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The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (1978)

Philosophy

The story behind the card

The sentence is from 'Thinking', the first part of The Life of the Mind, which Arendt left unfinished when she died in 1975; her friend Mary McCarthy edited it for publication in 1978. It returns to the idea she is best known for, the 'banality of evil'. Reporting on the 1961 Jerusalem trial of the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, Arendt concluded that he was not a monster but a thoughtless bureaucrat. Great harm, she argued, often comes from people who never stop to think about what they are doing.

Türkçe oku
İşin acı yanı şu ki kötülüğün çoğunu, kötü ya da iyi olmaya, kötülük ya da iyilik yapmaya hiçbir zaman karar vermemiş insanlar yapar.
Hannah Arendt, Zihnin Yaşamı (1978)

Cümle, Arendt'in 1975'teki ölümüyle yarım kalan Zihnin Yaşamı'nın ilk bölümü “Düşünme”den. Kitabı dostu Mary McCarthy yayına hazırladı ve eser 1978'de çıktı. Arendt burada en çok bilinen fikrine, “kötülüğün sıradanlığı”na geri döner. 1961'de Kudüs'te yargılanan Nazi yetkilisi Adolf Eichmann'ın davasını izlerken, Eichmann'ın bir canavar değil, düşünmeyen bir bürokrat olduğu sonucuna varmıştı. Ona göre büyük kötülükler çoğu zaman yaptıklarını hiç durup düşünmeyen insanlardan gelir.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Hannah Arendt
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