Introduction

1The title I have given this lecture series, The Life of the Mind, sounds pretentious自负的, and to talk about Thinking seems to me so presumptuous僭越的 that I feel I should start less with an apology致歉 than with a justification辩护.

2No justification, of course, is needed for the topic itself, especially not in the framework of eminence崇高地位 inherent固有的 in the Gifford Lectures.

3What disturbs me is that I try my hand at it, for I have neither claim nor ambition to be a "philosopher" or be numbered among what Kant, not without irony, called Denker von Gewerbe (professional thinkers).¹

4The question then is, should I not have left these problems in the hands of the experts, and the answer will have to show what prompted me to venture涉险进入 from the relatively safe fields of political science and theory into these rather awesome令人敬畏的 matters, instead of leaving well enough alone.

5Factually, my preoccupation萦怀、专注 with mental activities has two rather different origins.

6The immediate impulse促因、冲动 came from my attending the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem.

7In my report of it² I spoke of "the banality of evil."

8Behind that phrase, I held no thesis or doctrine, although I was dimly隐约地 aware of the fact that it went counter to our tradition of thought—literary, theological, or philosophic—about the phenomenon of evil.

9Evil, we have learned, is something demonic恶魔般的; its incarnation化身 is Satan, a "lightning fall from heaven" (Luke 10:18), or Lucifer, the fallen angel ("The devil is an angel too"—Unamuno) whose sin is pride ("proud as Lucifer"), namely, that superbia of which only the best are capable: they don't want to serve God but to be like Him.

10Evil men, we are told, act out of envy嫉妒; this may be resentment怨恨 at not having turned out well through no fault of their own (Richard III) or the envy of Cain, who slew Abel because "the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard."

11Or they may be prompted by weakness (Macbeth).

12Or, on the contrary, by the powerful hatred wickedness邪恶 feels for sheer goodness (Iago's "I hate the Moor: my cause is hearted"; Claggart's hatred for Billy Budd's "barbarian" innocence, a hatred considered by Melville a "depravity according to nature"), or by covetousness贪欲, "the root of all evil" (Radix omnium malorum cupiditas).

13However, what I was confronted with was utterly different and still undeniably无可否认地 factual.

14I was struck by a manifest明显的 shallowness浅薄 in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable无可争辩的 evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives.

15The deeds were monstrous骇人的, but the doer—at least the very effective one now on trial—was quite ordinary, commonplace平庸的, and neither demonic nor monstrous.

16There was no sign in him of firm ideological意识形态的 convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness不思考、无思.

17In the setting of Israeli court and prison procedures he functioned as well as he had functioned under the Nazi regime but, when confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he was helpless, and his cliché-ridden满口陈词滥调的 language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre阴森可怖的 comedy.

18Clichés, stock phrases, adherence墨守、遵奉 to conventional因袭的, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.

19If we were responsive有所回应的 to this claim all the time, we would soon be exhausted; Eichmann differed from the rest of us only in that he clearly knew of no such claim at all.

20It was this absence of thinking—which is so ordinary an experience in our everyday life, where we have hardly the time, let alone the inclination意愿、倾向, to stop and think—that awakened my interest.

21Is evil-doing (the sins of omission不作为、疏漏, as well as the sins of commission作为、犯下) possible in default of not just "base motives" (as the law calls them) but of any motives whatever, of any particular prompting of interest or volition意志、意愿?

22Is wickedness邪恶、恶意, however we may define it, this being “determined to prove a villain,” not a necessary condition for evil-doing?

23Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty能力、机能 for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?

24To be sure, not in the sense that thinking would ever be able to produce the good deed as its result, as though “virtue could be taught” and learned—only habits and customs can be taught, and we know only too well the alarming令人惊忧的 speed with which they are unlearned and forgotten when new circumstances情势 demand a change in manners and patterns of behavior.

25(The fact that we usually treat matters of good and evil in courses in “morals” or “ethics” may indicate how little we know about them, for morals comes from mores and ethics from ethos, the Latin and the Greek words for customs and habit, the Latin word being associated with rules of behavior, whereas the Greek is derived from habitat, like our “habits.”)

26The absence of thought I was confronted with sprang neither from forgetfulness of former, presumably想来、据推定 good manners and habits nor from stupidity in the sense of inability to comprehend理解—not even in the sense of “moral insanity,” for it was just as noticeable in instances that had nothing to do with so-called ethical decisions or matters of conscience.

27The question that imposed itself自行逼现 was: Could the activity of thinking as such就其本身而言, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass发生 or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from克制、不去做 evil-doing or even actually “condition” them against it?

28(The very word “con-science,” at any rate, points in this direction insofar as就……而言 it means “to know with and by myself,” a kind of knowledge that is actualized实现、成为现实 in every thinking process.)

