ABSTRACT
The “internal evidence” for the existence of the will consists of certain experiences that Hannah Arendt finds reported with some consistency in the writings of past philosophers, reports that she trusts more than the concepts and analyses that reflect the thinker’s bias. An equally if not more important experience of the willing ego for Arendt is the experience of internal conflict of the sort reported by St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans. Arendt also insists that the mental activities of thinking, willing, and judging must be autonomous of or independent of the faculty she calls “intellect. Arendt’s will can best be understood by locating it among the other human faculties. Arendt calls the self “an appearance among appearances;” thus when the thinking ego withdraws from the world of appearances, Arendt says, it withdraws from “its own body and therefore also from the self, of which it is no longer aware.”
