Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind—left unfinished at her death in 1975—explores what it means to live a reflective human life. Though only the first two volumes, Thinking and Willing, were completed, they show how our minds work, how we deal with thinking and willing. If death had not taken her, we would know much more about the process of judging, of looking into our own experience and evaluating the world around us. In addition to defining the modes in which our mind works Arendt wanted to look deeper into what she had seen in the trial of Adolph Eichmann, to ask why thoughtlessness could coexist with education and intelligence. Her answer was to return to the activity of the mind itself: thinking, willing, and judging.
In his lectures on The Life of the Mind at the Hannah Arendt Center, Roger Berkowitz said the key sentence of the entire book is in the Introduction on page 15 of the paperback edition:
The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. (These words are italicized in the book.)
Thinking as Interior Dialogue
For Arendt, thinking is not problem-solving or information processing but a withdrawal from the world into an inner dialogue. This is her Socratic inheritance: the “two-in-one” conversation where I, as thinker, am alone in the company of myself. This dialogue is a withdrawal from the world. Thinking refers to the present, to the here and now of existence, but in a way that suspends action. It is an activity that strips away worldly entanglements and confronts the mind with meaning rather than facts. Arendt insists that thinking is not about producing results; it is about keeping oneself in dialogue, preventing the collapse into thoughtlessness.
In thinking, Arendt says we are not searching for truth, but for meaning. This search for meaning is individual and unique. It may or may not lead to truth.
In the context of Eichmann, this withdrawal is central. She believed Eichmann’s evil was thoughtless precisely because he lacked this inner two-in-one. He conformed, he obeyed, but he never withdrew to examine whether what he was doing was right. To think is to interrupt the chain of command within oneself, to stand back and confront reality in the present tense.
Willing as the Struggle with the Future
If thinking is rooted in the present, willing is oriented toward the future. It is the inner effort to control what is not yet, to choose between possibilities, to force action upon the world. Arendt describes willing as a divided, restless power: the will affirms and denies at once. Unlike the serenity of the thinking dialogue, willing is conflictual, almost violent. We both want and do not want; we command ourselves and resist our own commands.
Where thinking withdraws from the world, willing strains against it. It is the mind’s way of asserting itself against time, against the uncertainty of what comes next. For Arendt, this tension is central to understanding political action: willing is the seed of freedom, but also of frustration. We are never at peace with the will because the future is never securely ours.
Thinking, Judging, and Willing
Arendt’s tripartite scheme assigns each faculty a temporal orientation. Thinking deals with the present; judging, with the past; willing, with the future. Judging, which she did not live to write, she connected to Kant’s Critique of Judgment and his idea of reflective judgment—how we make sense of past events, how we discern meaning after the fact.
Together, they give us three aspects of our inner life: thought that withdraws from the world, judgment that brings the past into evaluating the present, and will that looks to the future. The activity of the mind found in this temporal triad, is always in motion, changing and subject to chance as is all life.
The Christian Inheritance of the Will
The most striking feature of Willing is Arendt’s deep dive into the Christian tradition. She traces the genealogy of the will not to Greek philosophy, where the concept is largely absent, but to the New Testament. In Saint Paul she finds the first language of inner division: “the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.” The will appears here as torn between flesh and spirit, desire and command.
Augustine, whom Arendt calls the first Christian philosopher, builds on this Pauline insight. For him, the will is not simply choice but the innermost movement of the self toward or away from God. In Confessions, Augustine describes the paralysis of a divided will, torn between sin and obeying God. Arendt shows this is the decisive turn: the will becomes the core of human subjectivity, the theater of inner conflict.
Aquinas later systematizes the will into scholastic doctrine, aligning it with reason and natural law. Here the will finds its place within a rational order, no longer pure division but an instrument that can be directed toward the good. Arendt is less enamored with Aquinas than with Augustine, but she acknowledges the power of this tradition: Christianity gave the West the very concept of a faculty oriented to the future, an inner command that makes freedom both possible and perilous.
Along with Paul, Augustine and Aquinas, Arendt writes at length about Duns Scotus, a scholastic thinker who accepts contingency in life and through contingency shows that we truly have free will. The first time I read The Life of the Mind I was unaware of Scotus. In reading Arendt, I am delighted to find people and ideas I had never encountered.
The Life of the Mind is brilliant. Arendt writes not as a metaphysician spinning systems but as a thinker who wrestles with the facts of experience and the inheritances of tradition. Her exploration of the inner dialogue of thinking shows why reflection matters in a world of conformity. Her analysis of the will uncovers both its torment and its promise: the divided power that enables freedom but guarantees restlessness.
That she died before completing the volume on Judging is a loss, but the fragments we have are enough to make her point. To be human is to be suspended between past, present, and future, always in dialogue with ourselves, never fully at rest. Arendt’s book is not a manual but an invitation to return to that dialogue, to resist thoughtlessness, and to confront the responsibilities of freedom.
