# Thinking and Moral Considerations (1971) Hub: [[Topics/Hannah Arendt/Hannah Arendt|Hannah Arendt]] · Post analysis: [[Users/@rodjnaquin/Post Analyses/Post Analysis - rodjnaquin on Arendt's Thinking and Moral Considerations (2026-10-24)|@rodjnaquin's summary]] ## Publication - **First printed:** *Social Research* 38:3 (Autumn 1971), pp. 417–446 ([JSTOR 40970069](https://www.jstor.org/stable/40970069); [Social Research archive](https://www.socres.org/post/1971/10/01/vol-38-no-3-fall-1971)). Title as printed: "THINKING AND MORAL CONSIDERATIONS: A LECTURE BY HANNAH ARENDT", dedicated "For W. H. Auden". - **Reprints:** *Social Research* 51:1 (Spring 1984), pp. 7–37 ([Contemporary Thinkers](https://contemporarythinkers.org/hannah-arendt/essay/thinking-moral-considerations-lecture/)); *Responsibility and Judgment*, ed. Jerome Kohn (2003), pp. 159–189 ◻ (page range from a citation, not opened). - **German critical edition:** Wallstein *Complete Works* vol. 14.1 lists "Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture (1970-1971)" with draft and final text ([contents](https://www.wallstein-verlag.de/3027_LP.pdf)). - **Where it was delivered:** not established ⚠️. The text calls itself a lecture and opens "To talk about thinking seems to me so presumptuous that I f[eel] I owe you a justification". - **Free copy linked by @rodjnaquin:** [cooperative-individualism.org PDF](https://cooperative-individualism.org/arendt-hannah_thinking-and-moral-considerations-1971-autumn.pdf), a JSTOR download from 2022 re-hosted by a third party ⚠️. ## The argument in order (verbatim quotes from the 1971 text) 1. **The question from Eichmann.** "the banality of evil" was "no theory or doctrine but something quite factual, the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer". His trait was "not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think"; he had a "limited supply of stock phrases" and relied on "clichés used in funeral oratory" under the gallows. 2. **The questions.** "Is our ability to judge, to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly, dependent upon our faculty of thought? Do the inability to think and a disastrous failure of what we commonly call conscience coincide?" 3. **Thinking vs knowing.** Following Kant, she separates reason (the need to think) from intellect (the desire to know). Thinking yields no results that knowledge can store (paraphrase). 4. **Socrates as model.** "I propose to use a man as our model who did think without becoming a philosopher, a citizen among citizens". "He called himself a gadfly and a midwife, and, according to Plato, was called by somebody else an 'electric ray'". Thinking's "wind" undoes "frozen thoughts" such as the concepts in words like *house*; "no such rules can withstand the wind of thought." 5. **The danger.** "There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous, but nihilism is not its product. Nihilism is but the other side of conventionalism". Socrates' corrupted pupils had been "aroused by the gadfly" to "license and cynicism". 6. **Two-in-one.** Consciousness makes me "two-in-one"; thinking is the dialogue between me and myself (Theaetetus 189e, Sophist 263e). Socrates' key words: "Being one it would be worse for me to be at odds with myself than in disagreement with multitudes of men" (Gorgias 482c ◻), alongside "it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong" ◻ (Gorgias; standard rendering). 7. **Conscience.** "This conscience, unlike the voice of God within us or the lumen naturale, gives no positive prescriptions". "Conscience appears as an afterthought". For the thinking ego it "is a side effect". The fear it brings is "the anticipation of the presence of a witness who awaits him only if and when he goes home." The danger lies with "the non-wicked everybody who has no special motives and for this reason is capable of infinite evil". 8. **Judgment and emergencies.** Thinking "does not create values … and it does not confirm but rather dissolves accepted rules of conduct. Its political and moral significance comes out only in those rare moments in history when 'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold'". Then "those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action." "The faculty of judging particulars, the ability to say, 'this is wrong,' 'this is beautiful,' etc. is not the same as the faculty of thinking" ([Social Research](https://www.socres.org/post/1971/10/01/vol-38-no-3-fall-1971)). Thinking's manifestation "is the ability to tell right from wr[ong]", which "may prevent catastroph[es]" in the "rare moments when the chips are d[own]" (scan cropped). ## What followed The lecture is a first sketch of *The Life of the Mind*: "Thinking" (Gifford Lectures 1973), "Willing" (1974), and the barely begun "Judging"; published 1978, edited by Mary McCarthy ([Villa chronology](https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9780429754333_A41115454/preview-9780429754333_A41115454.pdf)).