The Life of the Mind

  On the assumption that the philosopher does not need the "rabble" to inform him of his "foolishness"—the common sense he shares with all men must be alert enough for him to anticipate their laughter—on the assumption, in short, that what we are dealing with is an intramural warfare between common-sense reasoning and speculative thinking going on in the mind of the philosopher himself, let us examine more closely the affinity between death and philosophy. If we take our perspective from the world of appearances, the common world in which we appeared by birth and from which we shall disappear by death, then the wish to know our common habitat and amass all kinds of knowledge about it is natural. Because of thinking's need to transcend it, we have turned away; in a metaphorical sense, we have disappeared from this world, and this can be understood—from the perspective of the natural and of our common-sense reasoning—as the anticipation of our final departure, that is, our death.

  That is how Plato described it in the Phaedo: Seen from the perspective of the multitude, the philosophers do nothing but pursue death, from which the many, if they cared at all, might conclude that philosophers had better die.34 And Plato is not so sure that the many are not right, except that they do not know in what sense that is to be construed. The "true philosopher," one who spends his whole life in thought, has two desires: first, that he may be free from all kinds of business and especially be rid of his body, which always demands to be taken care of, "falls in our way at every step ... and causes confusion and trouble and panic,"35 and second, that he may come to live in a hereafter where those things with which thinking is concerned, such as truth, justice, and beauty, will be no less accessible and real than what now can be perceived with the bodily senses.36 Even Aristotle, in one of his popular writings, reminds his readers of those "islands of the blessed" that are blessed because there "men would not need anything and none of the other things could be of any use to them so that only thinking and contemplating (theōrein) would be left, that is, what even now we call a free life."37 In short, the turning-about inherent in thinking is by no means a harmless enterprise. In the Phaedo it reverses all relationships: men, who naturally shun death as the greatest of evils, are now turning to it as the greatest good.

  All of this is of course spoken with tongue in cheek—or, more academically, it is put into metaphorical language; philosophers are not famous for their suicides, not even when they hold with Aristotle (in a surprisingly personal remark in the Protreptikos) 38 that those who want to enjoy themselves should either philosophize or depart from life, all else seems to be foolish talk and nonsense. But the metaphor of death, or, rather, the metaphorical reversal of life and death—what we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life-is not arbitrary, although one can see it a bit less dramatically: If thinking establishes its own conditions, blinding itself against the sensorily given by removing all that is close at hand, it is in order to make room for the distant to become manifest. To put it quite simply, in the proverbial absent-mindedness of the philosopher, everything present is absent because something actually absent is present to his mind, and among the things absent is the philosopher's own body. Both the philosopher's hostility toward politics, "the petty affairs of men,"39 and his hostility toward the body have little to do with individual convictions and beliefs; they are inherent in the experience itself. While you are thinking, you are unaware of your own corporality—and it is this experience that made Plato ascribe immortality to the soul once it has departed from the body and made Descartes conclude "that the soul can think without the body except that so long as the soul is attached to the body it may be bothered in its operations by the bad disposition of the body's organs."40

  Mnemosyne, Memory, is the mother of the Muses, and remembrance, the most frequent and also the most basic thinking experience, has to do with things that are absent, that have disappeared from my senses. Yet the absent that is summoned up and made present to my mind—a person, an event, a monument—cannot appear in the way it appeared to my senses, as though remembrance were a kind of witchcraft. In order to appear to my mind only, it must first be de-sensed, and the capacity to transform sense-objects into images is called "imagination." Without this faculty, which makes present what is absent in a de-sensed form, no thought processes and no trains of thought would be possible at all. Hence, thinking is "out of order" not merely because it stops all the other activities so necessary for the business of living and staying alive, but because it inverts all ordinary relationships: what is near and appears directly to our senses is now far away and what is distant is actually present. While thinking I am not where I actually am; I am surrounded not by sense-objects but by images that are invisible to everybody else. It is as though I had withdrawn into some never-never land, the land of invisibles, of which I would know nothing had I not this faculty of remembering and imagining. 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.

  Since time and space in ordinary experience cannot even be thought of without a continuum that stretches from the nearby into the distant, from the now into past or future, from here to any point in the compass, left and right, forward and backward, above and below, I could with some justification say that not only distances but also time and space themselves are abolished in the thinking process. As far as space is concerned, I know of no philosophical or metaphysical concept that could plausibly be related to this experience; but I am rather certain that the nunc stans, the "standing now," became the symbol of eternity—the "nunc aeternitatis" (Duns Scotus)—for medieval philosophy because it was a plausible description of experiences that took place in meditation as well as in contemplation, the two modes of thought known to Christianity.

