The Life of the Mind (19 page)

In other words, the chief difficulty here seems to be that for thinking itself—whose language is entirely metaphorical and whose conceptual framework depends entirely on the gift of the metaphor, which bridges the gulf between the visible and the invisible, the world of appearances and the thinking ego—there exists no metaphor that could plausibly illuminate this special activity of the mind, in which something invisible within us deals with the invisibles of the world. All metaphors drawn from the senses will lead us into difficulties for the simple reason that all our senses are essentially cognitive, hence, if understood as activities, have an end outside themselves; they are not
energeia,
an end in itself, but instruments enabling us to know and deal with the world.

Thinking is out of order because the quest for meaning produces no end result that will survive the activity, that will make sense after the activity has come to its end. In other words, the delight of which Aristotle speaks, though manifest to the thinking ego, is ineffable by definition. The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive.
Without the breath of life the human body is a corpse; without thinking the human mind is dead.
This in fact is the metaphor Aristotle tried out in the famous seventh chapter of Book Lambda of the
Metaphysics:
"The activity of thinking
[energeia
that has its end in itself] is life."
¹²⁵
Its inherent law, which only a god can tolerate forever, man merely now and then, during which time he is godlike, is "unceasing motion, which is motion in a circle"
¹²⁶
—the only movement, that is, that never reaches an end or results in an end product. This very strange notion that the authentic process of thinking, namely, the
noesis noeseos,
turns in circles—the most glorious justification in philosophy of the circular argument—has oddly enough never worried either the philosophers or Aristotle's interpreters—partly, perhaps, because of the frequent mistranslations of
nous
and
theorist
as "knowledge," which always reaches an end and produces an end result.
¹²⁷
If thinking were a cognitive enterprise it would have to follow a rectilinear motion, starting from the quest for its object and ending with cognition of it. Aristotle's circular motion, taken together with the life metaphor, suggests a quest for meaning that for man as a thinking being accompanies life and ends only in death. The circular motion is a metaphor drawn from the life process which, though it goes from birth to death, also turns in circles as long as man is alive. This simple experience of the thinking ego has proved striking enough for the notion of the circular movement to be repeated by other thinkers, even though it stands in flagrant contradiction to their traditional assumptions that truth is the result of thinking, that there is such a thing as Hegel's "speculative cognition."
¹²⁸
We find Hegel saying, without any reference to Aristotle: "Philosophy forms a circle.... [It] is a sequence which does not hang in the air; it is not something which begins from nothing at all; on the contrary,
it circles back into itself
" (italics added).
¹²⁹
And we find the same notion at the end of Heidegger's "What is Metaphysics?" where he defines the "basic question of metaphysics" as "Why is there anything and not rather nothing?"—in a way thinking's first question but at the same time the thought to which it "always has to swing back."
¹³⁰

 

Yet these metaphors, although they correspond to the speculative, non-cognitive way of thinking and remain loyal to the fundamental experiences of the thinking ego, since they relate to no cognitive capacity, remain singularly empty, and Aristode himself used them nowhere else—except when he asserts that being alive is
energein,
that is, being active for its own sake.
¹³¹
Moreover, the metaphor obviously refuses to answer the inevitable question, Why do we think?, since there is no answer to the question, Why do we live?

In Wittgenstein's
Philosophical Investigations
(written after he had convinced himself of the untenability of his earlier attempt in the
Tractatus
to understand language, and hence thought, as a "picture of reality"—"A proposition is a picture of reality. A proposition is a model of reality as we conceive it"
¹³²
), there is an interesting thought game that may help illustrate this difficulty. He asks: "What does man think for?...Does man think because he has found that thinking works?—Because he thinks it advantageous to think?" That would be like asking "Does he bring his children up because he has found it works?" Still, it must be admitted that "we do
sometimes
think because it has been found to work," implying by his italics that this is only "sometimes" the case. Hence: "How can we find out
why
man thinks?" Whereupon he answers: "It often happens that we only become aware of the important
facts,
if we suppress the question 'why?"; and then in the course of our investigations these facts lead us to an answer."
¹³³
It is in a deliberate effort to suppress the question,
Why
do we think? that I shall deal with the question,
What
makes us think?

Our question, What makes us think?, does not ask for either causes or purposes. Taking for granted man's need to think, it proceeds from the assumption that the thinking activity belongs among those
energeiai
which, like flute-playing, have their ends within themselves and leave no tangible outside end product in the world we inhabit. We cannot date the moment when this need began to be felt, but the very fact of language and all we know of pre-historical times and of mythologies whose authors we cannot name give us a certain right to assume that the need is coeval with the appearance of man on earth. What we can date, however, is the beginning of metaphysics and of philosophy, and what we can name are the answers given to our question at different periods of our history. Part of the Greek answer lies in the conviction of al! Greek thinkers that philosophy enables mortal men to dwell in the neighborhood of immortal things and thus acquire or nourish in themselves "immortality in the fullest measure that human nature admits."
¹
For the short time they can bear to engage in it, philosophizing transforms mortals into godlike creatures, "mortal gods," as Cicero says. (It is in this vein that ancient etymology repeatedly derived the key word "
theorem
" and even "
theatron
" from "
theos.
"
²
) The trouble with the Greek answer is that it is inconsistent with the very word "philosophy," love of or desire for wisdom, which cannot very well be ascribed to the gods; in the words of Plato, "No god philosophizes or desires to be wise; for he
is."
³

