274
PARTISAN REVIEW
The temptation to review
The Life
<if
the Mind
as if flawed by virtue of
being incomplete is not simple to resist. But there are so many broad hints,
fragments from lectures, and outright statements on judgment, that the
work can be examined as a complete effort. The relationships between
thinking, willing, and judging are set forth early in the first volume. And
like a profoundly risky move in chess, the disallowance of any intertrans–
latability between the three categories drastically weakens the work. For,
instead of searching out areas of analytic linkages (i.e., ways in which the
act of thinking involves willing and judging), instead of considering each
of these as aspects of a naturalistic theory of mind-perhaps along the lines
of H.
G.
Mead or Y H. Krikorian-we are required to see each aspect as a
windowless monad.
It
is curious that this should be so since Arendt was so
familiar with Aristotle and the remarkable way a sense of emergence cre–
ated linkages-biological issues into social, social into political, and
political into ethical. Indeed, these basic categories have survived two thou–
sand years, and if the contents of modern science are no longer
Aristotelian, the twentieth-century impulse toward the unity of science
remains inspired by the Greeks. This major dilemma notwithstanding,
Arendt's is a thorough examination into basic concepts and thus transcends
its own checkmate. She can at least claim a draw between the idealistic and
naturalistic traditions that propel her work.
These volumes consecrate Hannah Arendt's life's work, even if they do
not effect a synthesis of epistemology and ontology. For the essential state–
ment in
Thinking,
made many times over as a variation on the theme of the
mind, is the quintessential point about twentieth-century existence: it is
not the struggle between theory and action that is central but the struggle
between theory and theory. Thinking is the hallmark of a free person liv–
ing in a free society. To reduce action to behavior and then interpret
behavior as if it were pure thought is for Arendt the shared fallacy of
dialectical materialism and behavioral psychology. Whether in the language
of revolutionary act or operant conditioning, the pure activist fails to
understand that reducing thinking to doing is the end of the process of
thought and the beginning of thought control or behavior modification.
In place of the casual slogan about theory and its issuance into practice,
Arendt early on poses the question: "What are we 'doing' when we do
nothing but think?" The totalitarian temptation is to assume that those not
engaged in the collective will, in the process of bringing about progress, are
doing nothing. This is the metaphysical equivalent of the theological fear
that idle hands make for idle minds. The reduction of metaphysics to a
form of poetry by the positivist tradition is in fact a call for the repudia–
tion of speculation as a human activity in itself. Arendt shrewdly notes that
the crisis in philosophy, ontology, theology, social theory, etc., comes into
