The Philosophy of Buddhism

Introduction

Remarkably the Buddha’s Philosophy dating back 2400 years bears a striking resemblance to those sages that were soon to follow. The ancient Greeks represented by the Stoics, Plato and Aristotle all adopted similiar ideas independently or through interaction- for noone knows. That amalgam of ideas as to how to live the good life, a happier and more virtuous one, to deal with and overcome suffering, speaks to us today just as it did then.

Buddhism embraces science in modernity as the Dali Lamar reaches out to the scientific world in asserting its relevance to the in underpinning a happier existence, to quell a troubled world. 

Buddhism in terms of mindfulness and its wisdom stream has been demonstrated to reap healthy outcomes. The Dalai Lama has emphasised the need for a Universal Responsibility to be adopted by all major religious- traditions – to affirm a message of love, compassion and forgiveness.

Upon any form of sickness the Buddhist ideal is for the patient to seek medical treatment but to show compassion and mindfulness leading to calm and inner peace.    

Well known celebrities such as Richard Gear, Arthur C Clarke and in the more modern philosophical era both Wittgenstein and Russell endorse its philosophy.  

An overview of Buddhism and its evolution as spread out into the world

Buddhism first arose from the teachings of the Buddha Gautama who lived in the 6th century BC as an alternate response to its roots in Hinduism in India. His charismatic teaching was to take hold during a period of great social change and intense religious activity where many were no longer content with the external formalities of Brahmanic (Hindu high-caste) sacrifice and ritual.

As Buddhism took hold it spread out to Southeast Asia, China, Korea and Japan to play a pivotal role in the spiritual, cultural, and social life of the Eastern world.

More recently in its modernised mindful aspect it has taken hold during the 20th century as it spread to the West. 

Key Concepts and interpretation of his teaching

Buddhist councils for centuries following the Buddha's death attempted to establish his true and original teachings. After 18 councils of deliberation over many centuries principally two schools of thought survived.    

Theravāda is considered foundational in line with traditional Buddha's teachings. It posits the supremacy of the Buddha and his teachings to attain ‘enlightenment’ where one reaches a state where all suffering ceases referenced as ‘Nirvana’: that which is only attainable by Monks. But by following Buddhist principles lay people can be reborn into more positive circumstances. 

Mahāyāna is where Buddhists believe enlightenment can be attained in a single lifetime, and this can be accomplished even by a layperson. 

The Mahāyāna tradition is by fare the largest major tradition of Buddhism today, with 53% of practitioners, compared to 36% for Theravāda. 

Buddhism has become modified as it spread out to encompass further schools of thought that broadly assert:

·       Within each of us is a Buddha nature.

·       Attained by emptying the mind of preconceptions to allow for intuitive and meditative thinking or awareness. 

·       Accessibility through all sincere spiritual practices- meditation, mantra m praying, physical exercise, songs of realisation and so forth. 

·       The true self is nondual. 

·       Possible to reach enlightenment in a single lifetime, 

·       Can be part or complementary to any religion including Christianity. 

The Fundamental message is about suffering, impermanence, and no-self. Existence is painful and individuality implies limitation which gives rise to desire; and inevitably then causes suffering. 

What is desired is transitory and perishing- leading to disappointment and sorrow. The “path” taught by the Buddha, dispels the “ignorance” that perpetuates this suffering.

Hence, life is a stream of becoming, a series of manifestations and extinctions. The concept of the individual ego is a delusion; the objects with which people identify themselves—fortune, social, position, family, body, and even mind—are not their true selves. There is nothing permanent, and, if only the permanent deserved to be called the self, or atman, then nothing is self. There can be no individuality without a putting together of components. This is becoming different, and there can be no way of becoming different without a dissolution, a passing away.

Existence in terms of the Five aggregates

Buddhists set forth the theory of the five aggregates or constituents of human existence: (1) corporeality or physical forms (2) feelings or sensations (3) ideations i.e. perceptions or cognition/thinking (4) mental formations or dispositions i.e. intentions and (5) consciousness i.e. self-awareness.

According to Buddhists a person is in a process of continuous change, with no fixed underlying entity.

Rebirth, is potentially an endless series of worldly existences in which every being is caught up was already associated with the doctrine of karma - in pre-Buddhist India under Hinduism this concept was generally accepted by both the Theravāda and the Mahāyāna traditions.

