Hannah Arendt on evil: what can we learn from her today? - with Marci Shore
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Shall we talk about evil? Some might argue that this concept is outdated in our relativistic age. And yet, how can we speak of war crimes, cruelty or the neglect of human dignity without invoking the word evil? Perhaps it's time to take it seriously again, to revisit the thinkers who have grappled with its meaning. One of them, of course, is Hannah Arendt.

This is a conversation about Hannah Arendt and the concept of evil, which took place in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, on June 1st, 2025, at the Kyiv Book Arsenal, one of the country's major literary events. Despite the ongoing war, the fair was full of people. My guest was Marcia Shore, an American intellectual, historian and university professor. She specializes in 20th century European intellectual history with a particular focus on Hannah Arendt.

This year, Marci co-curated the Kyiv Book Arsenal focus topic alongside Oksana Forostyna.

My name is Volodymyr Yermolenko. I am a Ukrainian philosopher, the chief editor of Ukraine World and the president of PEN Ukraine. Ukraine World is an English-language media outlet about Ukraine run by Internet Ukraine. You can support our work at patreon.com/UkraineWorld. Your support is vital for us as we increasingly rely on crowdfunding. Even a small donation can make a big difference.

You can also help fund our regular volunteer trips to Ukraine's frontline areas where we provide aid to both soldiers and civilians, mainly by delivering vehicles for the military and books for local communities. To support these efforts you can donate via PayPal. You will find these links in the description of this episode. So let's begin.

So we're going to start our discussion and I would like us to give a very warm welcome to Marcie Shore, please. So Marcie is a North American historian, philosopher, intellectual. I say North American because she's currently professor at Yale University, but she's moving to the University of Toronto to Canada.

And you definitely know her for a wonderful book about Ukraine, The Ukrainian Knight. But I also very advise to you her course at Yale University about the intellectual history of the 20th century from Nietzsche. And this is a wonderful course which is available online on podcasting platforms, but also on YouTube.

And you can learn a lot about everything that has happened in the European intellectual history since Nietzsche onwards. And one of the key figures in that course is Hannah Arendt. So today we are going to talk about the question of evil in Hannah Arendt because Hannah Arendt is a very important thinker right now for Ukrainians. There are lots of concepts of Hannah Arendt that we try to apply and we try to rethink.

Another thing is that this year is the 50th anniversary of her death. She died in 1975. So if my math is correct, this is precisely the 50 years, half of the century. A lot of her works actually comes from the post-World War II era.

And I'm reading and rereading her wonderful work, "The Origins of Totalitarianism," about which Marcy says a lot in her lecture about Hannah Arendt in this course at Yale. There is also, of course, the fundamental book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, about the concept of the banality of evil.

There is a wonderful book which is called Men in Dark Times, which inspired myself to call the podcast Thinking in Dark Times. There is a wonderful book about us, about humans, the human condition. And there is a wonderful book about revolutions and all and all and all and all.

But today I really want us to talk about evil, because this is a question that Ukrainians are asking themselves very often. Let me ask you, Marcy, just to give us a general remark, how important Hannah Arendt is to understand not only the 20th century, but also the 21st century. Well, I should first say that Hannah Arendt was one of my first loves and most long-lasting loves.

I discovered her when I was a first-year, second-year university student. I was 19. And I have been thinking with her and reading her and rereading her since then. And at all moments of trauma and historical catastrophe, I always feel this impulse to go back to her. After the 2016 American elections happened,

which were so catastrophic, I immediately changed all my teaching plans for the following semester. And I thought, okay, we're all going to go back and reread Origins of Totalitarianism. Well, for me, rereading. For my students, reading for the first time. We're going to read it from the beginning. We're going to read it for the end. We're going to read Eichmann in Jerusalem. We're going to really think

intensely, you know, about how morality breaks down, under what conditions does morality break down and how is evil possible. And she remains for me, you know, all these decades later you go through so many different stages of your intellectual life, she remains to me a kind of point of grounding and clarity. So one of the concepts of origins of totalitarianism is the concept of radical evil.

She doesn't talk about this very much in detail. I think she mentions this concept just a few times. But then the definition is like illuminating for me because she says that radical evil is making people superfluous. And I also translate it as making people replaceable.

