The Life of the Mind

  What happens to thought's "ultimate question," once this faith is resolutely rejected and human reason is left completely alone with its own capacities, we can trace in Sartre's Nausea, by far the most important of his philosophical works. There the hero of the novel, looking at the root of a chestnut tree, has been suddenly overcome by "what 'to exist' meant...; existence usually hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can't say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it." But now "existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things....Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer." The reaction of Sartre's hero is not admiration, and not even wonder, but nausea at the opaqueness of sheer existence, at the naked thereness of the factually given, which indeed no thought has ever succeeded in reaching, let alone illuminating and making transparent: "You couldn't even wonder where all that sprang from, or how it was that a world came into existence, rather than nothingness." Now that all marveling had been eliminated, it was the scandal of Being that nothingness was "unthinkable." There had been nothing before it. Nothing ... That was what worried me: of course there was no reason for this flowing larval stuff to exist. But it was impossible for it not to exist. It was unthinkable: to imagine nothingness you had to be there already, in the middle of the world, alive, with your eyes wide open....I felt with boredom that I had no way of understanding. No way. Yet it was there, waiting, looking at one." It is this completely meaningless thereness that makes the hero shout: "'Filth! what rotten filth!'...but it held fast and there was so much, tons and tons of existence, endless."59

  In this progressive shift from Being to nothingness, caused not by the loss of wonder or perplexity but by the loss of admiration and willingness to affirm in thought, it would be very tempting to see the end of philosophy, at least of that philosophy whose beginning Plato had fixed. No doubt, the turning from admiration to negation is easy enough to understand, not because it is occasioned by any tangible events or thoughts but because, as Kant had already observed, speculative reason in itself "feels no loss" and no gain in turning to either side of the matter. Hence, the notion that to think means to say "yes" and confirm the factuality of sheer existence is also found in many variations throughout the history of philosophy in the modern age. We find it notably in Spinoza's "acquiescence" in the process in which everything that is swings and in which the "big fish" forever eat the small fish. It appears in Kant's pre-critical writings when he tells the metaphysician that he should first ask: "Is it possible that nothing at all exists?" which then should lead him to the conclusion that "if no existence is given at all, there would also be nothing to think about," a thought that in turn leads to a "concept of absolutely necessary being "60 —a conclusion Kant would hardly have recognized in the critical period. More interesting is a remark he makes a little earlier about living in "the best possible world": he repeats the old consoling thought, "that the whole is the best, and that everything is good for the sake of the whole," but seems himself not quite convinced of this ancient topos of metaphysics, for he suddenly injects: "Ich rufe allem Geschöpfe zu...: Heil uns, wir sind!"—"l call out to every creature...: Hail to us that we arel"61

  This affirmation, or, rather, the need to reconcile thought with reality, is one of the leitmotifs of the work of Hegel. It informs Nietzsche's amor fati and his notion of "eternal recurrence"—the "highest form of affirmation that can be reached" "62 precisely because it is at the same time the "heaviest weight."

  How, if a ... demon were to ... say to you "This life as you now live it ... you will have to live ... innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh ... must return to you—all in the same succession and sequence.... The eternal hour glass of existence is upended over and over and you with it, a dust grain of dust." Would you not throw yourself down ... and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or did you once experience a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, "You are a god and never have I heard anything more godly."...How well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal.63

  The point of these passages is that Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence is not an "idea" in the Kantian sense of regulating our speculations, nor, of course, is it anything like a "theory," a relapse, so to speak, into the ancient time-concept with its cyclical motion. It is indeed a mere thought or, rather, a thought-experiment, and its poignancy resides in the intimate connection that binds the thought of Being and the thought of nothingness together. Here the need for confirmation arises not out of a Greek admiration for the invisible harmony and beauty that bind together the infinite diversity of particular beings, but out of the simple fact that nobody can think Being without at the same time thinking nothingness, or think Meaning without thinking futility, vanity, meaninglessness.

  The way out of this perplexity seems to be indicated by the old argument that without an aboriginal confirmation of Being, there would be nothing to think about and nobody to do the thinking; in other words, the very activity of thinking no matter what kind of thought already presupposes existence. But such merely logical solutions are always treacherous; nobody who clings fast to the notion that "there is no truth" will ever be convinced if it is pointed out to him that the proposition is self-defeating. An existential, meta-logical solution of the perplexity can be found in Heidegger, who, as we saw, evinced something like the old Platonic wonder in reiterating the question Why is there anything at all rather than nothing? According to Heidegger, to think and to thank are essentially the same; the very words derive from the same etymological root. This, obviously, is closer to Plato's wondering admiration than any of the answers discussed. Its difficulty lies not in the etymological derivation and the lack of an argumentative demonstration. It is still the old difficulty inherent in Plato, of which Plato himself seems to have been well aware and which is discussed in the Parmenides.

