinking ego ... is a nowhere." | |
| 202-3 | According to what she calls Kafka's parable, we (he means our 'thinking ego') stand between the/our past and the/our future. | |
| 205 | With our activities in the world, "we continue what we started yesterday and hope to finish tomorrow"; this gives us a true analogy. | |
| 207 | But can one 'drop out' of Kafka's parable and become an umpire, or spectator? | |
| 208-9 | HA proposed an alternative model in 2 dimensions, with a diagonal graph as a 'resultant' between the forces of past (x) and present (y). | |
| 212 | "Historically speaking, what has actually broken down is the Roman 'trinity' that for thousands of years united religion, authority and tradition" - and we can't now renew it. So we have 'a fragmented past', which has lost its certainty of evaluation. | |
| 2.1 - | VOLUME 2 - 'WILLING' | |
| 14 | 'Contingent' is taken to mean that something 'may or may not be so', as opposed to things that 'cannot not be so'. | |
| "There can hardly be anything more contingent than 'willed acts' ... which I know that I could as well have left undone." | ||
| 27 | Schopenhauer: "Man does at all times only what he wills, and yet he does this necessarily". | |
| "The curse of contingency" is responsible for downgrading human affairs in the 'ontological hierarchy'. | ||
| 28 | Hegel tried to purify "reality from the merely accidental". | |
| 29 | "What is so very troublesome is the notion of an 'absolute beginning'." That hypothesis "goes back to the Biblical doctrine of Creation, as distinct from the Oriental theories of 'emanation'. | |
| "Creation ex nihilo ... is an addition of later speculations." | ||
| 30 | Can we humans spontaneously decide to begin a "new series", e.g. a composer's symphony? [RT: or my Fire Island maps?] | |
| 31 | Maybe it's "not freedom but necessity that appears as a delusion of consciousness". [RT: that's my prior prejudice, too!] Duns Scotus (DS), Bergson also took this line, but most others preferred the merging of Christian and Greek ideas. [RT: as in Whitehead's 'footnotes to Plato' jibe, or Sacks' revival of that jibe in his criticisms of Christianity (and Islam)? See e.g. C.A. Odora Hoppers on p 149 of 'Values, Religions and Education in Changing Societies' ed. Karin Sporre, Springer 2010.] | |
| DS: "Those who deny that some being is contingent should be exposed to torments until they concede that it is possible for them not to be tormented". | ||
| 32 | People 'prefer' determinism - it's simpler. 'Free Will' "seems utterly incompatible, not just with Divine Providence, but with the [RT: cherished] 'Law of Causality'. [RT: but see also these comments under Causation (Law).] | |
| 33 | But, Bergson admitted, "Free acts are exceptional; most of our acts are taken care of by habits, just as many of our everyday judgments are taken care of by prejudices". | |
| "Professional thinkers are less 'pleased' with freedom than with necessity." [RT: HA's gripe against philosophers.] | ||
| 33-4 | The problem of evil "has haunted philosophers, and attempts at solving it have never been very successful". E.g. it's 'absence of good', or that 'we don't understand the whole picture' (as God does). | |
| 34 | We can't trust philosophers "to arrive at a fair estimate of the Will ... (and their) hostility to the body is well known ... since Plato". [RT: Merleau-Ponty tried to fight the latter one. We also have Christian denigration of 'the flesh'.] | |
| [RT: an odd thought - we often 'have to' think when someone asks us a question and expects an answer.] | ||
| 35 | Our view of our future is mainly a mixture of hope and fear. As a cure for this, even sillier than 'silly prophecies' is 'fatalism'. | |
| 37 | DS: " 'I will and I can' is the Will's delight". | |
| 38 | Thinking and willing are "different modes" - we switch between them as well as with 'doing'. Thinking is more serene. Willing is like puzzle solving - we are not sure we can, until we try. | |
| [RT: another thought - Buddhism is maybe even more anti-Will than western philosophers who, like Leibniz, think we should "will not to will".] | ||
| 2.2 - | 'The Discovery of the Inner Man' | |
| 57 | Aristotle's "anti-Platonic insight ... reason by itself does not move anything". | |
| 59 | "Reason is persuasive, not imperative." | |
| Some men [RT: wicked ones?] "seek the company of others with whom to spend their days; but they avoid their own company". | ||
