The Life of the Mind (23 page)

In my attempt to isolate and examine one of the basic sources of non-cognitive thinking I have emphasized the elements of admiration, confirmation, and affirmation, which we encounter so powerfully in Greek philosophical and pre-philosophic thought and can trace throughout the centuries, not as a matter of influence but of often-repeated first-hand experience. I am not at all sure that what I have been describing runs counter to present-day experiences of thinking but I am quite sure that it runs counter to present-day opinion on the subject.

Common opinion on philosophy was formed by the Romans, who became the heirs of Greece, and it bears the stamp, not of the original Roman experience, which was exclusively political (and which we find in its purest form in Virgil), but of the last century of the Roman republic, when the
res publica,
the public thing, was already in the process of being lost, till finally, after Augustus' attempt at restoration, it became the private property of the imperial household. Philosophy, like the arts and letters, like poetry and historiography, had always been a Greek import; in Rome culture had been looked upon with some suspicion as long as the public thing was still intact, but it was also tolerated and even admired as a noble pastime for the educated and a means of beautification of the Eternal City. Only in the centuries of decline and fall, first of the republic and then of the empire, did these occupations become "serious," and did philosophy, for its part, Greek borrowings notwithstanding, develop into a "science," Cicero's
animi medicina—the
opposite of what it had been in Greece.
⁶⁵
Its usefulness was to teach men how to cure their despairing minds by escaping from the world through thinking. Its famous watchword—which sounds almost as though it had been formulated in contradiction of the Platonic admiring wonder—became
nil admirari:
do not be surprised at anything, admire nothing.
⁶⁶

But it was not just the popular image of the figure of the philosopher, the wise man whom nothing can touch, that we owe to the Roman transmittal; Hegel's well-known saying about the relation of philosophy and reality ("the owl of Minerva begins its flight when dusk is falling")
⁶⁷
bears the mark of the Roman rather than the Greek experience. For Hegel, Minerva's owl exemplified Plato and Aristotle rising, as it were, out of the disasters of the Peloponnesian war. Not philosophy, but the
political
philosophy of Plato and Aristotle grew out of the decline of the polis, "a shape of life grown old." And with respect to this political philosophy there is considerable evidence for the truth of Pascal's splendidly impertinent remark in the
Pensées:

 

We can only think of Plato and Aristotle in grand academic robes. They were honest men, and like others laughing with their friends, and when they wanted to divert themselves, they wrote the
Laws
or the
Politics,
to amuse themselves. That part of their life was the least philosophic and the least serious....If they wrote on politics, it was as if laying down rules for a lunatic asylum; if they presented the appearance of speaking of a great matter, it was because they knew that the madmen, to whom they spoke, thought they were kings and emperors. They entered into their principles in order to make their madness as little harmful as possible.
⁶⁸

 

In any event, the profound Roman influence on even so metaphysical a philosopher as Hegel is quite manifest in his first published book,
⁶⁹
where he discusses the relation between philosophy and reality: "The need for philosophy arises when the unifying power has disappeared from the life of men, when the opposites have lost the living tension of their relatedness and their mutual interdependence and have become autonomous. Out of disunity, out of being torn apart, arises thought," namely, the need for reconciliation ("
Entzweiung ist der Quell
des Bedürfnisses der Philosophic"). What is Roman in the Hegelian notion of philosophy is that thinking does not arise out of reason's need but has an existential root in unhappiness—whose typically Roman character Hegel with his great sense of history recognized very clearly in his treatment of the "Roman World" in the late lecture course published as the
Philosophy of History.
"Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Scepticism ... although ... opposed to each other, had the same general purport, viz., rendering the soul absolutely indifferent to everything which the real world had to offer."
⁷⁰
What he apparently did not recognize is the extent to which he himself had generalized the Roman experience: 'The History of the World is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony."
⁷¹
Thinking then arises out of the disintegration of reality and the resulting disunity of man and world, from which springs the need for another world, more harmonious and more meaningful.

