IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ
275
being as a result of pronouncements by the intelligentsia itself. But what
begins as a disputation among intellectual elites concludes with popular
disbelief in the worthiness of thinking:
These modern 'deaths'-of God, metaphysics, philosophy, and, by
implication, positivism-have become events of considerable histori–
cal consequence, since, with the beginning of our century, they have
ceased to be the exclusive concern of an intellectual elite and instead
are not so much the concern as the common unexamined assumption
of nearly everybody.. .. [Leaving aside] the issue...of poli tical author–
ity...our ways of thinking may be involved in this crisis[. But] our
ability
to think is not at stake; we are what man has always been–
thinking beings. men have an inclination, perhaps a need, to think
beyond the limitations of knowledge, to do more with this ability
than use it as an instrument for knowing and doing.
The subjugation of the will to reason is more than an indication that,
in the hierarchy of thinking, willing, and judging, willing comes in a dis–
tant third. That this portion of
The Life
if
the Mind
was completed before
only fragments of the portion on judging were done should not suggest
that the will somehow mediates the claims of thought and taste. Arendt is
the political philosopher par excellence and, unlike Kant, her sense of
philosophic categories was filtered through twentieth-century awareness of
totalitarianisms. She sees will as a constant clash with thinking. In her
words, "the will always wills to
do
something and thus implicitly holds in
contempt sheer thinking." But more, this impulse to will translates itself
into the constant search for the
novus ordo sec/orum.
The will remains the
final resting-place of "men of action." Activists demand forever new foun–
dations, constantly destroying what was and is, in the name of the new and
the yet to be. In this Arendt's strong conservatism emerges, certainly in her
critique of the men of action:
There is something puzzling in the fact that men of action, whose sole
intent and purpose was
to
change the whole structure of the future
world and create a
norms ordo seclorum
should have to go to that distant
past of antiquity, for they did not deliberately [reverse] the time-axis and
[bid] the young 'walk back into the pure radiance of the past' . . . .They
looked for a paradigm for a new form of government in their own
'enlightened' age and were hardly aware of the fact that they were look–
ing backward. More puzzling, I think, than their actual ransacking of
