Abstract

Now I maintain that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good. What sort of face does radical evil have? What strikes Hannah Arendt, as she sought to profile Adolf Otto Eichmann, is how completely ordinary he appeared in court. She describes him as medium-sized, middle-aged with receding hair, ill-fitting teeth, and nearsighted eyes. Yet this was the man who had meticulously organized the mass deportation of Jews to the extermination camps during the Holocaust. Like his appearance, his personality seemed so typical that it led her to coin the phrase the “banality of evil.” Paradoxically, banality can be so extraordinary to the point that Eichmann appeared completely impersonal and inhuman, which..