ABSTRACT

This chapter examines Hannah Arendt's distinction between critical and professional thinking as well as her account of conscience in order to argue how and why critical thinking can condition against evil. It investigates Arendt's account of the masses, conscience and action in times of crises. However, Arendt's position is more complex, as she makes an important distinction between critical thinkers and professional thinkers. Arendt argues that a genuine conscience is a by-product of the activity of thinking and not simply the presence of consciousness. In times of crises the critical thinker, by necessity, temporarily gives up on the project of achieving an ethical life based in representative norms formed through judgment and dialogue in the public realm, and falls back on the moral standpoint of conscience in which the self, and not the world we share and create with others, is primary.