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MARY ELLEN WAITHE

MARY ELLEN WAITHE

I.  BIOGRAPHY

Born in Germany of Jewish parents, Johannah Arendt experienced tragedy young, when, at age seven, she lost her father to syphilis. The best biography of her intellectual development is to be found in Elizabeth Young Breuhl’s nearly six hundred page tome, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World.1 Arendt’s early teens were a turbulent time, during which she became a voracious reader of German and French literature and philosophy. Her undergraduate education began at the University of Marburg for a year and continued for a year at the University of Freiburg. Her Ph.D. in Philosophy was completed at the University of Heidelberg when she was twenty-two.

It was at Marburg that Hannah Arendt met Martin Heidegger, who was at first, her philosophical mentor, and soon, her lover. At Freiburg Arendt studied under Edmund Husserl, and at Heidelberg she studied under Karl Jaspers. These philosophers, and importantly, her experiences as a Jew and as a woman in academia during the events leading up to the second World War were to have the greatest influence on her philosophical development. Following her release from a week’s imprisonment for doing library research on the biography of an eighteenth-century Jewish woman, Rahel Varnhagen,2 she and her first husband, Gunther Stern fled to Paris where she lived as a stateless person from 1933-1941. In 1940 she divorced Stern and remarried. Following brief separate internments, Arendt, along with her mother and her second husband, a gentile and a communist named Heinrich Blucher emigrated to the United States. Within a year, she had a part time appointment in History at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Soon afterwards she began the nearly decade-long process of writing The Origins of Totalitarianism?

A History of Women Philosophers/Voiume 4, ed. by Mary Ellen Waithe, 243-259. © 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

She spent the remainder of her life living in the United States, receiving her American citizenship in 1951.

Her many writings against racism, and particularly against anti-semitism, brought her major honors including a Guggenheim Foundation Grant, the Sonning Prize from the Danish government, and the American Political Science Association’s Lippincott Award. She received appoint-ments at major “think tanks” and at American universities. During the mid 1940’s Arendt was Research Director of the Conference on Jewish Relations, and much later, received a professorial appointment at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. Not only did she teach at the above-mentioned Brooklyn College, but also at New Jersey’s Princeton University, and in Manhattan at the prestigious New School for Social Research. There she held the rank of University Professor of Political Philosophy. She was invited to give the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 1973 and 1974. There she presented portions of what would be her final works, the first two books of the planned trilogy: The Life of the Mind. The work is edited by her friend and literary executor, the writer Mary McCarthy.

Despite her training and her faculty appointments in Philosophy (she had been the first female full professor at Princeton), Arendt denied for many years that she was a “philosopher” preferring, in the tradition of her contemporaries, Beauvoir (see Chapter 12), Sartre and Rand (see Chapter 9) to bring philosophical insights to bear on subjects that well-educated non-philosophers would find relevant to their lives. She wrote numerous short articles for the popular press, and even her more scholarly full-length works were mostly published by non-academic presses.  

of evil.8 She looked retrospectively to the moral, social, and political foundations of the Revolutionary War in America9 and explored the ideas of the virtue and abuse of labor.10 In addition, she completed two of three planned volumes on what can only be described as a moral philosophy of mind.11 In addition to being remembered as an original thinker, Hannah Arendt shall also be remembered as a philosopher who commemorated the work of Heidegger,12 and who edited the work of her friend, Karl Jaspers.13 Hannah Arendt was widowed in 1970 and died suddenly in 1975, as she apparently was about to begin the third and final volume (on judging) of her Life of the Mind. In what follows, I shall offer brief descriptions of On Revolution and of the first two volumes of Life of the Mind.

1. On Revolution

In On Revolution Arendt examines the French, American and Russian revolutions and the central components of each: power, passion and reason. In Arendt’s view, the American Revolution epitomized each component in ways that were subtly but crucially different than in the other revolutions. These differences, she claims, account for its unique success. The American Revolution broke with tradition in assuming the “naturalness” of poverty, Arendt claims.14 Arendt notes that historically, “revolution” has meant “restoration” and since Copernicus at least, has meant in cosmological terms “the orderly and lawful return to the original position.” It is this “orderliness” and “lawfulness” of the American Revolution that in Arendt’s view distinguishes it from others.15 Its statement of the “original position” (as John Rawls would also use the term) was a statement of original equality of all and the commitment of all to the orderly establishment of positive law. This was what the Declaration of Independence stated prior to the commencement of the American Revolution: the natural equality of citizens and their natural right to be self-governing and to establish institutions of law. In contrast, the French and Russian revolutions attempted to overthrow existing regimes, but resulted in perhaps even greater chaos, oppression and disorder:

