The Life of the Mind (71 page)

139.
De Civitate Dei,
bk. XII, chap. xx.

Hannah Arendt died suddenly on December 4, 1975. It was a Thursday evening; she was entertaining friends. The Saturday before, she had finished "Willing," the second section of
The Life of the Mind.
Like
The Human Condition,
its forerunner, the work was conceived in three parts. Where
The Human Condition,
subtitled
The Vita Activa,
had been divided into Labor, Work, and Action,
The Life of the Mind,
as planned, was divided into Thinking, Willing, and Judging, the three basic activities, as she saw it, of mental life. The distinction made by the Middle Ages between the active life of man in the world and the solitary
vita contemplativa
was of course present to her thought, although her own thinker, wilier, and judger was not a contemplative, set apart by a monkish vocation, but everyman insofar as he exercised his specifically human capacity to withdraw from time to time into the invisible region of the mind.

Whether or not the life of the mind is superior to the so-called active life (as antiquity and the Middle Ages had considered) was an issue she never pronounced on in so many words. Yet it would not be too much to say that the last years of her life were consecrated to this work, which she treated as a task laid on her as a vigorously thinking being—the highest she had been called to. In the midst of her multifarious teaching and lecture commitments, her service on various round tables and panels and consultative boards (she was a constant recruit to the
vita activa
of the citizen and public figure, though seldom a volunteer), she remained immersed in
The Life of the Mind,
as though its completion would acquit her not so much of an obligation, which sounds too onerous, as of a compact she had entered into. All roads, however secondary, on which chance or intention put her in her daily and professional existence, led back to that

When an invitation came, in June 1972, to give the Gilford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen, she chose to use the occasion for a kind of try-out of the volumes already in preparation. The Gifford Lectures also served as a stimulus. Endowed in 1885 by Adam Gifford, a leading Scottish justice and law lord, "for the purpose of establishing in each of the four cities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and St. Andrews ... a Chair ... of Natural Theology, in the widest sense of that term," they had been given by Josiah Royce, William James, Bergson, J. G. Frazer, Whitehead, Eddington, John Dewey, Werner Jaeger, Karl Barth, Etienne Gilson, Gabriel Marcel, among others—an honor roll to which she was quite proud to accede. If she was normally superstitious, she must have seen them too as a
porta-fortuna: The Varieties of Religious Experience,
Whitehead's
Process and Reality,
Dewey's
The Quest for Certainty,
Marcel's
The Mystery of Being,
Gilson's
The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy
had first seen the light as Gifford Lectures.... Having accepted, she drove herself harder perhaps than she ought to have to get hers ready in the time available; she delivered the first series, on Thinking, in the spring of 1973. In the spring of 1974, she returned for the second series, on Willing, and was interrupted by a heart attack after she had given her first lecture. She was intending to go back, in the spring of 1976, to finish the series; meanwhile she had given most of Thinking and Willing to her classes at the New School for Social Research in New York. Judging, she had not started, though she had used material on Judgment in courses she gave at the University of Chicago and at the New School on Kant's political philosophy. After her death, a sheet of paper was found in her typewriter, blank except for the heading "Judging" and two epigraphs. Some time between the Saturday of finishing "Willing" and the Thursday of her death, she must have sat down to confront the final
section.

Her plan was for a work in two volumes. Thinking, the longest, was to occupy the first, and the second was to contain Willing and Judging. As she told friends, she counted on Judgment to be much shorter than the other two. She also used to say that she expected it to be the easiest to handle. The hardest had been the Will. The reason she gave for counting on Judgment to be short was the lack of source material: only Kant had written on the faculty, which before him had been unnoticed by philosophers except in the field of aesthetics, where it had been named Taste. As for ease, she no doubt felt that her lectures on Kant's political philosophy, with their careful analysis of
The Critique of Judgment,
had pretty well prepared the ground to be covered. Still, one can guess that Judging might have surprised her and ended by taking up a whole volume to itself. In any case, to give the reader some notion of what would have been in the concluding section, an appendix has been joined to the second volume containing extracts from her classroom lectures. Aside from a seminar paper, not included here, on the Imagination, which touches briefly on its role in the judging process, this is all we now have of her thoughts on the subject (though something further may turn up in her correspondence, when that is edited). Mournful that there is not more; anyone familiar with her mind will feel sure that the contents of the appendix do not exhaust the ideas that must already have been stirring in her head as she inserted the fresh page in her typewriter.