| 60 | For Aristotle, 'choice' mediates between reason and 'desire', e.g. choice of means to achieve a purpose. | |
| 'Eudaemonia' is taken to mean 'living well in the active life'. | ||
| 62 | "Nobody deliberates between health and happiness" (as an aim). [RT: but we often face trade-offs between actions that are good for one or the other - like eating Mars Bars, or binge drinking.] | |
| But 'choice' isn't "wanting to start something new" - so it isn't Will. | ||
| 66 | "Jesus seems not to have preached resurrection." | |
| But he preached 'do as you would be done by' - and not 'don't do as you wouldn't be done by'. | ||
| 67 | Paul emphasized not doing, but believing. | |
| 68 | And with believing, we can say 'yes' or 'no'. | |
| 69 | With much Christian dogma, "Works no longer count" - obedience does. | |
| 70 | God's Grace sorts it out arbitrarily - thus "Grace abounds where sin increases". The implication is 'Will is impotent'. The task of 'the Spirit' is not just to make the flesh obey, but to mortify it. [RT: sounds like some Hindu doctrines.] | |
| 73 | Epictetus, a near contemporary of St Paul, was not so different in his views on the 'body'. | |
| 75 | Epictetus recognized that the only fear we need to resolve is of fear itself. | |
| 77 | ...and we shouldn't concentrate on "outward things". | |
| 78 | But he did emphasize Will (of a sort). | |
| 80 | Ultimately, Stoicism can descend into apathy, which is pretty silly. | |
| 90 | St Augustine: "The greatest joy is ushered in by the greatest painfulness". This seems to be a general fact. | |
| 93 | St A "discovered that Paul's interpretation of a struggle between flesh and spirit was wrong". | |
| 94 | St A: "You always need two antagonistic wills". | |
| 95 | St A said that it wasn't Divine Grace that healed the Will, but Love. | |
| 99 | St A's 'trinity of the mind', is. "I Am, I Know and I Will". | |
| 101 | St A certainly brought the Will into a prominent role. Redemption of the Will comes from "an act, Bergson's 'coup d'état' ", and "the price of this redemption is freedom." | |
| 103 | "What Love brings about is 'lastingness'." | |
| 105 | But St A had to introduce a 'Foreknower', and hence predestination, which seems very dubious. | |
| 106 | It's a "perverse radicalization of Paul's teaching that salvation lies not in works but in faith, and is given by God's grace - so that not even faith is within man's power". | |
| 110 | As a general comment on St A - he tried hard but created as many conundrums as he tried to solve. At least he didn't quote a lot of other writers, and spoke from his own experience. | |
| [RT: HA did her PhD on Augustine, so who dares to disagree with her reading!] | ||
| 2.3 - | 'Will and Intellect' | |
| 114 | Anselm was the last to write from experience, rather than book learning. | |
| Gilson suggested that the history of philosophy might have been different if Plato and Aristotle had read the first lines of Genesis. [RT: sounds a silly idea to me!] | ||
| 117 | Memory lost out in philosophy, compared with Intellect and Will. | |
| 117-9 | HA gives some arguments of Thomas Aquinas (TA) on these pages [RT: they seem weak to me]. | |
| 120 | But TA at least recognized Will. | |
| Duns Scotus (DS) thought that the 'abstract, imagined tree' has less 'ontological stature' than the actual tree [RT: that's common sense, surely?] Hence the 'particular' outranks the general concept - the reverse of Plato and his Forms. [RT: see my preliminary note.] | ||
| 121 | TA thought Intellect was higher and nobler than Will. | |
| 122 | TA: "Man's ultimate happiness is consistently to know God by the Intellect", and not to love him by an act of Will. [RT: This should make theologians the happiest people!] | |
| 123 | TA didn't consider the possibility of acts that are ends in themselves, e.g. flute playing (but not flute making - that's so someone can play the flute]. This is 'praxis' rather than 'poesis' - Aristotle had considered both. | |
| 129 | DS: Man has the mental capacity to transcend himself, i.e. to envisage things beyond his own limitations. | |
| "The Will may find it difficult not to accept what reason dictates, but the thing is not impossible." | ||
| 130 | "The Will can suspend itself ... the result of another volition." This is not the same as Nietzsche's, Heidegger's [RT: and Leibniz's?] "will not to will". | |
| 132 | DS distinguishes 'natural will' ("inspired by reason as well as by desire") and 'free will'. | |