And this sounds very plausible. How often indeed must the first thought-impulse have coincided with an impulse to escape a world that has become unbearable. It is improbable that this escape-impulse is less old than the admiring wonder. Yet we look in vain for its expression in conceptual language before the long centuries of decline that began when Lucretius and Cicero transformed Greek philosophy into something essentially Roman—which meant, among other things, something essentially practical.
⁷²
And following these precursors with their mere foreboding of disaster—'everything is gradually decaying and nearing its end, worn out by old age," in the words of Lucretius
⁷³
—it took over a hundred years before those thought-trains were developed into a sort of consistent philosophical system. That occurred with Epictetus, the Greek slave and the most acute mind, possibly, among the late Stoics. According to him, what must be learned to make life bearable is not really thinking, but "the correct use of imagination," the only thing we have entirely within our power. He still uses a deceptively familiar Greek vocabulary, but what he calls "the reasoning faculty" (
dynamis logikē
) has as little to do with Greek
logos
and
nous
as what he appeals to as "will" has to do with Aristotelian
proairesis.
He calls the faculty of thinking in itself "sterile" (
akarpa
);
⁷⁴
for him the subject matter of philosophy is each man's own life, and what philosophy teaches man is an "art of living,"
⁷⁵
how to deal with life, in the same fashion that carpentry teaches an apprentice how to deal with wood. What counts is not "theory" in the abstract but its use and application (
chrēsis tōn theōrēmatōn);
to think and to understand are a mere preparation for action; to "admire the mere power of exposition"—the
logos,
the reasoned argument and train of thought itself—is likely to turn man "into a grammarian instead of a philosopher."
⁷⁶

In other words, thinking has become a
technē,
a particular kind of craftsmanship, perhaps to be deemed the highest—certainly the most urgently needed, because its end product is the conduct of your own life. What was meant was not a way of life in the sense of a
bios theōrētikos
or
politikos,
a life devoted to some particular activity, but what Epictetus called "action"—an action in which you acted in unison with no one, which was supposed to change nothing but your self, and which could become manifest only in the
apatheia
and
ataraxia
of the "wise man," that is, in his refusal to react to whatever good or evil might befall him. "I must die, but must I also die sighing? I can't help being chained, but can't I help weeping?...You threaten to handcuff me. Man, what are you saying? You can't handcuff me; you manacle my hands. You are threatening to behead me; when did I say that my head could not be cut off?"
⁷⁷
Obviously, these are not just exercises in thinking but exercises in the power of the will. "Ask not that events should happen as you will, but let your will be that events should happen as they do, and you shall have peace" is the quintessence of this "wisdom"; for "it is impossible that what happens should be other than it is."
⁷⁸

This will be of considerable interest to us when we come to deal with the phenomenon of the will, an altogether different mental capacity, whose chief characteristic, compared with the ability to think, is that it neither speaks in the voice of reflection nor does it use arguments but only imperatives, even when it is commanding nothing more than thought or, rather, imagination. For in order to obtain the radical withdrawal from reality that Epictetus demands, the emphasis on thinking's ability to have present what is absent shifts from reflection to imagination, and this not in the sense of a Utopian imagining of another, better, world; rather, the aim is to strengthen the original absent-mindedness of thought to such an extent that reality disappears altogether. If thinking is normally the faculty of making present what is absent, the Epictetian faculty of "dealing with impressions aright" consists in conjuring away and making absent what actually is present. All that existentially concerns you while living in the world of appearances is the "impressions" by which you are affected. Whether what affects you exists or is mere illusion depends on your decision whether or not you will recognize it as real.

Wherever philosophy is understood as the "science" that deals with the mind sheerly as consciousness—where therefore the question of reality can be left in suspense, bracketed out altogether—we encounter in fact the old Stoic position. Only missing is the original motive for making thought a mere instrument which does its business at the bidding of the will as master. In our context, the point is that this bracketing of reality is possible, and not because of the force of will power but because of the very nature of thinking. If one may count Epictetus among the philosophers, it is because he discovered that consciousness makes it possible for mental activities to recoil upon themselves.