Let me first deal with that strange notion of
athanatizein—
immortalizing—whose influence on the legitimate subject matter of our traditional metaphysics can hardly be overrated. In an earlier chapter, you will remember, I interpreted the Pythagorean parable in terms of judgment, which as a separate faculty was discovered late in the modern age, when Kant, following up the eighteenth-century interest in the phenomenon of taste and its role in aesthetics as well as social intercourse, wrote his
Critique of Judgment.
Historically speaking, this was quite inadequate. The Pythagorean notion of spectatorship had another and more far-reaching significance for the rise of philosophy in the West. Closely connected with the parable's main point of the supremacy of
theōrein,
of contemplating over doing, is the Greek notion of the divine. According to the Homeric religion, the gods were not transcendent, their home was not an infinite beyond but the "brazen sky ... their sure citadel forever."
⁴
Men and gods were like each other, both of one kind (
hen andrōn, hen theōn genos
), drawing breath from one mother; the Greek gods, as Herodotus tells us,
⁵
had the same
physis
as men; but, though
anthrōpophysis,
of the same kind, they still, of course, had certain privileged peculiarities: unlike mortals they were deathless and enjoyed an "easy life." Free of mortal life's necessities, they could devote themselves to spectatorship, looking down from Olympus upon the affairs of men, which for them were no more than a spectacle for their entertainment. The Olympian gods' feeling for the world's spectacular quality—so different from other peoples' notions of divine occupations such as creating and law-giving, founding and governing communities—was a partiality they shared with their less fortunate brothers on earth.

That the passion for seeing, preceding (as we have noted) the thirst for knowledge even grammatically in the Greek language, was the basic Greek attitude to the world seems to me too obvious to require documentation. Whatever appeared—nature and the harmonious order of the
kosmos,
things that had come into being of their own accord and those that human hands had "led into being" ("
agein eis tēn ousian
")
⁶
(Plato's definition of fabrication [
to poiein
]) as well as whatever human excellence
(aretē)
brought forward in the realm of human affairs—was there primarily to be looked at and admired. What tempted men into a position of mere contemplation was the
kalon,
the sheer beauty of appearances, so that the "highest idea of the good" resided in what shone forth most (
tou ontos phanotaton
),
⁷
and human virtue, the
kalon k'agathon,
was assessed neither as an innate quality or intention of the actor, nor by the consequences of his deeds—only by the performance, by how he
appeared while
he was doing; virtue was what we would call virtuosity. As with the arts, human deeds had to "shine by their intrinsic merits," to use an expression of Machiavelli's.
⁸
Whatever existed was supposed, first of all, to be a spectacle fit for the gods, in which, naturally, men, those poor relations of the Olympians, wished to have their share.

Thus Aristotle ascribed the faculty of
logos,
reasoned speech, to the Greeks as distinguished from the barbarians, but the desire to see he ascribed to all men. Thus Plato's cave-dwellers are content to look at the
eidēla
on the screen before them without uttering a single word, unable even to turn to each other and communicate, being chained to their seats by the legs and neck. The many share in the divine passion to see. What was involved in the Pythagorean spectatorship, in the position outside all human affairs, was something divine. And the less time a man needed to take care of his body, and the more time he could devote to such a divine occupation, the closer he came to the way of life of the gods. Moreover, since men and gods were of the same kind, even the divine deathlessness seemed not altogether out of mortal reach; apart from being a constant source of envy, the great name, the precious reward for "great deeds and great words" (Homer), conferred potential immortality—to be sure, a poor substitute. This reward, again, was in the power of the spectator to bestow on the actor. For before the philosophers dealt with what is forever invisible and with what is not merely deathless but truly everlasting,
agenēton,
not only without end but also without beginning, that is, birthless—the Greek gods, as we know from Hesiod's
Theogony,
were deathless but not birthless—the poets and the historians had been dealing with what appears and, in the course of time, disappears from the visibility of the world. Hence, what was involved, prior to the rise of philosophy, in the notion of a position outside the realm of human affairs, can best be clarified if we briefly examine the Greek notion of the function of poetry and the position of the bard.

There exists a report of a lost poem by Pindar. It described a marriage feast of Zeus, where Zeus asked the assembled gods whether their happy blessedness still lacked something. Whereupon the gods begged him to create some new divine beings who would know how to beautify all his great works "with words and music." The new godlike beings Pindar had in mind were the poets
⁹
and bards who helped men to immortality, for "the story of things done oudives the act" and "a thing said walks in immortality if it has been said well."
¹⁰
The bards also, Homer-like, "straightened the story ... in ... magic words to charm all men thereafter."
¹¹
They did not merely report, they also set it right
(orthōsas)—
Aias had slain himself from shame, but Homer had known better and "honored him above all men." A distinction is made between a thing done and a thing thought, and this thought-thing is accessible only to the "spectator," to the non-doer.

This concept of the bard comes right out of Homer. The crucial verses occur when Odysseus has come to the court of the Phaeacians and, at the king's order, is entertained by the bard, who sings some story of Odysseus' own life, his quarrel with Achilles: Odysseus, listening, covers his face and weeps, though he has never wept before, and certainly not when what he is now hearing actually happened. Only when he hears the story does he become fully aware of its meaning. And Homer himself says: The bard sings for men
and
gods what the Muse, Mnemosyne, who watches over Remembrance, has put into his mind. The Muse gave him good and bad: she deprived him of eyesight and gave him sweet song.

 

Pindar, in the lost Zeus poem, must have made clear the subjective as well as the objective side of these early thinking experiences: Both the world and men stand in need of praise lest their beauty go unrecognized. Since men appear in the world of appearances, they need spectators, and those who come as spectators to the festival of life are filled with admiring thoughts which are then uttered in words. Without spectators the world would be imperfect; the participant, absorbed as he is in particular things and pressed by urgent business, cannot see how all the particular things in the world and every particular deed in the realm of human affairs fit together and produce a harmony, which itself is not given to sense perception, and this invisible in the visible would remain forever unknown if there were no spectator to look out for it, admire it, straighten out the stories and put them into words.