The Life of the Mind (11 page)

Seen from the perspective of the world of appearances and the activities conditioned by it, the main characteristic of mental activities is their
invisibility.
Properly speaking, they never appear, though they manifest themselves to the thinking, willing, or judging ego, which is aware of being active, yet lacks the ability or the urge to appear as such. The Epicurean
lathē biōsas,
"live in hiding," may have been a counsel of prudence; it is also an at least negatively exact description of the
topos,
the locality, of the man who thinks; in fact, it is the very opposite of John Adams' "
spectemur agendo
" (let us be seen in action). In other words, to the invisible that manifests itself to thinking there corresponds a human faculty that is not only, like other faculties, invisible so long as it is latent, a mere potentiality, but remains non-manifest in full actuality. If we consider the whole scale of human activities from the viewpoint of appearance, we find many degrees of manifestation. Neither laboring nor fabrication requires display of the activity itself; only action and speaking need a space of appearance—as well as people who see and hear-in order to be actualized at all. But none of these activities is invisible. Were we to follow Greek linguistic custom, by which the "heroes," acting men in the highest sense, were called
andres epiphaneis,
men who are fully manifest, highly conspicuous, then we would call thinkers the inconspicuous men by definition and profession.
⁷

In this, as in other respects, the mind is decisively different from the soul, its chief competitor for the rank of ruler over our inner, non-visible life. The soul, where our passions, our feelings and emotions arise, is a more or less chaotic welter of happenings which we do not enact but suffer (
pathein
) and which in cases of great intensity may overwhelm us as pain or pleasure does; its invisibility resembles that of our inner bodily organs of whose functioning or non-functioning we are also aware without being able to control them. The life of the mind, on the contrary, is sheer activity, and this activity, like other activities, can be started and stopped at will. The passions, moreover, though their seat is invisible, have an expressiveness of their own: we blush with shame or embarrassment, we grow pale with fear or anger, we can shine with happiness or look dejected, and we need a considerable training in self-control in order to prevent the passions from showing. The only outward manifestation of the mind is absent-mindedness, an obvious disregard of the surrounding world, something entirely negative which in no way hints at what is actually happening within us.

The mere fact of invisibility, that something can be without being manifest to the eye, must always have been striking. How much so may be gauged by the strange disinclination of our whole tradition to draw clear lines between soul, mind, and consciousness, so often equated as objects of our inner sense for no other reason than that they are non-appearing to the outer senses. Thus Plato concluded that the soul is invisible because it is made for the cognition of the invisible within a world of visible things. And even Kant, among the philosophers by far the most critical of traditional metaphysical prejudices, will occasionally enumerate two kinds of objects: "T, as thinking, am an object of inner sense, and am called 'soul'. That which is an object of the outer senses is called 'body'."
⁸
This, of course, is but a variation of the old metaphysical two-world theory. An analogy is made to the outwardness of sense experience, on the assumption that an internal space houses what is within us in the same way that external space provides for our bodies, so that an "inner sense," namely, the intuition of introspection, is pictured as fitted to ascertain whatever goes on "within" with the same reliability our outer senses have in dealing with the outer world. And for the soul, the analogy is not too misleading. Since feelings and emotions are not self-made but "passions" caused by outside events that affect the soul and bring about certain reactions, namely, the soul's
pathemata—
its passive states and moods—these inner experiences may indeed be open to the inner sense of introspection precisely because they are possible, as Kant once remarked, "only on the assumption of outer experience."
⁹
Moreover, their very passivity, the fact that they are not liable to be changed by deliberate intervention, results in an impressive semblance of stability. This semblance then produces certain illusions of introspection, which in turn lead to the theory that the mind is not merely the master of its own activities but can rule the soul's passions—as though the mind were nothing but the soul's highest organ. This theory is very old and reached its climax in the Stoic doctrines of the mind's control of pleasure and pain; its fallacy—that you can
feel
happy when roasted in the Phalarian Bull—rests ultimately on the equation of soul and mind, that is, on ascribing to the soul and its essential passivity the powerful sovereignty of the mind.

No mental act, and least of all the act of thinking, is content with its object as it is given to it. It always transcends the sheer givenness of whatever may have aroused its attention and transforms it into what Petrus Johannis Olivi, the thirteenth-century Franciscan philosopher of the Will,
¹⁰
called an
experimentum suitatis,
an experiment of the self with itself. Since plurality is one of the basic existential conditions of human life on earth—so that
inter homines esse,
to be among men, was to the Romans the sign of being alive, aware of the realness of world and self, and
inter homines esse desinere,
to cease to be among men, a synonym for dying—to be by myself and to have intercourse with myself is the outstanding characteristic of the life of the mind. The mind can be said to have a life of its own only to the extent that it actualizes this intercourse in which, existentially speaking, plurality is reduced to the duality already implied in the fact and the word "consciousness," or
syneidenai—
to know with myself. I call this existential state in which I keep myself company "solitude" to distinguish it from "loneliness," where I am also alone but now deserted not only by human company but also by the possible company of myself. It is only in loneliness that I feel
deprived
of human company, and it is only in the acute awareness of such deprivation that men ever exist really in the singular, as it is perhaps only in dreams or in madness that they fully realize the unbearable and "unutterable horror" of this state.
¹¹
Mental activities themselves all testify by their
reflexive
nature to a
duality
inherent in consciousness; the mental agent cannot be active except by acting, implicitly or explicitly, back upon himself. Consciousness, to be sure—Kant's "I think"—not only accompanies "all other representations" but all my activities, in which nevertheless I can be entirely oblivious of my self. Consciousness as such, before it is actualized in solitude, achieves nothing more than an awareness of the sameness of the I-am—"I am conscious of myself, not as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself, but only that I am"
¹²
—which guarantees the identical continuity of a self throughout the manifold representations, experiences, and memories of a lifetime. As such, it "expresses the act of determining my existence."
¹³
® Mental activities, and, as we shall see later, especially thinking—the soundless dialogue of the I with itself—can be understood as the actualization of the original duality or the split between me and myself which is inherent in all consciousness. But this sheer self-awareness, of which I am, as it were, unconsciously conscious, is not an activity; by accompanying all other activities it is the guarantor of an altogether silent I-am-I.

