Language:
English
Year of publication:
2009
Titel der Quelle:
History of European Ideas
Angaben zur Quelle:
35 (2009) 93-104
Keywords:
Arendt, Hannah,
;
Bauman, Zygmunt,
;
Holocaust (Jewish theology)
Abstract:
Arendt, reflecting on the Holocaust, inferred that evildoing was the result of an inability to think critically. She viewed perpetrators such as Eichmann as having refused to make moral judgments, and saw this refusal as rooted in an inability to think. Although Bauman followed Arendt in many respects, in particular in the call for critical thinking as a way out of evil, and was influenced greatly by her, he stressed morality. For him, resistance to evil is conditioned by following a pure ethics, which is not socially grounded and is completely independent from external legality. Arendt regarded the inability of thinking and totalitarianism itself as a rebellion against rationality, while Bauman saw it as an effect of modernity and cool rationality brought by it. Warns against following both Arendt's and Bauman's schemes in writing on the Holocaust, since the perpetrators' motivation and their relation to morality, the state, and its ideology might be more complicated.
DOI:
10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2008.07.010
URL:
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