  Admiring wonder conceived as the starting-point of philosophy leaves no place for the factual existence of disharmony, of ugliness, and finally of evil. No Platonic dialogue deals with the question of evil, and only in the Parmenides does he show concern about the consequences that the undeniable existence of hideous things and ugly deeds is bound to have for his doctrine of ideas. If everything that appears partakes in an Idea visible only to the eye of the mind and derives from this Form whatever reality it may possess in the Cave of human affairs—the world of ordinary sense perception-then everything that appears at all, by no means only admirable things, owes its very appearingness to such a suprasensory entity to explain its presence in this world. So, asks Parmenides, what about utterly "trivial and undignified objects" such as "hair and mud and dirt," which have never aroused admiration in anybody? Plato, speaking through Socrates, does not use the later common justification of evil and ugliness as necessary parts of the whole that appear evil and ugly only to the limited perspective of men. Instead, Socrates replies that it would be simply absurd to ascribe ideas to such stuff—"...in these cases, the things are just the things we see"—and suggests that it is better to retreat at this point "for fear of falling into a bottomless pit of nonsense." (Parmenides, however, an old man in the dialogue, points out: "That ... is because you are still young, Socrates, and philosophy has not yet taken hold of you so firmly as I believe it will someday. You will not despise any of these things then, but at present your youth makes you still pay attention to what the world will think."64 But the difficulty is not resolved and Plato never again raises the question.) We are not interested here in the doctrine of ideas, or only to the extent that one might be able to demonstrate that the notion of ideas occurred to Plato because of beautiful things and would never have occurred to him had he been surrounded by nothing but "trivial and un
dignified objects."

  There is, of course, a decisive difference between Plato's and Parmenides' quest for divine matters and the seemingly more humble attempts of Solon and Socrates at defining the "unseen measures" that bind and determine human affairs, and the relevance of the difference for the history of philosophy, as distinguished from the history of thought, is very great. What matters in our context is that in both instances thought is concerned with invisible things that are pointed to, nevertheless, by appearances (the starry sky above us or the deeds and destinies of men), invisibles that are present in the visible world in much the same way as the Homeric gods, who were visible only to those whom they approached.

  16. The Roman answer

  In my attempt to isolate and examine one of the basic sources of non-cognitive thinking I have emphasized the elements of admiration, confirmation, and affirmation, which we encounter so powerfully in Greek philosophical and pre-philosophic thought and can trace throughout the centuries, not as a matter of influence but of often-repeated first-hand experience. I am not at all sure that what I have been describing runs counter to present-day experiences of thinking but I am quite sure that it runs counter to present-day opinion on the subject.

  Common opinion on philosophy was formed by the Romans, who became the heirs of Greece, and it bears the stamp, not of the original Roman experience, which was exclusively political (and which we find in its purest form in Virgil), but of the last century of the Roman republic, when the res publica, the public thing, was already in the process of being lost, till finally, after Augustus' attempt at restoration, it became the private property of the imperial household. Philosophy, like the arts and letters, like poetry and historiography, had always been a Greek import; in Rome culture had been looked upon with some suspicion as long as the public thing was still intact, but it was also tolerated and even admired as a noble pastime for the educated and a means of beautification of the Eternal City. Only in the centuries of decline and fall, first of the republic and then of the empire, did these occupations become "serious," and did philosophy, for its part, Greek borrowings notwithstanding, develop into a "science," Cicero's animi medicina—the opposite of what it had been in Greece.65 Its usefulness was to teach men how to cure their despairing minds by escaping from the world through thinking. Its famous watchword—which sounds almost as though it had been formulated in contradiction of the Platonic admiring wonder—became nil admirari: do not be surprised at anything, admire nothing.66

  But it was not just the popular image of the figure of the philosopher, the wise man whom nothing can touch, that we owe to the Roman transmittal; Hegel's well-known saying about the relation of philosophy and reality ("the owl of Minerva begins its flight when dusk is falling")67 bears the mark of the Roman rather than the Greek experience. For Hegel, Minerva's owl exemplified Plato and Aristotle rising, as it were, out of the disasters of the Peloponnesian war. Not philosophy, but the political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle grew out of the decline of the polis, "a shape of life grown old." And with respect to this political philosophy there is considerable evidence for the truth of Pascal's splendidly impertinent remark in the Pensées:

