The Life of the Mind (14 page)

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.")

I have been speaking of the special predicaments of thinking that may be ascribed to the radicalism of its withdrawal from the world. By contrast, neither willing nor judging, though dependent on thought's preliminary reflection upon their objects, is ever caught up in these reflections; their objects are particulars with an established home in the appearing world, from which the willing or judging mind removes itself only temporarily and with the intention of a later return. This is especially true of the will, whose withdrawal phase is characterized by the strongest form of reflexivity, an acting back upon itself: the
volo me velle
is much more characteristic of the will than the
cogito me cogitate
is of thinking. What all these activities have in common, however, is the peculiar
quiet,
absence of any doing or disturbances, the withdrawal from involvement and from the partiality of immediate interests that in one way or another make me part of the real world, a withdrawal referred to earlier (
[>]
) as the condition prerequisite for all judgment.

Historically, this kind of withdrawal from doing is the oldest condition posited for the life of the mind. In its early, original form it rests on the discovery that only the
spectator,
never the actor, can know and understand whatever offers itself as a spectacle. That discovery greatly contributed to the Greek philosophers' conviction of the superiority of the contemplative, merely onlooking, way of life, whose most elementary condition—according to Aristotle, who was the first to elaborate it
⁴⁹
—was
scholē. Scholē
is not leisure time as we understand it, the leftover spare time of inactivity after a day's work "used for meeting the exigencies of existence,"
⁵⁰
but the deliberate act of abstaining, of holding oneself back (
schein
) from the ordinary activities determined by our daily wants
(he ton anagkaion scholē),
in order to act out leisure
(scholēn agein),
which in turn was the true goal of all other activities, just as peace, for Aristotle, was the true goal of war. Recreation and play, in our understanding the natural activities of leisure, belonged, on the contrary, still to
a-scholia,
the state of being deprived of leisure, since play and recreation are necessary for the restoration of the human labor force charged with taking care of life's necessities.

We find this act of deliberate, active non-participation in life's daily business, probably in its earliest, certainly its simplest, form, in a parable ascribed to Pythagoras and reported by Diogenes Laertius:

 

Life ... is like a festival; just as some come to the festival to compete, some to ply their trade, but the best people come as spectators
[theatai],
so in life the slavish men go hunting for fame
[doxa]
or gain, the philosophers for truth.
⁵¹

 

What is stressed here as more noble than the competition for fame and gain is by no means a truth invisible and inaccessible to ordinary men; nor does the place the spectators withdraw to belong to any "higher" region such as Parmenides and Plato later envisioned; their place is in the world and their "nobility" is only that they do not participate in what is going on but look on it as a mere spectacle. From the Greek word for spectators,
theatai,
the later philosophical term "theory" was derived, and the word "theoretical" until a few hundred years ago meant "contemplating," looking upon something from the outside, from a position implying a view that is hidden from those who take part in the spectacle and actualize it. The inference to be drawn from this early distinction between doing and understanding is obvious: 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.

The first datum underlying this estimate is that only the spectator occupies a position that enables him to see the whole play-as the philosopher is able to see the
kosmos
as a harmonious ordered whole. The actor, being part of the whole, must
enact
his part; not only is he a "part" by definition, he is bound to the particular that finds its ultimate meaning and the justification of its existence solely as a constituent of a whole. Hence, withdrawal from direct involvement to a standpoint outside the game (the festival of life) is not only a condition for judging, for being the final arbiter in the ongoing competition, but also the condition for understanding the meaning of the play. Second: what the actor is concerned with is
doxa,
a word that signifies both fame and opinion, for it is through the opinion of the audience and the judge that fame comes about. It is decisive for the actor, but not for the spectator, how he appears to others; he depends on the spectator's it-seems-to-me (his
dokei moi,
which gives the actor his
doxa);
he is not his own master, not what Kant would later call autonomous; he must conduct himself in accordance with what spectators expect of him, and the final verdict of success or failure is in their hands.