If the new metaphorical content of the word “revolution” sprang directly from the experiences of those who first made and then enacted the Revolution in France, it obviously carried an ever greater plausibility for those who watched its course, as if it were a spectacle, from 

the outside. What appeared to be most manifest in this spectacle was that none of its actors could control the course of events, that this course took a direction which had little if anything to do with the willful aims and purposes of men, who, on the contrary, must subject their will and purpose to the anonymous force of the revolution if they wanted to survive at all. This sounds commonplace to us today, and we probably find it hard to understand that anything but banalities could have been derived from it. Yet we need only remember the course of the American Revolution where the exact opposite took place, and recall how strongly the sentiment that man is master of his destiny, at least with respect to political government permeated all its actors, to realize the impact which the spectacle of the impotence of man with regard to the course of his own action must have made. The well-known shock of disillusion suffered by the generation in Europe which still lived through the fatal events of 1789 to the restoration of the Bourbons transformed itself almost immediately into a feeling of awe and wonder at the power of history itself. Where yesterday, in the happy days of Enlightenment, only the despotic power of the monarch had seemed to stand between man and his freedom to act, a much more powerful force had suddenly arisen which compelled men at will, and from which there was no release, neither rebellion nor escape, the force of history and historical necessity.16

The abject poverty that had once provided the stimulus for the French Revolution was also to be its downfall, for in outrage at the dehumanizing effect of abject, endless poverty, the masses who constituted the French Revolutionaries failed to redistribute the wealth, and instead destroyed it. In the stead of the monarchy there arose la Terreur, and an endless, incoherent, series of misguided attempts at constitutionwriting. In an attempt to nationalize and centralize the authority of constitutional law, regionalism, with its historical roots in the feudal aristocracy was suppressed in post-Revolutionary France. In the United States, the opposite occurred, as Arendt notes:

For in America the armed uprising of the colonies and the Declaration of Independence had been followed by a spontaneous outbreak of constitution-making in all thirteen colonies - as though, in John Adams’ words, “thirteen clocks have struck as one” - so that there existed no gap, no hiatus, hardly a breathing spell between the war 

of liberation, and the fight for independence which was the condition for freedom of the new states.17

The French Revolution assumed that the Declaration of the Rights of Man formed the foundation of any legitimate government; on the contrary, Arendt argues, the American Revolutionaries assumed that the rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence outlined the limits of government control over citizens.18 What the American founders understood and the French did not, Arendt says, is the need to distinguish the legitimacy of the government, the constituent power (that it rests on the consent of public opinion) from the constitutional authority of government (that it rests on a legitimately written document). The legitimacy of the American Constitution is derived from the consent of the legitimate state governments whose representatives wrote it and whose legislatures then ratified it. The legitimacy of the institutions of government which it created, and the system of lawmaking which it sets in place is more or less permanent. Changes in individual laws which are then written following procedures created by that system are vulnerable to the constituent power’s changeable court of public opinion, but the system of government itself is not so quickly changeable, and therefore is comparatively stable. The ability to provide for both stability and change was the genius of the American system, in Arendt’s view.19 Yet, in the final chapter, we find her lamenting with Jefferson the inability to avoid the “tyranny of the Constitution” and its consequent suppression of revolutionary spirit. By failing to incorporate the “town meeting” the truly “grass roots” level of representation into the Constitution, Arendt claims, the framers of the Constitution had the “vanity and presumption” to govern beyond the grave. At best, the American two-party system offers some measure of protection against representatives becoming despots; however, it does not give the ordinary person a true opportunity to participate in government. Thus, government tends to involve leaders leading the people rather than leaders emerging from and representing the views of the people. Arendt’s views here appear somewhat forced: she does not credit the negative forces within the system that create opportunities for ordinary citizens to seek leadership roles. She ignores for the most part, opportunities for initiative and recall, and seems to forget her own insight that the federal government is a limited government, all powers not granted to it by the states are reserved to the states, and thus may be exercised at the level of state assemblies. She ignores also the fact also that election to the federal House of 

Representatives is on the basis of congressional districts, which are re-apportioned each decade on the basis of the census, so that each representative represents approximately the same number of people.

1. e., the population of a large township. The House of Representatives was conceived as a constituent assembly to which ordinary citizens, acting within their communities, could aspire to represent their neighbors.

