Hannah Arendt’s Ethics

Hannah Arendt’s Ethics

Also available from Bloomsbury Heidegger, History and the Holocaust, Mahon O'Brien The Aesthetico-Political, Martín Plot Arendt: A Guide for the Perplexed, Karin A. Fry

For Jeanmarie, Shay and Shyam

Hannah Arendt’s Ethics By Deirdre Lauren Mahony University of Hamburg, Germany

Contents

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction: Hannah Arendt and Ethics after Auschwitz Philosophy and politics Ethics and politics Arendt’s ethics Hannah Arendt and ethics after Auschwitz 1 Arendt, Eichmann and the Banality of Evil Arendt on Eichmann The Eichmann controversy Was Arendt wrong about Eichmann? Banality: One form of evil Intention and moral responsibility Neiman on Arendt Intention Responsibility Moral luck Concluding remarks 2 Thinking and Evil Arendt on thinking and morality Thinking: A particular kind of process

Thinking as destructive Thinking as dialogue Conversation: A model for Arendt’s notion of thinking? Thinking, reality and the other The moral relevance of thought Is thinking a moralizing activity? Does the thinking process lead one to moral truth? Thinking as destructive, aimless and without result Can evil be an object of thought? Characterizing the dialogue of thought Ability to think and responsibility Morality and politics; thinking and judging Concluding remarks 3 Evil and Living with Oneself Reflections on meta-ethical positions in Arendt’s work Arendt on living with oneself Problematic elements of Arendt’s notion of ‘Living with Oneself’ Can living with oneself be an ultimate moral standard? Is living with oneself the same as thinking? Does everyone live with him- or herself or only a select few? Does the notion of living with oneself undermine the thinking thesis? Character, integrity and living with oneself 4 Nonparticipation Individual (moral) guilt and collective (political) responsibility Moral incapacity The morally unthinkable Conclusion Bibliography Index

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Christopher Hamilton and Robert Weninger for their academic guidance and advice, and Sarah Schmidt for her support. My thanks also go to Frankie Mace at Bloomsbury for her enthusiasm for this project. To my parents and my husband, I owe a deep debt of gratitude for their continued patience and encouragement.

List of Abbreviations

‘CR’

Hannah Arendt, ‘Collective Responsibility’, in Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003) EiJ Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 2006) EU Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 1994) HC Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) LKPP Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) LMT Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Volume One: Thinking (New York: Harcourt, 1978) OR Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006) OT Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1968) ‘PR’ Hannah Arendt, ‘Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship’, in Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003) R&J Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003) ‘SQ’ Arendt, ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, in Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003) ‘TMC’ Hannah Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003)

Introduction: Hannah Arendt and Ethics after Auschwitz

Hannah Arendt, the Jewish–German (and later American) thinker, writer and teacher, has become a well-known figure in twentieth-century Western intellectual life, particularly in her adopted home of the United States. Arendt was an émigré who fled the persecution in Europe. Finding refuge in America, she developed reflections on totalitarianism, Jewish identity, political theory and practice, culture, education and ethics that have informed numerous discourses in modern American and European philosophy, politics and history. Arendt has been variously considered a philosopher, a political scientist, a historian, a German romantic apologist for Heidegger, a disciple of Karl Jaspers, a Zionist and an enemy of the Jewish people. Her work has been both harshly criticized and reverently praised, her thinking considered original by some and derivative by others. Critics have emphasized her perceived conservatism as well as some of her more radical approaches, depending on their vantage point in the political spectrum. Her presence ‘in the world’, that is to say, her significance as a public thinker for public discourse and the contribution her thinking has made to the study of some of the most fundamental concepts in Western thought (totalitarianism, revolution, freedom and action in politics, for example) are considerable. Whether provoking fierce (and sometimes bitter) controversy or respectful veneration, even her detractors would admit that Hannah Arendt has had a significant impact on modern thought. Recent years have seen renewed interest in Hannah Arendt’s work, from both within and outside the Academy. The year 2011 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, on which Arendt had famously (and controversially) reported. Consequently, the last few years have witnessed a revival of discussions of the trial, its outcome – Eichmann’s execution – and the interpretation of Eichmann and his motivations that Arendt proposed in her reports. Significant new books have been published which once again seek to

deny the historical accuracy of Arendt’s view of Eichmann, most notably those by Bettina Stangneth and Deborah E. Lipstadt.1 Margarethe von Trotta’s 2012 film Hannah Arendt also centres on the Eichmann trial, using this as a lens through which to examine Arendt’s life and thought. Additionally, even more recent political developments – an apparent lurch to the right in modern European and American politics – have engendered a revitalized interest in Arendt’s account of the origins of totalitarian government, ideology and propaganda, authoritarianism and racism.2 That modern audiences, academic and non-academic, see echoes of the Europe of the 1930s in today’s right-wing populism is certainly concerning. Even the insights and guidance of as eminent and respected a figure as Hannah Arendt provide small comfort.

Philosophy and politics Arendt is particularly renowned as a political theorist, a fact that is reflected in the landscape of literature on Arendt. The vast majority of studies on her thought are concerned with the political concepts she illuminates in works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition and On Revolution. Exploration of Hannah Arendt’s ethical thought3 often seems to be relegated to second place in the literature, and, indeed, often discussed only insofar as it pertains to her political thinking. Although politics was undoubtedly a major concern in her work, ethics and morality, I would argue, occupy an equally central place in her canon, and her ethical theories in particular require deeper critical analysis. The dominance of political-theory interpretations in Arendt studies and the comparative lack of (moral) philosophy approaches are attributable not only to Arendt’s inspiring reinvigoration of older political concepts in the modern world, but also to the fact that she thought of herself, primarily, as a political theorist, describing her ‘profession – if it can be called that’ as ‘political theory’ rather than philosophy.4 Arendt rejected the title of philosopher, asserting that she did not ‘feel like a philosopher’ and that she had not ‘been accepted in the circle of philosophers’.5 Though her work clearly goes beyond political theory and into the realms of political and moral philosophy, Arendt did not see herself as a philosopher. For Arendt, the tradition of Western philosophy had closed itself off from an aspect of the world that fascinated her – the space of speech and action arising between people coming together in political communities.6 She rejected as implausible the ‘age-old distinction between the many and the “professional

thinkers” specializing in what was supposedly the highest activity human beings could attain to’.7 Turning away from what she viewed as a traditional ‘professional’ philosophical disdain for politics, Arendt often directed her thinking towards the common life shared by those in a political community. P hilosophy and theology can provide no guidance here since they concern man in the singular8 and politics is based on plurality, on ‘the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world’.9 Arendt was a thinker concerned with the real world and the real people in it rather than the abstract, removed, ideal world of the philosopher. Indeed, she had originally wanted to call The Human Condition ‘Amor Mundi’ – love of the world.10 Arendt also held that there is a ‘vital tension between philosophy and politics’,11 namely, the desire of philosophy to impose absolute standards on the messy, contingent world of politics: ‘To the philosopher, politics – if he did not regard this whole realm as beneath his dignity – became the field in which the elementary necessities of human life are taken care of and to which absolute philosophical standards are applied.’12 The imposition of rigid, absolute philosophical standards on politics is an unnecessary and damaging move in Arendt’s view, which maligns the very essence of politics – its plural and conditional nature. Arendt’s ‘amor mundi’ ensured she could never consider the contingent and diverse world of politics beneath her dignity.

Ethics and politics Though explicitly moral philosophical readings of Arendt’s thinking are limited, the many political-theory interpretations do encompass an ethical dimension, pertaining to the supposed lack of ethical constraint placed on the actors in Arendt’s ideal political realm. This area of study, which is about ethics within Arendtian politics rather than Arendtian ethics per se, has produced a rich debate among Arendt scholars, leading to her appropriation as a relevant thinker for a variety of different political positions. Arendt’s valorization of the performance of political action, coupled with her view that ‘the social’ (and thereby also moral questions of social justice) ought to be excluded from the realm of ‘the political’ proper – she criticizes ‘the rise of the social’13 and asserts that ‘the social question interfered with’ the course of the American and French revolutions14 – as well as a reluctance to admit certain moral sentiments into politics – compassion is, for Arendt, ‘politically speaking, irrelevant and without consequence’15 – have led some to worry that the

Arendtian political arena would be undefined by moral restrictions. Commentators who, though sympathetic to Arendt’s reinvigoration of the political, are critical of the notion of politics as pure performance (such as George Kateb, Dana Villa and Margaret Canovan),16 view Arendt as a thinker for whom the action of politics is its own goal – political action is not instrumentalized in the service of some goal extrinsic to itself such as social justice or better wealth distribution; rather, engaging in political action is valuable in itself and represents a form of existential validation. One’s being-inthe-world is affirmed, one’s existence made manifest in the practice of politics. Anything beyond that is not the proper function of politics. The critics’ concern is that Arendt’s strict separation of the social and the political and her claim that the political realm is not the place to address moral questions such as those concerning social justice lead to a political arena generally undefined by moral restrictions, an area where all that matters is political action for its own sake. Arendt has therefore been considered by some to exhibit a kind of political existentialism and indeed some have dismissed her for it. Richard Wolin and Martin Jay are perhaps the most prominent examples of this attitude. Jay refers to Arendt’s thought as ‘political existentialism’ and highlights her alleged ‘existentialist mentality proclaiming the permissibility and possibility of everything’.17 These concerns have, in turn, elicited responses from those who seek to recover a moral dimension to Arendtian politics. Deliberative democratic interpretations such as those of Seyla Benhabib and Jürgen Habermas18 emphasize the communicative aspect of politics for Arendt – not only is the political realm a performative one, it is also a deliberative one where each individual’s performance in act and speech communicates with the performances of others. Decisions of the political sphere are reached in this coming together of actors. Furthermore, for Benhabib, Arendt’s conception of the political involves more than mere existential affirmation for the actor: appearance in politics reveals who the individual is. This is what Benhabib calls the ‘narrative constitution of self and action in Arendt’s work’.19 In this way, deliberative democratic interpretations of Arendt recover a moral dimension in the practice of Arendtian politics – if political action is communicative as well as performative, then it is imbued with moral respect for other actors, with reciprocity and with a desire to arrive at decisions in conjunction with, and not in opposition to, others and their views. This broad debate between those political theorists emphasizing the

performative dimension of Arendt’s politics and those underscoring the communicative dimension has proved fruitful within Arendt studies. It has often defined the work on Arendt’s political thought and represents a clear engagement with Arendtian ethics, insofar as this pertains to and delineates her political thinking. Modern Arendt scholarship continues in this vein, with more recent treatments by Alice MacLachlan, Garath Williams and Steve Buckler, as well as the contributions to the recent volume Action and Appearance: Ethics and the Politics of Writing in Hannah Arendt.20

Arendt’s ethics In this book I offer a different approach: I consider Arendt’s ethical thought in its own right, separately from her politics. I do not treat the ethical dimensions (or perhaps lack of them) in the Arendtian political arena, but examine instead the moral ideas underlying her claims about the participation of individuals in acts of evil, which arise from her observations of Eichmann. My focus is on the intentions and motivations of individual perpetrators, just as Arendt’s is when it comes to attempting to understand how so many people became complicit in such monstrous evil.21 Arendt’s preoccupation with ethics was largely prompted by her experiences of the Nazi regime and the subsequent revelations of their totalitarian atrocities. Allusions to a concept of evil which encompasses both an aspect of radicalness and one of banality are evident in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt’s examination of the historical, cultural and political conditions which brought about the rise of totalitarianism and the ideologies, tactics of terror and fundamental abuses of the political which informed the practice of totalitarianism.22 Yet it was not until Arendt attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 in the capacity of a reporter for The New Yorker that her work began to consider explicitly the moral questions raised by Nazism and the Holocaust, namely how such evil could have occurred on such a scale in a world which had once seemed so certain of its own ethics. Moral codes, felt by many to be in some sense essentially inviolable, had crumbled to the extent that what was once an obvious crime now assumed the mantle of an unpleasant obligation in accordance with a higher law of nature.23 Arendt’s reflections on the nature of evil and the occurrence of wrongdoing in the world continued beyond the Eichmann book throughout the 1960s: she gave two series of lectures on moral thought to her students at the New School for

Social Research in New York and at the University of Chicago. These have been collected, edited and published in the volume Responsibility and Judgment.24 Arendt’s contemplation of ethics is also linked with her analysis of the faculty of thought: In Eichmann in Jerusalem she remarks upon Eichmann’s thoughtlessness as a causal factor in his capacity for wrongdoing. Indeed her notion of the interconnectedness of thought and morality came to inform her account of human thinking, an account which was originally prompted by that very assertion that Eichmann’s thoughtlessness defined his capacity for evil. In the first volume of The Life of the Mind, which is dedicated to the subject of thinking, Arendt writes that her preoccupation with this subject originated partly in the Eichmann trial itself.25 Its other impetus was, for Arendt, the need to examine the counterpart to the vita activa which she had so comprehensively treated in The Human Condition, namely the vita contemplativa, the world within the self w hich she saw as characterized by the faculties of thinking, willing and judging.26 Arendt’s own self-definition as a non-philosopher notwithstanding, it seems clear that her work encompasses much more than pure political theory and indeed traces a path through significant problems in moral philosophy. Arendt’s rejection of the title ‘philosopher’ is perhaps one reason why there is a relative lack of moral philosophical studies of her thought, compared to the considerable number of political-theory interpretations from the realm of her self-identified profession. A more historical reason is the legacy of the Eichmann controversy. Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil occasioned such bitter debate that the philosophical arguments often became lost in a sea of polemical contempt with the various sides merely asserting their contentions, rejecting opposing ones and avoiding a more probing and impartial investigation of the moral philosophical questions raised. Those who repudiated her notion of the banality of evil (such as Lionel Abel, Gershom Scholem and Marie Syrkin) often dismissed it out of hand and emphasized the alleged offence caused by the proposition that Adolf Eichmann was anything other than a deeply evil, fanatical and sadistic monster. On the other hand, those who saw something not only plausible but deeply significant in her claims about Eichmann – such as Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell and Dwight MacDonald – were often too busy defending her against unfair personal attacks to examine her moral philosophical ideas in greater depth.27 This original bitter debate has lingered ever since, overshadowing any subsequent discussions of Arendt’s view of Eichmann. Indeed, the recent revival of interest in the Eichmann trial has once again stoked

the controversy, with the dispute being played out in the pages of The New York Times and the Jewish Review of Books.28 This is not to say, of course, that there are not several works written on Arendt’s views on evil, and specifically her characterization of the banality of evil in Adolf Eichmann’s actions. Yet these have tended to concentrate on plotting a path through the controversy surrounding the Eichmann book. Less has been said about the ethical system underlying the banality-of-evil concept. Similarly, though contributions regarding her ideas on thinking are not inconsiderable, there are relatively few which seek to relate the portrayal in her work of how we think to the representation of ethics and moral behaviour which informs it.29 Where there is discussion in the literature of Arendt’s ideas regarding evil and morality, it tends to assume a more historical or political, rather than (analytic) philosophical, approach. Notable exceptions to this (such as the work of Seyla Benhabib, Susan Neiman, Richard Bernstein and Joseph Beatty among others) form the core secondary literature at the heart of this book. Arendt’s ethics and, indeed, the evils which induced her to develop ethical reflections, have tended to be excluded from the kind of Anglophone analytic philosophy interrogation reserved for other (perhaps less important) moral philosophical concerns in the twentieth century such as meta-ethics or the kinds of language used in moral philosophy. In the twenty-first century, a certain strand has emerged in Arendt scholarship which takes a phenomenological approach to interpreting her ethical ideas, both in themselves and as they appear to relate to her political thought. Marieke Borren, Bethania Assy and James Hart are Arendt scholars working in this vein to produce insightful and nuanced phenomenological readings of aspects of Arendt’s ethics.30 In this book I take an approach much closer to an analytic philosophy reading of Arendt’s ethics than a phenomenological one. The phenomenological approach has proved useful and revealing, and my aim is to provide similarly useful insights by employing an alternative, more analytic, method. Confronting an author with a different approach can often prove enlightening – the juxtaposition of Arendt’s richly rhetorical style and a focused, more analytic form of evaluation reveals elements which have been previously overlooked. Arendt does not conceive of ethics in entirely phenomenological terms – Arendt’s moral philosophy is concerned not only with how we experience morality or moral decisions, though she has some interesting things to say about this, but also with establishing values and making claims about what defines certain evils. It concerns questions of moral philosophy which are of significance in the analytic tradition such as those

relating to intention and moral responsibility. My approach will therefore seek to address these questions using a more analytic method than tends to be employed in Arendt studies, without, I hope, detracting from the richness of her ideas. Arendt’s ethical ideas have an intuitive appeal which requires deeper analysis. My aim is to begin this disassembling and appraisal of Arendt’s m oral philosophical ideas. The complicated, interrelated nature of many of the discussions in Arendt’s work means that the literature tends to lack a clear enunciation of the various different responses to, and analyses of, modern evil which Arendt espouses. I aim to remedy this lacuna. Through a close reading of Arendt’s works regarding ethical questions, I identify four aspects of her thought in this regard: first, the concept of the banality of evil; second, the positing of a link between thoughtlessness and evildoing; third, Arendt’s idea of ‘living with oneself’ (which is separate from, but related to, her characterization of thinking) as a prophylactic against evil; and, finally, her account of the ‘nonparticipants’ who refused to be complicit in the crimes of the Third Reich and their defining moral features. I examine and evaluate each aspect, including the relations and tensions between them, in the hope that my contribution to the literature on Arendt’s ethics can chart a more analytical course through her complex, and at times extremely confusing, reflections on the subject. In the process, I intend to draw out the most salient and valuable aspects of Hannah Arendt’s moral philosophical thought, while simultaneously providing a critical review of those elements which seem, prima facie, intuitively appealing, but which appear upon further investigation to be philosophically problematic. I begin by examining Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil in Chapter 1. I consider her view of Eichmann, the controversy surrounding this view, and the question of its historical accuracy, including the more recent work by Bettina Stangneth and Deborah E. Lipstadt on this question. I examine the moral philosophical meaning of the banality of evil for Arendt, paying particular attention to the insightful interpretation offered by Susan Neiman. In addition, I emphasize that the banality of evil represents only one form of evil for Arendt – she certainly does not exclude the possibility of other forms – and I also consider other evidence of the banality of evil which supports Arendt’s thinking, that is, accounts which imply a lack of decidedly evil intentions on the part of perpetrators of the Holocaust, in order to reveal the plausibility of Arendt’s banality-of-evil concept. Finally, in this chapter I consider the moral philosophical questions raised: the consequences for the concept of moral responsibility where evil intentions are absent, and the issue of moral luck.

Chapter 2 is dedicated to examining the claims Arendt makes about the links between thoughtlessness and wrongdoing and the concurrent assertion that thinking can (in some sense) prevent evil. I begin by reconstructing the general account of thinking Arendt gives, particularly in her work on ethics, and then interrogate the moral relevance she attaches to this thinking process, element by element. I also analyse the assumptions Arendt makes about the nature of evil – she follows the Augustinian doctrine that evil is without substance – and the conflations apparent in her thinking on this subject, such as her (confusing) merging of this Augustinian view on the ontological status of evil with Socrates’ views on the desirability of evil. In Chapter 3 I examine a third ethical concept which Arendt posits – that of ‘living with oneself’, which I treat as separate from the thinking thesis. Briefly explained, this is the idea that there is a kind of basic two-in-one condition of the self as it exists in solitude, a condition found in thinking as well. On this understanding, the question of whether to commit an act of evil is really a question of whether the two parts of the self could live together with one another after its commission. I investigate both, on the one hand, the intuitive appeal of this notion and the problems posed by its inherent subjectivity and, on the other, the concerning fact that this seems to undermine Arendt’s claims about thinking preventing evil. Once again, I consider the moral philosophical questions raised by this idea, especially those pertaining to character and integrity. In this chapter I also touch upon some of the meta-ethical assumptions underlying Arendt’s ethics. Finally, in Chapter 4 I identify and discuss an important element of Arendt’s ethics which has not previously been recognized in studies of her work: the concept of ‘nonparticipation’. This is an idea explored mainly in her essays ‘Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship’ and ‘Collective Responsibility’.31 Briefly explained, it is the notion that the public life of Nazi Germany was so tainted by evil, that to participate in any element of it was to be complicit to some extent in that evil, and therefore to bear some responsibility for it. Nonparticipants were those who chose not only not to join the Nazi Party or any of its organizations, but also not to take part in any form of public life – law, education, literature, culture – since it had all been contaminated by the evil of Nazi beliefs. Through their nonparticipation, these people remained free of culpability in Nazi crimes. I contend that Arendt’s idea of nonparticipation is the political expression of a form of moral incapacity. Nonparticipants were both political and moral actors: they experienced a moral incapacity when confronted

with the notion of engaging in a way of life defined by Nazi evil, and expressed this politically as the refusal to participate in the public life of Nazi society.

Hannah Arendt and ethics after Auschwitz Before beginning a close analysis of Arendt’s ethical ideas, it is important to contextualize her reflections: her explicit consideration of evil and individual perpetrators was prompted by the Eichmann trial, but she had recognized earlier that the events of the Holocaust and the shift in ethics which she considered them to have caused, would prove significant for subsequent political and ethical thought. In 1945 she wrote that ‘the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of post-war intellectual life in Europe’.32 Hannah Arendt’s thought on ethics contributes to a body of moral philosophy which asserts that the crimes of the Holocaust revealed a shift in ethics and the need for new responses to a new kind of evil. The question of whether the Holocaust is to be considered a unique event, new and unlike any form of evil which had existed before, is a subject of debate within Holocaust studies. A considerable proportion of the academic discussion of the Holocaust, in philosophy, history and literature, involves the position that it is, either explicitly or implicitly. In discussions of the violence and repression of Hitler’s Nazi regime and the terrible crimes it committed, one often encounters terms such as ‘rupture’ or ‘break’ – the idea that these events, namely the persecution and attempted destruction of Europe’s Jews (and other groups such as Roma and Sinti) represent a distinct schism in human experience. In discussions of the Holocaust,33 one encounters an implicit sense of the ethical significance of these horrors and the concomitant impression of a decisive, immutable transformation in human affairs. It certainly seems plausible to contend that the ethical significance of the Holocaust is determined by the fact that this particular horror, on this scale and with this level of complicity, was something not witnessed by humanity before. It demands a review and readjustment of our thinking on morality. Though this position is intuitively appealing – the murderous acts of the Nazis certainly render most normal ethical responses to terrible crimes inadequate – a deeper analysis reveals little that is concrete in terms of explanatory evidence. As Susan Neiman asserts, ‘The claim that Auschwitz represents a form of evil which is radically new persists despite all difficulties in giving reasons for it.’34 For some working in the field of Holocaust studies, these difficulties lead them to question

the notion that the events of the Holocaust represent a new and unique form of evil.35 This is not a question I wish to settle here (if, indeed, it is a question which could ever be settled). For my purposes I need only establish Arendt’s view of the matter. For Arendt, it was clear that the evil of the Holocaust was in some sense new and therefore necessitated new responses. She expresses the idea that Hitler’s totalitarian regime and the crimes it engendered represented a distinct break with the political and ethical traditions which had formed modern Germany. In the preface to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism she describes how all the traditional elements of the political and spiritual world extant at the time of the Nazi rise to power ‘were dissolved into a conglomeration where everything seems to have lost specific value, and has become unrecognizable for human comprehension, unusable for human purpose’.36 For Arendt, traditional understandings of ethics and the occurrence of evil had been altered by the Holocaust such that the problem of evil in the modern world needed to be addressed anew. The Holocaust seemed to call into question apparent certainties about the axiomatic and universal nature of ethical principles. According to Arendt, contemporaneous conceptions of morality were founded on ideas of self-evidence and permanency in ethics. On Arendt’s reading, prevailing cultural assumptions had encouraged many to view moral principles as axiomatic, their validity as beyond question. She writes: Among the many things which were still thought to be ‘permanent and vital’ at the beginning of the century and yet have not lasted [are] the moral issues … the few rules and standards according to which men used to tell right from wrong, and which were invoked to judge or justify others and themselves, and whose validity were [sic] supposed to be self-evident to every sane person either as a part of divine or of natural law.37 Arendt acknowledges that ‘a few’38 had questioned the assumption that moral precepts are self-evident and indeed refers, of course, to Nietzsche’s critique of Judeo-Christian ethics. Yet the contribution of some thinkers aside, commonly held cultural views considered ethical principles to be a matter of self-evidence: most people believed they could simply tell right from wrong and that this would always be the case. However, it proved not to be. Arendt states that her generation had ‘witnessed the total collapse of all established moral standards in public and private life

during the nineteen-thirties and –forties’.39 These ethical principles, thought to be valid beyond proof and immutable, simply crumbled in less than two decades and the horrors resulting from this collapse of morality were the worst the world had ever seen. The Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig described the significance of Nazi evil in similar terms; he saw an erosion of any enduring belief in ethical concepts such as justice and the rule of law: Before this ‘New Order’, the murder of a single man without legal process and without apparent reason would have shocked the world; torture was considered unthinkable in the twentieth century. … But now after successive Bartholomew nights and daily mortal tortures in the S.A. prisons and behind barbed wire, what did a single injustice or earthly suffering signify? In 1938, after Austria, our universe had become accustomed to inhumanity, to lawlessness, and brutality as never in centuries before. In a former day the occurrences in unhappy Vienna alone would have been sufficient to cause international proscription, but in 1938 the world conscience was silent or merely muttered surlily before it forgot and forgave.40 To Zweig it seemed that not only had human (moral) progress been halted in its tracks, but in fact it had been replaced altogether by its antonym: the world was witnessing a ‘moral retrogression’,41 a ‘decline of humanity into a barbarism which we had believed long since forgotten’.42 Zweig conclud es that with the emergence of National Socialism and its hideous crimes, ‘our world fell back morally a thousand years’.43 For Arendt, after the Holocaust moral principles can no longer be viewed as self-evident in the same way. Any collapse of morality must be accompanied by the concomitant collapse of those cultural understandings which considered morality as given. In addition, Nazi evil represented a new kind of wrongdoing in the modern world. There are at least two aspects to the novelty of the evil of the Holocaust for Arendt: the notion that the Holocaust represented the destruction of humanity rather than simply the murder of human beings, and the idea that this crime had required a new level of complicity among the general population of Germany and the occupied lands. In her monumental 1951 book on the political phenomenon of totalitarianism, The Origins of Totalitarianism, one of the main theses included an account of the nature of totalitarianism and its effect on humanity. Fundamental to Arendt’s thought on totalitarianism is her contention that it is novel: the social and political features of a system of total domination are unprecedented. Arendt

contended that not only were the forms of totalitarian domination novel (such as an ideology based upon a theory of nature or history, the paradoxical emphasis on human omnipotence coupled with a belief that ‘laws’ of history or nature supersede human efforts and the random terror perpetrated against populations) but so too were their political and ethical ramifications. The crimes committed by these systems are, like the political forms of domination that engender them, on Arendt’s understanding, new.44 They are thus beyond the scope of prevailing categories, of common general principles according to which we might judge the particular horrors of Auschwitz: they explode all previous concepts of criminality. These are new crimes which exceed the capacity of existing punishments and the circumstances of normal forgiveness.45 Indeed, our prevailing frameworks of understanding do not, for Arendt, accommodate any account of these crimes. Hence totalitarianism and its attendant barbarism are ethically significant: the Holocaust forms not just an occurrence of evil, however brutal, about which one must say ‘this should never have happened’, it is simultaneously a ‘stumbling block’ which challenges existing frameworks of understanding, and indeed the language we use to describe such evil.46 In common with other commentators, Arendt saw the Nazi crimes as unprecedented in part because of their particular nature. In her later work on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, she describes how the terms used in the trial, such as the portrayal of the Holocaust as a crime against humanity, were not apt. Rather, she contends, the Holocaust is better described as a ‘crime against the human status’.47 The death camps were not simply places where opponents of the regime were imprisoned, but rather they were ‘laboratories in the experiment of total domination’48 where humans are transformed into ‘ghastly marionettes with human faces … which all react with perfect reliability even when going to their own death, and which do nothing but react’.49 Arendt considers the evil of Nazism and its crimes to be qualitatively novel. In addition, the scale of the Holocaust meant an unprecedented level of collusion, negligence and/or indifference on the part of very many ‘ordinary’ people. Certainly, despicable crimes before and since the Holocaust have relied upon the collusion and collaboration of various sections of societies at different times. Yet nothing had necessitated the extent of the complicity witnessed in the Third Reich – from universities rejecting Jewish students, to the ordinary people who boycotted Jewish shops, to the rail service which ensured millions were transported efficiently to the killing centres of the East, to the businesses which supplied material for uniforms to the camps, to the concerns which exploited the

slave labour they contained; complicity, in one form or another, was ubiquitous. Many ordinary people were implicated in the crime. Attempting to understand how so many apparently normal people could be involved in such evil has proved a difficult challenge for ethical thought. Arendt’s Eichmann book and her subsequent reflections on ethics can be seen as an exercise in addressing precisely this question of mass complicity in Nazi crimes: in attempting to understand how the Holocaust could unfold in the way that it did, one is really posing a question about the role of the millions of ordinary people whose actions did not prevent it and, in many cases, contributed to it. It is not difficult to explain how the persecution and murder of innocent Jews appealed to the sadists and fanatical anti-Semites present in the population. Attempting an account of how a ‘normal’ person, that is to say, one who did not generally harbour cruel and depraved sentiments towards others and one whose judgement was previously unclouded by impassioned prejudice, racial or otherwise, could ignore, let alone participate in, such grievous crimes proves more problematic. As Primo Levi observes, ‘One cannot suppose that the majority of Germans lightheartedly accepted the slaughter,’50 and yet without their at least tacit complicity, it could not have occurred. The extent to which Nazi society was directed towards the elimination of the Jewish people (and other groups considered ‘undesirable’ or unlebenswert, not worthy of life) meant that large numbers of German citizens were working in the service of these goals: the civil service, the rail authorities, the businesses who both abused the slave labour of the camps and supplied the camps with the items nee ded, the company which furnished the extermination camps with their crematoria, the company which manufactured the murder weapon of choice: hydrocyanic acid gas and those families who collected the second-hand clothes and shoes available at Auschwitz.51 This list is indicative but not exhaustive. It suffices to say that widespread complicity, whether in the form of willed ignorance or the more explicit mode of active collusion, was a defining feature of Nazi evil and a feature which determined, in part, the unprecedented nature of that evil. In examining a perpetrator such as Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt added a major study to that body of scholarship that deals with the mass complicity of the Third Reich. I contend that it is this problem of explaining mass collusion in evil which Arendt’s ethical ideas mainly concern. The four separate yet related notions mentioned earlier (the banality-of-evil concept, the posited link between thoughtlessness and wrongdoing, the idea of ‘living with oneself’ as a

prophylactic against evil, and the moral features of the so-called nonparticipants) all pertain to understanding how it is that relatively ‘ordinary’ individuals can become complicit in extraordinary evil. The four ideas which I trace in her books, articles, lectures and speeches on ethical issues all apply to identifying and explaining how individuals come to participate in acts of great evil.

Notes 1 Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, trans. Ruth Martin (London: Vintage, 2016); Deborah E. Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial (New York: Schocken, 2011). 2 See for example Elizabeth Grenier, ‘Why the world is turning to Hannah Arendt to explain Trump’, Deutsche Welle, 2 February 2017, Sophie Gilbert, ‘1984 Isn’t the Only Book Enjoying a Revival’, The Atlantic, 25 January 2017, Sam Harnett, ‘Trump Election Spurs Sales of Books About White Working Class and Totalitarianism’, KQED News, 19 January 2017, Zoe Williams, ‘Totalitarianism in the age of Trump: Lessons from Hannah Arendt’, The Guardian, 1 February 2017. 3 In this book I use the terms ‘ethics’ and ‘moral philosophy’ interchangeably, as is the case in many discussions in this field. There are, of course, reasonable arguments for a distinction between the two, and even perhaps for an interpretation of Arendt’s thought which draws a distinction. This is not, however, the task I set for myself here. 4    Hannah Arendt, ‘“What Remains? The Language Remains”: A Conversation with Günter Gaus’, in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 1994), 1. (Subsequently abbreviated: EU.) 5    Arendt, ‘“What Remains? The Language Remains”: A Conversation with Günter Gaus’, in Arendt, EU. 6    Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 198. (Subsequently abbreviated: HC.) 7    Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Volume One: Thinking (New York: Harcourt, 1978), 13. (Subsequently abbreviated: LMT.) 8    Hannah Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’, in Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005), 93. 9    Arendt, HC, 7. 10 See Arendt’s letter of 6th August 1955 to Karl Jaspers in Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence: 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 264. Amor Mundi is the name of the Hannah Arendt Center’s weekly newsletter. 11 Arendt, ‘“What Remains? The Language Remains”: A Conversation with Günter Gaus’, in Arendt, EU, 2. 12 Hannah Arendt, ‘Socrates’, in Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005), 37. 13 Arendt, HC, 38. 14 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006), 129. (Subsequently abbreviated OR). Arendt criticizes the French Revolution on the grounds of its having included a social element: ‘Since the revolution had opened the gates of the political realm to the poor, this realm had indeed become “social”. It was overwhelmed by the cares and worries which actually belonged in the sphere of the household.’ Arendt, OR, 81. 15 Arendt, OR, 76.

16 See Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1984) and Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 17 Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 244. 18 See Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) and Jürgen Habermas, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power’, in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994), 211–29. 19 Benhabib, Reluctant Modernism, xvii. 20 See Alice MacLachlan, ‘An Ethic of Plurality: Reconciling Politics and Morality in Hannah Arendt’, History and Judgment, Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen Junior Visiting Fellows’ Conferences, Vol. XXI, IWM, Vienna, 2006, Garrath Williams, ‘Ethics and Human Relationality: between Arendt’s Accounts of morality’, Hannah Arendt.net: Zeitschrift für politisches Denken, Bd.3, Nr.1, (2007), Steve Buckler, Hannah Arendt and Political Theory: Challenging the Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011) and Action and Appearance: Ethics and the Politics of Writing in Hannah Arendt, ed. Anna Yeatman, Phillip Hansen, Magdalena Zolkos and Charles Barbour (New York: Continuum, 2011). 21 For a consideration of the global political and legal ramifications of Arendt’s interpretation of Nazi evil, see Lars Rensmann, ‘Grounding Cosmopolitics: Rethinking Crimes against Humanity and Global Political Theory with Arendt and Adorno’, in Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations, ed. Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). Arendt’s ethical thinking in light of the crimes of the Holocaust focuses on the intentions, actions and responsibility of individual perpetrators, diverging from the concentration on plurality in her politics. 22 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1968) (Subsequently abbreviated: OT). 23 Heinrich Himmler’s speeches often contained this sentiment. For example, he commiserated with an Einsatzgruppe, whom he had just witnessed shooting people into mass graves in Minsk in 1941, regarding how difficult their ‘task’ was and yet emphasizing its necessity in the service of the thousandyear Reich. See http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/einsatz/himmlerinminsk.html. For details of this and other speeches, see also Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 24 Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003) (Subsequently abbreviated: R&J). 25 Arendt, LMT, 3. 26 Ibid. 27 For an account of these and other contributions to the debate in the pages of Partisan Review, see Michael Ezra, ‘The Eichmann Polemics: Hannah Arendt and Her Critics’, Democratiya 9 (Summer 2007): 141–65. 28 See Richard Wolin, ‘The Banality of Evil: The Demise of a Legend’, Jewish Review of Books, Fall 2014; Seyla Benhabib, ‘Who’s On Trial, Eichmann or Arendt?’ The New York Times, 21 September 2014; Richard Wolin, ‘Thoughtlessness Revisited: A Response to Seyla Benhabib’, Jewish Review of Books, 30 September 2014; Seyla Benhabib, ‘Richard Wolin on Arendt’s “Banality of Evil” Thesis’, Jewish Review of Books, 14 October 2014 and Richard Wolin, ‘Arendt, Banality, and Benhabib: A Final Rejoinder’, Jewish Review of Books, 14 October 2014. 29 Three more recent works have begun to consider thought or thoughtlessness and moral conduct more

explicitly, though often still with a particular emphasis on the resultant political action rather than the implied ethical notions underlying this apparent connection in Arendt’s work. See Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, ed. R. Berkowitz, J. Katz and T. Keenan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); Action and Appearance: Ethics and the Politics of Writing in Hannah Arendt, ed. Anna Yeatman, Phillip Hansen, Magdalena Zolkos and Charles Barbour (New York: Continuum, 2011) and Valerie Hartouni, Visualizing Atrocity: Arendt, Evil and the Optics of Thoughtlessness (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 30 See Marieke Borren, ‘“A Sense of the World”: Hannah Arendt’s Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Common Sense’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2013): 225–55; Bethania Assy, Hannah Arendt: An Ethics of Personal Responsibility (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008) and James G. Hart, ‘Hannah Arendt: The Care of the World and of the Self’, in Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy: A Handbook, ed. John J. Drummond and Lester Embree (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 2002), 87–106. 31 Both of these essays are in Arendt, R&J. 32 Hannah Arendt, ‘Nightmare and Flight’, in EU, 134. 33 The appropriateness of the word ‘Holocaust’ to describe t he massacre of the Jews is not undisputed: its etymological origins lie in ancient Greek words used to describe offerings or sacrifices to God through fire. The religious and purifying connotations of this derivation certainly are not apposite in describing the systematic attempted genocide of the Jewish people of Europe. Among some specialists in the field and particularly in Israel, the Hebrew word ‘Shoah’ is considered preferable. These debates notwithstanding, I will use the term Holocaust since, as the editors of the recent Handbook of Holocaust Studies recognize, this term has taken root and ‘Holocaust studies’ continues to be the most commonly understood name for academic work in this subject area – see Peter Hayes and John K. Roth, ‘Introduction’, in The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, ed. Peter Hayes and John K. Roth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1–2. 34 Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002), 256. 35 See for example Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, 3rd edition, ed. Alan S. Rosenbaum (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2009). 36 Arendt, OT, viii. 37 Arendt, ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, in Arendt, R&J, 50 (Subsequently abbreviated: ‘SQ’). 38 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 51. 39 Ibid., 52. 40 Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (London: Cassell, 1943), 305. 41 Zweig, The World of Yesterday, 6. 42 Ibid., 7. 43 Ibid. 44 Of course subjugating forms of governance have an ancient pedigree – for instance Aristotle’s example of ‘tyrannis’ as the illegitimate one-person rule. Arendt recognizes the existence of these older forms of tyranny and authoritarianism but views totalitarianism as a novel kind of domination going beyond older forms of authoritarian rule. 45 Arendt makes this point in two of her essays: ‘Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship’ (subsequently abbreviated: ‘PR’) and ‘SQ’ in Arendt, R&J. 46 See Arendt’s discussion of Jesus’ teachings about the moral stumbling blocks (skandalon in Hebrew) which cannot be forgiven as normal transgressions – Arendt, ‘SQ’, 73–4 and 125. 47 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 2006), 268 (subsequently abbreviated: EiJ).

48 Arendt, OT, 436. 49 Ibid., 455. 50 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1989), 4. 51 Primo Levi discusses these facts in the Preface to The Drowned and the Saved and also in the chapter entitled ‘Letters from Germans’. In that chapter, when discussing the removal of the clothes and shoes of the victims by German families as though they were any other kind of second-hand items, he asks, ‘Did no one ask himself where so many children’s shoes were coming from?’ Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 148.

1 Arendt, Eichmann and the Banality of Evil

Arendt on Eichmann Adolf Eichmann, born in 1906 in the German town of Solingen in the Rhineland, began a relatively nondescript adult life as a travelling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company of Vienna.1 In 1932 he joined the National Socialist Party and the SS (Schutzstaffel), the elite paramilitary party formation which came to dominate the security and police apparatus of the Third Reich.2 The SS was also responsible for the system of concentration and extermination camps created in Germany and beyond its borders in the occupied territories. Despite his seemingly humble beginnings, Eichmann’s SS career proved highly successful. In 1934 he joined the Sicherheitsdienst (S.D.), the intelligence unit of the SS, and in 1935 transferred to the section concerned with the ‘Jewish question’ and rose through the ranks to become SS Obersturmbannführer and indeed a socalled ‘expert on the Jewish question’.3 In this capacity Eichmann presided first over the forced emigration of Jews in Germany and Austria and ultimately, after the summer of 1941,4 the deportation of millions to the extermination camps in the East. At the end of the war he went into hiding near Hamburg.5 Five years later he managed to escape to Argentina where his wife and children eventually joined him.6 In 1960 he was located and captured by agents of the Israeli Secret Service and brought to Jerusalem to stand trial for his part in the Holocaust.7 Hannah Arendt followed the lead-up to the trial with interest and, in June 1960, wrote to her friend, the American writer Mary McCarthy, that she was ‘half toying with the idea to get some magazine to send me to cover the Eichmann trial. Am very tempted. He used to be one of the most intelligent of the lot. It could be interesting – apart from being horrible.’8 Around a month later Arendt’s plans came to fruition and she was commissioned by The New Yorker to report

on the trial.9 Her reports formed a series of articles in the magazine and later appeared, in revised and expanded form, in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Arendt did not attend the whole of Adolf Eichmann’s trial, the main proceedings of which took place over 114 sessions, a point often noted by commentators.10 On 15 December 1961 Eichmann was sentenced to death. His appeal of the sentence was rejected by the Court of Appeal in Israel and despite calls for clemency from Eichmann, his family and others, including even representatives of Reform Judaism in the United States and academics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (led by Martin Buber), on 31 May 1962, two days after the Court of Appeal had delivered its judgement, Adolf Eichmann was hanged to death.11 In Eichmann in Jerusalem Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann, the high-ranking Nazi official with a central role in the Holocaust, is atypical: for Arendt, despite his voluntary entrance into the SS and his enthusiastic organization of Jewish deportations, Eichmann was not fanatical in his anti-Semitism. Nor was he, on Arendt’s reading, especially inclined towards violence or a sadistic pleasure derived from cruelty to others. This characterization of an undoubtedly significant perpetrator of the Holocaust contradicts the common stereotype: it is typically held that those individuals in Nazi Germany who not only joined the party but became members of its most elite formations and indeed were active participants in some of its most diabolical policies are indisputable monsters – ideologically convinced anti-Semites who dreamed of making Europe judenrein (free of Jews) and depraved sadists who delighted in any and all forms of brutality. That Arendt presents an account which runs so markedly counter to the conventional understanding of perpetrators of the Holocaust is part of the reason that Eichmann in Jerusalem engendered such a broad response and inspired such a deep controversy. This is also the reason why the book is philosophically interesting and deserving of closer ethical analysis. For, if Arendt’s depiction of Eichmann’s character, and hence his motivations, can be considered accurate, that is, i f we could say that this portrayal of Eichmann as neither ideologue nor sadist is certainly plausible, then Eichmann could serve as a kind of representative perpetrator of the Holocaust: he could be representative of those many ordinary people who became complicit in extraordinary evil, and an attempt to understand his intentions and actions could lead to a better understanding of this novel aspect of Nazi evil, that is, its reliance on an unprecedented level of collusion from normal society. As Arendt

explains, ‘For the truth of the matter is that there existed not a single organization or public institution in Germany, at least during the war years, that did not become involved in criminal actions and transactions.’12 Before considering how it may be possible to extrapolate from the case of Eichmann as Arendt describes him any useful understanding of complicity at large and the attendant issues of moral responsibility and blame, we must consider the portrait Arendt paints of Eichmann and the account of his inner life which she presents to the reader. Arendt’s account of Eichmann details some significant personality traits which she gleaned from the trial and accompanying evidence: among his ‘special qualities’ were his abilities to organize and to negotiate,13 which apparently stood him in good stead for orchestrating the expulsion, transportation and murder of millions. Arendt characterizes him as ‘an ambitious young man who was fed up with his job as traveling salesman even before the Vacuum Oil Company was fed up with him’.14 He was, according to Arendt, fascinated by the superficial grandeur and momentum of the Nazi Party: in court he described his experience as ‘like being swallowed up by the Party against all expectations and without previous decision. It happened so quickly and suddenly.’15 As Arendt explains: From a humdrum life without significance and consequence the wind had blown him into History, as he understood it, namely, into a Movement that always kept moving and in which somebody like him – already a failure in the eyes of his social class, of his family, and hence in his own eyes as well – could start from scratch and still make a career.16 In addition, Arendt describes Eichmann as a ‘joiner’.17 She writes that Germany’s defeat was significant for him ‘because it then dawned upon him that thenceforward he would have to live without being a member of something or other’.18 She quotes his own opinion on the subject: ‘I sensed I would have to live a leaderless and difficult individual life, I would receive no directives from anybody, no orders and commands would any longer be issued to me, no pertinent ordinances would be there to consult – in brief, a life never known lay before me.’19 Eichmann was also highly receptive to the charms of success and power. His opinion on Hitler, which Arendt quotes, gives a clear indication of how enchanted he was by status and prestige alone, regardless of the content of the goals in whose service that success was achieved: ‘Hitler, he said, “may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able

to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to Führer of a people of almost eighty million. … His success alone proved to me that I should subordinate myself to this man”.’20 As Arendt explains, ‘What he fervently believed in up to the end was success, the chief standard of “good society” as he knew it.’21 Furthermore, Eichmann, as a man beguiled by success, was of course greatly consumed by his own personal prospects for achievement and advancement in his job. He was engrossed by the minutiae of his career: his paramount concern during what may be called humanity’s darkest hour seemed to be his own progression through the ranks of the SS. Arendt details how during the trial and indeed the preceding police examination he often dwelt on the various reasons for his promotion or lack of promotion at different stages and on the satisfaction or frustration he felt as a result. Indeed Arendt asserts that he seemed to recall far better what had happened to his career during these years than what had happened to the Jews.22 Arendt contends that ‘Eichmann’s memory functioned only in respect to things that had had a direct bearing upon his career’.23 Arendt gives the reader a telling example of this: during his interview with the police examiner Captain Avner Less in Jerusalem, Eichmann mentioned a trip to Slovakia where he was the guest of a minister in the proGerman puppet government who invited him to go bowling.24 It was here in Bratislava that he heard of the assassination of his superior Reinhard Heydrich.25 These were the details of the trip to Slovakia which Eichmann recalled. Yet that had not been his only business there – in a later session the police examiner confronted Eichmann with documentary evidence that proved he was there to discuss the deportations of Slovakian Jews.26 When presented with this evidence he did not deny it, admitting that of course he had not been sent all that way just to go bowling.27 Arendt explains his memory loss: ‘To evacuate and deport Jews had become routine business; what stuck in his mind was bowling, being the guest of a Minister, and hearing of the attack on Heydrich.’28 Several elements in Arendt’s description of Eichmann combine to provide the picture of a man fascinated by status and success, extremely ambitious and keen to advance in his career, and prone to boasting of his own importance and competency. Arendt’s depiction of Eichmann is one of a self-interested and ambitious individual who sought success and prestig e in his work and who was apparently untroubled by the substance of that work. Yet how could Eichmann have been unperturbed by the fact that this job, in which he progressed and for which he received accolades, was the arrangement of the persecution and killing of millions of innocent people? The most obvious answer would be to claim not

