The Life of the Mind (32 page)

At the same time I shall follow a parallel development in the history of the Will according to which volition is the inner capacity by which men decide about "whom" they are going to be, in what shape they wish to show themselves in the world of appearances. In other words, it is the will, whose subject matter is projects, not objects, which in a sense creates the
person
that can be blamed or praised and anyhow held responsible not merely for its actions but for its whole "Being," its
character.
The Marxian and existentialist notions, which play such a great role in twentieth-century thought and pretend that man is his own producer and maker, rest on these experiences, even though it is clear that nobody has "made" himself or "produced" his existence; this, I think, is the last of the metaphysical fallacies, corresponding to the modern age's emphasis on willing as a substitute for thinking.

I shall conclude the second volume with an analysis of the faculty of judgment, and here the chief difficulty will be the curious scarcity of sources providing authoritative testimony. Not till Kant's
Critique of Judgment
did this faculty become a major topic of a major thinker.

I shall show that my own main assumption in singling out judgment as a distinct capacity of our minds has been that judgments are not arrived at by either deduction or induction; in short, they have nothing in common with logical operations—as when we say: All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, hence, Socrates is mortal. We shall be in search of the "silent sense," which—when it was dealt with at all—has always, even in Kant, been thought of as "taste" and therefore as belonging to the realm of aesthetics. In practical and moral matters it was called "conscience," and conscience did not judge; it told you, as the divine voice of either God or reason, what to do, what not to do, and what to repent of. Whatever the voice of conscience may be, it cannot be said to be "silent," and its validity depends entirely upon an authority that is above and beyond all merely human laws and rules.

In Kant judgment emerges as "a peculiar talent which can be practised only and cannot be taught." Judgment deals with particulars, and when the thinking ego moving among generalities emerges from its withdrawal and returns to the world of particular appearances, it turns out that the mind needs a new "gift" to deal with them. "An obtuse or narrow-minded person," Kant believed, "... may indeed be trained through study, even to the extent of becoming learned. But as such people are commonly still lacking in judgment, it is not unusual to meet learned men who in the application of their scientific knowledge betray that original want, which can never be made good."
²¹
In Kant, it is reason with its "regulative ideas" that comes to the help of judgment, but if the faculty is separate from other faculties of the mind, then we shall have to ascribe to it its own
modus operandi,
its own way of proceeding.

And this is of some relevance to a whole set of problems by which modern thought is haunted, especially to the problem of theory and practice and to all attempts to arrive at a halfway plausible theory of ethics. Since Hegel and Marx, these questions have been treated in the perspective of History and on the assumption that there is such a thing as Progress of the human race. Finally we shall be left with the only alternative there is in these matters—we either can say with Hegel:
Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht,
leaving the ultimate judgment to Success, or we can maintain with Kant the autonomy of the minds of men and their possible independence of things as they are or as they have come into being.

Here we shall have to concern ourselves, not for the first time, with the concept of history, but we may be able to reflect on the oldest meaning of this word, which, like so many other terms in our political and philosophical language, is Greek in origin and derived from
historein,
to inquire in order to tell how it was
—legein ta eonta
in Herodotus. But the origin of this verb is again Homer (
Iliad
XVIII) where the noun
histor
("historian," as it were) occurs, and that Homeric historian is the
judge.
If judgment is our faculty for dealing with the past, the historian is the inquiring man who by relating it sits in judgment over it. If that is so, we may reclaim our human dignity, win it back, as it were, from the pseudo-divinity named History of the modem age, without denying history's importance but denying its right to being the ultimate judge. Old Cato, with whom I started these reflections—"never am I less alone than when I am by myself, never am I more active than when I do nothing"—has left us a curious phrase which aptly sums up the political principle implied in the enterprise of reclamation. He said: "
Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni
" ("The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the defeated one pleases Cato").

Introduction

1.
Critique of Pure Reason,
B871. For this and later citations, see Norman Kemp Smith's translation,
Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason,
New York, 1963, which the author frequently relied on.

