The Life Of The Mind

The term “appearance,” also referred to as the “appearing” or “apparent” world, refers to how things show themselves. Plato famously drew this distinction in the allegory of the cave: The shadows on the wall (appearances) were mere illusions compared to eternal forms. In The Life of the Mind, Arendt reclaims appearance as a central feature of human existence. For her, the world is defined by worldly experience and plurality.

The phrase “the banality of evil” is frequently attributed to Arendt’s final passage in Eichmann in Jerusalem. In this work, Arendt describes watching Adolf Eichmann’s execution and how, even as he faced imminent death, Eichmann could only offer the stock phrases and ideologies that had been fed to him. The full quotation calls Eichmann’s wickedness the “word-and-thought defying banality of evil.” Arendt’s use of “banality” in this quotation refers to the unoriginality of evil and its reliance on repetition and mimicry.

In philosophy, “Being” is a fundamental concept that refers to what it means for something to be, not to a specific entity. Since antiquity, philosophers have debated how we can understand Being and whether it is stable or changing.