In this dissertation we will try to show how to understand evil that is happenig in the world and how to accept its existence. We will reexamine how Hannah Arendt thought about evil. The evil she writes about is embodied in totalitarian regimes. She does not adress it directly through religious or theological descriptions of sin and evil. Nevertheless, as we will try to show, her thought often approaches the thought of Aurelius Augustine in his conception of evil as a »privatio boni«. We wanted to undesrtand how she moved from defining evil as radical to defining it as banal: what led to it, and how much did her understanding of Augustine and his metaphysical construction of evil versus good influenced her view of evil. Why, until the trial of Adolf Eichmann, she spoke of radical evil, which with all its intermediate stages led to the Holocaust, and after the trial of banality of evil – which at first glance is the complete opposite of the concept of radical evil. Reading works of Hannah Arendts will show us that we are more often threatened by those who are indifferent, weak, decieved in their actions, than those with truly evil intentions. With the trial report, Arendt challenged the moral and judicial concepts that shaped the war crimes tribunal. Judging evil on conceptualy outdated individual responsibilities, personal integrity, and individual intentions was dangerous, especially because it thereby avoided the fundamental philosophical questions posed by the Holocaust. It was necessary to rethink our undesrstanding of how is moral consciousness of the individual so easily entwined in moral change in society.
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