The Life Of The Mind

As Arendt follows the history of philosophical thought on the concept of the Will, she turns to Thomas Aquinas, the Italian priest and Scholastic thinker. Arendt asserts that it is important to remember when studying medieval works that these are often written by thinkers who lived in monasteries and profoundly shaped the ideologies of the Western world. Reading Aquinas can be both difficult and rewarding, as he uses a complicated but specific systematic structure to his writing. He never uses rhetoric or persuasion. Instead, he presents three types of necessity: Rational, relative, and coercion.

Aquinas was the first to distinguish between intellect and the Will. Intellect is universal reason and deals with self-evident truths. The Will deals with good. Aquinas believed that a person could not be wholly evil or wholly good: “Thomas was not the first to regard evil as nothing but ‘privation,’ a kind of optical illusion that comes about if the whole, of which evil is only a part, is not taken into account” (118). This correlates with Arendt’s assertion that humans commit evil when they decentralize the whole and give primacy to the individual.