Thinking can prevent evil

(Continuation from last issue)

"The banality of evil" is certainly one of the most famous phrases Hannah Arendt, which is often used successfully or unsuccessfully in contemporary discourse. It comes from the title of the book that caused great controversy - "Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil". The book was created as a collection of newspaper reports from the trial Adolf Eichmann for the American weekly New Yorker. Arenta's desire to face the evildoer and see evil up close didn't come true the way she thought it would. For her, the trial process itself was a kind of theater, which had little to do with the execution of the legal process, and the already convicted Eichmann did not have the characteristics of radical evil that everyone ascribed to him.

Namely, for Arendt, he was a representative of a banality of evil that falls into a person who does not think or does not have the capacity for expansive thinking, who does not have the ability to imagine the world from another's perspective. A man who does not think, does not self-reflect, cannot see or imagine the consequences of his actions. In this way, evil is extreme but not radical, because it has no depth of thought but follows the superficiality of human action, and that is why it was possible in such large numbers.

The difference between those who participated in the crime and those who managed to resist is their ability to reflect. Those who resisted wondered to what extent they could still live in this world after the atrocities committed. Arendt distinguishes between legal and moral problems, just as she distinguishes between thinking and reasoning. The Nazis did not break the law, but on the contrary, they followed the law they voted for, which was against moral principles. That is why Eichmann should have been tried morally and not legally. For her, the issue of war crimes is then illegal, and it is actually a question of sharing a common life in this same, common world. A person who has committed such things must be sentenced to death, because he has destroyed the basic principles of communal life: plurality. Her judgment is not legal but moral.

The truth was a very important thing for Hannah Arendt, especially after the publication of the book "Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil". "Is it always legitimate to communicate the truth?", is a question she dealt with in her later essays, concerned about the future of factual truth in the coming time. She feared that theories and axioms would survive rather than factual truth, which springs from the experience of real life and which requires public action, i.e. presentation. She believed that we must create a public space for our private thoughts. However, she did not see the truth as a stationary phenomenon, but on the contrary as something that is in constant motion and changes depending on the point of our intellectual progress. She considered it the duty of every thinking person to constantly question the positions of their own truths.

In her reflections on revolution, violence, identity politics, Hannah Arendt presented controversial and polemical thoughts during that time and, it seems, for this time as well. She separates social and political revolution, stating that the issue of social revolution is the issue of economic distribution, while the goal of political revolution is to fundamentally change the political model of action. For her, the French Revolution was social, and that's why it was unsuccessful as a political party, as it presented itself. The goal of every revolution must be freedom. But freedom is only possible when basic human needs are satisfied.

Plurality is for Arendt the basis of human society, and it must not be masked by the need for social equality. Poverty cannot be eradicated by politics, but by better distribution of goods. For something to be called radical today, it has to carry a completely new form of governance. It is not enough to replace someone else. In America, she saw the success of the revolution in terms of organizing people at the local level, which, however, became less and less due to the privatization of public space.

She witnessed various social and political struggles during the last century in the USA, which often recognized violence as a legitimate means. She could not justify the violence. For Arendt, "the goal of politics is to generate power and violence destroys power, so violence cannot be an effective model. When politicians use violence, it does not strengthen their power, but weakens it". She did not consider herself a feminist, a Marxist, or a Zionist. She was against identity politics. For Arendt, politics cannot be organized around an identity, because then it tries to generate a universal subject, which is marked "only" by one of its characteristics. No one can belong to a political movement just because they are a woman, a Jew, an African American, etc.

Hannah Arendt died on December 4, 1975 at the age of 69, five years after the death of her husband, in her apartment in New York, after serving dinner to her friends. The final chapter "Reasoning" in "The Life of the Mind" was found in the typewriter. Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blicher they had no children because, as they said, the times in which they lived were difficult and uncertain.

Hannah Arendt made a clear distinction between "who" is and "what" a person is. "What" we are is given to us by birth or living in a community, and "who" we become throughout our lives through our thoughts, feelings and actions. Arendt was a Socratic, noble thinker. Open to dialogue and driven by a great love for life and the world. Her love for man led her to believe that thorough thinking can prevent evil. She thought that deep and broad thoughts could not think of evil, but as the end product always carry good. She believed in the great possibilities of the mind. She loved people and realized herself through them. Touching closeness with friends, famous poets, philosophers, notaries of that era, made it possible for her to belong to society. Kunderin the thesis that friendship is one of the highest virtues is vividly illustrated by Hannah Arendt. Her erudition, a great essential knowledge of poetry, philosophy, politics and art, which is reflected in numerous essays, gave her a breadth that is still difficult to fully comprehend even today. For me, Hannah Arendt is a poetic thinker. Like good poets, she brings to light those things that we were surrounded by, and we never understood and felt them as well as in the verses. Hannah Arendt created new meanings. Her immortality teaches us that the world and our own life should be thought through and created anew.

(The end)