Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderPhilosophy idea

Hannah Arendt coined “the banality of evil” after reporting on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, a senior Nazi organiser of the Holocaust. She was struck by how he described enormous crimes in stock bureaucratic phrases, as if they were routine office work.

Philosophy

PhilosophyHistory

The story behind the card

Arendt (1906–1975) was a German-Jewish political thinker who fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and reached the United States in 1941. Eichmann had managed the deportation of millions of Jews to ghettos and death camps; after the war he escaped to Argentina, where Israeli agents captured him in 1960. Arendt covered his trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker, and her reports became the 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. By “banality” she did not mean the crimes were ordinary. She meant that Eichmann seemed neither a monster nor a fanatic, but a careerist who had stopped thinking about what his work meant. The book caused a storm, and later historians, using recordings Eichmann made in Argentina, showed he was a committed antisemite. He was executed in 1962.

Türkçe oku
Hannah Arendt “kötülüğün sıradanlığı” kavramını, Holokost'un başlıca Nazi örgütleyicilerinden Adolf Eichmann'ın 1961'deki davasını izledikten sonra ortaya attı. Eichmann'ın korkunç suçlarını sıradan bir büro işiymiş gibi, basmakalıp resmî sözlerle anlatması onu çok şaşırtmıştı.

Alman Yahudisi bir siyaset düşünürü olan Arendt (1906–1975), 1933'te Nazi Almanya'sından kaçtı ve 1941'de ABD'ye yerleşti. Eichmann, milyonlarca Yahudinin gettolara ve ölüm kamplarına sürülmesini yönetmişti; savaştan sonra Arjantin'e kaçmış, 1960'ta İsrailli ajanlarca yakalanmıştı. Arendt, Kudüs'teki davayı The New Yorker dergisi adına izledi. Yazıları 1963'te kitap olarak yayımlandı; kitap Türkçeye Kötülüğün Sıradanlığı: Eichmann Kudüs'te adıyla çevrildi. Arendt “sıradanlık” derken suçların sıradan olduğunu söylemiyordu. Eichmann'ın ne bir canavara ne de bir fanatiğe benzediğini, yaptığı işin ne anlama geldiğini düşünmeyi bırakmış bir kariyerci gibi göründüğünü anlatıyordu. Kitap büyük tartışma yarattı. Sonraki tarihçiler, Eichmann'ın Arjantin'de yaptığı ses kayıtlarına dayanarak onun koyu bir Yahudi düşmanı olduğunu gösterdi. Eichmann 1962'de idam edildi.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Banality of evil
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderPhilosophy

Socrates, the Athenian philosopher who died in 399 BC, left no writings of his own. We know him mainly through his students Plato and Xenophon, and through a comedy that mocked him while he was still alive.

Socrates (about 470–399 BC) taught by asking questions in the streets and squares of Athens, and at about 70 he was tried for impiety and for corrupting the young, and sentenced to death. Plato, his most famous student, made him the main speaker in dozens of dialogues, and Xenophon wrote memoirs of him. The playwright Aristophanes had already mocked him in The Clouds (423 BC) as a crank who teaches young men clever tricks of argument. The three portraits often disagree, and scholars call the difficulty of recovering the real man the 'Socratic problem'. His silence on the page may have been a choice: in Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates argues that writing weakens memory and that a written text cannot answer back when it is questioned.

Philosophy historyRead card
WonderPhilosophy

In Plato's allegory of the cave, prisoners chained all their lives watch shadows on a wall and take them for the whole of reality. When one is freed and sees the sun, he realises the shadows were only copies, but on his return the others mock him.

The allegory opens Book VII of Plato's Republic, written around 375 BC, as a conversation between Socrates and Plato's brother Glaucon. The prisoners face the back wall of a cave; behind them a fire burns, and people carry objects past it, so the prisoners see only moving shadows and hear echoes. The freed prisoner is at first dazzled and in pain, and only slowly learns to see real things and, at last, the sun. Plato uses the sun to stand for the Form of the Good, the highest truth in his theory that perfect, unchanging Forms lie behind the changing world we see. Back in the dark, the returning prisoner stumbles, and the others say the journey ruined his eyes; they would even kill anyone who tried to free them, a clear echo of Socrates' own execution.

PhilosophyRead card
WonderPhilosophy

In 343 BC King Philip II of Macedon hired the philosopher Aristotle to teach his 13-year-old son, the future Alexander the Great. For two or three years Aristotle taught him at Mieza, in what is now northern Greece.

Aristotle (384–322 BC) had close ties to the Macedonian court: his father, Nicomachus, had been physician to Philip's father, King Amyntas III. At Mieza he taught Alexander ethics, politics and literature, and young nobles such as Ptolemy, later king of Egypt, sometimes joined the lessons. According to the Greek biographer Plutarch, Alexander kept a copy of Homer's Iliad annotated by Aristotle under his pillow on campaign, next to his dagger. The lessons ended when Alexander, at 16, was left to govern Macedon in his father's absence. He became king in 336 BC and in thirteen years built an empire stretching from Greece to India. Aristotle returned to Athens and in 335 BC founded his own school, the Lyceum. In later years the two men grew apart.

Philosophy historyRead card
WonderPhilosophy

In The Second Sex (1949), the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir argued that becoming a woman is shaped not only by biology but by upbringing, social roles and institutions.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was a French philosopher and novelist and a leading figure of existentialism, the philosophy that people are not born with a fixed nature but make themselves through their choices. She wrote The Second Sex in about 14 months and published it in two volumes in 1949. Its best-known line, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”, sums up her argument: society treats man as the norm and woman as the “Other”, defined only in relation to him, and education, myth, law and work then teach girls that role. The book sold some 22,000 copies in its first week, was placed on the Vatican's list of forbidden books and became a founding text of the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Simone de BeauvoirRead card
WonderHistory

Ise Grand Shrine, the holiest site of Shinto, Japan's native religion, takes down its main sanctuaries every 20 years and rebuilds them exactly on the plot next door. The custom began in 690 and, despite some long interruptions, continues today; the next rebuilding is due in 2033.

The rebuilding is called Shikinen Sengū. Along with the buildings, the shrine's furnishings and sacred objects are made anew, and the wooden Uji Bridge at the entrance is rebuilt too. The timber is hinoki, a Japanese cypress. Power tools are not allowed within the shrine grounds, so the work falls to miyadaiku, carpenters trained in traditional shrine building; less experienced carpenters usually learn on the bridge before they work on the sanctuaries. Shinto calls the idea tokowaka, 'ever young': renewing a sacred building keeps it fresh and passes the skills from one generation to the next. The present buildings, from 2013, are the 62nd set. Wars have delayed the cycle more than once, most notably for over a century during Japan's civil wars of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Ise Shikinen SenguRead card
Next card in the archiveThe trolley problem asks whether you would pull a lever to divert a runaway trolley away from five people on the track, knowing it will then kill one person on a side track.Read next →