Arendt addresses the question of deriving the ultimate legitimacy of law: what power higher than law legitimizes law itself? The timeless answer has always been “the deity.” And even though the American founders of the Constitution were all deists, theirs was the first attempt to establish a new “secular order” where religious freedom was one of the most fundamental guarantees. It is clear that the protection of what would come to be called “godless atheism” was probably far from the minds of the constitution-writers. Nevertheless, the commitment to prohibit the establishment of a “state religion,” and to the absolute separation of church and state left a void to be filled. If the state religion or the popular deity was not to be the “higher power” that legitimized the legal order itself, what then would be the “higher power” upon which the government was founded and through which it derived its legitimacy? Arendt wants us seriously to consider that philosophy or rather, philosophical clarity, was the “higher power” substituted by Jefferson for the deity when he wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” It is the inescapable conclusion of reason, even reason resisted by the will, that is the legitimizing higher power behind the legal order. It is because the rights to life, liberty, self-government, equality, freedom, and pursuit of happiness are taken as axiomatic, that those who are capable of reason are compelled to acknowledge the legitimacy of the new secular order.20

2. The Life of the Mind

Arendt’s last work, The Life of the Mind was planned to the a trilogy. Arendt died suddenly, almost immediately after completing the second volume. Volume 1, Thinking begins with analyses of phenomenology, rational personhood, and mental activities from thinking, to expressing, to doing. It continues with an exploration of two central questions: “what makes us think?” and “where are we in space and in time when we are thinking?”21 

In human intellectual life, Being and Appearance coincide, the thinking subject is the phenomenal object to another thinking subject; the perceiver is also the perceived. But thinking involves a withdrawal from the world of appearances into the world of the mind itself.22 Are there really two worlds, the true world of Being and the world of mere Appearance? According to Arendt, the two-world theory, although plausibly corresponding to much of human experience is but one of the great fallacies of philosophical metaphysics.

The world of appearances is prior to whatever region the philosopher may choose as his “true” home but into which he was not born. It has always been the very appearingness of this world that suggested to the philosopher, that is, to the human mind, the notion that something must exist that is not appearance... In other words, when the philosopher takes leave of the world given to our senses and does a turn about... to the life of the mind, he takes his clue from the former, looking for something to be revealed to him that would explain its underlying truth.23

Science suffers the same accident as philosophy, starting with appearances and seeking something that is on a higher epistemological plane than “mere appearance,” reality.

The belief that a cause should be of a higher rank than the effect (so that an effect can easily be disparaged by being retraced to its cause) may belong to the oldest and most stubborn metaphysical fallacies.24

Instead of affirming the value of underlying reality or truth masked by appearance, Arendt affirms a “reversal of the metaphysical hier-archy: the value of the surface.”25 Humans possess a strong urge to display the content of their misnamed “real selves,” their souls, minds, hearts. It is this displaying through which we fit ourselves into the world of appearances, to which we are body-bound. But it is this choosing to reveal oneself, to present an appearance of what appears to us to be our reality that is characteristically human. The exercise of choice is disclosing something about how we appear to ourselves to be (and bringing it to the surface where it becomes an appearance to others) and concealing other things about ourselves. Disclosure may turn out to be mere semblance. 

Nothing that appears manifests itself to a single viewer capable of perceiving it under all its inherent aspects. The world appears in the mode of it-seems-to-me, depending on particular perspective deter-mined by location in the world as well as by particular organs of perception. This mode not only produces error, which I can correct by changing my location, drawing closer to what appears, or by improving my organs of perception with the help of tools and imple-ments, or by using my imagination to take other perspectives into account; it also gives birth to true semblances, that is, to deceptive appearances which I cannot correct like an error since they are caused by my permanent location and remain bound up with my own existence as one of earth’s appearances.26

This then, is the argument that Arendt has to make against mind- body dualism, against those who claim that there is some dichotomy of Reality and Appearance, of Existence and Thought. We cannot exclude from our observation of the world of appearances, our own spacial/ temporal vantage point, and its prejudicial perspective, nor our own faculties of observation (and their limitations, inaccuracies), nor can we, in the end, “correct” for these defects. She acknowledges that there are some semblances, some appearances that, like mirages that

... will dissolve of their own accord or that can be dispelled upon closer inspection... [but other appearances,]... like 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 the sun and earth inevitably seems to an earth-bound creature that cannot change its abode.27

