Banal Evil – Radical Goodness. Reflection on the 60th Anniversary of “Eichmann in Jerusalem”

2.1 Evil as Thoughtlessness

“He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period”.^[1] Such is the description that Hannah Arendt gives of Eichmann. Thoughtlessness is identified in this case as one motivating factor that results in criminal acts. This situation is characterized as banal and “even funny,” because despite the gravity of Eichmann’s acts, one cannot find any “diabolical or demonical profundity” in Eichmann.^[2] Eichmann is described as an ordinary person that could have been perhaps even a respectable person if he would have been in different circumstances. Surprisingly, Eichmann is reported even to acknowledge that the Shoah was “one of the greatest crimes in the history of Humanity”^[3], thus acknowledging that the results of his acts were evil, without at the same time taking responsibility for them. Following the logic of his words, criminal nature would characterize the result of his acts, but not his acts as such. Eichmann’s justification is well known: he has simply obeyed orders. Moreover, this obedience is morally justified through reference to Kant’s definition of duty that explains as follows: “I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws,”^[4] which is approximately a correct definition of Kant’s categorical imperative and shows that Eichmann clearly had at least some rudimentary knowledge of Kant’s philosophy. On the other hand, Eichmann also claimed that he stopped living by Kantian moral precepts starting from the moment when he has been charged with the Final Solution, which inaugurated, following his own words “a period of crimes legalized by the state.”^[5]

Eichmann’s words are self-contradictory and raise for this reason the question if they are even worth to be analysed and reflected on. Nevertheless, Arendt takes these words very seriously and dismisses with indignation their reference to Kant, putting forward the fact that human capacity for judgement and practical, i.e. moral reason are at the core of Kant’s practical philosophy. She even reproaches Eichmann for distorting Kant’s categorical imperative so that the ultimate principle of obedience lies not anymore in the autonomy of the self-legislating practical reason, as for Kant, but in the arbitrary will of one single person, namely the Führer: “Act as if the principle of your actions were the same as that of the legislator or of the law of the land – or, in Hans Frank’s formulation of ‘the categorical imperative in the Third Reich,’ which Eichmann might have known: ‘Act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve it’”.^[6]

As a matter of fact, the precept of obedience to heteronomous authority is not alien to Kant’s if not moral at least political thinking. Thus, in his opuscule An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?, Kant clearly states that in some particular circumstances, “it is, certainly, impermissible to argue; instead, one must obey”.^[7] Indeed, a certain “mechanism” would be necessary for the “interest of a commonwealth”^[8]: it would be “ruinous” for an officer not to obey while on duty, for a citizen not to pay taxes, for a clergyman not to deliver his catechism class according to the creed of his church.^[9] Hence, from this perspective, Eichmann could have argued that he obeyed orders just as an officer would obey orders from his hierarchy. On the other hand, Kant states also that the same officer, citizen or clergyman insofar as he is a member of the “society of citizens of the world”^[10] should have the freedom to argue against orders by making public use of his reason, and this is precisely what Eichmann did not. Moreover, Kant also contends that if the official teaching of a church goes against the inner religion of a clergyman, the latter should resign from it, for “he could not in conscience hold his office.”^[11] Again, this is precisely what Eichmann did not, although he acknowledged during his trial the criminal nature of the results of his acts.

Hence, if we deepen Eichmann’s reference to Kant’s philosophy as a means of justification of his acts, we come to a conclusion that partly converges with Arendt’s verdict of thoughtlessness and that at the same time nuances it: indeed, Eichmann did not make use of his reason but he did not make use of it in a particular sense, namely in a public sense. In a private sense,^[12] Eichmann did make use of an instrumental form of reason in the strict limit of his functions, which allowed him to achieve specific goals required by his functions. In a broader perspective, it is also by virtue of this instrumental dimension that Eichmann could realize his personal ambitions, in accordance with his vanity, on which Hannah Arendt insists. However, he did not make use of his reason as a citizen of the world, endowed with a moral conscience, whose thoughts and actions have potential effects on the commonwealth as a whole. He identified his whole being with his figure and the role of a functionary. Hence, “he acted not as a man but as a mere functionary whose functions could just as easily have been carried out by an one else”.^[13] By renouncing to make use of his reason in a public sense, Eichmann made himself a replaceable and one could say superfluous entity that is at odds with his radical uniqueness, which is rooted in the freedom of his personality.^[14]

