Hannah Arendt
The Life of the Mind
University of Chicago Press, 1977

[NOTE: 1977a refers to Volume 1 (Thinking) and 1977b refers to Volume 2 (Willing).]

"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, Aristotle declares: "... there sees 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." (DA 403a5-10) 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." (DA 413b24ff) 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." (GA 736b5-29) 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." (ARENDT-1977a, pp. 33-34)

"The test applying to the hypocrite is indeed the old Socratic 'Be as you wish to appear,' which means appear *always* as you wish to appear to others even if it happens that you are alone and appear to no one but yourself. When I make such a decision [PSA: prohairesis = commitment], I am not merely reacting to whatever qualities may be given me; I am making an act of deliberate choice among the various potentialities of conduct with which the world has presented me. Out of such acts arises finally what we call character or personality, the conglomeration of a number of identifiable qualities gathered together into a comprehensible and reliably identifiable whole, and imprinted, as it were, on an unchangeable substratum of gifts and defects peculiar to our soul and body structure." (ARENDT-1977a, p. 37)

With regard to "Kant's 'professional thinkers'", she writes: "These we call philosophers, and their way of life will always be 'the life of a stranger' (bios xenikos), as Aristotle called it in the Politics. (Politics 1324a16)" (ARENDT-1977a, p. 53)

"[T]he Greeks had some reason for their 'prejudice' against the infinite. (Plato discovered that everything permitting of a comparative is by nature unlimited, and limitlessness was to him as to all Greeks the cause of all evils. (Philebus 25-26) Hence, his great confidence in number and measurement: it sets limits on what of itself [pleasure, for instance] 'does not and never will contain and derive from itself either beginning [arche] or middle or end [telos].' (Philebus 31a)" (ARENDT-1977a, p. 56)

"I called these mental activities basic because they are autonomous; each of them obeys the laws inherent in the activity itself, although all of them depend on a certain stillness of the soul's passions, on that 'dispassionate quiet' ('ledenschaftslose Stille') which Hegel ascribed to 'merely thinking cognition'." (ARENDT-1977a, p. 70). [PSA: Note the connection to stillness / ἠρεμία in Aristotle.]

"The mind's faculty of making present what is absent is of course by no means restricted to mental images of absent objects; memory quite generally stores, and holds at the disposition of recollection, whatever is no more, and the will anticipates what the future may bring but is not yet. [PSA: Cf DA 433b5ff] Only because of the mind's capacity for making present what is absent can we say "no more" and constitute a past for ourselves, or say "not yet" and get ready for a future. [PSA: This one sense of hexis as readiness.] But this is possible for the mind only after it has withdrawn from the present and the urgencies of everyday life. Thus, in order to will, the mind must withdraw from the immediacy of desire [PSA: epithumia?], which, without reflecting and without reflexivity, stretches out [PSA: oregetai] its hand to get hold of the desired object; for the will is not concerned with objects but with projects, for instance, with the future availability of an object that it may or may not desire in the present. The will [PSA: boulesis?] transforms the desire into an intention [PSA: prohairesis?]." (ARENDT-1977a, p. 76)

"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, 'fall in our way at every step ... and causes confusion and trouble and panic,' (Phaedo 66) 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. (Phaedo 65) 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 contemplation (theorein) would be left, that is, what even now we call a free life.' [Protrepticus B43]" (ARENDT-1977a, p. 84)

"Historically, this kind of withdrawal from doing is the oldest condition posited for the life of the mind. In its early, original form it rests on the discovery that only the spectator, never the actor, can know and understand whatever offers itself as a spectacle. That discovery greatly contributed to the Greek philosophers' conviction of the superiority of the contemplative, merely onlooking, way of life, whose most elementary condition - according to Aristotle, who was the first to elaborate it (Politics 1269a35, 1334a15; see bk. VII, ch. 15) - was scholē. Scholē is not leisure time as we understand it, the leftover spare time of inactivity after a days work 'used for meeting the exigencies of existence,' but the deliberate act of abstaining, of holding oneself back (schein) from the ordinary activities determined by our daily wants (he ton anagkaion scholē), in order to act out leisure (scholēn agein), which in turn was the true goal of all other activities, just as peace, for Aristotle, was the true goal of war. Recreation and play, in our understanding the natural activities of leisure, belonged, on the contrary, still to a-scholia, the sate of being deprived of leisure, since play and recreation are necessary for the restoration of the human labor force charged with taking care of life's necessities." (ARENDT-1977a, pp. 92-93)

