Dear all,
Chenghui Ma (visiting from Fudan University and Mudanjiang Normal University)
will be giving a talk next Friday, 8 November, on "Why Arendt was Right - A
General Introduction to the Banality of Evil and Defence of It". The abstract
of the talk is given below.
The meeting will be held in our usual time and location, 11-12:30 in the
Philosophy Faculty Board Room. Chenghui will speak for around 20-30 minutes,
followed by discussion. All are very much welcome.
With best wishes,
Senthuran Bhuvanendra
(PhD student, Philosophy Faculty)
Why Arendt was Right
―― A General Introduction to the Banality of Evil
and Defence of It
A renewed debate on the effectiveness of Arendt’s concept of the banality of
evil was initiated because of Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem:
The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murder, which applied historical materials about
Eichmann unused before the Jerusalem trial, arguing that Eichmann was never a
banal or a thoughtless person, but quite a crafty man who could “reinvent
himself at every stage of his life, for each new audience and every new alarm”.
Richard Wolin, who constantly takes a position divergent from Arendt’s,
immediately cited Stangneth’s comment that ‘Eichmann-in-Jerusalem was little
more than a mask’, pointing out that “Eichmann gave the performance of his
life, and Hannah Arendt was entirely taken in.” “If previous researchers have
seriously dented Arendt’s case, Ms. Stangneth ‘shatters’ it”, said Deborah E.
Lipstadt, a historian at Emory University and the author of a book about the
Eichmann trial. There were also some views in defence, in the meantime, from
Arendt’s supporters, such as Seyla Benhabib and Roger Berkowitz. In my view,
the critics were not right and their propositions are not sufficient to deny
the theoretical grounds of “the banality of evil”.
What I am going to demonstrate is not only the genuine meaning of the concept
but also its philosophical orientation that leads Arendt to Kant’s theory of
judgment and her last work, The Life of the Mind.
(1) In the first part, my talk will focus on the several different concepts
which Arendt applied to explicate her understanding of the modern phenomenon of
evil, especially “radical evil” and “the banality of evil”; (2) The following
part will try to illuminate why “the banality of evil” matters to Arendt, in
the sense of its counter connotations to Arendt’s fundamental ideas on the
being of humans; (3) Subsequently, the third part is supposed to indicate the
reason why this concept denotes Arendt’s “venture from the relatively safe
fields of political science and theory into these rather awesome
[philosophical] matters,” that is to say, to the theories of Kant, to some
extent.
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