only that he was undisturbed by the horrific nature of his job, but also that he enjoyed it, deriving a perverse pleasure from the cruelty he inflicted and indeed possessing a deep and wicked belief in the ‘rightness’ of a plan to destroy the Jewish people. This is not the answer Arendt gives. Rather, for Arendt, Eichmann was neither a perverted sadist nor a committed fanatic. He was, in fact, ‘normal’. This is the central point of philosophical interest in Eichmann in Jerusalem and this is the thought informing Arendt’s oft-quoted yet littleexplained concept of the banality of evil. Eichmann’s normality was affirmed by a number of psychiatrists prior to the trial, and indeed one found that ‘his whole psychological outlook, his attitude toward his wife and children, mother and father, brothers, sisters, and friends, was “not only normal but most desirable”’.29 For Arendt, the prosecution’s description of Eichmann as a ‘perverted sadist’ was ‘obviously mistaken’.30 Indeed the evidence that Eichmann himself had ever engaged in acts of violence was slim. Arendt asserts that ‘the prosecution wasted much time in an unsuccessful effort to prove that Eichmann had once, at least, killed with his own hands (a Jewish boy in Hungary)’.31 And Eichmann himself claimed to have been shocked upon receiving the news that the Jews were no longer merely to be ghettoized or deported but ultimately to be liquidated.32 He asserted that until that point he had thought only of a ‘political solution’ and never a ‘physical solution’.33 In discussing his experience of seeing the preparations for some of the first gassing units in Lublin, he said he found the notion ‘monstrous’.34 And later when he witnessed killings in a mobile gas van in Poland he claimed to have hardly been able to look, to have been ‘upset’ and that the dumping of the corpses into a ditch at the side of the road was ‘the most horrible sight I had thus far seen in my life’.35 He was apparently instructed to view the dying people through a hole in the van by a physician but could not and instead left as quickly as possible.36 So, on Arendt’s reading, Eichmann’s participation in the horror of the Holocaust was not motivated by sadism or a desire for cruelty. Neither was it because of any deep anti-Semitic fanaticism. In Eichmann in Jerusalem she states that ‘his was obviously also no case of insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical anti-Semitism or indoctrination of any kind. He “personally” never had anything whatever against Jews; on the contrary, he had plenty of “private reasons” for not being a Jew hater.’37 Indeed, Eichmann actually had Jewish relations in his extended family. Arendt suggests that ‘the Jews in his family were among his “private reasons” for not hating Jews’.38 She also relates an incident which

provided some anecdotal evidence for Eichmann’s claim: apparently as late as 1943 or 1944 he intervened in two cases on behalf of his Jewish relatives allowing them to emigrate and hence escape deportation to the East.39 In addition, Arendt also refers to another instance of Eichmann’s ‘lack of prejudice’: ‘It seems that in Vienna, where he was so extraordinarily successful in arranging the “forced emigration” of Jews, he had a Jewish mistress, an “old flame” from Linz. Rassenschande, sexual intercourse with Jews, was probably the greatest crime a member of the S.S. could commit.’40 Hence, according to Arendt, despite Eichmann’s voluntary participation in orchestrating the persecution and murder of the European Jews, he was neither a sadist nor a fanatical Jew-hater. Rather, the portrait of Eichmann which Arendt paints indicates that his motives were personal, not perverted, and self-interested rather than in the service of ideology. In this sense then, he can be viewed as ‘normal’ – what motivated him to be complicit in one of the greatest crimes in human history were relatively ordinary, banal, everyday concerns. And as such, he can be regarded as a representative perpetrator – representative of the many Germans without whose complicity the Holocaust could never have happened and yet to whom the attribution of a virulent anti-Semitism or a malicious delight in cruelty is simply implausible. This notion is, in essence, Arendt’s banality-of-evil thesis: motives which are banally self-serving can nonetheless result in deeds of great evil. The term ‘the banality of evil’, with which Arendt’s name was to become synonymous and which would come to elicit such contentious debates, actually appears only twice in the original Eichmann in Jerusalem: once as the subtitle of the book (which, as many commentators and critics have pointed out, must be some indication of the importance of the notion for the book as a whole) and once at the very end of the report. In discussing Eichmann’s final moments and the ‘grotesque silliness of his last words’41 at the gallows, Arendt states: ‘It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, wordand-thought-defying banality of evil.’42 This quote also conveys the other morally relevant aspect of Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann: his thoughtlessness. The notion of the banality of evil and the idea of thoughtles sness as a particular quality which influences ethical action are closely interrelated though not equivalent. In this chapter and the next I will examine in detail the conceptual integrity of both of these notions. At this juncture let us briefly consider the distinction: the idea of the banality of

evil seems to apply to the banal, ordinary, petty and self-serving motives of a perpetrator such as Eichmann which nonetheless led him to collude in the orchestration of acts that were neither ordinary nor petty but rather displayed utter barbarity. The notion of Eichmann’s thoughtlessness pertains to his inner life, to the thought processes (or lack thereof) which contributed to the formation of those banal motivations which spurred him on despite the horror of the consequences. In Eichmann in Jerusalem Arendt details how she found Eichmann’s manner of speech to be strange. She states that he was ‘genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché’.43 She describes how he often ‘repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés’.44 These modes of speech in which Eichmann expressed himself inclined Arendt towards a broader conclusion about Eichmann’s inner life: The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.45 Elsewhere she refers to his ‘lack of imagination’ and his ‘sheer thoughtlessness’.46 It is important to note that such an inability to think is not, for Arendt, comparable to a lack of intelligence. Indeed, Eichmann certainly did not lack intelligence: ‘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.’47 For Arendt, Eichmann ‘never realized what he was doing’.48 Yet Arendt leaves her reader in no doubt as to the consequences of this thoughtlessness: ‘Such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together.’49 In some of her later work (mainly the essays on ethics collected together in Responsibility and Judgment) Arendt expands on her idea of ‘the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil’.50 The notion that an inability to think can be morally relevant is examined in more detail in Chapter 2. For now it is important to note two points: First, it is clear that Arendt has some notion of thinking in mind which is more than pure reasoning and rational calculation. It seems that, for Arendt, to think is to appreciate, on some deeper level, the

existence and needs of the other such that when one thinks in this way, one cannot help but realize that the horrendous crimes in which one participates (despite one’s possibly banal motives) are deeply immoral and must be rejected. There is much in this thesis which is problematic and these challenges will be investigated systematically later on. Second, the relation of the banality of evil and thoughtlessness theses requires elucidation. Arendt herself does not categorically state the link between the two and so I offer the following interpretation. If we are to accept Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann as ‘normal’, that is to say as an individual who was neither perverted nor sadistic but rather motivated in his actions by seemingly benign and ordinary impulses (ambition, the desire to succeed in one’s career, self-interest), questions still remain: If he were ‘normal’ in this sense, that is, if he were not motivated by sadism or a desire for cruelty, how could he involve himself in acts of brutality on the scale of Nazi evil? Were his ordinary motives not immediately confounded by the reality of the barbarism in which he was engaged? In other words, in the calculations of his internal life, did not the reality of the evil in which he participated eclipse any mundane considerations of the possibility for personal success? There are at least two approaches to take in answering these questions. The first is conceptual and the second practical. Conceptually speaking, the thoughtlessness thesis supplements and extends the banality-of-evil thesis: one might contend that Arendt is correct in asserting that Eichmann’s desires and intentions in carrying out his duties in the SS were perfectly ordinary and indeed banal, like the desires and intentions of any average worker wanting to perform his job well. Yet one might also argue that such a depiction of his character and motives still does not answer the question of how he could do what he did. This is where the thoughtlessness thesis enters: Eichmann was able, despite his normality and the ordinary quality of his motives, to organize and execute policies of utter depravity because he was thoughtless, because there was some sense in which he did not fully and deeply comprehend the evil he served. So the idea of the banality of evil concerns the quality of a perpetrator’s motives and the thoughtlessness thesis accounts for how, given those motives, an offender would have been able to organize, oversee and engage in acts of such despicable evil without (as the banality-of-evil idea implies) being a devastatingly monstrous individual himself. Second, on a practical level, Arendt offers an explanation for why Eichmann,

who had apparently only ever considered a ‘political’ rather than a ‘physical’ culmination to Nazi anti-Semitic policies, was able to reconcile himself to the plans for extermination once they were in place. After the Wannsee conference Eichmann’s doubts had seemingly been dispelled: Now he could see with his own eyes and hear with his own ears that not only Hitler, not only Heydrich or … Müller, not just the S.S. or the Party, but the elite of the good old Civil Service were vying and fighting with each other for the honor of taking the lead in these ‘bloody’ matters. ‘At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt.’ Who was he to judge? Who was he ‘to have [his] own thoughts in this matter’?51 It would seem that his thoughtlessness and his deference to success and ‘good society’ caused him to absolve himself of the evil of his actions.

The Eichmann controversy Even before the publication of Arendt’s first report on the Eichmann trial in The New Yorker, the controversy which was to overshadow the reports and book for many years to come was already brewing. A full-scale eruption accompanied the appearance of the first piece: harshly critical reviews ensued, the AntiDefamation League urged rabbis in America to denounce Arendt from the pulpit and friends of many years’ standing broke with her.52 The ‘acrimonious and tangled’53 controversy elicited by the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem overwhelmed many, including Arendt herself. The Eichmann furore owed its potency in part to that common occurrence where public opinion is informed by the decidedly uninformed, that is to say, those who have never read the book.54 It became a cause célèbre, was widely discussed and enraged many members of the Jewish community.55 Arendt herself remarked in a post scriptum to Eichmann in Jerusalem, which was included in the later editions, that much of the vitriol was directed against a book that was never written.56 Nonetheless, the outcry on the publication of the reports and book was such that no discussion of Arendtian ethics would be complete without at least a brief analysis of the polemical responses it evoked.57 Objections to the book included a rejection of that aspect of Eichmann in Jerusalem which is most philosophically interesting and significant: the recognition that evil deeds, even on a huge scale, do not necessarily presuppose evil motives or intentions; the scope of the resulting evil need not be

commensurate with the barbarity or fanaticism of the motives. At least when it came to the example of Eichmann, many refused to accept a portrayal of him as anything less than a cruel, Jew-hating monster. Indeed such views totally rejected Arendt’s interpretation and preferred to conceive of a person involved in the Holocaust to the extent that Eichmann was as inevitably and necessarily depraved and fanatical. Countless commentators considered her characterization of Eichmann’s evil as banal ultimately to condense in the claim that Eichmann was not really evil, and for some, this implication was wholly unacceptable. How could the word ‘banal’ ever be associated with the murder, and murderer, of millions? How could the perpetrators of such horrendous acts be anything but radically evil monsters? Arendt’s depiction of a man who found himself so heavily implicated in a murderous system yet who claimed (convincingly, for Arendt) not to be a cruel, sadistic or violent person was not a characterization universally accepted. One argument prevalent among those who disputed her assessment of Eichmann was that he must have been such a brutal and inhuman specimen in order to have been involved in the processes of deportation and execution to the extent that he was.58 Arendt’s controversial contention was that he was not such a man, nor did he need to be: his banal motives could serve the greatest evil in the warped world of the Third Reich. Arendt’s assertion of the banal quality of Eichmann’s motives led some to accuse her of exonerating the perpetrators of the Holocaust: by arguing that he had not been motivated by vicious depravity and that, therefore, there was a gross disparity between Eichmann’s motivations and the hideous consequences of his actions, she was reproached for having implied that Eichmann had, in some sense, not really meant what he had done and so was, again in some sense, not responsible for the terrible consequences of his actions. Two points I think are of importance in defending Arendt against such charges: first, Arendt certainly did consider Eichmann responsible and culpable for his crimes and she thought it right that he be put to death.59 However, I would argue that there are conceptual difficulties inherent in trying to assign full responsibility to an individual for evil actions which were not motivated by evil intentions. In the latter part of this chapter I will examine these difficulties in more detail. Second, it is clear from other comments she makes in Eichmann in Jerusalem that Arendt was not in the business of exculpating the orchestrators of the Holocaust: she was severely critical of the willingness in Adenauer’s post-war Germany to continue the employment of many civil servants who had served the Nazi regime: ‘It has been estimated that of the eleven thousand five hundred judges in

the Bundesrepublik, five thousand were active in the courts under the Hitler regime.’60 She decried the reluctance of local German courts, in the wave of new arrests of former Nazis within Germany in the wake of Eichmann’s capture, to prosecute these crimes, stating that this reluctance ‘showed itself only in the fantastically lenient sentences meted out to the accused’.61 Arendt gives an example of such leniency: ‘Dr Emanuel Schäfer, a special protégé of Heydrich … had to stand trial in a German criminal court after the war. For the gassing of 6,280 women and children, he was sentenced to six years and six months in prison.’62 Arendt concludes that ‘it is the same story repeated over and over again: those who escaped the Nuremberg Trials and were not extradited to the countries where they had committed their crimes either were never brought to justice, or found in the German courts the greatest possible “understanding”’.63 Arendt’s critical stance on the effective amnesty that many Nazis received in Germany after the war and on the willingness of the post-war German government to forget the former Nazi allegiances of many members of the civil service demonstrates clearly that she did not seek to absolve the perpetrators of the Holocaust.64 A corollary of the charge that Arendt had exonerated Eichmann was the notion that she had blamed the victims of the Holocaust themselves for being somehow responsible for their fate, for going willingly to their deaths.65 Indeed the aspects of Eichmann in Jerusalem which were viewed as most inflammatory were those which pertained to the Jews, and especially their leaders. The remarks Arendt made in the book, at which many took umbrage, concerned two themes: resistance and the role of the Jewish councils under the Nazis. Some critics interpreted Arendt as claiming that the Jewish people offered scant resistance to the Holocaust and rather acquiesced in their fate.66 This point, and indeed the point about the involvement of the Jewish councils, has been much discussed in the secondary literature, both during the Eichmann controversy itself and in later years in accounts and analyses of the furore.67 For that reason I do not wish to engage in a lengthy exposition of the various positions since this has been well covered elsewhere. Let me simply point out, as others who have defended Arendt on this aspect of her work have, that the picture Arendt paints of the conduct of the Jews and their leaders is far more ambiguous than any simple ‘blaming-the-victims’-characterization implies. The following passage is typical: The contrast between Israeli heroism and the submissive meekness with which Jews went to their death – arriving on time at the transportation points, walking

on their own feet to the places of execution, digging their own graves, undressing and making neat piles of their clothing, and lying down side by side to be shot – seemed a fine point, and the prosecutor, asking witness after witness, ‘Why did you not protest?,’ ‘Why did you board the train?,’ ‘Fifteen thousand people were standing there and hundreds of guards facing you – why didn’t you revolt and charge and attack?,’ was elaborating it for all it was worth. But the sad truth of the matter is that the point was ill taken, for no nonJewish group or people had behaved differently.68 It is clear from an extract such as this that, contrary to the beliefs of some of her detractors, Arendt focuses on a more varied portrayal of the category of ‘victim’ than one which simply emphasizes Jewish victimhood. She highlights the fact that this kind of behaviour was not a Jewish-specific phenomenon: indeed for Arendt, establishing a system in which humans were reduced to a condition where they eventually submitted to their own demise was a goal of the Nazi totalitarian regime. She continues with a quote from David Rousset, a survivor of Buchenwald, who ‘described what we know happened in all concentration camps: “The triumph of the S.S. demands that the tortured victim allow himself to be led to the noose without protesting. … They know that the system which succeeds in destroying its victim before he mounts the scaffold … is incomparably the best for keeping a whole people in slavery.”’69 Arendt does not present a degree of submission to one’s fate under a totalitarian regime as a singularly Jewish occurrence; rather, it is clear that for Arendt the Nazi totalitarian system sought to (and often did) achieve this with all of its victims. Arendt does not claim that the Jews were especially prone to such submission, merely that, as victims of Nazi terror, they suffered from the erosion of their own identities and the dehumanizing processes which formed the essence of Nazism. Furthermore, Arendt is keenly aware of the difficulties faced by those who attempted to resist – she does not underestimate the danger resisters encountered. In rejecting the prosecution’s questioning of witnesse s as to why they did not retaliate, she writes: The court received no answer to this cruel and silly question, but one could easily have found an answer had he permitted his imagination to dwell for a few minutes on the fate of those Dutch Jews who in 1941, in the old Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, dared to attack a German security police detachment. Four hundred and thirty Jews were arrested in reprisal and they were literally tortured to death. … There exist many things considerably worse than death,

and the S.S. saw to it that none of them was ever very far from their victims’ minds and imagination.70 Elsewhere she states, ‘To be sure, those who resisted were a minority, a tiny minority, but under the circumstances “the miracle was,” as one of [the witnesses] pointed out, “that this minority existed”.’71 Clearly Arendt appreciated the inescapable impotency of most of the victims regarding the possibility of resisting the murderous Nazi machine. Yet Arendt’s opinion of the Judenräte (the Jewish councils appointed by the Nazis) and of some members of the European Jewish leadership was certainly less generous. Michael Ezra explains this in his account of the controversy: ‘These Councils were administrative bodies that the Nazis forced the Jews to establish in many occupied countries. The leaders had to follow Nazi orders under threat of immediate execution for disobedience. These orders included providing Jews for slave labour and organising the deportation of Jews to death camps.’72 While it would be inaccurate to state that Arendt blamed the victims of the Holocaust, it is certainly plausible to contend that she blamed some members of the Jewish councils. She accused the leaders of having a role in ‘the destruction of their own people’73 and criticized ‘the cooperation between the Nazi rulers and the Jewish authorities’.74 In one of her most concise expressions of contempt for those leaders whom she considered to have cooperated in the Nazi plans, she states: In Amsterdam as in Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property, to secure money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination, to keep track of vacated apartments, to supply police forces to help seize Jews and get them on trains, until, as a last gesture, they handed over the assets of the Jewish community in good order for final confiscation.75 Indeed Arendt is even more emphatic in attributing a decisive role to the Jewish councils in the Holocaust itself: Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been

between four and a half and six million people.76 Arendt’s comments about the Jewish councils were not generally well received. Marie Syrkin, in The Jewish Frontier, called them ‘scandalous’.77 In Partisan Review Lionel Abel accused Arendt of making a ‘terrible charge against the Jewish leaders’.78 There was a sense from critics that Arendt had judged the Jewish leaders harshly, that she had failed to appreciate the difficulty of their positions. Indeed this view often also informed a sense that Eichmann, by comparison, had been judged leniently in the book since he was not portrayed as a monster. This is another aspect of the controversy which is prevalent in the literature: much has been said on both sides and need not be repeated here; yet some significant points in Arendt’s defence may be summarized. First, as a number of commentators sympathetic to Arendt’s Eichmann book have observed, the discussion of the Jewish councils and their role occupied a mere dozen pages out of almost three hundred.79 The behaviour of the Jewish councils was clearly not the focus of the book and the volume and intensity of criticism aimed at this minor theme of Eichmann in Jerusalem can be seen as disproportionate. Second, Arendt was not the first observer to remark on the actions of some of the Jewish councils. Indeed she refers to Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews in which, she states, the role of the Jewish leadership ‘has now been exposed for the first time in all its pathetic and sordid detail’.80 Her view of the conduct of the Councils was not unique and indeed even her critics took care not to claim that every member of a council had behaved at all times with honour and integrity.81 Third, Arendt’s discussion of the Jewish councils was not without nuance: she distinguished between the early contacts between the Nazi regime and the German Jewish community and the later processes involving the Judenräte: ‘Needless to say, these negotiations were separated by an abyss from the later collaboration of the Judenräte. … After the outbreak of the war … these daily contacts between the Jewish organizations and the Nazi bureaucracy made it so much easier for the Jewish functionaries to cross the abyss between helping Jews to escape and helping the Nazis to deport them.’82 Fourth, it is also important to note, in response to those critics who have tried to extrapolate from Arendt’s censure of the Jewish councils the claim that she blamed the victims of the Holocaust, that Arendt’s obvious targets are those members of the European Jewish leadership whom she considered to have disappointed their people, rather than the people themselves.

Arendt’s most acerbic comment on the conduct of the Jewish councils, quoted above and in which she ventured the notion that had the Jewish people been unorganized and leaderless they would, in fact, have fared better, was illadvised. On this point many of her critics were able to disclose actual evidence which suggested that this claim was false: Lionel Abel highlighted the fact that in Soviet Russia there was no real organization of the Jewish people (since Stalin had already destroyed such associations before the war) and yet hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen.83 This argument was echoed in Jacob Robinson’s book-length attempt at a refutation of Eichmann in Jerusalem entitled And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight.84 Arendt’s discussion of the Jewish councils and the rather grand claims she makes about the significance of their role in the implementation of the Holocaust itself are problematic. It would seem that the murder of millions could not have depended heavily upon whether or not Jewish councils existed in certain areas. Yet the problems which trouble this relatively confined discussion in Arendt’s account need not be expanded to discredit the whole Eichmann book. Susan Neiman, in her analysis of Arendt’s thinking in Eichmann in Jerusalem, offers an interpretation: first, she asserts that commentators sympathetic to Arendt have often found it difficult to explain why Arendt included this (albeit short) discussion of the Jewish councils in the book – Neiman refers to Seyla Benhabib and Richard Bernstein in this context. According to Neiman, Benhabib offers no explanation for Arendt’s inclusion of the discussion and Bernstein considers its inclusion to be Arendt’s way of indicating the total moral collapse of European society during the Nazi period.85 Certainly in light of the contemptuous criticism Arendt received as a result of her comments on the Jewish councils an explanation as to why she did not exclude this material seems to be required. Neiman offers one: she concurs with Bernstein’s assessment that Arendt uses the example of the Jewish councils to demonstrate the considerable moral breakdown which had occurred in society at large. Indeed Arendt herself describes in Eichmann in Jerusalem how she has dwelt on ‘this chapter of the story’ because it ‘offers the most striking insight into the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society – not only in Germany but in almost all countries, not only among the persecutors but also among the victims’.86 For Neiman though, Arendt’s reason for incorporating material on the Jewish councils goes beyond this: it is in fact a form of practical philosophy included

to show that not intention but judgment is the heart and soul of moral action. What you mean matters far less than you suppose. The world will hold you accountable for what you do since it is what you do, not what you mean, that affects it.87 According to Neiman, while Eichmann in Jerusalem is an exploration of the fact that a perpetrator’s banal motives may nonetheless result in great evil, her inclusion of the discussion of the Jewish councils’ behaviour is an attempt to show that even benign motives may result in great evil.88 Neiman’s account here is interesting, though there is little evidence from the book that Arendt seeks to draw parallels such as this between perpetrators and victims. Neiman’s reading is linked to her view of the significance of the banality of-evil thesis: that it represents a rejection of what Neiman sees as a traditional focus on intention in determining the moral worth of an action. I will discuss Neiman’s insightful account later in this chapter. In addition to being criticized for her contentions regarding the Jewish councils, Arendt was also reproached for her tone in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Judith Shklar, for example, describes her approach in places as one of ‘uncomprehending arrogance’89 which glossed over the diversity of the Eastern European Jewish communities she discussed and showed no comprehension of the difficulties faced in Nazi-occupied Europe by Jews who did not belong to the educational and social elite of which she herself was a member, and from which the largest number of those who managed to escape abroad came.90 Richard J. Bernstein details how Arendt was condemned as ‘malicious’ and ‘flippant’.91 In Amos Elon’s introduction to Eichmann in Jerusalem, he summarizes this sense that Arendt’s tone lacked sensitivity and was inappropriate for the subject matter: ‘At times her style was brash and insolent, the tone professorial and imperious. She took a certain pleasure in paradox, and her sarcasm and irony seemed out of place in a discussion of the Holocaust.’92 For a number of commentators, Arendt’s irony was unbefitting of the subject of Eichmann and his crimes and created an obfuscation regarding her own position.93 Berel Lang characterizes Arendt as an ‘ironical writer’ and stresses that her sarcastic tendency could prove problematic: ‘As for many passionate ironists, this tendency often leaves both her and her readers, when we ask about her basic commitments, in a quandary.’94 Indeed Arendt admitted that the timbre of her report on Eichmann had been ironic: Jerome Kohn writes that in an interview ‘Arendt said: “That the tone of voice is predominantly ironic is completely true,”

adding that “the tone of voice in this case is really the person”, i.e., herself, the dramatist’.95 One particular instance of Arendt’s ironic tone proving highly problematic was what Elon describes as her ‘obviously ironic remark that Eichmann had become a convert to the Zionist solution of the Jewish problem. It was widely misunderstood and misinterpreted.’96 There is merit to criticisms like these and certainly in places it seems that Arendt’s style is little befitting of the subject material in the Eichmann book. Yet the sometimes misjudged tone of the book notwithstanding, much of its content remains philosophically interesting. While Arendt’s ironic and sometimes critical tone seemed in places incongruous with the subject matter of the Holocaust and its perpetrators, the critical stance she took regarding the court in Jerusalem and its proceedings was a more valid and appropriate position to occupy. There were a number of legal, moral and jurisdictional complications involved in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, not least of which was the matter of his having been captured and forcibly removed from Argentina to Israel. More significant for Arendt, though, was the danger that the Eichmann trial be allowed to assume the mantle of a show trial, a kind of exemplary bringing-to-justice of the Nazis for their crimes against the Jews, taking place in an independent Israeli state. Arendt was disparaging of the prosecutor Gideon Hausner and his ‘love of showmanship’ and praised Moshe Landau, one of the judges, for doing his best to prevent the trial from becoming a show trial under the influence of the prosecutor.97 Arendt continues, ‘Clearly, this courtroom is not a bad place for the show trial David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel, had in mind when he decided to have Eichmann kidnapped in Argentina and brought to the District Court of Jerusalem to stand trial for his role in the “final solution of the Jewish question”’98 She suspected the motives of both the prime minister and the prosecutor and considered any attempts to widen the remit of the trial not to be in the interests of justice. In a case such as Eichmann’s the complicated interrelation of one individual’s actions and ideas with those of the regime at large, and the complicated structure of hierarchy, orders and obedience in that totalitarian system, can be problematic when just one single individual is on trial and the task of the court is to determine his responsibility for the crime. It would certainly be tempting, in a trial as sensational and long-awaited as Eichmann’s, to widen the remit so as to put more than the individual in the dock on trial, to use him as representative of Nazi evil in general and effectively try the whole system and all its atrocities through this one representative. For Arendt, however, any expansion of the scope of the trial would not have been in the interests of

justice: Justice demands that the accused be prosecuted, defended, and judged, and that all the other questions of seemingly greater import – of ‘How could it happen?’ and ‘Why did it happen?,’ of ‘Why the Jews?’ and ‘Why the Germans?’ … be left in abeyance. Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann, son of Karl Adolf Eichmann, the man in the glass booth built for his protection. … On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.99 Arendt’s contention that the reach of the trial must be restricted to the issue of Eichmann’s individual culpability provided a valuable contribution to a better understanding of the legal–moral significance of the Holocaust: her analysis underscores the capabilities and limits of any courtroom prosecution – the wider moral matters and the need to account for, and seek retribution for, the evils of a murderous totalitarian regime like the Third Reich cannot be satisfied through the trial of one man alone. The immense controversy surrounding Arendt’s claims in her Eichmann book has resulted in a curious state of affairs as regards the scholarship. Commentary on the thesis tends to fall into one of two broad camps: on the one hand, Arendt’s idea that Eichmann is demonstrative of the banal quality that the perpetr ators of evil may exhibit is taken by some to be wholly wrong and indeed irresponsible and insensitive to the victims of the Holocaust. This view contends that Arendt is simply incorrect in attributing purely banal intentions to Eichmann. Advocates of this approach argue that Eichmann’s claims about not feeling any personal animosity towards Jews or about not taking any pleasure in inflicting pain are barefaced lies. They see Eichmann as the radically evil monster Arendt categorically rejects. Indeed they tend to advance the conceptual claim that Eichmann and others like him must necessarily have harboured such anti-Semitic and cruel sentiments in order to participate in the Nazi system. Daniel Goldhagen’s contentious book Hitler’s Willing Executioners is based on this premise – Goldhagen attributes to most Germans a virulent eliminationist antiSemitism which motivated their active and voluntary participation in the crimes of the regime. In seeking to explain how so many ordinary people could have become complicit in anti-Semitic atrocities, Goldhagen’s question-begging response is simply to say that violent anti-Semitism was ordinary in Germany.100 On the other hand, defenders of Arendt’s thesis (who also tend to be defenders and promoters of her work in general) tend to accept the banality of evil and

attendant thoughtlessness theses as groundbreaking ideas which perfectly capture the nature of evil fuelling the atrocities of the Third Reich. However, proponents of this view too often tend to accept the thesis without engaging in a sufficiently rigorous conceptual analysis of its claims. This too is problematic. It is equally clear that neither of these approaches does full justice to the banality-of-evil argument. To reject it outright as incorrect and insensitive is to overlook those aspects which have value. By the same token, to accept Arendt’s claim without further investigation is just to assume that there are no flawed elements, but this cannot be simply assumed. For now it is important to note that in her original reports and the subsequent book, Arendt aims to present an account of wrongdoing at an individual rather than a collective level. She offers an interpretation of the motivations and actions of a particular person whom she considered neither a sadist nor a fanatic. The ideas she posits in the Eichmann book and those she develops later, reflecting on these matters, form a partial answer to the question of how (at least tacit) acquiescence in the hideous aims of the Nazi Party could have been so pervasive among the ordinary people of Germany. To be sure, Eichmann presents a special case: he was a member of the SS, the elite party formation and paramilitary unit which came to dominate in the power games of the National Socialist Party and the German state. He was not an ordinary person in the sense of being, for example, merely a railway worker who maintained the tracks for deportations to Auschwitz or a secretary in one of the many firms which exploited the slave labour incarcerated in the camps. He had volunteered to join the SS, and he had risen through its ranks to become one of its organizational chiefs. He had worked in the section for Jewish affairs for a number of years, and when Nazi policy developed from one of forced deportations of Jews to one of mass murder, he continued in his role, apparently without hesitation. Nonetheless, if we accept Arendt’s portrayal of him as accurate, that is to say, if we concur that he could not be thought of as a sadist or a fanatic, then he presents an important case for study – an ordinary person who volunteered to participate in actions which resulted in extraordinary evil. Arendt’s thinking about perpetrators of totalitarian crimes is located firmly at the level of the individual: she focuses on the thought processes and motivations of individual wrongdoers.101 In addition, Arendt’s account of the offenders and those who colluded with them is not one coloured by the complications of fear and coercion: her interests lie in comprehending the behaviour of individuals exercising free (or at least relatively free) choice. Adolf Eichmann did not join

the SS because of fear for himself or his loved ones, nor was he coerced to carry out his murderous duties – he chose to sign up and he chose to continue in his role organizing deportations to the East long after he knew what the fatal consequences of deportation were for the victims. Indeed, as Christopher Browning’s study Ordinary Men made clear, individuals quite often retained a degree of choice in their actions and could opt out of killing duties.102 Arendt herself mentioned this in her famous exchange of letters with Gershom Scholem in the pages of Encounter: ‘The SS murderers also possessed, as we now know, a limited choice of alternatives. They could say: “I wish to be relieved of my murderous duties,” and nothing happened to them.’103 Hence Arendt felt her task to be to provide some kind of explanation for why normal, relatively free individuals would choose to participate in the murderous regime. A note of caution: that is not to say, of course, that there are no other relevant factors such as pressure to conform to group norms or to obey orders. Yet the fact remains: there were a range of (albeit rather limited) choices often open to individuals, the most basic of which was the choice between being complicit in murder or not. Even despite considerable pressure to obey, to conform to Nazi principles, there were ordinary individuals at every turn who resisted that pressure, who chose not to participate. None of the pressures to comply were universal or universally felt and, generally, choosing not to participate did not result in punitive or dangerous sanctions. A further key element of Arendt’s account is the negation of decisive external influence in motivating the actions of perpetrators like Eichmann. That is to say, Arendt does not imply that circumstances influenced Eichmann’s motives such that they produced his actions: Arendt is concerned with the free choices of individuals, and to lay heavy emphasis on the context of those choices is to connote a causal relation which Arendt’s reading does not support. Indeed, this is a common misreading of Arendt’s ethical thought that one encounters in the literature. Larry May, for example, contends that ‘Hannah Arendt argued that certain institutions were able to instill in their members a willingness to do virtually anything, even to participate in great evil’.104 Quite often the assumption is made that the story which Arendt is recounting in the Eichmann book is that of an individual altered by the pressures and practices of totalitarian domination, an ordinary individual who becomes so institutionalized and is so influenced by the demands of Nazi principles that his own internal thought processes become corrupted, and that this outside influence fulfils a causal function in actually inducing the commission of an evil action which this

individual would otherwise not perpetrate if it were not for these corrupting external influences. This is not a wholly accurate reading of Arendt’s work: attention to the detail of the Eichmann book and her other writings on ethics demonstrate that she is not concerned with institutionalization. Nowhere does she venture the argument that Eichmann’s actions were caused by his being institutionalized within the SS. She does recognize his suitability for the career which he embarked on within the elite Nazi Party formation but does not contend that his being an SS member caused him to be able to be complicit in Nazi crimes to the extent that he was. The implication is that he was already such a person to begin with. It is not the case, on Arendt’s reading, that the SS made Eichmann into a desk killer; rather it was his aptitude for such a position which made him join the SS in the first place. Indeed, as Paul W. Kahn states in his attempt to account for the evil of the Holocaust, we will not find the answer ‘by looking outside ourselves, at the circumstances under which groups and individuals act. Of course, circumstances matter, but they matter in the sense that they make socially and politically possible that which is existentially possible. They do not make us other than we are, and what we are includes a vast potential for evil.’105 Additionally, to focus ultimately on circumstances rather than on individual choices and actions obscures important moral differences between individuals, for ‘those same circumstances can bring out the very best in man as well’.106 This is certainly a notion supported by Arendt, for whom it was important to remember that not everyone in Germany during the Nazi era blindly conformed to the racist Nazi way of life. Finally, Arendt’s thinking on the perpetrators of the Holocaust and their motivations is not concerned with detailing psychological pathologies. Arendt is not seeking to diagnose some pathology of mind in the perpetrators (or at least not those perpetrators of whom Eichmann is the representative example). Her goal is not to present the picture of a diseased mind and to determine the causes for this. Her explanation is certainly not a psychoanalytical one which would turn towards Eichmann’s unconscious and his childhood for indications as to why he volunteered to be complicit in the horrendous crimes of the Holocaust. Rather, Arendt’s account underscores Eichmann’s ordinariness – his motivations and actions are not presented as pathological. Such an explanation would be exposed to problematic questions of responsibility – if Eichmann were considered to be suffering any kind of psychological disease then he may be considered less responsible for his actions. This is not a conclusion Arendt favours – it is clear that she holds Eichmann entirely and consciously responsible

for his deeds and as such she requires an account of his behaviour which leaves no doubt as to the normality of his psychological character. That is not to say that her account does not encounter problems when confronted with the issue of responsibility; it is these problems that I will examine in the latter half of this chapter.

Was Arendt wrong about Eichmann? The scale and depth of the controversy inspired by Eichmann in Jerusalem have endured. Arendt’s depiction of Eichmann has repeatedly been disputed and continues to be questioned. In recent years, with the fiftieth anniversary of the Eichmann trial and the publication of two new books in particular – Deborah E. Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial and Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann before Jerusalem – the question of whether Arendt was right about Eichmann is once again being debated. And, again, a sharp divide is apparent between critics and defenders. There are two essential elements to Arendt’s claim about Eichmann: that he was neither motivated to organize and engage in acts of evil by sadism, nor by virulent, fanatical anti-Semitism. No critic of Arendt’s view of Eichmann has ever really tried to show she was wrong about his being sadistically cruel. One could attempt to dispute her characterization of him as a man not driven by the derivation of sadistic pleasure from cruelty to others. Yet if one were to make such an argument, an obvious objection would arise: if Eichmann was a sadist, why could the Jerusalem court not find evidence to suggest any real incidence of this kind of perverted cruelty? Those who possessed such depraved instincts generally did exploit a political situation in which violence against Jews and other groups was not only not punished but actively encouraged.107 If Eichmann had been such a character, then surely he would have exploited his opportunities for abuse with impunity, as others did. The fact that, as far as all the evidence suggested, he did not, lends credence to Arendt’s argument that despite the brutality of the crimes in which he participated, he was not sadistically motivated. Critics of Arendt’s view tend to focus on denying the other essential element of Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann, namely, that he was not motivated by fanatical, eliminationist anti-Semitism. Yaacov Lozowick, for example, has argued that Arendt simply got it wrong regarding Eichmann’s anti-Semitism, claiming that he was in fact a fanatic and that there is ‘much evidence that ideology played a

central role’ in his actions.108 The director Claude Lanzmann, famous for his masterpiece Shoah, has released a new documentary – The Last of the Unjust – which concerns the Viennese Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein who worked with Eichmann in Austria and was later appointed by the Nazis as a so-called ‘elder of the Jews’ in Theresienstadt. In this film Lanzmann casts doubt on Arendt’s reading by including Murmelstein’s claim to have witnessed Eichmann on Kristallnacht, commanding a band of men who were destroying a synagogue.109 David Cesarani’s 2004 biography of Eichmann indicates that Eichmann was indeed motivated by anti-Semitism in his actions.110 And this is also the general argument pursued in the more recent works by Lipstadt and Stangneth. These critics tend to argue that the Eichmann Arendt saw on the stand in Jerusalem was not the real Eichmann, that he was acting the part of the ‘cautious bureaucrat’111 and she was taken in by his performance, which masked the true nature of the fanatical anti-Semitism that motivated him. Deborah Lipstadt, for example, refers to a remark by the French journalist Joseph Kessel – present in the courtroom one day when Arendt was not – that he felt ‘the “passion and rage” emerging from beneath [Eichmann’s] “hollow mask”. This, he declared, was the “true” Eichmann.’112 Arendt was not the only observer to regard Eichmann as ‘clownish’ rather than demonic – this was an opinion shared by many.113 And it is not clear why one courtroom observer’s impression of Eichmann in the dock should be given more weight than another’s, as in Lipstadt’s account, nor that this is a definite revelation of the ‘true’ Eichmann. These arguments against Arendt’s view of Eichmann are, however, for the most part, based not on his court appearance in Jerusalem, but on the ‘Argentina Papers’ and the ‘true’ Eichmann that they apparently reveal.114 This is a collection of recordings and transcripts of interviews with Eichmann, conducted in 1957 in Argentina by the Dutch former Nazi Willem Sassen (the so-called Sassen documents), as well as pages of Eichmann’s handwritten notes, memoirs and other texts.115 Stangneth’s meticulous book concentrates on these documents and this period in order to uncover the ‘real’ Eichmann. In her introduction Stangneth laments the ‘worryingly brief’ engagement of historians with the socalled Sassen interviews and the Argentina papers, despite their being increasingly available since the late 1970s.116 She asserts that anyone who ‘was of a mind to actually argue against Hannah Arendt … could have found plenty of ammunition here’.117 This ‘ammunition’ includes passages from the Sassen recordings such as this description of himself which Eichmann gave: referring to himself as a ‘cautious bureaucrat’, Eichmann states that ‘this cautious bureaucrat

was attended by a … a fanatical warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood, which is my birthright’.118 In another section Stangneth quotes, Eichmann talks of the Holocaust: ‘If of the 10.3 million Jews that Korherr identified, as we now know, we had killed 10.3 million, I would be satisfied, and would say, good, we have destroyed an enemy.’119 Stangneth’s contention is that statements such as these reveal that Eichmann was virulently, fanatically anti-Semitic, and that this motivated his actions. For Stangneth, Arendt did not recognize that the man she saw in court was a performance, that ‘Eichmann-in-Jerusalem was little more than a mask’.120 One response from defenders of Arendt’s banality-of-evil thesis to the apparent revelations of Eichmann’s true character in these documents is what Roger Berkowitz refers to as the ‘Yes/No’ reading:121 the assertion that Arendt was correct about the banality of evil – ordinary people with relatively banal motives can nonetheless commit acts of extraordinary evil – coupled with the concession that she was wrong in applying this concept to Eichmann. As Christopher Browning puts it, ‘Arendt grasped an important concept but not the right example.’122 Similarly, Richard J. Bernstein argues that ‘it is important to distinguish the historical issue of the accuracy of Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann from the conceptual issue – that individuals can commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale without these deeds being traceable to monstrous, demonic, evil motives’.123 The Yes/No reading has, as Berkowitz notes, become a ‘commonplace’, perhaps even a consensus, in discussions of Arendt on Eichmann.124 Yet, as Berkowitz argues, those keen to defend Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann are not compelled by the apparent revelations in the Argentina papers detailed by historians like Cesarani, Lipstadt and Stangneth to concede to the Yes/No reading. There are a number of grounds on which to resist: first, there is the question of whether or not the Argentina papers in fact reveal an Eichmann radically different from the one Arendt saw in Jerusalem. Comments from the Sassen tapes such as Eichmann’s statement that he would have been satisfied with killing 10.3 million Jews are not dissimilar to some of Eichmann’s remarks as revealed at the trial, including the statement that he would ‘jump into [his] grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews … on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction’, which Arendt discusses.125 In both the tapes and the trial Eichmann did not express regret for his actions and did not believe himself really guilty of murder. In several respects then, ‘Eichmann-in-Jerusalem’ (as Stangneth puts it) is quite consistent with

Eichmann in Argentina. Second, one might question the general reliability of the Argentina papers as sources revealing the ‘true’ Eichmann. As Berkowitz points out, the purported revelation of these documents is not that Eichmann was in some sense antiSemitic – Arendt knew that he was; rather, ‘the claim is that if she had heard the tapes or seen the transcript, she would have been compelled to admit the ferocity of Eichmann’s anti-Semitism and thus the fact that his anti-Semitism contributed to his actions to a far greater extent than she believed’.126 It is not, however, clear that the Argentina papers categorically show this. Berkowitz asks why we should privilege the Sassen interviews and other papers over the trial. Sometimes the context of the Sassen interviews is invoked as a justification: Eichmann was among a group of like-minded former Nazis during the recordings, an environment in which he could be his ‘true’ self. But as Berkowitz points out, emphasizing the context of the Sassen tapes could also produce arguments in the opposite direction127 – Eichmann in Argentina was the same vain, boastful and self-centred man whom Arendt later witnessed in Jerusalem, with a keen sense of his own importance. Perhaps he performed for the former Nazis in Argentina in the same way it is claimed he performed in Jerusalem. Indeed, ‘it is far from clear that Eichmann bared his true soul to Willem Sassen’.128 Third, it is important to recognize that Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann and her claims about the banality of evil turn on the question of motivation. Arendt’s contention is not that Eichmann held no anti-Semitic prejudices but, rather, that his participation in the evil of the Holocaust was not motivated by a fanatical, murderous anti-Semitism. Arendt’s critics generally agree with her view that a deep-seated hatred of Jews was not a decisive, motivating factor in Eichmann’s decision to join the Nazi Party or the SS.129 As David Cesarani admits, it is ‘unlikely that [Eichmann] joined the SS because he hated Jewish people’.130 Once in the SS, Eichmann adopted the language of the organization; by the time he was in exile in Argentina, as the evidence attests, he was well versed in the poisonous anti-Semitic rhetoric of Nazism. The question here, then, is whether Eichmann came to be motivated by the anti-Semitism he had adopted on joining the Nazis. Again, it is not clear that the Argentina papers provide a categorically affirmative answer. Seyla Benhabib, in her defence of Arendt’s depiction of Eichmann, admits that the Argentina papers provide new insight into the ‘depth’ and ‘intensity’ of Eichmann’s anti-Semitism, but argues that Arendt was fundamentally right: Eichmann’s clichéd anti-Semitism and racialist Nazi patriotism was not an expression of a deeply felt, motivating force, but,

rather, a confirmation of his shallowness, thoughtlessness and banality.131 Benhabib describes Eichmann’s ‘rigid self-righteousness’, ‘fervent patriotism’ and ‘paranoid projections about the power of Jews’ as a syndrome ‘banal in that it was widespread among National Socialists’.132 She asserts that Eichmann ‘was banal precisely because he was a fanatical anti-Semite, not despite it’.133 I concur with Berkowitz in rejecting the ‘Yes/No’ reading of Arendt’s banalityof-evil thesis. Not only is her contention that evil acts do not necessarily require evil motives (i.e. the banality-of-evil thesis) theoretically plausible, it also retains an empirical validity on two levels: first, as shown by Berkowitz, Maier-Katkin and Benhabib, it is not clear that any evidence which has come to light since Eichmann in Jerusalem represents a clear and definitive refutation of Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann. We cannot say for certain that the Eichmann of the Argentina papers is a radically different, ‘truer’ Eichmann than the one who appeared before the court in Jerusalem, and Benhabib’s point about the ubiquity and therefore banality of virulent anti-Semitic rhetoric among SS members is well taken. It is not clear that a murderous anti-Semitism became a decisive, motivating factor in Eichmann’s evil, and it is generally agreed that this was certainly not his motivation for joining the Nazi movement. Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann remains plausible: he seems to be an empirical embodiment of a philosophical conundrum – the perpetrator of unspeakable evil who is nonetheless an ordinary figure with banal motives. Second, as I will show in the next section of this chapter, other empirical instances of perpetrators’ behaviour exhibit a certain banality-of-evil quality. Eichmann was not the only example of a participant in the evil of the Third Reich whose motivations seemed petty and banal, rather than fanatical or diabolical. It is surely empirically the case that many of those ordinary citizens who participated to greater and lesser extents in the Holocaust did not harbour pathologically evil intentions. To be sure, some did; but not all. Goldhagen’s contention that all Germans harboured a desire to murder Jews, though neat in terms of explaining why the Holocaust happened, presents far too simplistic a picture of the moral landscape of Nazi Germany. Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil is more apt for capturing one of the forms of evil on display during the Holocaust. Eichmann can be seen as an illustrative perpetrator in this sense – he is representative of the many normal people who, uncoerced, engaged in acts of evil on a scale not reflected in their motives. Indeed Eichmann is an experiential instance of a frightening concept in modern evil: the ordinary killer.

