The Life of the Mind (72 page)

In any event, so far as I know, no change has been made that in any way affects the thought. A few cuts, mostly small, have been made, usually to eliminate repetitions, when I concluded that these were accidental rather than deliberate. In a very few plaoes, not more than two or three, I have added something, for the sake of clarity, e.g., the words "Scotus was a Franciscan" to a passage that otherwise would be obscure to a reader lacking that information. But with these minor exceptions, what has been done is just the habitual "Englishing" that all her texts underwent.

This does not apply to the material from her lectures printed in the appendix. These extracts are given verbatim, except for obvious typing mistakes, which have been corrected. It appeared to me that since the Kant lectures had never been intended for publication but to be delivered viva voce to a class of students, any editorial meddling would be inappropriate. It was not my business to tamper with history. Along with her other papers, the lectures from which the extracts have been taken are in the Library of Congress, where they can be consulted with permission from her executors.

I ought to mention one other group of changes. The manuscripts of both "Thinking" and "Willing" were still in lecture form, unchanged in that respect from the way they had been delivered in Aberdeen and New York, though in other respects much revised and added to (the last chapter of "Willing" was wholly new). Had she had time, obviously she would have altered that, turning listeners into readers, as she normally did when what had been given as a lecture came out in a book or magazine. In the present text, this has been done, except in the case of the general introduction, with its pleasant allusion to the Gifford Lectures. If something of the flavor of the spoken word nevertheless remains, that is all to the good.

A final remark about the Englishing should be interjected. Evidently personal taste plays a part in an editor's decisions. My own notion of acceptable written English is, like everybody's, idiosyncratic. I do not object, for instance, to ending a sentence with a preposition—in fact, I rather favor it—but I am squeamish when I see certain nouns, such as "shower" (in the sense of shower-bath) or "trigger," being used as verbs. So I could not let Hannah Arendt, whom I so greatly admired, say "trigger" when "cause" or "set in motion" would do. And "when the chips are down": I cannot say why the phrase grates on me, and particularly coming from her, who, I doubt, ever handled a poker chip. But I can see her (cigarette perched in holder) contemplating the roulette table or chemin de fer, so it is now "when the stakes are on the table"—more fitting, more in character. Would she have minded these small examples of interference with her freedom of expression? Did she set much store on "triggered"? I hope she would have indulged me in my prejudices. And though personal taste has occasionally marched in as arbiter (where once I would have sought to persuade), much care has been taken throughout to respect her characteristic tone. My own idiom has not been permitted to intrude; there is not a "Mary McCarthy word" in the text. In the one instance when, finding nothing better, I used such a word, it stuck out like a sore thumb from the galley proof and had to be hastily amputated. So that the text that the reader has been reading is hers; it
is
her, I hope, in the sense that the excisions and polishing reveal her, just as cutting away the superfluous marble from a quarried block lays bare the intrinsic form. Michelangelo said that about sculpture (as opposed to painting), and here at any rate there has been no hint of laying on or embellishment.

It has been a heavy job, which has kept going an imaginary dialogue with her, verging sometimes, as in life, on debate. Though in life it never came to that, now I reproach her, and vice versa. The work has gone on till late at night; then, in my dreams, pages of the manuscript are found all of a sudden to be missing or, on the contrary, turn up without warning, throwing everything, including the footnotes, out of kilter. But it has also been, if not fun, as in former days, rewarding. I have learned, for example, that I can understand the
Critique of Pure Reason,
which I had previously thought impenetrable by me. Searching for a truant reference, I have read some entire Platonic dialogues (the
Thaeatetus,
the
Sophist)
that I had never dipped into before. I have learned the difference between an electric ray and a sting ray. I have reread bits of Virgil's Bucolics and Georgics, which I had not looked at since college. Many of my old college textbooks have come down from their shelves, and not only mine but my husband's (he studied philosophy at Bowdoin) and my dear secretary's husband's (he had Rilke, some of the Aristotle we lacked, and more Virgil).