| DS agrees "that it is in human nature to incline toward the good, and explains the evil will as human weakness ... an inclination to sink back into nothingness". [RT: doesn't this 'nothingness' really mean 'instinctive animal behaviour'?] | ||
| "Free will ... freely designs ends that are pursued for their own sake, and of this pursuance only the Will is capable." | ||
| 132 | In DS's "quintessential thought (i.e. that) contingency (is) the price gladly paid for freedom, he had neither predecessors nor successors". | |
| 134 | DS "was no system builder; his most surprising insights often appear casually". | |
| 135 | "The primacy of the Intellect over the Will must be rejected 'because it cannot save freedom in any way'." | |
| 137 | "What apparently spoke against the Will's freedom to will or nill was the Law of Causality". But that law depends on "the assumption that no more than one cause is sufficient to explain why something should be rather than not-be." DS challenged this [RT: and HA and I too!] | |
| 138 | DS: "I do not say that something is contingent, but that something is caused contingently". HA: "In other words, it is precisely the causative element in human affairs that condemns them to contingency and unpredictability. Nothing indeed could be a greater contradiction to every philosophical tradition ..." | |
| "We need only think of the libraries that have been produced to explain the necessity of the outbreaks of the last two wars, each theory picking out a different single cause - when in truth nothing seems more plausible than that it was a coincidence of causes ..." (maybe with a final trigger). | ||
| 139 | But, "everything that is past is absolutely necessary" (DS) - because it can't be undone. [RT: but what if history gets 're-written', or we only see 'deemed' results?] This may be why, when we look back into the past, we tend to think that people didn't use their free will. | |
| 141 | DS disagreed with Paul and St A who said that "Divine Grace was necessary to heal the Will's misery". | |
| 142 | 'Activism' (action which has an end in itself) and 'Factivism' (action to produce or fashion some external object) had been differentiated by Aristotle long before DS. | |
| "Will as a mental potency whose power does not consist, as in Epictetus, in shielding the mind against reality, but on the contrary, inspires it and endows it with self-confidence ..." | ||
| 143 | DS realized that both Intellect and Will are "bound up with the senses". | |
| 144 | In the end the Will is transformed into Love. | |
| [RT: but DS was largely responsible for the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception - something many regard as sophistry.] | ||
| 2.4 - | 'Conclusions' [RT: they don't read like that to me - more like 'more of the same', concentrating on Nietzsche and Heidegger, and lots of it.] | |
| 150 | After Kant, interest turned from science to human affairs. | |
| Pascal: It's difficult to distinguish dreaming from live experience. | ||
| 151 | Pascal: "Cartesianism was something like the story of Don Quixote". | |
| The German Idealists realized that "The novelty of our contemporary position in philosophy lies in the conviction, which no era had before us, that we do not possess the truth". | ||
| 152 | The idea of step-by-step advancement of knowledge, over many generations, started with science and Bacon, initially with the astronomers. | |
| 154-5 | Goethe: "No action ever attains its intended goal and progress arises out of a senseless 'mixture of error and violence' ", or (Kant) out of a "melancholy haphazardness". | |
| 154-6 | The French Revolution was a further spur, especially for the German Idealists; invisibles ('personified concepts') like liberté, fraternité, égalité, might be actualized. | |
| 156 | Schelling thought "Will is a primordial Being". | |
| 157 | Nietzsche (N): "German philosophy is the most fundamental form of ... homesickness there has ever been; the longing for the best that has ever existed. One is no longer at home anywhere; at last one longs back for that place in which alone one can be at home." He meant the (ancient) Greek world, especially the pre-Socratics. [RT: shades of Robert Pirsig!] | |
| 158 | HA: "I am not homesick enough" - so she didn't want to follow that line. [RT: even if N himself seemed to.] | |
| 159 | N's style was "thought-experiments" [RT: many of which he failed to follow to their conclusion]. | |
