Chapter II – Overview of the Arendt’s Conception of Willing and Action
3. Looking for the Origin of the Philosophical Notion of Will
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
3. Looking for the Origin of the Philosophical Notion of Will
Arendt looks into the history of concepts to find the roots of the conception of will in the history of philosophy. We may agree with Susanne Jacobitti that “much of what Arendt says about the will is quite traditional.”13 Indeed much of what she herself says about the will is borrowed from other philosophers and it is necessary to pay a very close attention to what Arendt expresses about the willing, when she explicitly cites others.
Arendt claims that it was Saint Apostle Paul, who first brought forth the notion of will as an internal mental faculty. Arendt notices that Jesus Christ taught that we should want not only to act according to God’s commandments but also to want what is right and pleasing to God, to be pure and holy not only in action but in spirit also, to avoid any hypocrisy. Jesus Christ preached that to look at a woman with lust is already committing adultery in one's heart. Thus, a person is called not only to avoid acting (committing adultery in action), but also of willing (committing adultery in heart/mind)14. A person is thus called to change his own will and to find “delight in the law of God “in his inmost self”.
Arendt indicates that there is a fundamental difference between the two Laws: the Old Law (of the Old Testament) and the New Law (of the New Testament, brought by Jesus Christ). She puts it this way: “Law itself is understood as the voice of a master demanding obedience; the Thou-shalt of the law demands and expects a voluntary act of submission, an I-will of agreement. The Old Law said: thou shalt do; the New Law says:
thou shalt will.”15
13 Jacobitti, Suzanne. Hannah Arendt and the Will. Political Theory, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Feb., 1988), P. 59.
14 Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind: Willing. Pp. 66-68.
15 Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind: Willing. P. 68.
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
Arendt’s attempt to find the roots of “will” in the New Testament is natural, she wants to find the ultimate beginning of the notion of the inner faculty called willing.
However, her position in this respect is weak. The Ten Commandments of the Old Testament include two Commandments not to will something, i.e. not to will anything that belongs to your neighbour. Old Testament tells us much about willing and not willing to obey God’s Commandments. Arendt thus makes a simplification, which misrepresents the theology of the Two Testaments with respect to willing.
Nevertheless, Arendt is correct in indicating that St. Paul was first to introduce the notion of an “inner person”, this notion was not known to the people of the Old Testament.
Arendt claims that:
It was the experience of a imperative demanding voluntary submission that led to the discovery of the Will, and inherent in this experience was the wondrous fact of a freedom that none of the ancient peoples – Greek, Roman, or Hebrew – had been aware of, namely, that there is a faculty in man by virtue of which, regardless of necessity and compulsion, he can say “Yes” or “No,” agree or disagree with what is factually given, including his own self and his existence, and that this faculty may determine what he is going to do.16
Arendt looks into the teaching of St. Paul, who is preaching and presenting the teaching of Christ. St. Paul speaks in terms of two conflicting laws, the law of the mind and law of the flesh, Arendt claims that in this conflict of laws St. Paul came up with a conception of will. She says:
If the will did not have the choice of saying “No,” it would no longer be a will;
and if there were not counter-will within me that is aroused by the very
16 Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind: Willing. P. 68.
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
commandment of the Thou-shalt, if, to speak in Paul’s terms, “sin” did not dwell
“within me” (Romans 7:20), I would not need a will at all.17
St. Paul's internal experience of two conflicting laws was later rethought by St.
Augustine and rephrased in terms of a conflict within one’s own will: a positive "I will"
to do something, but also a negative "I nill". Arendt puts it in this way: “Augustine does not speak of two laws but of “two wills, one new and the other old, one carnal and the other spiritual,” and describes in detail, like Paul, how these wills struggled “within” him and how their “discord undid [his] soul”18”19
Arendt claims that this tension is inherent to human will. She sums up St.
Augustine’s thought in the following way:
The split occurs in the will itself; the conflict arises neither out of a split between mind and will nor out of a split between flesh and mind. This is attested by the very fact that the Will always speaks in imperatives: “Thou shalt will,” says the Will to itself… It is in the Will’s nature to double itself… For this reason you always need two antagonistic wills to will at all…20
Arendt seems to be agree with St. Augustine that will has this conflicting nature inherent in it, any willing has a corresponding counter-willing (or “nilling”), in other words, there is no willing, which is total/entire. However, as long as an affirmative willing is stronger than the negating nilling, there is a positive balance of willing, which normally results in action. In other words, there has to be a commitment strong enough to overcome the negative “nilling”, which attempts to nullify this commitment.
Arendt also indicates in Responsibility and Judgment:
17 Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind: Willing. P. 69.
18 St. Augustine of Hippo. Confessions, bk. VIII, chap. V.
19 Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind: Willing. P. 87.
20 Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind: Willing. P. 94.
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
…we discovered another human faculty that is split into two, not because it is opposed by an altogether different part of human nature, but because its very essence is to exist only as two-in-one. This split within the will itself, however, is a contest and not a dialogue. For if, on the contrary, the will were one, it would be superfluous, which means that it would have no one to command.21
Arendt explicitly indicates that this “split” of the will is actually will’s mode of existence. Without such split, there would be no purpose in giving commands, since a command means that “someone” has to obey it, and doesn’t want to obey.
Arendt’s conclusion requires some criticism. In fact it is no always necessary to have a “counter-will,” since we may agree to obey to what our will tells us to do. We may not have any resistance stemming from the will itself. In fact we have more resistance to will coming from our appetites and desires, rather than from the will itself.