"The spectators, although disengaged from the particularity characteristic of the actor, are not solitary. Nor are they self-sufficient, like the 'highest god' the philosopher tries to emulate in thought and who, according to Plato, 'is forever ... solitary by reason of his excellence, able to be together, he himself with himself, needing nobody else, neither acquaintance nor friend, he sufficient with himself.' (Timeaus 34b)" (ARENDT-1977a, p. 94)

"[T]he need of reason is to *give account*, logon didonai, as the Greeks called it with greater precision, of whatever there may be or may have occurred. This is prompted not by the thirst for knowledge - the need may arise in connection with well-known and entirely familiar phenomena - but by the quest for meaning." (ARENDT-1977a, p. 100) [PSA: Note the connection to action meta logou (as in the Laches), as well as to the central role in episteme of spelling out (apodeixis) the reasons why something is the way it is.]

"The difficulties to which the 'awesome science' of metaphysics has given rise since its inception could possibly all be summed up in the natural tension between theōria and logos, between seeing and reasoning with words - whether in the form of 'dialectics' (dia-legesthai) or, on the contrary, of the 'syllogism' (syl-logizesthai), i.e., whether it takes things, especially opinions, apart by means of words or brings them together in a discourse depending for its truth content on a primary premise perceived by intuition, by the nous, which is not subject to error because it is not meta logou, sequential to words. (Post. An., 100b5-17) If philosophy is the mother of the sciences, it is itself the science of beginnings and principles of science, of the archai; and these archai, which then become the topic of Aristotelian metaphysics, can no longer be derived; they are given to the mind in self-evident intuition." (ARENDT-1977a, p. 120)

"Aristotle speaks of 'philosophical energeia, activity' as the 'perfect and unhindered activity which [for this very reason] harbors within itself the sweetest of delights' ('alla men he ge teleia energeia kai akolytos en heate echei to chairein, hoste an eie he theoretike energeia pason hediste'). (Protrepticus B87)" (ARENDT-1977a, p. 123)

"The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life the human body is a corpse; without thinking the human mind is dead. This in fact is the metaphor Aristotle tried out in the famous seventh chapter of Book Lambda of the Metaphysics: 'The activity of thinking [energeia that has its end in itself] is life.' (Metaphysics 1072b27) Its inherent law, which only a god can tolerate forever, man merely now and then, during which time hs is godlike, is 'unceasing motion, which is motion in a circle' (Metaphysics 1072a21).... Aristotle's circular motion, taken together with the life metaphor, suggests a quest for meaning that for man as a thinking being accompanies life and ends only in death." With regard to these metaphors, Arendt comments that "Aristotle himself used them nowhere else - except when he asserts that being alive is energein, that is, being active for its own sake. (EN 1175a12) Moreover, the metaphor obviously refuses to answer the inevitable question, Why do we think?, since there is no answer to the question, Why do we live?" (ARENDT-1977a, pp. 123-125)

"What tempted men into a position of mere contemplation was the kalon, the sheer beauty of appearances, so that the "highest idea of the good" resided in what shone forth most (tou ontos phanotaton), [Republic 518c] and human virtue, kalon k'agathon, was assessed neither as an innate quality or intention of the actor, nor by the consequences of his deeds - only by performance, by how he *appeared while* he was doing; virtue was what we would call virtuosity. As with the arts, human deeds had to "shine by their intrinsic merits," to use an expression of Machiavelli's. Whatever existed was supposed, first of all, to be a spectacle fit for the gods, in which, naturally, men, those poor relations of the Olympians, wished to have their share." (ARENDT-1977a, pp. 130-131)

