  Arendt returned to this issue in The Life of the Mind, a work which was meant to encompass the three faculties of thinking, willing, and judging. In the introduction to the first volume she declared that the immediate impulse to write it came from attending the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, while the second, equally important motive, was to provide an account of our mental activities that was missing from her previous work on the vita activa. It was Eichmann’s absence of thinking, his “thoughtlessness,” that struck her most, because it was responsible in her view for his inability to judge in those circumstances where judgment was most needed. “It was this absence of thinking,” she wrote, “that awakened my interest. Is evil-doing … possible in default of not just ‘base motives’ ... but of any motives whatever … Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?” (LM, vol. I, 4–5).