THE SHALLOW WATERS OF EVIL – ARENDT AND KANT

Abstract

In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) Hannah Arendt will introduce a concept of radical evil as an historical appearance of something “we actually have nothing to fall back on in order to understand, a phenomenon that confronts us with its overpowering reality and breaks down all standards we know”. Arendt will not insist on her initial conception of radical evil and in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem a Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), the radical evil will be replaced by the banality of evil. According to this last view “evil is a surface phenomenon, and instead of being radical, it is merely extreme”, is “thought defying,” and that is its “banality.” Only the good has depth and can be radical. Arendt contrasts this banality with her own former conception of radical evil as also with Kant’s conception of radical evil (the latter wrongly in our opinion). In this paper, we will try to show the conceptual closeness between the banality of evil in Arendt and radical evil in Kant, as well as the radicality of good in Arendt as equal to the acquisition of good character in Kant’s Religion. Henry Allison claims that “Kant, by ‘radical evil’, does not mean a particular, especially perverse, form of evil but rather the root or ground of the very possibility of all moral evil.” In Kant, radical evil is deflationed from political and religious empirical elements. The term seems to be an olive branch which Kant offers to the church and the doctrine of original sin which he deconstructs in Religion as meaningless in time while he accepts its limited value in reason (morally). Evil for Kant is something that simply exists in the radix of our choices, as a propensity, the same as good does. Kantian radical evil acquires the banal aspect of evil character. For Kant, Eichmann has an evil heart the same way a thief has it. That’s why it is the Arendtian banality of evil that comes closer to Kantian radical evil. On the other hand, good heart for Kant demands our struggle to acquire it. That’s why the radicality of good in Arendt seems to be on a par with the acquisition of good heart in Kant.