After quoting from the Funeral Address of Pericles, Arendt observes: "It is the distinctive mark of Greek philosophy that it broke entirely with this Periclean estimate of the highest and most divine way of life for mortals. To quote but one of his contemporaries, Anaxagoras, who was also his friend: when asked why one should choose rather to be born than not - a question, incidentally, that seems to have preoccupied the Greek people and not merely philosophers and poets - he replied: '"For the sake of viewing the heavens and the things there, stars and moon and sun," as though nothing else were worth his while.' And Aristotle agrees: 'One should either philosophize or take one's leave of life and go away from here.' [Aristotle, Protrepticus, B19, B110; cf. EE 1216a11] What Pericles and the philosophers had in common was the general Greek estimate that all mortals should strive for immortality, and this was possible because of the affinity between gods and men. Compared to other living beings, man is a god; [Aristotle, Protrepticus, B109] he is a kind of 'mortal god' (quasi mortalem deum, to quote Cicero's phrase again), [Cicero, De Finibus, II.13] whose chief task therefore consists in an activity that could remedy his mortality and thus make him more like the gods, his closest relations. The alternative to that is to sink down to the level of animal life. 'The best choose one thing in place of all else - everlasting fame among mortals; but the many are glutted like cattle.' [Heraclitus, B29]" (ARENDT-1977a, pp. 133-134) [PSA: cf EE VIII.3; as to the cattle reference, see EN 1170b14.]

"Limited neither by birth nor by death, the duration of "What is" replaces and transcends the unending survival which characterizes the Olympian gods. In other words, Being, birthless as well as deathless, replaced for the philosophers the mere deathlessness of the Olympian gods; Being became the true divinity of philosophy because, in the famous words of Heraclitus, it was 'made by none of the gods or men, but always was and is and shall be: an ever-living fire, fixed measures kindling and fixed measures going out.' [B30] The gods' immortality could not be trusted; what had come into being could also cease to be - were not the pre-Olympian gods dead and gone? - and it was this flaw in the gods' everlastingness (much more, I think, than their frequent immoral conduct) that made them so vulnerable to Plato's ferocious attacks. The Homeric religion was never a creed that could be replaced by another creed; 'the Olympian gods were laid low by philosophy.' [Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, p. 40]" (ARENDT-1977a, p. 135)

"If Being replaced the Olympian gods, then philosophy replaced religion. Philosophizing became the only possible 'way' of piety, and this new god's newest characteristic was that he was One. That this One was indeed a god [PSA: at least divine; cf. KOSMAN] and thus decisively different from what we understand by "being" becomes obvious when we see that Aristotle called his 'First Philosophy' a 'Theology,' by which he did not mean a theory about the gods but what much later - in the eighteenth century - was called ontologia or 'Ontology.'" (ARENDT-1977a, p. 135)

"The way to the new immortality was to take up one's abode with things that are forever, and the new faculty making this possible was called nous or mind. The term was borrowed from Homer, where noos encompasses all mental activities besides designating the specific mentality of one person. It is nous that corresponds to Being, and when Parmenides says 'to gar auto noein estin te kai einai' ('to be and to think are the same'), he is already saying implicitly what Plato and Aristotle then said explicitly: that there is something in man that corresponds exactly to the divine because it enables him to live, as it were, in its neighborhood. It is this divinity that causes Thinking and Being to be the same. By using his nous and by withdrawing mentally from all perishable things, man assimilates himself to the divine. And the assimilation is meant pretty literally. For just as Being is the god, nous, according to Aristotle (quoting from either Ermotimus or Anaxagoras), is 'the god in us,' and 'every mortal life possesses the part of some god.' [Protrepticus, B110] Nous, 'as all wise men agree,' said Plato, 'is the king of heaven and earth'; [Philebus, 28c] hence it is above the whole universe, just as Being is higher in rank than anything else. The philosopher, therefore, who has decided to risk the voyage beyond 'the gates of Day and Night' (Parmenides), beyond the world of mortals, 'shall be called the friend of god, and if ever it is given to man to put on immortality, it shall be given to him.' [Symposium, 212a] In short, to engage in what Aristotle called the theoretike energeia that is identical with the activity of the god (he tou theou energeia) means to 'immortalize' (athanatizein), engage in an activity that in itself makes us immortal 'as far as that is possible, and [to] do our utmost to live in accordance with what is highest in us.' [EN 1178b3, 1178b22, 1177b33]" (ARENDT-1977a, p. 136)

