Ryan Carolan: ”Grasping Contemporary Evil: Rethinking Arendt’s Radical Evil through Shelling’s Freedom Essay.”

Beskrivning:

In 1945, Hannah Arendt declared that ‘the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.’ But, as Bernstein noted years later, she was wrong, and most European intellectuals avoided the topic altogether.

However, following George Bush’s State of the Union address in 2002, the “Axis of Evil” became a core pillar of U.S. foreign policy. But, as Bernstein argues, rather than provoking genuine thinking as older philosophical, religious, artistic and literary inquiry tried to do, the post-9/11 discourse on evil has been underpinned by a “quasi-Manichean” (they are evil so we must be good) that stifles genuine thinking, and cultivates extremism and rewards unquestioned loyalty.

So what were Arendt’s views on evil? Arendt’s 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem was enormously influential, but it is less well known that the Origins of Totalitarianism, originally published in 1951, was informed by a different conception of evil: Radical Evil. In this talk, I will contrast these two conceptions of evil – thoughtlessness on the one hand; the ideological goal of making human freedom and morality superfluous on the other – in order to argue that banal evil alone could support, but could not have engineered, the holocaust.

Following this, I will situate these two depictions of evil within a broader history of Theodicy, with a specific focus on Schelling’s 1815 Essay on Human Freedom. Schelling’s intervention challenged the tradition view of evil as a negation of being, and argued that ‘the real and vital conception of freedom… that… is a possibility of good and evil.’ Thus, for Schelling, genuine freedom includes the possibility of being and doing evil.

This not only offers important context for Arendt’s own thoughts on radical evil, it provides genuine orientation in a world in which the realities of the ecological and climate crisis are being displaced by the AI dreams of the Silicone Valley tech bros.