2.
Eichmann in Jerusalem,
New York, 1963.

3. Notes on metaphysics,
Kant's handschriftlicher Nachlass,
vol. V, in
Kant's gesammelte Schriften,
Akademie Ausgabe, Berlin, Leipzig, 1928, vol. XVIII, 5636.

4. Hugh of St. Victor.

5. André Bridoux,
Descartes: Oeuvres et Lettres,
Pléiade ed., Paris, 1937, Introduction, p. viii. Cf. Galileo: "
les math- ématiques sont la langue dans laquelle est écrit l'univers,
" p. xiii.

6. Nicholas Lobkowicz,
Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx,
Notre Dame, 1967, p. 419.

7.
De Republica,
I,17.

8.
The Phenomenology of Mind,
trans. J. B. Baillie (1910), New York, 1964, "Sense-Certainty," p. 159.

9. See the note to "Vom Wesen der Wahrheit," a lecture first given in 1930. Now in
Wegmarken,
Frankfurt, 1967, p. 97.

10. See "Glauben und Wissen" (1802),
Werke,
Frankfurt, 1970, vol. 2, p. 432.

11. llth ed.

12.
Werke,
Darmstadt, 1963, vol. I, pp. 982, 621, 630, 968, 952, 959, 974.

13. Introduction to his
The Basic Works of Aristotle,
New York, 1941, p. xviii. In citations from Aristotle, McKeon's translation has occasionally been used.

14.
Critique of Pure Reason,
B878. The striking phrase occurs in the last section of the
Critique of Pure Reason,
where Kant claims to have established metaphysics as a science the idea of which "is as old as speculative human reason; and what rational human being does not speculate, either in scholastic or in popular fashion?" (B871). This "science"..."has now fallen into general disrepute" because "more was expected from metaphysics than could reasonably be demanded" (B877). Cf. also sections 59 and 60 of
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.

15.
The Gay Science,
bk. III, no. 125, "The madman."

16. "How the True World' finally became a fable," 6.

17. "Nietzsches Wort 'Gott ist tot,'" in
Holzwege,
Frankfurt, 1963, p. 193.

18. B125 and B9.

19. René Char,
Feuillets d'Hypnos,
Paris, 1946, no. 62.

20.
Symposium,
212a.

21.
Kant's handschriftlicher Nachlass,
vol. VI, Akademie Ausgabe, vol. XVIII, 6900.

22.
Werke,
vol. I, p. 989.

23. "Prolegomena,"
Werke,
vol. III, p. 245.

24.
Critique of Pure Reason,
Bxxx.

25.
Kant's handschriftlicher Nachlass,
vol. V, Akademie Ausgabe, vol. XVIII, 4849.

26. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, London, 1962, p. 1. Cf. pp. 151 and 324.

27. "Einleitung zu 'Was ist Metaphysik?' " in
Wegmarken,
p. 206.

28. Hegel,
The Phenomenology of Mind,
Baillie trans., Introduction, p. 131.

29.
Ibid.,
p. 144.

 

Chapter I

1. The three ways of life are enumerated in
Nicomachean Ethics,
I, 5 and the
Eudemian Ethics,
1215a35 £F. For the opposition of the beautiful to the necessary and the useful, see
Politics,
1333a30 ff. It is interesting to compare the three Aristotelian ways of life with Plato's enumeration in the
Philebus—
the way of pleasure, the way of thinking (
phronēsis),
and a way of both mixed (22); to the way of pleasure Plato objects that pleasure in itself is unlimited in time as well as intensity: "it does not contain within itself and derive from itself either beginning or middle or end" (31a). And although he "agrees with all sages
(sophoi)
...that
nous,
the faculty of thought and of truth, is for us king of heaven and earth" (28c), he also thinks that for mere mortals a life that "knows neither joy nor grief," though the most divine (33a-b), would be unbearable and that therefore "a mixture of the unlimited with what sets limits is the source of all beauty" (26b).

2. Thomas Langan,
Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Reason,
New Haven, London, 1966, p. 93.

3. Frag. 1.

4.
Republic,
VII, 514a-521b.
The Collected Dialogues of Plato,
eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, "Republic," trans. Paul Shorey, New York, 1961, has sometimes been drawn on, as has Francis MacDonald Cornford's
The Republic of Plato,
New York, London, 1941.