If while perceiving an object outside myself I decide to concentrate on my perception, on the act of seeing instead of the seen object, it is as if I lost the original object, because it loses its impact upon me. I have, so to speak, changed the subject—instead of the tree I now deal merely with the perceived tree, that is, with what Epictetus calls an "impression." This has the great advantage that I am no longer absorbed by the perceived object, something outside myself; the seen tree is inside me, invisible to the outside world as though it had never been a sense-object. The point here is that the "seen tree" is not a thought-thing but an "impression." It is not something absent that needed memory to store it up for the de-sensing process that prepares the mind's objects for thinking and is always preceded by experience in the world of appearances. The seen tree is "inside" me in its full sensory presence, the tree itself deprived only of its realness, an image and not an after-thought about trees. The trick discovered by Stoic philosophy is to use the mind in such a way that reality cannot touch its owner even when he has not withdrawn from it; instead of withdrawing mentally from everything that is present and close at hand, he has drawn every appearance inside himself, and his "consciousness" becomes a full substitute for the outside world presented as impression or image.

It is at this moment that consciousness indeed undergoes a decisive change: it is no longer the silent self-awareness that accompanies all my acts and thoughts and guarantees my identity, the simple I-am-I (nor is it a question here of the strange difference that inserts itself into the core of this identity, which we shall come to later, an insertion peculiar to mental activities because of their recoil upon themselves). Since I am no longer absorbed by an object given to my senses (even though this object, unchanged in its "essential" structure, remains present as an object of consciousness—what Husserl called the "intentional object"), I myself, as sheer consciousness, emerge as an entirely new entity. This new entity can exist in the world in complete independence and sovereignty and yet seemingly remain in possession of this world, namely, of its sheer "essence," stripped of its "existential" character, of its realness that could touch and threaten me in my own. I have become I-for-myself in an emphatic way, finding in myself everything that was originally given as "alien" reality. It is not so much the mind as this monstrously enlarged consciousness that offers an ever-present, seemingly safe refuge from reality.

This bracketing of reality—getting rid of it by treating it as though it were nothing but a mere "impression"—has remained one of the great temptations of the "professional thinkers," till Hegel, one of the greatest of them, went even further and built his philosophy of the World Spirit on the experiences of the thinking ego: reinterpreting this ego on the model of consciousness, he carried the whole world into consciousness as though it were essentially nothing but a mental phenomenon.

The efficiency, for the philosopher, of turning away from the world into the self is beyond doubt. Existentially speaking, Parmenides was wrong when he said that only Being manifests itself in, and is the same as, thinking. Non-being is also thinkable if the will commands the mind. Its force of withdrawal is then perverted into an annihilating power, and nothingness becomes a full substitute for reality, because nothingness brings relief. The relief, of course, is unreal; it is merely psychological, a soothing of anxiety and fear. I still doubt that there ever was anybody who remained master of his "impressions" when roasted in the Phalarian Bull.

Epictetus, like Seneca, lived under the rule of Nero, that is, under rather desperate conditions, though he himself, unlike Seneca, was scarcely persecuted. But over a hundred years earlier, during the last century of the republic, Cicero, well versed in Greek philosophy, had discovered the thought-trains by which one could take one's way out of the world. He found that such thoughts, by no means as extreme or as carefully elaborated as in Epictetus, were likely to offer comfort and help in the world as it then was (and, of course, always is, more or less). Men who could teach this way of thinking were highly esteemed in Roman literary circles; Lucretius calls Epicurus—who more than two hundred years after his death finally got a pupil worthy of him—"a god" because "he was the first to invent a way of life which is now called wisdom and through his art rescued life from such storms and so much darkness."
⁷⁹
For our purposes, however, Lucretius is not such a good example; he does not insist on thinking but on knowing. Knowledge acquired by reason will dispel ignorance and thus destroy the greatest evil—fear, whose source is superstition. A more appropriate example is Cicero's famous "Dream of Scipio."