Evil and Appearances: Clarifying Arendtian Political Ontology

Abstract

<p> This thesis explores and clarifies Hannah Arendt' s conception of evil and its impact on her political theory. While following Arendt' s reflections on evil over the course of her career-from The Origins of Totalitarianism through Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Life of the Mind-I make the argument that the common thread in her apparently divergent accounts is a certain understanding of evil's negative ontology. I then demonstrate that Arendt's alternative "ontology of appearances" results in an account of "conscience" that prevents action based on cognitive certainty, and thus, evil. In the third chapter, I suggest that Arendt' s political theory, with its opposition to biological "life," is a direct response to totalitarianism's emphasis on animality and its de-emphasis on appearance. I claim furthermore that the difficulties of Arendt' s political thought (particularly her vacuous account of freedom and its troubling connection to immortality) are best explained in relation to her account of evil. On this point I suggest critically that her notion of political freedom is paralyzing or preventative in a way that resonates with her account of conscience. Finally, I propose that in seeking to articulate the meaning of immortalizing action, Arendt might have instead elucidated the difference between a totalitarian perversion of human desire, where desires become cognitive prescriptions, and a Platonic notion of properly erotic desire, where action manifests a desiring orientation to an independent object, but in a decisively non-totalitarian fashion.</p>