Toward Forgiveness: Arendt’s Banality of Evil

This essay employs Hannah Arendt’s idea of banal evil from Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) as a possible route to understanding or forgiving violent crimes. Through the mechanism of empathy, Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil may facilitate conceptions of forgiveness, despite Arendt’s resistance to forgiveness of serious offenses. If we can see perpetrators as unthinking, rather than as demonically or maniacally evil, we might be able make space for forgiveness by attempting to understand their motivations for complying with the violent order and committing their crimes. Arendt is in a way writing a warning to humankind: Eichmann’s banality of evil could potentially manifest itself in any human who ceases to think; anyone could be evil. Perhaps if victims understood or empathized with the human process by which one is transformed from a human to an inhuman killing machine as a bureaucratic and banal process that could happen to anyone, they would more readily consider forgiveness. Here, the opening banality gives to forgiveness can facilitate a reconsideration of Arendt’s restriction of forgiveness to minor offenses only, especially in light of recent atrocities.