  Just now, I chose to speak first of de-sensed sense-objects, that is, of invisibles belonging to the world of appearances that have temporarily disappeared from or have not yet reached our field of perception and are drawn into our presence by remembering or anticipation. What actually occurs in these instances is told for all time in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus went down to Hades to recover his dead wife and was told he could have her back on condition that he would not turn to look at her as she followed him. But when they approached the world of the living, Orpheus did look back and Eurydice immediately vanished. More precisely than could any terminological language, the old myth tells what happens the moment the thinking process comes to an end in the world of ordinary living: all the invisibles vanish again. It is fitting, too, that the myth should relate to remembrance and not to anticipation. The faculty of anticipating the future in thought derives from the faculty of remembering the past, which in turn derives from the even more elementary ability to de-sense and have present before (and not just in) your mind what is physically absent. The ability to create fictive entities in your mind, such as the unicorn and the centaur, or the fictitious characters of a story, an ability usually called productive imagination, is actually entirely dependent upon the so-called reproductive imagination; in "productive" imagination, elements from the visible world are rearranged, and this is possible because the elements, now so freely handled, have already gone through the de-sensing process of thinking.

  Not sense perception, in which we experience things directly and close at hand, but imagination, coming after it, prepares the objects of our thought. 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. To say it again, every thought is an after-thought. By repeating in imagination, we de-sense whatever had been given to our senses. And only in this immaterial form can our thinking faculty now begin to concern itself with these data. This operation precedes all thought processes
, cognitive thought as well as thought about meaning, and only sheer logical reasoning—where the mind in strict consistency with its own laws produces a deductive chain from a given premise—has definitely cut all strings to living experience; and it can do so only because the premise, either fact or hypothesis, is supposed to be self-evident, and therefore not subject to examination by thought. Even the simple telling of what has happened, whether the story then tells it as it was or fails to do so, is preceded by the de-sensing operation. The Greek language has this time element in its very vocabulary: the word "to know," as I pointed out earlier, is a derivative of the word "to see." To see is idein, to know is eidenai, that is, to have seen. First you see, then you know.

  To vary this for our purposes: All thought arises out of experience, but no experience yields any meaning or even coherence without undergoing the operations of imagining and thinking. Seen from the perspective of thinking, life in its sheer thereness is meaningless; seen from the perspective of the immediacy of life and the world given to the senses, thinking is, as Plato indicated, a living death. The philosopher who lives in the "land of thought" (Kant)41 will naturally be inclined to look upon these things from the viewpoint of the thinking ego, for which a life without meaning is a kind of living death. The thinking ego, because it is not identical with the real self, is unaware of its own withdrawal from the common world of appearances; from its perspective, it is rather as though the invisible had come forward, as though the innumerable entities making up the world of appearances, which through their very presence distract the mind and prevent its activity, had been positively concealing an always invisible Being that reveals itself only to the mind. In other words, what for common sense is the obvious withdrawal of the mind from the world appears in the mind's own perspective as a "withdrawal of Being" or "oblivion of Being"—Seinsentzug and Seinsvergessenheit (Heidegger). And it is true, everyday life, the life of the "They," is spent in a world from which all that is "visible" to the mind is totally absent.

  And not only is the quest for meaning absent from and good for nothing in the ordinary course of human affairs, while at the same time its results remain uncertain and unverifiable; thinking is also somehow self-destructive. In the privacy of his posthumously published notes, Kant wrote: "I do not approve of the rule that if the use of pure reason has proved something, the result should no longer be subject to doubt, as though it were a solid axiom"; and "I do not share the opinion ... that one should not doubt once one has convinced oneself of something. In pure philosophy this is impossible. Our mind has a natural aversion to it" (italics added).42 From which it follows that the business of thinking is like Penelope's web; it undoes every morning what it has finished the night before.43 For the need to think can never be stilled by allegedly definite insights of "wise men"; it can be satisfied only through thinking, and the thoughts I had yesterday will satisfy this need today only to the extent that I want and am able to think them anew.

  We have been looking at the outstanding characteristics of the thinking activity: its withdrawal from the common-sense world of appearances, its self-destructive tendency with regard to its own results, its reflexivity, and the awareness of sheer activity that accompanies it, plus the weird fact that I know of my mind's faculties only so long as the activity lasts, which means that thinking itself can never be solidly established as one and even the highest property of the human species—man can be defined as the "speaking animal" in the Aristotelian sense of logon echōn, in possession of speech, but not as the thinking animal, the animal rationale. None of these characteristics has escaped the attention of the philosophers. The curious thing is, however, that the more "professional" the thinkers were and the greater they loom in our tradition of philosophy, the more they were inclined to find ways and means of reinterpreting these inherent traits so as to be armed against common-sense reasoning's objections to the uselessness and unreality of the whole enterprise. The lengths to which philosophers went in these reinterpretations as well as the quality of their arguments would be inexplicable if they had been directed at the famous multitude—which has never cared anyway and remained happily ignorant of philosophical argumentation—rather than prompted primarily by their own common sense and by the self-doubt which inevitably accompanies its suspension. The same Kant who confided his true thinking experiences to the privacy of his notebooks announced publicly that he had laid the foundations of all future metaphysical systems, and Hegel, the last and most ingenious among the system-builders, transformed thinking's undoing of its own results into the mighty power of the negative without which no movement and no development would ever come to pass. For him, the same inexorable chain of developmental consequences which rules organic nature from germ to fruit, in which one phase always "negates" and cancels out the earlier one, rules the undoing of the mind's thinking process, except that the latter, since it is "mediated through consciousness and will," through mental activities, can be seen as "making itself': "Mind is only that which it makes itself, and it makes itself actually into that which it is itself (potentially)." Which, incidentally, leaves unanswered the question of who made the potentiality of the mind to begin with.