Karma in the form of good conduct brings a pleasant and happy result to engender similar good acts, while bad conduct brings an evil result to create repeated evil actions. This furnishes the basic context for the moral life of the individual. Some karmas bear fruit in the same life in which they are committed, others in the immediately succeeding one, and others in future lives that are more remote.

The acceptance by Buddhists of the belief in karma and rebirth while holding to the doctrine of no- self gave rise to a difficult problem: how can rebirth take place without a permanent subject to be reborn? Indian non-Buddhist philosophers attacked this vulnerable point in Buddhist thought, and many modern scholars have also considered it to be an insoluble question.

However, the relation between existences in rebirth has been explained by the analogy of fire, which maintains itself unchanged in appearance and yet is different in every moment—what may be called the continuity of an ever- changing identity.

The Four Noble Truths

·       The truth of misery, the truth that misery originates within us from the craving for pleasure that can be eliminated in a methodical way or path.

·       Hence, the Buddha formulated the law of dependent origination whereby one condition arises out of another, which in turn arises out of prior conditions.

·       Every mode of being presupposes another immediately preceding mode from which the subsequent mode derives, in a chain of causes.

·       The misery that is bound up with all sensate existence is accounted for by a methodical chain of causation.

The Eightfold Path

The Noble Eightfold Path is constituted by right views, right aspirations, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right meditational attainment. The term right (true or correct) is used to distinguish sharply between the precepts of the Buddha and other teachings. In effect what we might refer to today as virtue ethics. 

Nirvana

The aim of religious practice is to be rid of the delusion of ego, thus freeing oneself from the fetters of a mundane world. One who is successful in doing so, is said to have overcome the round of rebirths and to have achieved enlightenment. This is the final goal—not a paradise or a heavenly world.

Though nirvana is often presented negatively as “release from suffering,” it is more accurate to describe it in a more positive fashion: As an ultimate goal, to be sought and cherished. Though it is true the Buddha avoided discussion of the ultimate condition that lay beyond the categories of the phenomenal world. What the Buddha said when questioned on such matters is in effect it is enough knowing how to get there rather than to ponder such unknowns.

Conclusion  

Budda was an empiricist who observed the reality of suffering in the word to link such suffering to desires and unhealthy attachments that can never be satisfied. The way out of this reality where we are stuck in an endless cycle of suffering was to first acknowledge these noble truths and then to lay open the pathway to enlightenment. Buddhist philosophy accepts the cycle of birth and death and disease but puts forward the means by way of rebirth can end the cycle of attaining the state of nirvana in this life or the next. The question arises as to what happens next when one attains such an enlightened state is never answered by the Buddha. He contends it is enough to know how to get there by adopting the virtuous 8 fold steps.            

Hence this can be seen very much as a workmanlike approach that involves a continuing process that can be undertaken invoking references to meditative and intuitive mediums that vary across different schools. Suffice to say the answers to our questions along that path is for each individual to experience. It is not prescriptive in that sense of following rigid doctrines although these are integral to its philosophy.

Rather they underpin the way forward which can only be experienced and talked about in gradual steps to its ultimate aim of Nirvana – beyond the ceiling imposed by language.                    

Q & A

What aspects of Buddhism do you think seem reasonable as accounts of human reality?

The search for meaning to overcome suffering by following the enlightened pathway to happiness is both a reasonable and appealing aim to “being in the world”. So it’s hardly surprising we see elements elsewhere in western philosophy just as Buddhist schools have been influenced by alternate philosophises throughout the world.    

Buddhist thinking is evident within the home of western philosophy in ancient Greece where rational, abstract logical considerations took precedent. Here we see the desirability of striving to attain the “golden mean” by Aristotle as analogous to Buddhism’s ‘middle way" in common with the pursuit of happiness.

Aristotle’s ideal of attaining happiness echoes Buddhism as both articulate a gradual cumulative process of human development aimed at attaining an enlightened state.

Mindfulness attributable to Buddhism has been demonstrated to yield improved health and wellbeing and particularly in psychology.    

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/buddhist-psychology-east-meets-west/202009/buddhisms-place-in-psychology

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/the-cube/202203/when-the-buddha-gave-psychology-lesson

 

What aspects of Buddhism speak most clearly to your own personal experience?

