Today's question
Que. 11) "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."-Hannah Arendt. Comment.
Points -
• You must first understand what the question is about. It is based on Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘Banality of Evil’ and mention it in the introduction itself.
• You must then explain her way of thinking in context of this theory. • In the body, you must elaborate on how she believes that evil has become banal and also mention her works.
• In the conclusion, you can give her analysis of evil, and the importance of her theory.
Answer -
This statement relates to Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘Banality of Evil’, which came into prominence from her reportage on ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’, based on the trial of Adolf Eichmann.
his work marks a shift in her concerns from the nature of political action, to a concern with the faculties that underpin it - the interrelated activities of thinking and judging.
Her concern was to know the causes of evil, which she traced to the failure or absence of faculties of ‘critical thinking’ and judgement. From Eichmann’s trial, she concluded that he operated unthinkingly, following orders. The human dimension of these activities were not entertained, so the extermination of the Jews became indistinguishable from any other bureaucratically assigned and discharged responsibility.
In her later work ‘The Life of the Mind’, Arendt made the real message behind the given mentioned statement even more clear. Arendt held that that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” The problem for Arendt is, therefore, not a metaphysical “Evil” which enters our lives in some way or another but rather a “mere” lack of reflection on the morality of an action.
Thus, it was not the was not the presence of hatred that enabled Eichmann to perpetrate the genocide, but the absence of the ‘imaginative capacities’ that would have made the human and moral dimensions of his activities tangible for him.
Arendt’s thesis was that people who carry out unspeakable crimes, like Eichmann, may not be crazy fanatics (neither brilliant nor sociopaths) at all, but rather ordinary individuals who simply accept the premises of their state and participate in any ongoing enterprise with the energy of good bureaucrats.
Evil, according to Arendt, becomes banal when it acquires an unthinking and systematic character. Evil becomes banal when ordinary people participate in it, build distance from it and justify it, in countless ways. There are no moral conundrums or revulsions. Evil does not even look like evil, it becomes faceless.
Thus, Arendt helps us to understand the weight of collective responsibility: if evil is banal, then we all have a responsibility to eradicate it in our everyday lives. We can’t simply point the finger at others.
Motivational quote
"निंदा" से घबराकर अपने
"लक्ष्य" को न छोड़े
क्योंकि
"लक्ष्य" मिलते ही
निंदा करने वालों की
"राय" बदल जाएगी ।
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