Arendt’s account of Eichmann’s thoughtlessness implies at least two possible dimensions of interpretation of the phenomenon of thoughtlessness, which indicates towards (1) the question of judgement and of (2) the capacity to think from the standpoint of others. The first dimension can be read in this fragment:

There remains, however, one fundamental problem, which was implicitly present in all these postwar trials and which must be mentioned here because it touches upon one of the central moral questions of all time, namely upon the nature and function of human judgment. What we have demanded in these trials, where the defendants had committed “legal” crimes, is that human beings be capable of telling right from wrong even when all they have to guide them is their own judgment, which, moreover, happens to be completely at odds with what they must, regard as the unanimous opinion of all those around them. And this question is all the more serious as we know that the few who were “arrogant” enough to trust only their own judgment were by no means identical with those persons who continued to abide by old values, or who were guided by a religious belief. Since the whole of respectable society had in one way or another succumbed to Hitler, the moral maxims which determine social behavior and the religious commandments - “Thou shalt not kill!” - which guide conscience had virtually vanished. Those few who were still able to tell right from wrong went really only by their own judgments, and they did so freely; there were no rules to be abided by, under which the particular cases with which they were confronted could be subsumed. They had to decide each instance as it arose, because no rules existed for the unprecedented.^[15]

Thoughtlessness is reinterpreted implicitly in this passage as a lack of judgement, which is defined as the capacity to discern what is morally right and wrong. The faculty of judgement is conceived of as that which appeals to human freedom in its most radical form, namely as the capacity to resist the common doxa and generally accepted social behaviour and values. “The few who were ‘arrogant’ enough to trust only their own judgement were by no means identical with those persons who continued to abide by old values, or who were guided by a religious belief,” since those who trust their own judgement do not do this by virtue of a specific doxa, be it a minority doxa, such as specific old values of religious beliefs that were dismissed by the Nazi regime. The faculty of judgement thus entails the capacity to resist even to “the whole of respectable society” facing the risk of complete solitude and appeals to the most radical form of uniqueness and irreplaceability of a human person, which is left with its “own judgement” as sole guide.

In a text dated 1956–1957, “Introduction into Politics” Arendt distinguishes between two types of judgement. The first type organizes and subsumes “the individual and particular under the general and universal”.^[16] It presupposes “a prejudgement, a prejudice [Vorurteil]” that has been applied to the “standard itself,” i.e. to the general rule following which current judgements are effectuated,^[17] but that is not interrogated as such. Hence, the prejudice has to be understood in this context in a double meaning, i.e. in its etymological meaning, as that which precedes and makes possible the judgement, but also in its common meaning, namely as an unreflected doxa. ^[18] There is, however, also an authentic, original type of judgement, which manifests itself in situations when “there are no standards at our disposal”,^[19] and hence, that does not subsume following a general rule, simply because it does not dispose of such an overarching rule. It is precisely this second type of judgement that is highlighted in the above passage from Eichmann in Jerusalem, and which Arendt defines as the “ability to make distinctions,” and more precisely the distinction between right and wrong^[20]. Contrary to the first type of judgement, the second type of judgement does not dispose of any pregiven rule that it could apply to a particular case, but has to decide for a particular instance in an unprecedented and new way. Hence, this second type of judgement is intimately rooted in the phenomenon of natality that Hannah Arendt conceives as a new beginning and the introduction of novelty in the world. In The Human Condition Arendt relates the capacity of action of human beings to natality: “It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings …. The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world”.^[21] Nevertheless, it is possible to apply this same description to the human capacity for this original form of judgement, which is at stake in Eichmann in Jerusalem, since it entails the capacity to decide on the rightness or wrongness of a particular case in a new way, undetermined by precedent rules.^[22]

With this distinction between two types of judgement, Hannah Arendt recuperates the Kantian conceptual distinction between the determining and the reflecting judgement, which appears in the Critique of the Power of Judgment: “The power of judgment can be regarded either as a mere faculty for reflecting on a given representation, in accordance with a certain principle, for the sake of a concept that is thereby made possible, or as a faculty for determining an underlying concept through a given empirical representation” (Kant 2000, 15). Contrary to Arendt, Kant does not so much stress the idea of rule as the idea of concept in order to set up this distinction: by opposition with the determining judgement, the reflecting judgement does not dispose of any previous, “underlying” concept that it can apply to a representation, but creates a new concept for a particular representation.^[23] Nevertheless, Kant converges with Arendt’s idea of the originality of the second type of judgement, which is, in Kantian terminology, the reflecting judgement, when he states, “the reflecting power of judgment is that which is also called the faculty of judging (facultas diiudicandi)” (Kant 2000, 15). In other words, the reflective power of judgement is the power of judgement as such, in its most original form.