In 'Philosophy Now' Brian Morris describes four varieties of Buddhist metaphysics, and questions whether they can form one coherent system of thought.

I mostly agree with the writer as I see their continued relevance today.    

Buddhism and Stoicism Are Closer Linked than You'd Think –

Both offer real life hope and resilience to the inevitable trials and tribulation inherent in existence.  

https://bigthink.com/personal-growth/would-marcus-aurelius-be-a-buddhist-today/

What aspects of Buddhism resemble ideas in western philosophy?

The ancient Greeks inclusive of Stoicism and Aristotelians have similar ideas as summarised above.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote: "When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception” which some feel has a Buddhist flavour to it.

But how would one even know that if that's all there is to human beings? How would you determine what one perception is as distinct from another? Rather I think the Buddhist idea of a non self rests on the idea of impermanence and a more rational analogy is evident in Process philosophy. 

Process philosophy embraces the novelty of experienced reality to rely on intuition and reject permanence, uniformity and materialism. 

Arthur Schopenhauer was influenced by Indian religious texts and later claimed that Buddhism was the "best of all possible religions. Schopenhauer's view that "suffering is the direct and immediate object of life and that this is driven by a restless will and striving" are similar to the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha.  Schopenhauer promoted the saintly ascetic life of the Indian sramanas as a way to renounce the Will. His view that a single world-essence (The Will) comes to manifest itself as a multiplicity of individual things (principium individuationis) has been compared to the Buddhist doctrine as developed in Yogacara Buddhism. Finally, Schopenhauer's ethics which are based on universal compassion for the suffering of others can be compared to the Buddhist ethics of Karuṇā.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_Western_philosophy#:~:text=Arthur%20Schopenhauer%20was%20influenced%20by,Four%20Noble%20Truths%20of%20the

Immanuel Kant's Transcendental Idealism has also been compared with the Indian philosophical approach of the Madhyamaka school by scholars such as T. R. V. Murti. Both posit that the world of experience is in one sense a mere fabrication of our senses and mental faculties. For Kant and the Madhyamikas, we do not have access to 'things in themselves' because they are always filtered by our mind's 'interpretative framework'. Thus both worldviews posit that there is an ultimate reality and that reason is unable to reach it. Buddhologists like Edward Conze have also seen similarities between Kant's antinomies and the unanswerable questions of the Buddha in that "they are both concerned with whether the world is finite or infinite, etc., and in that they are both left undecided."

Bertrand Russell’s affinity is noted as he regarded Buddhism as the only religion compatible with science. But it must be remembered that Russell was part of a generation which looked on metaphysics with disdain. Bertrand Russell is my view became unnecessarily wedded to a purely scientific philosophical underpinning.       

A ‘Philosophy Now’ article talks about the meditations of Descartes (1596-1650) to ascertain any similarities in his approach compared to traditional Zen Buddhism.

At first glance one might conclude there are fundamental differences since western philosophy seeks to ask profound questions with responses usually guided by logic to form a narrative about such things as what is the meaning of life, the nature of the mind and what language is. Buddhism on the other hand draws its strength from inward meditative practices manifested in the eightfold paths to enlightenment. 

However, the author suggests there is a correlation in the approaches of both in what might be reasonably construed as their use of Koans.     
Koans used during meditative practices in Buddhism.   

Koans are used during meditative practices and are paradoxical statements or parables or questions that need not have a logical answer. The idea is for the student to abandon any preconceived ideas and instead rely on intuitive responses from meditating about the question, paradox or parable to achieve an enlightened response. 

The Buddhist is schooled on the idea that one cannot solve the Koan, for its value is in the response and the enlightenment realized. The Buddhist might spend a lifetime finding appropriate responses, the determinate to enlightenment. 

Does Buddhism seem consistent with a modern ‘scientific’ world view?

Some modern figures argue Buddhism is both rational and uniquely compatible with science.

Buddhism’s mindfulness and the designated pathway to enlightenment presents a wisdom stream that might be considered a modern “scientific” world view.

However, what might seem remarkable that such views arose

Buddhism’s evolutionary journey from its Hindu roots, less the priestly traditions, rituals and caste systems has been modified to accommodate its expansion into the world. This is evident more recently into western culture and previously Asia and along the Silk Road.

