本哈德•施林克小说《朗读者》“平庸的恶”现象研究 (2)
Generally speaking, the research on the correlation between The Reader and the banality of evil is still quite limited at present. Most experts do not work in the thorough research to explore the correlation between The Reader and the banality of evil from the view of philosophy, and few even misunderstand the intention of the banality of evil.
The banality of evil was based on the radical evil. Radical evil is a phrase coined by Kant in Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone. Hannah Arendt, in particular, was the philosopher who sought to comprehend what she called the "radical evil" of the Nazi period, as epitomized by the horrors of Auschwitz. Such radical evil involves much more than acting on the basis of "humanly understandable, sinful motives." It involves "making human beings as human beings superfluous", by eliminating what makes human life distinctively human, nullifying human freedom and moral responsibility. But after observing the trail of Eichmann, Arendt suggested, that evil can be extraordinary acts committed by otherwise unremarkable people. Then she tried to explain such phenomenon in the a more personal way and came up with the banality of evil.
This paper mainly deals with the content and role analysis of The Reader, attempting to find out the inter relation between The Reader and the banality of evil. Based on the literature review of the study on the concept of evil, this paper attempts to introduce the banality of evil. Then, this paper gives an analysis of the banality of evil in The Reader. At
last, this paper try to sum up the reasons lead to the banality of evil.
2 Understandings of The Banality of Evil
To explain the relationship between The Reader and the banality of evil more clear, it is necessary to discuss more about the banality of evil. The origin of the banality of evil was the subtitle of Hannah Arendt's 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. It's a chillingly controversial phrase, with which Arendt characterized the actions of the Nazi "desk murderers" like Eichmann, who committed large-scale crimes against humanity. By the banality of evil, Arendt was referring to how monstrously evil acts were committed as if they were "standard behavior", such as mundane, normal activities of everyday life. Think of the cool matter-of-fact with which Cheney speaks of the authorized acts of torture committed at Guantanamo, as if unconvicted prisoners there were no longer human beings with a freedom protected by moral traditions and laws.
Yet the central question remains the one that Arendt posed: did those men and women understand what they were doing? Maybe their native ability to distinguish between good and wrong was submerged by the weight of historical circumstances? Arendt believes that evil itself is indeed banal.
First, the banality of evil places evil at a level that is attainable without "conscious thought"( Bergen, 39) or "motive"(Arendt, 287).This reduces evil from a reified and rarely achieved status to a position like any other characteristic, where circumstance is the only deciding factor in whether a person ends up committing evil acts. This seems to pose a problem of agency: the lived experience of people is of some sort of interrogation into their own psychology. Arendt's theory does not reify evil, but instead reifies interrogation as she characteries Eichmann's "sheer thoughtlessness" (Arendt, 287) as what led him to act as he did. Bernard Bergen in his book about Arendt refers to this as "the problem of thinking"(Bergen, 39) that, Eichmann did not have the "ability to see himself by thinking about the meaning of who he is".(Bergen, 49)
Secondly, Arendt's interpretation broadens the meaning of evil to even the most innocuous actions such as the signing of a piece of paper. This redefinition certainly fitted Arendt's experience of Eichmann and was summed up well in Leonard Cohen's poem All There Is to Know about Adolf Eichmann as not only was Eichmann "Medium"(Arendt, 78) in everyway. But he also "merelynever realized what he was doing"(Arendt, 287). His involvement in what could be classified as evil sentiments are put into doubt by the use of the word "merely".
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