And you talk in your lecture about Hannah Arendt, I think you brilliantly and beautifully talk about how the totalitarianism are erasing the subjectivity of human beings. Can you elaborate on that? No, that's great. Maybe I'll start out with some of the definitions because we're just assuming not everyone here has been obsessively rereading Arendt the way Volodya and I have been obsessively rereading Arendt.

So Hannah Arendt ends Origins of Totalitarianism with comments about crimes that can neither be punished nor forgiven. And she uses the phrase radical evil, which in some ways comes from Kant, although Kant's...

The idea of radical evil is not particularly radical and is somewhat dissatisfying. It has to do with instead of acting according to your sense of moral duty, you act according to your capricious whims. But the deeper definition, what Volodya is referencing that comes back at different points in "Origins of Totalitarianism" is her idea of superfluous people. How are people made superfluous?

And there are various ways she discusses that people are made superfluous. She has a very famous argument about statelessness at the end of the First World War, the phenomenon of all of these refugees without passports.

She says that we now know that there really is no such thing as the rights of man. The famous French Revolution declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen somehow assumed that man and citizen were the same.

And Arendt says it turns out that in the absence of citizenship, in the absence of any kind of state guaranteeing those rights, they're meaningless and there is no guarantor of human rights and people are being treated like nothing. So there's this legal concept of what happens when people turn into superfluous people. But then she also talks in a kind of more philosophical sense about this eradication of subjectivity.

What does it mean to, and she makes a very controversial claim that by the time the Jews were led to the gas chambers, they were already dead, that their selves had been extinguished. And she makes a related very controversial claim that what totalitarianism was aiming at was the destruction of subjectivity

on behalf of both victim and executioner, of both victim and perpetrator, so that anyone could be equally suited for either role because there's no longer a real self there.

It's very important that we start on this very conceptual thing to understand the whole context because our idea with Marcie is to clarify the basic notions of Hannah Arendt and then to understand what is applicable now, whether she can help us to describe what is going on now. So let's place her in the history of thought.

She's a Jewish thinker, Jewish German thinker. She emigrates when Hitler comes to power. She says that the key thing for her is the news about Auschwitz that comes in 1943. And then she starts writing these origins of totalitarianism in the late 40s. So basically her thought is just, is the thought of a witness of the Second World War. Can you tell me more about this?

So Arendt was from Konigsberg, and she's coming from assimilated German Jewish family. She famously, or infamously, depending on one's point of view, studies with Heidegger at the University of Marburg, and then goes on to study with Karl Jaspers, which is also a very significant relationship in Heidelberg. And she's in Germany in 1933 when the Nazis take power. She's briefly arrested.

And when she gets out of prison, she leaves. She goes first to France and then eventually she goes to the States. And she does an interview I find every time I go back and re-listen to it and re-read it, a kind of extraordinary interview with someone named Gauss back in Germany in the early 50s, where she tells this story.

And she says, well, for me, the real moment of shaking was not 1933 when the Nazis came to power and as a Jew I had to flee Germany. For me, the moment was 1943 when I was in the United States and we learned about Auschwitz. She thought all sorts of things can be forgiven in politics. The way in which...

States have conflicts with one another, you know, and life goes on. But she said this was different. This is not something that can ever be gotten over or forgiven. And her preoccupation then is understanding that. Understanding how that was possible, understanding what that means, understanding how we go on, you know, given that we know that's possible.

And coming back to this biographical element, she publishes "Origins of Totalitarianism", which basically says that there are lots of commonalities between Nazism and Stalinism, which was a heretic thought at that time, because a lot of people thought that, well, Soviet Union is also on the side of the good.

And the end of the Second World War was the victory of the good against evil. And somehow Soviet Union is a part of the good. And therefore there were lots of leftist thinkers in 1950s, 1960s, who were saying that the good also comes from the communism and the Soviet Union.

I find it still very difficult in Germany and some other countries to take upon this argument that basically, yes, Nazism is absolute evil, but Stalinism and Communism was absolute evil too. So how do you think the legacy of that book, which was so illuminating in early 1950s, but then so much put under question later?

You make an interesting point because one of the things I love about Arendt

is the independence of her thinking. She is someone that you can't easily describe as being conservative or being a leftist or being X or Y. She reads Marx very seriously, reads Heidegger very seriously, reads Hegel very seriously. She reads everyone very seriously and then she takes what seems important to her and she doesn't feel like it has to fit in with some larger political project.

And it's a kind of uncanny perspicacity that she has about that. And her, I mean, I've been preoccupied with phenomenology for a long time. I'm finishing a book on phenomenology. And so to me, a lot of what I see her doing with Nazism and Stalinism is phenomenological. So this idea of can you look at a phenomenon? Can you look at something that's happening? And can you describe exactly what you see?

as precisely as possible. Can you take a step back and say, what am I seeing here? And I feel like that's what she's doing in that book. And of course, she doesn't see Stalinism as well as she sees Nazism because she lived in Nazism and she never lived in Stalinism. But she has a kind of uncanny ability to

to grasp at those anecdotal moments of illumination, like what happens when everybody is informing on everyone else? What happens when you no longer need spies because the whole society has been induced to spy on one another? How does atomization work? She was very interested in how atomization worked. And what happens to the self?

in these kinds of circumstances. I mean, she has this definition of the mob and the masses. And she says, when the masses finally come onto the political stage, as liberalism had been waiting anxiously since the Enlightenment, it turns out that they are led there not by the liberals but by the mob. And what is the mob? The mob is this dark underside of the bourgeoisie. And then she has this famous passage

where she talks about Brecht's Three Penny Opera and how the mob pulls the curtain on bourgeois hypocrisy and the bourgeoisie takes delight in the exposure of their own hypocrisy. And I think what she's trying to do there, and I think this is what she's trying to do in the Eichmann book too, is something that Husserl tries to do. And I feel like this is a very big audience. I don't want to subject you to too much Husserl. But so Husserl has this idea, for instance, that

you first engage in intense exhaustive description of what you see, precisely what you see. Can you really see what's in front of you? Which sometimes is the hardest thing to do. Sometimes we can't see the thing that's right in front of us. So imagine you have an apple, for instance. There's an apple on the table. And you can engage in an exhaustive description of exactly how that apple looks. And there's a little bit of red and a little bit of green and maybe a brown spot and it's kind of tilted.

But he says there's also something that is a kind of almost platonic essence of apple-ness, that is unchanged from one apple to another. So there's the irreducibility of the particular that can be described empirically, and then there's that universal essence of apple-ness that you extract.

from the description of the particular. And that, I think, is what she's trying to do in the Eichmann book, this exhaustive description of Eichmann and can you extract a kind of universal essence of evil. And I think she's trying to do that in a different way in Origins as well. Let me, you already touched upon this, so let us talk about the book which is probably the most famous Arendt's book about Eichmann, Eichmann in Jerusalem.

And I would like, I would ask you to connect this idea of radical evil in Origins of Totalitarianism and the idea of banal or banality of evil in the Eichmann book. Now this is probably her most famous concept. So she's really, Origins is a big book, yeah, and it goes through a lot of historical stages and a very complex argument about how we get to Nazism and Stalinism.

The Eichmann book, which was so much more controversial. I mean, she's still hated for that book. That book tore apart New York intellectual life, which has never recovered from it. But for those of you who don't know the story,

Yeah, so Adolf Eichmann, who was the kind of organizer of the final solution to kill all the Jews in Europe. So he wasn't the person, he wasn't the ideologue who thought of the idea, but he was the kind of the bureaucrat who was charged with carrying it out in very practical terms. You know, you have, you want to...

If you want to murder a few million people, you've got to organize trains, you've got to organize gas chambers. There's a lot of logistical organizational labor that goes on for something like that. And after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Adolf Eichmann escapes to Argentina and is living under a different name.

And the Israeli Mossad, the Israeli secret service, is looking for this guy for years and years. And they finally find him in 1961, I think it is, and illegally kidnap him in Argentina and bring him back to Israel to stand trial. And this is going to be the show trial that will also educate a whole next generation about what the Holocaust was.

And so they get Eichmann, they put him on trial in Israel, they get three Israeli judges who are native German speakers, which is important because they're listening to him speak in his own language. And Arendt then goes to Jerusalem to cover the trial for the New Yorker.

to report on that trial. And it's also very significant that she's listening to her native language. A lot of that book is her sensitivity to the language that she's listening. And she listens to Eichmann try to defend himself. And what completely shakes her is the discrepancy between the monstrosity of the crime and the total mediocrity of the man.

What is shocking about Eichmann is that he's totally ordinary, completely banal, doesn't particularly hate Jews, was a bureaucrat interested in self-advancement. If you perform your job well, you know, and you're obedient to your superiors, that facilitates your job advancement and your social mobility.

She said he was incapable of uttering a single word that was not a cliche. She says what was striking about him was his failure to think.

And this will turn out to be, for Arendt, I think, the greatest crime. And the source of evil is the failure to think. Maybe we should pick up on that. So let us, I think we kind of contextualize all that. And let's try to understand how these concepts work for us, for the present moment. One thing that I feel, which is kind of a...

which is probably not correct, is when people only look at Arendt through the concept of banality of evil. Because for us, the banality of evil is, of course, a very important concept, because we see in the Russian army this attitude. There are lots of, you know, there are conversations with the Russians, prisoners of war, in which they show themselves as

as Eichmanns, as people unable to think, as people unable to ask questions, as people very banal, as people ready to kill a lot of others just for the sake of money or because of orders or because of everything else. But then what I think is that you can only understand this thinking about evil if you connect these two concepts, the radical evil and the banal evil, because both of them are about being superfluous.

being unnecessary, being replaceable. And then you see these bad guys who organized the Holocaust, who organized the Russian invasion of Ukraine, who organized the massacres in Bosnia, etc., etc. But then in order

in order these crimes to be implemented, because they are implemented on the industrial scale, you need a whole machine to implement these crimes. You cannot just fantasize about it. As we say, it's not Putin who is killing Ukrainians, you know, it's lots of lots of other people. My question to you is that

If you understand Eichmann and this concept of banality of evil only as an idea that evil is banal, you don't really understand the Arendt's thinking because Eichmann is a person who is superfluous because his argument is that

If I'm not doing that, everybody else will be doing that. If I'm not organizing the deportation of Jews and transportation of them to the gas chambers, somebody else will do that. So he does not perceive himself as a personality who is responsible for his actions. Would you agree with that? Yeah, no, and I... I mean, I've also been... I think this is something we've both been preoccupied with, you know, through this time.

The crisis of subjectivity. You and Tanya wrote about crime without punishment and punishment without crime. And you said, okay, the problem in Russian is that you have these people who can commit any horrific crime with total impunity. You know,

and bear no responsibility. Then you have the masses of people who can be punished or taken away for no reason at all, and so also have no sense of responsibility because in either way, there's no responsible subject there. I feel like that is at the heart of both of the things she's talking about in those books. What does it mean to be a responsible subject? What does it mean to take responsibility?

And that does seem to me totally central to what is going on now. So coming back to this banality of evil, because I'm criticizing this concept for making it too aesthetic. I think the banality is a very aesthetic idea. And for Hannah Arendt, it's very interesting. In the book, Men in Dark Times, she talks about Hermann Broch.

and she talks about the way how he was criticizing esthetization of evil. It's a very interesting essay. Hermann Bruch also one of the greatest writers of that time. But my kind of thinking about this, if we say, well, banality of evil, do we say that all evil is banal? I don't think so. I don't think that all evil is banal. I think evil can be interesting. I think evil can be...

So Eichmann was not thinking, but can we really say that, for example, the Nazi ideologues were not thinking? They had a thinking system. We can say that it is horrible, immoral, but for some people it was interesting. For some people Putin is interesting because he suggests some thought about the greatness of Russia, etc.,

Don't you think that if we apply only this concept of banality of evil, we kind of underestimate the capacity of evil to seduce? I've been thinking about this too, like can you, the different categories, you know, and how they potentially interact. I mean, when Arendt came out with this book, I think it was profoundly misread.

by many readers and perhaps especially by Jewish readers as being an attempt to exculpate Eichmann. People wanted to see a demon and she's laughing at him. And I think people misread that as her sympathy for him. I don't think she had sympathy for him. I think what you feel in that book is not hatred, but what Yurko would say, "Verachtung," contempt.

when he described how he felt about the Russians coming in. He said, "It's not hatred, it's contempt. It's this kind of disdain, like they don't even deserve hatred because they're not enough of a person to be... And I think that was her attitude to Eichmann and for her, the most unforgivable thing was a failure to think. Our first and foremost responsibility as human beings is you always must think.

But I've also been like, I mean, like Volodya, I look at these different categories, you know, and I had this discussion with Yurko a year ago here about the problem of evil, you know, and what about sadism? You know, what does sadism, I mean, I'm looking now, if I can just indulge in speaking a bit about my own country, of which I feel like horrified and ashamed and guilty for at the moment.

And there's something, there's a real indulgence in actual sadism. There's a kind of reveling in cruelty that's going on. I mean, it's not only that our presidential administration is just sweeping up foreigners from the street and deporting them into a foreign prison, but they're making almost erotic videos about it, if I could use the word erotic. Kristi Noem, our president,

chair of Homeland Security did an almost kind of sexual video op-ed in front of these prisoners in an El Salvadorian prison. My daughter had to tell me what this meant. So they chain up these people that they take, and then they march them onto the plane. It's hard for them to walk because their legs are chained. And they did a social media post video

of looking at the chains and the rattling of the chains and posted it with the slogan for a pleasurable auditory sensation. And I didn't even know what that meant until like my adolescent daughter had to explain there was an Instagram phenomenon of these pleasing sounds. And that's just sadism. That's like reveling in cruelty to other human beings. That can't be exhausted by banality. That's not like the person who's just going along with something.

I thought about this too at the Oval Office meeting with your president. And I thought, you look at Trump. So afterwards, Lindsey Graham tweeted, President Trump has just given us a master class in putting America first.

And I tweeted back at him, and Tim said, you have to stop rage tweeting. It's not good. I tweeted back at him. I said, no, President Trump just gave us a master class in moral nihilism. And Lindsey Trump just gave us a master class in selling your soul to the devil.

And I felt like there were two different things going on. I look at Trump and Van-- I mean, I feel like for Trump, for Putin, other people's lives have no meaning whatsoever. You're just looking at-- you're looking at this abyss. You're looking at a moral abyss. There's nothing. There's no first principles. There's nothing. But for people like Lindsey Graham or Marco Rubio, our Secretary of State who's sitting in the room, they know

that they're participating in evil. They know that they've crossed over to the dark side. They have really made a Faustian bargain. So how do you, like, what is that category? Is there the Faustian bargain category, the banal category, the sadistic category, the moral nihilist category? Therefore, I think that this concept of radical evil, which takes this idea of being superfluous, meaning that

you have the ideology in which you can erase a certain number of people and nobody will care about that. And those examples that you mentioned, being stateless, being a refugee, being a victim of the bombardments, etc., etc., these are the elements of this. Because banality...

only characterizes a certain type of evil. It's an evil of executioners. It's an evil of implementers. But then,

Can it describe the way how evil comes into the world? I think this is a very important thing because I personally think that evil can be banal and it can be not banal. It's not the banality that makes evil evil. It's precisely this nihilism which you mentioned and the idea of erasure, the idea of total replacement, the destruction for the sake of destruction, the death for the sake of death. What do you think?

In that sense, my impulse that would link all those things together is to go back to Kant.

and say that the fundamental moral imperative is you treat every human being as an ends and not as a means. The fundamental definition of the human being is that anything that has a price and can be replaced by something of equivalent value, has a price in anything that is beyond all price and in midst of no replacement has dignity. Human beings are distinguished in that we have dignity.

Hence the fundamental moral principle that you treat every human being as an ends and not a means. And once there's no real self, once you don't have dignity, I mean, we go back to the revolution of dignity, right? It's not just a random term. Like if you lose that sense that every human life has an individual dignity, then we're on a kind of free fall. I think dignity is irreplaceability, right? It's an understanding that human beings are not replaceable.

And this is precisely what Eichmann could not imagine. He was imagining himself as replaceable. Let me, when I read the passages of Hannah and how she describes the origins of totalitarianism, when you listen to your lecture about the masses and the mob,

I have a feeling of repetition. I have a feeling that what is happening in the United States and elsewhere is a little bit of that, maybe differently, but a little bit of that. We also see the collapse of the liberal movement

believe that if we, if we're talking liberal values in these terms of non-replaceability to the mass of people, they will follow it. Instead, we see that the mass of people now through the social networks rather follows people who say,

all others are replaceable, refugees are replaceable, the black people are replaceable, Ukrainians are replaceable, etc., etc. Do you feel this sense of repetition? I feel it intensely, perhaps for over-determined reasons. I feel it even more now than I did eight years ago, and I felt it intensely eight years ago.

So I taught a class the first year of the first Trump presidency, so that must have been fall of 2017, on the intellectual history of totalitarianism. And I taught it just to first-year students. So this is significant because these are all kids, young adults who are 18,

who were in their last year of school when Trump won the presidency. So it's the first election that they're aware is going on. For all they know, all elections are like that. I mean, they don't have the perspective of comparison. They have intuitions that something is wrong.

but they don't have concepts to make sense of those intuitions. It's also very Kantian, right? Like, you know, concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. And so they were searching for ways to understand. And we read through Origins of Totalitarianism, and when we got to that part about how the mob comes out on the stage, flagrantly breaks all the rules, says everything is permissible, now we just grab what we want,

Yeah. One of my, one of the first year students said like, "Oh my God, Professor Shor, she's talking about us!" Said, "How did she know she's talking about us?" And the whole class was kind of mesmerized. They're like, "Oh my God, that's what's happening. I didn't like, now I see it. That's what's happening." And once you know that that's possible, you can't unknow that that's possible.

And I think we kind of have a trend to come back to those thinkers like Hannah Arendt, you also mentioned Karl Jaspers. Karl Jaspers was also discussed in Ukraine because we see how Karl Jaspers was talking about responsibility of the German people and how we're talking about responsibility of the Russian people for this invasion. But then, I mean, I have the feeling that the trends of thought that developed afterwards

I primarily think about existentialism. I think that Sartre was a big disaster for Europe. I like Sartre, there are lots of good things about him, but the very concept of nothingness is a very bad thing because when he says that our liberty is a capacity of nothingness, what he calls the "neantisation", is not understanding what nothingness means.

This precisely, this nihilism that you are talking about, because evil is the drive for nothingness, we can say. Then we have post-structuralism, post-structuralism, Habermas and all these wonderful guys that kind of...

that relativize the concept of evil, right? The people start saying, okay, but why are you using this concept of evil? It helps you to formulate these ideologies that kill all other people because they're evil, etc. And I still find it very hard to talk about evil in the Western world. People like

look at me as a very crazy and dangerous person, what would you say then? Why this concept of evil is not relative, it should not be relativized? Why we should come back to it maybe?

No, this is a very good point. And this was... I would love to hear more about your analysis of Sartre. This was Tony Jett's problem with Sartre too. For Sartre, radical nothingness was radical freedom. And that was precisely the space we have for self-creation. He just didn't know what nothingness means. Right. Sartre understood nothingness in a particular way. He understood it, it seems to me, the way the avant-garde understood it.

of like the 1910s and 1920s, that anything is possible. He understood it as something that was liberating and creative. But then, like a lot of those avant-gardists, they make that leap. They make that leap to the Bolshevik Revolution because the nothingness becomes unendurable that way. And one of the...

Tony Jett, who was this extraordinary historian, originally from Britain, of 20th century Europe, who died very sadly and very prematurely in 2010. He gave a lecture several years before he died at Indiana University that I was at. And he started off by saying, "If you can't use the word evil, you have a really hard time understanding what happened in the 20th century."

And even as someone who has very much enjoyed a lot of post-structural philosophy, using it, teaching it, playing with it, I think Tony's right. I think we have to go back

to some kind of ontological distinction between good and evil. And this relates to the problem of post-truth because like Kolkowski would say, Lesha Kolkowski would say that without a distinction between truth and lies, we don't have a basis for making that distinction between good and evil. That, you know, the epistemological realism in some sense that moral realism is predicated on epistemological realism.

Yeah, because the 20th century philosophy afterwards, 1960s, 1970s, I love it, I adore it, I'm a student of it, but I'm also very critical. I think this idea of replacement, the danger of this idea of replaceability of human beings was just cut off from the thinking. And I think it's very important for us to understand it.

And therefore people just didn't perceive Putin as evil, didn't perceive Russian new autocracy as evil because it was just a polite guy who was talking to them, who was giving deals to them. You could have traded with them, etc. But what people didn't understand is that it's precisely the type of people who are learned to replace others, who are learned... And therefore I...

I'm now coming up with this concept of thanatocracy, meaning when you use death as a management tool,

People, therefore I'm critical of this idea of banality of evil and I'm saying it's just a part of it because you cannot really say that Putin is banal. I think the problem is that he is intelligent in his way how to use death as a management tool and therefore he's dangerous. So my reproach about Eichmann book is not that she was sympathizing with Eichmann, it's that she was portraying

this evil is not very dangerous. When you think, well, this evil cannot think.

it kind of lessens the level of it. I think we need to take evil seriously. See, I would say I think she thinks it remains very dangerous. I don't think she was in any way making light of the danger. But I do think, you're right, it doesn't apply to Putin the way it didn't apply to Goebbels. It didn't apply to Hitler. You have to kind of go down a level. But the problem of people, I mean, if I can say something about like then how...

how what's happening in Ukraine is talked about in the States.

I listen to these talks by political scientists and there are no people. You know, I listen to a talk by Stephen Wertheim, I think, you know, about the war in Ukraine and how it was really NATO's fault and we should negotiate with Putin and everything is a negotiation and realpolitik and it's not that he was evil, but afterwards one of my colleagues came to me and said, "I'm sorry, Marcy, it must have been difficult for you to listen to somebody speak about this war for an hour and not mention a single human being."

And when I talk to American audiences, and I might be overly emotional about this, but I started a lecture recently with a picture of Stanislav Asayev, who I'm sure a lot of you know. When he was on the front, he miraculously survived two times of being seriously wounded, but his coffee cup

was kind of shot through with shells. And he gave this coffee cup as a present to our mutual friend Olena, who's from Horlivka. And when I visited Olena for her birthday, we took a picture with Stas' coffee cup. And so I started this lecture with this picture of Stas' coffee cup.

And then I told this story of this young philosophy student who is writing weekly Phaetons for Radio Free Europe and gets captured and is then gruesomely tortured. And I'm like...

We have to start by looking at that. Your minds have to be in that basement. You have to be seeing this young brilliant person being chained to a bed and electrocuted. Then let's start the discussion here because without looking at that, without looking at that and trying to understand what that evil is and where that comes from, everything is an abstraction. Then we're not talking about people.

Therefore, I'm thinking that this abstract geopolitics, which is very, very present in the way how people talk about the war outside, or let's look at the maps, let's see how people are moving, etc., how armies are moving, is also part of this evil because they make people replaceable, they make people disappear.

Let me ask maybe last or before last question. So there are some other ideas of Hannah Arendt which I feel that they're very necessary. One of it is vita activa, or as she says, bios politicos in Greek. This is one of the key topics of her human condition. So basically she says that

She says that just speculative philosophy, just this abstract theory is not enough. You should be active as citizen, as people in ancient Greece, ancient Polis were acting. How do you decipher that? Yeah. No, I mean, in that way, I find aren't like,

I find that the human condition, which I've gone back to at various times and re-read in different ways, the distinction between labor and work, the distinction between vita contempliva and vita activa, and the idea of natality.

The idea of the human capacity to set in motion something new, which is the hope. Which is in fact the only hope, the fact that we have that capacity and that responsibility. But then what she talks about in the life of the mind that also has to, like for her thinking is active.

Right? Like, like, Denkin is not a passive thing. Thinking is active, you know, and it's a responsibility. Yeah, and a failure to think is always going to be connected to evil. And this is one of the reasons, if I can, you know, say something about the book fair. This is one of the reasons why...

gives me so much hope to be here. I'm feeling paradoxically much more hopeful now that I'm in Kiev than I have been for the past year of being back and forth between Canada and the States because it's amazing to see all these people caring about books. It's amazing to see all these people caring about ideas. And Arendt would say that's the thing that could save us. You have that active, like, you have to think, you know, and that acting has to be, thinking has to be part of acting.

And you mentioned natality, and I think there are several other concepts which can help us a lot today.

which are very heretic from the point of view of some utopian liberalism. For example, she literally says that roots are important. Then when you are uprooted, you are atomized, you lack your community, then it is very easy to drag you into a totalitarian project because you're an atomized individual with no identity.

She literally says that natality is important, which we can translate today as demography is important. Something that liberal thinking was just erased from its thinking tradition.

And for me it's very important. I mean, why liberalism gave away these ideas of identity, of natality, of kids, of children, of family? Why liberalism gave it away to conservatism? And this is one of the reasons why conservatives are now taking up these ideas and saying we are, you know, we're champions of it. But I was told that we need to wrap up. Look,

Maybe let's talk a little bit about just the final words of yours about this hope. Because I had recently, just a few weeks ago, we had a conversation with Ann Applebaum in Lviv Media Forum, and she was more hopeful than before. So...

She was saying that, look, something is going on in the United States, that people are coming back from this initial shock.

And we also understand that in order, therefore I try to connect this concept of radical evil and banal evil, in order to implement this evil, in order to make it industrial, you need to have all these millions of people who would do that, millions of Eichmanns. Putin has them. Trump doesn't have them. I hope that in America, in North America, in the United States,

there will be more opposition to it and we will maybe soon witness a collapse of this Trumpist utopianism. What do you think? I'm desperately hopeful that you're right. I'm terrified it's going to end in civil war. I feel like the violence is palpable.

both overt and covert, and certainly anything is possible. No, I'm glad that Anne is now feeling more optimistic. Maybe if I could end with an anecdote about Anne that's...

But so I'm sure you... Anne Applebaum and her husband, Radek Sikorski, who is now Polish prime minister. And we have Polish election today. Yes, and today are the Polish elections. So shortly after the full-scale invasion, it was spring of 2022. And of course, Anne and Radek and my husband Tim and I were all very kind of involved from afar in what was going on. And I was...

I was the most hysterical because I'm always the most hysterical and I felt like the world is going to end at any moment. This is the third world war and I kept compulsively checking the news. And Anne wrote to me and said, you know, Roddick and I are coming to New Haven, Connecticut. We'll just be there for one evening, two weeks from now. Like, can you make reservations for dinner someplace that's quiet so the four of us can talk? And my first thought was that

absurd to make a restaurant reservation two weeks from now. What are the chances the world is going to exist two weeks from now? The idea that someone was even thinking more than two hours ahead, it seemed crazy to me. And I said, Anne, what are you even thinking? Did a reservation two weeks from now? Why do you even assume the world will still be here? And she emails me back in her very Anne-like way. She's like, Marcy, just in case, humor me. Make the reservation. And

And so I did make the reservation, you know, the four of us had dinner, you know, and they were feeling very optimistic that, like, Radek had ideas about, like, the new weapons that Ukraine was going to get, and he could see, like, ways that there was going to be Ukrainian victory. And so we're walking out of this restaurant in New Haven, so you've got two American Jews and a Midwestern Quaker and a Polish patriot, and we're saying goodbye, and we're all like, Slava Ukrainii! Slava Ukrainii!

Anyway, that's your Anne Applebaum story for the evening. So, thank you for this story and thank you for this thinking. I do think that the dark times bring more light, actually, sometimes. And as our friend, a soldier just gave us a gift recently, who is called Bordin, and he wrote...

bright people are more visible during dark times and I think this is a very very very good metaphor for about us but also about Hannah Arendt and I'm sure that reading these people is very important because these people were going through very similar challenges and some of these ideas that Hannah Arendt had actually can help us a lot to think through the today dark times and to see hope despite the darkness. Please welcome and thank Marcia Schorr.

This was a podcast series Thinking in Dark Times by Ukraine World, an English language media outlet about Ukraine. My name is Volodymyr Yermolenko. I am a Ukrainian philosopher, the chief editor of Ukraine World and the president of PEN Ukraine. This episode was a recording of a conversation about Hannah Arendt and the concept of evil, which took place in Kyiv during the Kyiv book arsenal.

My guest was Marcie Shore, an American intellectual, historian and university professor who specializes in 20th century European and American intellectual history with a particular focus on Hannah Arendt.

Let me remind you that you can support our work at patreon.com/ukraineworld. Your support is vital for us as we increasingly rely on crowdfunding. Even a small monthly donation of $5-10 can make a big difference for us. You can also help fund our volunteer trips to Ukraine's frontline areas, where we provide aid to both soldiers and civilians, mainly by delivering vehicles for the military and books for local communities.

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