• inability to place Eichmann (a German officer who was simply “following orders”) under pre-existing “universals” to understand this “normal” person, carrying out the extermination of Jews.
• she needed a new criminal type, to fit what she termed the “banality of evil”.
• she must ascend from the particular to a universal, in this uneasy case. We must “either actively uncover or imaginatively invent”.
• defending himself as simply following orders, with no one questioning the Final Solution, Arendt considers him thoughtless in a particular sense – his inability to see beyond the rules and procedures (see nihlism perhaps), and his “inability to see things from the standpoint of others”.
• she goes on to think that we have over a long history, considered thinking a specialized activity of a few (perhaps now even AI). If thinking is a part of thinking right from wrong, then we must demand it of everyone, as an inner dialogue by stopping and thinking.
• drawing on Socrates, the thinking is not towards an answer, but is critical – always interrogating and disclosing faults, a “resultless enterprise”, leaving us with questions and perplexities, not answers.
• Quote: “The intrinsically destructive character of all genuine thinking has, according to Arendt, “a liberating effect on another human faculty, the faculty of judgment, which one may call, with some justification, the most political of man’s mental abilities” (TMC, 188). For judgment is liberated only to the extent that we can free ourselves from received opinion and preconceived categories.”
• This thinking involves an inner partner, who we converse with. According to Socrates, it is better to be out of tune with other people and society than to be out-of-tune with this inner voice {note: doesn't seem to be a problem for some people}
• In situations where everyone is swept along by unthinking, this inner self ceases to be marginal and by definition political in terms of a kind of resistance through “action”.
• Drawing upon the person of wisdom and phronesis, this individual wisdom still upholds a few individuals as the ones who think and can act wisely.
• Drawing upon Kant's aesthetic Judgment raises 3 points:
  • equality and that we all possess it (no experts).
  • shared appearances and the judgment of particulars (not the imposition of categories)
  • intersubjective natures of “taste”
• Quote:
  • “The power of judgment rests on a potential agreement with others, and the thinking process which is active in judging something is p. 108 not, like the thought process of pure reasoning, a dialogue between me and myself, but finds itself always and primarily, even if I am quite alone in making up my mind, in an anticipated communication with others with whom I know I must finally come to some agreement. From this potential agreement judgment derives its specific validity.”(BPF, 217)
• Requirements
  • Requires individuals to eliminate all that is subjective or idiosyncratic {but what does that do to the critical inner voice earlier?}. In order to develop agreement with others.
  • Enlarged mentality: to develop a view across all of those individuals present
  • {it isn't ends focused – i.e. it isn't to “get all the stakeholders to the table”, to get “buy in”}
  • Not factual, but moral, political and aesthetic judgments through persuasion and giving reasons to peers {but how do we deal with the MAGA crowd? Are they producing enlarged mentality through reflective judgments?}
• In contrast to what we think about thinking
  • She cites Heidegger: “Thinking does not bring knowledge as do the sciences. Thinking does not produce usable practical wisdom. Thinking does not solve the riddles of the universe. Thinking does not endow us directly with the power to act.“
  • Instead, thinking is for its own sake as a human, to be alive. It has no particular end.
  • Quote
    • “When Socrates in the Apology states that the unexamined life is not worth living, he does so not because he fears that leading an unexamined life will lead to Eichmann-like complicity with evil. According to Arendt, he makes this statement because a life without thinking cannot be said to be fully alive. For Socrates, “there is no ulterior motive or ulterior purpose for the whole enterprise. An unexamined life is not worth living. That’s all there is to it”
    • ”'Thinking things through' in the Socratic manner is closer to what we might call “ordinary” thinking—the kind of reflection all rational individuals are capable of—than it is to the activity practiced by “professional thinkers.””
  • Contrast to the way thinking has been turned into a search for “truth”, through ideals and categories, through specialists turned away from the world.
    • Quote: “This deductive habit of thought spread far beyond the relatively narrow precincts of philosophy. As Arendt points out in OR, even the American Founders, who discovered the power of mutual promising and acting together, felt compelled to cite a “higher law” to lend authority to their new constitutional creation. The notion that we cannot know what real justice is apart from such a transhuman reality or standard—originating in Plato, but spread throughout the Western world thanks to the triumph of p. 117 Christianity—has become virtually second nature to us. In its more aggressive versions (Plato’s Republic, militant Christianity, Jacobin radicalism, totalitarian ideology), this recurring pattern of deducing coercive and violent political action from some supposedly unquestionable Absolute (Nature, God, History, etc.) has been the bane of Western civilization.”
  • Conversations about the absence of the “will” in Greek philosophy – as we turn away from the senses to universals – we come to view the future as “nothing but a consequence of the past”.
  • Quote: “Indeed, according to Arendt, Western philosophers were so scandalized by the idea that human beings possessed a capacity for spontaneous beginning that they continually sought ways to either deny freedom of the will (à la Hobbes and Spinoza) or demonstrate that new beginnings were actually the result of causal forces working “behind the backs” of the agents involved.”
  • Quote: “What she criticizes is the idea that thinking is an activity reserved for a relative few. And, despite her critique of the philosophical tendency to be embarrassed by the idea of genuine novelty and to p. 123 discount the “merely contingent,” she is no voluntarist. She does not say, with Goethe’s Faust, “in the beginning was the deed.” Rather, what she upholds is the human capacity to interrupt history, to make new beginnings that no one could have predicted.”
  • key final quote: “From her perspective, freedom is not a capacity lodged in the Will or any other “organ” of the individual. It is, rather, a reality made possible by the fact of human plurality and the availability of a public realm, one in which words never before said and deeds never before performed can occur. C5.P70

This is not to say that the philosophers get it wrong, and that political thinkers and actors get it right. As Arendt notes in the last chapter of LM, even the men of the American Revolution were frightened by what she calls the “abyss of freedom.” This fear led them to fall back upon either the Christian notion of divine providence or the Roman notion (expressed in Virgil’s Aeneid) that every foundation is actually a re-foundation.

C5.P71 From Arendt’s point of view, this is a lapse into what the existentialists called “bad faith,” a turning away from the fact that it is human beings, bound together by “mutual promises,” who are able to create new bodies politic and to commence entirely new p. 124 stories. This capacity is “miraculous,” especially when compared to the repetitive behavior that characterizes much of everyday life. It is a miracle, however, that is made possible not by God but by political action— by plural agents “acting together, acting in concert” for the sake of a new beginning.