The Thinking of the Thoughtlessness of Evil: Hannah Arendt’s Account on Thinking as Conditioning Against Evil-Doing

Abstract

Hannah Arendt describes thinking as an undetermined process, i.e., as a process that is not conditioned by any event in the world since it does not follow from any specific event in the world and it is not aimed at any such event. The essential feature of thinking is that it is excluded from the world. And in relation to this property of thinking Arendt asks: “Could the activity of thinking as such [..] regardless of results and specific content, [..] be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually ‘condition’ them against it?” (Arendt 1978, 5). Considering the importance of Immanuel Kant’s account on the mechanism of moral action for Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann’s type of evil, in this article the author argues that it is not the lack of thinking “regardless of results and specific content”, therefore, not thinking as such, that can serve as a condition against evil-doing, but rather the ability to form a positive principle upon which to act, therefore it is the determinate rather than indeterminate thinking that can prevent evil-doing.