scholarly journals Hannah Arendt and Augustine of Hippo : On the Pleasure of and Desire for Evil*

2010 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 371-385
Author(s):  
Antonio Calcagno
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
Augustine Of Hippo ◽  
Untimely Death ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
Political Judgement ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Problem Of Evil ◽  
Human Desire ◽  
The Mind

Hannah Arendt wrote two volumes on thinking and willing in The Life of the Mind, but due to her untimely death her work devoted to judgement, especially political judgement, was never completed. We do, however, have a significant amount of writings on this theme as evidenced by her lectures on Kant’s Third Critique. Judgement and thinking are critical in order to prevent what Arendt calls the “banality of evil”. Drawing on Augustine and Arendt’s work on Augustine, this paper seeks to argue that another form of serious evil has its root in what Augustine calls the libido habendi and the libido dominandi, the desire or drive to dominate and possess. It will be argued that Arendt’s solution to the problem of evil as banal can also be applied to the very human desire and pleasure to cause or inflict evil.

The real banality of evil

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Regine Lamboy
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
The Real ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
Adolf Eichmann ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The University

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] When Hannah Arendt encountered Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem she was struck by the fact that his most outstanding characteristic was his utter thoughtlessness. This raised the questins of whether there might be a connection between thinking and abstaining from evil doing, which she explored in her last book The Life of the Mind. If there is indeed such a connection, there may be a class of people who might be led to abstain from evil doing if they can be persuaded to engage in thinking. This dissertation examines Arendt's success in establishing such a connection. Overall, her project does not really succeed. Her overly formal analysis of thinking wavers between a highly abstract and obscure conceptualization of thinking and a more down to earth definition. Ultimately she winds up stripping thinking of all possible content. .

scholarly journals The Legacy of Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-86
Author(s):  
Sabah Carrim
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
The Problem Of Evil ◽  
Adolf Eichmann

Contemporary thinkers such as Philip Zimbardo, Alexander Hinton and Elizabeth Minnich recently coined the terms Banality of Heroism, Banality of Everyday Thought, and Banality of Goodness respectively (without these concepts being the linchpins of their theses). These terms can be retraced to one thinker in particular who is constantly referred to by them: Hannah Arendt. Arendt’s Banality of Evil, a key concept in her work, was devised to discuss the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. This paper seeks to critically analyze these “banalities,” and ascertain whether they have contributed meaningfully to the existing literature on the problem of evil.

Muriel Spark and Evil

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan Hepburn
Keyword(s):  
Sustained Attention ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
Psychological Issue ◽  
Memento Mori ◽  
Personal Gain ◽  
Muriel Spark ◽  
The Problem Of Evil

Muriel Spark gave sustained attention to the problem of evil. In her view, people committed evil acts gratuitously, merely for the sake of causing suffering. By the same token, novels are virtually unthinkable without some degree of evil—or evil in its lesser forms, such as mischief, wickedness, or wanton cruelty. Using previously untapped archival materials, this chapter focuses on manifestations of evil in two of Spark’s novels: The Comforters, in which evil is an intrusion on privacy, and Memento Mori, in which the evil characters, Mabel Pettigrew and Eric Colston, manipulate, blackmail, and threaten others for personal gain. Spark’s speculations on evil must be understood in terms of philosophical and theological discussions at mid-century. For Spark, evil was not a psychological issue so much as a moral one. In this regard, her novels can be profitably read alongside works about evil by C. E. M. Joad, Jean Nabert, and Hannah Arendt.

Coleridge the Talker

2019 ◽  
pp. 115-132
Author(s):  
Karen Swann
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Social World ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind

This chapter explores Coleridge’s late career as a prodigious talker. An insistent strain in contemporary accounts of Coleridge’s talk suggests that his auditors recognized in his talking the dynamics of thinking itself: not a content that could be transported back from one’s encounter with him, but the rhythms of a mind in a state of radical non-relation to a social world with which it nonetheless “colludes,” in Thomas De Quincey’s words. Both Hannah Arendt, in The Life of the Mind, and William Hazlitt, in The Spirit of the Age, hold up this sort of thinking as a slender, rear-guard resistance that the purposelessness of thought can offer to an unthinking instrumentalism that functions to “reduce law to a system, and the mind of man to a machine,” in Hazlitt’s words. In his time, Coleridge became the figure of a thinking without limits, the bearer of a frail resistance to the modern social and political arrangements from which this thinking withdraws.