  I have mentioned Hegel because large portions of his work can be read as a running polemic against common sense, especially the Preface to the Phenomenology of the Mind. Very early (1801), he had asserted in a truculent mood, obviously still bothered by Plato's Thracian girl and her innocent laughter, that indeed "the world of philosophy [is for common sense] a world turned upside down."44 Just as Kant had started out to remedy the "scandal of Reason," namely, that reason when it wished to know got trapped in its own antinomies, so Hegel set out to remedy the impotence of Kantian reason, that "it could achieve no more than an Ideal and an Ought," and declared that reason, on the contrary, by virtue of the Idea is das schlechthin Mächtige, the mighty as such.45

  Hegel's significance in our context lies in the fact that he, perhaps more than any other philosopher, testifies to the intramural warfare between philosophy and common sense, and this by virtue of his being by nature equally gifted as a historian and as a thinker. He knew that the intensity of the thinking ego's experiences is due to their being sheer activity: the mind's "very essence ... is action. It makes itself what it essentially is; it is its own product, its own work." And he knew about its reflexivity: "In this lust of activity it only deals with itself."46 He even admitted in his own way the mind's tendency to destroy its results: "Thus the mind is at war with itself. It must overcome itself as its own enemy and formidable obstacle."47 But these insights of speculative reason into what it is actually doing when to all appearances it is doing nothing he transformed into pieces of dogmatic knowledge, treating them as results of cognition, so as to be able to fit them into an all-comprehensive system where they would then have the same reality as the results of other sciences, results which, on the other hand, he denounced as essentially meaningless products of common-sense reasoning, or as "defective knowledge." And indeed the system with its strict architectonic organization can give the fleeting insights of speculative reason at least a semblance of reality. If truth is taken to be the highest object of thought, then it follows that "the true is real only as a system"; only as such a mental artifact does it have any chance to appear and acquire that minimum of durability that we demand of anything real—as a mere proposition it will hardly survive the battle of opinions. To make sure of having eliminated the common-sense notion that thinking deals with abstractions and irrelevancies, which indeed it does not, he asserted, always in the same polemical spirit, that "Being is Thinking" (dass das Sein Denken ist), that "the spiritual alone is the real," and that only those generalities with which we deal in thinking actually are.48

  No one has fought with more determination against the particular, the eternal stumbling block of thinking, the undisputable thereness of objects that no thought can reach or explain. The highest function of philosophy, according to Hegel, is to eliminate the contingent, and
all particulars, everything that exists, are contingent by definition. Philosophy deals with the particulars as parts of a whole, and the whole is the system, a product of speculative thought. This whole, scientifically speaking, can never be more than a plausible hypothesis, which by integrating every particular into an all-comprehensive thought transforms them all into thought-things and thus eliminates their most scandalous property, their realness, together with their contingency. It was Hegel who declared that "the time has come for the elevation of philosophy to a science," and who wished to transform philo-sophy, the mere love of wisdom, into wisdom, sophia. In this way he succeeded in persuading himself that "to think is to act"—which this most solitary occupation can never do, since we can act only "in concert," in company and agreement with our peers, hence in an existential situation that effectively prevents thinking.

  In sharp contrast to all these theories, framed as a kind of apology for speculative thought, stands the famous, strangely unconnected and always mistranslated remark that occurs in the same Preface to the Phenomenology and that expresses directly, unsystematically, Hegel's original experiences in speculative thought: "The true is thus the bacchanalian revel, where no member [i.e., no particular thought] is not drunken, and since every member [every thought] no sooner separates itself [from the train of thought of which it is a mere part] than it dissolves straightaway, the revel is just as much a state of transparent, unbroken quiet." To Hegel, this was how the very "life of truth"—truth that has come alive in the process of thinking—manifests itself to the thinking ego. This ego may not know whether man and the world are real or—see especially Indian philosophy—a mere mirage; it knows only of being "alive" in an elation that always borders on "intoxication"—as Nietzsche once said. How deeply this feeling underlies the whole "system" may be gauged when we encounter it again at the end of the Phenomenology: there it is contrasted with the "lifeless"—the emphasis is always on life— and expresses itself in Schiller's verses, badly misquoted: "Out of the chalice of this spiritual kingdom/foams forth the mind's infinity." ("Aus dem Kelche dieses Geisterreiches/schäumt ihm seine Unend-lichkeit.")