"[T]he word for 'wonder' (thaumazein), which he [Plato] here divests of the orgniary sense in which Theaetetus had used it by giving its genealogy, occurs regularly in Homer and is itself derived from one of the many Greek verbs for seeing in the sense of 'beholding': theasthai - the same root we met earlier in Pythagoras' theaetei, spectators. In home, this wonder-struck beholding is usually reserved for men to whom a god appears; it is also used as an adjective for men in the sense of O admirable one! - namely worthy of the admiring wonder we usually reserve for gods, a godlike man." (ARENDT-1977a, p. 142) [PSA: if Being has replaced the gods, then wonder can be experienced simply when beholding existence, including one's own awareness thereof.]

"[T]hinking implies an unawareness of the body and of the self and puts in their place the experience of sheer activity, more gratifying, according to Aristotle, than the satisfaction of all the other desires, since for every other pleasure we depend on something or somebody else. (Politics 1267a12)" (ARENDT-1977a, p. 162) [PSA: note the connection to EE VIII.3]

"[T]he paralysis induced by thinking is twofold: it is inherent in the *stop* and think, the interruption of all other activities - psychologically, one may indeed define a 'problem' [PSA: aporia] as a 'situation which for some reason appreciably holds up an organism in its effort to reach a goal' - and it also may have a dazing after-effect, when you come out of it, feeling unsure of what seemed to you beyond doubt while you were unthinkingly engaged in whatever you were doing. If what you were doing consisted in applying general rules of conduct to particular cases as they arise in ordinary life, you will find yourself paralyzed because no such rules can withstand the wind of thought." (ARENDT-1977a, p. 175) [PSA: note the connection to phronesis and the lack of hard-and-fast rules in ethics]

"However, non-thinking, which seems so recommendable a state for political and moral affairs, also has its perils. By shielding people from the dangers of examination, it teaches them to hold fast to whatever the prescribed rules of conduct may be at a given time in a given society. What people then get used to is less the content of the rules, a close examination of which would always lead them into perplexity, than the *possession* of rules under which to subsume particulars." (ARENDT-1977a, p. 177)

"The meaning of what Socrates was doing lay in the activity itself. Or to put it differently: To think and to be fully alive are the same, and this implies that thinking must always start afresh; it is an activity that accompanies living and is concerned with such concepts as justice, happiness, virtue, offered us by language itself as expressing the meaning of whatever happens in life and occurs to us while we are alive." (ARENDT-1977a, p. 178)

"Men love wisdom and therefore begin to philosophize because they are not wise, and they love beauty, and do beauty, as it were - philokaloumen, as Pericles called it in the Funeral Oration [Thucydides II.40] - because they are not beautiful." (ARENDT-1977a, p. 178)

"The only criterion of Socractic thinking is agreement, to be consiste with oneself, homologein authos heauto: [Protagoras 339c] its opposite, to be in contradiction wtih oneself, enantia legein autos heauto, [Protagoras 339b, 340b] actually mean becoming one's own adversary. Hence Aristotle, in his earlier formulation of the famous axiom of contradiction, says explicitly that this is axiomatic: 'we must necessarily believe it because ... it is addressed not to the outward word [exo logos, that is, to the spoken word addressed to someone else, an interlcutor who may be either friend or adversary] but to the discourse within the soul, and though we can always raise objections ot the outward word, to the inward discourse we cannot always object,' because here the partner is oneself, and I cannot possibly want to become my own adversary. [Post. An. 76b22-25]" (ARENDT-1977a, p. 186) [PSA: this is discussed more fully in FLANNERY]

