6 ideas
Thinking is a soundless dialogue in which I split into two partners, myself and the self I must answer to, and carry on a conversation between them. Because I must go on living with this inner partner, I avoid acts that would turn it into an adversary I cannot stand to be alone with. Conscience is therefore a byproduct of thinking. It is not an external rule. It is the wish to remain on good terms with oneself.
Starting from Eichmann, whose deeds were monstrous but who seemed shallow rather than demonic, Arendt asks whether the habit of thinking might condition people against evildoing. Evil on a vast scale can come from people who never stop to examine what they are doing and who rely on clichés and stock phrases that shield them from reality.
To think, the mind must step out of the world of appearances. It deals with objects that are absent, turning sense experiences into images and then into concepts. This is why the thinker looks absent-minded and 'nowhere' to others, and why thinking interrupts all doing. Thinking is an activity with its own time and place, set apart from action and from everyday perception.
Kant distinguished reason (Vernunft) from intellect (Verstand), and Arendt builds on this. Cognition seeks truth and produces verifiable results. Thinking seeks meaning and produces nothing final. Thinking must restart continually and unravel its own results like Penelope's weaving, so the metaphysical error is to demand of thinking the kind of certainty that belongs only to knowledge.
Arendt takes Socrates as her model thinker. He stung citizens awake like a gadfly and delivered their pregnant opinions like a midwife. Like an electric ray, he paralyzed others with the same perplexity he felt himself. His questioning destroyed unexamined opinions without replacing them with doctrine, which shows that thinking's political value is purgative. By dissolving received rules, it frees judgment to operate in moments of crisis.
Judging is the faculty of assessing particulars ('this is wrong,' 'this is beautiful') without subsuming them under general rules. It draws on Kant's reflective judgment and the enlarged mentality of imagining others' standpoints. Thinking frees the mind from fixed rules. Judgment then realizes thinking in the world of appearances, which makes it the most political of the mental faculties.