Andīshīdan va Mulāḥiẓāt-i akhlāqī: Persian 1401

Is our ability to judge, to distinguish good from evil, beautiful from ugly, dependent on our ability to think? So many years after the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt returns in this short essay, written in 1970, to the question of evil. Eichmann was neither monstrous nor demonic, and the only characteristic detectable in his past as in his behavior during the trial and interrogation was a negative fact: it was not stupidity but an extraordinary superficiality. A curious and authentic inability to think. The question that Hannah Arendt poses is: can the activity of thinking in itself, the habit of examining everything and reflecting on everything that happens, without regard to the specific content, and concern for the consequences, this activity be of such a nature that it conditions men not to do evil? Is the disastrous lack of what we call conscience not ultimately only an inability to think?