"To Socrates, the duality of the two-in-one meant no more than that if you want to think, you must see to it that the two who carry on the dialogue be in good shape, that the partners be *friends*. The partner who comes to life when you are alert and alone is the only one from whom you can never get away - except by ceasing to think." (ARENDT-1977a, pp. 187-188)

"What Socrates discovered was that we can intercourse with ourselves, as well as with others, and that the two kinds of intercourse are somehow interrelated. Aristotle, speaking about friendship, remarked: 'The friend is another self' [EN 1166a30] - meaning: you can carry on the dialogue of thought with him just as well as with yourself.... The common point, however, is that the dialogue of thought can be carried out only among friends, and its basic criterion, its supreme law, as it were, says: Do not contradict yourself. It is characteristic of 'base people' to be 'at variance with themselves' (diapherontai heautois) and of wicked men to avoid their own company; their soul is in rebellion against itself (stasiazei). [EN 1166b5-25] What kind of dialogue can you conduct with yourself with your soul is not in harmony but at war with itself?" (ARENDT-1977a, pp. 188-189)

"[T]hinking as such does society little good, much less than the thirst for knowledge, which uses thinking as an instrument for other purposes. It does not create values; it will not find out, once and for all, what 'the good' is; it does not confirm but, rather, dissolves accepted rules of conduct. And it has no political relevance unless special emergencies arise. That while I am alive I must be able to live with myself is a consideration that does not come up politically except in 'boundary situations.' [PSA: cf. Patocka on 'living in truth'] .... When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join in is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action." (ARENDT-1977a, p. 192)

"The thinking ego, moving among universals, among invisible essences, is, strictly speaking, nowhere; it is homeless in an emphatic sense - which may explain the early rise of a cosmopolitan spirit among the philosophers. The only great thinker I know of who was explicitly aware of this condition of homelessness as being natural to the thinking activity was Aristotle - perhaps because he knew so well and spelled out so clearly the difference between acting and thinking (the decisive distinction between the political and the philosophical way of life) and, drawing the obvious inference, refused to 'share the fate' of Socrates and to let the Athenians 'sin twice against philosophy.' When a charge of impiety was brought against him, he left Athens and 'withdrew to Chalcis, a stronghold of Macedonian influence.' [Ross, Aristotle, p. 14] He had counted homelessness among the great advantages of the philosopher's way of life in the Protreptikos, one of his early works, which was still well known in antiquity but has come down to us only in fragments. There he praises the bios theoretikos because it needed 'neither implements nor special places for its trade; wherever on earth somebody devotes himself to thinking, he will attain the truth everywhere as though it were present.' Philosophers love this 'nowhere' as though it were a country (philochorein) and they desire to let all other activities go for the sake of scholazein (doing nothing, as we would say) because of the sweetness inherent in thinking or philosophizing itself. [Protrepticus B56] The reason for this blessed independence [PSA: autarkeia] is that philosophy (the cognition kata logon) is not concerned with particulars, with things given to the senses, but with universals (kath' holou), things that cannot be localized. [Physics 189a5]" (ARENDT-1977a, pp. 199-200)

"Aristotle did not have to be aware of the Will's existence; the Greeks 'do not even have a word for' what we consider to be 'the mainspring of action.' (Thelein means 'to be ready, to be prepared for something,' boulesthai is 'to view something as [more] desirable,' and Aristotle's own newly coined word, which comes closer than these to our notion of some mental state that must precede action, is pro-airesis, the 'choice' between two possibilities, or, rather, the preference that makes me choose one action instead of another.) [Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, pp. 182-183]" (ARENDT-1977b, p. 15)