| John Donne was another homesick guy - he lamented "all cohaerence gone". | ||
| 160 | N's book 'Will to Power' was a collection of aphorisms edited by others. [RT: but didn't he invent the phrase? And wasn't his Nazi sister involved?] | |
| Schopenhauer's 'Will' was more like "craving, instinct, drive". [RT: and didn't he apply it also to inanimate things?] But he still regarded Will as leading to unhappiness. | ||
| 161 | N's Will is "that something be commanded" - and hence that something obeys, even if it is within oneself. The 'I' "escapes the conflict by identifying with the commanding part, and overlooks ... the unpleasant sentiments of being coerced". | |
| 162 | "... The Will, if it did not have to overcome resistance, could never achieve power." | |
| 163 | "Joy ... can only be experienced if one is wholly free of pain and desire." It's the 'Dionysian' principle - "temporary identification with the principle of life (including the voluptuousness of the martyr) ... triumphs over existing things, however good". [RT: sounds like somewhere between Shiva the Destroyer and rule through binge drinking!] | |
| 167 | "For N, as well as for Hume, free will is an illusion inherent in human nature ... which philosophy will cure us of." | |
| 168 | N ascribed "all human evil - resentment, thirst for vengeance (we punish because we cannot undo what has been done), thirst for power to dominate others" to the impotence of the Will to look backward. | |
| HA says "The concept 'will-to-power' is redundant: the Will generates power by Willing, hence the will whose objective is humility is no less powerful than the will to rule over others". | ||
| 169 | N's 'overcoming', the will to 'surplus', is the basis of all culture. | |
| For N, "Man seeks ... a world that is not self-contradictory, not deceptive, does not change, a true world ..." [RT: homesickness again?] | ||
| 170 | HA: (For N,) "what is needful is not to change the world or man, but to change their way of 'evaluating' it ... What must be overcome are the philosophers" (which sounds like Epictetus' view). | |
| N's "basic insight into the essence of Being is "that there are no moral facts at all". | ||
| 170-1 | Christianity's "concept of a 'moral world order' infects the innocence of 'becoming' by means of 'punishment' and 'guilt' ('the metaphysics of the hangman') ... because, with the elimination of intent and purpose, of somebody who can 'be held responsible', causality itself is eliminated". | |
| 171 | 'Eternal sameness' makes more sense than a world oriented towards some final state. | |
| 172 | HA judges N to have repudiated "the Will and the willing ego, whose internal experiences have misled thinking men into assuming that there are such things as cause and effect, intention and goal, in reality. The superman is one who has overcome these fallacies ... (he) redeems (his will) from all oscillations ... because nothing is left but the wish to be a yes-sayer ... to bless everything there is for being". | |
| Heidegger (H) too had a "passionate insistence on willing 'not to will', dating from his days of studying Nietzsche (1940s on). | ||
| 173 | H came to understand "the will to rule and dominate (as) 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". | |
| 174-5 | H contrasts the "Being of Being" with the "isness of entities". [RT: sounds something worth 'bracketing' out!] | |
| 176 | H highlighted a contradiction in N, between goal-directed will-to-power (which requires a rectilinear time concept) and 'eternal recurrence' (which requires a cyclical one). But that wasn't his main criticism. | |
| More importantly, H thought, "the will-to-power finally 'evaluates' an eternally recurring Becoming as the sole way out of the meaninglessness of life and world" - which is subjective thinking and just 'inverted Platonism', which therefore retains a categorical framework and hence isn't radical enough. [RT: I'd like a way out of the 'meaninglessness' of the above remarks!] | ||
| 177 | In volume 2 of his work on N, H ditched eternal recurrence to seeing "Will as almost exclusively will-to-power" as domination rather than life instinct. [RT: whatever, it doesn't sound good.] | |
| 178 | Will, H says, is obsessed with the future and "forces men into oblivion". Technology is included here. What we need instead is "letting be" - in German, Gelassenheit. [RT: sounds like a new scale of measurement!] | |
