The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt Read Free Book Online Page A

forever troublesome body-soul problem are very old. Aristotle's
De Anima
is full of tantalizing hints at psychic phenomena and their close interconnection with the body in contrast with the relation or, rather, non-relation between body and mind. Discussing these matters in a rather tentative and uncharacteristic way, Aristode declares: "...there seems to be no case in which the soul can act or be acted upon without the body, e.g., anger, courage, appetite, and sensation generally. [To be active without involving the body] seems rather a property of the mind
[noein].
But if the mind
[noein]
too proves to be some imagination
[phantasia
] or impossible without imagination, it
[noein]
too could not be without the body." 25 And somewhat later, summing up: "Nothing is evident about the mind [nous] and the theoretical faculty, but it seems to be a different kind of soul, and only this kind can be separated [from the body], as what is eternal from what is perishable." 26 And in one of the biological treatises he suggests that the soul—its vegetative as well as its nutritive and sensitive part—"came into being in the embryo without existing previously outside it, but the
nous
entered the soul from outside, thus granting to man a kind of activity which had no connection with the activities of the body." 27 In other words, there are no sensations corresponding to mental activities; and the sensations of the psyche, of the soul, are actually feelings we sense with our bodily organs.
    In addition to the urge toward self-display by which living things fit themselves into a world of appearances, men also
present
themselves in deed and word and thus indicate how they
wish
to appear, what in their opinion is fit to be seen and what is not. This element of deliberate choice in what to show and what to hide seems specifically human.
Up to a point
we can choose how to appear to others, and this appearance is by no means the outward manifestation of an inner disposition; if it were, we probably would all act and speak alike. Here, too, we owe to Aristotle the crucial distinctions. "What is spoken out," he says, "are symbols of affects in the soul, and what is written down are symbols of spoken words. As writing, so also is speech not the same for all.
That however of what these primarily are symbols, the affections [pathemata] of the soul, are the same for all.
" These affections are "naturally" expressed by "inarticulate noises [which] also reveal something, for instance, those made by animals." Distinction and individuation occur through speech, the use of verbs and nouns, and these are not products or "symbols" of the soul but of the mind: "Nouns themselves and verbs resemble
[eoiken]
...thoughts [
noemasin
]" (italics added). 28
    If the inner psychic ground of our individual appearance were not always the same, there could be no science of psychology which qua science relies on a psychic "inside we are all alike," 29 just as the science of physiology and medicine relies on the sameness of our inner organs. Psychology, depth psychology or psychoanalysis, discovers no more than the ever-changing moods, the ups and downs of our psychic life, and its results and discoveries are neither particularly appealing nor very meaningful in themselves. "Individual psychology," on the other hand, the prerogative of fiction, the novel and the drama, can never be a science; as a science it is a contradiction in terms. When modern science finally began to illuminate the Biblical "darkness of the human heart"—of which Augustine said: "
Latet cor bonum, latet cor malum, abyssus est in corde bono et in corde malo
" ("Hidden is the good heart, hidden is the evil heart, an abyss is in the good heart and in the evil heart") 30 —it turned out to be "a motley-colored and painful storehouse and treasure of evils," as Democritus already suspected. 31 Or to put it in a somewhat more positive way: "
Das Gefühl ist herr-lich, wenn es im Grunde