It has been a co-operative enterprise. My secretary, typing the manuscript, has gently interposed on behalf of commas and a sterner way with grammatical lapses: she is a Scruple, doing battle on the side of Temptation. Hannah Arendt's teaching assistant at the New School—Jerome Kohn—has hunted down dozens of references and, quite often, answering the appeal of those anxious question marks, been able to clarify, or else we have pooled our bewilderment and arrived at reasonable certainties. He has even (see the bad dream above) discovered a page that, unnoticed by us, was missing from the photo-statted manuscript. Other friends, including my German teacher, have helped. Throughout this travail, there have been times of positive elation, a mixture of our school days revisited (those textbooks, late-night discussions of philosophic points), and the tonic effect of our dead friend's ideas, alive and generative of controversy as well as of surprised agreement. Tuough I have missed her in the course of these months—in fact more than a year now—of work, wished her back to clarify, object, reassure, compliment and be complimented, I do not think I shall truly miss her, feel the pain in the amputated limb, till it is over. I am aware that she is dead but I am simultaneously aware of her as a distinct presence in this room, listening to my words as I write, possibly assenting with her musing nod, possibly stifling a yawn.

A
few explanations of practical matters.
Since the manuscript, though finished in terms of content, was not in final shape, not every quotation and allusion in the text was accompanied by a footnote. Thanks to Jerome Kohn and to Roberta Leighton and her helpers at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, many of these have been run down. But as I write, a few are still missing and if they cannot be found in time, the search will have to continue and the results be included in a future edition. Also, even where we do have references, a few of the footnotes are incomplete, chiefly because the page or volume number as given appears to be wrong and we have not yet been able to locate the right passage. This too, I hope, will eventually be rectified. We have been aided by having books from Hannah Arendt's library that were used by her for reference. But we do not have all the books she referred to.

It is clear that she often quoted from memory. Where her memory did not correspond with a cited text, this has been corrected. Except in the case of translations: here we have sometimes corrected, sometimes not. Again it has been a question of trying to read her mind. When she varied from a standard translation of a Greek or Latin or German or French original, did she do so on purpose or from a faulty recollection? Often one cannot be sure. As comparison shows, she did use standard translations: Norman Kemp Smith's of Kant, Walter Kaufmann's of Nietzsche, McKeon's Aristotle, the various translations of Plato in the Edith Hamilton-Huntington Cairns edition. But she knew all those languages well—a fact which prompted her to veer from the standard version when it suited her, that is, when she found Kemp Smith, for example, or Kaufmann imprecise, too far from the original, or for some other, purely literary reason. From an editorial point of view, this has created a rather chaotic situation. Do we credit Kemp Smith and Kaufmann in the footnotes when she has leaned heavily, but not entirely, on their versions? Not to do seems unfair, but in some eventualities the opposite could seem unfair too: Kaufmann, for instance, might not care to be credited with words and expressions that are not his. Kemp Smith is dead, like many of the Plato translators, but that does not mean that feeling for their feelings should die too.

Leaving the puzzles of credit aside for the moment, we have attacked the overall problem of translations in what may be a piecemeal,
ad hoc
way but which does meet the realities of the circumstance, for which no general and consistently applied rule seems to work. Where possible, each passage has been checked against the standard translation, often underlined or otherwise marked by her in the book she owned; when the variation is wide, we have gone back to the original language, and if Kemp Smith seems closer to Kant's German, we have used Kemp Smith. But when there is a shade of meaning overlooked in the standard translation that the Arendt translation brings out, we have used hers; also when the meaning is debatable. With practice, it soon becomes fairly easy to discern when a variant rendering corresponds to an intention on her part as opposed to inadvertence—a slip of memory or mistake in copying; differences in punctuation, for instance, we have treated as inadvertent.

Unfortunately, this common-sense solution does not meet all contingencies. Unless the text cited was in her library, in English, we have no idea of what translation, if any, she used for reference. In the absence of further clues, I have assumed that she made her own translation and have felt free to alter it slightly, in the interests of English idiom or grammar, just as I would with her own text. (Once in a while, I have retranslated from the original myself. But I have lacked the effrontery to try that much with Heidegger, though I have dared with Master Eckhart.) In the case of classical authors, there is such a wealth of translations to choose among that one could hardly hope to find the one she might have been drawing on—a needle in a haystack. Once, by luck, I happened on a translation of Virgil which—it was apparent in a flash—she had used. My pencil moved (Eureka!) to indicate editor, date, and so on, in a footnote; then I looked again—no. Here, as so often, she had used a translation but had not stuck to it. And it is impossible to show in a footnote in which spots she diverged and which not.