"[I]n the frame of pre-Christian thought freedom was localized in the I-can; freedom was an objective state of the body, not a datum of consciousness or of the mind. Freedom meant that one could do as one pleased, forced neither by the bidding of a master nor by some physical necessity that demanded laboring for wages in order to sustain the body nor by some somatic handicap such as ill health or the paralysis of one's members. According to Greek etymology, that is, according to Greek self-interpretation, the root of the word for freedom, eleutheria, is eleuthein hopos ero, to go as I wish, [Nestle, Eleutheria, pp. 6ff.] and there is no doubt that the basic freedom was understood as freedom of movement. A person was free who could move as he wished,; the I-can, not the I-will, was the criterion." (ARENDT-1977b, p. 19)

"Speaking in terms of tonality - that is, in terms of the way the mind affects the soul and produces its *moods*, regardless of outside events, thus creating a kind of *life* of the mind - the predominant mood of the thinking ego is serenity [PSA: ἠρεμία / ἀταραξία], the mere enjoyment of an activity that never has overcome the resistance of matter." (ARENDT-1977b, p. 38)

"Seen from the perspective of the Will, old age consists in the shrinkage of the future dimension, and man's death signifies less his disappearance from the world of appearances than his final loss of a future. This loss, however, coincides with the ultimate accomplishment of the individual's life, which at its end, having escaped the incessant change of time and the uncertainty of its own future, opens itself to the 'tranquillity of the past' and thereby to inspection, reflection, and the backward glance of the thinking ego in its search for meaning. Hence, from the viewpoint of the thinking ego, oldl age, in Heidegger's words, is the time of meditation or, in the words of Sophocles, it is the time of 'peace and freedom' [Republic, 329b-c] - release from bondage, not only to the passions of the body, but to the all-consusming passion the mind inflicts on the soul, the passion of the will called 'ambition.'" (ARENDT-1977b, p. 42)

"Within man's soul, reason becomes a 'ruling' and commanding [PSA: kurios] principle only because of the desires, which are blind and devoid of reason and therefore supposed to obey blindly. This obedience is necessary for the mind's tranquillity, the undisturbed harmony between the Two-in-One that guarnteed by the axiom of non-contradiction - do not contradict yourself, remain a friend to yourself: 'all friend feelings toward others are an extension of the friendly feelings a person has for himself.' [EN 1168b6] In the event that the desires do not submit to the commands of reason, the result in Aristotle is the 'base man,' who contradicts himself and is 'at variance with himself' (diapherein). Wicked men either 'run away from life and do away with themselves,' unable to bear their own company, or 'seek the company of others with whom to spend their days; but they avoid their own company. For when they are by themselves they remember many events that make them uneasy ... but when they are with others they can forget.... Their relations with themselves are not friendly ... their soul is divided against itself ... one part pulls in one direction and the other in another is if to tear the individual to pieces.... Bad people are full of regrets.' [EN 1166b5-25] This description of internal conflict, a conflict between reason and the appetites, may be adequate to explain conduct - in this case the conduct, or, rather, misconduct, of the incontinent man. It does not explain action, the subject matter of Aristotelian ethics, for action is not mere execution of the commands of reason; it is itself a reasonable activity, though an activity not of 'theoretical reason' but of what in the treatise On the Soul is called 'nous praktikos,' practical reason. In the ethical treatises it is called phronesis, a kind of insight and understanding of matters that are good or bad for men, a sort of sagacity - neither wisdom nor cleverness - needed for human affairs, which Sophocles, following common usage, ascribed to old age [see the last lines of Antigone] and which Aristotle conceptualized. Phronesis is required for any activity involving things within human power to achieve or not to achieve. Such practical sense also guides production and the arts, but these have 'an end other than themselves,' whereas 'action is itself an end.' [EN 1139b1-4] (The distinction is the difference between the flute-player, for whom the playing is an end in itself, and the flute-maker, whose activity is only a means and has come to an end when the flute is produced.) There is such a thing as eupraxia, action well done, and the doing of something well, regardless of its consequences, is then counted among the aretai, the Aristotelian excellences (or virtues). Actions of this sort are also moved not by reason but by desire, but the desire is not for an object, a 'what' that I can grasp, seize, and use again as a means to another end; the desire is for a 'how,' a way of performing, excellence of appearance in the community - the proper realm of human affairs. Much later but quite in the Aristotelian spirit, Plotinus has this to say, as paraphrased by a recent interpreter: 'What actually is in man's power is the sense that it depends entirely upon him ... is the quality of his conduct, to kalos; man, if compelled to fight, is still free to fight bravely or in a cowardly way.' [Graeser, Plotinus and the Stoics, p. 119] Action in the sense of how men want to appear needs a deliberate planning ahead, for which Aristotle coins a new term, proairesis, choice in the sense of preference between alternatives - one rather than another. The archai, beginnings and principles, of this choice are desire *and* logos: logos provides us with the purpose for the sake of which we act; choice becomes the starting-point of the actions themselves. [EN 1139a31-33, 1139b4-5] Choice is a median faculty, inserted, as it were, into the earlier dichotomy of reason and desire, and its main function is to mediate between them.' (ARENDT-1977b, pp. 59-60)