| 179 | HA asks, isn't H's 'History of Being' reminiscent of Hegel's 'Geist', Adam Smith's 'invisible hand', or Christianity's 'ultimate salvation'? | |
| 180 | "The stubborn resiliency of the idea ... which was the result of an unprecedented re-thinking of world history that deliberately eliminated from the factual record everything 'merely' factual as accidental and non-consequential." [RT: sounds like a general condemnation of many philosophers!] | |
| "The (fallacious) notion that the actual outcome (of our plans) must be due to some alien supernatural force which, undisturbed by human plurality, has provided for the end result." [RT: General condemnation of theist religion?] | ||
| 183 | H said that the "Will's function is 'to recover this fundamental self' from the requirements of social life in general and language in particular, whose every word already has a 'social' meaning, ... (from) a cliché-ridden language needed for communication with others". | |
| "Life in common with others has created 'a second self ... which obscures the first". The task of philosophy is to lead the social self back 'to the real and concrete self ... which is sheer spontaneity'." [RT: This all sounds like existentialism to me.] | ||
| 184 | H had a silly (in HA's view) of guilt: "Human existence is guilty to the extent that it 'factually exists', and that every action kills off all the other alternatives". But then we are all equally guilty, or equally innocent! | |
| 185 | H deliberately avoided dealing with 'action'; 'Events' are the 'scum' on his 'History of Being'. | |
| 186 | H was desperate to eliminate the Cartesian ego. | |
| 187 | H's ideal thinker "weaned himself from willing to 'letting be' ... listens to the call of Being instead of the call of Conscience ... enacts by sheer thinking the counter-current of Being underlying the 'form' of beings - the mere appearances whose current is steered by the will-to-power". | |
| 188-9 | HA thinks H didn't really attend to the effect of the interruption caused by Germany's WW2 defeat. But he did write 'The Anaximander Fragment', saying that maybe we were entering a new age. But that hope evaporated with (West) Germany's rapid recovery under Adenauer. | |
| One of H's theme's at this time was "Things emerge from concealment ... live in the world of appearances ... then withdraw (again) into concealment". | ||
| 190 | But H says 'The unconcealment of beings ... obscures the light of Being", i.e. the loss of it's 'shelter'. Heraclitus had said that " 'Physis' likes to hide". [RT: sounds all very negative to me.] | |
| 193 | "The Will as destroyer is the 'craving to persist', the inordinate appetite men have 'to cling to themselves'." This is an "insurrection" directed against "order". HA blames certain lines in Goethe for this view of Heidegger's. | |
| 195- | 'The Abyss of Freedom and the novus ordo seclorum' [RT: I think 'Conclusions' really starts here, with the final sub-chapter on pp 195-217.] | |
| 217 |
The theme here is 'Beginnings of New Ages', e.g. Moses leads Israel to Canaan, Rome is founded, USA is founded. There is a tendency to look back to antiquity for ideas for the new foundation; often even back to some golden pastoral age as in Virgil's Georgics. But more realistically, each new beginning is just an update of previous 'constitutions', while at the same time the leaders wax lyrical about 'freedom' - which usually doesn't stretch very far. | |
| 196 | Scientists were disturbed when nuclear physics (Heisenberg) came up with the Uncertainty Principle - of which Einstein said "God does not play dice". | |
| 197-8 | "Materialists play the game of speculation with the aid of computers [RT: and models]; their extrapolations produce, not ghosts like ... (those of) the Idealists, but materializations like those of spiritualist séances." HA instances Lewis Thomas's worldwide 'Great Brain'. | |
| 198 | Lewis Thomas's idea does "away with 'the whole dear notion of one's own self' ... which is 'a myth' ... (and) the proper name of this myth, which we are admonished from all sides to get rid of, is Freedom". | |
| "Professional thinkers, whether philosophers or scientists, have not been 'pleased with freedom' and its ineluctable randomness." | ||
| 200 | Political freedom is more about 'I can' than 'I will'. | |
| 200-2 | 'We' arises whenever men live together. So when does the 'We' actually begin? | |
