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is Evil Banal? A Misleading Question r i c h a r d J . b e r n s t e i n I have been asked to address the question “Is evil banal?” I am going to be confrontational because I think that this question is badly formulated. This is the type of question that invites serious misinterpretations of Arendt. I find the question objectionable for three reasons. First, the question suggests that Arendt has a general theory or thesis about the nature of evil. This is absolutely false. Over and over again she insisted that she was not proposing a general theory when she spoke about the banality of evil. She was calling attention to a factual phenomenon that she observed at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem . Second, the question obscures the most important aspect of Arendt’s thinking about evil. From the time that she discovered what was happening in the Nazi death camps—especially Auschwitz—until her death, she sought on a number of occasions to comprehend what was distinctive about Nazi evil. One needs to follow the twists and turns of her thinking to appreciate fully her subtle and complex reflections on evil. Third, the question obscures a distinction that is crucial for Arendt—the distinction between the doer and the deeds. “The banality of evil” describes the character and motivations of the doer (Eichmann), not his deeds—the monstrous actions that he committed, and for which he was fully responsible. She categorically rejected the “cog” theory—that Eichmann was simply a cog in a complex machine. Remember, she supported the court’s decision to hang Eichmann. The suggestion—still quite common—that Arendt was trivializing the evil of the Shoah by speaking about Eichmann’s banality is a slander. To justify my critical remarks, one has to say a few words about Arendt as a thinker. The metaphor that best characterizes Arendt’s style of thinking is “thought trains.”1 She was not a theoretician who proposed general and comprehensive theories. She pursued different thought trains; sometimes these intertwine and reinforce each other, and sometimes they conflict and even contradict each other. She was an independent thinker (Selbstdenker); she did Facing: Hannah Arendt’s notes on the front endpaper of her heavily annotated copy of Isaac Deutscher’s Stalin: A Political Biography. These notes highlight Arendt’s practice of intense engagement with a text by outlining and indexing the major themes on the front or back endpapers. The notes are in pencil and difficult to decipher, but they highlight sections in which Deutscher discusses his own Bolshevik past and suggest that Arendt thinks he excuses the Communists unduly for the turn to totalitarianism. Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Collection, Stevenson Library, Bard College. 132 Is Evil Banal? A Misleading Question not follow fashions or schools of thought. This is why she is still so thoughtprovoking —she makes us think. On any topic that she discusses—whether it is action, politics, freedom, or evil—there are various strands in her thinking that need to be carefully discriminated. This is emphatically true of her reflections on evil. If we turn to The Origins of Totalitarianism, we discover that she initially characterized Nazi evil as absolute or radical evil. And by radical evil, she means the evil of making human beings superfluous as human beings: Difficult as it is to conceive of an absolute evil even in the face of its factual existence, it seems to be closely connected with the intention of a system in which all men are equally superfluous. The manipulators of this system believe in their own superfluousness as much as that of all others, and the totalitarian murderers are all the more dangerous because they do not care if they themselves are alive or dead, if they ever lived or never were born. The danger of the corpse factories and holes of oblivion is that today, with populations and homelessness everywhere on the increase, masses of people are continuously rendered superfluous if we continue to think of our world in utilitarian terms.2 Arendt claimed that the concentration and death camps served as “laboratories ” for the Nazis: “The camps are meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human beings, but also to serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating , under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior and transforming the human personality into a mere thing, into something that even animals are not.”3 Arendt subsequently...

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