The withdrawal of judgment is obviously very different from the withdrawal of the philosopher. It does not leave the world of appearances but retires from active involvement in it to a privileged position in order to contemplate the whole. Moreover, and perhaps more significantly, Pythagoras' spectators are members of an audience and therefore quite unlike the philosopher who begins his
bios thedretikos
by leaving the company of his fellow-men and their uncertain opinions, their
doxai
that can only express an it-seems-to-me. Hence the spectator's verdict, while impartial and freed from the interests of gain or fame, is not independent of the views of others—on the contrary, according to Kant, an "enlarged mentality" has to take them into account. The spectators, although disengaged from the particularity characteristic of the actor, are not solitary. Nor are they self-sufficient, like the "highest god" the philosopher tries to emulate in thought and who, according to Plato, "is forever ... solitary by reason of his excellence, able to be together, he himself with himself, needing nobody else, neither acquaintance nor friend, he sufficient with himself."
⁵²
"

This distinction between thinking and judging only came to the fore with Kant's political philosophy—not surprisingly, since Kant was the first, and has remained the last, of the great philosophers to deal with judgment as one of the basic mental activities. For the point of the matter is that in the various treatises and essays, all written late in Kant's life, the spectator's viewpoint is not determined by the categorical imperatives of practical reason, that is, reason's answer to the question What ought I to do? That answer is moral and concerns the individual qua individual, in the full autonomous independence of reason. As such, in a moral-practical way, he can never claim the right to rebel. And yet, the same individual, when he happens not to act but to be a mere spectator, will have the right to judge and to render the final verdict on the French Revolution on- no other grounds than his "wishful participation bordering on enthusiasm," his sharing in the "exaltation of the uninvolved public," his basing himself, in other words, on the judgment of his fellow-spectators, who also had not "the least intention of assisting" in the events. And it was their verdict, in the last analysis, and not the deeds of the actors, that persuaded Kant to call the French Revolution "a phenomenon in human history [which] is not to be forgotten."
⁵³
In this clash between joint, participating action, without which, after all, the events to be judged would never have come into being, and reflecting, observing judgment, there is no doubt for Kant as to which should have the last word. Assuming that history is nothing but the miserable story of mankind's eternal ups and downs, the spectacle of sound and fury "may perhaps be moving for a while; but the curtain must eventually descend. For in the long run, it becomes a farce. And even if the actors do not tire of it—
for they are fools
—the spectator does, for any single act will be enough for him if he can reasonably conclude from it that the never-ending play will be of eternal sameness" (italics added).
⁵⁴

This is a telling passage indeed. And if we add to it Kant's conviction that human affairs are guided by the "ruse of nature," which leads the human species, behind the backs of acting men, into a perpetual progress, just as Hegel's "ruse of reason" leads them to the revelation of the Absolute Spirit, we may well be justified in asking if all actors are not fools, or if the spectacle, revealing itself only to the spectator, would not just as well be served by the acts of fools. With more or less sophisticated qualifications, this has always been the secret assumption of the philosophers of history, that is, of those thinkers of the modern age who, for the first time, decided to take the realm of human affairs—Plato's
ta tōn anthrōpōn pragmata—seriously
enough to reflect upon it. And are they right? Is it not true that "something else results from the actions of men than what they intend and achieve, something else than they know or want"? "To give an analogy, a man may set fire to the house of another out of revenge.... The immediate action is to hold a small flame to a small part of a beam.... [What follows is] a vast conflagration.... This result was neither part of the primary deed nor the intention of him who commenced it.... This example merely shows that in the immediate action something else may be involved than is consciously willed by the actor."
⁵⁵
(These are Hegel's words, but they could have been written by Kant.) In either case it is not through acting but through contemplating that the "something else," namely, the meaning of the whole, is revealed. The spectator, not the actor, holds the clue to the meaning of human affairs—only, and this is decisive, Kant's spectators exist in the plural, and this is why he could arrive at a political philosophy. Hegel's spectator exists strictly in the singular: the philosopher becomes the organ of the Absolute Spirit, and the philosopher is Hegel himself. But even Kant, more aware than any other philosopher of human plurality, could conveniently forget that even if the spectacle were always the same and therefore tiresome, the audiences would change from generation to generation; nor would a fresh audience be likely to arrive at the conclusions handed down by tradition as to what an unchanging play has to tell it.

 

If we speak of the mind's withdrawal as the necessary condition of all mental activities, we can hardly avoid raising the question of the place or region toward which the movement of absenting oneself is directed. I have treated the withdrawal of judgment to the spectator's standpoint prematurely and yet at some length because I wanted to raise the question first in its simplest, most obvious form by pointing to cases where the region of withdrawal is clearly located within our ordinary world, the reflexivity of the faculty notwithstanding. There they are, in Olympia, on the ascending rows of theater or stadium, carefully separated from the ongoing games; and Kant's "uninvolved public" that followed events in Paris with "disinterested pleasure" and a sympathy "bordering on enthusiasm" was present in every intellectual circle in Europe during the early nineties of the eighteenth century—although Kant himself was probably thinking of the crowds in the streets of Paris.