  We can only think of Plato and Aristotle in grand academic robes. They were honest men, and like others laughing with their friends, and when they wanted to divert themselves, they wrote the Laws or the Politics, to amuse themselves. That part of their life was the least philosophic and the least serious....If they wrote on politics, it was as if laying down rules for a lunatic asylum; if they presented the appearance of speaking of a great matter, it was because they knew that the madmen, to whom they spoke, thought they were kings and emperors. They entered into their principles in order to make their madness as little harmful as possible.68

  In any event, the profound Roman influence on even so metaphysical a philosopher as Hegel is quite manifest in his first published book,69 where he discusses the relation between philosophy and reality: "The need for philosophy arises when the unifying power has disappeared from the life of men, when the opposites have lost the living tension of their relatedness and their mutual interdependence and have become autonomous. Out of disunity, out of being torn apart, arises thought," namely, the need for reconciliation ("Entzweiung ist der Quell des Bedürfnisses der Philosophic"). What is Roman in the Hegelian notion of philosophy is that thinking does not arise out of reason's need but has an existential root in unhappiness—whose typically Roman character Hegel with his great sense of history recognized very clearly in his treatment of the "Roman World" in the late lecture course published as the Philosophy of History. "Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Scepticism ... although ... opposed to each other, had the same general purport, viz., rendering the soul absolutely indifferent to everything which the real world had to offer."70 What he apparently did not recognize is the extent to which he himself had generalized the Roman experience: 'The History of the World is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony."71 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.

  And this sounds very plausible. How often indeed must the first thought-impulse have coincided with an impulse to escape a world that has become unbearable. It is improbable that this escape-impulse is less old than the admiring wonder. Yet we look in vain for its expression in conceptual language before the long centuries of decline that began when Lucretius and Cicero transformed Greek philosophy into something essentially Roman—which meant, among other things, something essentially practical.72 And following these precursors with their mere foreboding of disaster—'everything is gradually decaying and nearing its end, worn out by old age," in the words of Lucretius73 —it took over a hundred years before those thought-trains were developed into a sort of consistent philosophical system. That occurred with Epictetus, the Greek slave and the most acute mind, possibly, among the late Stoics. According to him, what must be learned to make life bearable is not really thinking, but "the correct use of imagination," the only thing we have entirely within our power. He still uses a deceptively familiar Greek vocabulary, but what he calls "the reasoning faculty" (dynamis logikē) has as little to do with Greek logos and nous as what he appeals to as "will" has to do with Aristotelian proairesis. He calls the faculty of thinking in itself "sterile" (akarpa);74 for him the subject matter of philosophy is each man's own life, and what philosophy teaches man is an "art of living,"75 how to deal with life, in the same fashion that carpentry teaches an apprentice how to deal with wood. What counts is not "theory" in the abstract but its use and application (chrēsis tōn theōrēmatōn); to think and to understand are a mere preparation for action; to "admire the mere power of exposition"—the logos, the reasoned argument and train of thought itself—is likely to turn man "into a grammarian instead of a philosopher."76

  In other words, thinking has become a technē, a particular kind of craftsmanship, perhaps to be deemed the highest—certainly the most urgently needed, because its end product is the conduct of your own life. What was meant was not a way of life in the sense of a bios theōrētikos or politikos, a life devoted to some particular activity, but what Epictetus called "action"—an action in which you acted in unison with no one, which was supposed to change nothing but your self, and which could become manifest only in the apatheia and ataraxia of the "wise man," that is, in his refusal to react to whatever good or evil might befall him. "I must die, but must I also die sighing? I can't help being chained, but can't I help weeping?...You threaten to handcuff me. Man, what are you saying? You can't handcuff me; you manacle my hands. You are threatening to behead me; when did I say that my head could not be cut off?"77 Obviously, these are not just exercises in thinking but exercises in the power of the will. "Ask not that events should happen as you will, but let your will be that events should happen as they do, and you shall have peace" is the quintessence of th
is "wisdom"; for "it is impossible that what happens should be other than it is."78

  This will be of considerable interest to us when we come to deal with the phenomenon of the will, an altogether different mental capacity, whose chief characteristic, compared with the ability to think, is that it neither speaks in the voice of reflection nor does it use arguments but only imperatives, even when it is commanding nothing more than thought or, rather, imagination. For in order to obtain the radical withdrawal from reality that Epictetus demands, the emphasis on thinking's ability to have present what is absent shifts from reflection to imagination, and this not in the sense of a Utopian imagining of another, better, world; rather, the aim is to strengthen the original absent-mindedness of thought to such an extent that reality disappears altogether. If thinking is normally the faculty of making present what is absent, the Epictetian faculty of "dealing with impressions aright" consists in conjuring away and making absent what actually is present. All that existentially concerns you while living in the world of appearances is the "impressions" by which you are affected. Whether what affects you exists or is mere illusion depends on your decision whether or not you will recognize it as real.