About the editing.
As far as I know, all of Hannah Arendt's books and articles were edited before reaching print. Those written in English, naturally. It was done by publishers' editors, magazine editors (William Shawn on
The New Yorker,
Robert Silvers on
The New York Review of Books,
Philip Rahv, in the old days, on
Partisan Review),
and also by friends. Sometimes several hands, unknown to each other, went to work on her manuscripts, with her consent and usually, though not always, with her collaboration; those she had learned to trust, she tended to leave rather free with the blue pencil. She referred to all this wryly as her "Englishing." She had taught herself to write English as an exile, when she was over thirty-five, and never felt as comfortable in it even as a spoken tongue as she had once felt in French. She chafed against our language and its awesome, mysterious constraints. Though she had a natural gift, which would have made itself felt in Sioux or Sanskrit, for eloquent, forceful, sometimes pungent expression, her sentences were long, in the German way, and had to be unwound or broken up into two or three. Also, like anybody writing or speaking a foreign language, she had trouble with prepositions. And with what Fowler called "cast-iron idiom." And with finding the natural place for adverbs; for that in English there are no rules—only an unwritten law, which appears tyrannous and menacing to a foreigner because it can also, unpredictably, be broken. Besides, she was impatient. Her sentences could be unwieldy not only because her native language was German, with its affection for strings of modifiers and subordinate clauses encumbering the road to the awaited verb, but also because she tried to get too much in at once. The mixture of hurry and generosity was very characteristic.

Anyway, she was edited. I worked on several of her texts with her, sometimes after another editor, amateur or professional, had preceded me. We went over "On Violence" together one summer in the Café Flore, and then I took it home for further attention. We worked on "On Civil Disobedience" in a
pensione
in Switzerland for several days, and we put some finishing touches on her last published article, "Home to Roost," in an apartment she had been lent in Marbach (Schiller's birthplace), handy to the
Deutsche Literaturarchiv,
where she was sorting Jaspers' papers. I worked with her on the Thinking section of
The Life of the Mind
in Aberdeen; in the photostat of the original manuscript, I can make out my penciled changes. The next spring, when she was in a ward in the Aberdeen hospital, for some days under an oxygen tent, I went over bits of Willing by myself, at her request.

When she was alive, the editing was fun, because it was a collaboration and an exchange. On the whole she accepted correction with good grace, with relief when it came to prepositions, for instance, with interest when some point of usage came up that was new to her. Sometimes we argued and continued the argument by correspondence; this happened over her translation of Kant's
Verstand
as "intellect"; I thought it should be "understanding" as in the standard translations. But I never convinced her and I yielded. Now I think we were both right, because we were aiming at different things: she clung to the original sense of the word, and I was after audience comprehension. In the present text it is "intellect." Most of the disagreements we had were settled by compromise or by cutting. But in the process her natural impatience, sooner or later, would reassert itself. She did not like fussing over details. "
You
fix it," she would say, finally, starting to cover a yawn. If she was impatient, she was also indulgent; for her, I figured as a "perfectionist," and she was inclined to humor the tendency, provided no proselytization was in view.

