| The study attempts to re-think the sense and significance of Hannah Arendt's engagement with the question of evil, and to bring out the hitherto concealed relation that obtains between this question and Arendt's celebrated theory of political action. It is argued that Arendt's engagement must be located on the philosophical plane, and that notwithstanding Arendt's deflationary language, her contribution must be grasped as a response to that powerful line of thinking about evil that begins with Kant and Schelling and culminates in Heidegger's ontological investigations. To speak of the 'question of evil' in Arendt is, of course, to speak of a lengthy path, a notoriously winding path marked by numerous complicated twists and turns, suspensions and displacements, and (at least the appearance of) a single decisive break or reversal. In speaking of a concealed relation, the author does not mean to suggest that at a certain isolable juncture on this path, the confrontation with evil suddenly intersects with an extrinsic concern and prompts Arendt to raise the question of political action. Rather, once Arendt's theory of political action is itself understood in its full radicality; once it is wrenched away from its fashionable interpretation as a systematic renewal of the Aristotelian praxis, and its essentially post-traditional starting point and intention is recognized; then it becomes possible, as it were, to overthrow the entrenched opposition of 'radical' and 'banal' evil that has structured virtually every philosophical interpretation of Arendt on evil, and which has effectively prevented us from appreciating the real stakes of Arendt's thought. It becomes possible, from the vantage point of what Arendt calls the 'brokenness' of tradition, to subject this opposition to a thorough investigation as to its roots, its characteristic metaphors, its assumptions, its firmness. Moreover, and perhaps for the first time, it becomes possible to grasp the surprising continuity that links Arendt's earliest thoughts on evil to her last, from the initial meditations on Nazism and 'absolute evil' to her very late reflections on mental processes, and their possible conditioning of man against evildoing. |