On thinking: Open letter to Hannah Arendt

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 159 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-34
Author(s):  
Agnes Heller ◽  
David Roberts ◽  
Peter Beilharz
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Open Letter ◽  
New School ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind

Thesis Eleven is honoured to be able to publish this text by our late friend and mentor Agnes Heller. It was secured in the period before her recent death, and is published now posthumously in her memory. Echoing her earlier text written as an Imaginary Preface to Arendt’s Totalitarianism, it responds to themes in the later text, The Life of the Mind. These were among the most eminent of the minds referred to later as Women in Dark Times. Their connection was not only institutional, via the New School, but represented a deep and ongoing affinity and critical engagement in political and philosophical terms. The imaginary letter arcs around issues and questions indicated by Cicero, Kant, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, including matters of republicanism, rhetoric and the question of thinking. Best of all, it shows Agnes Heller at work, at her best: it shows her thinking. Like Arendt, she offers inspiration, provocation, through thinking.

scholarly journals Ethical Monism and The Problem of Evil

1908 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-222
Author(s):  
B. A. G. Fuller
Keyword(s):  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
The Problem Of Evil ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Ethical Monism ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Perfect World

A favourite argument of the neo-Hegelian apologists for the appearance of evil in a perfect world is the contention that without evil good could not exist. By this we are to understand, not that evil is a sine qua non of the existence of the good, unavoidably incidental to its production and maintenance, but rather, indeed, that it is an indispensable factor in the very essence of perfection and positively contributive to its value. Unaltered in accidents yet changed in substance, it is, as it were, transubstantiated by an eternal act of consecration in the mind and purpose of God. That we neither perceive nor comprehend the miracle is due to our human limitations. Could we see things as God sees them, “under the aspect of eternity,” we should then understand how what we call sin and suffering and defeat and shame have their place in the economy of the whole, and provide, along with the other oppositions and conflicts in the world, the indispensable condition of that victorious battle with obstacles and limitations and that triumphant resolution of contradictories in higher syntheses in which the life and happiness of the absolute consists. So, though our partial and superficial experiences do not enjoy the triumph (and indeed cannot, since were we conquerors or indifferent to defeat there would be no evil to transcend), we may yet have faith that in our deepest and total self the victory has been won and peace attained. Thus God's ways are justified to man; and though the world is apparently full of evil, we are still entitled to believe it really good, and are able intelligently to account for and defend our belief.

Swinburne's Heaven: One Hell of a Place

1993 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 519-531
Author(s):  
Michael Levine
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Body Problem ◽  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
The Problem Of Evil ◽  
Mind Body Problem ◽  
Richard Swinburne ◽  
The Mind

Discussions of immortality have tended to focus on the nature of personal identity and, in a related way, the mind/body problem. (i) Who is that is going to survive, and (ii) is it possible to survive bodily destruction? There has been far less discussion of what immortality would be like; e.g. the nature of heaven. Richard Swinburne, however, has recently discussed ‘heaven’, and has constructed a novel theodicy fundamentally based on his conception of what heaven is like. I shall criticize both his conception of heaven – a conception he claims is consonant with the classical theistic one of Aquinas – and also his theodicy. I will argue that his theodicy reintroduces the problem of evil in connection with his idea of heaven – and does nothing to resolve it.

