Spiritual life · Will

Author: Hannah Arendt (USA)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: If one examines this historical record revealed by religious and secular theories and traditions, the conclusion is inevitable: philosophers have never been able to explain a certain spiritual phenomenon and its place in the world. We believe that thinkers can make fair judgments about the body, but we do not believe they can make fair judgments about the will. However, the philosopher's hostility toward the body is well-known, at least since Plato, with documented records. The main reason is not due to the unreliability of sensory experience—because these errors can be corrected, nor is it due to the difficulty of controlling passions—because passions can be subjugated by reason. It is merely due to the incurable nature of our body's needs and desires. As Plato correctly emphasized, the body is always "in need of care," even in the most favorable conditions—health and leisure, as well as in an orderly state of the nation—but it disrupts the activity of the thinking self with its capricious demands. According to the allegory of the cave, the body forces the philosopher to return from the world of ideas to the cave of worldly affairs. (This hostility is often attributed to Christianity's hostility toward the body. This hostility is not only ancient; it is even believed that one of Christianity's tenets—physical resurrection, unlike the ancient belief in the immortality of the soul—contrasts not only with the general beliefs of mysticism but also with the general concepts of classical philosophy.)
Of course, the thinking self's hostility toward the will is a completely different kind of hostility. Here, the conflict arises between two psychological activities that cannot coexist. When we form a will, that is, when we focus our attention on a future plan, we do not, like when we focus on a series of thoughts, leave the phenomenal world. In terms of how thought and will affect our psychological state, they are incompatible. Indeed, both thought and will present to our minds something that is absent in the present, but thought brings into the continuous present what exists or at least once existed, while will extends into the future, operating in a realm where such certainty does not exist. Our psychological organs—different from the spiritual soul—can process what enters from the realm of the unknown through anticipation, and the primary way of anticipation is hope and fear. These two emotional forms are intrinsically linked, with each tending to transform into its apparent opposite. Due to the uncertainty of scope, these transformations are almost automatic. Any hope itself contains fear, and any fear is alleviated by transforming into a corresponding hope. Due to their transformations and their unstable and unsettling nature, the classical era classified them as the harmful gifts in Pandora's box.