The Life of the Mind

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Book: Read The Life of the Mind for Free Online
Authors: Hannah Arendt
Tags: Psychology, Non-Fiction, Philosophy, Politics
maximum power of expression compared with the internal, whose functions are of a more primitive order." 19 The use of the word "expression" shows clearly the terminological difficulties an elaboration of these consequences is bound to encounter. For an "expression" cannot but express something, and to the inevitable question, What does the expression express? (that is, press out), the answer will always be: something inside—an idea, a thought, an emotion. The expressiveness of an appearance, however, is of a different order; it "expresses" nothing but itself, that is, it exhibits or displays. It follows from Portmann's findings that our habitual standards of judgment, so firmly rooted in metaphysical assumptions and prejudices—according to which the essential lies beneath the surface, and the surface is "superficial"—are wrong, that our common conviction that what is inside ourselves, our "inner life," is more relevant to what we "are" than what appears on the outside is an illusion; but when it comes to correcting these fallacies, it turns out that our language, or at least our terminological discourse, fails us.
4. Body and soul; soul and mind
    Besides, the difficulties are far from being merely terminological. They are intimately related to the problematic beliefs we hold with regard to our psychic life and the relationship of soul and body. To be sure, we are inclined to agree that no bodily inside ever appears authentically, of its own accord, but if we speak of an inner life that is expressed in outward appearance, we mean the life of the soul; the inside-outside relation, true for our bodies, is not true for our souls, even though we speak of our psychic
life
and its location "inside" ourselves in metaphors obviously drawn from bodily data and experiences. The same use of metaphors, moreover, is characteristic of our conceptual language, designed to make manifest the life of the mind; the word's we use in strictly philosophical discourse are also invariably derived from expressions originally related to the world as given to our five bodily senses, from whose experience they then, as Locke pointed out, are "transferred"—
meta-pherein,
carried over—"to more abstruse significations, and made to stand for ideas that come not under the cognizance of our senses." Only by means of such transference could men "conceive those operations they experimented in themselves, which made no outward sensible appearances." 20 Locke relies here on the old tacit assumption of an identity of soul and mind, both being opposed to the body by virtue of their invisibility.
    Upon closer examination, however, it turns out that what is true for the mind, namely, that metaphorical language is the only way it has to make an "outward sensible appearance"—even silent, non-appearing activity already consists in speech, the soundless dialogue of me with myself—is not at all true for the life of the soul. Conceptual metaphorical speech is indeed adequate to the activity of thinking, the operations of our mind, but the life of our soul in its very intensity is much more adequately expressed in a glance, a sound, a gesture, than in speech. What becomes manifest when we speak about psychic experiences is never the experience itself but whatever we
think
about it when we reflect upon it. Unlike thoughts and ideas, feelings, passions, and emotions can no more become part and parcel of the world of appearances than can our inner organs. What appears in the outside world in addition to physical signs is only what we make of them through the operation of thought. Every
show
of anger, as distinct from the anger I feel, already contains a reflection on it, and it is this reflection that gives the emotion the highly individualized form which is meaningful for all surface phenomena. To show one's anger is one form of self-presentation: I decide what is fit for appearance. In other words, the emotions I feel are no more
meant
to be

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