Hannah Arendt on Good and Evil

Arendt thought 20th-century philosophy had become too passive and abstract. She called for “active thinking” that prepares us to live in the real world.

The banality-of-evil thesis was a flashpoint for controversy.

You might think philosophy is a boy’s club. We are here to correct that misconception. 

On January 1, 2016, one of the most infamous books of the 20th century — Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf — enters public domain and can be published by anyone in Germany for the first time since the end of World War II. Seventy years after the fall of the Nazis, people still debate allowing that particularly evil genii out of the bottle to influence young minds. Others argue that the genii’s been out of the bottle all along, either through underground sources or, more recently, the Internet. More controllable, however, have been the propaganda films of the Nazis, whose chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, announced in 1941 that, “Film is our most important medium for propaganda.” Felix Moeller’s new documentary Forbidden Films: The Hidden Legacy of Nazi Film examines this question of allowing new generations to see these banned films and, if so, how to show them without that evil history repeating itself.

In this excerpt from “One Hand Clapping,” Nikolay Kukushkin makes the case that neurons reveal how memory, meaning, and even consciousness emerge from the same biological roots in humans, sea slugs, and beyond.