Hannah Arendt

Evil and the atomization of the subject

Abstract

I start from a general conceptualization of how the problem of evil has been approached throughout the philosophical and religious tradition, as an ontological problem and concerned, in most cases, to a theodicy that tries to explain the existence of evil in the world. Next, I approach a new way of thinking about the problem of evil through the idealist thought of Immanuel Kant, who moved the problem in a different direction to the previous one, that is, stating that evil was not a problem located in reality, but in the subject as a being endowed with morality, residing in the most radical dimension of human nature. In Arendt, evil leaves the plane of the singular subject and begins to be understood as a political phenomenon. For the author, evil should not be a political phenomenon, however, with the rise of totalitarian movements and other phenomena that break with the thread of tradition, this problem begins to occupy the dimension of public life. In this way, the author's objective is to try to understand the conditions for thinking about evil as a political phenomenon, as well as what underpins it and guarantees legitimacy. The guiding thread of this article are the works Origins of totalitarianism (ARENDT, 2018) and the set of essays published in the period 1930-54 (ARENDT, 2008). The product of this analysis refers to the human experience of loneliness as a basis for evil in the political sphere.