Banality: One form of evil Eichmann’s motives were, on Arendt’s reading, personal rather than ideologically programmatic and banal rather than monstrously evil. Indeed, the personal, banal and common motivations which, for Arendt, defined Eichmann’s conduct can be considered normal: the desire for career success and a wish to be a family provider are ordinary influences on human behaviour. The Holocaust could not have happened without the collusion and involvement of many ordinary citizens, and yet the idea that these thousands of normal people were all invariably sadists and fanatics remains implausible. Hannah Arendt’s banalityof-evil thesis is a response to the problem of accounting for this fact. It is, in essence, the claim that normal people influenced by banal, ordinary, self-serving motives can nonetheless be complicit in acts of invidious evil. Arendt’s banalityof-evil idea rejects the notion that evil actions necessarily presuppose monstrously evil motives or intentions. The case of Eichmann as Arendt presents him is a convincing example to the contrary. Arendt is concerned with the motives and actions of normal people. That is to say, her notion of the banality of evil neither applies to perverted sadists nor to vehement Jew-hating fanatics, for these kinds of perpetrators commit evil deeds because they derive pleasure from harming others or because they are consumed by deep hatred and convinced of the ‘good’ of their racist aims. Their motives are not hard to fathom nor are they banal: such offenders are simply induced to evil acts by evil intentions. The crux of Arendt’s notion is that while some kinds of perpetrators are motivated by evil intentions, not all are nor indeed need to be. Arendt seeks to understand the ordinary offenders, not those warped by mental perversions. Arendt was not the first, nor the only, thinker to point out the striking disparity between the horror of the atrocious Nazi crimes and the rather mundane quality of so many of the perpetrators; Steven E. Aschheim, in his review of the recently published full correspondence between Arendt and Gershom Scholem, quotes the following from the German journalist Sebastian Haffner, writing in 1940: ‘The doer does not fit the deeds. The enormity is committed by extraordinarily banal, weak, and insignificant men. … No different are their bureaucratic colleagues who sit in offices and torture their victims by methods less physical and palpable, but no less effective.’134 Though Arendt was not the only thinker to propose the notion of a vast incongruity between the doer and the deed regarding the hideous crimes of the

Nazis, she is perhaps the most prominent. Indeed she is probably the only thinker who sought to apply this understanding of the Nazi perpetrators to echelons as high as Eichmann’s. While one would perhaps be inclined towards the notion that the foot soldiers of the SS were not despicable monsters, one might yet baulk at the idea that Eichmann, as a lieutenant colonel of the SS, could be considered banal in the same sense. Yet for Arendt this was precisely the case. Despite his seniority, his power and his knowledge, Eichmann was an unremarkable figure motivated by banal concerns for his own success in the same way as those SS members at lower levels may have been. Arendt’s terminology in speaking of the banality of evil has invited criticism. Jean Améry, the writer and survivor of Auschwitz, wrote that there is no ‘banality of evil’, and Hannah Arendt, who wrote about it in her Eichmann book, knew the enemy of mankind only from hearsay, saw him only through the glass cage. When an event places the most extreme demands on us, one ought not to speak of banality. For at this point there is no longer any abstraction and never an imaginative power that could even approach its reality.135 This assertion contains the usual claim that Arendt did not see the ‘real’ Eichmann in the dock in Jerusalem, as well as the notion that one ‘ought not’ to speak of banality in this context, that it is an abstraction from the reality. Such criticism is rather unfair – in describing the banality of evil Arendt was certainly not dismissing the evil of the Holocaust as in any sense ‘banal’, nor was she indulging in an abstract retreat from reality: the banality-of-evil thesis is Arendt’s attempt to account for the very real evil of Nazism committed by real people, not supposed demonic monsters. Indeed, the banality-of-evil idea had occurred to Arendt long before her encounter with Eichmann – formulations of the notion of the banality of evil are expressed in Arendt’s earlier work. In The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt describes the ‘real horror’ contained in the shift in responsibility for the concentration camps from the Sturmabteilung (SA) to the SS: the ‘blind bestiality’ of the SA was replaced by ‘an absolutely cold and systematic destruction of human bodies , calculated to destroy human dignity’ perpetrated by the SS.136 Significantly, the character and motivations of the concentration camp administrators altered accordingly: ‘The camps were no longer amusement parks for beasts in human form, that is, for men who really belonged in mental institutions and prisons; the reverse became true: they were turned into “drill

grounds”, on which perfectly normal men were trained to be full-fledged members of the SS.’137 In a footnote to this point Arendt notes that documents from the Hitler era ‘contain numerous testimonials for the average normality of those entrusted with carrying out Hitler’s program of extermination’.138 In her famous essay entitled ‘Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility’, published in 1945 in Jewish Frontier (as ‘German Guilt’) and subsequently reprinted in the collection of Arendt’s works Essays in Understanding, the notion of individuals complicit in terrible crimes being motivated not by cruel perversions or fanaticism but by rather more mundane concerns (job security, providing for a family) is already evident.139 Arendt insists that much can be learnt from the ‘characteristic personality’ of Heinrich Himmler, SS leader and the ‘organizing spirit’ of the murder:140 He is neither a Bohemian like Goebbels, nor a sex criminal like Streicher, nor a perverted fanatic like Hitler, nor an adventurer like Goering. He is a ‘bourgeois’ with all the outer aspect of respectability, all the habits of a good paterfamilias who does not betray his wife and anxiously seeks to secure a decent future for his children; and he has consciously built up his newest terror organization, covering the whole country, on the assumption that most people are not Bohemians nor fanatics, nor adventurers, nor sex maniacs, nor sadists, but first and foremost jobholders, and good family men.141 Later in the essay Arendt continues, Thus that very person, the average German, whom the Nazis notwithstanding years of the most furious propaganda could not induce to kill a Jew on his own account (not even when they made it quite clear that such a murder would go unpunished) now serves the machine of destruction without opposition. In contrast to the earlier units of the SS men and Gestapo, Himmler’s over-all organization relies not on fanatics, nor on congenital murderers, nor on sadists; it relies entirely upon the normality of jobholders and family men.142 In describing the motivations of the ordinary family man who collaborates in atrocities Arendt asserts that ‘when his occupation forces him to murder people he does not regard himself as a murderer because he has not done it out of inclination but in his professional capacity. Out of sheer passion he would never do harm to a fly.’143 It is as early as 1945 that Arendt’s conception of Nazi evil comprises the germ of that idea which would reach its full expression in Eichmann in Jerusalem: the characterization of the ‘normal’ perpetrator who is

not motivated by a desire for cruelty but rather by more commonplace aspirations and the recognition that, their lack of base motives notwithstanding, such figures complied with, and committed, heinous acts. It is important to recognize that Arendt’s banality-of-evil thesis pertains to only one form of evil, the form which Eichmann exemplified. Arendt recognizes that the Nazi movement contained other forms of evil – she refers to the ‘sadists and perverts’, the ‘ordinary criminals who could do with impunity under the Nazi system what they had always wanted to do’.144 And she acknowledges the possibility of other versions and personifications of evil as distinct from Eichmann’s – she contrasts Eichmann with the characters of Macbeth and Iago,145 and with Richard III who was determined ‘to prove a villain’.146 This suggests that Arendt is not committed to the claim that there is only one mode of evil and that it is characterized by banality. Rather, she indicates that there are forms of evil which differ from Eichmann’s and leaves it open as to how many there may be. Arendt never evinces the argument that all forms of evil are banal. Améry’s criticisms of Arendt’s banality-of-evil thesis are, therefore, perhaps not quite correctly aimed. The assertions which Améry makes appear in his essay on torture – he recounts his experiences at the hands of the Gestapo when he was interrogated and tortured as a political prisoner. Améry’s Gestapo torturer may well be very far from the banal figure of Eichmann which Arendt describes, yet this does not invalidate her banality-of-evil thesis. It simply demonstrates that the concept is not universally applicable, a point which Arendt herself clearly recognizes since she allows for other forms of evil. Améry is not correct if he considers the example of his torturer to be proof that evil is never banal – it may be simply proof that his torturer was not banal. The Gestapo torturer may be a kind of sadist or fanatic whose motives require little explanation – precisely the kind of perpetrator who, on Arendt’s understanding, Eichmann is not. Or the torturer may represent an alternative manifestation of evil which is neither sadistic, nor fanatical, nor banal. Arendt’s banality-of-evil thesis may not pertain to this torturer of the Third Reich. It may not pertain to any number of perpetrators of Nazi crimes. The appositeness of its application to Eichmann, however, need not be doubted merely because of this fact. Arendt’s ethical ideas mainly relate to the issue of mass complicity in the evil of the Holocaust. The notion of the banality of evil specifically pertains to understanding the frequently apparent deep discrepancy between the unremarkable, ordinary, banal doers and the extraordinary evil of their deeds. Indeed this disparity is the real subject of much of the discourse surrounding

Holocaust perpetration both in the relatively small field of moral philosophy and the Holocaust, and in the dominant realm of historical study of the events. Both Daniel Goldhagen and Christopher Browning are, in their historical treatments of the period, really seeking an understanding of this dissonance between the perpetrator and the act. As we have seen, the need to reconcile the doer and the deed leads Goldhagen in a particular direction: he argues that, though it might not seem so, the doer in fact did fit the deed – the seeming normality of the perpetrators actually masked a deep, virulent, murderous anti-Semitism. This is a rather unsatisfactory answer: simply to say that the ordinariness of the offenders was really only a cunning guise seems too convenient. Browning’s approach is, conversely, to emphasize the actual ordinariness of many perpetrators and considers the psychological effects and demands on these individuals. Arendt’s banality-of-evil thesis must be viewed and appreciated in this context. The occurrence of the Holocaust – initiated by a few, executed by many and ignored by as many more – demonstrates a certain conceptual distance between evil actions and their motivations. Améry’s criticisms notwithstanding, Arendt’s reflections seem to reveal something correct about many of the perpetrators: there was a sense in which their motives were banal, petty and self-serving rather than diabolically evil; they committed these horrific transgressions not because they were evil, but in some strange way while being indifferent to the fact that they were. The observations of other writers and thinkers on this subject support Arendt’s view. A fascinating collection discovered just over a decade ago by the historian Sönke Neitzel in the British National Archives – the transcripts of the secret recordings of thousands of conversations between German prisoners of war held by the British and Americans – is insightful into the perspectives of perpetrators. Neitzel and the social psychologist Harald Welzer have collected, analysed and published many of the recordings. The collection is revealing in light of the question of mass complicity in the perpetration of the Holocaust: a number of different attitudes are displayed by the men who knew of, witnessed, or, in some cases, perpetrated acts of mass murder. Some express disbelief at tales of mass murder, others shock and disgust. Among the attitudes on display one certainly encounters sadism and fanaticism, such as the remark from one officer who declares, ‘When I meet a Jew I could shoot him out of hand’,147 or the approval expressed by some for the Nazi policies against the Jews and the beliefs espoused by others in the ridiculous conspiracy theories regarding Jewish people which abounded at the time.148 Yet strikingly, among those various attitudes, one also finds something which seems akin to the banality of evil: a

blank, matter-of-fact description of the processes and technical means used to commit despicable crimes unaccompanied by any kind of reflection on the evil of these actions, merely an account of how the job was done. The following interchange provides an example: A low-ranking Luftwaffe officer named Heimer told of Jews being killed by diverting gas into train cars: HEIMER: There was a large collecting place, the Jews were always brought out of the houses and then taken to the station. They could take food with them for two or three days, and then they were put in a long distance train with the windows and doors sealed up. And then they were taken right through to Poland, and just before reaching their destination they pumped in some sort of stuff, some sort of gas, cool gas or nitrogen gas – anyway some odourless gas. That put them all to sleep. It was nice and warm. Then they were pulled out and buried. That’s what they did with thousands of Jews! (Laughs.) … KASSEL: Surely, you can’t do that! HEIMER: It’s quite simple. Why shouldn’t one arrange something like that? KASSEL: In the first place it’s not possible and secondly you just can’t do a thing like that for God’s sake! HEIMER: All the same it was done.149 This historical evidence reinforces Arendt’s supposition – at least some kinds of perpetrators in the Third Reich can indeed be characterized by the concept of the banality of evil. Her supposition is similarly supported by remarks from Primo Levi: when asked to describe the guards at Auschwitz and what they were like, Levi responded that, for the most part, they just seemed bored.150 They did not seem to be delighting in the sadistic cruelty of their jobs nor celebrating the culmination of their fanatical aims. Similarly, Levi writes of a story told to him by a German correspondent of his after the war: a woman whose husband had been deployed in the East expressed consternation at the post-war trials of war criminals, saying: When my husband came on furlough from Poland, he told me: ‘Almo st all we did was shoot Jews, shoot Jews all the time. My arm hurt from so much shooting.’ But what was he supposed to do, if they had given him those orders? 151

The perspective expressed here is one of banality and pettiness: though her

husband perpetrated atrocious acts of evil, the woman’s banal concern is the apparent repetitive strain injury which he developed as a result of all the killing. And she dismisses the question of his moral agency and responsibility with a casual invocation of the ‘just following orders’-defence. Again, the offender here described does not appear to have revelled in his evil acts, he merely seems to have grown tired of them. Christopher Browning’s account of ordinary perpetrators points in a similar direction. He emphasizes the general lack of Nazi indoctrination for the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101: ‘They were educated and spent their formative years in the pre-1933 period. Many came from a social milieu that was relatively unreceptive to National Socialism. They knew perfectly well the moral norms of German society before the Nazis. They had earlier standards by which to judge the Nazi policies they were asked to carry out.’152 They were neither committed anti-Semites nor, for the most part, sadists enjoying the barbarity they inflicted on others – indeed Browning details how shocked many of the men were to discover their intended role as racist killers.153 Nonetheless, the majority reconciled themselves to their task and only a minority refused to participate. Finally, Heinrich Böll’s novel Wo warst du, Adam? relates a similar sentiment: at one point two German soldiers are driving a van packed with Jewish victims to their deaths. In between shouting at the victims to be quiet, one man shows the other pictures of his wife and child and they casually discuss their personal lives.154 Their self-involved, self-serving interests are predominant – the suffering of their victims is viewed as incidental to some other goal such as getting the job done. One other issue needs to be addressed here: that of the relevance of distance. It is sometimes suggested, for example by Richard Schmitt, that ‘distancing’ in some form or other played a role in the Holocaust.155 Yet I wish to sound a note of caution as far as the idea of the relevance of physical distance is concerned: sometimes Eichmann’s actions are accounted for by his status as a Schreibtischtäter (a ‘desk-killer’). The thought here is that, given that Eichmann was probably neither a serious sadist nor a convinced racist, his being able to participate in, and organize, mass murder, can be explained by the fact that it was done remotely, from the comfort of his office – he was not regularly confronted by the reality of the killing. The difficulty with assertions such as these is the counterexamples I have just mentioned from the works of Levi, Browning and Böll: they demonstrate that the banality of evil was evident not only in the desk-killers of the Third Reich but also in at least some of those who

were actually killing and were not at a distance from the deed. Banal, petty and self-serving attitudes and a corresponding lack of any particular desire for cruelty or fanatical aims were on display not only among perpetrators such as Eichmann who generally organized evil from afar, they were also conspicuous among some of the killers themselves. Hence physical distance cannot be a determining factor. The words of the journalist Haffner, quoted earlier, are relevant here: he refers to those who actually commit the ‘enormity’ of this evil as being ‘banal, weak, and insignificant men’ and sees no difference between the perpetrators on the ground and their ‘bureaucratic colleagues’ in offices who ‘torture their victims by methods less physical’.156 It is possible that some kind of psychological distancing might be relevant,157 and indeed there were perhaps individuals with banal motives who could kill only from behind a desk and not face-to-face – Eichmann claimed to be so when he asserted that he had recoiled at watching people being murdered in front of him. Yet it remains the case that there were others in possession of banal motives who could participate in faceto-face killing.158 The Holocaust was not committed by only one type of offender and there is not only one form of evil. The range of motivations in the Third Reich spanned hatred, fanaticism and sadistic cruelty through callous opportunism, banal and petty self-serving motives and wilful disregard of the suffering of others. Not all, but some of the perpetrators are aptly characterized by Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil, a trope encountered elsewhere in Holocaust accounts and studies.

Intention and moral responsibility The crux of the philosophical problem arising from Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann is the relation between motivation or intention159 and moral responsibility. For Arendt, Eichmann’s intentions in actively participating in the evil of the Holocaust were banal, petty and self-serving ones such as advancing his career and improving his social status. That the deeds in which he participated were evil is undeniable. Yet how are we to understand Eichmann’s moral responsibility for undoubtedly evil deeds if we grant (with Arendt) that his intentions were not evil per se? It is to this question I now turn, beginning first with an analysis of Susan Neiman’s account of the banality of evil.

Neiman on Arendt The most comprehensive treatment of Arendt’s banality-of-evil notion is that of

Susan Neiman. Neiman’s insightful analysis offers an understanding of the ethical significance of the concentration camps and of the actions of men like Eichmann, which locates the novelty and uniqueness of the events in their confounding of our conceptual resources: the Holocaust left us ‘conceptually devastated’.160 The occurrence of the Holocaust and the murder of millions by men like Eichmann would have been conceptually easier to account for had its perpetrators all been sadists and fanatics. Of course, some were. Arendt recognizes that the regime comprised some ‘criminal and abnormal elements’.161 But many of those responsible for the atrocities were not uncommonly cruel or brutal; indeed, as Neiman points out, ‘the SS sought to avoid using those who took obvious pleasure in murder’.162 Arendt describes Eichmann’s pride in the so-called ‘objective’ attitude of the SS: ‘By its “objectivity” (Sachlichkeit), the S.S. dissociated itself from such “emotional” types as [Julius] Streicher.’163 For Neiman (as for Arendt) the great ethical stumbling block of Auschwitz was how to explain the complicity of millions of relatively ordinary people without such ‘emotional’ attitudes.164 As Neiman asserts, ‘Auschwitz threatened and implicated a larger portion of humanity than had been threatened and implicated before.’165 According to Neiman, traditional conceptual accounts of evil associate evil acts with evil intent – ‘Modern evil is the product of will,’ she states.166 Indeed, the law generally makes similar demands, requiring both the action (actus reus) and the intent (mens rea) to be present for the commission of a crime. In general, where mens rea is absent, a defendant may only be accused of criminal negligence rather than intended crime.167 Hence, on Neiman’s reading of the traditional understanding of evil, a person’s act may only properly be thought of as evil if that person truly intends the act of evil committed. If an act of wrongdoing is committed through negligence, or occurs as a result of some unintended consequence, then we do not traditionally hold that to be an evil deed per se on the part of the individual perpetrator.168 This is the traditional view of evil which, for Neiman, is shattered by the Holocaust. As Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem illustrates, very many of those involved did not intend the horror of the gas chambers in this sense; they did not will that evil, and yet they were instrumental in its occurrence.169 A corollary of this is confusion regarding moral responsibility. In traditional moral and theological reflection on wrongdoing, the extent to which one is held responsible for one’s (wrong) actions depends considerably upon one’s intentions. If, for example, one unintentionally steals something (perhaps

because one forgets one has something in one’s hand when leaving a shop), one’s responsibility in the matter seems diminished – the commission of the act is undeniable but theft is not what was meant. Hence Auschwitz ‘posed philosophical problems because it left the nature of assuming responsibility so very unclear’.170 Neiman’s discussion of intent and responsibility in this context reveals much of what is morally significant and problematic about the Holocaust. On the metalevel of the Nazi leadership at least, the intent to murder millions of Jews was indisputable. She argues, Auschwitz stood for moral evil as other war crimes did not because it seemed deliberate as others did not. Sending children to fight for Britain in the mud of Flanders without grasping the power of the weapons you have put in their hands can be called gross criminal negligence. Rounding up children from all ends of Europe and shipping them to gas chambers in Poland cannot. The number of Jews herded into cattle cars was even exactly calculated; the SS wished to pay the Reichsbahn no more than economy group rates for the cost of transporting people to be murdered. It is hard to imagine an act that is more intentional, at a structural level.171 And yet the question of intent at an individual level remains quite difficult to penetrate. Those components of intention generally held to be necessary for the commission of an evil act, such as malice aforethought, were often absent in the individual Nazi perpetrators at lower levels.172 Indeed, the SS actively sought to avoid employing those who might have taken malicious pleasure in their duties. As Neiman concludes, ‘At every level, the Nazis produced more evil, with less malice, than civilisation had previously known.’173 Neiman observes that the desire to preserve the (old-fashioned) notion of the direct connection between intention and act has led to some interesting consequences. Daniel Goldhagen’s work, again, reflects this. In the apparent absence of obvious intent on the part of many of the offenders, he attributes to them a subconscious form of intention: Goldhagen’s main claim in Hitler’s Willing Executioners is that most Germans had been subject, from an early age, to an ‘eliminationist antisemitism’ as part of German national identity which had created in them the willingness (and indeed desire) to carry out Hitler’s murderous programme.174 This view presumes that, in order for the Holocaust to have occurred, those many ordinary people who were complicit must have intended it to happen: such evil cannot happen without intention on that scale.

And yet it seems apparent, and Arendt’s depiction of Eichmann is testament to this, that very many of those involved did not possess such intentions. These conceptual presumptions are simply deficient in properly accounting for what actually happened. It is Neiman’s contention that the ethical significance of Auschwitz is situated in its revelation of the inadequacy of prevailing concepts of intention and wrongdoing – the Holocaust demonstrates that there is no necessary link between an evil act and an evil intention: the commission of an evil act need not entail a motivating evil intention. Referring to those views which seek to attribute, at the very least, unconscious intention to the perpetrators, Neiman reminds her reader: It is easier to appeal to unconscious hatred and unconscious knowledge than to admit the more disturbing view. They really didn’t mean it – and it really doesn’t matter. Auschwitz embodied evil that confuted two centuries of modern assumptions about intention.175 Neiman maintains that the assumption that evil requires evil intention can often mean that ‘denying the latter is normally viewed as a way of denying the former’.176 This is one of the main sources of criticism of Arendt’s account of Eichmann.177 Many of those who decried her work did so on the basis that by denying malicious intent on Eichmann’s part, she was somehow dismissing the evil of his deeds and effectively not holding him responsible for his role in the mass murders since he did not intend the Holocaust.178 Neiman argues that Arendt’s ‘main point is that Eichmann’s harmless intentions did not mitigate his responsibility’.179 The question of attributing responsibility and blame where intentions do not marry up with actions and consequences is problematic. Neiman’s reading of Arendt is correct in respect of her view on Eichmann’s responsibility: Arendt certainly held that Eichmann was responsible for his part in the Holocaust and that his execution was justified. Yet, as Neiman rightly explains, Arendt’s banality-of-evil thesis simultaneously denies that he intended the murder of millions of Jews in the sense that he aimed at this rather than aiming at doing his job. So it seems that Arendt does think that Eichmann’s responsibility is not mitigated by his lack of evil intention. Neiman’s inte rpretation of Arendt seems, however, to convey more clarity on Arendt’s position than I think her words in Eichmann in Jerusalem can really justify. Neiman claims that Arendt argued that the judges at Eichmann’s trial missed

the greatest moral and legal challenge of the case: ‘Their judgment depended on the common assumption that intention is the place to locate responsibility and blame.’180 Neiman continues, ‘That you could do nothing but sign a paper and nevertheless be guilty of murder is a fact that shows how our categories are in need of change.’181 In response to this need Neiman posits that ‘if mass murderers’ intentions can be unexceptionable, we are not to conclude that nobody is responsible for anything, but to locate responsibility elsewhere’.182 Neiman asserts that the success of Nazism in co-opting so many ‘normal’ people into the system ‘revealed the impotence of intention on its own’.183 Elsewhere she states that the example of Eichmann as a person who committed great evil from banal motives shows that ‘subjective states are not here decisive’.184 Furthermore, Neiman argues that, supposing Eichmann’s sincerity, ‘this is no reason to deny his responsibility, but to look for responsibility elsewhere than in the contents of the soul’.185 For Neiman, the concepts of responsibility and blame have been too closely tied to the notion of intention; the Holocaust (and its perpetration by many possessed of banal rather than deeply evil intentions) demonstrates that blame and responsibility should perhaps be freed of these close binds with intention. And indeed this is precisely the position that she attributes to Arendt: she states that a traditional identification of evil with evil intent led to a misreading of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, such that it was presumed that by denying Eichmann’s evil intentions Arendt was effectively denying his responsibility.186 But, Neiman continues, ‘[Arendt’s] point was not to deny responsibility but to demand that we understand responsibility anew’.187 As we have already seen, she states that Arendt’s account of Eichmann shows that ‘what you mean matters far less than you suppose. The world will hold you accountable for what you do since it is what you do, not what you mean, that affects it.’188 In other words, it would seem that, for Neiman, action rather than intention is the proper locus of responsibility and therefore blame, and she posits that this is Arendt’s position as well. Neiman’s discussion of intention and responsibility contains some problematic aspects: first, her presumption of a ‘common assumption’ that responsibility and blame are placed at the level of intention is open to dispute. Certainly for Kant, or a Kantian philosopher, the consequences of an action are not what determine its moral worth; rather, the motivating intention, the reason for which one acts, is determinate. It is perhaps to this school of thought that Neiman is alluding. Yet a closer analysis of any common moral assumptions regarding responsibility and blame would surely conclude that both intention and action are generally viewed

as morally relevant. The mens rea/actus reus distinction which is fundamental to many criminal justice systems is indicative of this. It is not clear that there has ever been a common assumption that intention alone is morally meaningful. Rather, there is a tendency to consider the immoral act and the intent of the doer as both contributing to the overall effect and therefore as both morally significant. If both motivation and deed are thought of as morally meaningful then both become potential locations for responsibility and blame. Neiman therefore seems to begin her argument from an unsatisfactory premise. The world has surely always held humans to account for both what they do and what they mean. Neiman’s claim that the Holocaust reveals something new about how we conceive of wrongdoing because it shows us that deeds rather than intentions matter morally, is conceptually difficult to justify. Responsibility and therefore blame are apportioned according to some combined consideration of the intention and the act motivated by it. Second, Neiman’s contention that this is Arendt’s position and that, in the postHolocaust world, Arendt is advocating that intention is no longer the place to locate responsibility and that we ought to understand responsibility anew, is not entirely supported by Arendt’s words in Eichmann in Jerusalem. It is worth examining the relevant passage in detail. At the end of the Eichmann book, Arendt writes an alternative judgement which she suggests would have revealed ‘the justice of what was done in Jerusalem’,189 that is, the justified nature of Eichmann’s execution, ‘if the judges had dared to address their defendant’190 as follows: You admitted that the crime committed against the Jewish people during the war was the greatest crime in recorded history, and you admitted your role in it. But you said you had never acted from base motives, that you had never had any inclination to kill anybody, that you had never hated Jews. … We find this difficult, though not altogether impossible, to believe; there is some, though not very much, evidence against you in this matter of motivation … that could be proved beyond reasonable doubt. You also said that your role in the Final Solution was an accident and that almost anybody could have taken your place, so that potentially almost all Germans are equally guilty. What you meant to say was that where all, or almost all, are guilty, nobody is. This is an indeed quite common conclusion, but one we are not willing to grant you. … Guilt and innocence before the law are of an objective nature. … You yourself claimed not the actuality but only the potentiality of equal guilt

on the part of all who lived in a state whose main political purpose had been the commission of unheard-of crimes. And no matter through what accidents of exterior or interior circumstances you were pushed onto the road of becoming a criminal, there is an abyss between the actuality of what you did and the potentiality of what others might have done. We are concerned here only with what you did, and not with the possible non-criminal nature of your inner life and of your motives or with the criminal potentialities of those around you. … Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder; there still remains the fact that you have carried out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder. … And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations … we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.191 A first reading of this passage does seem to support Neiman’s interpretation of Arendt: it is clear that, for Arendt, Eichmann’s execution is justified because of what he did rather than what he intended: even though his intentions may have been banal, his actions were not and, because of his actions, his being put to death is just. Yet there are problems with this reading: first, though it does seem clear that Arendt thinks Eichmann is responsible and blameworthy because of his actions and indeed regardless of his intentions, this does not mean that intention is, in a world containing modern evil such as the horrific Nazi crimes, no longer morally relevant. It may mean that there are some deeds so evil that the motivating intention is outweighed by the deep evil of the acts and that the despicable actions in the Third Reich are the perfect example of this. Yet this need not touch upon general moral understandings which include both intention and action in the apportioning of blame and, on a comparative level, we would still need to concede that Eichmann, if he truly did not intend the Holocaust, may be less blameworthy than those who did. Second, Neiman seems to make a broader extrapolation indicating that we need to shift where we locate responsibility in light of the fact that many of the perpetrators of the Holocaust may not have intended it. For Neiman the ‘goal’ of Arendt’s discussion of evil is ‘to preserve individual moral responsibility without relying on a notion of intention’.192 Elsewhere she states, ‘Intention, or motive, has been viewed as the heart and soul of action, the thing that determines its very

meaning.’193 She continues, ‘It is not only the motive for an action that is irrelevant to its being a good or an evil one, but every other feature of the agent’s intended aim. … In the Third Reich, the meaning of action was not determined by intentionality.’194 There are at least two possible interpretations of Neiman’s meaning, one involving a strong claim about the moral irrelevance of intention and the other a similar, yet weaker, claim. Let us consider the first of these. The strong-claim version of Neiman’s argument would be that, in light of the apparently banal motivations of many perpetrators of evil in the Third Reich, we must conclude that intention is not at all morally relevant. Some of Neiman’s words imply that she means this stronger claim: she argues that the significance of the evil of Auschwitz for moral philosophy was the ‘attack on intention’.195 Elsewhere she refers to the ‘irrelevance’196 of the inner state and, as the quote above demonstrates, Neiman thinks that the horrors of the Third Reich have revealed that ‘not only the motive for an action’ but also ‘every other feature of the agent’s intended aim’ is ‘irrelevant’.197 This is the position she attributes to Arendt, interpreting the point of Arendt’s discussion of the Judenräte in Eichmann in Jerusalem as being to show that intention is ‘irrelevant’.198 Neiman even goes so far as to refer to Arendt’s thinking as a ‘denial of the moral relevance of intention’.199 Phrases such as these tend to suggest Neiman may mean the stronger-claim version of the argument, that is, that the Holocaust has shown us that intention can no longer be considered morally relevant. The stronger-claim position would, however, be difficult to defend: the idea is that responsibility should be freed of its bond with intention and rather located at the level of action alone. This would mean we would hold humans responsible and blameworthy only for what they do and not for what they mean. Such a position seems counterintuitive. It seems to contradict a general moral understanding and an essential principle of many criminal justice systems which would seek to distinguish between, for example, an act of accidental killing and one of coldblooded, premeditated murder. Given the difficulty in defending a position which advocates the stronger-claim version of the argument, Neiman perhaps intends a lesser, and more plausible, claim. There are at least three possible ways to configure a lesser claim about the relevance of intention for either questions of responsibility or for assessing the moral worth of an action. The first would be the notion that, in light of the barbarity of the twentieth century, intention alone can no longer be thought of as solely relevant for morality – action must also be thought of as relevant. In Evil

in Modern Thought Neiman claims that the evil of Auschwitz revealed the ‘impotence of intention on its own’.200 The problem with this particular configuration of the lesser-claim argument is that it begins from a premise whose plausibility is doubtful: this claim implies that, previously, intention alone was considered morally relevant. As discussed above, this claim seems to contradict a general moral understanding and principle of justice which has never viewed intention as the single relevant factor in questions of morality. This version of Neiman’s claim really tells us nothing new: we can continue to exercise our general modern understandings whereby both intention and action are deemed morally relevant and still hold that Eichmann is responsible and blameworthy – though his intentions may have been banal, his actions were not, and because we consider both intention and action to be appropriate loci of responsibility and blame, this is simply a case where the allocation of responsibility pertains more to the act than the intent. There is no need to shift the locus of responsibility; we can simply admit that, in a case such as Eichmann’s, more responsibility and therefore more culpability is applicable at the level of action rather than intention. A second possible construction for the lesser-claim version of Neiman’s argument would be the notion that what the terrible evil of the Holocaust has revealed is not that we can no longer consider only intention to be morally relevant, but rather that we must conclude that intention matters far less (morally speaking) than we have previously surmised. Neiman states that, in light of the horrors of the gas chambers, our moral understanding is affected such that we realize that ‘what you mean matters far less than you suppose’.201 This is an interesting thought: certainly the experience of evil in the Third Reich indicated that intentions were frequently incongruous with the resultant evil acts. As Neiman states, ‘A small number of racist fanatics proposed the Final Solution, and a small number of sadists took advantage of the opportunities the camps afforded. But neither would have gotten anywhere were it not for the support of millions whose intentions spanned the gamut between moderately low to positively good.’202 Given that there was often such disparity between intention and act during the Nazi period, it is reasonable to contend that we perhaps need to reassess how much relative emphasis we place on intention in determining questions of responsibility or evaluating the moral worth of actions. Again, however, this does not reveal anything especially groundbreaking: if we consider our general moral understanding to involve a combined focus on both intention and action

then this claim returns us once again to that very understanding – most normal assessments of the responsibility of an agent for a given action or of the good or evil of that action depend upon reflection on both the intention informing the action and the action itself. That in some cases more attention should be paid to the action rather than the intention fits onto this schema of common understanding without any need to revolutionize that understanding. There is a final possible configuration of the lesser-claim version of Neiman’s argument: the idea that what is revealed by the horrific Nazi crimes is the fact that sometimes the evil of a deed is so great that it eclipses any question of intention. When an act of evil is so vile, it no longer matters what intention was behind it. If an evil act was not intended, or at least not intended in the way it happened, this has no bearing on questions of responsibility or of the moral worth of the action when its evil is as palpable as it was in an event like the Holocaust. Neiman states that ‘where it really matters, intention may drop out entirely’.203 This notion is interesting and has intuitive appeal – when it comes to reflecting on events such as the Holocaust it seems right to claim that, when we are speaking of the systematic murder of six million innocent people, questions of what was truly intended fall out of the equation. The horror is too real and the evil of the deeds too evident to inquire into all of the motivating factors. Yet this final configuration of the lesser-claim version of the argument could prove problematic when one examines the specifics. A number of problematic questions may be raised. For example, how evil does an act have to be before intention fails to figure in the equation? Is it a question of numbers, that is, of how many victims there are? Is there a number which acts as a turning point? If so, how could this be determined without being arbitrary? Or is it perhaps not a question of numbers but a question of cruelty? Or of how systemized the murder was? I ask these questions only to highlight that despite a certain intuitive appeal to this notion, one cannot say much about the concrete specifics of its meaning and is left with the sense that any criteria used for demonstrating where intention becomes less relevant would be largely arbitrary or would become a matter for moral judgement, a concept which is neither clear nor uncontentious. Neiman’s other contention that Arendt is advocating a shift in how to locate responsibility is not borne out by Arendt’s own words. The passage quoted above does not seem to call for a radically new understanding of how to attribute responsibility; rather it simply implies that, in a case such as this, the amount of blame attached to the action outweighs that which is attributed to the intent, and, because the action is so evil, Eichmann’s execution can be considered just. And

while we might agree that it was right that Eichmann was executed just as many of those at the Nuremberg trials were, we might also agree he was less to blame than figures at Nuremberg such as Julius Streicher and Hans Frank who had arguably both intended and carried out acts of evil. Rather than demonstrating a need to shift our positioning of blame and responsibility, I would argue that Arendt’s account of Eichmann and the justification for his execution simply makes clear the impasse that is reached in considering these moral issues. This is made clearer by the passage in Eichmann in Jerusalem which precedes Arendt’s imaginary judgement. Here she writes that where intent is absent and where, for whatever reasons, even reasons of moral insanity, the ability to distinguish between right and wrong is impaired, we feel no crime has been committed. We refuse, and consider as barbaric, the propositions ‘that a great crime offends nature, so that the very earth cries out for vengeance; that evil violates a natural harmony which only retribution can restore; that a wronged collectivity owes a duty to the moral order to punish the criminal’ (Yosal Rogat). And yet I think it was undeniable that it was precisely on the ground of these long-forgotten propositions that Eichmann was brought to justice to begin with, and that they were, in fact, the supreme justification for the death penalty. Because he had been implicated and had played a central role in an enterprise whose open purpose was to eliminate forever certain ‘races’ from the surface of the earth, he had to be eliminated.204 Arendt recognizes that the intent to commit acts of evil was absent in Eichmann’s case and yet that he was responsible for the evil of his actions nonetheless. However, this leads her to justify his execution on the grounds of his having violated a natural moral order while simultaneously rejecting this justification as ‘barbaric’. Indeed the end of the previous passage quoted seems to advocate a similar kind of retributive justice: Eichmann acted out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with certain groups, so now the earth should not be shared with him. Arendt’s account here serves to demonstrate the m oral philosophical aporia reached when trying to attribute responsibility for an evil act where the intention to commit it is absent: a person can still be held responsible for his or her actions, yet if we are to contend that those actions merit the death penalty and that he or she did not really mean the evil of his or her deeds, then on what grounds is he or she to be punished so severely? Arendt’s reversion to archaic justifications for execution depending on the action having violated some natural moral order locates morality at the level of pure

action, the material level of deeds rather than the immaterial level of thought and motive, where only a disturbance in a perceived right order of things (rather than, say, a right order of the mind or of moral thinking) can be punished. Arendt demonstrates how our concept of responsibility reaches a kind of impasse in trying to attribute and accommodate notions of the responsibility of individuals whose banally self-serving intentions are transformed into extreme evil. Yet she does not, as Neiman claims, offer us a newly understood idea of responsibility. Rather, she herself also cannot escape this impasse and proffers an understanding of Eichmann’s responsibility as residing decidedly far from the soul: in the natural moral order which his evil actions disturb, but whose constitution we do not understand and which must restore itself through his punishment, while decrying that very understanding as ‘barbaric’.

Intention Arendt’s account of evil in the Third Reich is one which emphasizes the uncoerced choices given individuals made. It is a moral account which therefore pays particular attention to the issues of responsibility and culpability. Only where humans choose their actions free from duress do the tenets of most moral philosophies hold those people responsible. If I am threatened with the death of my family unless I carry out a given evil action, then generally speaking I am not considered responsible for that evil action once committed since I had no choice but to do it. There were no viable alternate possibilities.205 Arendt’s examination of these issues is decidedly not about what people do when their choices are constrained by fear: she shows how many relatively free choices continued to be made during the Nazi reign and how those who chose to be part of the killing machine cannot hide behind arguments of fear or coercion – they are wholly responsible for their actions, she would claim, and can therefore be punished accordingly. And yet, as we have seen, this becomes problematic when the issue of intention is included. Certainly perpetrators like Eichmann did freely choose to join institutions such as the SS and to participate in activities which, we must surmise, they knew amounted to evil deeds (or at least according to any prevalent moral understanding prior to the warped context of the Third Reich). But, if we accept Arendt’s banality-of-evil thesis as it pertains to perpetrators like Eichmann as correct, then we consider that their actions were not motivated by intentions of, or desires for, extreme evil. On this understanding, culprits such as this did not therefore intend, desire or will the evil in which they were

nonetheless complicit and in which they nonetheless knowingly participated. In everyday moral discourse we tend to accept that full responsibility for evil is attributed to those who intended or desired it and who acted in accordance with those intentions, whereas for those whose actions result in deeds which they did not fully intend, responsibility is alleviated, at least to a certain degree. It is this schism which opens up between (possibly banal) intention and (undeniably evil) action which evokes problems for concepts of blame and responsibility. As already touched upon above, when it comes to general everyday acts of immorality (e.g. theft or lying) we operate with a sense that if an immoral act is committed unintentionally, the doer is less responsible and therefore not as blameworthy as the person who deliberately steals, cheats or lies. If we are to apply this general concept of blame to the case of Eichmann, and if we are to concede that Arendt’s estimations of his intentions are correct, then there may be some sense in which his responsibility for his evildoing is to an extent relieved and in which he is less blameworthy (certainly compared to perpetrators who did intend the evil acts they committed). According to Neiman, Arendt’s response to the problem of disparity between the intentions of a doer and their deeds and its implications for responsibility is to relocate responsibility, to understand it anew, in short, to break the link between responsibility and intent. Yet, as I have argued, it is not at all clear that this is what Arendt means. Rather, I maintain that Arendt offers no definite response to the problem of attributing responsibility in these circumstances. Instead, the confusion apparent in the final pages of Eichmann in Jerusalem demonstrates this. Her response reveals the aporia reached in moral philosophy when considering this issue. So far we have been proceeding according to Neiman’s schema of intention versus act. There is, however, a more basic ambiguity which requires illumination: Neiman alludes to the fact that the concept of intention itself remains unclear – to which kinds of mental state or combination of mental states does it refer? What is the phenomenology of intention? She does not clarify this uncertainty in the advancement of her argument. Our analysis will benefit from augmenting her fundamental intention/act model for understanding certain forms of evil to include a further discussion of what is meant by the term ‘intention’ itself. In what sense exactly did Eichmann not intend the evil in which he became complicit? What does it mean to have the intention of committing a particular evil deed? In what sense might one intend (or not intend) the evil that results from certain acts? One way of understanding intending is to view it as

designing or meaning the occurrence of a particular state of affairs. Intending in this sense can mean desiring or actively willing a given outcome, knowing it to be this very outcome. Alternatively, in another sense, to intend something can mean to have it in mind to bring about some state of affairs but not under the description as that state of affairs. Let me explain. Neiman argues that Eichmann lacked the intention to cause the evil which resulted from his actions. Given what we have just said about the two different senses of intention, she must mean that he lacked the intention in the first sense, that is, he did not design, mean, desire or will the evil his deeds produced. Yet he certainly intended the evil of the Holocaust in the second sense – he had in mind the destruction of the Jewish people of Europe as a state of affairs to be brought about, but not under the description ‘evil’. There seems to be a distinction here which corresponds to these two senses of intention: the difference between committing an evil deed because it is evil and committing an evil deed knowing it to be evil but not because it is evil. Intending in the first sense correlates to committing an evil deed because it is evil, that is, designing or meaning, desiring or willing the evil which results from the deed. Intending in the second sense correlates to perpetrating an offence knowing it to be evil but not because it is evil, that is, not because one desires or wills the evil which results from it. Rather, one knows that evil will result from the act and commits it anyway, but one does so for some reason other than desiring or willing that evil. In Eichmann’s case, that other reason was the advancement of his career in the SS. Let us apply this rubric to Arendt’s depiction of Eichmann and the moral landscape of the Third Reich. If Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann and his motives is correct, then he clearly belongs in the second category of people who knew their deeds resulted in evil but did not commit them for that reason. In contrast, the sadists and fanatics in the movement (the counterexamples to Eichmann whom Arendt always has in mind) perpetrated their offences because of the evil that resulted – the sadist desires the evil of the harm caused to others and the anti-Semitic fanatic desires the evil of the destruction of the Jewish people. So we can say that Eichmann intended the evil of the Holocaust only in so far as he held the destruction of European Jewry in mind as something to be brought about. Yet he did not, on Arendt’s understanding, intend it in the sense of desiring or willing the evil of the Holocaust, that is, the evil of the pain, harm and death caused to millions. He did not perpetrate the Holocaust because it was evil but rather he became complicit in the Holocaust knowing it to be evil, despite the fact that it was evil but because of his own petty, self-serving

reasons. This illuminates another path of inquiry: we have so far said that though Eichmann did not commit evil because it was evil, he did commit evil knowing it to be evil. Yet one might question whether he did really know it to be evil. Is it possible that, in some sense, Eichmann did not know, or realize, or perceive, or comprehend the true evil in which he was complicit? Arendt herself implies this might be the case when she asserts that Eichmann ‘never realized what he was doing’. 206 Let us suppose there is some sense in which Eichmann did not know his actions amounted to evil. What possible reasons could there be for him not to know? One obvious reason could have been that it was through lack of intelligence that Eichmann did not perceive or comprehend the evil of his acts; another, that he lacked the information to know the extent to which his actions caused evil. Neither of these reasons is, however, particularly convincing: Eichmann was clearly not an ignorant man – it cannot be sheer stupidity which clouded his recognition of the evil in which he collaborated. In addition, he certainly did not lack information about the pain and suffering endured by the people whose deportations he organized. He knew very well that he was sending them to their deaths. What of the dominant social and political conditions in the Third Reich? Could it be that the corrupted, immoral Nazi code which proclaimed the murder of innocent Jewish people to be right and good obscured the true evil of his actions for Eichmann? Indeed, Arendt suggests that Eichmann acted under circumstances ‘that [made] it well-nigh impossible for him to know or feel that he [was] doing wrong’.207 Historical evidence of contemporary attitudes, however, shows that collaborators in Nazi crimes were often very much aware of the evil in which they were complicit. The collection of transcripts from German prisoners of war cited earlier proves illuminating here. Among the attitudes on display, one finds reflections such as the remark from infantry lieutenant Bentz that the persecution of the Jews is a ‘shameful blot on our history’.208 Prevailing conditions under the Third Reich were not characterized by universal indoctrination such that everyone was now unable to know evil as evil.209 And Arendt herself recognizes this at many points in her work. So if Eichmann did not know evil as evil, if he did not perceive the reality of the evil in which he was complicit, it can neither have been because of ignorance, nor lack of information, nor indoctrination. We should, therefore, assume that Eichmann knew his actions to be evil. Yet there is the possibility of a more nuanced conclusion suggested by Stanley Cavell’s distinction between

knowing and acknowledging. In his discussion of scepticism and the problem of other minds, Cavell asserts that perhaps knowing something is weaker than, or less than, acknowledging it: From my acknowledging I am late it follows that I know I’m late …; but from my knowing I am late, it does not follow that I acknowledge I’m late. … One could say: Acknowledgement goes beyond knowledge. (Goes beyond not, so to speak, in the order of knowledge, but in its requirement that I do something or reveal something on the basis of that knowledge.)210 Could we apply such a distinction to the moral questions we are here considering? Could we say that there is a difference between knowing one is committing evil and acknowledging that one is? Cavell’s description of acknowledgement’s ‘requirement’ to do or reveal something based on knowledge is particularly interesting. If the knowledge in question were knowledge that one is committing acts of evil, then the ‘something’ to be done could be to refrain from those acts, and the ‘something’ to be revealed could be a confrontation with the real evil of those acts – an acceptance of them as evil. To acknowledge one is participating in evil is more than to know, it is to move beyond that knowledge to the realization that one truly is transgressing and on to the impulse to desist. On this understanding we might argue that Eichmann, who was neither stupid nor ill-informed about the evil resulting from his actions, nor so indoctrinated as to have been rendered incapable of telling right from wrong, knew his deeds amounted to evil, but had not acknowledged it. Acknowledgement’s demand that something be revealed or done on the basis of knowledge was not met by Eichmann – he neither revealed anything by confronting the real evil of his actions, nor did he do anything in response to knowing his deeds were evil – he simply carried on. He did not acknowledge his part as a perpetrator of evil.211 Where does this leave us with regard to Eichmann? If Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann’s motivations is correct, then we must say that he did not commit evil because it was evil – he did not participate in the Holocaust specifically because he wanted to bring about the evil of it. Rather, he organized and participated in the Holocaust because of his own self-serving, banal desires for career and social success. He knew, though did not acknowledge, that he was complicit in evil. He perpetrated evil deeds knowing them to be so, but the evil of those deeds was merely, from his perspective, incidental to his goal.

