Comments On Hannah Arendt’s Notion Of "the Banality Of Evil"

Hannah Arendt is a witness of dark times in 20th, and thinking of evil runs through all her life. She puts forward the controversial concept of evil of banality which points out that Eichmann is a thoughtless person, and things behind his heinous crime may just some shallow and hollow motivations of his. The evil of banality is a deeper thinking of the radical evil that Ms. Arendt puts in her early age. Radical evil analyses the extremely terror of the totalitarian regime, then evil of banality reveals the satiation that western traditional ethics is falling in crisis. The evil of banality is born under the circumstances that the public realm is disappearing in modern society, men’s action and ethic are split with the public realm, finally the glory of the ethic extinguishes, and directly reflects that humanity was devastated in the totalitarian system. Ms. Arendt does not confine her analysis of modern crisis under the basic institutional framework of modern society; instead she criticizes from western metaphysic political tradition which starts from Plato. In order to resist the evil of banality, Ms. Arendt leads the answer to thinking, especially the judging which is full of political significance. Finally, the paper discusses the way that Ms. Arendt analyzes the evil of banality, and points out the limitations of research methods of Arendt’s political philosophy.