# Vocabulary Hub: [[Topics/Hannah Arendt/Hannah Arendt|Hannah Arendt]] | Term | Meaning (with Arendt's words where available) | |---|---| | Banality of evil | Arendt's phrase from *Eichmann in Jerusalem* (1963): great evil done by people without monstrous motives; "no theory or doctrine but something quite factual" (lecture). | | Thoughtlessness / inability to think | Eichmann's trait in her reading: "not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think"; reliance on stock phrases. | | Two-in-one | The split inside consciousness that makes inner dialogue possible; thinking is the conversation between me and myself. | | Thinking vs knowing | Kant's reason (the need to think about meaning) vs intellect (the desire to know truth); thinking yields no lasting results. | | Wind of thought | Thinking's power to dissolve "frozen thoughts", concepts and rules taken for granted; "no such rules can withstand the wind of thought." | | Frozen thoughts | Concepts congealed in words (her example: *house*) that thinking has to unfreeze. @rodjnaquin cites this in his feedback blog. | | Gadfly | Socrates' self-description (Apology 30e): he wakes the citizens. | | Midwife | Socrates' self-description (Theaetetus 149–151): he delivers others' thoughts and purges "unexamined prejudgments"; himself "sterile". | | Electric ray (torpedo fish) | Meno's description of Socrates (Meno 80a–b); Socrates accepts it only if the ray paralyzes itself as well. | | Conscience (Socratic) | The "fellow" waiting at home; gives "no positive prescriptions"; "a side effect" of thinking, unlike "the voice of God within us or the lumen naturale". | | Nihilism vs conventionalism | "Nihilism is but the other side of conventionalism": both seek fixed results; thinking itself is dangerous but nihilism "is not its product". | | Judgment | The faculty of judging particulars, the ability to say "this is wrong", "this is beautiful", without subsuming them under general rules; distinct from thinking but its by-product. | | Sassen papers | Eichmann's Argentina memoir and interview transcripts with Willem Sassen (1957 ◻); *Life* excerpts 1960. |