IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ
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a response to the human need for tranquility. Arendt wrote a work on Jews
worthy of a German scholar and a classical Greek humanist. Whether the
work captured the ultimate tragedy of the Jewish people in the twentieth
century, or even the imagination of the Israeli citizens at the time, remains
an open issue. But whatever turns out to be the ultimate judgment, this is
clearly one of those rare works in which the object of the discourse is sig–
nificant.along with the subject of investigation.
The
Life
if
the Mind
represents a culminating philosophic effort to under–
stand the life of the state. To be sure, it is not quite complete, and leaves less
than one-third unrevealed. Even stating the obvious is bound to create some
misunderstanding since Arendt disclaims being a philosopher or "profes–
sional thinker." Indeed, publication of a large part of the first volume,
Thinking,
in The
New Yorker,
not to mention that a widely respected but thor–
oughly commercial publisher issued the two volumes, might lend some
weight to such a disclaimer. But, in fact, the work is thoroughly philosoph–
ical in the German classical tradi tion of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and
Heidegger.
It
is a measure of Hannah Arendt's justifiable fame as the author
of The
Origins
if
Totalitarianism,
The
Human Condition, On R evolution,
and
Eichmann in Jerusalem,
among others, that a work so demanding, requiring
intimacy with major figures of philosophical history, would receive wide
hearing. Under the circumstances, one might well have anticipated com–
mercial drivel from editor or publisher. It is to their lasting credit that no
such posthumous exploitation is attempted. McCarthy's postface is entirely
professional and pellucid. Everyone connected with this project exhibited at
least one central element of good judgment ("judging" was to have consti–
tuted the final volume of this trilogy) . That element is good taste.
The
Life of the Mind
picks up on themes first expressed two decades ear–
lier in The
Human Condition.
The first two parts of the new work, offered as
the Gifford Lectures for 1973 and 1974 respectively, seem to express polar
opposites. The earlier work emphasized the active life--comprised of what
we are doing-labor, work, and action. The new work involves the con–
templative life-thinking, willing, and judging. But this triad is only
superficially antithetical to the earlier one. Labor, work, and action are inter–
connected as biosocial activities, whereas thinking, willing, and judging
occupy far more autonomous realms in the contemplative life. The triads
remain, and the polarities remain, but the special nature of philosophical
activities is in asking unanswerable questions and hence establishing human
beings as question-asking beings. In this way Arendt sought to get beyond
the atomism that afflicts the social sciences in particular-the search for the
magical key word:
society
for sociology,
culture
for anthropology,
polity
for
political science,
money
for economics, and
personality
for psychology. The
magic key is less in the artifact than in the demystification of all artifacts.