Responsibility

How are we then to understand Eichmann’s responsibility for his actions in the context of these discussions? What relative apportioning of blame is fair between those who commit evil because it is evil and those who commit evil for some other reason? Does it matter in terms of responsibility and blame that those with alternative motivations, such as Arendt’s Eichmann, were not driven to commit evil because it is evil? Surely the mere fact of their having participated is enough to allow us to blame them and hold them responsible, regardless of their motivations? It is important to state that, in spite of a perpetrator’s intentions, motives or desires, if she has committed an act of evil, then she can quite properly be held responsible for having committed the act. Irrespective of what she meant, there is blame to be attributed to the deed itself. The difficulty here is fairly ascribing blame as regards the different motivations encouraging the commission of the deed. Certainly it seems right to say that the worst kinds of perpetrator are those in whom desire and deed are united in their committed evil, that is, those who committed evil acts because they were evil, because they desired the evil engendered by these acts. Finding such offenders has proven problematic with regard to the Third Reich: after the defeat of National Socialism in Germany it was rather difficult to find anyone who admitted to believing in the racist aims of the Nazis and yet it is hardly possible that the Holocaust could have happened unless at least some people desired or meant it to. At the very least, we may presume that Hitler and some of his closest followers (Himmler, Heydrich) could be placed in this group – they were the architects of the Final Solution who both designed, and ruthlessly acted out, the process of attempting to murder all the Jews of Europe. What about perpetrators like Eichmann? If we adhere to Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann and her banality-of-evil thesis then we must view him as a perpetrator who committed evil knowing it to be evil, but not because it was evil. He did not desire, will or mean the evil that resulted from his deeds. Does this make him less culpable? Or at least comparatively less culpable than those who desired the evil they instigated? Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell’s essays in Philosophy and Animal Life, which consider the issues raised by the author J. M. Coetzee’s character Elizabeth Costello, offer useful reflections here. Coetzee’s character of Costello is an author and lecturer concerned with, among other subjects, the treatment of animals in modern food production. For this reason she is a vegetarian yet is painfully aware of the inconsistencies in her position – at one point a colleague attempts to praise her for her moral stance on meat production, to which she responds with a quip about her own hypocrisy as

a person who wears leather.212 She draws controversial analogies between the mass slaughter of large-scale meat production and the Holocaust. Not only does Costello find the scale and callousness of the killing comparable to that of the Holocaust, she also draws parallels between the complicity of ordinary people in the mass production of meat and the complicity of ordinary people in the Holocaust: I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh Holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched. We do not feel tainted. We can do anything, it seems, and come away clean. We point to the Germans and Poles and Ukrainians who did and did not know of the atrocities around them. We like to think they were inwardly marked by the aftereffects of that special form of ignorance. We like to think that in their nightmares the ones whose suffering they had refused to enter came back to haunt them. We like to think they woke up haggard in the mornings and died of gnawing cancers. But probably it was not so. The evidence points in the opposite direction: that we can do anything and get away with it; that there is no punishment.213 Elsewhere Costello states, It is not because they waged an expansionist war, and lost it, that Germans of a particular generation are still regarded as standing a little outside humanity, as having to do or be something special before they can be readmitted to the human fold. They lost their humanity, in our eyes, because of a certain willed ignorance on their part.214 Costello admits that some people did not know of the horrors committed in their name but contends that many did and chose to turn away in ‘willed ignorance’. And it is for this willed ignora nce that they are blamed and held accountable. Similarly she thinks modern meat eaters can be considered responsible and therefore blameworthy for their complicity in the barbarity of mass meat production. In her essay on Coetzee Diamond refers to the ‘ineluctable facts of our capacity to miss the suffering of others’ and to the ‘possibility of our own suffering being unknown and uncared about’.215 Cavell, in his response, raises the spectre of us failing to see ‘others or ourselves as human’, a condition he calls ‘soul-blindness’.216 If we map these reflections onto Cavell’s

knowledge/acknowledgement distinction we could argue that this ‘soulblindness’, this capacity to miss the suffering of others, corresponds to a failure to acknowledge the anguish others face. Our ‘missing’ the suffering of other humans pertains not necessarily to a lack of knowledge about the horrendous conditions under which others exist, but rather to a failure to face up to, and confront, the reality of that pain. Questions of responsibility regarding the Holocaust are questions which concern the complicity of individuals in systems which produce evil. Can the contemporary meat eater be held responsible for her complicity in the barbarity and cruelty of the meat industry? To take another example, can the person who buys cheap clothing in Western Europe or North America be held to account for the evil engendered by the poor working conditions of garment manufacturers in Bangladesh? Supposing the modern consumer is reasonably well-informed, we can assume he knows that suffering is occasioned by the food and clothing retail industries. In other words, he knows that his actions make him in some sense complicit in evil – his buying clothes and food perpetuates these industries and therefore the evil they engender. Yet we can also probably assume that most modern consumers do not mean or desire that evil – they are motivated by other banal and self-serving concerns such as having continued access to vast quantities of meat or being able to buy cheap clothes. We, as modern consumers, are not complicit in this evil because it is evil. We are complicit for other reasons but we nonetheless know that evil results, in some sense, from our actions. We ‘miss’ the suffering of others here just as a generation of Germans ‘missed’ the suffering of the Jews. Again Cavell’s knowledge/acknowledgement distinction seems to apply: we know that evil ensues from our actions but we do not acknowledge it. To acknowledge it would be to confront the real evil in which we are complicit and such acknowledgement might well prompt us to abstain from it. How are we, then, to attribute responsibility to individuals who commit evil acts knowing them to be evil but not because they are evil? Elizabeth Costello’s position is clear: individuals are culpable for their ‘willed ignorance’, which causes them to ‘lose their humanity’. Furthermore, she is concerned by the fact that this willed ignorance, this blindness to the suffering of others has probably not caused the perpetrators and those complicit themselves any pain or anguish. She wishes to see the participants in evil haunted by nightmares of that evil but concludes that this is probably not the case. Her point is clear: it should be. Those individuals should suffer under the knowledge of the evil their deeds

engendered. In short, they are culpable and blameworthy. To apply this understanding to the Eichmann case means to argue that Eichmann is wholly responsible and blameworthy for his participation in evil, not because he meant or desired that evil, but because he knew it to be evil. It does not matter that he did not desire evil; he knew it to be evil and that is enough to ascribe blame to him. This is a strong argument. We can use it to build on Neiman’s argument and assert a more nuanced, more accurate account: for Neiman, all that matters in this context is what one does. What one intends or means becomes irrelevant. To augment this using the position espoused by Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and the discussions in Cavell and Diamond’s work, we can say that, rather, although what one does clearly matters, what matters just as much is what one knows. What is meant, what is desired, what is intended in this sense is irrelevant – what counts is what one knows and what one does on the basis of that knowledge. Eichmann is responsible not just because of what he actually did but because he knew it to be evil. It does not matter that he did not commit evil because it was evil. To know it as evil is enough for us to hold him responsible. What of Eichmann’s comparative blameworthiness? It is certainly the case that Eichmann’s deeds and his complicity in the murder of millions are such that it is right that he was punished accordingly, whether or not he really desired what happened. But does it matter, from a moral perspective, that Eichmann was not a hateful fanatic like Julius Streicher or a cruel sadist like Klaus Barbie? In attributing responsibility must one take this into account? Intuitively it seems correct to say that someone like Barbie is, in some sense, more morally culpable than someone like Eichmann because not only did Barbie knowingly carry out evil actions and contribute to the occurrence of evil (as did Eichmann) but he also desired to do so – he committed evil because it was evil. In Barbie, knowledge of evil and the desire for evil were united. Eichmann’s case seems in some sense at least marginally morally superior. Earlier I discussed Susan Neiman’s reading of Arendt and addressed three broad points: first, Neiman’s contention that intention may not matter morally speaking; second, Neiman’s assertion that this is Arendt’s view; and third, Neiman’s claim that for Arendt, in light of this, we need to understand responsibility in a new, different way. Let us consider these questions again having further illuminated the concept of intention. First, as I argued earlier, if we construe Neiman’s contention as being the stronger claim that a perpetrator’s motivations are in no way morally relevant, then it is difficult to uphold.

Whether or not an individual commits evil because it is evil, because she desires the evil that is occasioned by the act, matters in terms of moral responsibility up to a point. If a person knows she is doing evil but is motivated by petty, personal ambitions rather than a desire for that evil she c an be considered comparatively less culpable than the person who is motivated to commit evil because it is evil.217 Yet here, I think, we can see that one of the lesser-claim versions of Neiman’s argument seems to capture something correctly: maybe the individual possessed of banal motivations is marginally less blameworthy, but in the face of the scale and scope of the evil of the Holocaust, such distinctions hardly seem to matter. Earlier I contended that the idea that some events are so evil as to render the motivations of individuals complicit in them morally irrelevant is plausible, though I questioned the criteria for deciding which sorts of incident constitute that kind of evil. I can offer nothing much more concrete and specific on this here, yet I submit the thought that if there are occasions of deeds so evil that their commission leaves the motivating reasons unimportant, then surely the Holocaust is such an occasion. Second, I have maintained that Neiman’s suggestion that Arendt considers the motivations behind wrongdoing to be irrelevant in the face of great evil conveys more clarity on Arendt’s position than is readily apparent from her work. Rather, Arendt’s view on this point is characterized by a lack of clarity and Arendt does not, contrary to Neiman’s third assertion, advocate a new understanding of responsibility. She simply demonstrates the difficulties for our concept of responsibility in circumstances like these.218 Yet the foregoing discussion of the notion of intention has perhaps alleviated some of these difficulties by demonstrating that the relevant issue in attributing responsibility is specifically an issue of knowledge, rather than intention conceived in a vaguer sense.

Moral luck There is a final issue which cannot be overlooked in considering questions of moral responsibility: the concept of moral luck. The philosopher Bernard Williams has written much on the subject as a counterpoint to Kant’s (and other Kantian philosophers’) ethical projects. Williams explains that these projects are in large part determined by Kant’s desire to isolate ethics and moral action from the vicissitudes of luck in human life. He refers to the ‘Kantian attempt to escape luck’219 and asserts that the aim of Kantian ethics is ‘making morality immune to luck’.220 Both Williams and Thomas Nagel challenge this alleged immunity of morality to luck.221 Their main argument is that luck (in various forms) affects

our moral lives – diverse aspects of human morality from the kinds of moral choices we are inclined to make, to the ethical consequences of our actions, are often affected by sheer luck. Yet, when considering questions of morality we are concerned with the proper ascription of praise or blame for morally good or bad actions. In order properly to ascribe praise or blame we must presume that the individual in question was in full control of his actions – we cannot blame someone for an immoral act if its commission was beyond his control. Yet in examining how the moral life really is, it becomes apparent that full control over every aspect of a moral action and its consequences is rarely something an agent experiences. There are always, at the very least, some small details of circumstance which are beyond the agent’s control. Furthermore, these small details could, in fact, prove significant – some change in circumstance due to luck might well change the moral outcome of a given situation. And in this case, how are we to understand and allocate responsibility and blame? Nagel and Williams illuminate the difficulties caused in attributing responsibility and blame when luck is often demonstrably instrumental in a moral outcome. Daniel Statman, in his introduction to Moral Luck, identifies a number of senses in which Nagel speaks of moral luck, among others: ‘Constitutive luck’ which is ‘the kind of person you are, where this is not a question of what you deliberately do, but of your inclinations, capacities and temperament’; ‘circumstantial luck’ described as ‘the kind of problems and situations one faces’; and ‘resultant luck’ which is luck ‘in the way one’s actions and projects turn out’.222 It is relatively straightforward to imagine how any of these forms of luck could have a significant bearing on whether a moral c hoice results in a morally good or morally bad outcome. Let us take the example of Eichmann: the fact that Eichmann was the kind of person that he was, concerned with petty ambition and career success, is (at least to some relevant extent) a matter of luck. Arendt’s account of Eichmann underlines these character traits and implies that they were motivationally important in his moral choices – he carried on in the SS despite knowing he was complicit in mass murder at least in part because of these personal motivations (continued career and social success) which were, in some sense, however, beyond his control; they were a matter of constitutive luck. Similarly, Eichmann can be viewed as having the circumstantial bad luck to be living under the Nazi dictatorship and to happen to find himself in a situation where he committed evil acts. It is possible that a person such as he, living under different circumstances, might never have committed evil deeds. Eichmann’s circumstances in this sense are, again, beyond his control and yet

simultaneously significant in terms of moral outcomes. The notion of resultant luck can also be applied: it could have happened that before an evil action which Eichmann had set in motion could come to its climax, something intervened such that the result was changed and the evil action was halted and hence not committed. If, for example, the Allied victory had occurred just as Eichmann was having his first group of Jewish people herded onto trains, this would have prevented an evil act from occurring, not because of any intention on Eichmann’s part but rather because of resultant luck. The claims of a Kantian philosopher – that all that matters morally speaking is the motivating intention of an action and not any consideration of its consequences – admit no possibility for external luck to interfere in the assessment of the moral worth of an agent’s action. On the other hand, if one argues that it is not only the intention which determines the moral worth of an action but rather that other factors can or should be considered (such as the consequences of the action), then one admits luck into the moral equation. Especially in cases where the consequences or circumstances resulting from an action are included in the assessment of its moral worth, luck may play a very large role. If we agree that Eichmann did not actively desire the evil in which he participated, we must assume that ‘bad luck’ had a role in placing him in a position where his banal, personal motivations resulted in such deeply evil repercussions. In another time or another place, it is possible that Eichmann would not have been complicit in such horrific crimes. Indeed this is a fact that Arendt alludes to. Hence one is left with the sense that luck is morally significant and that, given how morally significant it can be, it is unclear on what concrete basis we make our moral judgements. Our assessment of Eichmann’s responsibility, our ascription of blame to him, presumes his control over the factors relevant in his moral choices. Yet as Williams and Nagel show, luck plays a role in moral choices and that is something over which an agent does not have control.

Concluding remarks Arendt’s notion of ‘the banality of evil’ is well known yet little understood perhaps because it is simultaneously insightful, seeming to capture something true about (at least) some kinds of perpetrators in Nazi Germany, and also confused, offering no clear means to navigate a new ethical course in response to the quandary raised. In contradistinction to the tone of Neiman’s interpretation, I do not see any conclusive resolutions to the problems raised through the

banality-of-evil notion, particularly the difficulties relating to moral responsibility. This is not to say, of course, that there are any conclusive resolutions – perhaps there is no path beyond this impasse. Yet in any case, to view Arendt as giving a clear indication of the road our thinking on this subject should take strikes me as too optimistic a reading of her work on ethics. As Hannah Fenichel Pitkin puts it, there are ‘multiple incoherences [in] our ordinary ways of discussing agency, responsibility, and causation in human affairs – incoherences that Arendt cannot avoid but does little to clarify’.223 What she does show, however, is that where doers do not fit deeds, an aporia arises as to how to match the motivations of a perpetrator with the question of his or her relative responsibility. I have offered a response to this problem: we can quite obviously consider Eichmann morally responsible for his evil deeds (as Arendt does), and we can consider him responsible for his intentions though they were not evil, since he knew what he was doing amounted to evil, though he neither desired that evil nor acknowledged it as such.224

Notes 1 The biographical details of Eichmann’s life given here are those that Arendt describes in the chapters ‘The Accused’ and ‘An Expert on the Jewish Question’ in Arendt, EiJ. These details are also to be found in David Cesarani’s, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes (London: William Heinemann, 2004); Lipstadt’s, The Eichmann Trial and Stangneth’s, Eichmann before Jerusalem. Arendt’s EiJ was first published in 1963 by Viking. A revised and enlarged edition (which includes a postscript discussing some of the criticisms of the book) appeared in 1965. The Penguin 2006 version to which I refer is the 1965 revised edition with an added insightful introduction by Amos Elon. 2 For a history of the SS and its developments, see Heinz Zollin Höhne, The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS, trans. Richard Barry (London: Penguin, 2000) and Adrian Weale, The SS: A New History (London: Hachette Digital, 2010). 3 Arendt, EiJ, 36. See also Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, 225–7. 4 Eichmann claimed that around six to eight weeks after the German invasion of the Soviet Union he was summoned to Reinhard Heydrich’s office to be told that a ‘physical extermination’ of the Jews had been ordered by Hitler. See Arendt, EiJ, 83. 5 For fascinating details of this period in hiding, see Stangneth, Eichmann before Jerusalem, 56–101. 6    Eichmann’s life in Argentina has been painstakingly researched and detailed by Bettina Stangneth – see Stangneth, Eichmann before Jerusalem, 103–311. 7    For information on the events of this period see Arendt, EiJ, 236–43; Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, 10– 20 and Stangneth, Eichmann before Jerusalem, 345–7. 8    Carol Brightman, ed., Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1995), 81. 9    Brightman, Between Friends, 98–9. 10 See for example Liliane Weissberg, ‘Introduction’, in Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, The Life of a Jewess (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 29 and Cesarani, Eichmann, 15.

11 Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, 232. 12 Arendt, EiJ, 159. 13 Ibid., 45. 14 Ibid., 33. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 32. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 126. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 53. 23 Ibid., 62. 24 Ibid., 81. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 82. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 26. 30 Ibid., 276. 31 Ibid., 22. 32 See Ibid., 83–4. 33 See Ibid., 41. 34 Ibid., 87. 35 See Ibid., 87–8. 36 Ibid., 88. 37 Ibid., 26. 38 Ibid., 30. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 252. 42 Ibid. (italics in original). 43 Arendt, EiJ, 48. 44 Ibid., 49. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 287. 47 Ibid., 287–8. 48 Arendt, EiJ, 287 (italics in original). 49 Arendt, EiJ, 288. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 114. 52 See Amos Elon’s introduction to Arendt, EiJ, xix–xxiii. 53 Seyla Benhabib, ‘Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed.

Dana R. Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 65. 54 Daniel Maier-Katkin, in his account of the Eichmann row and the reception of the book, details how Arendt received a huge volume of correspondence, much of which ‘bordered on hate mail’ and included this fairly typical example: ‘A letter from a woman in New Jersey which began with the declaration that she had never read the Eichmann book and “would never read such trash”, and concluded with the hope that “the ghosts of our six million martyrs haunt your bed at night”’. Daniel Maier-Katkin, ‘The Reception of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem’, Hannah Arendt.net: Zeitschrift für politisches Denken, Bd.6, Nr.1/2 (2011): 3. 55 For a biographical account of this period, see the chapter entitled ‘Cura Posterior: Eichmann in Jerusalem’, in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 328–78. 56 Arendt, EiJ, 283. 57 For good summaries of the Eichmann controversy and how it unfolded in the pages of the various literary and political magazines of 1960s New York, see for example Ezra, ‘The Eichmann Polemics: Hannah Arendt and Her Critics’ and Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 328–78. See also Elon, introduction, EiJ, vii– xxiii and Maier-Katkin, ‘Reception’. Shiraz Dossa and Barry Clarke also provide summaries of the main foci of the controversy – see Shiraz Dossa, ‘Hannah Arendt on Eichmann: The Public, the Private and Evil’, The Review of Politics, Vol. 46, No. 2 (1984): 163–82 and Barry Clarke, ‘Beyond “The Banality of Evil”’, British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 10, No. 4 (1980): 417–39. 58 An example of this kind of reading can be found in Judge Musmanno’s review of the Eichmann book – Musmanno had been a witness for the prosecution during the Jerusalem trial and had also acted as a judge during the Nuremberg trials. See Micheal A. Musmanno, ‘Man With An Unspotted Conscience’, The New York Times Book Review, 19 May 1963. Another exemplar of this attitude was Lionel Abel in his review – see the discussion of this in Maier-Katkin, ‘Reception’, 4. 59 See the discussion of this in Arendt, EiJ, 253–79. 60 Arendt, EiJ, 16. 61 Ibid., 15. 62 Ibid., 184–5. 63 Ibid., 185. 64 On the subject of bureaucratic participation there is interesting research – see for example Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes and Moshe Zimmermann, Das Amt und die Vergangenheit: Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik (München: Karl Blessing Verlag, 2010). 65 See for example Bernard Wasserstein, ‘Blame the victim. Hannah Arendt among the Nazis: The historian and her sources’, The Times Literary Supplement, No 5558, 9 October 2009. 66 See for example Ezra, ‘The Eichmann Polemics’, 144–59. 67 See Ezra, ‘The Eichmann Polemics’. 68 Arendt, EiJ, 11. 69 Ibid., 11–12. 70 Ibid., 12. 71 Ibid., 122–3. She also made clear in her famous reply to a critical letter from Gershom Scholem that she understood the impossibility of resistance – see Hannah Arendt, ‘A Letter to Gershom Scholem’, in Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken, 2007), 468. 72 Ezra, ‘The Eichmann Polemics’, 142. 73 Arendt, EiJ, 117. 74 Ibid., 124.

75 Ibid., 118. 76 Ibid., 125. 77 See Ezra, ‘The Eichmann Polemics’, 144. 78 Ibid., 148. 79 See for example Elon, introduction, EiJ, xviii. Mary McCarthy also made this point in her piece defending Arendt against Abel in Partisan Review – see Maier-Katkin, ‘Reception’. 80 Arendt, EiJ, 117–18. 81 See for example Gerturde Ezorsky’s comments quoted in Ezra, ‘The Eichmann Polemics’, 145. There were also, on the other hand, individuals whose honour and integrity prevented them from continuing on the Jewish Councils – the Jewish Polish-German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki recounted, in a speech to the German Bundestag, the suicide of a member of one of the councils who simply could no longer bear his complicit role. For this speech, see http://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2012/rede_ranicki/250616. 82 Arendt, EiJ, 11. 83 See Ezra, ‘The Eichmann Polemics’, 148–9. 84 Ibid., 158. 85 See Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 334 (note 18). 86 Arendt, EiJ, 125. 87 Susan Neiman, ‘Banality Reconsidered’, in Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, ed. S. Benhabib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 309. 88 Neiman, ‘Banality Reconsidered’, 310. 89 Judith N. Shklar, Political Thought and Political Thinkers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 373. 90 See Shklar, Political Thought and Political Thinkers, 372. 91 Richard J. Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Investigation (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 217. Indeed one of her most ill-advised remarks, in which she referred to the Berlin rabbi Leo Baeck as the ‘Jewish Führer’, was removed and did not appear in later editions of Eichmann in Jerusalem. On this point, see Benhabib, Reluctant Modernism, 178. For a discussion of Arendt’s remarks on Baeck, see Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 362–6. 92 Elon, Introduction, EiJ, xvii. 93 On this point, see also Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, ‘From the Pariah’s Point of View: Reflections on Hannah Arendt’s Life and Work’, in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 20. 94 Berel Lang, ‘Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Evil’, in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994), 44. 95 Jerome Kohn, ‘Evil: the Crime Against Humanity’, in Jerome Kohn, Three Essays: The Role of Experience in Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/essayc1.html, 6. 96 Elon, Introduction, EiJ, xvii. Arendt herself highlights the ‘irony of the sentence’ in which she reported Eichmann’s own words about being a ‘Zionist’ in her reply to a letter of criticism from Gershom Scholem – see Arendt, ‘A Letter to Gershom Scholem’, 468. 97 Arendt, EiJ, 4. 98 Ibid., 4–5. 99 Ibid., 5. 100 See Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New

York: Vintage Books, 1997). 101 Hence Hans Mommsen is incorrect when he claims that Arendt emphasized the ‘mainly anonymous process resulting in the murder of almost six million Jews [which] emerged from the self-moving dynamic of totalitarian rule’. Hans Mommsen, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Interpretation of the Holocaust as a Challenge to Human Existence’, in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven E. Ascheim (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 229. For Arendt there was nothing anonymous about it – particular individuals chose to participate. 102 See Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (London: Penguin, 2001). In the end, only a minority (10–20 per cent) of the members of reserve police battalion 101 chose not to participate in mass killings – see Browning, Ordinary Men, 159. 103 See Arendt, ‘A Letter to Gershom Scholem’, 469. 104 Larry May, ‘Socialization and Institutional Evil’, in Hannah Arendt Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 83. Michael Marrus makes a similar point – see Michael R. Marrus, ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem: Justice and History’, in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, 211. 105 Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the Problem of Evil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 212. 106 Kahn, Out of Eden, 212. 107 To mention but two examples: Josef Mengele, a physician at Auschwitz, whose human experimentation plumbed the depths of barbarity and Klaus Barbie, an SS captain, known as the ‘Butcher of Lyon’ because of his penchant for cruelty. 108 Yaacov Lozowick, ‘Malicious Clerks: The Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil’, in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, 222. 109 See the film review and interview with The Independent newspaper: Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Claude Lanzmann’s new film The Last of The Unjust revisits Holocaust epic’, The Independent, 15 March 2014. In this interview with The Independent Lanzmann himself describes Arendt’s banality-of-evil idea as ‘the most stupid sentence I ever heard’. See also clips of Lanzmann’s interview with Murmelstein on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website: http://www.ushmm.org/online/film/display/detail.php?file_num=4742. It is not exactly clear, however, that Murmelstein was an entirely reliable source – he himself was a compromised figure, accused of collaboration with the Nazis and ostracized from the Jewish community in Rome where he settled after the war. 110 See Cesarani, Eichmann, 1–17. 111 Stangneth, Eichmann before Jerusalem, 303. This was one of Eichmann’s self-descriptions. 112 Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, 116–17. Lipstadt’s mention of Kessel is discussed in Daniel Maier-Katkin and Nathan Stolzfus, ‘Hannah Arendt on Trial’, The American Scholar, 10 June 2013. 113 See Roger Berkowitz, ‘Yes and No: The Split the Difference Approach to the Banality of Evil’, News Section, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, 31 May 2013, http://hac.bard.edu/news/?p=10751. 114 This is pointed out by both Berkowitz and Seyla Benhabib. See Berkowitz, ‘Yes and No’ and Benhabib, ‘Who’s on Trial, Eichmann or Arendt?’ 115 See Stangneth, Eichmann before Jerusalem, 192–310 for a detailed account of these papers. Arendt knew of the Sassen interviews and the notes Eichmann had written preparing for them. Indeed some of the notes were admitted as evidence in the trial, though most of this material was successfully blocked by Eichmann’s lawyer. See Arendt, EiJ, 238. See also Benhabib, ‘Who’s on Trial, Eichmann or Arendt?’ 116 Stangneth, Eichmann before Jerusalem, xxiv. 117 Ibid., xxiv. 118 Ibid., 303.

119 Ibid., 304. 120 Ibid., xxiii. 121 Berkowitz, ‘Yes and No’. 122 Christopher R. Browning, ‘How Ordinary Germans Did It’, in The New York Review of Books, 20 June 2013. 123 Bernstein, Radical Evil, 269 (note 42). 124 Berkowitz, ‘Yes and No’. 125 Arendt, EiJ, 46. Arendt attributes this remark to Eichmann’s love of bragging, calling it ‘sheer rodomontade’. 126 Berkowitz, ‘Yes and No’. 127 Ibid. 128 Ibid. 129 Berkowitz makes this point – see Berkowitz, ‘Yes and No’. 130 Cesarani, Eichmann, 7. 131 Benhabib, ‘Who’s on Trial, Eichmann or Arendt?’ 132 Ibid. 133 Ibid. 134 Steven E. Aschheim, ‘Between New York and Jerusalem’, Jewish Review of Books, Number 4 (Winter 2011). 135 Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1980), 25–6. 136 Arendt, OT, 454. 137 Ibid. 138 Ibid. (note 159). 139 This point is also made by Hannah Fenichel Pitkin. See Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 208–10. 140 Hannah Arendt, ‘Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility’, in EU, 128. 141 Ibid. 142 Arendt, ‘Organized Guilt’, 129. 143 Ibid., 130. 144 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 59. 145 For a fascinating study of the character, motivation and world view of Iago, see Richard Raatzsch, The Apologetics of Evil: The Case of Iago, trans. Ladislaus Löb (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). For Raatzsch, Iago represents not merely an ‘extreme egoist’ (98) and an ‘absolute amoralist’ (99), but is also ‘perverse’, ‘pathological’ and an ‘unnatural monster’ (105). The kind of evil Iago represents is clearly not the same as the kind of evil Eichmann represents, yet both can be called evil. As Raatzsch states, ‘Iago embodies the concept of evil, or, more precisely, he belongs in the ranks of those who embody that concept.’ (80). I contend, along with Arendt, that Eichmann also belongs in those ranks though he expresses evil in a different form. 146 Arendt, EiJ, 287. See also Arendt’s account of the ‘wicked’ figure of Claggart in Billy Budd – Arendt, OR, 73–5. 147 Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, Soldaten on Fighting, Killing and Dying: The Secret World War II Tapes of German PoWs, trans. Jefferson Chase (London: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 229. 148 See Neitzel and Welzer, Soldaten, 228–38.

149 Ibid., 154. 150 Levi made this remark in a television interview in 1984. See the video (in Italian) available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=os1UgCUGZC0. 151 Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 162. 152 Browning, Ordinary Men, 182. 153 See Ibid., 188. 154 Heinrich Böll, Wo warst du, Adam? (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2005), 88–91. 155 Richard Schmitt, ‘Murderous Objectivity: Reflections on Marxism and the Holocaust’, in Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb (New York and Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1990), 64–87. 156 See Aschheim, ‘Between New York and Jerusalem’. 157 Zygmunt Bauman considers this possibility in his Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity, 1989) where he examines the idea of ‘social proximity’ and moral responsibility in the Holocaust. For Bauman, a kind of social distancing or psychological othering process took place during the Holocaust which allowed individuals to be complicit in evil. 158 Indeed, as George M. Kren observes, ‘the vast majority kept on in their grisly task, and with only a few exceptions, the psychic costs of the killings did not decrease efficiency’. George M. Kren, ‘The Holocaust as History’, in Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time, ed. Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E. Myers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 26. 159 I use the terms motivation, motive and intention to mean something broadly similar: the desire for something to be achieved which forms an impetus for action. A marathon runner’s intention is to complete the race in good time, which forms the motivation to act in order to realize that intention. 160 Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 240. 161 Arendt, OT, 453. 162 Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 271. 163 Arendt, EiJ, 69. 164 It is worth noting that two different tendencies in contemporary thinking on the evil of the Holocaust are rejected by Neiman, as they are by Arendt: considering the Nazis as either no worse than other war criminals or thinking of them as ‘uniquely diabolical’ conceals the novelty and ethical significance of the Holocaust (Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 253). The former view holds the Nazi perpetrators to be simply another band of anti-Semites in a long history of discrimination against the Jews in Europe. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt describes as ‘fallacious’ notions of ‘an unbroken continuity of persecutions, expulsions, and massacres … down to our time’ (Arendt, OT, xi). Many terrible pogroms and expulsions have occurred in Jewish history, but a programme for the mass extermination of the entire race, enacted by a state apparatus entirely geared towards the completion of this goal (even to the detriment of the German war effort), is certainly unparalleled in history. Arendt and Neiman also reject the view that the Nazis were ‘singularly demonic’; Neiman states: ‘On this view, Auschwitz reveals much about one nation in particular but nothing about humanity in general’ (Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 254). This kind of argument is reminiscent of those Sonderweg interpretations of German history, which see the German nation as uniquely susceptible to anti-Semitism and militarization given its particular social, political and institutional developments – see for example A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History (London: Routledge, 2001). As with any explanation which attributes the crimes committed by a criminal regime in a particular nation state to the very essence of that nation state itself, it raises more questions than it answers and refuses to acknowledge the fact that the perpetrators were humans neither so very different from the victims nor from people in other nations. And indeed, the implication of inevitability negates the role of human agency, a tendency in historical explanations which Arendt strongly rejected. For Arendt, human agency and the ability of human beings

to initiate, their capacity to begin something new, is a fundamental feature of human existence – see Arendt, OT, 460–79. Any theory which relegates human agency while promoting causal historical narratives would not be in keeping with Arendt’s views. 165 Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 254. 166 Ibid., 268. 167 Ibid., 271. This distinction, based on a perpetrator’s intention, can determine whether that perpetrator is convicted of a greater or lesser offence, for example murder as opposed to manslaughter. 168 It is of course, as Neiman points out, not clear exactly what we mean in discussing the concept of intention, that is, which mental state or combination of mental states is being described. Neiman does not propose to provide the analytical account of the concept that is missing. See Susan Neiman, ‘Theodicy in Jerusalem’, in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, 79. 169 This is of course not to say that there were none who intended it; indeed the architects of the ‘Final Solution’ designed and supervised, very deliberately, the execution of millions. The point is that many participated who would never have thought up such barbarities themselves. 170 Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 270. 171 Ibid. 172 Ibid. 173 Ibid., 271. 174 See Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 49–128. Neiman’s discussion of this appears on page 271 of Evil in Modern Thought. 175 Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 271. 176 Ibid. 177 This view is discussed in the earlier section on Eichmann. 178 See Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 271–2. 179 Ibid., 272. Neiman’s terminology in characterizing Eichmann’s intentions here is perhaps too generous: Eichmann’s intentions were banally self-interested but certainly not harmless. Rather, they were intentions that demonstrated little care for the harm that might be caused to others in the quest for selfpromotion. Indeed, Arendt clearly emphasizes these petty and self-serving character traits in Eichmann. 180 Neiman, ‘Banality Reconsidered’, 311. 181 Ibid. 182 Ibid. 183 Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 274. 184 Ibid., 275. 185 Ibid. 186 Ibid., 277. 187 Ibid. 188 Neiman, ‘Banality Reconsidered’, 309. 189 Arendt, EiJ, 277. 190 Ibid. 191 Ibid., 277–9. 192 Neiman, ‘Theodicy in Jerusalem’, 66. 193 Ibid., 77. 194 Ibid., 79. 195 Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 281.

196 Neiman, ‘Theodicy in Jerusalem’, 78. 197 Ibid., 79. 198 Ibid., 78. 199 Ibid., 82. 200 Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 274. 201 Neiman, ‘Banality Reconsidered’, 309. 202 Ibid. 203 Ibid., 310. 204 Arendt, EiJ, 277. 205 Harry Frankfurt has provided some counterexamples to this general point in moral philosophy demonstrating that it is possible to conceive of situations in which one is morally responsible even if one could not have done otherwise than one did. See Harry Frankfurt, ‘Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility’, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 66, No. 23 (1969): 829–39. 206 Arendt, EiJ, 287 (italics in original). 207 Arendt, EiJ, 276. 208 Neitzel and Welzer, Soldaten, 140. 209 This is the conclusion reached by David H. Jones in his thorough examination of the extent of Nazi indoctrination. See David H. Jones, Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust: A Study in the Ethics of Character (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 117. In the next chapter I discuss this in more detail in the section ‘Thinking, Reality and the Other’. 210 Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 257. 211 This sense of ‘acknowledging’ evil is similar to an aspect of Arendt’s concept of thinking (and its moral relevance for thought): true thinking confronts reality – it grasps and grapples with real facts and experiences. See the section on thinking and reality in Chapter 2. 212 J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999), 43. 213 Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 35. 214 Ibid., 20. 215 Cora Diamond, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy’, in Philosophy and Animal Life, ed. Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 68. 216 Stanley Cavell, ‘Companionable Thinking’, in Philosophy and Animal Life, 93. 217 Todd Calder claims that Hitler and Eichmann ultimately belong to the same moral category of ‘moral idiots’, though there is a difference of degree in their evil which allows us to judge their culpability differently: ‘Hitler, like Eichmann, may have been a moral idiot, but he was a moral idiot of monstrous proportions; this is what accounts for our judging them differently.’ Paul Formosa, on the other hand, sees clear moral categorical distinctions between Eichmann and Hitler – Eichmann was ‘blindly committed’ to anti-Semitism whereas Hitler was a ‘convinced fanatic’. So Hitler was closer to being a moral monster than a moral idiot. See Todd Calder, ‘The Apparent Banality of Evil: The Relationship between Evil Acts and Evil Character’, Journal of Social Philosophy, Vol. 34, No. 3 (2003): 364–76 and Paul Formosa, ‘Moral Responsibility for Banal Evil’, Journal of Social Philosophy, Vol. 37, No. 4 (2006): 501–20. 218 The picture of responsibility in the Third Reich is further complicated by the inverted hierarchy of responsibility where those who were the most responsible for the hideous crimes (that is to say the architects of the genocide such as Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich) were often at the farthest remove from the deeds themselves while those closest to them were arguably comparably less responsible. Arendt praises the original judgement in the Eichmann case for recognizing ‘the weird fact that in the death camps it was usually the inmates and the victims who had actually wielded “the fatal instrument with

[their] own hands”’. Arendt quotes the explanation of the judgement further: ‘For these crimes were committed en masse, not only in regard to the number of victims, but also in regard to the numbers of those who perpetrated the crime, and the extent to which any one of the many criminals was close to or remote from the actual killer of the victim means nothing, as far as the measure of his responsibility is concerned. On the contrary, in general the degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hands.’ (italics in original) See Arendt, EiJ, 246–7. 219 Bernard Williams, ‘Moral Luck’, in Moral Luck, ed. Daniel Statman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 37. 220 Williams, ‘Moral Luck’, 36. 221 See also Thomas Nagel, ‘Moral Luck’, in Moral Luck, 57–72. 222 See Daniel Statman, ‘Introduction’, in Moral Luck, 11. 223 Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 214. 224 At the end of my discussion, one issue remains which I should not leave unmentioned: the possibility of a ‘banality of good’. If the banality of evil is a recognition of the disparity between a person’s ordinary, banal, petty intentions and the extraordinary grand scale of the evil of their actions, then a corresponding notion of the banality of good must be possible where individuals unintentionally commit good actions despite their (not particularly good) petty, self-serving intentions. Would we consider these people praiseworthy for their (unintentionally) good deeds? If we think that perpetrators like Eichmann can be blamed for their actions in spite of their intentions, then presumably we must consequently hold that those who do good should be praised even when they did not intend it. This once more shows up in sharp relief the confusing counterintuitive consequences for questions of moral responsibility of the concept of the banality of evil.

2 Thinking and Evil

Arendt’s banality-of-evil idea is not the only notion she suggests as a basis for understanding certain perpetrators of the Holocaust. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, as we have seen, Arendt also characterizes Eichmann as ‘thoughtless’, a quality she does not equate with stupidity.1 As we have already seen, for Arendt, Eichmann possessed an ‘inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.’2 According to Arendt, Eichmann’s inability to think meant that, even when he committed acts of profound evil, he ‘never realized what he was doing’.3 Furthermore, Eichmann’s thoughtlessness is morally relevant: Arendt implies that because of his thoughtlessness, Eichmann was predisposed to becoming a Nazi criminal. Arendt posits a relationship between thoughtlessness and wrongdoing – ‘the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil’,4 she calls it. Elsewhere she describes how thoughtlessness can wreak havoc.5 It is clear that, for Arendt, Eichmann’s inability to think was instrumental in his commitment of evil deeds. A claim like this also entails the implication that had Eichmann engaged in a process of thinking, had he really thought about his actions, then he would not have participated in such horrific crimes. Rather, he would have, in some sense, grasped the deeply evil and abhorrent nature of the deeds in which his complicity was demanded and would have rejected them. By extension then, thinking, or perhaps at least a certain kind of moral thinking, is, for Arendt, a prophylactic against evil.

Arendt on thinking and morality

Discussions of thinking or thought6 in Arendt’s work broadly fall into two categories: examination of the thinking process itself and investigations into links between thinking as a mental procedure and acting morally. The most systematic treatment of the faculty of thinking (as Arendt considers it) is to be found in her final project The Life of the Mind.7 This project began in earnest with Arendt’s invitation to deliver the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 1973.8 Her 1973 lectures Thinking were followed in 1974 by a series on Willing. In revised shape, these sections later came to form the two volumes of The Life of the Mind which were published only posthumously. Arendt’s death in 1975 meant, however, that she never completed the final volume she had envisaged in her investigation of the faculties of the human mind: Judging. Indeed, she had just begun typing the manuscript for this volume and its title page was ready in her typewriter when a fatal heart attack struck.9 Her thoughts on judgement had also been intended for delivery at the Gifford Lectures.10 Yet the concept of thinking and indeed the particular form it takes in Arendt’s thought arises earlier. She is already discussing thinking in The Human Condition as well as in her earlier essay on Lessing. In both Arendt’s earlier reflections and the later volume Thinking, her portrayal of thinking does not explicitly include the connotations for morality which play a significant role in some of her work on the subject. In Arendt’s report of the Eichmann trial she does not systematically investigate the claims she makes regarding the hypothesized link between thinking and the avoidance of doing evil. The material which demonstrates Arendt’s most concentrated treatment of, and engagement with, this link she had posited in response to Eichmann as the banal, ordinary perpetrator personified, is to be found in the collection Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn.11 The long essay ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’ which appeared in this volume consists of the combined edited text of two lecture courses Arendt led in 1965 and 1966 (held at the New School for Social Research and the University of Chicago respectively).12 This long exposition, combined with the essays ‘Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship’, ‘Collective Responsibility’ and ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’13 (also found in this collection), forms the apex of Arendt’s sustained reflections on moral conduct. At this juncture it is important to delineate the account of Arendt’s notion of thinking which I intend to give. My concern is the relationship between Arendt’s idea of thinking and good moral conduct, a relationship she establishes with her

claims that Eichmann’s ‘thoughtlessness’ was relevant in his individual participation in the evil of the Holocaust. My account is not intended to provide a full study of all aspects of Arendt’s ideas on thinking. Such a comprehensive study is lacking in Arendt scholarship and would be a valuable contribution. Yet my task here is to concentrate on the ways in which Arendt’s version of ‘thinking’ could be relevant for morally good behaviour. This offers something different from what is currently available in the literature, where approaches tend to either seek to relate Arendt’s portrayal of thinking to the realm of politics as she conceives it,14 or to trace Martin Heidegger’s influence on Arendt’s concept of thinking, highlighting the convergences and divergences of their accounts.15 The question of Heidegger’s influence on Arendt’s ideas about thinking has once again arisen in a recent exchange of views between Richard Wolin and Seyla Benhabib over the question of Arendt’s use of the term ‘thoughtlessness’ (Gedankenlosigkeit) in describing Eichmann.16 Wolin contends that it is Heidegger’s notion of Gedankenlosigkeit which influences Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann and her ‘misplaced loyalty’ to Heidegger which compels her to utilize it.17 Conversely, for Benhabib, this dismissal of Arendt as a mere disciple of Heidegger disregards the clear Kantian influence on her thought – Arendt is using ‘Kantian terminology, in which “to think” means to think for oneself and to think consistently, but also from the standpoint of everyone else’.18 My account of Arendt on thinking does not enter this debate,19 nor does it attempt to categorically define the influence of either Kant or Heidegger on Arendt’s concept of thinking – this path has been well-trodden by Wolin, Benhabib, Dana Villa and others. I limit myself, rather, to identifying the elements of Arendt’s notion of thinking and interrogating their moral relevance. In any case, the kind of thinking Arendt sees as morally relevant is the kind of thinking she finds a model for in Socrates, rather than Heidegger. In all her reflections which concern thinking, either considering it as a pure mental process or as practically relevant to moral action, Arendt presents a picture that is in many respects consistent across her work. Her account exhibits two prominent features: the first is the characterization of thinking as an internal dialogue within the self. The second is the establishment of thinking as a particular kind of mental process, strictly demarcated from other kinds: thinking is not mere passive contemplation or reflection. The thinking process Arendt captures is an active one. And yet its activity is not directed towards any specific aim or result. Rather, Arendt seems to consider it a kind of open-ended process whose outcomes cannot be predetermined. Furthermore Arendt clearly has in

mind a mental procedure imbued with more meaning than pure logical reasoning and deduction, and indeed she views thinking as an activity expressing human freedom: for Arendt ‘the freedom inherent in man’s capacity to think’ is opposed to the ‘strait jacket of logic’ employed in totalitarian ideologies.20 Arendt characterizes ideological thinking as founded upon an ‘idea’ considered to be self-evident – for example, the Nazi ‘idea’ of a racial hierarchy placing Aryans at its pinnacle, which unfolds and develops according to a relentless unquestioning logic unaffected by contrary evidence.21 Arendt clearly juxtaposes her notion of discursive, open-ended thinking with the narrow confinement of such ideological positions. It is to these two prominent features of thinking which we now turn in the first part of this chapter, in order to elucidate better Arendt’s ideas on the subject. First, it is necessary to consider the form of mental process which Arendt presents as thinking and how she differentiates it from other mental processes. Second, we shall consider the idea of thinking as dialogue which features regularly in Arendt’s work on the topic. This section will then examine, first, the idea of conversation as a credible philosophical model of the kind of mental process Arendt holds thinking to be and, second, the connection she posits between thinking and reality. This will allow us to reconstruct Arendt’s view of Eichmann as a moral nonthinker. In the second part of this chapter I interrogate the moral relevance Arendt attaches to thinking and address the inconsistencies within, and problematic elements of, Arendt’s notion of thinking. Finally, I also consider briefly Arendt’s idea of judging and argue against the suggestion by some Arendt scholars that this plays a signif icant role in her ethical thought as it pertains to individual Holocaust perpetrators.

Thinking: A particular kind of process In The Human Condition Arendt distinguishes four distinct kinds of mental process: thought, contemplation, logical reasoning and cognition. In order to investigate the moral import which Arendt attaches to thought in relation to the other forms of mental process, it is necessary to form a layered presentation of the concept of thinking with which she operates. The first layer is the depiction of thought as an ‘activity’ – it is an active, rather than passive, mental experience.22 The second is the contrast Arendt highlights between her idea of thinking and mental processes defined by logical reasoning. In The Human

Condition she observes that ‘thought and cognition … must be distinguished from the power of logical reasoning which is manifest in such operations as deductions from axiomatic or self-evident statements, subsumption of particular occurrences under general rules, or the techniques of spinning out consistent chains of conclusions’.23 While it is not clear exactly what Arendt means in opposing logical reasoning with thought, one interpretation would be that while every kind of human cerebral activity involves logical reasoning at some level, thought is something more than mere logical reasoning. The kinds of mental activity which demonstrate methods of logical reasoning are, for Arendt, rather technical and limited processes: making a series of deductions from an axiom or assigning particular instances to general categories, are, for her, practices which have a narrow frame of reference. Accordingly, Arendt likens procedures such as logical reasoning to labour: in The Human Condition Arendt distinguishes between three different forms of human activity – labour, work and action. The various modes of activity are presented according to a hierarchical schema where action is the highest activity, an activity in and through which human freedom can be expressed. Labour, by contrast, is seen as the lowest type of activity – one borne out of sheer necessity. Logical reasoning is similarly low on the scale in that it does not require much thinking per se – it simply requires the automatic application of a process of logic (inherent to the normally functioning human mind) to appropriate situations.24 It is due to this automatism that Arendt came to question the value of mere logical reasoning in relation to moral issues. In ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’ Arendt contends that the horrific crimes of the Third Reich shattered a widespread belief in the self-evidence of moral principles: according to Arendt, the existing moral precepts of the early twentieth century had been held to be axiomatic; yet the Holocaust and the mass complicity of the German people, and of the people of the occupied lands, threw this notion into doubt. Moral principles no longer seemed self-evident. Or, at least, they could no longer be considered to be universally self-evident.25 Hence if Arendt associates logical reasoning with deductions based on axiomatic principles, and if the apparent axiomatic nature of moral principles is rendered doubtful in light of the largescale collaboration of ordinary people in Nazi evil, then the suitability of mere logical reasoning for considering moral questions appears dubious. Consequently for Arendt, thinking as opposed to logical reasoning becomes the mental process most adequate for examining morality. Moreover, even if the putative axiomatic nature of moral principles had not been rendered doubtful, it

is unlikely that Arendt would have thought that mere logical reasoning alone sufficed for moral thinking. Arendt also identifies a third, paramount feature of her concept of thinking: thought is differentiated from cognition because of two interrelated features – thought does not attempt to achieve results, nor does it pursue aims. In The Human Condition Arendt distinguishes between thought and cognition. Cognition, she claims, ‘always pursues a definite aim’ and once it is reached ‘the cognitive process has come to an end’.26 Arendt continues, ‘Thought, on the contrary, has neither an end nor an aim outside itself, and it does not even produce results.’27 Indeed in her essay on Lessing Arendt expresses praise for a thinker who never bound his thinking to results.28 According to Arendt, Lessing explicitly renounced the desire for results, in so far as these might mean the final solution of problems which his thought posed for itself; his thinking was not a search for truth, since every truth that is the result of a thought process necessarily puts an end to the movement of thinking. The fermenta cognitionis which Lessing scattered into the world were not intended to communicate conclusions, but to stimulate others to independent thought, and this for no other purpose than to bring about a discourse between thinkers.29 Arendt juxtaposes cognition with her idea of thinking as an aimless process producing no results: thinking does not have aims since to suppose otherwise would be to posit an end to the thinking process. This element of Arendt’s characterization of thinking is founded upon the first and second layers of her concept of thought. Thought, for Arendt, cannot be conceived of as a process with definite aims since it is, first, an ‘activity’ which is lively and engaged with its subjects, and second, it is open and not restricted to technical procedures of logical reasoning. Arendt does not make clear the relationship between the various tenets of her concept of thinking and the ways in which the layers build upon one another. A plausible interpretation in this instance is to see an active, open conception of thinking as not compatible with positing definite, restricted goals since such an open process of thought must be allowed the freedom to roam where it will without being confined to particular aims. Arendt seems to have in mind a notion of thought as a process wh ich must be permitted to engage completely with its subject and follow the twists and turns of unfolding ideas freely.30 It is also for this reason that Arendt utilizes Kant’s distinction between thinking and knowing: she asserts that Kant ‘separated knowing from thinking’31 and that he distinguished between ‘thinking and knowing, between

reason, the urge to think and to understand, and the intellect, which desires and is capable of certain, verifiable knowledge’.32 In addition to being free from definite aims, according to Arendt’s concept, thinking is an activity which produces no results. The thinking process is free and destructive: it is not tainted by preconceptions before it begins, nor is it crystallized into definite results at its conclusion. In distinguishing between thinking and knowing, Arendt attributes to the latter the status of a ‘worldbuilding’ activity which ‘leaves behind a growing treasure of knowledge that is retained and kept in store by every civilization as part and parcel of its world’.33 Thinking, on the other hand, ‘leaves nothing so tangible behind’.34 Arendt regards thinking as a ‘quest for meaning’ as distinguished from ‘the scientist’s thirst for knowledge for its own sake’35 and portrays it as a ‘resultless’36 enterprise. The kind of thought process Arendt has in mind ‘does not produce definitions and in this sense is entirely without results’.37 Socrates exemplifies, according to Arendt, a kind of thinker par excellence in the mode of thought which she advocates. Socrates engages in the kind of open and active thinking process which Arendt elucidates: he always proceeds by ‘asking questions to which he does not know the answers’ and by inquiring into the ‘meaning’ of various concepts such as justice, the good and the beautiful.38 The extent to which Arendt’s characterization of Socrates is accurate (as a thinker whose thought truly excluded predetermined aims, and whose thoughtful dialogic exchanges with his interlocutors were inevitably without result) remains open to question. Indeed, in a later section I will examine the aptness of Arendt’s portrayal of Socrates and the question of whether a fully undetermined thinking process could ever be a possibility.39 Nonetheless she constructs a plausible Socratic model of thought: one defined by openness, active inquiry and freedom.

