The Life of the Mind Read Online Free

beginning, been described as the world of the few. This age-old distinction between the many and the "professional thinkers" specializing in what was supposedly the highest activity human beings could attain to—Plato's philosopher "shall be called the friend of the god, and if it ever is given to man to put on immortality, it shall be given to him" 20 —has lost its plausibility, and this is the second advantage in our present situation. If, as I suggested before, the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be. Kant—in this respect almost alone among the philosophers—was much bothered by the common opinion that philosophy is only for the few, precisely because of its moral implications, and he once observed that "stupidity is caused by a wicked heart." 21 This is not true: absence of thought is not stupidity; it can be found in highly intelligent people, and a wicked heart is not its cause; it is probably the other way round, that wickedness may be caused by absence of thought. In any event, the matter can no longer be left to "specialists" as though thinking, like higher mathematics, were the monopoly of a specialized discipline.
    Crucial for our enterprise is Kant's distinction between
Vernunft
and
Verstand,
"reason" and "intellect" (not "understanding," which I think is a mistranslation; Kant used the German
Verstand
to translate the Latin
intellectus,
and
Verstand,
though it is the noun of
verstehen,
hence "understanding in current translations, has none of the connotations that are inherent in the German
das Verstehen).
Kant drew this distinction between the two mental faculties after he had discovered the "scandal of reason," that is, the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about, and for him such matters, that is, those with which mere thought is concerned, were restricted to what we now often call the "ultimate questions" of God, freedom, and immortality. But quite apart from the existential interest men once took in these questions, and although Kant still believed that no "honest soul ever lived that could bear to think that everything is ended with death," 22 he was also quite aware that "the urgent need" of reason is both different from and "more than mere quest and desire for knowledge." 23 Hence, the distinguishing of the two faculties, reason and intellect, coincides with a distinction between two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing, and two altogether different concerns, meaning, in the first category, and cognition, in the second. Kant, though he had insisted on this distinction, was still so strongly bound by the enormous weight of the tradition of metaphysics that he held fast to its traditional subject matter, that is, to those topics which could be
proved
to be unknowable, and while he justified reason's need to think beyond the limits of what can be known, he remained unaware of the fact that man's need to reflect encompasses nearly everything that happens to him, things he knows as well as things he can never know. He remained less than fully aware of the extent to which he had liberated reason, the ability to think, by justifying it in terms of the ultimate questions. He stated defensively that he had "found it necessary to deny
knowledge
... to make room for
faith
," 24 but he had not made room for faith; he had made room for thought, and he had not "denied knowledge" but separated knowledge from thinking. In the notes to his lectures on metaphysics he wrote: 'The aim of metaphysics ... is to extend, albeit only negatively, our use of reason beyond the limitations of the sensorily given world, that is,
to eliminate
the obstacles by which reason hinders