Although in Eichmann in Jerusalem Hannah Arendt does not distinguish thinking from judging and seems on the contrary to identify thoughtlessness with the absence of judgement, she clearly distinguishes these two human faculties in the first volume of her work The Life of the Mind. This distinction appears also in the tripartition of this work whose part are devoted to thinking, willing and judging. One essential distinctive feature between judging and thinking lies in the fact that judgement is focused on the particular, while thinking strives towards generalization.^[24] In Eichmann in Jerusalem such a distinction is not explicitly present, and the absence of judgement understood in its original sense, i.e. as faculty of making distinctions in a particular case, appears on the contrary as a way of understanding the phenomenon of thoughtlessness, incarnated by Eichmann’s figure.

Apart from the lack of judgement a second essential feature of thoughtlessness according to Arendt is the lack of the capacity to think from the standpoint of others. Thus, she writes in Eichmann in Jerusalem: “The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that this inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else”.^[25]

These two characteristics of thoughtlessness are correlated, since the faculty of judgement in its original sense, i.e. as the capacity for reflective judgement in the Kantian sense, necessarily entails following Hannah Arendt the capacity to think from the perspective of others and even of everybody else:

In the Critique of Judgment … Kant insisted upon a … way of thinking … for which it would not be enough to be in agreement with one’s own self, but which consisted of being able to “think in the place of everybody else” and which he therefore called an “enlarged mentality” (eine erweiterte Denkungsart). … And this enlarged way of thinking, which as judgment knows how to transcend its own individual limitations, on the other hand, cannot function in strict isolation or solitude; it needs the presence of others “in whose place” it must think, whose perspectives it must take into consideration, and without whom it never has the opportunity to operate at all. As logic, to be sound, depends on the presence of the self, so judgment, to be valid, depends on the presence of others. Hence judgment is endowed with a certain specific validity but is never universally valid.^[26]

Although Hannah Arendt does not mention in this fragment explicitly the notion of reflective judgement, it is obvious that it is precisely this particular form of judgement that is here at stake, since the determining judgement is precisely universally valid, contrary to the reflecting judgement that is not universally valid as such, but can only woo a universal adherence. More particularly, Arendt bears here in mind the judgement of taste, whose object, namely the beautiful is defined as “that which, without concepts, is represented as the object of a universal satisfaction.”^[27] The beautiful is only represented as an object of universal satisfaction; i.e. it pretends to such a form of universality, it is however not the object of a universal judgement, because it does not ground on concepts. In Arendtian words: the judgement of taste has a specific validity, but is never universally valid. Its validity is always particular since it is always related to particular cases and instances.

On the other hand, a judgement that is truly universal, and that can be only a determining judgement, does not need, paradoxically, “the presence of others,” but only logic, and the mere “presence of the self” that it entails. Hence, in order to acknowledge that the proposition “2 + 2 = 4” is universally valid I do not need to take into consideration the presence of others.^[28] I can even consider that this proposition would be true even if no human being or any other form of mind, not even my mind, would exist. When I recognize a bird as being beautiful, I cannot do this without taking into account the possibility that any other human being would find this bird necessarily beautiful.

Hence, one can find in Arendt’s thinking a “political appropriation of Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment.”^[29] It is a political appropriation since Arendt interprets the wooing of a universal consent that is implied in the judgement of taste as a typical “political form of people talking with one another,” since it corresponds to the “convincing and persuading speech” that corresponds to “what the Greeks called peithein.”^[30] Persuasion founds the life of citizens in the polis because it excludes physical violence, but also because the political realm is conceived by Hannah Arendt as a realm of collective thinking and action. It “resembles a … stage … and … rises directly out of acting together, the ‘sharing of words and deeds.’”^[31] Hence judgement in its original form has necessarily a political dimension, and if this form of judgement is an original form of thinking, then one can conclude that we cannot genuinely think without the presence of others and the horizon of a political community.