Thinking as destructive An additional important aspect of the mode of thinking Arendt advocates is its inherent destructiveness. Arendt contends that ‘thinking inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values, measurements for good and evil, in short on those customs and rules of conduct we treat of in morals and ethics’.40 In discussing the ‘invisible wind of thought’ Arendt asserts that ‘this same wind, whenever it is aroused, has the peculiarity of doing away with its own previous manifestations. It is in its nature to undo, unfreeze as it were, what language, the medium of thinking, has frozen into thought – words (concepts, sentences, definitions, doctrines).’41 This destructive element to

thinking which Arendt suggests builds upon the other layers of her concept: an active, open process of thought unconstrained by definite aims and attempts to achieve certain results may tend to explode concepts or definitions and challenge dogma and orthodoxy. Arendt’s open and engaged conception of thought can decipher and destroy entrenched views, leaving the path clear for new potential constructions and understandings of common values and definitions.42 The notion of thinking which Arendt posits is a plausible contention: the idea of thought (or at least of a particular mode of thought) as actively engaged rather than passively receiving, as open to inquiry rather than constrained by limited knowledge-goals and, therefore, as a critical and examining faculty which unravels concepts, makes sense. Yet Arendt’s notion becomes more problematic when thinking is imbued with ethical connotations: certainly an inquiring mode of thought which questions dogma may prove morally useful in, for example, criticizing prevailing Nazi norms. Such an undetermined process, however, cannot be expected to tell us anything about good or evil, or about right conduct. Nor can we assume that it will only dismantle unjust norms – such a mode of thinking could well break down socially constructed norms of justice which we hold dear and indeed which we tend to think are right and good. Arendt is not oblivious to these potential criticisms of her ideas and she addresses them in her work, though not in a fully satisfactory manner. Later I will discuss these problematic elements of Arendt’s concept of thinking and the responses she proposes.

Thinking as dialogue The first key element of Arendt’s ideas about thinking is, therefore, the way in which she clearly demarcates thinking as a special kind of mental process, different from other modes of mental practice. The second prominent feature of Arendt’s account of thinking is her characterization of thought as a dialogue which takes place within the self. In The Human Condition, first published in 1958, Arendt refers to ‘the dialogue between “me and myself” … in which Plato apparently saw the essence of thought. To be in solitude means to be with one’s self, and thinking, therefore, though it may be the most solitary of all activities, is never altogether without a partner and without company.’43 In her speech accepting the Lessing Prize of the Free City of Hamburg in 1959 she referred to this idea, which she accredits to Plato, of thought as a ‘silent dialogue between me and myself’ and contrasts it

with a differing model: Lessing’s thought is, for Arendt, rather ‘an anticipated dialogue with others, and this is the reason that it is essentially polemical’.44 Arendt develops and extends this notion of thinking as internal dialogue with one’s self in her later work; in ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, Arendt asserts that ‘thought is a dialogue carried on by the mind with itself’.45 Elsewhere she refers to ‘the activity of thinking, which in its most general, entirely nonspecialized sense can be defined with Plato as the silent dialogue between me and myself’.46 The prerequisite for a dialogic process of thought like this is, according to Arendt, a division within the self into two parts, two separate yet related discursive entities whose connection lies in their dialogic interaction. Arendt claims that ‘no thinking process is even conceivable without this two-in-one, this splitting up in which the self is actualized and articulated’.47 Arendt describes this condition of the ‘two-in-one’ in a similar way across several of her essays on ethics. She takes her cue from Socrates, examining his words in the Theaetetus where he is attempting to explain what he understands by dianoeisthai, to think a matter through, and he says: ‘I call it a discourse that the mind carries on with itself about any subject it is considering. … It looks to me as though this is nothing else but dialegesthai, talking something through, only that the mind asks itself questions and answers them, saying yes or no to itself. Then it arrives at the limit where things must be decided, when the two say the same and are no longer uncertain, which we then set down as the mind’s opinion.’48 Arendt elaborates further on the two-in-one condition of human beings when thinking: Even though I am one, I am not simply one, I have a self and I am related to this self as my own self. This self is by no means an illusion; it makes itself heard by talking to me – I talk to myself, I am not only aware of myself – and in this sense, though I am one, I am two-in-one and there can be harmony or disharmony with the self.49 The condition of the two-in-one is a universal human state for Arendt: All men are two-in-one, not only in the sense of consciousness and selfconsciousness (that whatever I do I am at the same time somehow aware of doing it), but in the very specific and active sense of this silent dialogue, of having constant intercourse, of being on speaking terms with themselves.50

The two-in-one quality of thought is revealed, for Arendt, when the thinker is alone. When an individual thinking being is in company with others, that being appears as one, since he or she would be unrecognizable otherwise.51 Arendt continues, ‘And so long as I am together with others, barely conscious of myself, I am as I appear to others.’52 Yet once the thinking being removes herself from the company of others and retires into a condition of solitude, the self diverges into the two-in-one which enables thinking. The thinker finds herself to be still in company, that is, in the company of herself.53 Upon ceasing thinking and returning to the realm of interaction with others, the two-in-one condition dissolves and the thinker is once again a unitary entity: ‘If somebody addresses me [whilst I am thinking], I must now talk to him, and not to myself, and in talking to him, I change. I become one, possessing of course self-awareness, that is, consciousness, but no longer fully and articulately in possession of myself.’54 So for Arendt, a thinking being is able to engage in a dialogue within the self once the condition of solitude is experienced whereby the self divests itself of the unity necessary for interacting with others. In this condition of solitude then, the self takes on the dichotomous quality necessary for a dialogue within the self which inevitably requires at least two discursive elements. The kind of model of thinking which Arendt presents here contains plausible as well as problematic elements: there is intuitive appeal to a notion of thought as a kind of internal dialogue. And yet how to characterize the speakers in this dialogue (i.e. the two parts of the self) and their relation to each other remains open to question. Later I will examine these ambiguous elements.

Conversation: A model for Arendt’s notion of thinking? Arendt’s broad concept ion of thought is constituted by two essential aspects: the first is Arendt’s understanding of thinking as a particular kind of mental process differentiated from other, more limited processes, and involving a layered characterization as a procedure defined by activeness, openness, free inquiry and destruction. The second element is Arendt’s portrayal of thinking as a dialogue which takes place within the self. Before moving on to examine some of the conceptual difficulties inherent in Arendt’s illustration of the thinking process and in particular the problems she encounters when trying to derive moral standards from thinking, let us consider the model of thinking she employs. How can we usefully interpret this idea of a mode of thought which is dialogic, active, open and imbued with a spirit of inquiry or examination? Quite apart from considering whether such a mental process could tell us anything about morality,

we must query whether it is plausible to imagine a mode of thought like this, and, if so, how best to understand it. Characterizing thinking in this way (or at least some kinds of thinking) is plausible and it can perhaps be better understood using a model. A credible model in this instance might perhaps be a model of conversation. Conversation is more than mere dialogue, though of course it necessarily takes place in a dialogic fashion. A model of conversation seems to include more than a backand-forth exchange between two parties; it seems to presuppose a responsiveness and an openness which mere dialogue does not. Indeed a notion of conversation seems to combine the two elements of Arendt’s understanding of thought – a discourse and an active, open and inquiring disposition. In his book The Hungry Soul (which comprises an examination of the philosophy of eating), Leon R. Kass posits an illuminating interpretation of conversation which may provide an explication of the kind of mode of thought and discussion Arendt has in mind. Kass asserts that conversation ‘in spirit and manner, if not also in content, … can be distinguished from communication, recital, argument, boasting, advertisement, announcement, gossip, inquiry, small talk, shoptalk, exchange of opinion, edification, and even discussion’.55 Conversation, for Kass, is not like argument which is ‘earnest and seriously bent on victory or conversion’.56 In a lengthy passage he considers exactly what a conversation is (and, indeed, since his book is concerned with a philosophy of eating, why conversation is fitting for dining): The word conversation goes back to the Old French converser, meaning, first, to pass one’s life or to live or dwell with someone and, later, to exchange words. The primary Latin source, conversari, literally and originally means ‘to turn oneself about’ and ‘to move to and fro’. This self-turning and moving to and fro presumably became the image that conveyed the later meanings of passing one’s life and keeping company with others, toward whom one turns and with whom one moves, sometimes this way, sometimes that. This more comprehensive sense of conversing as ‘living with’ gradually was transformed and narrowed to conversing as ‘talking with’. Yet, even so, the connotations of leisure and passing time, of unhurriedness and spontaneity, of exploration and invention, of being well turned and well rounded, and, above all, of openness and responsiveness are still attached to the idea of conversation.57 Kass further describes conversation as having ‘no script or plan’ and being ‘a construction built by the free play of the mind, out of information, stories,

experiences and opinions contributed by the participants, each of whom is open both to the already contributed speeches, and to the souls, of the contributing speakers’.58 Conversation, as Kass depicts it, seems to be something comparable to the mode of thought Arendt discusses. Kass’s characterization of conversation as having no plan corresponds to Arendt’s depiction of thought as aimless and not constrained by fixed goals. Kass’s distinction between conversation and argument also appears relevant: Arendt’s idea that thinking does not produce results tends to suggest a mode of thought different from argumentation which seeks to impose a conclusion on an interlocutor. Moreover, the description Kass gives of conversation as open and responsive seems to convey the kind of active, engaged thinking which Arendt advocates. Thinking is hence perhaps less a dialogue and more a conversation between the two parts of the self.

Thinking, reality and the other Arendt’s notion of thinking is also invested with another quality, about which she says tantalizingly little and which nonetheless proves illuminating in attempting to conceive of the exact mode of thought she is proposing and its moral relevance. This quality is the link she posits (though does not explain) between thinking, reality and the Other. Arendt moots the idea of a connection between thinking and reality in Eichmann in Jerusalem yet does not expand much on it in her subsequent pieces on ethics. The brief mentions she makes of the idea do, however, suggest another tenet to her concept of thinking and might also prove helpful in comprehending some of the other aspects of the concept such as the notion of thought as dialogue. Let us first extract the core elements of the link between reality, thought and the Other which Arendt suggests. First, it is clear that for Arendt, when she castigates the German population in general and the perpetrators of the Holocaust in particular, for not facing up to ‘reality’, what she means is that they failed to acknowledge the reality of the crimes in which they were complicit. The evil of the Holocaust is, for Arendt, real and absolute, neither illusory nor relative. That the Holocaust was an event of great evil is a fact for Arendt; and therefore to confront reality (and the real facts of which it is comprised) is to confront the real evil of the Holocaust. According to Arendt, during the reign of the Nazis, eighty million Germans ‘had been shielded against reality and factuality by [means of] self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become engrained in Eichmann’s mentality’.59 Arendt describes this fictitious totalitarian world, removed from reality, in The

Origins of Totalitarianism. For Arendt, Nazi totalitarianism constituted a society dominated by race ideology and the methods of terror employed to implement it. According to Arendt totalitarian ideologies proceed from false premises: an ‘idea’ is proffered, which, it is claimed, acts as a ‘key’ to history. In the example of the Third Reich this is the ‘idea’ that human history can be viewed as a struggle between a hierarchy of races. Totalitarianism treats the ‘idea’ as a selfevident truth, from which a number of other premises are logically deduced and a world is fabricated based on these premises. Ideology is immune to experience – a totality of explanation is contained within the idea itself already, so there is no need for empirical data to interfere with the ideology: ‘Ideological thinking becomes emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses.’60 Ideology also ‘proceeds with a consistency that exists nowhere in the realm of reality’.61 So for Arendt, the entire totalitarian world of Nazism is imbued with an air of fiction and is divorced from reality, which no doubt has an effect on the people living within it.62 Yet the link Arendt posits between reality and thinking suggests more: here Arendt is concerned not with the circumstances of censorship and propaganda in which the German people found themselves. These were general, prevailing conditions. Rather, Arendt is interested in the personal motivations of individual perpetrators, in the internal processes of thought in which they engaged. As Arendt indicates, individuals in the Third Reich were not only remote from reality in so far as social and political life was dictated by an unreal ideology; some of them were also removed from reality within their own minds because they were thoughtless. In ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’ Arendt discusses the linguistic methods, some employed by Eichmann himself, by which we sometimes seek to protect ourselves from confrontations with reality: ‘Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention which all events and facts arouse by virtue of their existence.’63 In Eichmann in Jerusalem Arendt also connects thinking and reality, stating that ‘such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together’.64 Remoteness from reality and thoughtlessness are explicitly linked by Arendt. Eichmann’s use of clichés and stock phrases is, for Arendt, an expression of his thoughtlessness – reaching for well-worn adages and mottoes about a given subject and accepting them prima facie are in contradistinction to the mode of (moral) thinking which Arendt advocates, where thought actively

engages with its subject, first taking it apart and then evaluating it. Indeed, Hannah Fenichel Pitkin states that Arendt’s response to thoughtlessness is ‘realism’.65 The interconnected nature of thinking and reality which Arendt proposes raises two issues: first, a question regarding the influence of prevailing social conditions on thought itself, and, second, a query about the plausibility of connecting thinking and reality in this way. Turning to the first of these, it might be tempting to suggest that in a totalitarian world defined by ideology and unreality, organized according to a fictional interpretation of human life and characterized by propaganda and censorship, no one can be expected to grasp reality – the barriers to it are simply too great. How can anyone have been expected to be able properly to confront the reality of the crimes in which he or she was complicit in an environment which declared the killing of Jews to be right, good and indeed desirable? In such an unreal world, how could one access any knowledge about the very real evil of one’s actions? One is left with the sense that we are requiring too much of ordinary people to be able to confront the reality of the hideous crimes in which they collaborated from a vantage point within a world which announced the desirability of these horrors.66 And this sense might lead us to conclude that we cannot hold those complicit (to greater or lesser extents) in the Holocaust responsible since they could not have known that their actions were really evil because they were so far removed from any notion of reality, protected within a totalitarian bubble. There is a practical response to this problem: one must be careful not to overestimate the levels of indoctrination achieved within Nazi society. The Nazis were in power in Germany for not much longer than a decade and even if we count the period of time prior to that during which they were gaining influence, their period of domination did not exceed fifteen years. Even a perpetrator such as Adolf Eichmann did not himself grow up under the influence of a pervasive Nazism, but rather in a typical bourgeois Austrian environment. The point here is that it is important not to overstate the influence of indoctrination since fifteen years is hardly long enough to impart a deep, universal commitment to a world view to a whole population. And indeed it is crucial to note that the party’s high functionaries were not the product of Nazi propaganda themselves, since they had been raised in the world of crumbling multinational empires and nascent republics and democracies. Indoctrination into a Nazi world view could not have been as pervasive as is sometimes suggested and this is evidenced by the existence of various kinds and classes of resistors. Though no large-scale

organized resistance to the Third Reich existed, individuals and small groups continued to try to undermine the regime and indeed attempted to assassinate Hitler on some occasions.67 One example was the working-class resister Johann Georg Elser who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1939. J. P. Stern describes the case of Elser, a man who did not succumb to propaganda or indoctrination of any kind. Though he had joined a communist group he was not particularly ideologically committed, but rather concerned with everyday, practical issues: ‘What moved him were personal and political considerations of the simplest, most commonplace kind – considerations shared no doubt by millions of others, but in their minds outweighed by other arguments.’68 Elser was a man ‘stubborn and courageous enough not to salute the swastika flag and to leave the room as soon as the radio began transmitting one of Hitler’s speeches, a man who had no interest in abstract thought and to whom “doing something” meant above all doing something with his hands’.69 After his attempt failed (a bomb he had placed exploded shortly after Hitler had left the building) he was captured, imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo. He told his interrogators that he had never been ‘against National Socialism’, and at least this much seems true, that he never considered politics abstractly, in terms of –isms: he was a man without an ideology. But he felt that ‘conditions in Germany could only be altered by disposing of the present leadership’. … Assassination of ‘the highest Leadership’ … would prevent greater bloodshed; that was the rationale of the deed he planned.70 The mere fact that different individuals from various social classes or professional groups, different genders, religions and family backgrounds, either actively resisted or refused to participate puts paid to the idea that the Nazis’ fictional reality could achieve universal indoctrination.71 So on a practical level, we cannot assume deep, universal indoctrination – rather, a certain amount of room for manoeuvre remained possible. Therefore, those who chose to be complicit in the crimes of the Holocaust cannot plead indoctrination, they cannot claim they did not know better or indeed did not have any way of knowing better since the fiction of the Nazi world was not impregnable. Indeed this also means that questions regarding responsibility must remain firmly in the foreground of discussions on complicity – if it were the case that perpetrators operated in a world where they were effectively coerced by means of omnipotent indoctrination, individual responsibility would be harder to attribute. But given that the fictitious world of the ideology of the Third Reich was a realm over

which the Nazis only had imperfect indoctrinating control, there remained room for choice and deviation. And wherever there is room for moral choice, there is responsibility. David H. Jones provides a thorough discussion of this problem in his book Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust: A Study in the Ethics of Character. Jones considers the question of how broad the scope of Nazi indoctrination truly was and whether or not there was a strong correlative relationship between levels of indoctrination or socialization and a deficiency in the ability to tell right from wrong (i.e. to confront the reality of the evil of the Holocaust which Jones refers to as ‘diminished capacity’). Were there to be a strong correlation, we may have to conclude that many people involved in the Nazi crimes were somehow less blameworthy since the prevailing ‘bad political culture’ damaged significantly their ability to recognize the evil of their actions. Jones, however, concludes that this was not the case: The scope of socialization into the majority political culture of Germany in the years before and during the Holocaust fell far short of being universal, and the correlation between socialization and diminished capacity was not strong. … It seems reasonable to infer that diminished capacity probably played a minor role in the perpetration of the Holocaust; therefore, it can have only a marginal effect, overall, on the assessment of the blameworthiness of individual Germans for their role in that catastrophe.72 Returning to the question of how plausible the association is that Arendt sees between thinking and reality, let us clarify the nature of the connection: for Arendt, reality is the proper object of thought. Real events and facts have a ‘claim’ on our ‘thinking attention’. Therefore if we are not responding to this claim, if we are not engaged with reality, then we are not thinking. According to the contours of the concept of thinking Arendt lays out, thought is more than merely accepting things at face value and more than applying general rules to particular instances. It is much more than reaching for the nearest cliché in the way that Eichmann did. Thinking, for Arendt, means breaking through the barriers of euphemism, cliché and language rules; it means confronting events in their factuality and actively engaging with the subjects of thought. Arendt’s idea of thinking is plausible: a mental process characterized by openness, inquiry and a destructive nature would tend not to be satiated by the shallow emptiness of cliché or the automatic and technical procedure of finding general principles to accommodate particular examples. Rather, Arendt’s mode of thinking (plausibly

constructed in itself) could possess a credibly deep connection with reality – in dismantling notions and looking beyond cliché this kind of thinking considers the real and basic elements of an idea. Thinking in Arendt’s sense would mean grasping real facts in an immediate, active and engaged way, a way which is, indeed, unmediated by euphemism or pretence. There is one final element to the interconnected portrait of thinking, reality and the Other which Arendt presents: we have seen already how she joins thinking and reality together; in addition, she draws a connection between thinking and a kind of moral recognition of the other, and between reality and the existence of the other. Hence all three emerge in an interlinked arrangement for Arendt. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, there is a significant passage which demonstrates this interwoven connection between the three elements of thinking, reality and the Other. It is an important quote and I have used it elsewhere. In this case it can be seen as the most explicit expression of Arendt’s views on the interplay between the three elements; reflecting on Eichmann’s statements, she writes: The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.73 Here Arendt is clearly stating that an ability to think is identical with an ability to think from the position of the other. Therefore thinking involves a moral recognition of the other and indeed of the views, needs and desires of the other. Elsewhere Arendt refers to Eichmann’s ‘almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view’.74 She is also asserting that Eichmann’s thoughtlessness acted as a safeguard against reality which she equates with ‘the words and presence of others’. So it seems that Arendt considers confronting reality to mean recognizing and engaging with the spoken words and the physical presence of other human beings. Confronting reality, then, involves a kind of (moral) existential recognition of the other. It is perhaps this element which underpins Arendt’s idea that confronting the reality of the Holocaust means grasping the very real evil of the events – if part of grasping reality is recognizing and facing the real existence of the Other, then someone engaging in this mode of thinking will understand the real evil of crimes like those of the Third Reich since he or she will understand them to be truly harmful

to the other. Arendt is implying that, in grasping the real existence of the Other, one grasps the real harm that evil will do to the Other, and the further implication is that this will prevent one from doing evil. Only where an individual is thoughtless and does not confront the real existence of the other can that person fail, on Arendt’s understanding, to appreciate the real harm and real evil of crimes such as those of the Holocaust. And where one cannot appreciate the real evil of an action, one will not necessarily refrain from committing it. Furthermore, if thinking can be equated with viewing a matter from the point of view of the other, this bestows another guise upon the notion of thought as dialogue. As I have discussed, Arendt conceives of thinking as, in part, a dialogue within the self, between two parts of the self. In most of her discussions of this topic, Arendt refers to the thinking partner within the self as another part of the self. Yet, if, in the Eichmann book at least, she imbues thinking with this sense of considering things from the fellow human being’s vantage point, perhaps we ought to think of the dialogic partner in the self as some kind of representation of the other. In some ways this might explain how exactly we are to proceed from the idea of thinking in a particular way to the conclusion that it will encourage acting in a particular way. For, if the two partners in the silent dialogue of thinking are simply two parts of the self, it is hard to see how one could draw from such a dialogue any inference about how one ought to treat others (which is essentially the question being asked by these kinds of moral consideration). Yet if the dialogic partners of thought are in fact the self and a representative form of the other, then a link between conclusions reached in this kind of discussion and a particular attitude towards others is clearer and more plausible. I will later discuss this problem in more depth – for now it suffices to indicate that the statements Arendt makes connecting thinking, reality and the other may prove illuminating in attempting plausibly to construct a relationship between thoughtlessness and evil. Arendt’s idea can also be viewed in connection with another discussion relating reality, fantasy and ethics: in his article ‘Ethics and the Spirit’, Christopher Hamilton explores the idea that the ‘nobility of spirit in someone’s response to misfortune’ consists in his or her resistance to ‘self-consoling’ fantasy and his or her ability to face reality.75 For Hamilton, in ‘cases where we view someone’s response to misfortune with disapprobation’, this is because the person is ‘in some way giving in to the temptation to indulge himself in fantasy which cuts him off from reality and from a lucid assessment of his and others’ situation’.76 Those who are deserving of praise, those who exhibit a nobility of

spirit – Dostoyevsky is the prime example cited – are characterized by their ability to face reality rather than to retreat into fantasy and, in fact, by their refusal to indulge themselves in comforting yet fictitious illusions. Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann can be seen as an expression of this topos of ethical thought: Eichmann is to be impugned for his refusal to look beyond the nearest cliché and confront the reality of the evil in which he was complicit. Those resistors who rejected the fictional tenets of Nazism and who saw the very real evil of the crimes of the Third Reich are worthy of praise: they displayed an ethical strength of spirit which is captured precisely in their confronting of reality. The morally good quality of these people consisted in their willingness to fully acknowledge the real evil of the regime and its crimes.

The moral relevance of thought So far we have seen that Arendt presents an interpretation of the thinking process which furnishes it with particular qualities: it is active and engaged with its subject, it is a broad and open activity, undefined by specific aims and not restricted to achieving particular results, it is imbued with a destructive tendency, breaking down concepts into their constitutive elements through inquiry, and it is characterized by a dialogic property: a responsive back-and-forth movement within the self which involves recognizing the reality of a moral situation and indeed the reality of the Other’s existence as it pertains to that moral situation. The next step is to proceed with this reading of Arendt’s concept of thinking and interrogate the moral relevance she attributes to it. For Arendt, Eichmann’s apparent thoughtlessness was morally significant – he became a perpetrator in the Holocaust because he did not think, o r, at least, he did not think in this Arendtian way. The corollary of this is, of course, that had he thought, he would not have participated in the evil of the Holocaust. There are at least two ways to interpret the moral importance of the Arendtian thinking process: first, the claim could be that it is in the thinking process itself that the evil of a contemplated action is revealed – by thinking in this kind of open, responsive and critical way we come to know or realize or perceive the evil of a given action. This interpretation also entails a subsequent move: not only do we come to know that something is evil through thinking, we therefore refrain from doing it because we know it to be evil. Second, alternatively, rather than deriving a conclusion about what is right or wrong from the procedure of thinking itself, we might interpret the moral significance of thinking in a different way: perhaps it is the case that the properly thinking person, the person whose inner life is

characterized by this kind of broad, open, dialogic thought, will not entertain notions of committing evil acts. This kind of attitude in one’s thinking life simply does not admit the consideration of committing evil actions. On this reading what is morally relevant is less the process of thinking itself and more the kind of attitude this type of thinking would tend to encourage. Joseph Beatty distinguishes between these two related arguments about morality and reasoning: ‘The first is’, he writes, ‘that thinking or reasoning will lead us to the conclusion that … we must be moral; the other is that the act of thinking itself is inherently moralizing.’77 Arendt’s statements on thinking and morality do not provide a clarity which would allow the reader to ascribe to her one of these distinct arguments. Rather, various claims in her work indicate that she may consider thinking to be morally significant in both of these ways. It is therefore necessary to examine the possible relevance of thinking to morality from both perspectives.

Is thinking a moralizing activity? In places in her essays and lectures on ethics, Arendt appears to suggest that the thinking activity itself can condition one against wrongdoing. In ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’ she raises this as a driving question of the inquiry, asking ‘whether the thinking activity, the very performance itself – as distinguished from and regardless of whatever qualities a man’s nature, his soul, may possess – conditions him in such a way that he is incapable of evil’.78 In ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, Arendt asserts that the thinking being will place limits on his own conduct: ‘If he is a thinking being, rooted in his thoughts and remembrances’, she reflects, ‘there will be limits to what he can permit himself to do, and these limits will not be imposed on him from the outside, but will be self-set.’79 Could it be the case that the activity of thinking itself, if carried out in this Arendtian way, can create thinking beings for whom the notion of committing an evil act cannot be entertained? Can the thinking activity be considered inherently moralizing? And if so, in what way does this activity tend to encourage good moral behaviour? As is often the case with Arendt’s work on ethics, she does not furnish her audience with any clear account here. On the face of it, if we adopt the account of thinking I have constructed from Arendt’s claims, we could argue that it seems likely that adhering to a form of thinking (at least about moral matters) which is broad, open, responsive and attentive to the reality of others would tend to promote moral sensitivity. It would be difficult, however, to corroborate any claim which is stronger and more substantial than this about

how thinking can condition one against wrongdoing. Certainly such a thinking attitude, though it may tend to support a generally responsive and more benevolent approach towards others and in this sense encourage a morally better outlook, cannot provide clear guidance in moral dilemmas. It seems perfectly possible that two people could be thinking in this particular Arendtian way, neither being any less open and responsive than the other, and still come to different conclusions on a given moral issue. Arendt’s kind of thinking, insofar as the activity itself can inoculate one against evildoing, cannot present clear moral guidance about which course of action is to be chosen in a situation of moral dilemma. At best, the thinking activity in Arendt’s sense furnishes its possessor simply with a mode of moral sensitivity. One might concede, however, that thinking in the way Arendt advocates does not offer strict moral direction in complicated ethical situations and yet contend that, for Arendt’s purposes, it need not. One might argue that the mode of moral sensitivity she promotes cannot provide guidance in matters where various morally sensitive thinking beings come to differing (morally sensitive) conclusions and yet simultaneously hold that, when discussing an event of evil such as the Holocaust, this is not significant. For, one may maintain that there were not a variety of morally sensitive conclusions to be reached about the Holocaust – there is only one morally sensitive conclusion to be drawn which is that the Holocaust was an evil event and as such one should not become involved in its perpetration. Insofar as the way of thinking Arendt espouses (which is really an attitude of general moral sensitivity) would abhor contemplation of committing the evil acts of the Holocaust since they are clearly devoid of moral sensitivity, it can be seen generally as a barrier to evil. Yet this notion remains weak: the claim only holds true in these general terms – an attitude of general moral attentiveness will probably tend to exclude contemplation of acts which display such obvious moral disregard as the murder of innocents. But, in the case of specific, complex moral situations, the like of which must have been experienced during the Third Reich, this thinking attitude cannot prescribe any concrete measures regarding particular courses of action – the best it can provide is a general, vague even, sense of openness and respect for humanity. And it is not clear that this vague sense would be the deciding factor in a moral decision. There is another problem inherent in these discussions: by describing Arendt’s form of thinking with terms such as ‘broad’, ‘open’ and ‘responsive to others’, I have already imbued the process with a particular ethical outlook. These terms

are already morally loaded. My layered reconstruction of Arendt’s notion of the thinking process is, I think, a fair one: the terms I have used to describe it correspond accurately to the ways in which she conceives of thinking. Yet one can see that, from the outset, Arendt’s descriptions of thinking, which I have summarized, include a normative perspective, not a neutral one. This renders the claim that thought inhibits evil actions question-begging because it presupposes the very normativity which is supposed to be absent from the concept of thinking in the first place. Furthermore, there is an additional problem: being sensitive or responsive to others does not necessarily mean doing so in a kind way where one seeks to avoid harming the other. Cruelty, in fact, involves a great deal of sensitivity to the reality of the other, to the feelings of the other, but in a malevolent way. The sadistic torturer is highly sensitive towards his victim since he derives his pleasure from his victim’s pain – without some kind of sensitivity and responsiveness to the other he could not enjoy the cruelty he inflicts. Indeed the power of the torturer’s cruelty lies in his sensitivity to others. There is another possible route in explaining how the activity of thinking could prove to be moralizing: the suggestion that this kind of thinking simply does not admit of evil, not because, as argued previously, it would tend to be thematically excluded from the thought of a person with an open, responsive, morally sensitive attitude in thinking, but because contemplation of evil would be technically and practically proscribed since evil is a negation, a privation and therefore insubstantial and as such it cannot be the proper object of thought. Arendt does assert the claim that evil is insubstantial, clearly drawing on a philosophical and theological tradition with which she was familiar. And she uses this notion to indicate that proper thought cannot grasp evil since evil has no substance, an assertion – ‘evil is … merely a privation’80 – upon which she does not critically reflect. This view of evil is significant in Arendt’s work and I discuss it in more detail in the later section ‘Can Evil be an Object of Thought?’ At this juncture, let us merely acknowledge that if we were to agree that evil possesses no substance, and that the proper objects of thought are substantive things, then we could establish that evil cannot be an object of thinking. In this sense then, we could claim that the properly thinking person is conditioned against wrongdoing insofar as the (Arendtian) thinking attitude conceptually omits contemplation of non-substantive (evil) things. The discussion in Arendt’s work alluding to thinking as an innately moralizing activity is also complicated by Arendt’s simultaneously arguing from the other

direction: not only does she suggest that thinking can condition one against wrongdoing, she concomitantly raises the notion of wrongdoing upsetting one’s capacity to think such that one will tend to avoid wrongdoing in order not to lose the (desirable) human facility for thinking. The sometimes seemingly endemic confusion in Arendt’s views on ethics comes to the fore here: this is an entirely different argument relating thinking and morality than that given elsewhere. For here the claim is that thinking is a desirable human activity and that human beings will therefore be inclined to encourage thinking. Correspondingly, humans will tend to discourage or avoid anything damaging to the thinking activity. Wrongdoing is, for Arendt, harmful to the thinking process itself, harmful to the capacity or disposition needed to carry out thinking. Therefore humans will refrain from wrongdoing since they will wish to eschew anything which could prove harmful to the desirable thinking activity. Arendt asserts that ‘Socrates believed that men are not merely rational animals but thinking beings, and that they would rather give up all other ambitions and even suffer injury and insult than to forfeit this faculty’.81 Later, in discussing the thinking capacity, she claims, ‘To do wrong means to spoil this [thinking] ability.’82 Again, in referring to the thinking capacity, Arendt contends that Socrates, if asked what would be the sanctions for ‘crime hidden from the eyes of gods and men’, could have ‘answered only by saying: the loss of this capacity, the loss of solitude … with its loss of creativity – in other words, the loss of the self that constitutes the person’.83 This line of argument is founded upon a series of claims: first, there is the assertion that thinking, or at least the capacity to think, is a faculty desirable to human beings and therefore something humans would wish to maintain. Second, there is the contention that evildoing damages the capacity to think. Third, there is the presupposition that human beings know this to be the case. Fourth, there is the idea that humans will always hold the desirable thinking activity to be more important than any potential selfish benefits of wrongdoing. Finally, there is the conclusion that because humans desire to think, they will avoid committing deeds of evil. Of these implied claims in the argument which Arendt seems to be advancing, the third, fourth and especially the second prove problematic. In what way could wrongdoing damage the capacity to think? Once again we are confounded by Arendt’s lack of explicitness in her account of ethics. There are, however, passages in her work which may shed light on this subject. In ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, for instance, Arendt contends that ‘if you want to think you must see to it that the two who carry on the thinking

dialogue be in good shape, that the partners be friends’.84 For this reason, one cannot commit evil deeds such as murder since ‘who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even a murderer’.85 So the claim here is that if one commits an act of evil, one creates such dissonance between the two parts of the self engaged in the thinking dialogue that thinking can no longer continue. These two parts of the self can no longer relate to one another for the purposes of thinking – they can no longer be ‘friends’. The trouble here is that Arendt gives no explanation for how wrongdoing entails this state of affairs within the self other than to assume that no one wants to live together (in the self) with a murderer. But is it not perfectly plausible that an individual could be content to live with a murderer? Or at least be indifferent towards it? Could the partners in dialogue (the parts of the self) not remain friends despite evildoing?86 Surely an individual could act in a wrong way yet still retain the capacity to think? In addition, even if it were demonstrably true that evildoing harms the capacity to think, would it be the case that all human beings know this? And even if they did, would the desire to think always and inevitably outweigh other desires which could be satisfied by wrongdoing? It is not clear that individuals would prioritize their desire to think above other desires – Arendt is a modern thinker in a philosophical tradition espoused by philosophers which, unsurprisingly, lauds thinking and philosophizing as the most desirable of all human activities; as Dana Villa puts it, Arendt is loyal to ‘one of the most cherished prejudices of the Western philosophical tradition: the Socratic idea that thinking/philosophy makes us moral’.87 Arendt’s contention that thinking guarantees good moral conduct is, therefore, not as original as some have suggested.88

Does the thinking process lead one to moral truth? What of the other claim that it is through the process of thinking that one arrives at the revelation that something is evil and therefore to be avoided? Can thinking lead, in this sense, to moral ‘truth’? This is the question implied in Arendt’s work. Arendt takes it as a premise that the Holocaust was evil is true. How then, on Arendt’s account, is someone to recognize this truth? Arendt’s idea is that thinking will somehow engender this recognition. Can the thought process, as Arendt describes it, get us to this realization? Before examining this question, it is worth reminding ourselves of the tenets of Arendt’s concept of thinking and considering ways in which they could be

relevant for moral matters. Arendt’s concept, as I have constructed it, involves a number of layers: first, thinking is active not passive; and second, it is broad and open, not restricted and narrow. At this stage in the construction there is no real moral content to the aspects of thinking that Arendt names: thinking can be active and broad without being constituted in any particular moral manner. One might contend that a certain attitude of broadness and openness in thinking can better lend itself to inquiry into moral matters since these are rarely narrow, specific and clear but rather can often be complicated and wide-ranging. Insofar as this is the case, the openness of Arendt’s idea of thinking has a limited relevance for morality. The next layers of the concept appear to be more significant for Arendt in terms of relating thought and morally good action: thinking is characterized by Arendt as aimless, without results and destructive. Arendt views this tendency of thinking to break down concepts without necessarily having a pre-existing objective as morally relevant – thinking tends to subvert established codes of conduct because it does not simply accept them at face value but rather disassembles them in a critical manner. I will discuss the importance of this in a subsequent section of this chapter. In Arendt’s concept of thinking as I have interpreted it, there is a final precept which can be seen as morally relevant: the characterization of thinking as dialogue. There are at least two possible ways in which thought as dialogue could be considered morally significant: first, though Arendt defines the discursive partners in thought as parts of the self, these parts (or at least one of them) could, as I mentioned earlier, be a way to represent to oneself internally the views of the Other. Insofar as a part of the self might perform this representative function, and therefore promote consideration of the Other in deciding on a course of action, thinking as dialogue between parts of the self can be seen as morally relevant. This possibility is discussed in more detail in a subsequent section. The second way in which portraying thinking as a dialogic activity can be considered morally relevant is again related to the prerequisite of thinking as dialogue: the division of the self into parts which engage with one another. This state of affairs allows the differentiated parts of the self the possibility of disagreement – one part being opposed to the views or actions of another. This in turn allows for a kind of psychic disharmony in the self – an undesirable situation which is to be avoided. Arendt understands evildoing as causing disagreement between the parts of the self involved in dialogue and therefore as undesirable since it causes psychic disharmony. This is a weak claim since there really is no reason to suppose that for everyone wrongdoing will

cause this kind of dissonance in the self. I consider this claim as related less to Arendt’s idea of thinking and more to her notion of ‘living with oneself’ – an idea which also requires a prior division within the self into at least two parts. Therefore, I discuss this claim in detail in the chapter on living with oneself. The destructive, aimless nature of thinking according to Arendt and its dialogic aspect can be viewed as morally relevant. There is something about these qualities of thinking for Arendt which means that if one exercises them, one can be led to some sense of moral truth, to the recognition that evil actions are wrong and ought to be avoided. Joseph Beatty interprets her argument thus: Arendt offers three arguments to support her claim that thinking excludes evildoing. First, insofar as thinking calls into question one’s adherence to conventions, codes, or ideologies it is likely that those like Eichmann would be roused from their dogmatic slumbers. … Second, since the quest for meaning that thinking exhibits aims necessarily (like Platonic eros) at the good and the beautiful, or, more properly, at that which really is, evil is [excluded] for it is merely a privation or negation.89 Finally, on Beatty’s reading, Arendt cites a third argument which is generated from two of the Socratic propositions in the Gorgias (it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, it is better to be in disagreement with all around me than be out of harmony with myself or contradict myself): ‘Thinking and wrongdoing are disjunctive because evil menaces one’s psychic harmony or integrity.’90 For Beatty the first argument is the ‘negativity a rgument’ which is founded upon the second, the ‘privation argument’:91 the idea is that thinking, as a destructive activity tends to undermine convention and dogma and that (destructive) thinking ‘dissolves evil (a privative concept) into its original meaninglessness’.92 Beatty refers to the third and final argument he identifies as the ‘argument from conscience’ – ‘designed to repair the defects in the first two by arguing that psychic disharmony follows upon evildoing’.93 I interpret Arendt differently from Beatty in this regard: I read Arendt’s argument about psychic disharmony as pertaining predominantly to her claims about ‘living with oneself’ as a prerequisite condition for morally good behaviour, rather than the claims about thinking. Indeed in Beatty’s reading, this ‘third’ argument as he describes it is not founded upon the other two arguments but seems entirely separate. Its disassociation from the other claims Arendt offers about the moral significance of thinking means it can be treated separately: in the next chapter I discuss

Arendt’s notion of ‘living with oneself’ and the concomitant assertion that psychological dissonance issues from wrongdoing. Yet the first two arguments which Beatty distinguishes pertain clearly to Arendt’s notion of the thinking process as morally relevant – as revealing the prohibition on wrongdoing. Let us now turn to these arguments and evaluate, with Beatty, how convincing Arendt is on the subject of the moral relevance of thinking.

Thinking as destructive, aimless and without result As we have seen, Arendt considers the (proper) thinking process to be without aims, resultless and destructive in character. The question now is what is the moral relevance of this characterization? Arendt praises Lessing as a thinker who did not shackle the free movement of his thinking to achieving particular aims, and praises Socrates as a thinker who thought without care for results. She therefore holds this kind of thinking to be good and valuable. Yet her valorization of this type of thinking is partly informed by her view that the goodness of such thinking lies in its connection to good moral behaviour. We must ask what form this connection takes – what is it about aimless, resultless, destructive thinking that can lead a thinker to morally good decisions? And how plausible is her description of an entirely undetermined, resultless, destructive thinking process? I consider each of these three elements (undetermined, resultless, destructive) separately. Arendt contends, as we have seen, that thinking possesses no aim outside itself. It is, for Arendt, an entirely undetermined process. Is this in itself a credible assertion? It is certainly possible to imagine a kind of thinking which is not strictly predetermined by definite aims, given before one embarks on a process of thought. Yet an entirely undetermined thinking, free of any precogitated, conditioning factors whatsoever, seems far less plausible. At the very least, there must be some extent to which the thinking process itself, even if it begins from a position without definite aims, is delimited by the thinking subject: the potential paths of thought are circumscribed by the various commitments, abilities and characteristics of the thinker. Furthermore, Arendt’s portrait of Socrates as a thinker par excellence in this vein is not entirely convincing. Arendt claims that it was the thinking experience itself which led Socrates to establish certain ethical principles, while also holding that ‘he did not start his enterprise in order to arrive at them’.94 Yet when one examines a number of the Socratic dialogues, one is given the impression that Socrates has a particular conclusion in mind even before beginning

discussions with his interlocutors and that the path along which the conversation proceeds is skilfully manipulated by a thinker who already has a destination in mind. Indeed Beatty asserts that ‘Arendt goes very far – too far I think – toward emptying Socrates of any positive doctrines’.95 Socrates’ thinking and the dialogues with his interlocutors are not morally neutral, not only because it seems he (at least sometimes) directs conversations towards a predetermined conclusion, but also because they occur within a specific ethical context – the mores, customs and beliefs of ancient Greece. There are actions it would never have occurred to Socrates or his conversational partners to take, or even to discuss, since they would have considered them so immoral – cutting down or uprooting a sacred olive tree, for example, an act, which John M. Dillon explains, was ‘always regarded as something approaching a war crime’.96 Socrates’ arguments themselves grow out of, and express, his prior ethical commitments. He does not arrive at his ethical commitments through argument; rather, his arguments proceed from those commitments to begin with. In short, the plausibility of a wholly unconditioned form of thought is questionable. But what of its possible moral connotations? The idea of an undetermined thinking process relates to other tenets of thinking which Arendt elucidates – she is trying to construct a notion of thinking in which freedom is a dominant feature. Insofar as this is the case, and inasmuch as the lack of a definite, predetermined aim for a process of thought may tend to encourage a broader, more open, freer kind of thinking, her contention is plausible. Yet how can this kind of thinking tell us anything about morality? Again, it can perhaps promote a more morally sensitive attitude on the part of the thinker, who is allowing him- or herself to think more freely, without the restrictions of particular goals; yet it cannot provide anything more concrete by way of moral guidance or, indeed, by alighting on moral truth of any kind. This aspect of Arendt’s notion of the aimlessness of thinking as morally significant remains unconvincing. She also holds that thinking is a process which produces no results. Again we must pose questions both about the plausibility of the claim that thinking is resultless and the implied connection to morally good behaviour. First, regarding the assertion that thinking produces no results, Arendt’s statements on this subject are in fact rather inconsistent. In examining the activity of thinking, she tells us that ‘nothing in this activity indicated that an impulse for doing could arise out of it’.97 In other words, thinking produces no results in the form of prescribing courses of action. Indeed, Arendt asserts that thinking ‘could not

yield positive indications for our conduct among others’.98 Yet Arendt seems to undermine these claims in a number of other statements across her work on ethics: at one point she suggests that the ‘moral precept rises out of the thinking activity itself’;99 at another, thinking is ‘an activity that has certain moral results, namely that he who thinks constitutes himself into somebody, a person or a personality’.100 Elsewhere Arendt refers to the ‘moral by-product of thought’.101 Prima facie it would seem that Arendt is simply contradicting herself in these statements. Upon deeper investigation, however, one can see that there is more to this apparent discrepancy: what Arendt seems to be suggesting is that the thinking activity itself, while it does not produce results in terms of clear and definite moral dicta, because of its nature generates morally relevant sensitivities in the thinker. She attempts to impart clarity to this position in her discussion of Socrates: in examining the ‘two positive Socratic propositions’ (it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, and it is better to be in discord with those around one than with oneself), Arendt asserts that it was the experience of thinking, that led Socrates to make these statements – although, of course, he did not start his enterprise in order to arrive at them. For it would be a serious mistake, I believe, to understand them as the results of some cogitation about morality; they are insights, to be sure, but insights of experience, and as far as the thinking process itself is concerned they are at best incidental by-products.102 Later in the same discussion she indicates that ‘it looks as though what we are tempted to understand as a purely moral proposition actually arises out of the thinking experience as such’.103 Arendt offers no further argument on this point. It looks as though these are merely semantic distinctions: a by-product could surely also be called a result. And what Arendt refers to as an ‘insight’ is in fact a moral precept. The demarcations Arendt tries to outline here between result, insight and by-product are superficial and linguistic rather than substantial. It is possible to conceive of a thinking process which engenders no results – a thought procedure which provides reflections rather than conclusions. Yet this raises the question of how such a resultless process can have any moral significance. As Beatty points out, ‘If thinking yields absolutely no positive results, then there can be no necessary connection between thinking and (moral) respect for persons.’104 Indeed I think this is the reason that Arendt ends up contradicting herself and undermining her own argument: she wants to portray the thinking process as morally relevant and at the same time as being without

result. But the fact that the process she portrays is without result means that ultimately there cannot be any moral relevance to it. This is perhaps why she counteracts her own claims by attributing (moral) results to the thinking process under the guise of the terms ‘by-product’ or ‘insight’ – merely results by another name. Finally we turn to the question of thinking’s destructiveness. Arendt’s position (as discussed earlier) is that the process of thinking, of reflecting and analysing, tends to break down concepts into their constituent parts and as such it undermines established codes and norms through constant critical examination. The thinking process, as Arendt envisages it, does not replace those subverted norms with any other positive doctrine – thinking is therefore a negative activity for Arendt. In The Life of the Mind she contends that thinking ‘does not create values; it will not find out, once and for all, what “the good” is; it does not confirm but, rather, dissolves accepted rules of conduct’.105 When discussing the perils of non-thinking Arendt asserts: ‘By shielding people from the dangers of examination, it teaches them to hold fast to whatever the prescribed rules of conduct may be at a given time in a given society.’106 This idea of a negative, destructive thinking process is plausible: there is a sense in which the kind of thinking Arendt advocates (reflective, critical) will encourage the dismantling of complex codes or norms. And there is also a sense in which Arendt is correct in saying that thinking is like this – that in its nature thinking involves a necessary destructive element. When applying thought to a subject we often find ourselves picking the subject apart, reducing it to its simplest parts in order to understand better. And there is also a sense in which it is this destructive element of thinking which is truly successful – the history of philosophy is littered with examples of how destructive, sceptical arguments prove far more convincing than attempts at positive answers to philosophical problems. There are no philosophers whose positive reflections lead to conclusions agreed upon by all; yet there are many sceptical arguments which seem more powerful. In the realm of epistemology for example no one has refuted the claim that we cannot truly know that we are not brains in vats. We can only suppose that we probably are not and we must live our lives as though we are not. Indeed Kant did not, despite all his (positive) thinking, solve the problems of ethics, and Descartes’ most powerful, convincing and most widely accepted views are not his constructive arguments about, for example, the existence of God, but the destructive, sceptical arguments of his first meditation about those things which can be called into doubt.