| 205 | Kant rubbished the idea of an 'absolute beginning' ... which "will nevertheless always remain 'the continuation of a preceding series' ". | |
| 206-7 | The Founding Fathers of the American Republic faced this 'new beginning' conundrum. Jefferson had "laws of nature and nature's God", while John Adams had "great legislator of the Universe". In France, Robespierre had the cult of a "Supreme Being". | |
| 209 | For the USA, they included stuff about a "future state of rewards and punishments", but without any allusion to a 'hereafter'. | |
| 212-4 | Virgil's "utopian fairy tale" (the Georgics) envisaged "an Italic past when the natives were Saturn's people whom no laws fettered to justice, (and who were) upright of their own free will ..." | |
| 215 | The modern equivalent is probably "Marx's fantasy of a classless and warless 'realm of freedom' ". | |
| 215-6 | "The 'Golden Age' is a melancholy thought; it is as though thousands of years ago, our ancestors had a foreboding of the eventual discovery of the entropy principle in the midst of the progress-drunk 19th century - a discovery which, if it had gone unchallenged, would have deprived action of all meaning." | |
| 216 | Hence maybe the yearning for "a cyclical time concept where the pre-historic innocence of the beginning would finally return, no less triumphant than the Second Coming". [RT: as in the last verse of the Christmas hymn, 'It came upon the Midnight Clear' - "When with the ever circling years comes round the age of gold."] | |
| There's no "pure spontaneity", just "understanding the new as the improved re-statement of the old". | ||
| Marx's "utopian and unfounded promises ... would indeed spell 'the end of all things', a sempiternal peace in which all specifically human activities would wither away". | ||
| 216-7 | For St Augustine (in 'The City of God'), "new men, again and again appear in the world by virtue of birth". | |
| 217 | HA concludes [RT: at last!] that "we are doomed to be free by virtue of being born", whether we like it or not, whether we stick it or try "to escape its awesome responsibility by electing some form of fatalism". And this means we have to appeal to our facility of Judgment. | |
| Appe- | 'Judging' - only the title was in HA's typewriter when she died. This appendix is based on her lectures on Kant's political philosophy. | |
| ndix | 255 | In these extracts, 'judgment of right and wrong' is excluded, as this is deemed to be covered by reason - in the form of Kant's 'categorical imperative'. |
| 256 | Kant's treatment of judgment relates to particulars rather than universals. | |
| 257-8 | "Enlargement of the mind", i.e. inter-subjectivity, is inherently an element - we compare our judgment with those of others. | |
| 258-9 | Kant liked the French Revolution, but he thought revolutionary activities were inexcusable. [RT: so his judgment is like taste, or like in a spectator sport.] | |
| 260 | However much we don't want war, it can serve a purpose. "A long peace generally brings about a predominant commercial spirit and, along with it, low selfishness, cowardice and effeminacy, and debases the disposition of the people." | |
| 261 | "For judging of beautiful objects taste is required ... for their production genius is required." | |
| 262 | Kant's judgment unites "imagination, intellect, spirit and taste". Probably, he is thinking primarily of art. | |
| "The condition ... for the existence of beautiful objects is communicability." [RT: i.e., " 'We' like it" has to be possible.] | ||
| 263 | This relates to 'common sense' - one is deemed insane if one's 'judgment' is totally private and not validated by the presence of others. | |
| 263-4 | HA contrasts [RT: to me, confusingly] the 'taste' in Kant's 'judgment' with 'taste' as one of our 5 senses; together with 'smell', it is more private than hearing, seeing and touching. | |
| 269 | It's best to put oneself, when judging, in the position of others and try to look from a "general standpoint". | |
| 269- 70 | But one "can never compel anyone to agree" with one's own
judgments; one can only 'court' agreement by appeal to "community sense". | |
| 272 | 'Ideal examples' are one means of calibrating judgment, e.g. "courage is like Achilles". | |
| HA: "The very idea of progress" (if we mean more than just general improvement) "contradicts Kant's notion of men's dignity". [RT: Doesn't seem much use as a last word!] | ||