Thus, this model of “two-in-one” may be accepted, but only conditionally, this situation of “two-in-one” is possible but is not always necessary with respect to the will.
In the history of philosophy this “nilling” is usually denoted by the concept of
“weakness of the will.” However, it should be noted that a “nilling” is by itself a kind of willing, while “weakness” is simply a lack or shortage of willing. These conceptions shall be treated in a greater detail in the following Chapters of this paper.
For St. Augustine the will may be harmonized once it is transformed into “love”.
It is “love”, which has no internal contradictions, it is a Christian love towards God and towards people, which does not differentiate between people, since it does not seek any gain for the self, but rather makes a person directed towards others in serving them through personal sacrifice. This conception of “love” is not deeply analyzed by Arendt in relation to her philosophy of will, but it is important for the purposes of current research, especially since it will contribute to universalizing application of will to various phenomena of human life and to all parts of the time continuum.
21 Arendt, Hannah. Responsibility and Judgment. New York: Schocken Books, 2003. P. 121.
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
Arendt indicates that in this discovery of the willing faculty, there is a discovery of authentic human freedom. Freedom from all of the conditions, where a person finds himself, and ability to initiate or create something new, something which breaks the causal chain of events. Arendt makes the following conclusion:
Inherent in this experience [of willing, or, as Arendt puts it, “of an imperative demanding voluntary submission”, K.C.] was the wondrous fact... that there is a faculty in man by virtue of which, regardless of necessity and compulsion, he can say “Yes” or “No,” agree or disagree with what is factually given, including his own self and his existence, and that this faculty may determine what he is going to do.22
Arendt agrees that human will is free, a person may be willing to act in any way he decides to act. However, Arendt does not develop a detailed philosophical model of human will and freedom. She does not go deep into the philosophical speculations about positive and negative freedom, about various kinds of determinism etc. To some extent she seems to be following the spirit of St. Paul, who “was content with sheer descriptions and refused to 'philosophize' about his experiences.”23
This may also be deduced from her criticism of “profession thinkers”, who were unable to avoid many “fallacies” due to their professional “bias” towards thinking and disinterested speculation. For this reason in the history of philosophy “men of thought were no longer willing to abandon philosophy altogether and say, with Paul, “we preach Christ crucified”... and let it go at that.”24
Arendt puts expresses her concern about philosophic treatment of the issues related to will in the following way:
22 Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind: Willing. P. 68.
23 Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind: Willing. P. 57.
24 Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind: Willing. P. 3.
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
…an inevitable flaw in …examinations of the willing faculty …that every philosopher of the Will is conceived …not by men of action but by philosophers … [who are, K.C.] more inclined to ‘interpret the world’ than ‘to change it’.25
According to Arendt, “professional thinkers” are to a large extent deprived of real experiences of action, they are not phenomenologically aware of the “essences” (in Husserlian sense) of willing experiences and therefore are not able to escape “the thinker’s bias” towards conceptual treatment of the willing faculty.
This notion of Arendt certainly has some truth to it, however, it provides somewhat erroneous explanation of thinkers’ difficulty in theoretical account on the
“will.” Philosophical reflection is often prompted by real life experiences including phenomenological perception of various realities. Such realities may include science, art, technology, psychology, medicine, etc. Philosophical reflection on such realities does not have to be erroneous due to the fact that a philosopher is not a professional, who is always involved in related practices. Thus, Arendt’s claim that philosophers are fundamentally unable to reflect upon political action due to their not-involvement in such action, is erroneous theoretically, even though it may be not erroneous practically.
Moreover, it may be noted that Arendt herself is not a politician, nevertheless she hopes to provide a better theoretical account of political theory and philosophy of willing and action, and this hope may certainly be a justifiable one.
It should also be noted that in her treatment of the will Arendt utilized much more ideas of St. Augustine’s than those of the “men of action,” which actually indicates that St. Augustine was more successful in accounting on will and its freedom than the
“men of action,” who attempted to negate “freedom” and “spontaneity” altogether (for political purposes..).
It should be noted that “freedom” and “spontaneity” are the factors, which determine whether something is related to will or no. Thus, it will be claimed that these
25 Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind: Willing. P. 195.
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
notions belong to the central principle of the will, which is sought for in this research paper, the principle of determining whether something is directly related to willing and action. It will be necessary to formulate this principle and to perform a phenomenological research on it before constructing a coherent theoretical model of the will. These issues will be discussed in more detail later in this research paper.
A very thoughtful reflection on Arendt’s concern with “thinkers’ bias” in relation to the “will” is given by Max Deutscher:
In the end, it is not the bias of thought in addressing will that is the problem. We can admit that a predisposition to thinking might encourage writers to downgrade willing in relation to it. This is not inevitable, however. Except for thought itself, everything that is thought about is other than thought. …One might remark, indeed, on the tendency to some form of idealism, which every systematic thought displays… So we can take ourselves to be given fair warning of our likely ‘deformation professionelle’, but not therefore to have an excessive mistrust of theories of the will in particular. To put it shortly – a theory of will is not an instance of willing, no matter who produces it, whether ‘professional thinker’ or ‘professional activist’.26
It is evident that Arendt’s claim does not withstand academic criticism. However, her observation about “thinker’s bias” is a useful “warning” to all philosophic theorists, regarding all matters related to real life, including their reflection on willing and action, especially political action, which they do not experience directly.
Arendt also presents her understanding of the willing faculty as a journey into the history of philosophical and political thought and tries to find some answers in philosophical reflection as well as in political realities.
26 Deutscher, Max. Judgment after Arendt. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2007. P.
152.
‧
國立 政 治 大 學