Yet the significance of this destructive thinking for morality is not at all apparent – why should a destructive form of thinking which has no positive content be able to tell us anything about morality or give any ethical guidance? Why should it prove a prophylactic against evil? Presumably all moral codes would be subject to disintegration under this kind of negative scrutiny, not merely the unjust ones. Thinking in this way could well destroy widely held, just norms. Arendt offers no criterion of evaluation in her destructive thinking process – there is no way to tell from this point o f view whether an accepted ethical code is just or unjust and therefore whether or not one code is morally ‘better’ than another. Indeed Arendt admits that ‘thinking is equally dangerous to all creeds and, by itself, does not bring forth any new creed’.107 Beatty rightly asserts that ‘someone who as a result of his thinking concludes that injustice benefits him more than justice would (a) be warranted on Socratic principles and (b) demonstrate the danger of Socratic thinking. For such a person could decide to be unjust while constantly cross-examining the principles and empirical basis for one’s choice. In the meantime, however, the community is threatened.’108 How then is thinking to combat evil specifically when, on Arendt’s reading, thinking is indiscriminately destructive of all codes, whether they are good or evil?109 The answer to this lies in Arendt’s assumption of an Augustinian position on the nature of evil – because evil is not substantial, but merely the absence of good, it cannot be an object of thought. As Beatty explains, Arendt thinks that ‘the concepts of “thinking” and “evil” are necessarily disjunctive for the object of reason is and is of value whereas “evil” lacks being and value’.110 The objects of thought are what is, rather than what is not. So thinking cannot grasp evil since it is a mere privation. Hence thinking and evil are a priori, logically, mutually exclusive. Arendt portrays thinking as a ‘quest for meaning’: ‘Socrates called this quest for meaning erōs, a kind of love which is primarily a need – it desires what it has not – and which is the only matter he pretends to be an expert in.’111 She elucidates further: Since the quest is a kind of love and desire, the objects of thought can only be lovable things – beauty, wisdom, justice, etc. Ugliness and evil are excluded by definition from the thinking concern, although they may occasionally turn up as deficiencies, as lack of beauty, injustice, and evil (kakia) as lack of good. This means they have no roots of their own, no essence of which thought could get hold.112 And ‘if thinking dissolves normal, positive concepts into their original meaning,

then the same process dissolves these negative “concepts” into their original meaninglessness, into nothing’.113 Evil is just such a negative concept. Upon encountering evil, the destructive thought process reveals its insubstantial nature.

Can evil be an object of thought? Arendt’s argument in this vein includes assumptions which are not systematically defended. Certainly the broad sweep of the argument makes logical sense – if evil is a mere privation, and if thinking is concerned with what is rather than what is not,114 then evil cannot be an object of thought. Yet the claim that evil is a negation is assumed rather than justified through argument. Arendt even goes so far as to contend that it ‘is the nearly unanimous opinion of all thinkers’ ‘that evil is a mere privation, negation, or exception from the rule’.115 The position she assumes here is Augustinian.116 Augustine was a thinker with whose work Arendt was of course well acquainted, having written her doctoral thesis on the concept of love in Augustine’s writings.117 Augustine held the following view on evil: For the Almighty God, who, as even the heathen acknowledge, has supreme power over all things, being Himself supremely good, would never permit the existence of anything evil among His works, if He were not so omnipotent and good that He can bring good even out of evil. For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present – namely, the diseases and wounds – go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to exist; for the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance, – the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evil s – that is, privations of the good which we call health – are accidents. Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else.118 This is clearly the view informing Arendt’s position on the disjunctive quality of the relationship between thinking and evil. Yet she provides no defence of it. Given that this claim is the foundation of the subsequent argument, Arendt’s lack of defence for this claim is all the more surprising. The argument is undermined further by her bizarrely emphatic statement that the notion of evil as a privation

of being is upheld almost unanimously by all those who have considered it, disregarding the criticisms put forward. In an article examining both ancient and contemporary scholarship on the privation theory of evil, Todd C. Calder articulates this critique: a primary objection to the privation theory of evil is that ‘in some cases evil is not just the absence of goodness but rather some positively bad existing property or quality, and thus, the privation account of evil cannot characterize all forms of evil’.119 Calder cites the following example: For instance, the malicious torturer is not just not as good as she might be. She is not simply withholding gestures of kindness which a morally decent person would bestow; her actions are positively bad and these actions are constituted by attributes she possesses, i.e., desires for other people’s pain for pleasure, and not by attributes she lacks. Similarly, pain is not simply the absence of feeling or pleasure, it is a positively bad sensation or feeling.120 The privation theory of evil denies this and as such is unable to account for what Calder refers to as paradigmatic cases of evil. Indeed, to apply this objection to the moral landscape of the Third Reich, it seems clear that though a privation theory of evil could perhaps characterize the actions (or inactions) of some perpetrators – those who, through indifference and lack of compassion for instance, became involved in the inhumanity of the Nazi regime – it cannot be equally successfully applied to perpetrators who actively sought to inflict cruelty and harm such as the sadists and fanatics who were complicit in the crimes of Nazism. A defender of Arendt’s position might interject at this point that it does not matter that the privation theory of evil to which Arendt subscribes cannot explain the (positively bad) actions of a proportionately smaller group of perpetrators since she is concerned with explaining the actions of the greater number of ordinary people who collaborated in the crimes of National Socialism. The defender may argue that a privation theory of evil can adequately explain the actions of these kinds of ordinary perpetrator. But even where this may be the case it does not rescue the privation account since the privation theory is shown to be, at best, only partially suitable. Nor, more specifically, does it redeem Arendt’s argument since she categorically states that evil is a privation – her entire argument is therefore liable to be undermined by the demonstrable weakness in this claim. Other objections have been raised to the privation theory of evil. Calder, for instance, rejects the ‘false dichotomy’ of ‘conceiving of evil as either the privation of goodness or the result of an evil substance’121 – for Augustine, of

course, the alternative to the privation account was Manichaeanism: the notion that the world consisted in a conflict between two substantive forces, one good, one evil, originating ‘in two coequal and coeternal first principles: the principle of goodness (i.e. God, or light), and the principle of evil (i.e. the Prince of Darkness)’.122 Augustine rejected Manichaean dualism since, for Augustine, God is wholly and perfectly good and He is the creator of all that is to be found in the world. Therefore, it is not possible for Him to create evil – rather, everything that is created, is created good. To posit a substantive, created evil (as the Manicheans do) would be to deny either that God is supreme creator of everything or that He is omnibenevolent, alternatives which are unacceptable from an Augustinian Christian perspective. Augustine equates being and goodness – all that is, is created by a benevolent God, therefore all that is, is good. Hence the privation theory of evil allows Augustine to account for the presence of evil in a world created good by God – evil is simply the absence of this goodness. Moral evil can be explained by the exercise of free will: human beings are created by God and endowed with free will; if they use their free will to turn away from God, then evil creeps into the world. In Book XII of Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, he asserts, Let no one, therefore, look for an efficient cause of the evil will; for it is not efficient, but deficient, as the will itself is not an effecting of something, but a defect. For defection from that which supremely is, to that which has less of being – this is to begin to have an evil will. Now, to seek to discover the causes of these defections, – causes, as I have said, not efficient, but deficient – is as if someone sought to see darkness, or hear silence. Yet both of these are known by us, and the former by means only of the eye, the latter only by the ear; but not by their positive actuality, but by their want of it. … For those things which are known not by their actuality, but by their want of it, are known, if our expression may be allowed and understood, by not knowing them, that by knowing them they may be not known. For when the eyesight surveys objects that strike the sense, it nowhere sees darkness but where it begins not to see. And so no other sense but the ear can perceive silence, and yet it is only perceived by not hearing. Thus, too, our mind perceives intelligible forms by understanding them; but when they are deficient, it knows them by not knowing them; for who can understand defects?123 Augustine’s repudiation of Manichean substantive dualism therefore owes much to his theodicy and offers a response to the problem of evil – the difficulty in

reconciling a world coloured by evil and suffering with an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent supreme being and creator. Yet it is not necessary to consider evil in these terms. Calder argues that we can ‘reject the idea that goodness and evil are the result of underlying substances and contend instead that good and evil depend on properties such as felt qualities and propositional attitudes’.124 He continues, For instance, we can hold that pain is neither the result of an evil substance nor the privation of goodness, but rather an experiential property caused by the stimulation of certain nerves. Pain is a felt quality that makes a life go less well, and thus an evil for the person who experiences it. Similarly, we can contend that maliciousness is not a lack of goodness nor the result of an evil substance. Instead, we can contend that maliciousness simply consists in having a particular propositional attitude, namely, a desire for another person’s harm for pleasure. We can judge this propositional attitude as despicable enough to warrant the label evil without positing an underlying substance of evil.125 Calder regards the positing of only two alternatives in the privation theory of evil (i.e. evil is either a substantial property or the lack of some other substantial property) as erecting a false dichotomy: ‘Instead evil may consist in a variety of properties or attributes, together with the lack of other properties or attributes that, in combination, we find despicable enough to label evil.’126 Calder suggests that a ‘plausible theory of evil must accommodate both positive and privative forms of evil’.127 Clearly, the objections raised by Calder to the privation account of evil are likely to erode Arendt’s argument, as are the credible criticisms articulated by others thinking in this vein.128 Arendt’s claims about evil not being an object of thought only make sense within an Augustinian framework which associates goodness with being. If that framework is impaired by reasonable critique, Arendt’s claims that thought cannot grasp evil are weakened. Perhaps, however, we are not fully understanding Arendt’s meaning here. So far I have treated her argument that evil has no substance, that the objects of thought are substantial things and that therefore evil cannot be an object of thought as operating at the level of a logical puzzle: the argument makes logical sense and its logical sense is undermined when any of the premises are disputed. But perhaps Arendt means something altogether less superficially logical – maybe she is alluding to the notion of being fascinated by evil. She could be

implying that no one can fully understand the meaning of evil and remain so fascinated by it that he or she desires to commit evil. Maybe in arguing that thought cannot grasp evil, Arendt is stating that one cannot fully understand evil and then commit evil, since if one ever did fully understand it, one’s understanding (one’s thinking) would deter one from that evil. Raimond Gaita explores a similar line in his Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception: in places he implies that a truly full understanding of evildoing would also involve the understanding of what a person can become through evil and ‘how evil can spread through a life, destroying any intelligible purpose for which it [evil] might have been done’.129 The notion that evildoers never fully understand what they do can be plausible insofar as it can show that ‘a full understanding of the evil we would be doing would always so transform our desires and needs that they could no longer be a source of temptation or despair’.130 It is possible that Arendt has some notion like this in mind. If she does, it leads to problems: we seem to be building the idea of ‘transformative’ understanding into the idea of understanding itself such that if one is not transformed by one’s understanding, one is not really understanding. In other words, if a person is not deterred from evil by his understanding of it, then we can simply say, ‘Ah, but then he didn’t really understand!’ The concept of understanding here is evaluatively loaded: the idea of understanding and the idea of evil are made for each other on this reading. And as such, the significance and meaning of the concept of transformative understanding is undermined. In any case, Arendt says little on this beyond her (logical) arguments about the ontological status of evil. There is another connection Arendt draws between thinking and the avoidance of evil. We have seen that she thinks thinking is incompatible with evil since evil is insubstantial. She also cites the second Socratic paradox: that no one does evil willingly. Again, evil and thinking (as conceived of as knowing or holding a genuine belief) are disjunctive. Yet Arendt mistakenly implies that this idea springs from the origin of the other – that is, that evil cannot be done knowingly because it has no substance. Let us now re-examine a confusing passage in her work which was referred to earlier: Arendt contends that, for Socrates, the quest for meaning which, Arendt considers, constitutes thinking is a kind of ‘love and desire’ and therefore the objects of thought can only be lovable things – beauty, wisdom, justice, etc. Ugliness and evil are excluded by definition from the thinking concern, although they may occasionally turn up as deficiencies, as lack of beauty,

injustice, and evil (kakia) as lack of good. This means that they have no roots of their own, no essence of which thought could get hold. Evil, we are told, cannot be done voluntarily because of its ‘ontological status’, as we would say today; it consists in an absence, in something that is not.131 Furthermore she states that the view that ‘evil is a mere privation, negation, or exception from the rule’ is ‘by no means only Socrates’ opinion’.132 A number of the claims in this passage are problematic: first, Arendt provides no defence of, n or argument for, the claim that the objects of thought can only be lovable things. The general meaning of what she says here seems to be that thinking can be equated with a ‘quest for meaning’ which Socrates apparently refers to as ‘eros’ (a kind of love or desire). Arendt does not cite the passages from the Socratic dialogues which she appears to have in mind here so it is difficult properly to reconstruct her argument. In any case, if Socrates does claim that there is a quest for meaning and that it is characterized by desire or love, is Arendt correct in equating it with her notion of thinking? Let us, for the moment, agree to this: so thinking is a loving or desirous pursuit of meaning. How is it that such a pursuit is only concerned with lovable things, that is, things to be loved or desired? Could it not quest after things to be despised? Informing all of Arendt’s vague and implied argumentation are the first and second Socratic paradoxes: that no one desires evil and therefore that no one who knows or believes something to be evil does it willingly. Thinking, which is a desire, a quest for meaning, can only desire things which can be desired – and therefore it cannot desire evil since evil cannot be desired. However, Arendt complicates things further by claiming that, because evil cannot be desired, it therefore cannot be done voluntarily because of its ontological status: evil cannot be desired because it does not exist as a definite substance. It is, rather, insubstantial, it is nothing, and an object of desire must be something, not nothing. Arendt is here conflating two separate arguments – one is about the existential status of evil and the other is about the desirability, or undesirability, of evil. In addition, she creates a level of obfuscation by applying an Augustinian doctrine to a Socratic paradox: Socrates does not hold that no one desires evil because of its ontological status; rather, for Socrates, one does not desire evil because evil is conceived of as pain or harm to oneself – and no one in her right mind desires to inflict pain on herself. Arendt’s obscuring of the philosophical issues is then further compounded by her claim that it is Socrates who regards evil as a privation or a negation. This is simply not the case – all of the passages in the Socratic dialogues where the first and

second paradoxes are discussed turn on the issue of the desirability of evil, not on any examination of whether evil is a substance or an absence. These discussions can be found in the Protagoras (350a–362a), in the Meno (77b–78b), in the Gorgias (467c–468e) and also in the Apology (25c). In his detailed article, George Nakhnikian analyses the two main treatments of the first Socratic paradox, found in the Meno and the Gorgias.133 Nakhnikian’s thorough examination of these sections demonstrates that the argumentation is entirely based upon an understanding of evil which has nothing to do with its substance or otherwise and everything to do with the rational self-interest of the subject: in all of these interactions with his interlocutors Socrates adopts a formulation of evil as that which causes pain to, or harms, its possessor. As Nakhnikian explains, ‘For Socrates “If x is evil, then x harms those who possess it” and “If x is good, then x benefits those who possess it” are true in virtue of what it is to be good and to be evil.’134 Therefore, a right-minded person, that is, a person who is rational (and therefore also rationally self-interested) cannot desire that which would harm her – it would be logically untenable to suggest otherwise.135 Nowhere in these passages does Socrates suggest that one cannot choose evil because it is a mere privation. Arendt is, consequently, surely incorrect in asserting that the privation theory of evil is Socratic – it is Augustinian (and therefore, of course, informed by Neoplatonism, but not necessarily by a purely Socratic perspective). Indeed Socrates seems to be of the opinion that evil (or evil things, or bad things) does (do) have some kind of substantial existence. In the Gorgias he poses the question: ‘Now is there any thing that isn’t either good, or bad, or, what is between these, neither good nor bad?’136 A correlative of this mistaken claim from Arendt is yet more confusion regarding Augustinian doctrine and the Socratic approach: we have seen that Arendt incorrectly applies Augustine’s view of evil as a privation to Socrates’ contention that no one desires evil; she also, therefore, gives the false impression that the Socratic notion can be applied to Augustine – that is, that Augustine, like Socrates, holds that evil cannot be desired and therefore cannot be done willingly. Yet Augustine does think that evil can be done voluntarily – it can be chosen as an act of free will. Its insubstantial nature notwithstanding, evil (the turning away from the good, and therefore from God) can and is freely chosen by human beings. A further perplexing layer is added to the discussion when Arendt refers to ‘Plato’s admission that men can and do commit evil voluntarily’.137 Despite her valorizing of the Socratic position, it would seem that Arendt is not entirely in agreement with it – she accepts evil can be desired

and therefore done willingly. Of course much of this turns on the question of how to define evil. If it is defined, as it is in the Socratic dialogues mentioned above, as that which causes pain or harm to its possessor, then it seems simple to accept the a priori Socratic argument that an ordinary, sane, rational (thinking) person would not assent willingly to evil, knowing it to be evil. A person may, of course, on this understanding, mistakenly commit evil, thinking it to be good. Yet no one, it might seem, could know or strongly believe an act is evil, and therefore that it will harm him- or herself, and still, without coercion, acquiesce in it. However, as Beatty ma kes clear, Arendt ‘would like to call Eichmann’s acts “evil” and argue that thinking would have precluded such acts. However, in Eichmann in Jerusalem she suggests that Eichmann viewed such evil acts as means to his own self-advancement.’138 Arendt certainly would like to call Eichmann’s deeds evil and, indeed, we would no doubt be inclined to agree – if anything can be called evil, then surely the Holocaust is one such event. In which case, the Socratic characterization of evil does not appear adequate: if the criterion by which evil is recognized is the harm done to the acting subject rather than that done to the receiving object, then we might struggle to call Eichmann’s actions evil. For, prima facie, it would seem that his evil deeds did not (at least for a long time) cause him harm or pain – rather, his actions brought him success in his career and personal life. Therefore, on this reading, Eichmann’s actions were not evil. Beatty summarizes what is needed in this argument: ‘What must be shown in the Gorgias, the Republic, and in Arendt’s paper as well is that one’s own utmost happiness indeed necessitates abstention from evil, where evil means not harm to oneself but harm to others.’139 Arendt’s work in this regard is far from successful. In fact the only route of argumentation open to her, and indeed the one that she takes, is the very route Socrates follows in his discussions of justice: Arendt seeks to show that harming others causes harm to oneself and therefore that evil (the harm to oneself caused by hurting others) is to be avoided. Arendt’s claim is that acts of evil which inflict pain on others cause a kind of troubling psychic dissonance in the mind of the evildoer, such that the two parts of the self required for the dialogue of thought begin to contradict one another, thereby creating a tumultuous inner life which is unpleasant and even harmful. This notion is dubious and Arendt’s argument is far from convincing. My treatment of this idea can be found in the subsequent chapter on living with oneself. There is an additional problem: though at first glance it seems obvious to assent to the notion that no one would knowingly or willingly cause harm to

him- or herself, human psychology is in fact much stranger, more complicated and indeed more perverse than this allows. Human beings can and do knowingly inflict harm on themselves. One can desire evil as harm to oneself. Indeed, human perversity prompts Fyodor Dostoyevsky to ask, What can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself – as though that were so necessary – that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely. … And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point.140 Later on I consider the case of Shakespeare’s Macbeth as an individual who seems to commit evil freely, knowing it to be evil and, indeed, because it is evil and yet knowing in advance that it will cause him harm in the form of a tortured conscience. Somehow both the transgressive nature of the deed and the knowledge that its doing will torment him do not deter Macbeth. On the contrary – these features fascinate him.

Characterizing the dialogue of thought Arendt’s concept of thinking and the moral relevance she attaches to it is further delineated through her characterization of thinking as dialogue. The most frequent description Arendt employs for the dialogic nature of thought is that of a ‘silent dialogue between me and myself’. There is an intuitive credibility to this portrait of thinking – certainly at times it seems as though thinking is akin to engaging in dialogue with oneself; when one thinks a matter through it can often feel as though one is conversing with oneself. Yet this idea encounters difficulties when it is imbued with moral significance: Even if thinking is best

conceived of as a dialogic exchange between two parts of the self, why should this hold any particular ethical relevance? Why should my talking to myself through thought have any bearing on my ethical conduct? One response to this query would be to assert that the discursive partner found in the self is in fact a representation of the Other, such that the internal dialogue is characterized by a consideration of the Other. This is Beatty’s interpretation: he contends that Arendt ‘regards the soul’s dialogue with itself as an interiorization of the individual’s dialogue with others’.141 As evidence for this reading Beatty cites a passage in ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’ in which Arendt, according to Beatty, ‘speaks of taking “this otherness (alteritas) … into account”’.142 He argues that Arendt ‘seems to be suggesting, although this is not stated explicitly here, that we take others into account’.143 In the footnotes to his article he refers to a place in her work where she is more explicit: in The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt asserts that all thinking, strictly speaking, is done in solitude and is a dialogue between me and myself; but this dialogue of the two-in-one does not lose contact with the world of my fellow-men because they are represented in the self with whom I lead th e dialogue of thought.144 This passage is less equivocal than the one on which Beatty relies. Beatty’s quote is from the following section of Arendt’s ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’: I am not only for others but for myself, and in this latter case, I clearly am not just one. A difference is inserted into my Oneness. We know of this difference in other respects. Everything that exists among a plurality of things is not simply what it is, in its identity, but it is also different from other things; this being different belongs to its very nature. When we try to get hold of it in thought, wanting to define it, we must take this otherness (alteritas) or difference into account. When we say what a thing is, we always also say what it is not; every determination, as Spinoza has it, is a negation. Related to itself alone it is the same … and all we can say about it in its sheer identity is ‘A rose is a rose is a rose.’ But this is not at all the case if I in my identity (‘being one’) relate to myself. This curious thing that I am needs no plurality in order to establish difference; it carries the difference within itself when it says: ‘I am I.’145 What is being suggested by Arendt in this extract is far less clear than Beatty

implies. Beatty’s conjecture is that when Arendt speaks of taking otherness into account she means other people and, therefore, the moral perspectives of other people. It is certainly not categorically clear from this passage that Arendt equates ‘otherness’ with other people as moral persons with particular moral attitudes. Indeed she seems to be considering ‘otherness’ as a metaphysical status (rather than as a representation of other people): ‘Otherness’ appears to be an expression of predicative existence – all that exists, exists as a given, particular thing and therefore does not exist as another, different thing. Without doubt this is a rather enigmatic passage and, therefore, the strongest viable claim one can make is that it is simply not at all clear that by ‘otherness’ Arendt means other human beings and their moral views. In any case, however, it is possible to assent to Beatty’s line of argument – the quote from The Origins of Totalitarianism, which is far clearer, does suggest that the dialogue which Arendt believes takes place within the self, includes some representation of other people within the self. So if the dialogic partner within oneself is a form of representation of the Other, does this mean that the moral relevance of thought as dialogue is illuminated? Is it the case that because in thinking we are discussing something, within ourselves, between ourselves and an interiorized representation of the Other, we are therefore automatically considering the moral attitudes and desires of other people on a par with our own and thereby ensuring that, so long as we think a matter through, we are inevitably showing deep moral concern for other people and are hence likely to act in a way which is considerate of those others and their needs or wishes? This is the question Beatty poses and indeed answers, in a critical manner: The issue here is whether, while the self somehow appropriates the viewpoints of others cognitively, it also takes the others themselves into (moral) account. … Yet surely one can take otherness or another’s point of view into consideration (cognitively) without giving moral consideration to the other and without according the other or his view decisive moral status in conflict situations.146 It is perfectly possible that someone can be engaged in thinking as dialogue, that he or she can be internally discussing a moral decision with an interiorized representation of the Other without this being decisively relevant for this individual’s subsequent choice of action – even if one is thinking (holding a dialogue within the self) in the manner Arendt favours, there remains no guarantee that one will avoid evil (defined as harming others). The commission

of an evil act may be viewed by the perpetrator as the best choice for herself, regardless of what has passed in dialogue within the self. As Beatty correctly points out, Arendt seems to be ‘building “moral reasoning” into “reasoning” such that if someone does not have the requisite moral concern for others, that is, if he does not make an appropriate (moral) response to others, he is not really thinking’.147 Beatty continues, Now Arendt may wish to argue that a necessary condition of thinking (or dialogue) conceived as taking the other’s view into account is moral concern or respect for the other. Although this does not seem to be her argument, if we nevertheless grant her this reply then, still, someone who is thinking could (1) consider the other’s view, (2) have moral consideration for the person enunciating the view, and (3) not make such moral concern overriding in conflicts with what he takes to be his own good.148 I have also suggested that Arendt’s idea of thought as dialogue already contains within it a prerequisite sense of respect for the dialogic partner: I proposed the notion of conversation as a way to understand the dialogic quality of Arendt’s concept of thinking, a notion which necessarily entails a kind of receptiveness and openness to the partner in dialogue that could be construed as a type of moral respect for the partner and his or her views. Yet Beatty is right in asserting that Arendt is not clearly offering such an argument. And indeed he is correct, too, in contending that, even if she were, such a line of argumentation would not result in the conclusion that taking the other into account when thinking inevitably means privileging the moral perspective of the other above our own at all times. In incorporating moral thinking into the very concept of thinking itself, Arendt’s implied arguments about how thinking ensures good moral conduct begin to become tautologous – one can always explain any incident of wrongdoing by saying that the perpetrator simply did not think, for, if she had, she would not have done wrong since thinking necessarily excludes wrongdoing. The argument descends into circularity and is divested of power. It is not dissimilar to the way that Socrates’ reduction of all of the virtues to one – wisdom – and his assertion that if one knows what is evil one will avoid it become almost unfalsifiable since every act of evil can be explained by maintaining that t he perpetrator did not really know what he was doing or else he would not have committed an evil deed. Furthermore, one might query the limiting of the interlocutors in the internal discussion of thought to merely two – the subject and a sort of amalgamated

representation of the Other. Which ‘Other’ constitutes the internal discursive partner? Surely, if the representation of the Other within the self is supposed to represent moral alternatives to the subject’s preferences (i.e. alternatives which are preferable to another), then it is disingenuous to imply that there is only one alternative to the subject’s own view – the amalgamated ‘Other’. Surely there is a plurality of moral alternatives in any given matter which may be quite different from one another, and it would therefore be wrong to intimate that the entirety of moral reasoning can be contained within a dialogue between the subject and one other representative. Indeed, in her essay on ‘Truth and Politics’, where Arendt discusses ‘political thought’ rather than moral thinking, she asserts that properly representative political thought makes ‘present to [one’s] mind the standpoints of those who are absent’.149 She further contends that ‘the more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue … the more valid my final conclusions’,150 suggesting Arendt recognizes the need to represent a plurality of views, and therefore of plurality of Others, to oneself when engaged in thinking. In addition Beatty raises a further criticism, namely ‘that “the otherness” or other view interiorized may be an otherness that supports and reinforces evildoing rather than opposing it’.151 Indeed Beatty applies this to Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann – when Arendt discusses the sense that Eichmann would have had a bad conscience had he abandoned his murderous duties,152 Beatty holds that here is an instance where the internal dialogue of thought could well result in a reinforcement of evildoing, not an end to it. The problematic consequences for Arendt’s ideas are encapsulated by Beatty as follows: In the light of this, either Arendt must hold that (moral) thinking is occasioned when a certain kind or range of otherness or societal superego is interiorized, or that we have a conscience which reveals right and wrong independently of thinking conceived as the soundless dialogue with self. In this latter account conscience is intuitive and innate, not necessarily mediated or awakened by the dialogue with self as Arendt claims. In the former case, we still need to know why acquaintance with certain societal prohibitions will necessarily be decisive and overriding. For, to be sure, societal prohibitions or codes are not, as Arendt and Socrates both maintain, self-certifying; they must be subjected to critical scrutiny and could be rejected. In the latter case, thinking does not lead to moral considerations but our ‘moral sense’ arises from elsewhere.153 With these criticisms in mind it becomes clear that Arendt fails to demonstrate

sufficiently the moral relevance of her characterization of thinking as dialogic. Even if thinking, and especially thinking about moral matters, is best described as a kind of dialogue between parts of the self, there is no good reason to presume that this entails any kind of moral significance or that it can reveal any kind of moral truth. Thinking as dialogue is not a prophylactic against evil.

Ability to think and responsibility Arendt’s discussion of thinking and its moral relevance is further complicated by puzzlingly contradictory remarks she makes about the ability to think. This has significant bearing on the repercussions of her argument for conceptualizing responsibility in evildoing. Let us recapitulate Arendt’s claims: for Arendt, thinking and evil are disjunctive. If one is thinking (properly) then one will avoid committing acts of evil. Of course Arendt has not produced any truly convincing argument of why this should be the case, but she nonetheless holds that this situation obtains. The question now is whether this ability to think (and therefore, on Arendt’s understanding, to avoid evil) is a universal quality which all sane and rational human beings possess. Or is it rather a capability awarded only to a privileged, virtuous few who are able really to think? If it is the former, then any normal person in possession of this ability who chooses not to exercise it and therefore chooses not to avoid evil can be held responsible for that choice and is hence blameworthy and punishable. If the latter is the case, then responsibility seems far less attributable – how could we hold an individual responsible for not thinking and therefore not resisting evil if he or she never possessed the capacity to do so in the first place? It is in regard to this question that a number of Arendt’s contentions are undermined by her characterization of Eichmann. At one point Arendt asserts that if an ‘inner connection between the ability or inability to think and the problem of evil’ exists, then ‘the faculty of thinking, as distinguished from the thirst for knowledge, must be ascribed to everybody; it cannot be a privilege of the few’.154 Elsewhere she states, ‘If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to “demand” its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant, how intelligent or stupid he may prove to be.’155 According to Arendt thinking is ‘an ever-present faculty of everybody’ and an ‘inability to think is not the “prerogative” of those many who lack brain power but the ever-present possibility for everybody … to shun that intercourse with oneself whose possibility and importance Socrates first discovered’.156

Following these quotes it appears that Arendt’s view is clear: everyone retains the ability to think in this Arendtian way and therefore those not thinking (and consequently not abstaining from evil) are doin g so as a matter of choice, they are choosing not to exercise an innate ability. Indeed this interpretation of Arendt’s meaning is strengthened by other comments: in ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’ she portrays wrongdoers as those ‘who refuse to think by themselves what they are doing and who also refuse in retrospect to think about it’.157 In ‘Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship’ she draws a distinction between ‘those who want to think and therefore have to judge by themselves, and those who do not’.158 The language Arendt employs is very much the language of choice – people who do not think are refusing to do so, they do not want to think. What is implied is that it is possible for everyone to think but people frequently choose not to. And the significant further implication of this is that people are responsible for not thinking – if it is a matter of choice, then responsibility is attributable for the (moral) choices one makes. Yet Arendt’s depiction of Eichmann is, in this regard, strikingly at odds with her contentions about thinking being a universal ability and its employment a matter of choice for an individual. This is most evident in her introduction to ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’ in which she refers to Eichmann’s ‘quite authentic inability to think’,159 an assertion prefigured in Eichmann in Jerusalem itself where she discusses how Eichmann’s ‘inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think’.160 Here it would seem that thinking is portrayed as a special, particular ability rather than as a universal capability. On this reading, then, attributing culpability to Eichmann becomes problematic – how can we hold a person responsible for not exercising an ability which he never possessed? And yet, of course, as we have seen, Arendt considers Eichmann fully culpable for his participation in the Holocaust. Arendt leaves her argumentation vulnerable when trying to ascribe responsibility. It simply cannot be the case, if thinking (and subsequently avoiding evil) depends upon whether or not one happens to have the capability of thinking, that we hold individuals responsible for not thinking if they did not happen to possess the ability to begin with. Hence, following this line of argument, Arendt would have to concede that, on this understanding, Eichmann’s culpability is diminished. The problems apparent in Arendt’s position are compounded by her discussions of those who avoided participation in the evil of the Holocaust: she describes them as ‘the few who were “arrogant” enough to trust only their own judgment’.161 She continues, ‘Those few who were still able to tell right from

wrong went really only by their own judgments.’162 Here the scarcity of those in possession of the ability to avoid evil is emphasized – only a select few are even able to think, to tell right from wrong, to abstain from evil. As Beatty points out, if this is the case, then ‘it is incorrect to assert that human beings all should be held accountable for such discernment’.163 And indeed, there is potentially a more worrying consequence: if abstention from evil relies upon one being a member of a privileged, virtuous group with the capacity to eschew evil, and if this group is so limited and select (as appears to be the case given the widespread complicity in Nazi evil compared with the much smaller number of resisters or nonparticipants), then what hope is there for most ordinary human beings?

Morality and politics; thinking and judging Before concluding this chapter on Arendt’s notion of thinking and its moral relevance, it is important to mention another faculty of mind which Arendt had begun to examine (though she never completed her work on the subject): judging. Her reflections on judging were to form the third and final part of her Life of the Mind, which had previously considered the faculties of thinking and willing. Though Arendt’s work on judging remained incomplete at the time of her death, it is a rich, innovative and idiosyncratic account, which adapts Kant’s idea of aesthetic judgement to the political realm.164 I do not propose here to examine extensively Arendt’s ideas on judging. There is excellent work on this subject in the secondary literature.165 Yet it is necessary to make some remarks about judging and its possible relationship to morality. Some Arendt scholars have suggested that Arendt’s ideas about judging, though predominantly directed towards political judging, can supp lement, extend or indeed fill the lacunae in her moral philosophy.166 This is in part because of the freshness of Arendt’s work on judging which seems to inspire many fruitful directions for considering concepts of judging, both political and moral; it is also because, first, Arendt herself tentatively suggests, in ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, that Kant’s model for understanding aesthetic judging might be applied to moral judging,167 and second, because she sometimes uses the terminology of judging in the context of morality, such as in those quotes above from Eichmann in Jerusalem (those who did nothing wrong characterized as ‘the few who were “arrogant” enough to trust only their own judgment’,168 or as ‘those few who were still able to tell right from wrong’ who ‘went really only by

their own judgments’.169 ) My view, however, does not concur with this reading. Fascinating though Arendt’s ideas on judging are, they are neither intended to provide a grounding to her moral philosophy as it concerns the individual perpetrators of the Holocaust, nor to ‘rescue’ her moral philosophy from its own problematic elements. Good moral conduct for Arendt is, in fact, not a matter of judging but rather a matter of the internal harmony of the self. For Arendt, the faculty of judgement is ‘the most political of man’s mental abilities’.170 And its political nature lies in its intersubjectivity. Arendt adapts Kant’s model of aesthetic judgement from the Critique of Judgment, expanding it beyond Kant’s employment of the term for aesthetic judgement.171 Arendt contends that judgement in general, not merely aesthetic judgement, is conditioned by the kind of intersubjectivity which Kant applies to the aesthetic sphere. Arendt distinguishes the intersubjective modality from the objective and subjective modalities: intersubjective judgement is more than mere subjective, personal taste and yet it is not equal to objectivity. Judgement operates in the realm of the Kantian ‘enlarged mentality’, taking into account the perspectives of others, anticipating communication with them and the possibility of wooing their consent: ‘The power of judgment rests on a potential agreement with others, and the thinking process which is active in judging something … finds itself always and primarily … in an anticipated communication with others with whom I know I must finally come to some agreement.’172 Judgement consists in ‘being able to “think in the place of everybody else”’ – this is the notion of the Kantian ‘“enlarged mentality” (eine erweiterte Denkungsart’).173 Furthermore, for Arendt, the validity of judgements is grounded in their intersubjectivity.174 As she explains, when someone judges, ‘he claims assent from others because in judging he has already taken them into account and hence hopes that his judgments will carry a certain general, though perhaps not universal validity’.175 She explains further, ‘From the potential agreement [with others] judgment derives its specific validity.’176 Arendt explicitly frames judging as an inherently political faculty of mind. Her views on judging and intersubjective validity in the realm of politics have inspired deliberative democracy theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib, who see the rational discourse of the public sphere as a means of achieving a form of intersubjective validity for political judgements. Their valorization of this mode of political judging has also sparked criticism from theorists like Chantal Mouffe177 who advocate agonism in politics, that is, the view that political conflict can be a positive aspect of political life, not

something to be necessarily eradicated through forcing the formation of a consensus. Indeed, for Mouffe, such genuine consensus formation is not possible in the dynamic, agonistic political realm. Though Arendt does sometimes use the language of judging when considering moral matters, and suggests extending the notion of the Kantian enlarged mentality and the validity of the intersubjective beyond the realm of aesthetics and into the moral sphere in ‘Some Questions’,178 judging is not, I would argue, central to Arendt’s ethical theories insofar as they concern the motives and responsibility of individual perpetrators of evil. Indeed, I find it telling that Arendt draws few firm conclusions from this line of thinking in ‘Some Questions’ and refrains from attempting a comprehensive defence of moral judgement as intersubjectively valid. Rather, for Arendt, right moral conduct and the right judgement which must accompany it, is guaranteed by a certain unity of the inner self. As we have seen, Arendt draws on two Socratic notions which frame her thinking on ethics: the notion that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, and the idea that it is better to be in discord with all those around me than with myself. Governing the Socratic principles is the Arendtian conception of thinking as an internal dialogue taking place within the self. There must be inner harmony between these two dialogic elements of the self and this is the reason, for Arendt, that a thinking individual will not commit evil acts since to do so would mean living together with a wrongdoer, within the self. Just behaviour is therefore conditioned by a person’s inner life and, on Arendt’s understanding, there is a Socratic–Platonic principle of fundamental internal harmony governing actions in the moral sphere. Seyla Benhabib, while acknowledging that for Arendt morality concerns the conditions of the inner life – ‘through this emphasis on unity or harmony [Arendt] presented a quasi-intuitionist conception of moral judgment’179 – has tried to extend Arendt’s appropriation of Kantian judgement beyond political purposes and into the moral sphere. Benhabib presents a ‘discourse model of ethics’ which demands a form of Kantian enlarged thought.180 For Benhabib, intersubjectivity is the proper form of moral thought and judgement – it is important that ethical judgement be informed by as many perspectives as possible, that it be truly intersubjective and that this quality of intersubjectivity be guaranteed by a civic and institutional culture of public participation. And indeed, for Benhabib, the validity of a moral judgement can be founded on its intersubjectivity. Of course Benhabib is clear in pointing out that grounding the validity of moral

judgements in their intersubjectivity is not a task Arendt undertakes. This is, rather, Benhabib’s extension of Arendt’s thinking. There are some problematic elements to Benhabib’s conception of validity achieved through intersubjectivity, and Arendt’s reluctance to definitively expand the concept of enlarged thought to the moral sphere is perhaps indicative: maybe Arendt was aware of the difficulties such an endeavour might pose. There are at least two significant problems with Benhabib’s extension of Arendt’s project beyond the political and into the moral realm. First, Benhabib asserts that enlarged thought ‘morally obligates us to think from the standpoint of everyone else’.181 Yet, it is not clear how we are to understand the obligatory quality of enlarged thought. Even if we were to agree that, at least on a practical level, judgements which include more perspectives are more appropriate, or indeed better, this still would not obligate us to practice enlarged thought in moral judgements. Second, Benhabib’s notion of applying enlarged thought to morality encounters difficulties at the level of practical, normative ethics. Let us take a contentious ethical issue such as abortion. Benhabib contends that enlarged thought makes ‘the perspective of all involved in a dialogue situation the sine qua non of the moral standpoint’.182 But, in considering an issue such as abortion, how could we meaningfully represent the perspectives of all in our moral judgements? Beliefs regarding abortion can be so diametrically opposed that a form of judgement which could somehow incorporate and reconcile such dichotomous positions seems a chimeric hope. By asserting that including the perspectives of all concerned is an indispensable condition of any moral standpoint, Benhabib sets a seemingly unachievable standard for moral judgements. Her argument remains more convincing at an abstract level. Indeed, we can see that the kinds of objections raised by agonistic pluralists in the political sphere to the belief of deliberative democrats (like Benhabib) that real consensus can be achieved, can also be applied here. The notion that value pluralism can be eradicated from the moral sphere is even less convincing than the notion that it can be removed from the political arena. Similarly, we can question the extent to which the standpoints and perspectives of others can actually prove decisive in formulating moral judgements – an ethical issue may well be examined intersubjectively without the views of other subjects being significant in terms of the outcome. Indeed Iris Marion Young questions the ‘symmetrical reciprocity’ in Benhabib’s account of intersubjective moral judgement: for Young, Benhabib presumes that the positions of those engaged in the formation of a moral (or indeed political) judgement are

‘symmetrical and reversible’.183 According to Young we do not, and perhaps even cannot, adopt the standpoint of others in considering moral matters. Rather the relation between actors in moral deliberation is one of ‘asymmetrical reciprocity’ – the relation is ‘asymmetrical in terms of the history each has and the social position they occupy’.184 This echoes Nancy Fraser’s critique of Lisa Disch’s defence of Arendt’s conception of judgement. For Disch, Arendtian judgement provides a structure for understanding feminist consciousness-raising as an activity which can generate an intersubjective political validity and therefore lead to real emancipation, rather than being denigrated as a retreat into subjective, personal experience. For Disch, ‘a practice such as consciousness-raising need not be seen to effect a sisterly reversal of the public sphere, creating a domain of mutual understanding by means of empathy rather than argumentation’.185 Arendt’s idea of judgement is seen by Disch as a model for the right kind of consciousnessraising. Yet Fraser adopts a more sceptical position. She questions the efficacy of Arendtian judging which is constructed as an internal, rather than external process: rather than actually speaking and listening to others with different perspectives, one is supposed to imagine those perspectives and imagine oneself judging from those perspectives; ‘one elaborates an interior, not an exterior, dialogue’.186 This strikes Fraser as inadequate for the purposes which Arendtian judgement purports to serve: it leads rather to a situation in which ‘one insulates oneself from the sort of provocation that could actually lead one to change one’s perspective’.187 In addition, Fraser raises two important, related issues. The first is the ‘question of how one selects the perspectives one “visits”’.188 As Fraser points out, Arendt cannot mean that we must examine a matter from the perspective of every individual concerned; rather, we must consider the matter from certain representative standpoints. But how are we to determine the relevant representative standpoints? For Fraser, the Arendtian concept of judging seems to invite more questions than it answers. The second issue is how ‘visiting’ the perspectives of others in the process of judging can lead me to alter my own judgement. Fraser asks what one should do with the ‘plurality of different judgments’ one would accumulate in the Arendtian mode of judging. How should one resolve them?189 It is difficult to see how Arendt’s emphasis on maintaining plurality can be reconciled with a seeming need to identify points of convergence and divergence between differing perspectives and effectively abstract some kind of higher standpoint

from them. Fraser realizes that a ‘single higher standpoint’ would result in ‘transcending the condition of plurality’, the very condition which Arendt (and those such as Disch who advocate a form of Arendtian judgement) is so keen to preserve.190 And indeed, it remains unclear as to why or how any of these perspectives other than an individual’s own should prove decisive in formulating a judgement. I could examine a matter from a variety of perspectives without incorporating any of them into the judgement I subsequently compose. One might object that this would then not constitute a judgement since it would not be intersubjective. In which case, the definition of judgement presupposes intersubjective validity rather than justifies it. Furthermore, the problem of truth claims in relation to both political and moral judgement applies here: if intersubjectivity is the only measure of validity when arriving at moral judgements, how are we to proceed if an intersubjective judgement does not correspond to truth? To be sure, defining clearly what constitutes ‘truth’ in moral matters is highly problematic and it is far from clear that a ‘correspondence to facts’-version of truth is relevant for ethical considerations. In any case, my point is that there are other measures of validity in moral discourse which may conflict with the intersubjectivity condition. Despite using the language of judging when discussing moral matters and alluding to the possibility that the kind of intersubjectively valid judgement she deems possible in the political sphere may extend to the moral arena, Arendt ultimately concludes that good moral conduct is not a matter of judging, but, rather, of the internal harmony of the self. Hence judging does not seem to be fundamentally morally relevant for Arendt, at least not insofar as she is concerned with the immoral acts of the individual perpetrators of the evil of the Holocaust. Furthermore, it is far from clear that achieving a truly intersubjective validity in either political or moral judgements is possible.

Concluding remarks Arendt’s argument for a link between thinking and avoiding evil not only has an intuitive appeal but also an ancient pedigree: we have the sense that really thinking about one’s actions can halt wrongdoing in one way or another. When faced with an evil deed we often express the idea that, had the perpetrator truly understood the nature of his actions and the full extent of their consequences – the serious harm he would do to others, the potential guilt and remorse he might burden himself with – in short, had he experienced Gaita’s kind of

transformative understanding of the evil he might do, he could not have helped but refrain from doing evil. Arendt’s argument is occasioned by the frustration she feels at Eichmann’s apparent thoughtlessness, at the way he did not seem to apprehend the very real evil in which he was complicit. Here Arendt seems to have hold of some correct and valuable intuition about Eichmann which touches upon this intuitive link we posit between evil and thoughtlessness. Yet in working it through philosophically Arendt encounters the kinds of problems seen by many philosophers before her who have attempted to show that the exercise of reason guarantees good moral conduct. In addition, sometimes good moral conduct is guaranteed by something entirely different to reason: by a much more primitive and natural sense of morality.191 For, it is surely possible thoughtlessly to commit acts of good as well as acts of evil. If I step out into the road without looking and a perfect stranger immediately puts out a hand to stop me and protect me from the traffic, her response to me can be seen as a moral one, as her coming to my aid and preventing harm. But her response is not one borne out of long deliberation or a great deal of thinking: it is immediate and thoughtless. Thou ghtless actions can, therefore, also be good and we cannot comprehend the notions of goodness or correct moral choices without allowing for those elements not defined by reason and deliberation. Craig Taylor examines the concept of sympathy from a moral philosophical perspective in which he identifies sympathy as a primitive response to the suffering of another. By ‘primitive’ I mean, first, that such responses are in an important respect immediate and unthinking, and second, that they cannot be broken down and explained in terms of something more fundamental such as a desire or other motive that we possess.192 It is this immediate and unthinking, non-rational sense of moral goodness which Arendt’s account of Eichmann seems to overlook – indeed moral philosophers who have investigated connections between reason and good moral conduct have often neglected this kind of moral impulse that is without rational thought. And perhaps some of Arendt’s claims about Eichmann really pertain to this sort of moral inclination: when she describes him as being removed from reality, unable to think from anyone else’s perspective, as apparently unmoved by the knowledge of the terrible fates to which he condemned his victims, maybe she is in fact demonstrating that he may have been not only thoughtless, but also lacking in this more basic and primitive non-rational moral inclination to respond to another person in distress – not only did Eichmann not think, he also

lacked this basic sensitivity to, or awareness of, others’ humanity. That thinking in and of itself cannot prevent wrongdoing is made manifest by an example particularly relevant for Arendt: that of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was undoubtedly a great thinker and yet nothing in his ability to think restrained him from participating in the unjust anti-Semitic public life of the Third Reich. As Dana Villa puts it, ‘The capacity for thought, which Heidegger possessed in spades, did nothing to prevent him from engaging with National Socialism in 1933.’193

Notes 1 Arendt, LMT, 13. 2 Ibid. 3 Arendt, EiJ, 287 (italics in original). Perhaps this ‘realization’ which Eichmann lacked might be akin to Cavell’s notion of ‘acknowledging’ discussed in the previous chapter. 4 Arendt, EiJ, 288. 5 Ibid. 6    In accordance with Arendt’s usage, I shall use the terms ‘thinking’ and ‘thought’ to refer to the same thing where ‘thinking’ is the term in verb form and ‘thought’ the term in noun form. She uses the terminology in this way as well as using ‘nonthinking’ and ‘thoughtless’ as the respective opposite verb and noun forms. 7    Arendt, LMT. 8    For details of the invitation, Arendt’s acceptance and the preparation and delivery of the lectures, see Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 448–60. 9    Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 467. 10 Ibid., 466. Much of what remains of Arendt’s reflections on judging pertains to Kant’s Critique of Judgment and can be found in Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). (Subsequently abbreviated: LKPP). 11 See Arendt, R&J. 12 See ‘A Note on the Text’, in Arendt, R&J. 13 Kohn writes that these three essays were originally prepared as spoken pieces (lectures or public addresses) by Arendt. See ‘A Note on the Text’, in Arendt, R&J. ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, however, did appear in published form in Arendt’s lifetime in the journal Social Re search in 1971. 14 See for example several of the essays collected in Thinking in Dark Times and Politics in Dark Times, and Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft’s Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 15 This approach is taken by Richard Wolin in Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015) and also by Dana Villa in his Arendt and Heidegger, though Villa’s approach is far more sympathetic to Arendt. Wolin has often portrayed Arendt as a rather unreflective disciple of Heidegger, heavily influenced by his work. Villa, like other Arendt scholars such as Seyla Benhabib, is far more appreciative of the originality of Arendt’s own work and the ways in which she sometimes adapts and sometimes rejects and subverts Heidegger’s philosophy. 16 See Wolin, ‘The Banality of Evil: The Demise of a Legend’, Benhabib, ‘Who’s On Trial, Eichmann or

Arendt?’ Wolin, ‘Thoughtlessness Revisited: A Response to Seyla Benhabib’, Benhabib, ‘Richard Wolin on Arendt’s “Banality of Evil” Thesis’ and Wolin, ‘Arendt, Banality, and Benhabib: A Final Rejoinder’. 17 Wolin, ‘The Banality of Evil: The Demise of a Legend’. 18 Benhabib, ‘Who’s On Trial, Eichmann or Arendt?’ 19 Though I think it worth noting that I would tend towards Benhabib’s reading of Arendt, rather than Wolin’s. 20 Hannah Arendt, OT, 470. 21 For Arendt’s discussion of ideology and its role in totalitarianism, see Arendt, OT, 460–79. 22 See Arendt, ‘SQ’, 97, 105, 122. See also Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, in Arendt, R&J, 166, 175, 179 (Subsequently abbreviated: ‘TMC’). 23 Arendt, HC, 171. 24 See Ibid. 25 For this discussion, see Arendt, ‘SQ’, 50–78. 26 Arendt, HC, 170. 27 Ibid. 28 Hannah Arendt, ‘On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing’, in Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1968), 10. 29 Arendt, ‘On Humanity in Dark Times’. 30 Indeed, when asked about it, Arendt portrayed her own way of thinking as free and undirected: ‘I have a metaphor. … I call it thinking without a bannister. In German, Denken ohne Geländer. That is, as you go up and down the stairs you can always hold onto the bannister so that you don’t fall down. But we have lost this bannister. That is the way I tell it to myself. And this is indeed what I try to do.’ Hannah Arendt, ‘On Hannah Arendt’, in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, 336. 31 Arendt, ‘TMC’, 164. 32 Ibid., 163. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 165. See also Arendt, LMT, 15. 36 Arendt, ‘TMC’, 167. 37 Ibid., 173. 38 See Ibid., 170–1. 39 By which I wish to allude to the fact that each thinking process carried out by an agent is necessarily determined in some respect by the subjectivity of that agent. 40 Arendt, ‘TMC’, 176. 41 Ibid., 175. 42 If thinking is conceived of (in contradistinction to Arendt’s idea) as a limited, predetermined process with narrow goals, then this mode of thought may lack the freedom and scope to destroy established notions: such destruction may simply not be in the remit of a thinking process directed at particular ends. Alternatively, perhaps it might be – perhaps the end or aim of the thinking process might be destruction itself. 43 Arendt, HC, 76. 44 Hannah Arendt, ‘On Humanity in Dark Times’, 10. 45 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 92. 46 Hannah Arendt, ‘Collective Responsibility’, in Arendt, R&J, 157 (subsequently abbreviated: ‘CR’).