5. Kant,
Opus Postumum,
ed. Erich Adickes, Berlin, 1920, p. 44. Probable date of this remark is 1788.

6.
Critique of Pure Reason,
B565.

7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
The Visible and the Invisible,
Evanston, 1968, p. 17.

8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, Evanston, 1964, Introduction, p. 20.

9. Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz,
Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker,
Berlin, 1959, vol. II, B26.

10.
The Visible and the Invisible,
pp. 40–41.

11.
Das Tier als soziales Wesen,
Zürich, 1953, p. 252.

12.
Animal Forms and Patterns,
trans. Hella Czech, New York, 1967, p. 19.

13.
Ibid.,
p. 34.

14.
Das Tier als soziales Wesen,
p. 232.

15.
Ibid.

16.
Ibid.,
p. 127.

17.
Animal Forms and Patterns,
pp. 112,113.

18.
Das Tier als soziales Wesen,
p. 64.

19.
Biologie und Geist,
Zürich, 1956, p. 24.

20.
Of Human Understanding,
bk. III, chap. 1, no. 5.

21. Merleau-Ponty,
Signs,
Introduction, p. 17.

22.
The Visible and the Invisible,
p. 259.

23. Signs, p. 21.

24.
The Visible and the Invisible,
p. 259.

25.
De Anima,
403a5–10.

26.
Ibid.,
413b24 ff.

27.
De generatione animalium,
II, 3, 736b5–29, quoted from Lobkowicz,
op. cit.,
p. 24.

28.
De Interpretatione,
16a3–13.

29. Mary McCarthy, "Hanging by a Thread,"
The Writing on the Wall,
New York, 1970.

30.
Enarrationes in Psalmos, Patrologiae Latina,
J.-P. Migne, Paris, 1854–66, vol. 37, CXXXIV, 16.

31. Frag. 149.

32. Schelling,
Of Human Freedom
(1809), 414. Trans. James Gutmann, Chicago, 1936, p. 96.

33. Frag. 34.

34.
Critique of Pure Reason,
B354–B355.

35.
Ibid.,
A107. Cf. also B413: "In inner intuition there is nothing permanent," and B420: Nothing "permanent" is "given ... in ... intuition" "insofar as I think myself."

36.
The Visible and the Invisible,
pp. 18–19.

37.
Critique of Pure Reason,
A381.

38.
Critique of Pure Reason,
B565-B566. Kant writes here "transcendental" but means "transcendent." This is not the only passage in which he himself falls prey to the confusion that constitutes one of the pitfalls for the reader of his works. His clearest and simplest explanation of the use of the two words can be found in the
Prolegomena,
where he answers a critic, in the note on
[>]
(
Werke,
vol. Ill), which reads as follows: "My place is the fruitful
bathos
of experience, and the word transcendental ... does not signify something that transcends all experience, but what
(a priori)
precedes it in order to make it possible. If these concepts transcend experience I call their use transcendent." The object that determines appearances, as distinguished from experience, clearly transcends them as experiences.

39.
Critique of Pure Reason,
B566.

40.
Ibid.,
B197.

41.
Ibid.,
B724.

42.
Ibid.,
B429.

43.
The Philosopher and Theology,
New York, 1962, p. 7. In the same vein, Heidegger in the classroom used to tell the biography of Aristotle. "Aristotle," he said, "was bom, worked [spent his life thinking], and died."

44. In his
Commentary
to I Corinthians 15.

45.
Critique of Pure Reason,
A381.

46.
Ibid.,
B157–B158.

47.
Ibid.,
B420.

48. The last and presumably best English translation, by John Manolesco, appeared under the title
Dreams of a Spirit Seer, and Other Writings,
New York, 1969. I have translated the passage myself from the German in
Werke,
vol. I, pp. 946–951.

49. "Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels,"
Werke,
vol. I, p. 384. English translation:
Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens,
trans. W. Hastie, Ann Arbor, 1969.