One of its central elements is a style of mindfulness meditation practice that derives largely from the modern Theravāda Buddhist meditation revival in Burma, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. 19^th and 20^th centuries. Robert Sharf     

 https://philosophyofbrains.com/2017/01/23/the-embodied-mind-in-hindsight.aspx

Robert Sharf, who is a scholar of Buddhist studies at UC Berkeley and he has, apparently, heard this kind of question before, is specific in terms of the challenge he thinks Buddhism presents the sciences' presumed philosophical basis.

"In order to make Buddhism compatible with science," Sharf says, "Buddhist Modernism ... accepts a Cartesian dualistic understanding of the world." This Cartesian separation would, he claims, be pretty weird to most Buddhist teachers throughout its history. As he puts it:

"Traditional Buddhist epistemology, for example, simply does not accept the Cartesian notion of an insurmountable gap between mind and matter. Most Buddhist philosophies hold that mind and object arise interdependently, so there is no easy way to separate one's understanding of the world from the world itself."

Scholars have deduced from the Buddhist writers what they consider are the foundational aspects which however don’t necessarily encompass the current “mindfulness” ideas that are attributed to Buddhism.

The scholar here presents a view about its early roots increasingly becoming repositioned into mindfulness in its evolutionary journey and particularly in the last few centuries.    

https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/05/11/527533776/buddhism-and-science

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_Western_philosophy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Buddhist_schools

The nature of Evil

Introducing Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) and others on the nature of Evil

Introduction to Hannah Arendt

As a Jew and intellectual who maintained a relationship throughout her life with Martin Heidegger she was well qualified academically in both philosophy and theology and lived through the early period of anti –Semitism to ponder the holocaust for which she felt responsible-but for what one might ask?  

Her subsequent political philosophy is written in the style of Jewish person responding to the evil inflicted on one's people and not as a world citizen (as she puts it) and her ideas remain controversial today. But her many publications sheds light on her view on the nature of evil which can flourish under totalitarianism.  She is at pains to point out the challenge to one’s mental capacity essential to rise above the terrible fate of one's own people to ascertain what was pernicious for all humanity in her conclusion.    

A brief summary of her life’s work  

After arrest in 1933 for affiliation with a Zionist organisation she took the first opportunity to leave Germany. After hostilities ceased in 1945 she turned her attention to the concentration camps which remained her focus until 1953. After the death of Stalin she published The Human Condition in 1958. She then analysed American, French, and Russian Revolutions.

She revisited her earlier work after the trial of Adolf Eichmann with the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the “Banality of Evil” followed in 1963.

Although she ceased writing about totalitarian concentration camps in 1966 that preoccupation with the problem of evil remained to the end of her life.

Key concepts  

The “The Banality of evil” talks about how easily a process can be executed, however evil, in a non-thinking way by individuals under the power of totalitarian regimes. Individuals may act in ordinary ways (to be observed as terrifyingly normal as she puts it)  in all other respects outside of the regime to strictly follow those orders with horrendous consequences.    

But that line of thinking doesn't wash of course in a legal sense as was concluded in the Nuremberg trials.  Arendt disagrees with the concept introduced by the court under the heading of crimes against humanity.

She points out Concentration camps are not a unique invention of totalitarian regimes, but were first used both by the Spanish in Cuba and in the Boer War (1899-1902).  Similar concepts were justified under an alleged 'wrath of the people'"--to rationalize and justify their existence was invoked by British imperial rule in India as well as South Africa and the subsequent world wars.

She does however acknowledge a new phenomenon in the form of a complete dehumanising of its occupants in the concentration camps and also under the Stalin purge.    

Her final ideas on the nature of evil are psychologically based.

Her position is that while one is thinking i.e., experiencing the silent dialogue of thought, the ego splits in two, disclosing an inner difference within an apparent identity. At lightning speed these "two-in-one," as she calls them converse as long as the activity of thinking lasts.

She found that these thinking "partners" have to be on good terms, essentially in agreement, because they cannot go on or resume thinking if they contradict one another. Arendt grounded, existentially, the logical law of non-contradiction in the congeniality of the two-in-one.

By the same token it is in the activity of thinking that the explicitly human relationship between a plurality, though it be only of two, is first established. Again, it is not an "idea" but the experience of sheer activity that makes the one not only respect and relish but refuse to abrogate at any cost the right of the other to freely exercise the right to think.