In any case, we never had a substantive difference. If at times I questioned the thought in one of her manuscripts, it was only to point out what seemed to be a contradiction with another thought she had been putting forward several pages back. It would usually turn out that I had failed to perceive some underlying distinction or, conversely, that she had failed to perceive the reader's need for the
distinguo.
Strange as it may seem, our minds were in some respects very close—a fact she often remarked on when the same notion would occur to each of us independently, while an ocean—the Atlantic—lay between us. Or she read some text I had written and found there a thought she had been silently pondering. This convergence of cast of mind, she decided, must have something to do with the theology in my Catholic background which had given me, she believed, an aptitude for philosophy. Actually I had made far from brilliant marks in the two college courses in philosophy I had taken, bumbling and lethargically taught, it must be added. Otherwise, though, our studies had not been so far apart. In Germany, she had done her doctoral thesis on the Concept of Love in St. Augustine; in America, I had read him in an undergraduate course in Medieval Latin and been exhilarated by
The City of God—
my favorite. Possibly my medieval and Renaissance studies in French, Latin, and English, plus years of classical Latin and later home reading of Plato, had joined with a Catholic girlhood to make up the deficiency in formal philosophical training. There is also the fact, which she did not consider, that in the course of years I had learned a great deal from her.

I mention these things now to cite my qualifications for editing
The Life of the Mind.
It was not a job I had applied for, and when, in January, 1974, she made me her literary executor, I doubt very much that she foresaw what was coming, i.e., that she would not live to finish those volumes and that it would be I, without benefit of her assistance, who would see them through the press. If finally she did foresee it, at least as a distinct possibility, after the heart attack a few months later in Aberdeen, she must have known how I would set about the work, with all my peculiarities and stringencies, and have accepted the inevitable in a philosophical spirit. Knowing me, she may even have foreseen the temptations that the new freedom from interference would dangle before me, freedom to do it "my" way, but if she read me as well as that, she would also have foreseen the resistance the mere glimmer of such temptations would muster in my still-Catholic conscience....If she divined, in short, that there would be days when I would become a battlefield on which allegiance to the prose of my forefathers fought my sense of a duty to her, the picture of all that furious contention—the contest of the scruples and the temptations—so foreign to her own nature, would probably have amused her. I must assume that she trusted my judgment, had faith that in the end no damage would be done, that the manuscript would emerge unscarred from the fighting; lacking that basic confidence in
her
confidence, I would have soon had to throw in the sponge.

But whatever she foresaw, or failed to foresee, she is not here now to consult or appeal to. I have been forced to guess her reaction to every act of editorial interference. In most cases, previous experience has made that easy: if she knew me, I also knew her. But here and there problems have come up which in the past I would surely not have attempted to solve on my own, by guesswork. Whenever I was unsure, I would pepper a manuscript with question marks meaning "What do you want to say here?" "Can you clarify?" "Right word?" Today those points of interrogation ("What do you suppose she means by that?" "Does she intend this repetition or not?") are leveled at me. Yet not in my own person exactly; rather, I put myself in her place, turn into a sort of mind-reader or medium. With eyes closed, I am talking to a quite lively ghost. She has haunted me, given pause to my pencil, caused erasures and re-erasures. In practice, the new-found freedom has meant that I feel less free with her typescript than I would have felt if she were alive. Now and then I have caught myself leaning over backwards for fear of some imagined objection and have had to right myself with the reminder that in normal circumstances the page-long sentence staring at me would never have been allowed to pass.

Or on the contrary it has happened that I have firmly crossed out a phrase or sentence whose meaning was opaque to me and substituted language that seemed to make better sense; then, on a second reading, I have had misgivings, gone back to consult the original text, seen that I had missed a nuance, and restored the passage as written or else made a fresh effort at paraphrase. Anybody who has done translating will recognize the process—the repeated endeavors to read
through
language into the mind of an author who is absent. Here the fact that several years ago—and mainly, I suppose, because of my friendship with her—I started taking German lessons has turned out to be a benign stroke of fate. I know enough of her native language now to make out the original structure like a distant mountainous outline behind her English phrasing; this has rendered many troublesome passages "translatable": I simply put them into German, where they become clear, and then do them back into English.