Readers of Arendt’s work find themselves on a winding rollercoaster. A single paragraph may link Lucifer to Cain, to Shakespeare’s MacBeth to Herman Melville’s Billy Budd. Arendt opens her work by claiming that she is not a professional philosopher. This declaration allows Arendt to look at her subject matter in a holistic manner rather than submitting her discussion to a narrow canon of philosophical thought. Arendt’s holistic approach to the subject of thinking allows her to draw from history, literature, philosophy, and human experience to develop her ideas. This approach mirrors her emphasis on The Plurality of Experience and Responsibility. By drawing from multiple resources and disciplines, she positions collective human experience and thought over the scientific logic of the individual.

Arendt’s work is known for its worldliness: She cannot fathom approaching a philosophy that is separate from what is happening in everyday life. As she traces the history of philosophy and its movements from a focus on metaphysics to rationalism, she argues that neither gives a comprehensive picture. Thinking predates philosophy, and Arendt argues that it may offer clues into both the metaphysical realm and the world of appearances: “We are what men always have been—thinking beings” (11). As her work focuses on both metaphysics and appearances, her study of thinking seeks to connect it to social and political space. 

The Life of the Mind seeks to uncover the connections surrounding The Moral Importance of Thinking. Arendt cites the Eichmann trial in her introduction—a significant moment in her life and works—as the catalyst for her question about whether thinking and morality are interconnected. Her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem details the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking official in the Nazi Party. During the trial, Eichmann claimed that he had committed no unlawful or immoral act and that he was merely doing his job. Arendt was struck by his callousness and what she identified as an absence of thinking. In the final chapter of her book, Arendt describes Eichmann’s execution. His last words merely echoed the words of others, another example of his thoughtlessness. Arendt writes that Eichmann is a lesson on the “word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.” The phrase “banality of evil” has been used repeatedly as a marker of Arendt’s work, especially on her theories about the relationship between thinking and morality. In Arendt’s view, evil is entirely unoriginal.