The Life of the Mind

Introduction

Arendt’s last work grew out of her Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen in 1973 and 1974 and was published posthumously in 1978 in two volumes, Thinking and Willing, edited by her friend Mary McCarthy. A third part, Judging, remained unwritten: after her death in December 1975 only its title page was found in her typewriter. Her starting point is the thoughtlessness she had seen in Eichmann, which raised the question whether thinking itself might keep people from doing evil. Thinking appears as the silent dialogue with oneself that Socrates practised, a withdrawal from the world of appearances. For her views on judging, readers turn to her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, published in 1982.

Connections

Builds on

• Critique of Judgment1790 · Immanuel Kant
• Eichmann in Jerusalem1963 · Hannah Arendt

More works by Hannah Arendt

• 1951The Origins of Totalitarianism
• 1958The Human Condition
• 1963Eichmann in Jerusalem