47 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 117. 48 Ibid., 91–2. 49 Ibid., 90. 50 Ibid., 92. 51 Arendt, ‘TMC’, 183. 52 Ibid. 53 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 96. 54 Ibid., 98. For a similar discussion of thinking as dialogue and of the concept of the two-in-one, see Arendt, LMT, 179–93. 55 Leon R. Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 170. 56 Kass, The Hungry Soul, 171. 57 Ibid., 172. 58 Ibid. 59 Arendt, EiJ, 52. 60 Arendt, OT, 471. 61 Ibid. 62 For a full discussion of the unreal totalitarian world, see Arendt, OT, 341–479. 63 Arendt, ‘TMC’, 160. 64 Arendt, EiJ, 288. 65 Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 272. 66 It is interesting to note that some commentators have recently sought to draw connections between Arendt’s account of the fictitious totalitarian world and the nonsense of current claims about ‘alternative facts’ from the right wing of American politics – see for example Elizabeth Grenier, ‘Why the world is turning to Hannah Arendt to explain Trump’, Deutsche Welle, 2 February 2017 and Zoe Williams, ‘Totalitarianism in the age of Trump: lessons from Hannah Arendt’, The Guardian, 1 February 2017. One must of course be wary, however, of exaggerating the parallels between contemporary political and social conditions and those extant in Germany and Russia in the 1930s – it seems clear that, disturbing as the view espousing ‘alternative facts’ is, it is not enforced in the manner in which the fictions of a totalitarian society would be. 67 For excellent accounts of German resistance, see Joachim Fest, Plotting Hitler’s Death: The German Resistance to Hitler 1933-1945, trans. Bruce Little (London: Phoenix, 1997), Hans Mommsen, Germans A gainst Hitler: The Stauffenberg Plot and Resistance Under the Third Reich, trans. Angus McGeoch (London and New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd., 2003) and Peter Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance 1933-1945, 3rd Edition (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996). 68 J. P. Stern, Hitler: The Führer and the People (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 127. 69 Stern, Hitler. 70 Ibid., 128. 71 This is also apparent from Nechama Tec’s sociological study of the Holocaust referred to by Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman discusses how Tec searched in vain for common sociological determining factors among resistors, rescuers and nonparticipants, concluding that class, education, political and religious affiliation were not determining factors. Rather, these rescuers and nonparticipants did what felt right and natural to them as individuals. See Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 5. 72 Jones, Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust, 117. For the whole discussion of this issue, see 99–119.

73 Arendt, EiJ, 49. 74 Ibid., 48. 75 Christopher Hamilton, ‘Ethics and the Spirit’, Philosophical Investigations, Vol. 21, No. 4 (1998): 315. 76 Hamilton, ‘Ethics and the Spirit’, 320. 77 Joseph Beatty, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations: Socrates and Arendt’s Eichmann’, in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994), 68. 78 Arendt, ‘TMC’, 180. See also Arendt, LMT, 5. 79 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 101. 80 Beatty, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, 60. 81 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 92. 82 Ibid., 94. 83 Ibid., 101. 84 Arendt, ‘TMC’, 185. 85 Ibid. 86 Indeed, Arendt’s idea of friendship appears dubious here: Must friendship depend upon the two friends always being in agreement with one another? Can individuals not have fruitful and fulfilling friendships despite disagreement? One example is the long friendship and professional partnership of the director Werner Herzog and the actor Klaus Kinski, portrayed in Herzog’s documentary ‘Mein liebster Feind’ (‘My Best Ene my’). Arendt herself alludes to the productive disagreements which she would have with Karl Jaspers, her friend and teacher – see Arendt, ‘On Hannah Arendt’, 338. 87 Dana R. Villa, ‘The Banality of Philosophy: Arendt on Heidegger and Eichmann’, in Hannah Arendt Twenty Years Later, 181. 88 Bernstein refers to her idea as ‘novel’ while Denneny calls it ‘original’. See Richard J. Bernstein, ‘Arendt on Thinking’, in Cambridge Companion, 291 and Michael Denneny, ‘The Privilege of Ourselves: Hannah Arendt on Judgment’, in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, 245. 89 Beatty, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, 60. 90 Ibid., 61. 91 Ibid., 62. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid., 64. 94 Arendt, ‘TMC’, 181. 95 Beatty, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, 62. 96 John M. Dillon, Salt and Olives: Morality and Custom in Ancient Greece (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 164. 97    Arendt, ‘SQ’, 122. 98    Ibid., 123. 99    Ibid., 93. 100 Ibid., 105. 101 Ibid., 107. 102 Arendt, ‘TMC’, 181–2. 103 Ibid., 183. 104 Beatty, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, 63. 105 Arendt, LMT, 192.

106 Ibid., 177. 107 Ibid., 178. 108 Beatty, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, 62. 109 Arendt’s assertions about the destructive (indeed dangerous) tendencies of thinking are open to accusations of advocating a nihilistic perspective – if thinking is so destructive, do we not end up with an approach in which nothing has any meaning or value, and therefore anything goes? Arendt admits this difficulty: ‘What we commonly call nihilism … is actually a danger inherent in the thinking activity itself.’ (Arendt, ‘TMC’, 177.) Arendt concedes that ‘nihilism may be seen as an ever-present danger of thinking’ (ibid.). And yet she asserts that though thinking is dangerous, nihilism is not its product. Rather the danger of nihilism comes not from thinking, but from ‘the desire to find results which would make further thinking unnecessary’ (ibid.). So for Arendt, as long as thinking continues, nihilism is kept at bay. 110 Beatty, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, 63. 111 Arendt, ‘TMC’, 179. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid. 114 This premise is of course very significant for Arendt’s argument since one might assent to the first premise (that evil is a privation and without substance) without assenting to the second (that thinking is concerned only with what is substantive.) One might argue that, for example, though blindness can be viewed (with Augustine) as a deprivation of sight, blindness can itself be a positive object of thought. I can certainly think about blindness even if I do consider it to be the absence of sight rather than the presence of something else. 115 Arendt, ‘TMC’, 179–80. 116 It is worth noting that there are alternative interpretations of Augustine: see for example Rowan Williams, ‘Insubstantial Evil’, in Augustine and His Critics, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless (London: Routledge, 2004), 105–23. 117 Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 118 Saint Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 1996), 11– 12. 119 Todd C. Calder, ‘Is the Privation Theory of Evil Dead?’ American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 4 (2007): 373. 120 Calder, ‘Is the Privation Theory of Evil Dead?’. 121 Ibid., 377. 122 Ibid. 123 Saint Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 507–8. 124 Calder, ‘Is the Privation Theory of Evil Dead?’, 377. 125 Ibid. 126 Ibid., 378. 127 Ibid. 128 See for example G. Stanley Kane, ‘Evil and Privation’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Vol. 11 (1980), 43–58; H. J. McCloskey, God and Evil (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974); John F. Crosby, ‘Is All Evil Really Only Privation?’ Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, Vol. 75 (2001): 197–209. 129 Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2nd Edition (London and New York:

Routledge, 2004), 235. 130 Gaita, Good and Evil, 236. 131 Arendt, ‘TMC’, 179. 132 See Ibid., 179–80. 133 George Nakhnikian, ‘The First Socratic Paradox’, in Plato’s Meno in Focus, ed. Jane M. Day (New York: Routledge, 1994), 129–51. 134 Nakhnikian, ‘The First Socratic Paradox’, 133. 135 Nakhnikian does however point out the possibility of a person knowing the better and yet doing the worse – we can conceive of circumstances in which this potential situation could arise. See Nakhnikian, ‘The First Socratic Paradox’, 148–50. 136 Plato, Gorgias, 467e in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1997). 137 Arendt, ‘TMC’, 181. 138 Beatty, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, 63–4. 139 Ibid., 64. 140 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground, Part I, Section VIII (Project Gutenberg eBook), http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/bmxlYmtfXzIwMDkzNzhfX0FO0? sid=24ee91da-490e-4ec2-8e48-226f3e72ac86@sessionmgr4001&vid=1&format=EB&rid=1,9. 141 Beatty, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, 64. 142 Ibid. 143 Ibid., 65. 144 Arendt, OT, 476. Beatty quotes these lines in note 24 of his paper. 145 Arendt, ‘TMC’, 184. 146 Beatty, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, 65. 147 Ibid., 65. 148 Ibid., 65–6. 149 Hannah Arendt, ‘Truth and Politics’, in Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 2006), 237. 150 Ibid. 151 Beatty, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, 66. 152 See Arendt, EiJ, 25. 153 Beatty, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, 66. 154 Arendt, ‘TMC’, 166. 155 Ibid., 164. See also Arendt, LMT, 13. 156 Ibid., 187–8. 157 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 112. 158 Arendt, ‘PR’, 45. 159 Arendt, ‘TMC’, 159. 160 Arendt, EiJ, 49 (italics in original). 161 Arendt, EiJ, 295. 162 Ibid. 163 Beatty, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, 70. 164 The main expressions of Arendt’s thoughts on judging are to be found in the essay ‘The Crisis in Culture’, in Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York:

Penguin, 2006) and in Arendt, LKPP. 165 See Judgment, Imagination and Politics, ed. Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), Richard J. Bernstein, ‘Judging – the Actor and the Spectator’, in The Realm of Humanitias: Responses to the Writings of Hannah Arendt, ed. Reuben Garner, (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 235–54, Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), Bryan Garsten, ‘The Elusiveness of Arendtian Judgment’ in Politics in Dark Times, 316–41, George Kateb, ‘Fiction as Poison’, in Thinking in Dark Times, 29–42, Jennifer L. Culbert, ‘Judging the Events of Our Time’, in Thinking in Dark Times, 145–52, Anthony J. Cascardi, ‘Communication and Transformation: Aesthetics and Politics in Kant and Arendt’, in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 99–131, Lisa Disch, ‘“Please Sit Down, but Don’t Make Yourself at Home”: Arendtian “Visiting” and the Prefigurative Politics of Consciousness-Raising’, in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, 132–65 and Nancy Fraser, ‘Communication, Transformation, and Consciousness-Raising’, in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, 166–75. 166 See for example Seyla Benhabib, ‘Judgment and the Moral Foundations of Politics in Hannah Arendt’s Thought’, in Judgment, Imagination and Politics, 183–204. Others have wondered whether Arendt’s notion of judging and its importance in politics can restore a moral dimension to the Arendtian political arena. On this point George Kateb remains sceptical while Dana Villa defends the possibility. See George Kateb, ‘The Judgment of Arendt’ in Judgment, Imagination and Politics, 121–38 and Dana R. Villa, ‘Hannah Arendt: Modernity, Alienation and Critique’ in Judgment, Imagination and Politics, 287– 310. 167 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 137–46. 168 Arendt, EiJ, 295. 169 Ibid. 170 Arendt, ‘TMC’, 188. 171 See Arendt, LKPP, 68–77. It is worth noting that some commentators dispute Arendt’s reading of Kant’s account of judgement – see for example Robert J. Dostal, ‘Judging Human Action: Arendt’s Appropriation of Kant’, in Judgment, Imagination and Politics, 139–164. An assessment of the accuracy of Arendt’s treatment of Kant is, however, not a task with which I am here concerned. 172 Arendt, ‘The Crisis in Culture’, 217. 173 Ibid. 174 See Arendt, ‘The Crisis in Culture’, 217–19. 175 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 140. Arendt differs from Kant on this significant point: as Beiner and Nedelsky point out, for Kant, ‘the ground for the “common sense” is the identical cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding that all human beings share’. The common sense is universal for Kant, and judgments are therefore universally valid. Yet for Arendt, ‘the common sense that makes judgment possible is based not in universally shared cognitive faculties, but in shared community’. Judgements are not therefore universally valid but, rather, valid for ‘the community of judging subjects whom one invokes in the exercise of the enlarged mentality’. See Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky, ‘Introduction’, in Judgment, Imagination and Politics, xi. 176 Arendt, ‘The Crisis in Culture’, 217. See also Arendt’s discussion of representative political thought in ‘Truth and Politics’, 237. 177 See for example Chantal Mouffe, ‘Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?’ Social Research, Vol. 66, No. 3 (1999): 745–58. 178 See the discussion in Arendt, ‘SQ’, 137–46. 179 Benhabib, ‘Judgment and the Moral Foundations of Politics in Hannah Arendt’s Thought’, 199

180 Ibid., 200. 181 Ibid., 201. 182 Ibid., 200. 183 Iris Marion Young, ‘Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought’ in Judgment, Imagination and Politics, 206–7. 184 Young, ‘Asymmetrical Reciprocity’, 208. 185 Disch, ‘Please Sit Down, but Don’t Make Yourself at Home’, 159. 186 Fraser, ‘Communication, Transformation, and Consciousness-Raising’, 171. 187 Ibid., 172. 188 Ibid. 189 Ibid. 190 Furthermore, Fraser concludes that ‘Arendtian judgment is too dissociated from questions of dominance, subordination, and justice’. Here we see Arendt’s notion of judging suffering the same criticisms as her conception of politics – the idea that something is fundamentally missing from the political arena if questions of social justice are omitted. For Fraser, an account of judgement is needed which ‘does justice to two moments – both the individuality of judgment and its structural locatedness in contexts of inequality’. See Fraser, ‘Communication, Transformation, and Consciousness-Raising’, 174–5. 191 Indeed, Arendt notes that one of the main problems for SS commanders of Einsatzgruppen was not so much getting individuals to overcome their consciences, as getting them to overcome the ‘animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering’ – see Arendt, EiJ, 106. 192 Craig Taylor, Sympathy: A Philosophical Analysis (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 3. 193 Villa, ‘The Banality of Philosophy’, 181. Margaret Canovan also makes this point – see Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought, 269.

3 Evil and Living with Oneself

In Arendt’s lectures and essays on ethics there is a third response to the problems posed by the collaboration of many ordinary people in the extraordinary evil of the Third Reich – the idea of living with oneself. Arendt presents living with oneself as a way of being and a form of moral existence which can prevent wrongdoing. Ultimately the notion of living with oneself proves, like the thinking thesis, problematic, and seems to offer no guarantee of morally good behaviour. Arendt’s discussion of ‘living with oneself’ arises in ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’ from a consideration of broader meta-ethical issues. It is therefore best, I think, to trace the path of Arendt’s thought about living with oneself as it emerges from this meta-ethical discourse about the nature of moral propositions.

Reflections on meta-ethical positions in Arendt’s work In ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, Arendt begins by querying the notion of objective moral standards in light of the evil perpetrated in the Third Reich. She refers to the ‘total collapse of all established moral standards’1 witnessed in the 1930s and 1940s and also to the ‘moment morality collapsed’2 under the weight of totalitarian crimes. In the opening pages of this essay Arendt introduces the notion that at the beginning of the twentieth century, among the many things thought to be ‘permanent and vital’ (in Winston Churchill’s words), and which have not lasted, is morality, or at least ‘the few rules and standards according to which men used to tell right from wrong’.3 Her contention is that the events of the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes have called into question a general belief in the abiding, essential and universal quality of morality. According to Arendt, this apparent breakdown of moral sensibilities meant that it

seemed ‘as though morality suddenly stood revealed in the original meaning of the word, as a set of mores, customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with hardly more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of an individual or a people’.4 Jean Améry expresses a similar sentiment when he states: ‘Yes, the SS could carry on just as it did: there are no natural rights, and moral categories come and go like the fashions.’5 In raising this possibility, Arendt (and Améry) is raising the spectre of moral relativism: ‘An empirical thesis that there are deep and widespread moral disagreements and a metaethical thesis that the truth or justification of moral judgments is not absolute, but relative to some group of persons’.6 In suggesting that morality has perhaps been exposed as no more than mere custom, Arendt is highlighting the possibility that it may be relative and changeable rather than absolute and permanent. Arendt probes the nature of moral standards further by examining this apparent collapse of morals among ordinary people who ‘as long as moral standards were socially accepted, never dreamt of doubting what they had been taught to believe in’.7 For these ordinary people, morality had ‘collapsed into a mere set of mores’.8 She also describes the way in which moral standards which had apparently once been considered immutable were replaced rapidly with the Nazi code which in turn was just as rapidly replaced once more after Germany’s defeat: ‘Hence we must say that we witnessed the total collapse of a “moral” order not once but twice’, she contends, ‘and this sudden return to “normality”, … can only reinforce our doubts.’9 Without specifically articulating them as such, Arendt’s ‘doubts’ pertain to a number of meta-ethical positions. Arendt is questioning moral realism and allowing relativist and sceptical doubts to colour her discussion. However, though she toys with such sceptical positions, Arendt never goes so far as to occupy any of them. There are a number of reasons why, despite the uncertainties Arendt articulates, one can assume that she refrains from adopting a sceptical position. First, even those passages in her work which raise doubts about moral realism are themselves characterized by some ambivalence: Our own experiences seem to affirm that the original names of these matters (mores and ethos), which imply that they are but manners, customs, and habits, may in a sense be more adequate than philosophers have thought. Still, we were not ready to throw moral philosophy out of the window for this reason. For we took the agreement of philosophic and religious thought in this matter

to weigh as heavily as the etymological origin of the words we use and the experiences we have had ourselves.10 Arendt introduces doubts about moral reality only equally quickly to dismiss them, stating clearly that etymology and experience are no more important than the philosophical and religious commitments to a morally realist approach which she discusses earlier in the essay. Sections such as this suggest that when Arendt says ‘we were not ready’ to dismiss moral philosophy, referring to the discussions in her earlier lectures to students,11 she really means that she was not prepared to discard the idea of a moral reality, or the possibility of universal moral truths, in favour of some kind of relativist position. Another indication that Arendt tends towards a broad moral realism can be found in the following excerpt: If you examine the few, the very few, who in the moral collapse of Nazi Germa ny remained completely intact and free of all guilt, you will discover that they never went through anything like a great moral conflict or a crisis of conscience … they never doubted that crimes remained crimes even if legalized by the government, and that it was better not to participate in these crimes under any circumstances.12 Those who are praiseworthy in Arendt’s eyes are those who did not participate in the moral collapse, those who did not take morality to be akin to custom and therefore did not simply exchange the ethical conventions of Weimar Germany for the murderous code of the Nazis. When Arendt states that for these people ‘crimes remained crimes’ she must really mean something different, since, technically speaking, the murder of innocent Jewish people was an act no longer subject to criminal sanctions in the Third Reich. In asserting that crimes remained crimes, Arendt is making a moral rather than a legal point: whatever the legal framework defining actions as crimes or otherwise, certain acts can always be considered wrong. There is a sense then, for Arendt, of abiding moral facts and related truths. In claiming that crimes remained crimes Arendt is really asserting that evil remains evil, no matter the surrounding circumstances. In this instance Arendt entertains no scepticism whatsoever regarding moral reality and moral truth. Furthermore, the tone of much of Arendt’s writing tends to suggest morally realist sympathies. She always discusses the Holocaust in terms which imply that the evil of the events is real and indisputable. Had she been contemplating moral

irrealism and relativism in earnest then perhaps she would have been more cautious in defining Nazi acts as incontrovertibly evil. That she takes no such care implies that she does not take sceptical positions to heart: it seems clear that Arendt considers it to be simply true to say that the Holocaust was evil. Indeed, this is further confirmed by the attitude to responsibility which her approach takes. Both in Eichmann in Jerusalem and in her subsequent lectures and essays on ethics, Arendt focuses on the issue of personal responsibility and the apportioning of blame. She often emphasizes the need for individuals to confront the reality of their participation in the evil excesses of National Socialism and to take full responsibility for their actions.13 She holds those who were complicit in the Holocaust responsible and therefore blameworthy. None of these claims about responsibility would make sense if, underlying them, there were a real commitment on Arendt’s part to denying moral reality. Any dismissal of universal moral facts or truths would undermine the strict application of blame which Arendt seems in favour of. For, if we allow that it is in some sense not actually/really/truly the case that the Holocaust was evil, then blame attributed for wrongdoing begins to seem misplaced and unfair. As illustrated earlier, however, Arendt never denies the responsibility of participants in the Holocaust and never truly questions the notion that it is true that it was an evil event with complicity in it being therefore equally evil. Indeed, if Arendt were committed to a morally relativist position, she would perhaps have more sympathy for the ‘bad political culture’ argument which David H. Jones introduces. Jones asks whether Nazi indoctrination universally impaired the German population in its ability to distinguish between right and wrong. He concludes that socialization and indoctrination into Nazism was far from universal in the Third Reich and therefore that a ‘diminished capacity’ to distinguish between right and wrong actions can only have played a ‘minor role’ in the perpetration of the Holocaust.14 This in turn means that the responsibility of the individuals involved cannot be mitigated by a ‘bad political culture’ – by the sense that they could not have known any better given the prevailing social and political conditions. The strict, committed moral relativist might attempt to advance a different view: first, the relativist would claim that the truth of moral judgements is not absolute but relative to culture. Second, she would argue that, in light of this, there is no absolute truth to the statement ‘the killing of innocent Jewish people is morally wrong’. Rather, its truth is relative to a particular culture. Third, the relativist would perhaps claim that, relative to the Nazi culture of the Third Reich this statement is not true. Rather, relative to a society

dominated by a code of Nazism, the opposite statement – ‘the killing of innocent Jewish people is morally right’ – is true. Hence those who participated in the perpetration of the Holocaust were in fact acting rightly in the eyes of the prevailing moral code. Not only this: for the committed relativist there is no real or factual sense in which they could be said to have been acting wrongly – there is no objective, ultimate, superlative moral code which these perpetrators contravened, only the moral code of their existing circumstances, and to murder innocent Jews was not condemned by that code. The extreme, convinced relativist is then committed to accepting that these individuals cannot be blamed for their wrong actions since these deeds were in fact ‘right’ as far as contemporaneous norms dictated.15 Arendt’s stance defies this position: it is clear that Arendt holds individuals fully, personally responsible for their complicity in the horrific events of the Holocaust. It is also apparent that she does not accept anything resembling the argument which views ‘bad political culture’ as mitigating responsibility. Given her commitment to attributing blame to individuals for their parts in the perpetration of the Holocaust, her notion that ‘crimes remain crimes’ and the tone with which she discusses the Holocaust (an event she considers to be evil in a very real sense), it seems clear that, insofar as it is possible to draw conclusions about her meta-ethical views from her work, Arendt can be considered to have broadly morally realist views. She is neither a committed moral relativist nor a moral sceptic. For Arendt, it is (in some sense or other) really or truly the case that the Holocaust was evil and Eichmann’s part in it constituted an evil deed. Furthermore, this is an enduring fact for Arendt – it is permanently the case that the killing of innocents merely because of their membership of a given group is wrong, and despite official sanction of such actions the fact of their wrongness (indeed their evil) never changes. Hence Arendt views moral truths as not only possible but also absolute rather than relative: it is absolutely true that the Holocaust was evil, not relatively true depending on one’s social, political or cultural stance. Yet Arendt does raise moral epistemological doubts16 – in light of the experience of moral collapse in Western Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, Arendt questions the extent to which moral knowledge is as certain as had been assumed; she observes: No one in his right mind can any longer claim that moral conduct is a matter of course – das Moralische versteht sich von selbst, an assumption under which

the generation I belong to was still brought up. … Whatever the source of moral knowledge might be – divine commandments or human reason – every sane man, it was assumed, carried within himself a voice that tells him what is right and what is wrong, and this regardless of the law of the land and regardless of the voices of his fellowmen.17 Arendt also mentions Kant’s view that while moral conduct per se may not be a matter of course, moral knowledge, that is, ‘the knowledge of right and wrong’ is.18 In ‘Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship’, Arendt refers to another view which she considers prevalent before the horrors of Nazism had become apparent, that though some element of weakness could prevent right moral conduct, knowledge of what that right action ought to be could not be doubted: ‘We were brought up under the assumption: Das Moralische versteht sich von selbst, moral conduct is a matter of course. … To be sure, every once in a while we were confronted with moral weakness, with lack of steadfastness or loyalty … but we had no idea how serious such things were and least of all where they could lead.’19 Arendt is referring here to the notion of akrasia or weakness of will – the idea that one can know what the better (moral) course of action is and yet lack the strength of will to accomplish it. Socrates, of course, sought to deny the possibility of akrasia and denounced it in the Protagoras. For Socrates, there is only really one virtue – knowledge – and all others are a question of knowledge: ‘Everything is knowledge – justice, temperance, courage.’20 He argues, therefore, that failure to pursue the good is not a result of weakness of will (a lack of courage or some other virtue) but rather a lack of knowledge: ‘No one goes willingly toward the bad or what he believes to be bad; neither is it in human nature, so it seems, to want to go toward what one believes to be bad instead of to the good.’21 So ‘those who make mistakes with regard to the choice of pleasure and pain, in other words, with regard to good and bad, do so because of a lack of knowledge’.22 According to Socrates, one cannot know the better and do the worse – if one does the worse, then it is clear on a Socratic account, that one did not truly know what the better course of action was. Since then, many moral philosophers have engaged with the concept of weakness of will and there is a voluminous body of literature on the subject.23 Arendt herself does not engage in these discussions yet her mention of the notion of moral weakness serves a particular purpose in her work: she is highlighting what she considers a fairly common view that although right moral conduct could be frustrated by human weakness, knowledge of the right way to act was

indubitable and obvious. She is, in light of the experience of the crimes of the Third Reich, drawing a contrast with the post-Holocaust world in which she seems to be questioning the possibility not merely of human moral courage but also of moral knowledge itself. In ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, Arendt again tries to elucidate this apparently prevalent sense of certainty about moral knowledge before the Holocaust: ‘We deal … with the assertion, upheld by all philosophers who ever touched the matter, that, first, there is a distinction between right and wrong, and that it is an absolute distinction, unlike distinctions between large and small, heavy and light, which are relative; and that, second, every sane human being is able to make this distinction.’24 Later in the same passage Arendt describes the Socratic statement ‘It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong’ as the ‘basic assumption of all moral philosophy’ and asserts that there exists a conviction that ‘this statement is self-evident to every sane person’ which, in light of contemporaneous experience, ‘has not stood the test of time’.25 A dissection of these passages proves useful in understanding Arendt’s implied meta-ethical position. There are some problematic elements: Arendt claims that all philosophers who have ever considered morality have adhered to absolute, rather than relative, distinctions. It is not immediately apparent why she makes this claim, not least because it seems evident that it is false – many philosophers have doubted absolute moral distinctions and prohibitions on certain kinds of action regardless of the circumstances, from the recorded statements of Sophists like Thrasymachus of ancient Greece, to the questions raised by Hume about the distinction between fact and value, to the relativistic thrust of many of Nietzsche’s ideas, to the British moral philosophers of the twentieth century like A. J. Ayer, R. M. Hare and C. L. Stevenson, all of whom express doubts about the reality of morals and subsequently about their absolute claim to truth. We can perhaps assume that it is employed as a rhetorical device: Arendt is attempting to emphasize the shock to our ordinary moral understandings caused by the horrific acts of the Holocaust and the mass complicity involved. In purporting that there had been consistent agreement in the field of moral philosophy on the absolute nature of moral truths, Arendt can make the distinction between this state of affairs and the moral collapse apparent in the perpetration of the Holocaust ever sharper and more distinct. One might offer another interpretation: although Arendt relates her claim to philosophers, perhaps what she is really emphasizing is less the professional philosophers’ views on moral philosophy and more a kind of everyday moral discourse which includes the belief that right and wrong in

morality have definite, absolute, knowable answers. The moral confusion witnessed during, and in the wake of, Nazism and the extensive collaboration from ordinary German citizens called into question that sense of absolutism in morality. Alternatively, perhaps Arendt is expressing a significant point about moral philosophy. Perhaps she is alluding to the fact that all philosophers who examine the moral life have agreed that there is a distinction between right and wrong, but they have very often disagreed on which values constitute that distinction and what reasons there are for it. Arendt is not stating that all philosophers have agreed on the content of moral absolutes. She argues that moral distinctions have been considered absolute and not relative in the way that distinctions of size or mass are. This is surely true of moral philosophy – though moral relativists consider moral values to be relative to culture this does not mean they view values as necessarily relative to each other, or as necessarily reducible to measurable units. Apart from strict utilitarian thinkers, most philosophers, including moral relativists, would consider that moral values do not have a common measure in the way that mathematical values do. A moral issue such as abortion, for example, cannot be thought of as good or bad relative to some other good or bad thing in the way that a mouse can be considered small relative to a lion but large compared to a flea. Even moral relativism can recognize the incommensurability of moral matters – it is possibly this to which Arendt alludes. Similarly problematic is Arendt’s second claim: that the proposition ‘it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong’ is the basic assumption of all moral philosophy. Again, it remains unclear why she contends in such strong terms that this is the case – as many of the Socratic dialogues attest, this view has constantly been challenged in philosophy.26 Indeed Socrates and Plato themselves encounter difficulties in advocating it and, in The Republic, Socrates only really succeeds in his claim that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it by showing that an unjust soul is a disordered, and therefore implicitly unhappy, soul – a description which relies heavily on the contestable notion that disorder of the soul or rule of the soul by desires or spirit rather than reason necessarily entails unhappiness.27 Again, Arendt is perhaps adopting a rhetorical device to accentuate the difference between a pre-Nazism world supposedly defined by the Socratic idea that it is better to suffer injustice than to inflict it and the world of the Third Reich, where this very commitment had been so drastically reversed. Then again, she may be proposing a more substantial yet

subtle point: it is the case that most philosophers have tended to defend the view that acting morally is a necessary condition of the happy or flourishing human life. The mere fact that moral philosophers concern themselves with morality at all means they must consider it of deep significance for human beings. Certainly, challenges to this position have emerged but they are always met with more responses aiming to show that the unjust man truly is unhappy. A modern example is Raimond Gaita’s opposition to Aurel Kolnai’s view. Gaita quotes Kolnai: When Plato argues that ‘to suffer wrong is better than to inflict it’ and that ‘the just man is happy’ – he was not the first and by no means the last dealer in such edifying stock-in-trade – I feel impressed with the mass of intellectual distortion, bel esprit ungenuineness and cheap preaching packed into a concise aphoristic form. In the plain natural sense in which it is better to win than to lose battle, or better to be the rider than the horse, or an eater of beef than a beast of prey, it is patently better to inflict wrong (that one gets away with it is presumed) than to suffer it; and in an equally plain moral sense, he who does not inflict wrong is a better man than he who does.28 For Kolnai, ‘I ought to abstain from wrongdoing because it is evil, not because it is, truly or allegedly, bad for me. Justice is good, whether it brings happiness or unhappiness, or neither, to him who practises it.’29 Gaita, however, contests this view: he considers the deep remorse that wrongdoers can feel in the light of Socrates’ words and indicates that this can be seen as a manifestation of the harm evildoers do to themselves. Remorse is, for Gaita, ‘in a Socratic light’, the ‘understanding of what it is to do evil and what becomes of us when we do it’.30 Gaita contends that ‘remorse is a recognition of the reality of evil’.31 In other words, the wrongdoer who recognizes the real evil of his deed suffers. Gaita is reiterating the moral philosophy argument that the unjust man who understands his injustice truly is unhappy. Hence Arendt is correct if she is asserting that one central motivation in moral philosophy has been to show that wrongdoing causes real harm to perpetrators. Arendt’s discussions on these subjects are tainted by a certain degree of ambiguity. Yet there is a point of clarity regarding moral epistemology: in many of the sections quoted above, Arendt refers to the idea that every sane human being is capable of moral knowledge, that is to say, every person is equally able to tell right from wrong, and the evil of certain actions (and therefore the proscription of those actions) is self-evident to all mentally sound individuals.

This is the common belief which she claims was shattered by the experience of widespread participation in the evil of the Holocaust. And indeed this apparent common belief is, in part, a meta-ethical epistemological position: to hold that all sane human beings can distinguish between right and wrong is to contend that moral knowledge is certainly possible and indeed attainable by everyone. This point, however, is accompanied by a caveat which may give another indication of Arendt’s broad commitment to moral realism: one might argue that moral knowledge is definitely possible without conceding that it must relate to absolute, universal truths. One could assert that moral facts and truth claims relating to those facts are actually relative rather than absolute, without denying the possibility of moral knowledge. On this argument, moral knowledge is possible, but the kind of moral knowledge one can achieve is only relative to the moral community in which one exists and not universal or absolute. Clearly, this is not the type of moral knowledge with which Arendt is concerned: in various places in her work, Arendt appears to presume that there are, in some sense or other, universal moral truths – in her discussion of the evil events of the Holocaust, Arendt maintains that ‘crimes remained crimes’ even though sanctioned by the state. In other words, for Arendt, the acts which constituted these crimes remained evil and therefore to be avoided, despite the granting of official permission. Proceeding on the assumption that Arendt generally adheres to a morally realist outlook and to the notion of absolute, universal moral truths, there is only one sense in which she can be questioning the possibility of moral knowledge: there are moral truths, but how can we come to know them? This is the level at which Arendt pitches her moral epistemological doubts. And it is the actual experience of the mass perpetration of the abhorrent acts of the Holocaust which engenders these doubts: Arendt clearly identifies herself as one of those who, before the Nazi rise to power, had considered moral knowledge a matter of course for normal, sane people. That so many apparently normal, mentally sound individuals could have become complicit in acts of such incontestable evil throws the claim that moral knowledge is possible, and indeed possible for all, into doubt. In ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, Arendt enters into a discussion on the nature of moral knowledge: Moral propositions, like all propositions claiming to be true, must be either self-evident or sustained by proofs or demonstrations. If they are self-evident, they are of a coercive nature; the human mind cannot help accepting them, it

bows to the dictate of reason. The evidence is compelling and no argument to sustain them is needed, no discourse except elucidation and clarification. … Moral propositions have always been held to be self-evident and it was very early discovered that they can’t be proved, that they are axiomatic.32 Prima facie it appears that contending that moral principles are self-evident and do not require proofs does not correspond with Arendt’s idea of the moral relevance of the thinking process. In what sense is a procedure of thought useful in arriving at moral propositions if they are, to begin with, axiomatically true or not? It surely then becomes merely a matter of acceptance rather than requiring a process. In addition, Arendt’s contention here suggests that she perhaps has a view of morality which is close to intuitionism. Intuitionism as espoused by G. E. Moore and other philosophers33 is the view that moral properties such as goodness are simple indefinable properties – the idea of ‘good’ cannot be dismantled into smaller constituent parts, nor can it be explained. Furthermore, intuitionism states that claims about what is good are self-evidently true or false and we cannot give reasons for them. In other words, one simply knows by intuition that something is good – one can see it in the way one can see that 2 + 2 = 4. Several difficulties in intuitionism have been identified and if Arendt’s moral thought is intuitionist, then it would be subject to these difficulties. It is, for instance, problematic to equate perceiving the truth of a moral proposition with seeing the truth of a mathematical equation – if someone were to disagree with another and say 2 + 2 = 5, that person would be simply incorrect. However if someone were to disagree with another by saying, for example, euthanasia is always wrong, then we could not hold that that person was incorrect in that view in the same way as she would be incorrect if she pronounced 2 + 2 = 5. Furthermore, the fact that intuitionism states that we cannot give reasons for considering certain actions good or right, but must instead rely on self-evidence, seems to miss something important about morality: we expect reasons for moral decisions, not only in order to navigate the difficulties in moral dilemmas but also since it seems an integral part of morality – if I claim that euthanasia in the right circumstances is right, it is a natural part of moral discourse that my interlocutors would expect me to give my grounds for this view. A position such as the intuitionist one excludes this important premise of morality. If Arendt’s view could be fully identified with this intuitionist position then her ideas would encounter the same criticisms. Arendt is not, however, a full-blown intuitionist. She does not consider moral propositions to be like mathematical

ones: she asserts that there is ‘something wrong with this assumption of selfevidence for moral commandments as though the “Thou shalt not bear false testimony” could ever have the same validity as the statement two and two equal four’.34 At the very least, she does not seem to think that moral propositions, if they are self-evident, possess the kind of self-evidence present in mathematical equations. If she thinks they are self-evident at all, it is clear that she does not think, as an intuitionist typically would, that they are axiomatic in the same way as mathematical propositions. For this reason, and also because Arendt expresses such ambiguity in general in her meta-ethical discussions, it would not be correct to identify her as an intuitionist. Nonetheless, her ethical thought does include intuitionist elements. And the fact that this appears contrary to the idea that a special kind of thinking process can reveal the truth of moral propositions is a problem which plagues, and perhaps undermines, the whole thinking thesis. In any case, at this juncture in her discussion in ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, Arendt is claiming that moral propositions are self-evident. This is the view that she suggests was widespread prior to the advent of Nazism and which was challenged by the events of the Holocaust – if moral precepts are selfevidently true, then the moral prohibition on the murder of innocents simply because of their chance membership of a certain group must be one such maxim. The fact that so many people seemed not to have taken for granted this axiomatic truth and, instead, chose to participate in killing (or facilitating the killing of) innocents suggests that perhaps moral propositions are not in fact self-evident in this way. Consequently, as explained above, Arendt directly questions the presumption of self-evidence: ‘To be sure, a few had known before that there was something wrong with this assumption of self-evidence for moral commandments as though the “Thou shalt not bear false testimony” could ever have the same validity as the statement: two and two equal four.’35 If at this point the thrust of Arendt’s argument appears to be directed towards a sceptical repositioning regarding the axiomatic nature of moral dicta, she nonetheless does not go so far as to reject the idea of moral propositions as self-evident. In ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, we recall, Arendt discusses the ‘few, the very few’ who remained free of guilt in Nazi Germany and asserts that they never went through anything like a great moral conflict or a crisis of conscience. They did not ponder the various issues – the issue of the lesser evil or of loyalty to their country or to their oath, or whatever else there might have been at stake. Nothing of the sort. They might have debated the pros and cons

of action and there were always many reasons that spoke against the chances of any success in this direction; also they might have been afraid, and there was much to fear. But they never doubted that crimes remained crimes even if legalized by the government. … In other words, they did not feel an obligation but acted according to something which was self-evident to them even though it was no longer self-evident to those around them.36 Here we encounter what amounts to the clearest rendering of Arendt’s position – moral knowledge is a matter of apprehending axiomatic principles, but this kind of knowledge is not universally possible. That is to say, moral principles are only self-evident for particular people and it was the self-evidence of the principles to those people which prevented them from becoming complicit in such heinous acts. Arendt’s picture here of the moral landscape in the Third Reich can be summarized thus: the experience of widespread collaboration in evil during the reign of Nazism suggests that many people do not simply know what the right thing to do is. To put it another way: many people, it would seem, do not know that it is absolutely and universally true that to murder innocent people is wrong. Rather, they appear to need guidance in the form of the rules, laws, customs and mores of society. And when those laws are suddenly reversed such that what was previously considered wrong is now sanctioned and indeed encouraged, at the very least, many people are thrown into moral confusion. Rather than simply knowing for themselves what the right thing to do is, in their confusion they adhere to the rules given to them without considering their rightness or wrongness. Yet among them there remain people who are not confused at all – even when the customs change they possess a deeper knowledge of, and commitment to, what they see as right. These are the people for whom complicity in evil is simply unthinkable. They are the individuals Arendt describes as being the only morally reliable people ‘when the chips are down’ – ‘those who say “I can’t”’.37 But who are these special people? What distinguishes them from the rest? In response to this question Arendt examines two models: the Platonic and the Socratic. Arendt first considers the Platonic doctrine of ‘Forms’: ‘Not through discourse, but by looking toward these Forms, visible to the eyes of the mind, the philosopher is informed by Truth, and through his soul … he partakes of the invisible, imperishable, unchangeable Truth. He partakes of it, that is, through seeing and beholding it, not through reasoning and argument.’38 Arendt

comments, ‘When I told you of the self-evidence of general moral statements, of their compelling nature for those who perceive them and of the impossibility of proving their axiomatic verity to those who do not perceive them, I was talking in Platonic rather than Socratic terms.’39 For Arendt, ‘Plato’s doctrine of Ideas introduced … standards and measurements into philosophy, and the whole problem of how to tell right from wrong now boiled down to whether or not I am in possession of the standard or the “idea” which I must apply in each particular case.’40 Indeed Arendt emphasizes the credibility of the Platonic approach in moral philosophy: If you think these matters through, you will easily arrive at the Platonic solution: those few whose nature, the nature of their souls, lets them see the truth, don’t need any obligation, any ‘Thou Shalt – or else’, because what matters is self-evident. And since those who don’t see the truth can’t be convinced by arguments, some means has to be found to make them behave, to force them to act, without being convinced – as though they, too, had ‘seen’.41 This seems to correspond with Arendt’s depiction of the moral landscape in Nazi Germany – a small number of special individuals who always knew that participation in the Holocaust was wrong, surrounded by a larger number of people to whom the knowledge of these absolute prohibitions was not immediate and for whom the laws and sanctions of society provided their only moral compass. Arendt presents the Platonic model as one response to the question of how to distinguish the few special, yet ordinary people who did not participate in Nazi evil from the considerably larger number of apparently normal individuals who did. On this account, what enables this group to always avoid evil regardless of the circumstances is their possession of some special insight, their privileged access to a standard revealed to them according to which they can judge the rightness or wrongness of an action. Yet Arendt does not, in fact, subscribe to this Platonic understanding of moral knowledge and moral conduct. Rather, she presents an alternative account based on a Socratic model. She contrasts Plato’s approach with that of Socrates who ‘knew nothing of Plato’s doctrine of Ideas, and hence nothing of the axiomatic, nondiscursive self-evidence of things seen with the eyes of the mind’.42 The Socratic model Arendt describes posits that people who ‘live with themselves’ know how to avoid wrongdoing – they do not require special insight but rather live their lives in such a way that the evil of a deed (such as participating in the perpetration of the Holocaust) and therefore the prohibition on committing it is

apparent to them. It is to this concept of ‘living with oneself’ that I now turn.

Arendt on living with oneself The basic idea of living with oneself stems from the two-in-one quality of the self in solitude, the prerequisite for thinking as dialogue discussed previously. In places Arendt implies that all people live with themselves.43 Yet elsewhere she alludes to living with oneself being a kind of special quality – only very few ordinary people in Nazi Germany resisted participating in evil and these individuals were the ones who ‘lived’ with themselves. We shall return to this and similar problematic elements of Arendt’s ideas about thinking, living with oneself and evil momentarily. First, though, it is important to construct Arendt’s argument for living with oneself and how this purportedly prevents evil. The essential idea is simple: those who ‘live with themselves’ will not engage in evil deeds since to do so would mean that they would have to live together with a wrongdoer. Arendt claims that this is ‘the actual reason it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong: if I do wrong I am condemned to live together with a wrongdoer in an unbearable intimacy; I can never get rid of him’.44 Arendt bases the notion of living with oneself, of harmony within the self, on Socrates’ proclamation that ‘it would be better for me that my lyre or a chorus I direct were out of tune and loud with discord, and that most men should not agree with me and contradict me, rather than that I, being one, should be out of tune with myself and contradict myself’.45 It is this Socratic principle of noncontradiction which is crucial – the agent must act in accordance with herself; to contradict herself would be unbearable: ‘If you are at odds with yourself it is as though you were forced to live and have daily intercourse with your own enemy. No one can want that.’46 This is an interesting and credible claim on Arendt’s part – the idea that being ‘true to oneself’ in some sense implies psychological harmony and is therefore preferable to acting contrary to one’s self which would entail psychological disharmony. Yet Arendt confounds this notion with a much less plausible further contention: ‘If you do wrong you live together with a wrongdoer, and while many prefer to do wrong for their own benefit rather than suffer wrong, no one will prefer to live together with a thief or a murderer or a liar.’47 Arendt presumes that to live together with a wrongdoer within one’s own self would necessarily entail discordance in the soul. Arendt summarizes her position thus: Morality concerns the individual in his singularity. The criterion of right and

wrong, the answer to the question, what ought I to do? depends in the last analysis neither on habits and customs, which I share with those around me, nor on a command of either divine or human origin, but on what I decide with regard to myself. In other words, I cannot do certain things, because having done them I shall no longer be able to live with myself.48 Arendt even formulates a kind of Socratic imperative: ‘It is as if Socrates had said every act is wrong with whose agent I cannot go on living together.’49 Later she states: ‘According to Socrates, wrong would be whatever I cannot bear to have done.’50 Consequently, Arendt’s ‘living with oneself’ argument entails two claims, one founded upon the other. The first (more plausible) claim is that it is better to have harmony than disharmony within the self and therefore one ought to act in such a way that one’s actions accord with one’s self, which will mean that one can live with oneself having committed those deeds. The second, less credible claim, is that wrongdoing would necessarily entail an individual not being able to live with herself – that to do wrong would inevitably result in discord in the self. This second claim proves difficult for Arendt to defend.