Eventually we arrived at a policy, which has been to cite a translation only when it has been followed to the letter. Where no translator is named, it means that the version used is entirely or largely the author's or that we could not find the translation she drew on, if one exists. Yet even that policy requires qualification. The reader should know that some standard translations (McKeon, Kemp Smith, Kaufmann, the Hamilton-Cairns miscellany), even where not specifically mentioned, have served g
rosso modo
as the author's guides.

The Bible has been a special problem. It seemed hard to tell at first whether she was using the King James version, the Revised Standard version, the Douai version, a German version which she then translated into English, or a mixture of all these. I even amused myself with the fond hypothesis that she had gone back to St. Jerome's Vulgate and done her own rendering from the Latin. My inclination was to use the King James version; aside from personal preference, there was the argument that the "thou shalt"s in the author's voice that appear repeatedly in the "Willing" volume should be matched by Biblical "thou" and "thee"s of the older version—otherwise it would sound peculiar. But Roberta Leighton has demonstrated to me that careful comparison shows that the manuscript is closest to the Revised Standard version; hence, that has been used, with a few exceptions, where the beauty of the King James language proved irresistible to us, as it evidently had to our author. At any rate, sticking on the whole to the Revised Standard has done away with one difficulty: the fact that the old version translates "love"
(agape)
as "charity." Since for modern ears, the word has a mainly tax-deductible connotation, or refers to "taking a charitable view" of something, it would have had to be changed to "love," in surrounding brackets, each time it occurred, which would have made awkward reading.

Such preoccupations with consistency and mirror-fidelity of reference will seem curious to the general reader. They are an occupational infirmity of editors and academics. Or they are the game-rules that scholarly writing agrees to and by their ›ery strictness they add to the zest of the pursuit—a zest that cannot be shared by non-players. Hunting-the-slipper in the guise of an elusive footnote must be taken with dead seriousness, like any absorbing sport or game. Yet if it matters only to a few, mainly those engaged in it, where is the sense? What difference does it make whether God is "He" on one page and "he" on the next? Maybe the author just changed her attitude, which is her right. Why seek to divine her underlying preference and lock her, a free spirit, into a uniform "He" or "he"? Well, it is "He." And the will is "Will" when it is a concept and "will" when it is acting in a human subject.

I apologize to the general reader for mentioning these details of footnotes, capitalization, brackets, and so on, as devoid of interest to an outsider as a sportsman's pondered choice of trout-fly when a worm will catch the fish. That the fish is the point tends to be lost sight of by specialists, as Hannah Arendt would be the first to agree. She cared for the general reader, who for her remained a student in adult form. That was why she especially loved Socrates. Still, being a teacher and scholar, she knew about the game-rules and by and large accepted them, though more in the spirit of tolerance one brings to children's pastimes than with the zeal of a true participant. Anyhow, in the course of these months with the manuscript, my well-sharpened pencils have turned into stubs. And now I have talked enough shop-talk. It is time to leave the manuscript to itself.

...We know from Kant's own testimony that the turning-point of his life was the discovery of the human mind's cognitive faculties and their limitations (in 1770), which took him more than 10 years to elaborate and publish as
Critique of Pure Reason.
We also know from his letters what this immense labor of so many years signified for his other plans and ideas. He writes of this "main subject" that it kept back and obstructed like "a dam" all the other matters which he had hoped to finish and publish, that it was like "a stone in his way" on which he could only proceed after its removal.... Prior to the event of 1770, he had intended to write and publish soon the
Metaphysics of Morals
which was then written and published nearly 30 years later. But at this early date, the book was announced under the title of
Critique of Moral Taste.
When Kant turned finally to the third
Critique,
he still called it to begin with Critique of Taste. Thus two things happened: Behind taste, a favored topic of the whole eighteenth century, he had discovered an entirely new human faculty, namely, judgment. But at the same time, he withdrew moral propositions from the competence of the new faculty. In other words: It now is more than taste that will decide about the beautiful and the ugly; but the [moral] question of right and wrong is to be decided neither by taste nor judgment but by reason alone.