In the Introduction to The Life of the Mind, Arendt tells us that her preoccupation with mental activities (thinking, willing, and judging) had two different origins. The immediate impulse came from her reflections on the Eichmann trial. The most unsettling trait of Adolf Eichmann, who seemed to be completely entrapped in his own clichés and stock phrases, was his inability to think. The phenomenon of the banality of evil led her to ask: “Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty of telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?” “Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually 'condition' them against it?” (LM, vol. i, p. 5). The second source was “certain doubts” that had been plaguing her since she had completed The Human Condition. She originally intended to call the book The Vita Activa because she focused her attention on three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. But she realized that the very term, vita activa, was coined by those who primarily valued the vita comtemplativa. Such a tradition held that “thinking aims at and ends in contemplation, and contemplation is not an activity but a passivity” (LM, vol. i, p. 6). Thus contemplation was valued above the active life.