The Life of the Mind (12 page)

Although this last class of thought-objects—concepts, ideas, categories, and the like—became the special subject matter of "professional" philosophy, there is nothing in the ordinary life of man that cannot become food for thought, that is, be subjected to the twofold transformation that readies a sense-object to become a suitable thought-object. All the metaphysical questions that philosophy took as its special topics arise out of ordinary common-sense experiences; "reason's need"—the quest for meaning that prompts men to ask them—is in no way different from men's need to tell the story of some happening they witnessed, or to write poems about it In all such reflecting activities men move outside the world of appearances and use a language filled with abstract words which, of course, had long been part and parcel of everyday speech before they became the special currency of philosophy. For thinking, then, though not for philosophy, technically speaking, withdrawal from the world of appearances is the only essential precondition. In order for us to think about somebody, he must be removed from our presence; so long as we are with him we do not think either of him or about him; thinking always implies remembrance; every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought. It may, of course, happen that we start thinking about a still-present somebody or something, in which case we have removed ourselves surreptitiously from our surroundings and are conducting ourselves as though we were already absent.

These remarks may indicate why thinking, the quest for meaning-as opposed to the thirst for knowledge, even for knowledge for its own sake—has so often been felt to be unnatural, as though men, whenever they reflect without purpose, going beyond the natural curiosity awakened by the manifold wonders of the world's sheer thereness and their own existence, engaged in an activity
contrary to the human condition.
Thinking as such, not only the raising of the unanswerable "ultimate questions," but every reflection that does not serve knowledge and is not guided by practical needs and aims, is, as Heidegger once observed, "
out of order
" (italics added).
¹⁹
It interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop-and-think. Whatever the fallacies and the absurdities of the two-world theories may have been, they arose out of these genuine experiences of the thinking ego. And since whatever prevents thinking belongs to the world of appearances and to those common-sense experiences I have in company with my fellow-men and that automatically guarantee my sense of the realness of my own being, it is indeed as though thinking paralyzed me in much the same way as an excess of consciousness may paralyze the automatism of my bodily functions, "
l'accomplissement d'un acte qui doit être réflexe ou ne peut être,
" as Valéry phrases it. Identifying the state of consciousness with the state of thinking, he added: "
on en pourrait tirer toute une philosophie que je résumerais ainsi: Tantôt je pense et tantôt je suis
" ("At times I think, and at times I am").
²⁰
This striking observation, entirely based on equally striking experiences—namely, that the mere consciousness of our bodily organs is enough to prevent them from functioning properly—insists on an antagonism between being and thinking which we can trace back to Plato's famous saying that only the philosopher's body—that is, what makes him appear among appearances—still inhabits the city of men, as though, by thinking, men removed themselves from the world of the living.

Throughout the history of philosophy a very curious notion has persisted of an affinity between death and philosophy. Philosophy for many centuries was supposed to teach men how to die; it was in this vein that the Romans decided that the study of philosophy was a fit occupation only for the old, whereas the Greeks had held that it should be studied by the young. Still, it was Plato who first remarked that the philosopher appears to those who do not do philosophy as though he were pursuing death,
²¹
and it was Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, who, still in the same century, reported that the Delphic oracle, on his asking it what he should do to attain the best life, had answered: "Take on the color of the dead."
²²
In modern times it is not uncommon to find people holding, with Schopenhauer, that our mortality is the eternal source of philosophy, that "death actually is the inspiring genius of philosophy...[and that] without death there would scarcely be any philosophizing."
²³
Even the younger Heidegger of
Sein und Zeit
still treated the anticipation of death as the decisive experience through which man can attain an authentic self and be liberated from the inauthenticity of the They, quite unaware of the extent to which this doctrine actually sprang, as Plato had pointed out, from the opinion of the many.

"Take on the color of the dead"—so indeed the philosopher's absent-mindedness and the style of life of the
professional
who devotes his entire life to thinking, thus monopolizing and raising to an absolute what is but one of the many human faculties, must appear to the common sense of common men, since we normally move in a world where the most radical experience of disappearing is death and withdrawal from appearance is dying. The very fact that there have always—at least since Parmenides—been men who chose this way of life deliberately without being candidates for suicide shows that this sense of an affinity with death does not come from the thinking activity and the experiences of the thinking ego itself. It is, rather, the philosopher's own common sense—his being "a man like you and me"—that makes him aware of being "out of order" while engaged in thinking. He is not immune from common opinion, because he shares, after all, in the "common-ness" of all men, and it is his own sense of realness that makes him suspect the thinking activity. And since thinking itself is helpless against the arguments of common-sense reasoning and the insistence on the "meaninglessness" of its quest for meaning, the philosopher is prone to answer in common-sense terms, which he simply turns upside down for the purpose. If common sense and common opinion hold that "death is the greatest of all evils," the philosopher (of Plato's time, when death was understood as the separation of soul from body) is tempted to say: on the contrary, "death is a deity, a benefactor to the philosopher, precisely because it dissolves the union of soul and body"
²⁴
and thus seems to liberate the mind from bodily pain and pleasure, both of which prevent our mental organs from pursuing their activity, just as consciousness prevents our bodily organs from functioning properly.
²⁵
The whole history of philosophy, which tells us so much about the objects of thought and so little about the process of thinking and the experiences of the thinking ego, is shot through with an
intramural warfare
between man's common sense, this sixth sense that fits our five senses into a common world, and man's faculty of thought and need of reason, which determine him to remove himself for considerable periods from it.