After dismissing Kant as over-energetic in his obsession with identi-fying a thing-in-itself beyond the world of appearances28 Arendt attacks solipsism as “the most pernicious fallacy of philosophy even before it attained in Descartes the high rank of theoretical and existential con-sistency.”29 With tongue-in-cheek she attacks the cogito:

His main concern was to find something - the thinking ego, or in his words “la chose pensante,” which he equated with the soul - whose reality was beyond suspicion, beyond the illusions of sense percep-tion: even the power of an all-powerful Dieu trompeur would not be able to shatter the certainty of a consciousness that had withdrawn 

from all sense experience. Although everything may be illusion and dream, the dreamer, if he will only consent not to demand reality of the dream, must be real. Hence, “je pense done je suis,” “I think, therefore I am.”... [I]t never occurred to him that no cogitatio and no cogito me cogitare, no consciousness of an acting self that suspended all faith in the reality of its intentional objects, would ever have been able to convince him of his own reality had he actually been born in a desert, without a body and its senses to perceive “material” things and without fellow-creatures to assure him that what he perceived was perceived by them too. The Cartesian res cogitans, this fictitious creature, bodiless, senseless, and forsaken, would not even know that there is such a thing as reality and a possible distinction between the real and the unreal, between the common world of waking life and the private world of our dreams. What Merleau-Ponty had to say against Descartes is brilliantly right: “to reduce perception to the thought of perceiving... is to take an insurance against doubt whose premiums are more onerous than the loss for which it is to indemnify us: for it is to... move to a type of certitude that will never restore to us the ‘there is’ of the world.”30

In the second chapter of Thinking Arendt attacks monistic views of moral personality that required reason to be subjected to willing or passion (Hume) or vice-versa (Plato), denying a hierarchy of the autonomous activities of the mind, thinking, willing and judging. Although there is no hierarchical order, she says, there is an order of priorities. Arendt notes that every mental act requires mental represen-tation of what is not immediately present to the senses (but may recently have been perceived), this faculty of representation through imagination or through intuition is logically prior to thinking, willing and judging. And just as mental representation is logically prior to thinking, so is thinking to willing and to judging.31 For these reasons too, thinking is always a withdrawal from the world of sense-experience, it is, as Heidegger said, out of order. Thinking, as an autonomous activity of the mind has been represented by professional philosophers as something essentially at war with “common sense” (which Arendt describes as that “sixth sense that fits our five senses into a common world”) precisely because thinking requires a withdrawal from the sensory world.32

To put it quite simply, in the proverbial absent-mindedness of the philosopher, everything present is absent because some thing 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” 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 corporeality - 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.”33

Thinking requires language for its outward manifestation, and bodily metaphors like “seeing,” “gaining insight” “envisioning” are the usual mode of manifesting thought.34 Willing, according to Arendt, is usually expressed by the bodily metaphor of desire. Here, in what can only be a disingenuous move, Arendt ignores the traditional accounts distin-guishing between passion/desire and will/conscience.35 Judgment, she notes, has been discussed in depth only by Kant, whose original title for the Critique of Judgment was Critique of Taste.36 Thinking is inherently a linguistic act: it needs speech to take place at all, but its language is entirely one of 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; they are not energeia, an end in itself, but instruments enabling us to know and deal with the world.... The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life the human body is a corpse; without thinking the human mind is dead.31

In answer to the question “what makes us think?” Arendt surveys the answers given by the Greeks (the desire to immortalize oneself, to find the divine within oneself)38 and by the Romans (the desire to reconcile ourselves to the disunity and chaos of the universe through 

understanding and systematizing).39 Arendt instead offers an alternative answer. Arendt is suspicious of all professional philosophers because when professional philosophers like Plato and Epictetus have asked such questions, they have asked them as a matter of professional interest, as though the question was one that came from outside common sense, outside the experience of ordinary living. As “thinking egos” professional philosophers have no urge to appear in the world of appearances, in the real world: they want to hide instead in a world of their own making, the world of the mind separate from that of the real world.