This political form of thinking is fundamentally grounded on the capacity of empathy, since it presupposes the capacity to think from the standpoint of somebody else, or, in the place of somebody else. Contrary to what Arendt’s words may suggest, what is at stake here is not to represent others through our singular and particular thinking, in the same way as a delegate would represent a community – such a way of thinking would amount in a mere abstract presence of others – but to attempt to think from the standpoint of others as if I would be in their place, in Husserl’s words, as if I would be “there.”^[32] Husserl’s phenomenology of empathy (Einfühlung), particularly as it unfolds in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, allows us to describe precisely this empathic structure, highlighted by Arendt, according to which one can project itself in the perspective of the other. This structure is marked, as Husserl shows, by an unbridgeable dichotomy between the “here” of my own original perspective and the “there” of the other’s perspective.^[33] The “there” of the other will never become my “here” – however, I can perceive this “there,” through a process of analogy with my own “here,” as if it would be a “here,” i.e., as if, precisely as Hannah Arendt puts it, I would be from the standpoint of the other.

As it appears from this analysis, the phenomenon of thoughtlessness is described in Eichmann in Jerusalem as bearing two essential features: (1) the absence of judgement in its original form, i.e. as faculty of distinguishing good from evil in particular cases, independently from a general law or from any “clichés”^{[34] [35]}; (2) the absence of consideration of the standpoint of others through empathy acts that allow us to project ourselves in the place of others. The first feature remains ambiguous in Arendt’s account, since it is not clear if it should be understood as the absence of the faculty of judgement as such or merely of the exercise of this faculty, an exercise that would necessarily entail the question of the will. In regard to this second reading, the phenomenon of thoughtlessness should be specified not merely as the absence of thinking, but as the absence of the will to think. Hence, evil would not mean mere thoughtlessness but a lack of will to think.^[36]

2.2 Evil as Ontological Deficiency – Goodness as Ontological Fullness

Despite the emblematic nature of the notion of banality of evil that Hannah Arendt uses in Eichmann in Jerusalem, surprisingly this notion is very rarely used in this work, nor does it lead to any systematic elaboration or any theory on evil. It appears rather that “Arendt’s primary concern is not to elaborate a normative moral philosophy^[37] but to capture evil in political-phenomenological terms,”^[38] i.e. to capture evil in its most prominent manifestation, as it destroys political thinking and political life. From this standpoint, Eichmann appears as a prominent and paradigmatic case of evil, which incarnates the banality of evil. On the one hand, Arendt states that “when [she] speaks of the banality of the evil, [she] does so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial,”^[39] and while she distinguishes Eichmann from Iago and Macbeth, suggesting thus that other forms of evil would be possible;^[40] on the other hand she also contends that “such thoughtlessness [that characterizes the banality of evil] can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man.”^[41] This particular banal form of evil is paradigmatic not so much because it is the most common form of evil,^[42] but because paradoxically, it bears, despite its banality, the most disastrous and extremely harmful effects. This does not entail that evil is defined by Hannah Arendt merely through its degree of harmfulness^[43] and hence also through a victim approach to evil. Arendt’s account of evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem reunites the victim but also the perpetrator approach,^[44] since it defines evil through the mental representations and characteristics of the evil perpetrators, namely their absence of thinking, while at the same time, it construes this form of evil as a paradigmatic case of evil because of the extreme magnitude of its harmfulness.

It is however in Arendt’s correspondence, more precisely in a letter from July 1963 addressed to Gershom Scholem, that one can find if not a proper theory at least a general statement on the nature of evil:

you are quite right: I changed my mind and do no longer speak of “radical evil.”^[45] … it is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical”, that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor demonic dimensions. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface … the moment [thought] concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality”. Only the good has depth and can be radical.^[46]

This short but very dense passage features two striking points: (1) a distinction between evil and goodness that is ontologically based; (2) an ontologically framed definition of the banality of evil. Evil cannot be radical because it is nothing, in other words, it does not have any ontological consistency. Conversely, only its opposite, goodness, “has depth and can be radical.” Hence, only goodness is “something,” has ontological consistency and fullness.

These distinctions lead to a reconsideration of what is the banality of evil, which is at odds with every possible attempt to minimize the scope of evil: evil is banal because it is nothing, and precisely because it is nothing is it extremely devastating and can “lay waste the whole world.” At the same time, we find here again this paradoxical relationship of consequence between extremely harmful effects and something that is merely banal, highlighted already in Eichmann in Jerusalem.

In what sense, however, is evil devoid of ontological consistency? Following our previous analyses, it appears that the ontological deficiency of evil has to be construed as the lack of a human faculty (as such, or in its exercise, this point remains ambiguous as we have seen), namely the faculty of thinking, understood as the capacity for judging and of empathy. Conversely, the ontological fullness of goodness would imply the presence of this human faculty.^[47]