The Trinitarian Theology of Augustine and His Debt to Plotinus

1961 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 248-255
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Wassmer
Keyword(s):  
Saint Augustine ◽  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
Simple Solution ◽  
Latin Translation ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Doctrine Of The Trinity ◽  
The Problem Of Evil ◽  
Divine Mind ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Trinity

A Very powerful case has been made out for the influence of the Platonism of Plotinus upon Saint Augustine. From the Manichaean simple solution of the problem of evil Augustine was delivered by reading the neo-Platonists and especially Plotinus. It was Plotinus who convinced him that God was a spirit, not a luminous body, and he always remained grateful for this deliverance from the crude fantasies of the Manichaeans. In the two years before his conversion when he was receiving a deeper penetration into Christianity through the sermons of St. Ambrose, he came to know of Plotinus in a very few treatises of the Enneads (certainly I, 6 ‘On the Beautiful’ and quite probably V, 1 ‘On the Three Chief Hypostases’) in the Latin translation of Marius Victorinus. St. Ambrose made a determined effort to apply the principles of Plotinus' philosophy to the clarification of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity as against the Arians. The results of such an attempt might not be theologically satisfying but they are interesting. This impact of the mind of Plotinus upon the mind of Augustine was a decisive one because Augustine found a very great area of agreement between the teaching of Plotinus and that of the Scriptures as expounded by St. Ambrose, above all the Gospel of St. John. It was their agreement that God is spirit and altogether immaterial, as Plotinus explains, which liberated him from the Manichaean materialism. Augustine thought that Plotinus' teaching about the Divine Mind was identical with that of St. John about the Divine Logos.

scholarly journals «Rom» som metafor i utviklingen av (kritisk) tenkning: En diskusjon av begrepene «kritisk tenkning» og «etisk bevissthet» i læreplanens overordnede del i lys av Hannah Arendt

2020 ◽  
pp. 229-248
Author(s):  
Marianne Hustvedt
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
National Curriculum ◽  
Spatial Metaphors ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Pedagogical Literature

This article aims to discuss the key notions ‘critical thinking’ and ‘ethical consciousness’ in the new national curriculum in the light of the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s work The Life of the Mind. Much has been said about being critical, but not so much about thinking. It is the claim of the author that it is unclear in both the national curriculum and some of the pedagogical literature as to what characterizes thinking, and that this stems from a theoretical deficit for understanding the activity of thinking. The consequence is that concepts such as thinking and judgement are confused and thinking is instrumentalized. Hence the article proposes to see Arendt’s use of the metaphor ‘space’ and other spatial metaphors to determine hallmarks of the activity of thinking. A vital hallmark of Arendt’s work is the radical autonomy of thinking partly detached from judgment and instrumental purposes. The author thus attempts to give a critical but constructive contribution to the national curriculum’s description of thinking as ‘giving room for uncertainty and unpredictability’ which could be understood in light of Arendt’s thought.

The Trinitarian Theology of Augustine and His Debt to Plotinus

1960 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 261-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Wassmer
Keyword(s):  
Saint Augustine ◽  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
Simple Solution ◽  
Latin Translation ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Great Area ◽  
Doctrine Of The Trinity ◽  
The Problem Of Evil ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Trinity

A very powerful case has been made out for the influence of the Platonism of Plotinus upon Saint Augustine. From the Manichaean simple solution of the problem of evil Augustine was delivered by reading the Neo-Platonists and especially Plotinus. It was Plotinus who convinced him that God was a spirit, not a luminous body, and he always remained grateful for this deliverance from the crude fantasies of the Manichaeans. In the two years before his conversion when he was receiving a deeper penetration into Christianity through the sermons of St. Ambrose, he came to know of Plotinus in a very few treatises of the Enneads (certainly 1/6 “On the Beautiful” and quite probably V/1 “On the Three Chief Hypostases”) in the Latin translation of Marius Victorinus. St. Ambrose made a determined effort to apply the principles of Plotinus’ philosophy to the clarification of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity as against the Arians. The results of such an attempt might not be theologically satisfying but they are interesting. This impact of the mind of Plotinus upon the mind of Augustine was a decisive one because Augustine found a very great area of agreement between the teaching of Plotinus and that of the Scriptures as expounded by St. Ambrose, above all the Gospel of St. John.

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