Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-18-2008

Comments

Dean's Lecture presented at St. Johns College on 4/18/08 in the Great Hall at Peterson Student Center at 8pm.

Abstract

After witnessing the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the chief bureaucrat at Auschwitz, Hannah Arendt identifies a “new problem of evil that rears its head in the twentieth century.” She calls this problem “the banality of evil: the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, that could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was perhaps extraordinary shallowness.”

Struck by the disproportion between the aim of the Final Solution and the petty motives of many of its executioners, Arendt wonders: If “the greatest evil” comes from “not-thinking” (or banality), is it possible that the activity of thinking for oneself has the power to keep us from participating in such evil – even in a perverse social context where “every legal act is immoral and every moral act a crime”? Arendt turns to Socrates to support her conclusion that thinking is an antidote to evil. We shall ask whether Arendt proves her case and manages to save the Western philosophical tradition from the brink of shipwreck.

 

The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author.