"It is in the Eudemian Ethics that Aristotle explains in a more concrete way why he found it necessary to insert a new faculty into the old dichotomy and thus settle the old quarrel between reason and desire. He gives the example of incontinence: all men agree that incontinence is bad and not something to be desired; moderation or so-phrosyne - that which saves (sozein) practical reason (phronesis) - is the naturally given criterion of all acts. If a man follows his desires, which are blind to future consequences, and thus indulges in incontinence, it is as though 'the same man were to act at the same time voluntarily [that is, intentionally] and involuntarily [that is, contrary to his intentions],' and this, Aristotle remarks, 'is impossible.' [fn16] Phronesis is the way out of the contradiction." (ARENDT-1977b, p. 61) [PSA: the blindness of desire / thumos / epithumia is related to the lack of awareness / theoria that occurs in cases of akrasia; on contradictions in action, see FLANNERY.]

In several passages, Arendt draws helpful contrasts between Aristotle and the Stoics, especially Epictetus. She notes that for Epictetus "life, as it is given on earth, with inevitable ending in death, and hence beset by fear and trembling, was incapable of giving real happiness without a special effort of man's will. Thus 'happiness' changed its meaning; it was no longer understood as eudaimonia, the *activity* of eu zen, living well, but as euroia biou, a Stoic metaphor indicating a free-flowing life, undisturbed by storms, tempests, or obstacles.... to be 'happy' now meant primarily 'not to be miserable'." (AREND-1977b, p. 74-75) Even more starkly, for Epictetus, the philosopher "'keeps watch and guard on himself as his own enemy, lying in wait for him.' [The Manual, 51, 48] We need only remind ourselves of Aristotle's insight ('all friendly feelings toward others are an extension of the friendly feelings a person has for himself') to gauge the distance the human mind has traveled since antiquity." (ARENDT-1977b, pp. 82-83)

"The pleasure of drinking the most exquisite wine cannot be compared in intensity with the pleasure felt by a desperately thirsty man who obtains his first drink of water. In this sense there is a clear distinction between joy, independent of and unrelated to needs and desires, and pleasure, the sensuous lust of a creature whose body is alive to the extent that it is in need of something it does not have. Joy, it seems, can only be experienced if one is wholly free of pain and desire; that is, it stands outside the pain-pleasure calculus, which Nietzsche despised because of its inbred utilitarianism. Joy - what Nietzsche called the Dionysian principle - comes from *abundance*, and it is true that all joy is a kind of luxury; it overcomes us, and we can indulge in it only after the needs of life have been satisfied." (ARENDT-1977b, pp. 162-163) [PSA: although this passage refers to Nietzsche, the contrast between abundant joy and needs-driven pleasure seems just as relevant to Aristotle since he disputes the Socratic view of pleasure]

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