Between Thinking And Morality

Hannah Arendt was an influential western political philosopher in the20th century. Late in her career, she revisited her experience of attending the Eichmann Trial. She was shocked by Eichmann’s thoughtlessness and his monstrous deeds. And she wondered whether our ability of judging right from wrong, beautiful from ugly, was based on the faculty of thinking, and whether thinking made humans abstain from doing evil. Considering thinking from a moral perspective, she examined thinking and discussed its moral significance in detail.This article is based on Arendt’s The Life of the Mind:Thinking. Following Arendt’s in looking for the reason why Eichmann committed the atrocious evil from the perspective of the mind, we first discuss the philosophical meaning of thoughtlessness by revisiting the Eichmann Trial. Then, we look into Arendt’s mentor-Heidegger, who, as a great thinker, went astray during the Nazi period with unforgivable deeds. And we distinguish the concept of thinking in Heidegger and in Arendt. Next, we come back to how Arendt has vividly described thinking in The Life of the Mind:Thinking, thinking is like Penelope’s web; it quests for meaning endlessly but does not endow us directly with the power to act. Ultimately, Arendt’s analysis of thinking and its moral side-effects centered on Socrates-a gadfly, a midwife, an electric ray, whom she presented as the model of a thinker.In the main part of this article, we focus on the moral significance of thinking, that is to say, how does the activity of thinking help prevent committing atrocious evil. For Arendt, there appears to be two interconnected ways in which thinking has moral side-effects. First, thinking, as the internal dialogue between me and myself, makes me live in my own presence, thus giving rise to a self-consciousness that is tantamount to conscience. Second, thinking is able to criticize universal principles and liberate one’s own independent judgements. Moreover, thinking helps us develop imaginations, by which I can gain views from others’ perspective, eliminate my prejudices, and in turn arrive at more reasonable judgements. Eventually, we analyze Arendt’s criticism of universal moral principles, through which we better understand the fundamental premises of Arendt’s considerations on thinking and the implication thereof.