[3] She first addressed the second part in her preface to Between Past and Future (1961), which she eventually developed into The Life of the Mind, more than ten years later, her book on thinking.

[5] An invitation to deliver the 1973–1974 Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen (the first woman to do so), provided an incentive to gather together a variety of materials including courses she had taught over the last few years on "Basic Moral Propositions," "Thinking," "The History of the Will," "Kant's Critique of Judgment", together with two essays, "Truth and Politics" and "Thinking Moral Considerations (1971)."

This appropriation of Socrates leads her to introduce novel concepts of conscience—an enterprise that gives no positive prescriptions, but instead, tells one what I cannot do if I would remain friends with myself when I re-enter the two-in-one of thought where I must render an account of my actions to myself—and morality—an entirely negative enterprise concerned with forbidding participation in certain actions for the sake of remaining friends with oneself.

The book begins with the same epigraph from Cato the Elder,[b] with which she ended The Human Condition: Numquam se plus agere quam nihil cum ageret, numquam minus solum esse quam cum solus esset(Never is he more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself)It was planned in two parts, "Thinking" and "Willing and Judgement".

The first was the epigraph with which she had ended "Thinking": Victorix causa diis placuit sed victa Catoni(The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the vanquished pleases Cato)[c] Arendt, here draws attention to Cato, who unlike Eichmann, clearly distinguished between right and wrong and was steadfast in his judgement.

The second epigraph was this stanza by Faust from Goethe's drama of that name (II: Act V 11404–7): Könnt' ich Magie von meinem Pfad entfernen,Die Zaubersprüche ganz und gar verlernen,Stünd' ich, Natur, vor dir ein Mann allein,Da wär's der Mühe wert, ein Mensch zu sein.

[13] (If I could banish [Magic] from my track, Unlearn the [spells] that draw me back, And stand before you, Nature, as mere Man, [Then would it] be worth the [trouble] of being Human.

[15] In the place of the unwritten "Judgement" section, McCarthy substituted relevant excerpts from Arendt's lectures on Kant's political philosophy delivered at the New School in the fall of 1970, as a guide to her thinking on the subject.