| [RT general comment on this Appendix: it doesn't really match the pattern of the rest of the work. Maybe it might have formed part of one sub-chapter. We sorely miss what she might have gone on to say.] | ||
| Men in Dark Times | viii | "If it is the function of the public realm to throw light on the affairs of men by providing a space of appearances in which they can show in deed and word, for better and worse, who they are and what they can do, [RT: phew, pause for breath!] then darkness has come when this light is extinguished by 'credibility gaps' and 'invisible government', by speech that does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet, by exhortations, moral or otherwise, that, under the pretext of upholding old truths, degrade all truths to meaningless triviality." [RT: must be among the longest sentences ever penned, and not untypical of this writer. The main clause seems to be "darkness has come"; and with the general message that "we're drowning in a morass of bullshit". I very much agree!] |
| ix | Heidegger's take on this was "Everything that is real or authentic is assaulted by the overwhelming power of 'mere talk' that irresistibly arises out of the public realm..." [RT: i.e., it's the fault of the "chattering classes" and commentators who have to fill newspaper columns and broadcast slots.] | |
| 13 | Friendship is strongest under persecution ... | |
| 16 | But it (i.e. the above phenomenon) "never yet survived the hour of liberation by so much as a minute". | |
| 29 | GE Lessing asked "Would any such doctrine [RT: I think he meant any dogma or ideology], however convincingly proved, be worth the sacrifice of so much as a single friendship between two men?" | |
| 39 | Rosa Luxemburg asked, "Why did capitalism not collapse [as Marx had predicted]? Because it isn't a closed system. It modified pre-existing systems and could extend its reach beyond national boundaries. It could only collapse after 'the whole surface of the earth was covered' ". | |
| 48 | Bernstein added: "... and [there have been] an increasing number of capitalists of all degrees". | |
| 54 | Rosa Luxemburg correctly predicted the total moral collapse of revolutionary USSR. | |
| 57-69 | Pope John XXIII (Roncalli) was a rare case of a pope who tried to behave as Jesus might have done. [RT: This reminds me of the leader of a Methodist group I was involved in as a student, who rhetorically asked us "Where would Jesus be if he were alive today?" The answer was "With the publicans and sinners". So off we went to the pub.] | |
| 109 | "Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent." | |
| 164 | Walter Benjamin: "The true picture of the past flits by, and only the flâneur who idly strolls by receives the message". [RT: I think I must be one!] | |
| 239 | Berthold Brecht aligned himself with the Communist Party because it "not only had made the cause of the unfortunate ones its own but also possessed a body of writings upon which one could draw for all circumstances and from which one could quote as endlessly as from Scripture". [RT: he was never actually a member of the CP, but a follower of Korsch. But he did accept a Stalin Peace Prize in 1954.] |
Hannah Arendt is not a writer one can go to expecting to get a consistent answer to issues. Her style is to look at them from many sides and through the writings of many previous writers. Her own life experiences, as with Sartre's, have probably covered her overall outlook (e.g. relationship with Heidegger, escape from Nazi Germany, finding her role in the USA and attending the Eichmann trial).
It doesn't make reading easy - it's all rather 'stream of consciousness'. A "disputation" style, as used by Plato, Aquinas, or RP Anschutz might have helped, or even a 'point-by-point' structured thesis as with Euclid, Spinoza, Heidegger or Wittgenstein. Otherwise, it's sometimes difficult to distinguish what the person she is quoting thinks - from what she herself (HA) thinks.
However looking at things from multiple views must be a good thing, and I tend to side with her own inclinations on many occasions. Her time with Jaspers (and Heidegger) means she has Existential tendencies. She is also somewhat of what I think of as a Fabian.
For a totally different angle on the same title, try this article about David Chalmers.
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 27th February 2012
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .