Kant e o problema do mal no pensamento de Hannah Arendt

Abstract

This research examines evil as an ethical and political problem that runs through human history and imposes itself in the twentieth century, when certain forms of destruction seem to exceed the categories of guilt, punishment, and weakness. We begin from the premise that evil cannot be reduced either to an agent’s psychology or to a purely moral dimension: it strikes the common world, undermines confidence in the intelligibility of actions, and reopens the question of responsibility. The aim is to understand, in Hannah Arendt, how the problem of evil is configured and to identify where Immanuel Kant is present in this debate. The guiding question — “within Arendt’s problematic of evil, where is Kant present?” — leads the research while preserving a thread between philosophical tradition, historical experience, and the new perspective brought by Arendt. We adopt a deliberate scope: we initially privilege evil in the moral sense, that is, evil that is committed and imputable, while also adopting a conceptual and genealogical reconstruction: the reading of primary sources, the selection of passages, and a critical dialogue with the bibliography. The interest is not to accumulate interpretations, as in a simple overview of the history of philosophy, but to make explicit what each concept illuminates when confronted with limit-events. The path taken moves through authors in whom evil appears as error, weakness, or privation, highlighting the shift toward the problem of will and of imputability. In Kant, we examine how radical evil undergirds freedom and responsibility without reducing the agent to determinisms; at the same time, we emphasize his rejection of a diabolical will—that is, of willing evil for its own sake—since such a hypothesis proves contrary to the moral-philosophical tradition of duty. In Arendt, the focus shifts to political experience, so that, in her analyses of totalitarianism, radical evil takes on contours tied to the fabrication of the superfluous and to the collapse of the conditions of belonging to the world. In Eichmann, the banality of evil emerges, in which the extreme can be carried out through shallowness, clichés, and thoughtlessness, rather than through demonic depth. From this displacement, we highlight the role of thinking, judging, and imagination as conditions of resistance. We argue that Kant is present in Arendt in multiple ways: (i) as both inheritance and displacement of the term radical evil, whose function changes when it is transferred to the political plane; (ii) as the problem of responsibility and imputation, especially when bureaucratic structures attempt to sever the link between act and agent; and (iii) as a horizon for judging and for the sensus communis, since the communicability of judgment and the consideration of the other’s point of view appear as antidotes to the thoughtlessness and loneliness that feed banal evil. The contribution of this work consists in showing that this encounter is not one of identity, but of tension: Kant offers a grammar of imputation; Arendt exposes its historical crisis and reinscribes the problem of evil on political ground. We do not offer a total history of evil, nor do we exhaust Kant and Arendt; rather, we delineate an interpretive axis of evil in history, especially in the unfoldings and points of contact of Kant within Arendtian thought.