The philosophers have interpreted that intramural warfare as the natural hostility of the many and their opinions toward the few and their truth; but the historical facts to support this interpretation are rather scanty. There is, to be sure, the trial of Socrates, which probably inspired Plato to declare at the end of the Cave parable (when the philosopher returns from his solitary flight into the sky of the ideas to the darkness of the cave and the company of his fellow-men) that the many, if they only could, would lay hands on the few and kill them. This interpretation of Socrates' trial echoes through the history of philosophy up to and including Hegel. Yet, leaving aside some very justified doubts about Plato's version of the event,
²⁶
the fact is, there are hardly any instances on record of the many on their own initiative declaring war on philosophers. As far as the few and the many are concerned, it has been rather the other way round. It was the philosopher who of his own accord quitted the City of men and then told those he had left behind that, at best, they were deceived by the trust they put in their senses, by their willingness to believe the poets and be taught by the populace, when they should have been using their minds, and that, at worst, they were content to live only for sensual pleasure and to be glutted like cattle.
²⁷
It seems rather obvious that the multitude can never resemble a philosopher, but this does not mean, as Plato stated, that those who do philosophy are "necessarily blamed" and persecuted by the many "like a man fallen among wild beasts."
²⁸

The philosopher's way of life is solitary, but this solitude is freely chosen, and Plato himself, when he enumerates the natural conditions favorable to the development in "the noblest natures" of the philosophical gift, does not mention the hostility of the many. He speaks, rather, of exiles, of a "great mind born in a petty state whose affairs are beneath ... notice," and of other circumstances such as ill health that cut such natures off from the public affairs of the many.
²⁹
But this turning-of-the-tables, to make the warfare between thought and common sense the result of the few turning against the many, though perhaps a shade more plausible and better documented—to wit, on the philosopher's claim to rule—than the traditional persecution mania of the philosopher, is probably no nearer the truth. The most plausible explanation of the quarrel between common sense and "professional" thinking still is the point already mentioned (that we are dealing here with an intramural warfare) since surely the first to be aware of all the objections common sense could raise against philosophy must have been the philosophers themselves. And Plato—in a different context, where he is not concerned with a polity "worthy of the philosophical nature"—dismisses with laughter a question raised as to whether a man who is concerned with divine things is also good at things human.
³⁰

Laughter rather than hostility is the natural reaction of the many to the philosopher's preoccupation and the apparent uselessness of his concerns. This laughter is innocent and quite different from the ridicule frequently turned on an opponent in serious disputes, where it can indeed become a fearful weapon. But Plato, who argued in the
Laws
for the strict prohibition of any writing that would ridicule any of the citizens,
³¹
feared the ridicule in all laughter. What is decisive here are not the passages in the political dialogues, the
Laws
or the
Republic,
against poetry and especially comedians, but the entirely serious way in which he tells the story of the Thracian peasant girl who bursts out laughing when she saw Thales fall into a well while he was watching the motions of the heavenly bodies above him, "declaring that he was eager to know the things in the sky, but what was ... just at his feet escaped him." And Plato adds: "Anyone who gives his life to philosophy is open to such mockery.... The whole rabble will join the peasant girl in laughing at him...[as] in his helplessness he looks like a fool."
³²
It is strange that in the long history of philosophy it occurred only to Kant—who was so singularly free of all the specifically philosophical vices—that the gift for speculative thought could be like the gift "with which Juno honored Tiresias, whom she blinded so that she might give him the gift of prophecy." He suspected that intimate acquaintance with another world could be "attained here only by forfeiting some of the sense one needs for the present world." Kant, at any rate, seems to have been unique among the philosophers in being sovereign enough to join in the laughter of the common man. Probably quite unaware of Plato's story of the Thracian girl, he tells in perfectly good humor a virtually identical tale about Tycho de Brahe and his coachman: the astronomer had proposed that they take their bearings from the stars to find the shortest way during a night journey, and the coachman had replied: "My dear sir, you may know a lot about the heavenly bodies; but here on earth you are a fool."
³³

On the assumption that the philosopher does not need the "rabble" to inform him of his "foolishness"—the common sense he shares with all men must be alert enough for him to anticipate their laughter—on the assumption, in short, that what we are dealing with is an intramural warfare between common-sense reasoning and speculative thinking going on in the mind of the philosopher himself, let us examine more closely the affinity between death and philosophy. If we take our perspective from the world of appearances, the common world in which we appeared by birth and from which we shall disappear by death, then the wish to know our common habitat and amass all kinds of knowledge about it is natural. Because of thinking's need to transcend it, we have turned away; in a metaphorical sense, we have disappeared from this world, and this can be understood—from the perspective of the natural and of our common-sense reasoning—as the anticipation of our final departure, that is, our death.

That is how Plato described it in the
Phaedo:
Seen from the perspective of the multitude, the philosophers do nothing but pursue death, from which the many, if they cared at all, might conclude that philosophers had better die.
³⁴
And Plato is not so sure that the many are not right, except that they do not know in what sense that is to be construed. The "true philosopher," one who spends his whole life in thought, has two desires: first, that he may be free from all kinds of business and especially be rid of his body, which always demands to be taken care of, "falls in our way at every step ... and causes confusion and trouble and panic,"
³⁵
and second, that he may come to live in a hereafter where those things with which thinking is concerned, such as truth, justice, and beauty, will be no less accessible and real than what now can be perceived with the bodily senses.
³⁶
Even Aristotle, in one of his popular writings, reminds his readers of those "islands of the blessed" that are blessed because there "men would not need anything and none of the other things could be of any use to them so that only thinking and contemplating (
theōrein
) would be left, that is, what even now we call a free life."
³⁷
In short, the turning-about inherent in thinking is by no means a harmless enterprise. In the
Phaedo
it reverses all relationships: men, who naturally shun death as the greatest of evils, are now turning to it as the greatest good.