Sublime

I went back to [Hannah] Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and reread sections of it. I was looking for a clue as to what she meant by “the banality of evil,” which she defines as a “kind of thoughtlessness.” I guess I think of evil as in some way connected with self-deception. —Morris

It would have suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him. To a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I did not know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness

Indeed, I will argue that liberty in the broad sense requires judges and officials, when applying legal principles, to assert norms of reasonableness. Otherwise, self-interested people will use law to claim almost anything.

Marcel’s ‘shell’ recalls Husserl’s notion of the accumulated and inflexible preconceptions that one should set aside in the epoché, so as to open up access to the ‘things themselves’. In both cases, what is rigid is cleared away, and the trembling freshness of what is underneath becomes the object of the philosopher’s attention. For Marcel,

“Every epistemology becomes an ethic,” the educator Parker J. Palmer once observed. “The shape of our knowledge becomes the shape of our living; the relation of the knower to the known becomes the relation of the living self to the larger world.”