What Is Evil According To Hannah Arendt?

Good and evil are ideas we develop throughout our lives. When thinking of someone as 'evil,' many people imagine someone who is weak-willed or who has malicious intentions. By taking a look at a 'villain' in any children's book, we can see these themes. However, evil does not always look this way, particularly in totalitarian regimes. A philosopher who pointed this out and challenged conventional ideas of evil was Hannah Arendt.

Hannah Arendt is often considered one of the greatest, yet one of the most controversial thinkers, of the twentieth century. Arendt famously coined the term 'banality of evil.' Her ideas on evil specifically explain and define the evil that took place during Nazi Germany. Here, we will explore Arendt's ideas about evil and how they apply to the world today.

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Who Was Hannah Arendt?

Hannah Arendt was a German-Jewish philosopher who left her mark on the world with her philosophy about evil. She was born in 1906 in Germany and left her country in 1933 to live in Paris. Throughout her life, she worked at various Jewish refugee organizations and later moved to the United States. There, she got involved in the world of academia. She wrote three major books in her lifetime: The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem. She also wrote essays on topics such as revolution, freedom, authority, tradition, and the modern age. Her writing had a major impact on the world, not just in academia. Arendt got people talking about evil and the unexplainable horrors that perpetuated fascist regimes. The question of how something as horrible as the Holocaust could happen was the inspiration for her philosophical work.

The Eichmann Trial

A large portion of Arendt's work on evil comes from her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. The book reports on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. He was a German-Austrian official of the Nazi Party and one of the organizers of the Holocaust. Arendt's hope in studying Eichmann's trial was to understand evil better and, ultimately, totalitarianism. In studying the trial, Arendt came up with the idea of the 'Banality of Evil' and explored the role of passivity in enabling the horrors that happened under Eichmann's watch.

What is The Banality of Evil?

Banality means that something is commonplace and trite. The 'banality of evil' essentially means the commonplaceness of evil. This might seem like a ridiculous or dramatic statement. However, Arendt's point is that there is something commonplace about the type of evil in totalitarian regimes. Arendt draws attention to the fact that certain types of evil, such as the Holocaust, require a lot of ordinary processes to happen. For example, these processes include paperwork, transportation services, and government officials setting up meetings. These all require people to just do their jobs as normal. This does not look like evil in the way we normally imagine it.

Totalitarian Evil

Most of the time, we think of evil as a deviance from normal behavior, something that people who have a weak will or who are malicious become. However, Arendt's banality of evil points out that evil is not always out of the normal. In the totalitarian context, evil is often the normal. Not everyone in a totalitarian regime is directly killing someone or causing someone suffering. Instead, people are merely doing their jobs. This allows people to dissociate from the consequences of their actions. After all, people are "just doing their job."

Evil in The Modern World

Signing paperwork, driving a train, setting up an appointment, or answering the phones aren't inherently evil tasks. However, in a totalitarian regime, these tasks can contribute to evil. In the past, evil actions such as genocide involved violence and weapons. There was an obvious appearance of evil in the actions. However, in the modern world, what Arendt's philosophy alludes to is that evil does not always look like this.

Totalitarian regimes depend on the order of society to carry out their plans. Everyone part of the system becomes part of the order and conformity that defines totalitarian evil. Totalitarian evil is so different from other types of evil because it is an efficient system that is organized and legal. This allows evil on an unprecedented scale. Since this does not look like evil in the traditional sense we imagine, the evil often continues longer.

Eichmann, an Example of The Banality of Evil

In covering the trial of Eichmann, Arendt concluded that he was a strange person who was especially thoughtless. While the media portrayed him as malicious, Arendt believed his evil was a result of the banality of evil. She saw him as a government bureaucrat doing his job, looking to advance his career. This idea was controversial, and she faced harsh criticism for her philosophy. Some people even claimed she was diminishing the horrors of the Holocaust. However, her philosophy was not an excuse for his behavior. Instead, it was an idea to be wary of. If Eichmann was a thoughtless government bureaucrat who committed horrors in the Holocaust in looking to advance his career, what would stop other people from doing the same thing in the future?

Not Just About Bureaucrats

Ultimately, Arendt believed the banality of evil emerges when people turn a blind eye to the suffering of others. Whether it is a politician looking to advance their career or an accountant obsessed with numbers, the banality of evil emerges where bureaucracies lose sight of humanity. Reading this, some people might think this is only a problem for power-hungry politicians and bureaucrats. However, this is far from the truth. In the Holocaust, there were all sorts of people required to do all sorts of jobs to make the genocide operational. If Hannah Arendt's philosophy is true, everyone can be affected by the banality of evil.

Why Learn About This

Imagine a time you were working and disagreed with a task you had to do. Maybe you had to repeat a company slogan you did not believe in, fire someone, throw something useful away, cover up an unethical mistake, or do something else you fundamentally disagreed with. Did you do the task anyway? If the answer is yes, you can imagine the banality of evil in action. These are all smaller examples with less dire consequences than genocide. However, these examples show how it can be easy to ignore your own morals in the name of a job. What Arendt's philosophy about evil teaches us is the importance of being vigilant and responsible for our actions. It can be easy to slip into thoughtlessness, following along with someone else's orders. However, by having our own moral compass and showing an unwillingness to lose sight of humanity, we can hopefully stop ourselves from becoming a part of totalitarian evil.