Socrates is the exception. He is the professional philosopher who has, in terms of epistemology, always insisted on living in the real world, the world of appearances. He is a self-described gadfly and midwife, a philosopher with questions and no answers who leaves his auditors paralyzed with confusion - like an electric sea ray.40

... Socrates, knowing that we do not know, and nevertheless unwilling to let it go at that, remains steadfast in his own perplexities and, like the electric ray, paralyzed himself, paralyzes anyone he comes into contact with. The electric ray, at first glance seems to be the opposite of the gadfly; it paralyzes where the gadfly rouses. Yet, what cannot fail to look like paralysis from the outside - from the standpoint of ordinary human affairs - is felt as the highest state of being active and alive. There exist, despite the scarcity of documentary evidence about the thinking experience, a number of utterances of thinkers throughout the centuries to bear this out.41

Thus the activity is the act of being fully alive, of being concerned with justice, love and happiness because these terms, “justice,” “love,” “happiness,” express the meaning of what we seek through living. Non-thinking and evil are similarly connected. Thinking and judging something to be morally good or morally evil, are related activities, consciousness and conscience. Judging is the act of manifesting in the world of appearances the contents of the world of thought.

The manifestation of the mind of thought is not knowledge; it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly, and this, at the rare moment when the stakes are on the table, may indeed prevent catastrophes, at least for the self.42

The Greeks, Arendt claims in The Life of the Mind: Two/Willing,43 lacked a concept of willing. Prohairesis (choice) failed to take into 

account the possibility that someone can know the good and can knowingly will to do evil. The Greeks failed to identify a separate psy-chological faculty, that of the willing ego and understood only the knowing ego. It was not until the Christian era with the development of more complex concepts of the ingredients needed for salvation that the faculty of will, and thus the act of willing, began to emerge as a separate moral and psychological construct. Likewise, the Greek stage had been set by the deterministic fates, and questions of the possibility of free will in the face of an all-knowing, all powerful deity remained unaddressed.

Arendt begins with a review of the history of philosophy of willing and examines that history in terms of two concepts: that of the existence of a separate psychological faculty of willing; and that of a free will that exercises choice. The mind’s power to recall and to recollect, to bring into the here and now that which is inexorably not now here prompts Arendt to consider the mind as it exists in time. The will, as a faculty of choice deals not with the past and with things that exist, but with the future, with that which may or may not come into existence. Willed acts are contingent. They are that which “I know that I could as well have left... undone.”44 Antiquity identified temporality with cyclical repetitions: that which comes into being has previously potentially but not actually existed. Thus, the concept of willing, of producing a new possibility that may not have existed as a possibility until we willed it, was in large part absent to the ancients. The modern age, with its linear concept of time, and its notion of progress as a causal force in history emphasized the importance of the future - that which has not yet been and which might not be thus and so. From the Christian period through the modem age, the most important philosophical question, Arendt notes, has been whether the omnipotence and omniscience of the deity can be reconciled with the concept of a free, rather than a determined will. Philosophers have wrestled with this problem within the context of religion, so the question “what is the nature of the will” has historically been tied up with the question of salvation.

Arendt credits Bergson with the insight to recognize the power of the past in obscuring our concept of the will. Referring to Bergson, she notes that 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. The impact of reality is overwhelming to the point that we are unable to “think it away”; the act appears to us now in the guise of a necessity that is by no means a mere delusion of consciousness or due only to our limited ability to imagine possible alternatives. This is most obvious in the realm of action, where no deed can be safely undone, but it is also true, though perhaps in a less compelling way, of the countless new objects that human fabrication constantly adds to the world and its civilization, art objects as well as use objects; it is almost as impossible to think away the great art works of our cultural inheritance as to think away the outbreak of the two World Wars or any other events that have decided the very structure of our reality.45

The inability to think away the past, to think away that which has happened, makes it difficult to envision thinking away the future, i.e., not willing what we would otherwise will. Here Arendt seems to lack circumspection: after all, doesn’t the entire penal system and the system of justice upon which it is based, depend precisely on the fact that we (albeit retrospectively) do conceive that the felon could have willed otherwise and could have acted as he otherwise could have willed? Indeed, the capacity to formulate a will is the sine qua non of (at least western) justice systems. We always require, for proof of criminal (and therefore moral) responsibility and guilt, evidence that there was criminal intent, i.e., evidence that the way things turned out was in fact as the felon willed them to: that someone was killed, or robbed, etc. Yet, ultimately, it is not the fact that we assume the freedom of the will that Arendt is concerned with. Rather, it is the inability to prove that the will is, indeed free that concerns her. Compounding the psychological effect of the lack of philosophic proof of the freedom of the will is that of the tension, the “clash” as she calls it, between thinking and willing. Thinking comfortably concerns the what is now or has been; willing stretches the psyche to the very edge of the abyss of the what may become, of the fearful uncertainty of the unknown.