In this respect Socrates preferred death rather than live apart from his thinking "partner" and in Arendt's many references to him stands forth as the diametric opposite of Eichmann. Eichmann's contradictions indicated not that he had lost this aspect of consciousness to become bereft of inner plurality, no contact with himself, and that therefore he could be relied upon to do anything, anything at all, that his "conscience" assured him was his duty. 

However Arendt did not live to complete her theory on the mind.   

The Banality of Evil: Reference

Evil: The Crime against Humanity | Articles and Essays | Hannah Arendt Papers | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

 

  Introducing the nature of evil as seen by author Jung Chang – Mao – The unknown Story.

I recall the conversations with Jung Chang who discussed the 10 years of painstaking research underpinning his book “Mao, The unknown Story" which she co-authored with her husband Jon Halliday.

You may recall Jung Chang wrote 'The Wild Swans': which sold over 10 million copies and as far as I know is still banned in China.

During their research Jung and her husband were able to interview 150 close confidants of Mao including the immediate family, which allowed them to determine aspects not previously understood and hence the title 'The unknown story':

In tandem with this research a virtual treasure trove of additional material was also discovered in the Russian archive demonstrating the importance of Russia to Mao.

What Jung was able to capture the essence of the man, another terrible dictator with a lust for power outrivalling Hitler or Stalin as the consummate ultimate psychopath?

Jung found through the interviews with those close to him, a revelation of how Mao had described to them his overwhelming intense ecstasy arising from inflicting violence and brutality against the mass peasantry.

Violence shaped every facet of his life as an attachment expressed in the form of a constant desire for brutal vengeance and dehumanisation.

China was a net importer of grain, a poor nation and Mao realised that food was the only saleable asset at his disposal to achieve funding for the military might necessary to become a world power. Mao turned to China's food production and diverted domestic requirements for sale to Russia knowing such a policy would cause mass starvation. In fact Mao had acknowledged that it may be necessary for up to half of the entire population of China to starve to death as a sacrifice for China to become a superpower. There were opponents who objected to this policy, but as a brilliant strategist he managed to isolate them and finally had his revenge against them and the party who did not fully support him with the introduction of the 'Cultural Revolution'.

It has been estimated he was responsible for possibly over 70 million deaths in China.

During the period of the 'Cultural Revolution' all cultural activity was banned as Mao knew culture is what makes us human and his attachment to power by dehumanisation remained with him all of his life.

He also was a great strategist in terms of enlisting intellectual support abroad, and diverted a massive 7 % of gross national product to those splinter groups of intelligence who became supporters of his purpose. Consider that today where foreign aid is much less than 1% of GDP for even the wealthiest of countries.

Jung wrote this account with no mention of Mao being evil as the facts speak for themselves. It was written out of an intense curiosity, not out of vengeance in any way, even though both her parents suffered terribly. Her father died prematurely in a mental asylum and both were heavily beaten and publicly humiliated.

Hence, my inclination is to also see evil as an alluring sense of power (lust if you will) underpinned by the intense feelings that consumes its perpetrators. The darker side of humanity manifests in power as in an evil spirit if you will.

All of what we consider as evil acts that we in the 21st Century inclusive of the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the Mass murders by the Khmer Rouge, the communist mass killings following the policies of Stalin and Mao, the slaughter in Rwanda are underpinned I believe by both the lust for power and the intense ecstasy arising from inflicting violence and brutality.  

That is evident as the heart of evilness which is to deny that part of us humans that allows us to transcend nature and not to succumb to the allure of power and is inevitably accompanying brutality and dehumanising objectives.       

 

An antidote to evil? - Professor Raymond Tallis (‘Philosophy Now’) as a humanist puts succinctly his view as follows:     

 We need to preserve the vast, rich cultural legacy owing to, or inspired by, religious belief. We cannot forget or actively reject this without losing something irreplaceably precious in ourselves. The legacy is not simply out there in the public realm as a collective heritage of art, literature, architecture, and music. It is in the very fibre of our individual and social being. The atheist, existentialist, Marxist, Maoist, Jean-Paul Sartre highlighted this in L’Idiot de la Famille, cited and translated by Robert Cumming in Starting Point (1979, p.225):

 “We are all Christians, even today; the most radical disbelief is still Christian atheism. In other words, it retains, in spite of its destructive power, schemata which are controlling – very slightly for our thinking, more for our imagination, above all for our sensibility. And the origins of these schemata are to be sought in centuries of Christianity of which we are the heirs whether we like it or not.”