29And is not this hypothesis假设 enforced得到加强、佐证 by everything we know about conscience, namely, that a “good conscience” is enjoyed as a rule only by really bad people, criminals and such, while only “good people” are capable of having a bad conscience?

30To put it differently and use Kantian language: after having been struck by a fact that, willy-nilly不由自主地, “put me in possession of a concept” (the banality of evil), I could not help raising the quaestio juris and asking myself “by what right I possessed and used it.”³

31The Eichmann trial, then, first prompted my interest in this subject.

32Second, those moral questions, arising from源自 factual experience, and going counter to抵触、违背 the wisdom of the ages—not only to the various traditional answers that “ethics,” a branch of philosophy, has offered to the problem of evil, but also to the much larger answers that philosophy has ready for the much less urgent question What is thinking?—were apt to易于、往往会 renew in me certain doubts that had been plaguing不断困扰 me ever since I had finished a study of what my publisher wisely called “The Human Condition,” but which I had intended more modestly as an inquiry探究 into “The Vita Activa.”

33I had been concerned with the problem of Action, the oldest concern of political theory, and what had always troubled me about it was that the very term I adopted for my reflections on the matter, namely, vita activa, was coined创制、铸成 by men who were devoted to the contemplative沉思的 way of life and who looked upon all kinds of being alive from that perspective.

34Seen from that perspective, the active way of life is “laborious辛劳的,” the contemplative way is sheer纯然的 quietness; the active one goes on in public, the contemplative one in the “desert”; the active one is devoted to “the necessity of one’s neighbor,” the contemplative one to the “vision of God.” (Duae sunt vitae, activa et contemplativa. Activa est in labore, contemplativa in requie. Activa in publico, contemplativa in deserto. Activa in necessitate proximi, contemplativa in visione Dei.)

35I have quoted from a medieval author⁴ of the twelfth century, almost at random, because the notion that contemplation is the highest state of the mind is as old as Western philosophy.

36The thinking activity—according to Plato, the soundless无声的 dialogue we carry on with ourselves—serves only to open the eyes of the mind, and even the Aristotelian nous is an organ for seeing and beholding the truth.

37In other words, thinking aims at and ends in contemplation, and contemplation is not an activity but a passivity被动状态; it is the point where mental activity comes to rest.

38According to traditions of Christian time, when philosophy had become the handmaiden侍女、婢女 of theology, thinking became meditation, and meditation again ended in contemplation, a kind of blessed state of the soul where the mind was no longer stretching out to know the truth but, in anticipation of a future state, received it temporarily in intuition直观.

39(Descartes, characteristically, still influenced by this tradition, called the treatise in which he set out to demonstrate God’s existence Méditations.)

40With the rise of the modern age, thinking became chiefly the handmaiden of science, of organized knowledge; and even though thinking then grew extremely active, following modernity’s crucial conviction that I can know only what I myself make, it was Mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the Science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed遮蔽、隐藏 by appearances.

41If it was axiomatic不证自明的 for Plato that the invisible eye of the soul was the organ for beholding invisible truth with the certainty of knowledge, it became axiomatic for Descartes—during the famous night of his “revelation”—that there existed “a fundamental accord一致、契合 between the laws of nature [which are concealed by appearances and deceptive欺骗性的 sense perceptions] and the laws of mathematics”;⁵ that is, between the laws of discursive推论式的 thinking on the highest, most abstract level and the laws of whatever lies behind mere semblance表象、假象 in nature.

42And he actually believed that with this kind of thinking, with what Hobbes called “reckoning with consequences,” he could deliver certain knowledge about the existence of God, the nature of the soul, and similar matters.

43What interested me in the Vita Activa was that the contrary notion of complete quietness in the Vita Contemplativa was so overwhelming压倒性的 that compared with this stillness all other differences between the various activities in the Vita Activa disappeared.

44Compared to this quiet, it was no longer important whether you labored and tilled the soil, or worked and produced use-objects, or acted together with others in certain enterprises.

45Even Marx, in whose work and thought the question of action played such a crucial role, “uses the expression ‘Praxis’ simply in the sense of ‘what man does’ as opposed to ‘what man thinks.’”⁶

46I was, however, aware that one could look at this matter from an altogether different viewpoint, and to indicate my doubts I ended this study of active life with a curious sentence that Cicero ascribed to归于、认为出自 Cato, who used to say that “never is a man more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself” (Numquam se plus agere quam nihil cum ageret, numquam minus solum esse quam cum solus esset).⁷

47Assuming Cato was right, the questions are obvious: What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think?

48Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow-men人类同伴、他人, are together with no one but ourselves?