Taking her lead from Hegel’s view of time, Arendt notes that volun-tarist philosophy which identifies the self with the willing ego (rather than the thinking ego) necessarily defines self in terms of the future: the self ceases to exist when it faces no more tomorrows. The self ceases to exist when it can no longer truthfully will a state of affairs that is not now and never was present.46 Hegel makes the point forcefully: “the Will’s projects take on the appearance of an anticipated past.”47 

To oversimplify: That there exists such a thing as a Life of the mind is due to the mind’s organ for the future and its resulting “restlessness”; that there exists such a thing as the life of the Mind is due to death, which, foreseen as an absolute end, halts the will and transforms the future into an anticipated past, the will’s projects into objects of thought, and the soul’s expectation into an anticipated remembrance.48

Arendt traces the history of the concept of the faculty of will, begin-ning with Aristotle’s discovery that reason “moves nothing,” that the incontinent man follows desire rather than reason, but desire can be moderated by reason: it too is not self-moving. Inserting a new faculty into the reason/desire struggle, Aristotle gave us prohairesis, the faculty of choice. Paul the Apostle, and Epictetus the philosopher, respectively found the faculty of choice to be impotent (in choosing which of two conflicting laws to obey) and omnipotent (in creating law unto oneself). Augustine, Arendt notes, is the first philosopher to distinguish the faculty of willing from that of doing.49 In Augustine, the Will is the unifying force behind Knowing and Doing, it is that which determines whether and how the knowing self becomes the doing self by “springing into action.”50 In Duns Scotus, the will is “redeemed” by transforming itself into Love: love of that which God commands. Thus is solved the paradoxical tension between free will and determinism. The will is indeed free, free to embrace and act according to the Law of God (which is what God wills) or not. And God determines the law. God is omnipotent (and can override human will), and has foreknowledge, but does not compel.

In Part Three of Willing Arendt explores the connection between the will and the intellect in the thought of Thomas Aquinas (as influenced by Aristotle and Augustine) and Duns Scotus - two near contemporaries, Arendt notes. Scotus’ notion of the potent, active free will that creates its truth by inspiring the intellect is at the core, Arendt believes, of Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s identification of the will with power. In Scotus the function of the will is to delight in function of willing, i.e., to delight in the transformation of the will into Love. Loving the object that is presented by the intellect to the will, does not cease to be an activity of the will, but rather, a permanent (eternal?) characteristic of “beatitude.” And beatitude is the “perfect love of God for God’s sake “... thus distinct from the love of God for one’s own sake,” i.e. for the sake of salvation.51 It is in a life of beatitude that the faculty of will becomes pure activity. 

The final, and concluding part of Willing reviews German idealism and its constructions of the will. Nietzsche’s insight that there are no moral facts, that we cannot know how humans came to exist or how this world came to be frees us from the shackles of an intellect occupied with a never-ending inquiry into cause-and-effect. Free of the need to find a reason for everything in terms of its cause, we are free to ignore the more or less self-imposed temporal perspective of past-present-future. We are free to value all moments as moments of becoming, free to repudiate the will and to affirm all that is.52 Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, that the will is essentially destructive, and that the only alternative is “letting be,” affirms that willing and thinking are inherently opposing faculties of the mind. After a lengthy analysis of Heidegger’s metaphysics that I cannot pretend to comprehend, Arendt explores what she identifies as the “abyss of freedom and the new secular order.” In this new order, political freedom has its origins in the concept of a free will, a will that can be a law unto itself, or, when viewed collectively, western society has its origin in the concept of collectives of free wills, collectives that can be self-legislating. The idea of free will then, if not a philosophical necessity (or, even, a philosophical possibility) is a political necessity. How well that faculty is exercised depends upon the faculty of judging, the subject matter of the ill-fated final work of Arendt’s trilogy.

III. CONCLUSIONS

Hannah Arendt was an unusual and original philosopher. Overcoming the multiple obstacles of race and gender, she rose to become one of the leading philosophers of this century. Even those who are less than fully sympathetic to the methods and insights of German phenomenology can appreciate the depth of her analyses of the nature and faculties of human thought. And it was human moral and political thought that captured her imagination the most. Arendt was clearly far more than a mere chronicler and translator of the philosophies of her mentors, Jaspers and Heidegger. She was very much a socratic gadfly: prodding us to inquire into social phenomena we found distasteful, but which nevertheless characterize the century we live in. Her interpretations of the philosophical assumptions of revolution, exploitation, oppression and violence engaged in on the basis of class, race and gender contain forceful, fresh new insights on contemporary morality. 

 

 


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