At the very least, humanist philosophers should spend less time brooding on the wickedness seemingly inspired by religious belief, and more on what religion tells us about our nature. Most importantly, we should consider what we can learn from the history of religions, how a sense of the transcendent – what theologian Hans Kung characterised as “a particular social realisation of a relationship to an absolute ground of meaning”, answering an existential hunger experienced by all humans – can play into our lives for good or ill. In particular, how we can avoid the path that leads from beatific visions to thuggery – a question that is as much a challenge for secular humanism as it is for religious believers.

 

 

Q & A: But what is it about the actions that make them evil?

They all involve the complete dehumanising of those involved in executing and organising such atrocities, to negate any form of freedom and independence in thinking. Therein we can reliably observe an absence of any guiding ethical considerations pertaining to governance. Instead what is apparent is the regime's involvement as one consumed in a nationalistic fervour intent upon revenge against a perceived evil enemy or group.      

This was abundantly clear in the Concentration Camps, in the Stalinist purges and in the “ecstasy in violence” and mass societal sacrifice of people starved under Mao’s leadership in order to make China a world power. Similarly in the slaughter in Rwanda we see the same “dehumanisation” in the form of a perceived evil enemy (Satan) as justification for unparalleled levels of violence and genocide.  

 Q Are they not just part of human nature, with a foundation in our DNA and evolutionary history? Or is there something else going on?

Arendt’s final conclusions offer food for thought and a glimmer of hope they are not integral to human nature but rather it is our darker side that can only flourish when we relinquish our inner consciousness. The plurality of two egos as she puts it allows us to consider the two sides to any argument in the Socratic tradition keeping in mind ethical considerations.

Professor Raymond Tallis puts forward a similar idea given his idea that we can “transcend nature” and the instinctive reaction that leads to extreme violence and mindless brutality.  

We need to preserve the vast, rich cultural legacy owing to, or inspired by, religious belief. We cannot forget or actively reject this without losing something irreplaceably precious in ourselves. The legacy is not simply out there in the public realm as a collective heritage of art, literature, architecture, and music. It is in the very fibre of our individual and social being. The atheist, existentialist, Marxist, Maoist, Jean-Paul Sartre highlighted this in L’Idiot de la Famille, cited and translated by Robert Cumming in Starting Point (1979, p.225):

“We are all Christians, even today; the most radical disbelief is still Christian atheism. In other words, it retains, in spite of its destructive power, schemata which are controlling – very slightly for our thinking, more for our imagination, above all for our sensibility. And the origins of these schemata are to be sought in centuries of Christianity of which we are the heirs whether we like it or not.”

At the very least, humanist philosophers should spend less time brooding on the wickedness seemingly inspired by religious belief, and more on what religion tells us about our nature. Most importantly, we should consider what we can learn from the history of religions, how a sense of the transcendent – what theologian Hans Kung characterised as “a particular social realisation of a relationship to an absolute ground of meaning”, answering an existential hunger experienced by all humans – can play into our lives for good or ill. In particular, how we can avoid the path that leads from beatific visions to thuggery – a question that is as much a challenge for secular humanism as it is for religious believers.

My inclination is to also see evil as an alluring sense of power (lust if you will) underpinned by the intense feelings that consumes its perpetrators. The darker side of humanity manifests in power as in an evil spirit if you will.

Are evil acts an aberration whose cause is some individual or systemic failure? Are some people just prone to evil and given power and opportunity, act out their evil intent?

The inclination may be to see these events as an aberration but it appears to me that the darker side to our nature is also a constant that can reappear with devastating consequences given the right conditions.

 The legacy in thinking from Hannah Arendt was that the while calling for a rethinking of the concept of evil, most importantly she  demands a rethinking of the notion of moral responsibility, by claiming that every human being not only holds the potential to eradicate evil, but has the responsibility to do so, through the power of critical thinking. Indeed “we resist evil by beginning to think, by reaching another dimension than the horizon of everyday life” (Hannah Arendt: Legal Theory and The Eichmann Trial, Peter Burdon, 2017, p.279). reference © Georgia Arkell 2023- Philosophy Now.