The life of the mind in which I keep myself company may be soundless; it is never silent and it can never be altogether oblivious of itself, because of the reflexive nature of all its activities. Every
cogitate,
no matter what its object, is also a
cogito me cogitare,
every volition a
volo me velle,
and even judgment is possible, as Montesquieu once remarked, only through a "
retour secret sur moi-même.
" This reflexivity seems to point to a place of inwardness for mental acts, construed on the principle of the outward space in which my non-mental acts take place. But that this inwardness, unlike the passive inwardness of the soul, could only be understood as a site of activities is a fallacy, whose historical orgin is the discovery, in the early centuries of the Christian era, of the Will and of the experiences of the willing ego. For I am aware of the faculties of the mind and their reflexivity only as long as the activity lasts. It is as though the very organs of thought or will or judgment came into being only when I think, or will, or judge; in their latent state, assuming that such latency exists prior to actualization, they are not open to introspection. 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.

Since mental activities, non-appearing by definition, occur in a world of appearances and in a being that partakes of these appearances through its receptive sense organs as well as through its own ability and urge to appear to others, they cannot come into being except through a deliberate
withdrawal
from appearances. It is withdrawal not so much from the world—only thought, because of its tendency to generalize, i.e., its special concern for the general as opposed to the particular, tends to withdraw from the world altogether—as from the world's being
present
to the senses.
Every mental act rests on the minds faculty of having present to itself what is absent from the senses.
Re-presentation, making present what is actually absent, is the mind's unique gift, and since our whole mental terminology is based on metaphors drawn from vision's experience, this gift is called
imagination,
defined by Kant as "the faculty of intuition even without the presence of the object."
¹⁴
The mind's faculty of making present what is absent is of course by no means restricted to mental images of absent objects; memory quite generally stores, and holds at the disposition of recollection, whatever is
no more,
and the will anticipates what the future may bring but is
not yet.
Only because of the mind's capacity for making present what is absent can we say "no more" and constitute a past for ourselves, or say "not yet" and get ready for a future. But this is possible for the mind only after it has withdrawn from the present and the urgencies of everyday life. Thus, in order to will, the mind must withdraw from the immediacy of desire, which, without reflecting and without reflexivity, stretches out its hand to get hold of the desired object; for the will is not concerned with objects but with projects, for instance, with the future availability of an object that it may or may not desire in the present. The will transforms the desire into an intention. And judgment, finally, be it aesthetic or legal or moral, presupposes a definitely "unnatural" and deliberate withdrawal from involvement and the partiality of immediate interests as they are given by my position in the world and the part I play in it.

It would be wrong, I believe, to try to establish a hierarchical order among the mind's activities, but I also believe that it is hardly deniable that an order of priorities exists. It is inconceivable how we would ever be able to will or to judge, that is, to handle things which are not yet and things which are no more, if the power of representation and the effort necessary to direct mental attention to what in every way escapes the attention of sense perception had not gone ahead and prepared the mind for further reflection as well as for willing and judging. In other words, what we generally call "thinking," though unable to move the will or provide judgment with general rules, must prepare the particulars given to the senses in such a way that the mind is able to handle them in their absence; it must, in brief,
de-sense
them.

The best description of this process of preparation I know of is given by Augustine. Sense perception, he says, "the vision, which was without when the sense was formed by a sensible body, is succeeded by a similar vision within," the image that re-presents it.
¹⁵
This image is then stored in memory, ready to become a "vision in thought" the moment the mind gets hold of it; it is decisive that "what remains in the memory"—the mere image of what once was real—is different from the "vision in thought"—the deliberately remembered object. "What remains in the memory ... is one thing, and ... something else arises when we remember,"
¹⁶
for "what is hidden and retained in the memory is one thing, and what is impressed by it in the thought of the one remembering is another thing."
¹⁷
Hence, the thought-object is different from the image, as the image is different from the visible sense-object whose mere representation it is. It is because of this twofold transformation that thinking "in fact goes even further," beyond the realm of all possible imagination, "when our reason proclaims the infinity of number which no vision in the thought of corporeal things has yet grasped" or "teaches us that even the tiniest bodies can be divided infinitely."
¹⁸
Imagination, therefore, which transforms a visible object into an invisible image, fit to be stored in the mind, is the condition
sine qua non
for providing the mind with suitable thought-objects; but these thought-objects come into being only when the mind actively and deliberately remembers, recollects and selects from the storehouse of memory whatever arouses its interest sufficiently to induce concentration; in these operations the mind learns how to deal with things that are absent and prepares itself to "go further," toward the understanding of things that are always absent, that cannot be remembered because they were never present to sense experience.