Problematic elements of Arendt’s notion of ‘Living with Oneself’ Arendt’s idea of ‘living with oneself’ posits an answer to the question of why some ordinary people refused to collaborate in the evils of the Third Reich while so many around them showed no such restraint. Arendt contends that it is because these special individuals live with themselves that they were unable to be complicit in wrongdoing. Can living with oneself be an ultimate moral standard? Arendt essentially posits the idea of living with oneself as a kind of ultimate moral standard: not being able to live with oneself is a final criterion governing an individual’s behaviour – the ultimate sanction on an act is to be found in the thought that one could not live with oneself having committed it. This idea entails at least two complicating issues: the first is that though the notion of living with oneself as an ultimate moral standard has an appealing simplicity and an intuitive, common-sense attraction, its utility as a moral notion is limited since its obvious subjectivity means it cannot become a universal standard. The second issue is the question of knowledge – in suggesting that one is prevented from wrongdoing by the knowledge that one could not live with oneself afterwards, Arendt presumes a kind of perfect self-knowledge: one must always

be certain of how one will think, feel and relate to one’s self after committing a particular act. This is problematic since it is not evident that every individual possesses self-knowledge which is so comprehensive that it allows that person to predict with certainty whether he or she can live with him- or herself after the commission of an evil deed. Put simply, it is likely to be the case that many people simply do not know whether or not they can live with themselves until this is put to the test by the actual commission of an evil act. Let us turn to address the first of these matters causing perplexity in Arendt’s arguments. Arendt herself is aware of the problem. She states that for a person who lives with himself there are ‘limits to what he can permit himself to do, and these limits will not be imposed on him from the outside, but will be self-set’.51 She then goes on to admit that ‘these limits can change considerably and uncomfortably from person to person, from country to country, from century to century’.52 Later she concedes the ‘intensely personal and, if you will, even subjective quality of all the criteria which were proposed to you here’.53 Arendt’s idea of living with oneself has a simple, intuitive appeal. Prima facie it is a straightforward criterion according to which an individual can decide on her actions. To state that ultimately one has to be able to live with oneself after the commission of a particular act and that this consideration in advance affects how one acts, seems to be at least one truthful way of accounting for how moral choices are made. In everyday moral discourse it is common to encounter the notion that ‘I couldn’t live with myself if I did X’ and to cite this as the reason for not committing a particular deed. Although an idea such as this does not necessarily lend itself to the rational articulation of specific reasons for avoiding evil, it does propose a plausible understanding of the moral sense of self which places a prohibition on particular acts for particular people. Indeed, perhaps Arendt’s argument has a more phenomenological bent: maybe she takes herself to be reporting how we experience the phenomenon of morality. Perhaps she is describing how the experience of moral choices actually manifests itself as a sense of the limits of one’s moral self. It is just a fact that I cannot live with myself if I commit a particular deed – it is simply beyond the confinements of my moral self to be able to live with having acted a certain way, therefore I avoid that course of action. Arendt may be right here about the phenomenology of morality: that the experience of a moral choice is the sense, in confrontation with evil, of encountering personal, felt obstructions as one approaches the ends of one’s moral limits. Exceeding those moral limits is then experienced as a change in one’s moral sense of self such that one cannot live in

peace with the knowledge of one’s evil deeds. Perhaps Arendt is merely asserting this as a phenomenological fact about the human experience of morality and how it affects how we behave. The trouble is that if Arendt’s idea of living with oneself is construed merely as reporting phenomenological fact, it is divested of its normative aspects: stating that it is just a fact that certain people cannot live with having committed certain deeds does not imply anything about ‘living with oneself’ being a desirable condition guaranteeing good moral conduct – there can be no sense of obligation derived from this, the sense that one ought to live with oneself. Arendt’s notion appears Kantian yet differs significantly from Kant’s ethics in a crucial respect. For Arendt, we have seen, the ‘criterion of right and wrong, the answer to the question, what ought I to do? depends in the last analysis … on what I decide with regard to myself’.54 This idea has a Kantian resonance: it is almost reminiscent of Kant’s description of the ‘law-making member in the universal kingdom of ends’ which constitutes the third formulation of the categorical imperative.55 But of course Kant’s lawmaking individual is not simply setting limits for herself, she is employing reason to discover the universal moral law – those moral maxims she adopts for herself are universal and therefore hold true not only for her but for all moral persons. Arendt’s descriptions of her ‘living with oneself’ idea do not include this universal aspect. For Kant, there could be no such moral notion as ‘I cannot commit X because I could not live with myself afterwards’. Rather, on a Kantian understanding, the reason I cannot commit X is because it would contravene the categorical imperative: I cannot commit X because I cannot will that the maxim with which I am acting in accordance become a universal law. Furthermore, the credibility of Arendt’s ethical model of living with oneself is grounded in the plausible contention that psychic disharmony in the self is not desirable and is something which human beings seek to avoid. The trouble of course is that there is no good reason to suppose that wrongdoing will inevitably cause contradictions in the self. Arendt holds that humans will not want to commit evil acts since then they would have to live together with a wrongdoer and this would entail the discord in the self which any human would want to avoid. However, living together with a wrongdoer need not produce dissonance in the self – perhaps one is precisely the kind of person who can live together with an evildoer. So while we might accept that psychic disharmony is generally something human beings find undesirable and try to avoid, we cannot also accept that acts of evil will indubitably produce this discord in the self. As

indicated above, Arendt is conscious of this problem, yet she never really espouses a satisfactory response to it. She refers in quite clear terms to the subjective nature of an ultimate criterion which simply requires that an individual refer to herself and some assessment of whether or not she could live with herself after a particular act. Elsewhere in ‘Some Questions’ Arendt states, On a popular level, you find the same attitude in the Roman proverb ‘Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi’ – what is permitted to Jove is not permitted to an ox. In other words, what somebody does, depends upon who he is. What is permitted to some is not permitted to others, from which it follows that many things may be permitted to an ox that are not permitted to Jove.56 So in the end, the question of the moral choices an individual makes is answered by the kind of person he or she is to begin with, and the kind of acts he or she could live with having committed. And Arendt’s insistence that no one will want to live together with a wrongdoer as part of the self is undermined precisely by her admission that what humans can live with having done varies greatly and therefore this cannot constitute any kind of universal moral standard. In her discussion of ethics Arendt claims that wicked people are ‘at odds with themselves’57 and implies therefore that they are unhappy since, on her favoured Socratic understanding, ‘happiness would mean to be at peace with oneself’.58 Yet in the next paragraph she decides to ‘leave this bothersome question of happiness out of account’ since ‘the happiness of the wicked in their success has always been one of the more uncomfortable facts of life which it would do no good to explain away’.59 Arendt’s argument turns first on the idea that being at odds with oneself and experiencing psychic dissonance is undesirable and means unhappiness for human beings. Second, the argument pivots on the idea that wrongdoing will necessarily entail being at odds with oneself and therefore being unhappy. Yet as she concedes here, it is evidently the case that some wrongdoers are not unhappy, which must mean that they are, in fact, not experiencing any disharmony in the self. So evildoing does not necessarily entail psychic discord. Indeed, as Nietzsche declared, ‘the wicked who are happy’ are ‘a species about whom moralists are silent’.60 Mary McCarthy succinctly summarizes this difficulty in her correspondence with Arendt. On 10 August 1954, McCarthy writes to Arendt asking about a problem related to her latest novel: One thing I’m anxious to talk to you about is a problem connected with the

novel. … ‘How do you know that?’ one of the characters keeps babbling about any statement in the realm of fact or aesthetics. In morals, the reiterated question is ‘Why not?’ ‘Why shouldn’t I murder my grandmother if I want to? Give me one good reason,’ another character pleads. This is Raskolnikov’s old problem.61 In Arendt’s response of 20 August, she says, Your Example [sic]: why should I not kill my grandmother if I want to? … The philosophic answer would be the answer of Socrates: Since I have got to live with myself, am in fact the only person from whom I never shall be able to part, whose company I shall have to bear for ever, I don’t want to become a murderer; I don’t want to spend my life in the company of a murderer.62 McCarthy’s response of 16 September encapsulates the problem with Arendt’s idea that living with oneself prevents wrongdoing: I would question one thing in your letter: what you gave as Socrates’ answer to the question of why not murder one’s grandmother: because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with a murderer. Isn’t this really a petitio principi? The modern person I posit would say to Socrates, with a shrug, ‘Why not? What’s wrong with a murderer?’ And Socrates would be back where he started.63 The next letter in the series is again from Mary McCarthy dated 8 December. If there was a response from Arendt to McCarthy’s indication of the problem highlighted in the 16 September letter, it is not to be found in the correspondence. Indeed the second McCarthy letter in a row (from 8 December) mentions a visit with Arendt in the intervening months during which, we may reasonably presume, they must have discussed this very problem. Perhaps Arendt had a response to McCarthy’s query which she did not commit to a letter. Yet one presumes that if she had, this would be found in the essays and lectures of Responsibility and Judgment, a collection of Arendt’s closest engagements with moral philosophy. Arendt’s idea of living with oneself as a prophylactic against evil cannot withstand the criticism that, for at least some people (perhaps more that we might care to admit), living with oneself and doing evil are not mutually exclusive. Indeed literature furnishes us with instances of precisely this counterexample to Arendt’s notion of the wrongdoer inevitably troubled by the fact of living with

his evil acts. In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead, a memoir describing his years in a Siberian prison camp, the narrator tells of his encounter with one particular convict, Orloff. This ‘famous’ prisoner was due to be flogged as punishment and expected to be brought to the hospital afterwards, which excited the inquisitiveness of the other inmates: The prisoners who were already there said that the punishment would be a cruel one, and every one – including mysel f I must admit – was awaiting with curiosity the arrival of this brigand, about whom the most unheard-of things were told. He was a malefactor of a rare kind, capable of assassinating in cold blood old men and children. He possessed an indomitable force of will, and was fully conscious of his power. As he had been guilty of several crimes, they had condemned him to be flogged through the ranks.64 The narrator, motivated by this curiosity, makes Orloff’s acquaintance, stating, ‘Never in my life did I meet a man whose will was more firm or inflexible.’65 He continues, Orloff … was a brilliant example of the victory of spirit over matter. He had a perfect command over himself. … I was not astonished at his haughty air. He looked down upon all around him from the height of his grandeur. Not that he took the trouble to pose; his pride was an innate quality. I don’t think that anything had the least influence over him. He looked upon everything with the calmest eye, as if nothing in the world could astonish him. He knew well that the other prisoners respected him; but he never took advantage of it to give himself airs. … He was intelligent and strangely frank in talking too much about himself. He replied point-blank to all the questions I put to him, and confessed to me that he was waiting impatiently for his return to health in order to take the remainder of the punishment he was to undergo. … At times he was gay and in the best of humours. I profited by these rare occasions to question him about his adventures. Then he would contract his eyebrows a little; but he always answered my questions in a straightforward manner. When he understood that I was endeavouring to see through him, and to discover in him some trace of repentance, he looked at me with a haughty and contemptuous air, as if I were a foolish little boy, to whom he did too much honour by conversing with him. I detected in his countenance a sort of compassion for me. After a moment’s pause he laughed out loud, but without the least irony. I fancy he must, more than once, have laughed in the same manner, when my

words returned to his memory.66 Orloff is exactly the kind of wrongdoer who, on Arendt’s understanding, should be experiencing a discord in the self, a sense of not wanting to live together in psychic intimacy with a person who commits evil. And yet when the narrator attempts to detect a troubled inner life, a sense of regret or remorse in this evildoer, Orloff finds it merely laughable. The notion that he should be disturbed by his own actions, that they should cause some kind of long-term unsettling effect in the self, is utterly foolish to Orloff. Indeed, that anyone could think this evokes his contempt. In fact, for an individual to whom coexisting with a wrongdoer presents no danger of being at odds with him- or herself, it may be the exact opposite which excites psychic dissonance: to live with having done good may be an unbearable condition – to have succumbed to the feeble foolishness of Dostoyevsky’s narrator which arouses Orloff’s disdain. The final words of Aaron from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus convey this sentiment. In this very bloody play Aaron is responsible for deception, mutilation and murder, yet remains unrepentant, even during his own tortuous execution: O, why should wrath be mute, and fury dumb? I am no baby, I, that with base prayers I should repent the evils I have done: Ten thousand worse than ever yet I did Would I perform, if I might have my will; If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul. 67 It is not living with having done evil that has ever disturbed Aaron’s inner life. Rather, it is the thought that he might have committed acts of good which troubles his mind. Arendt’s idea that one will avoid wrongdoing since it would entail living together with a wrongdoer and this would mean a discordant, unhappy inner self presumes that one is, to begin with, not the kind of person who can live together with a wrongdoer. If one is, however, the type of individual who can live together with a wrongdoer, then disharmony in the self is unlikely. Arendt actually refers to the ‘well-known and rather alarming fact that only good people are ever bothered by a bad conscience’.68 While Arendt’s idea of living with oneself cannot, then, provide a universal (or

indeed universalizable) moral standard, it does demonstrate a kind of personal ultimate moral standard. It is credible to imagine that individuals make moral choices based, at least in part, on an evaluation of whether or not they could live with having done the act in question. This must, in turn, depend upon what kind of individual the person is to begin with and what her moral sense of self is, by which I mean the perceived quality of her moral being. Arendt’s idea of living with oneself illuminates this notion of a moral sense of self and is plausible insofar as she concludes that acting in a way which is at odds with oneself will tend to trouble one’s inner life. It is just that we cannot presume that doing wrong necessarily means acting at odds with oneself. However, that is not to say that evildoing never constitutes acting at odds with oneself. Again literature provides a number of instructive examples of individuals who commit evil acts and cannot live with themselves afterwards. They experience a great deal of disharmony within the self, indicating that they have acted at odds with themselves which in turn shows that, to begin with, they were not the kind of people who could have lived with having done evil. Another of Dostoyevsky’s characters is the example of this par excellence: Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment. Having resolved to murder the moneylender and convinced of the necessity of the crime, Raskolnikov, once it is committed, experiences a range of symptoms suggesting severe disturbance in his inner life: mental turmoil, delirium, dreams disturbed by images of his victim. Even when he finally confesses to Sonia his tumultuous mental state is not assuaged and he continues to wrestle with his having committed a murder and attempting to understand his own actions: First Raskolnikov suggests that he was trying to mimic the motives and actions of a great man like Napoleon, subordinating immoral acts to the greatness of the final goal: What if Napoleon, for instance, had happened to be in my place, and if he had not had Toulon nor Egypt nor the passage of Mont Blanc to begin his career with, but instead of all those picturesque and monumental things, there had simply been some ridiculous old hag, a pawnbroker, who had to be murdered too to get money from her trunk (for his career, you understand). Well, would he have brought himself to that if there had been no other means? Wouldn’t he have felt a pang at its being so far from monumental and … and sinful, too? … I guessed at last (all of a sudden, somehow) that it would not have given him the least pang, that it would not even have struck him that it was not monumental … that he would not have seen that there was anything in it to pause over, and that, if he had had no other way, he would have strangled her in

a minute without thinking about it! Well, I too … left off thinking about it … murdered her, following his example.69 Yet in the next breath he rejects this notion, instead claiming it was poverty and concerns over the living standard of his family which motivated him: I resolved to gain possession of the old woman’s money and to use it for my first years without worrying my mother, to keep myself at the university and for a little while after leaving it – and to do this all on a broad, thorough scale, so as to build up a completely new career and enter upon a new life of independence. … Well … that’s all. … Well, of course in killing the old woman I did wrong. … Well, that’s enough.70 Again, the hypothesis is rejected and Raskolnikov offers a different explanation – the crime was a result of his own baseness: ‘I am vain, envious, malicious, base, vindictive and … well, perhaps with a tendency to insanity.’71 This reasoning too, however, he comes to dispute, now stating that power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up. There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare! … I saw clear as daylight how strange it is that not a single person living in this mad world has had the daring to go straight for it all and send it flying to the devil! I … I wanted to have the daring … and I killed her. I only wanted to have the daring, Sonia! That was the whole cause of it!72 Raskolnikov’s last resort in attempting to account for his actions to Sonia is to invoke external evil influence – it was the devil who led him to commit the crime: I know myself that it was the devil leading me. … I wanted to find out something else; it was something else led me on. I wanted to find out then and quickly whether I was a louse like everybody else or a man. … The devil led me on then and he has shown me since that I had not the right to take that path, because I am just such a louse as all the rest.73 The number and variety of interpretations of his own actions which the tormented former student offers, in addition to the symptoms of a troubled mind he exhibits before confessing his crime, demonstrate the severe inner disquietude his deeds have provoked. It certainly seems to be the case that Raskolnikov cannot live with himself having committed evil, or at least, he finds it very

difficult to live with himself, to reconcile himself to what he has done. This example is in sharp contrast to the character of Orloff, a man for whom the notion of not being able to live with oneself having committed acts of evil is simply ludicrous. Orloff appears to experience nothing of the psychic dissonance which plagues Raskolnikov. In simple terms the moral point is reducible to the following: Orloff is, to begin with, the kind of person who can live together with a wrongdoer and Raskolnikov is not. This represents the quality of the moral difference between them. Another instance of an individual tortured mentally by his actions is Shakespeare’s Macbeth. After hearing the prophecy of the three witches that he shall become the king of Scotland, Macbeth appears both troubled and excited by it from the outset. He seems to know the terrible deed which may be required of him to bring about his ascension to the throne and equivocates. Goaded by Lady Macbeth he resigns himself to murder King Duncan: ‘I am settled, and bend up/ Each corporal agent to this terrible feat./ Away, and mock the time with fairest show,/ False face must hide what the false heart doth know.’74 Once the deed is done, however, Macbeth’s once settled mind is in tumult – he imagines he hears voices: ‘Methought I heard a voice cry, Sleep no more:/ Macbeth does murther Sleep, the innocent Sleep.’75 Later he states, ‘To know my deed,/ ’Twere best not know myself./ Wake Duncan with thy knocking: I would thou could’st.’76 He suffers from disturbed sleep: ‘Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep/ In the affliction of these terrible dreams,/ That shake us nightly.’77 And, most obviously, Macbeth is haunted by the ghost of his second victim Banquo: ‘Avaunt, and quit my sight, let the earth hide thee:/ Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold:/ Thou hast no speculation in those eyes/ Which thou dost glare with.’78 It is clear that Macbeth does not seem able to live with what he has done – his mind is extremely disturbed by his actions and never really recovers. Indeed, even Lady Macbeth, who is arguably the more evil of the two characters, is eventually tormented by the deed and descends into sleepwalking madness becoming ‘troubled with thick-coming fancies/ That keep her from her rest.’79 That Macbeth experiences this level of psychic disharmony as a result of his actions indicates that, on an Arendtian understanding, he must have acted not in accordance with himself in murdering Duncan. He clearly cannot live with himself as a wrongdoer so he is, therefore, unlike Orloff or Aaron, simply not the kind of person who could live together with a wrongdoer. In fact one of Lady Macbeth’s speeches seems to confirm this: informed of the prophecy of the

witches she doubts her husband’s ability to do what may be necessary to bring it about: ‘Yet do I fear thy nature,/ It is too full o’ th’ milk of humane kindness … Thou wouldst be great … but without/ the illness should attend it.’80 It is this nature defined by ‘humane kindness’ which Macbeth acts contrary to in killing the king. He therefore acts against himself (as a person who cannot live with a wrongdoer) and, in doing so, invites discord and turmoil into his inner life. One real-life example of a person who could not live with what he had done is taken from the 1999 BBC documentary series Loyalists. The journalist Peter Taylor published a book which accompanied the series,81 designed to tell the other side of the story he had begun with Provos – an account of the bloody sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland between the 1950s and the 1990s. Taylor begins the book with the story of Billy Giles, a protestant who became a member of a paramilitary organization in his youth. Giles was deeply affected by one incident of sectarian violence in particular: in 1982 a young protestant woman was fatally wounded in a shooting by a member of a republican splinter group. This changed Giles’s view of the conflict and his role in it irrevocably: his thoughts and plans now turned to assassination as a means of retaliation. He picked a target – a Catholic friend and workmate named Michael Fay. In November 1982 Giles lured Fay into his car, drove away and later stopped the car and shot Fay in the back of the head. Taylor details Giles’s own words on the effect this act had on him: The split second it happened, I lost part of myself that I’ll never get back. You hear the bang and it’s too late. Standing over the body, it hits you. I felt that somebody had reached down inside me and ripped my insides out. You’ve found somewhere you’ve never been before and it’s not a very nice place. You can’t stop it. It’s too late. … I never felt a whole person again. … I’ve done something and been involved in something that I can’t ever change and I have to live with it.82 Giles was later arrested, convicted of the murder and imprisoned. After his release many years later Billy Giles took his own life. The day before his suicide he wrote, ‘I hurt … I’ve been hurting for years and soon the hurting and the pain and suffering will be over. Everyone is going to say, “fool”. To me, it’s the easy way out. I’m sick of suffering, soon I’ll be free of it all – that’s the driving force – freedom from having to live with my conscience.’83 By the following morning, Giles had hanged himself. It seems that he simply could not go on living with what he had done. The suicide note and his actions make clear that he suffered

from a troubled mind as a result of murdering his friend. His descriptions of losing a part of himself as soon as he committed the crime perhaps indicate that he acted, in some sense, at odds with himself in doing it. The idea of a moral sense of self may be useful here: in murdering Michael Fay, Billy Giles had, as it turned out, defied his own moral idea of himself and this contradiction produced a psychic dissonance which became unbearable to him; so much so, that he could not continue to live with the memory of an act which had so transgressed his moral being. Giles, it transpired, was simply not the kind of person who could live together with a murderer. An interesting tangential point to make here is that this example set among the entrenched sectarian communities of Northern Ireland is particularly useful when assessing the moral landscape of the Third Reich because it provides an analogous ‘bad political culture’ context – propaganda, demonization of the ‘other’ who is the victim of violence, proclamations about the rightness and goodness of killing the other side and so on. Of course it is not the case that the legal situation in Northern Ireland can be compared to the Third Reich where crimes against certain groups were actually legalized. Nonetheless, one can argue that Giles was subject to a political context which could have encouraged him to view his deed as, in some way, good or right. The fact that he did not perceive his actions in this light but rather was deeply troubled by them, once again demonstrates the inadequacy of the ‘bad political culture’ argument. Finally, let us return to the second issue – the question of knowledge and whether or not one can know in advance how one will respond to having committed a given act. Certainly when considering a case such as that of Billy Giles, it seems as though he did not know until he committed murder that he could not live with it. In Loyalists Taylor describes how Giles had been determined to do it, had wanted to do it even; yet the deep impact on him which his deed had and the fact that he took his own life in the end, demonstrates that he could not live with it. But his attitude before committing murder seems to suggest that he thought he could live with it. Giles is a counterexample to the idea that one can definitely know before the commission of a deed whether or not one can live with it once it is done. The assumption here, of course, is that had Giles known beforehand that he would not have been able to live with being a murderer, then he would not have committed murder. This seems straightforward and may well apply in Giles’s case. Yet some of the examples cited in this section become problematic when considered in this aspect – for both Macbeth and Raskolnikov seem to entertain

the notion, before the deed is done, that they will not be able to live with having done it. Yet they are not deterred. Raskolnikov, for instance states, ‘What shows that I am utterly a louse … is that I am perhaps viler and more loathsome than the louse I killed, and I felt beforehand that I should tell myself so after killing her. Can anything be compared with the horror of that? The vulgarity! The abjectness!’84 Raskolnikov seems to be implying that he knew beforehand that he would consider himself viler than his victim once he had killed her. Yet this is not a str ong deterrent for him, though it does cause him to hesitate a little. But though he seems to know he will feel revulsion for himself once he commits the murder and therefore seems to acknowledge that he will, in some sense, not be able to live with himself afterwards, he is not dissuaded from acting. Macbeth’s words suggest that he too knows before murdering the king that the act will prove troubling to him: Why do I yield to that suggestion, Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair, And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, Against the use of Nature? Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings: My thought, whose murther yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man, That function is smother’d in surmise, And nothing is, but what is not.85 The imagery and tone of this passage (the ‘horrid image’ and ‘horrible imaginings’) indicate Macbeth’s own horror of, and aversion to, the notion of killing the king. The suggestion that the thought of murder ‘shakes so my single state of man’ demonstrates the deep and troubling effect the mere idea of it has upon Macbeth. That Macbeth recognizes this before he commits the deed indicates that, in some sense, Shakespeare is portraying a human being who knows he cannot live with himself once he has done it – if simply imagining it causes Macbeth such internal strife, he must know that actually committing it can only mean more. Nonetheless, Macbeth does murder Duncan and Banquo and suffers inner turmoil because of it. As these two examples demonstrate, knowing one will not be able to live with oneself does not necessarily prevent one from doing evil. Arendt does not take up this question of knowledge. She seems to presume that individuals know what they can and cannot live with

having done and that they are always able to make choices based on this knowledge. As we have seen, it is not clear that people can or do possess such knowledge. Nor is it certain that, even if they do, they will act accordingly. Indeed there is a further complicating factor in considering the example of Macbeth, which is identified by Wilbur Sanders. Sanders discusses the key passage from the play quoted above and notes that ‘the hideous impulsion of the “horrid Image” overbears all resistance. … Its hideousness is indeed part of its power, as anyone knows who has stood at the brink of a sheer drop and felt that uncanny and powerful urge to throw himself down.’86 Elsewhere Sanders mentions ‘Macbeth’s torment’ and describes it as stemming from the fact that ‘he knows the depths of the evil, the “deepe damnation” of the deed, and desires it nonetheless’.87 Sanders observes that there is a sense that the transgressive nature of the deed, the recognition of it as evil and horrible, is in itself attractive to Macbeth. Murdering the king seems to hold a fascinating allure for him by virtue of the fact that it is an evil deed. This obscures the picture of knowledge even more: not only could we say, therefore, that Shakespeare constructs in Macbeth a character who in some sense seems to know that he will not be able to live with himself before he commits murder and yet does it anyway, in addition we might now contend that he is almost drawn to the fact that he knows it is likely he will not be able to live with himself. The fact that this deed both contravenes normal moral codes and also transgresses Macbeth’s own moral sense of self such that he knows it will invite turmoil into his inner life not only does not dissuade him from acting but rather encourages him. The transgressive quality of the act appears to be a motivating factor. Indeed here we can augment the analysis of motivations to commit evil offered in Chapter 1: there I drew a distinction between those motivated to do evil because it is evil and those who commit evil knowing it to be evil yet not because it is evil. Macbeth, on this understanding, is a character who commits evil because it is evil, that is, because he is motivated by fascination with the transgressive deed. This is similar to Saint Augustine’s account of stealing pears. Augustine admits he stole pears from a neighbour’s garden not because he needed them or even wanted them but because he enjoyed the thrill of the transgression. In short, Augustine stole the pears because it was evil. He confesses, ‘Wickedness filled me. I stole something which I had in plenty and of much better quality. My desire was to enjoy not what I sought by stealing but merely the excitement of thieving and doing of what was wrong. … Our pleasure lay in doing what was not allowed.’ 88 The thrill of the transgression itself

excited him and this was his motivation. I contrasted this with Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann, an individual who knew he was committing evil but was motivated by reasons other than the evil itself, that is, by banal desires for career success and social status – the evil is a means to these other goals. There is at least one other case which must be added to this schema: the sadist who commits evil knowing it to be evil and yet not because it is evil per se, but rather because of the pleasure he or she gleans from seeing evil in the form of pain caused to others. This is distinct from those individuals who commit evil motivated by its transgressive thrill – Macbeth, for example, clearly does not take pleasure in seeing Duncan suffer though he is excited by the transgressive quality of killing his king. Being thrilled by the commission of evil need not be the same as taking pleasure in the pain caused by evil. Arendt’s account does not answer these questions of self-knowledge and motivation in making moral choices, nor does it convince that living with oneself is a moral state of being which precludes one from committing evil. Arendt’s idea of living with oneself possesses a certain phenomenological soundness – it corresponds to a sense we have of ourselves as having a kind of internal integrity, the breaching of which (by acting at odds with ourselves) causes internal disturbance. It does not seem, however, to provide the protection against wrongdoing which Arendt claims it can; living with oneself is not moral integrity. Is living with oneself the same as thinking? Arendt’s notion of living with oneself is, then, a kind of ultimate, personal and subjective moral standard. Throughout these discussions I have been treating this idea as distinct from Arendt’s claim about the moral relevance of thinking: both ‘living with oneself’ and ‘thinking’ are different moral responses to the problem of the mass complicity of ordinary people in the Holocaust. By deploying these ideas Arendt is seeking to decipher what exactly set apart those individuals who resisted participation in Nazi evil from the rest of the compliant masses – she suggests, on the one hand, that it is because they ‘thought’; on the other, because they ‘lived with themselves’. I think it is right to interpret these two ideas as separate, independent approaches to the problem of Nazi evil, and indeed Arendt’s treatment of them implies as much. Yet, once again, Arendt’s own discussions invite confusion: in places she seems to claim that living with oneself and thinking are the same thing, while in others it appears she holds them to be distinct. A close reading of these seemingly contradictory statements

can clarify Arendt’s position. In her essay ‘Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship’, Arendt discusses the good judgement of those Germans at the time of the Third Reich who chose not to participate in perpetrating the Holocaust: ‘The precondition for this kind of judging is not a highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters, but rather the disposition to live together explicitly with oneself, to have intercourse with oneself, that is, to be engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself which, since Socrates and Plato, we usually call thinking.’89 In this passage Arendt appears to conflate living with oneself and thinking: here living together with oneself is thinking. Though Arendt makes this cursory statement it would be a mistake to consider this her definitive word on the subject, not simply because extracts from elsewhere in her work seem to suggest otherwise, but also because this claim, made so briefly, seems at odds with the portrait of ‘thinking’ she paints throughout her work. If thinking is the same as living with oneself, then it seems very different from the multifaceted, particular process which she describes in most of her discussions on thinking and which is detailed in the previous chapter. In order for the concept of living with oneself to function it must be preceded by a formal notion of differentiation of the self into (at least) two parts, for one cannot begin to ‘live with oneself’ in a moral sense unless the self is divided into more than one part, with which one can or cannot live, just as the two-in-one state of being is a kind of precondition for the thinking activity. In ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, Arendt discusses the notion of differentiation within the self – the two-in-one: ‘Even though I am one’, she writes, ‘I am not simply one, I have a self and I am related to this self as my own self. … Though I am one, I am two-in-one and there can be harmony or disharmony with the self.’90 The two-in-one, that is to say the differentiation occurring in the self in solitude, is a precondition for living with oneself rather than an expression of living with oneself. Later in that same piece Arendt refers to ‘living with yourself’ as something which ‘becomes manifest in discourse between you and yourself’.91 If what is meant by ‘discourse between you and yourself’ is thinking, then Arendt seems to be claiming that living with oneself is made manifest by thinking, a notion which conflates the two. Again, the case must be made for these ideas to remain separate: thinking cannot be merely the manifestation of living with oneself, since thinking itself, as Arendt describes it, is a much more comprehensive process involving many different aspects. What is more, for Arendt, living with

oneself is independently morally relevant, indeed it is more than that – living with oneself is a condition which can, in and of itself, prevent wrongdoing. If living with oneself is ever depicted as a kind of precondition to thinking, and if living with oneself is enough in Arendt’s view to avoid evil, then this necessitates the question: Why bother with thinking at all? At another point in ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, we find the following passage: ‘Conflicts of conscience in secular terms, on the other hand, are actually nothing but deliberations between me and myself; they are not resolved through feeling but through thinking. Insofar, however, as conscience means no more than this being at peace with myself which is the condition sine qua non of thinking, it is indeed a reality.’92 Arendt employs the term ‘conscience’ here though it is not at all clear what she means by this; in the essays and lectures collected in Responsibility and Judgment, Arendt mentions ‘conscience’ a number of times without clarifying its meaning or differentiating it from ‘living with oneself’. Suffice to say that, at least in this passage, it seems that what Arendt terms ‘conscience’ is closely related to what she calls ‘living with oneself’. This passage expresses the idea that dissonance in the self (one part seeming at odds with another, creating a conflict of conscience) can be resolved through the thinking process. And yet in the very next sentence Arendt claims that in order to think, one must first be at peace with oneself, that is to say, one must first not be experiencing discord in the self. The argument here is clearly circular: Arendt simultaneously offers two contradictory understandings: for thinking to happen at all, there must be harmony in one’s inner life – thinking cannot happen without this inner harmony. And yet, at the same time, it is apparently only thinking which can resolve discord in the self. In ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’ Arendt includes the following discussion: ‘So long as I am conscious, that is, conscious of myself, I am identical with myself only for others to whom I appear as one and the same. For myself, articulating this being-conscious-of-myself, I am inevitably two-in-one … Consciousness is not the same as thinking; but without it, thinking would be impossible. What thinking actualizes in its process is the difference given in consciousness.’93 Here Arendt appears to be using ‘consciousness’ in a similar way to how she used ‘conscience’ in the previous extract. Indeed, for Arendt, the two are related: ‘Conscience in all languages means originally not a faculty of knowing and judging right and wrong but what we now call consciousness, that is, the faculty by which we know, are aware of, ourselves.’94 Yet here she explicitly states that consciousness (this being-conscious-of-myself,) is not the

same as thinking – rather thinking is some kind of manifestation of consciousness. Again, it seems plausible to think that when Arendt is referring to consciousness, to differentiation in the self, she is describing something similar to living with oneself; thus here it would seem that living with oneself is distinct from thinking, even if thinking includes realizing the duality in the self which is a significant component of living with oneself. And yet, even if Arendt’s consideration of these topics seems obscured by confusion, nonetheless it is possible to chart a course through the conflicting assertions: living with oneself and thinking are not the same thing for Arendt. Thinking is a very particular kind of process which she describes in quite different terms to the notion of living with oneself. Though there are places in her work where she seems to equate the two, there are many more where they are described as distinct. Both notions share a similarity in that they require some kind of differentiation within the self into at least two parts (the two-inone) for the ideas to make sense. Aside from this prerequisite, thinking (as a particular process) and living with oneself (as some kind of deep ethical awareness of, and engagement with, the self) are different ideas. And, crucially, not only are these ideas different, they are also conflicting – on the one hand, Arendt is claiming that in order to be prevented from wrongdoing one must engage in a particular process of thinking, on the other, that no such process is needed but rather, simply, the apprehension of whether or not one could live with oneself. Does everyone live with him- or herself or only a select few? In parts of her essays and lectures on ethics Arendt appears to imply that living with oneself is a universal condition – that everyone lives with him- or herself in some sense since ‘even though I am one, I am not simply one, I have a self and I am related to this self as my own self’.95 Yet it cannot be the case that she thinks that every ‘normal’ person lives with himself or herself because, for Arendt, living with oneself would have been sufficient to prevent evil, while the widespread complicity of ‘normal’ people in the Holocaust indicates that very many people appeared precisely not to ‘live with themselves’ in Arendt’s morally relevant sense. Indeed in ‘Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship’, Arendt observes that the ‘best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain: that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves’.96 If only the ‘best’ among us are able to live with themselves then living with oneself is not something all, or even most, people

do. Perhaps this inconsistency can be alleviated by reintroducing the idea of the two-in-one as a prerequisite (both for living with oneself and for thinking): Arendt could be arguing that everyone lives with themselves in the sense that every human being experiences the differentiation in the self into at least two parts when alone in solitude. Living with oneself proper could therefore be thought of as something which builds on this basic differentiation: everyone experiences the two-in-one and lives with his- or herself in this sense, but not everyone experiences living with oneself as being at peace with oneself. This distinction could assuage the confusion apparent on this point in Arendt’s work by demonstrating a way in which living with oneself in one sense – the sense of the two-in-one – can be a universal human condition while living with oneself in another, more morally relevant sense – the sense of being at peace with oneself – remains the domain of the better, more morally good among us. In any case, as my discussion has shown, even this second sense of living with oneself represents no guarantee of good moral conduct for it is not the case that each individual will inevitably not be at peace with herself having committed evil. Does the notion of living with oneself undermine the thinking thesis? There is a potentially serious flaw in Arendt’s ethical work: the incompatibility of the thinking and living with oneself theses. Arendt claims that both thinking and living with oneself are morally relevant and indeed represent preventative methods against evil – if one thinks in Arendt’s sense, or if one lives with oneself in the way she describes, then one will not commit acts of evil. We have already seen how the argument that thinking will prevent wrongdoing is unconvincing, just as the claim that living with oneself will impede evil is unsatisfactory. Yet both notions are in fact more fundamentally undermined by a mistake in the internal logic operating between the two: Arendt presents living with oneself as something rather different from thinking. In her depiction of thinking, the process is emphasized – it is the dialogue of thought which somehow makes the wrongness of participation in evil apparent. Yet in her discussions of living with oneself, it seems no process is needed to attain comprehension that certain acts are evil – for those living with themselves, the evil of particular choices is plainly apparent. They do not engage in any kind of thought process – by virtue of living with themselves they just know that certain acts are evil and therefore to be avoided. The living with oneself thesis consequently undermines the notion of thinking as morally relevant – if what is needed to avoid evil is that one lives

with oneself, that one merely exists in a particular moral condition, then how can the process of thinking be pertinent to morality at all? This problem also affects Arendt’s characterization of the ‘nonparticipants’ who were not complicit in Nazi evil – again Arendt emphasizes the lack of any process of thinking or deliberation on the part of the praiseworthy nonparticipants. I discuss this characterization and its problems in Chapter 4. As we have seen, in ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’ Arendt asserts that ‘the few, the very few, who in the moral collapse of Nazi Germany remained completely intact and free of all guilt … never went through anything like a great moral conflict or a crisis of conscience’.97 They simply and intuitively ‘never doubted that crimes remained crimes’.98 In other words, they never questioned the evil of these acts, even though they were now legally sanctioned; no thought was needed and no extended engagement of the self in dialogue. These ‘nonparticipants’, who are for Arendt people who live with themselves, just knew they could not be complicit in Nazi evil. Elsewhere she asserts that those who resisted could be found in all walks of life, among poor and entirely uneducated people as among members of good and high society. They said very little and the argument was always the same. There was no conflict, no struggle, the evil was no temptation. … They simply said, I can’t, I’d rather die, for life would not be worthwhile when I had done it.99 Again, Arendt emphasizes the lack of conflict or struggle – no extended internal debate or discussion was required in order to arrive at the conclusion that participation in the Holocaust was evil and therefore unconscionable. The ‘best’ people, it seems, do not need to think – they simply intuit the prohibition on evil acts. Thinking, therefore, appears to have little moral relevance since the ‘best’, those most morally good people, are morally good precisely because they do not have to think. I already cited Arendt’s assertion in ‘Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship’ that ‘best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain: that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves’.100 The best among us are not the thinkers but rather those who live with themselves. In making this assertion, Arendt subverts her own claims about the moral relevance of thinking. Close reading of Arendt’s work on ethics must lead us to conclude that, for Arendt, thinking is in fact not morally important, only the disposition to live with oneself is. And yet we must also conclude that the notion of a condition of living with oneself being capable of preventing evildoing is equally ineffectual since there is no reason to suppose

that every rational being considers the same actions to be something he or she could live or not live with having done. The limits of what one can live or not live with vary so greatly as to render this no kind of moral standard at all. The perpetrators of Nazi crimes are an illuminating case in point.

Character, integrity and living with oneself The notion of living with oneself, of acting in accordance with oneself, even of ‘being true to yourself’ as it is expressed in common parlance, is related to two areas of discourse in moral philosophy: the first is discussions of character and the second is the idea of integrity. Arendt’s notion of living with oneself is related to character insofar as one’s character can be thought of as determinant in one’s moral actions. Arendt’s thinking in this vein does not pertain to the debates about moral character in contemporary moral philosophy – this discourse tends to focus on a revival of virtue ethics emphasizing the question of how it is best to live rather than a Kantian or utilitarian concentration on rules and obligations, and also on issues of teaching and developing good moral character.101 What is germane about moral philosophical ideas of character for Arendt’s purposes is simply the extent to which character is relevant in determining morally good or bad actions. Arendt’s notion of living with oneself claims that individuals decide on moral or immoral actions based on a calculation of whether or not they could live with themselves having committed those acts. Arendt is asserting that if a person acts in such a way that is not in accordance with herself, then she will not be able to live with the inner dissonance caused. Arendt concedes that this criterion is highly subjective and that what an individual can live with having done varies greatly from individual to individual. Hence, what determines one’s actions on Arendt’s understanding is some kind of harmonious sense of self which could be described by the term ‘character’. We could say that Arendt’s approach indicates that one’s character is morally relevant – what kind of a person one is determines one’s assessments of what one could or could not live with having done. In ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’ Arendt actually states that ‘what somebody does, depends on who he is’.102 Arendt is approaching a way of thinking about character, disposition and determinism espoused in philosophical contemporary literature by Galen Strawson. Concerning moral responsibility, Strawson argues for the validity of what he calls the ‘Basic Argument’: the claim that (1) Nothing can be causa sui – nothing can be the cause of itself. (2) In order to

be truly morally responsible for one’s actions one would have to be causa sui, at least in certain crucial mental respects. (3) Therefore nothing can be truly morally responsible.103 Elaborating on this, Strawson includes certain key premises in an alternative, longer version of his argument: ‘You do what you do, in any situation in which you find yourself, because of the way you are’ and ‘what you intentionally do, given the circumstances in which you (believe you) find yourself, flows necessarily from how you are’.104 Strawson builds these premises into an argument to demonstrate that we cannot really have any ultimate moral responsibility since there is no real sense in which we could be the cause of our own characters, personalities or dispositions, in short, of how we are, so we do not possess ultimate responsibility for the actions which result from how we are. Arendt appears to be thinking in this vein in admitting that what one can live with having done varies from individual to individual and depends upon who one is to begin with – in other words, one’s moral or immoral actions can be determined by one’s character. Arendt does not consider the consequences for the concept of moral responsibility originated by this notion as Strawson does, but we can see that similar problems arise: If what one can or cannot live with having done depends upon one’s character and this consideration affects one’s actions, and if, as Strawson argues, one cannot be fundamentally responsible for how one is since this is not, generally, a matter of one’s own volition, then it follows that one cannot be ultimately responsible for one’s actions. In a fundamental sense we are not free but rather determined by our characters. Arendt, of course, certainly did consider the individual perpetrators of the evil of the Holocaust to be morally responsible for their actions. Yet, as we have seen, pursuing her thought trains regarding living with oneself leads to concerning questions about how to attribute that responsibility. Arendt thinks, at least to some extent, that what we do depends on who we happen to be and what we happen to be able to live with. Strawson shows that who we happen to be is not something we choose. This places our moral responsibility for what we do (which results from who we are) in question, a conclusion which would not have satisfied Arendt. Arendt’s notion of living with oneself is also related to the moral philosophical idea of integrity. In the philosophical literature there are a number of different views on the concept of integrity. Generally speaking, ordinary discourse about integrity involves two fundamental intuitions: first,

that integrity is primarily a formal relation one has to oneself, or between parts or aspects of one’s self; and second, that integrity is connected in an important way to acting morally, in other words, there are some substantive or normative constraints on what it is to act with integrity.105 Arendt’s notion of ‘living with oneself’ seems to be related to this – it certainly involves the aspect of one’s (formal) relation to oneself and, additionally, the notion that this is connected to what it is to act in a morally good way, that is, that ‘living with oneself’ can be morally relevant. Within this broad definition, a number of positions on the philosophical concept of integrity can be distinguished, among them the view of integrity as the integration of self, the view of integrity as maintenance of identity and the view of integrity as a virtue.106 Arendt’s notion of ‘living with oneself’ seems closely to resemble the self-integration conception of integrity which holds that integrity is ‘a matter of persons integrating various parts of their personality into a harmonious, intact whole. … The integrity of persons is analogous to the integrity of things: integrity is primarily a matter of keeping the self intact and uncorrupted. The self-integration view of integrity makes integrity a formal relation to the self.’107 The notion of living with oneself seems to have much in common with the self-integration view of integrity – living with oneself means acting in accordance with oneself, which means maintaining a kind of internal integrity. To speak of a person’s integrity is, on this view, to refer to the various parts of the person’s self being integrated into a harmonious whole – this closely resembles the emphasis on internal harmony in Arendt’s notion of ‘living with oneself’. Yet Arendt’s concept of living with oneself is not merely about the formal relation one has to oneself. It also relates to the identity view of integrity that considers integrity ‘in terms of a person’s holding steadfastly true to their commitments, rather than ordering and endorsing desires’.108 What this means is that human actions, including moral actions, are not merely determined by one’s desires, which one then ranks accordingly depending on the situation. Rather, human actions are also contingent upon certain commitments which can take precedence over desires and which can seem more fundamental, more important and ultimately constitutive of who we are as individuals. These kinds of commitment can be called ‘identity-conferring commitments’,109 or, as Bernard Williams refers to them, ‘ground projects’: ‘A man may have, for a lot of his life or even just for some part of it, a ground project or set of projects which are

closely related to his existence and which to a significant degree give a meaning to his life.’110 These types of identity-conferring commitments or ground projects are an integral condition of one’s existence such that ‘unless I am propelled forward by the conatus of desire, project and interest, it is unclear why I should go on at all’.111 On this view, ‘to act with integrity is just to act in a way that accurately reflects your sense of who you are; to act from motives, interests and commitments that are most deeply your own’.112 Arendt’s idea of ‘living with oneself’ corresponds to this: to live with oneself is to act in accordance with one’s sense of self, with one’s conception of who one is. In committing a deed which contravenes one’s sense of (moral) self, one is contradicting one’s own identity and as such, acting without integrity, and inviting disharmony in the self. One of the problems with these notions of integrity when viewed from a moral perspective is that they do not inherently include any normative values. There is an alternative view which holds that integrity can be considered a moral virtue. In general moral philosophical discourse integrity is often held to be virtuous and praiseworthy. The challenge for this view is to demonstrate in exactly which way integrity can, in itself, be thought to be virtuous – it is not obvious how an idea of staying true to oneself can issue normative maxims. A further challenge for this view is to find a satisfactory answer to the question: What sort of virtue is integrity? As Cox, La Caze and Levine put it, ‘What is its object and characteristic motivation?’113 Bernard Williams considers this question and rejects the notion of integrity as a virtue. For him, integrity is ‘an admirable human property’, but it is not a virtue since ‘it is not related to motivation as the virtues are’.114 By this Williams means that integrity is ‘not a disposition which itself yields motivations, as generosity and benevolence do’.115 Neither is it an ‘executive’ virtue like courage or self-control which ‘do not themselves yield a characteristic motive, but are necessary for that relation to oneself and the world which enables one to act from desirable motives in desirable ways’.116 For Williams, a person showing integrity is someone who ‘acts from those dispositions and motives which are most deeply his, and has also the virtues that enable him to do that. Integrity does not enable him to do it, nor is it what he acts from when he does so.’117 Arendt’s concept of ‘living with oneself’ encounters similar difficulties: as we have seen, the idea of ‘living with oneself’, like the notion of integrity, does not necessarily possess any universal, normative content. A person can live with him- or herself, possess integrity in some sense, and still act in immoral ways. No guarantees against wrongdoing can be gleaned either from living with

oneself or from having integrity per se. Additionally, if we consider Arendt’s ‘living with oneself’ concept as a form of integrity, and if we assert that she seems to think of it as a kind of virtue, or at least as a kind of praiseworthy disposition, we find it is subject to the same criticism Williams makes of the notion of integrity as a virtue: living with oneself seems to offer no characteristic motivation, no ‘characteristic thought’.118 In which case, how are we to move from living with oneself, or possessing integrity, to acting in morally good ways? It is unclear how living with oneself should in itself motivate an individual to avoid evil and act in ways to promote moral good. My investigation of Arendt’s idea of living with oneself as morally relevant and preventative of evil has shown that the concept cannot fulfil this role; neither can her concept of thinking. There is no reason to suppose that people who live with themselves in the way Arendt describes, or think according to her account of thinking, will be impeded in doing wrong. Yet there is one additional idea which Arendt suggests in her essays on ethics which may prove fruitful in understanding how so many ordinary people could have become complicit in the evil of the Holocaust and how so few resisted: the notion of the moral ‘I-cannot’ and its political expression in nonparticipation in the regime, related to notions of the morally unthinkable and moral incapacity. The next and final chapter is dedicated to drawing out the most salient aspects of this.

Notes 1 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 52 and 138. 2 Ibid., 63. 3 Ibid., 50. 4 Ibid. 5 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 11. 6 Chris Gowans, ‘Moral Relativism’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2012 Edition, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2012/entries/moral-relativism. 7 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 54. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 75–6. 11 As mentioned above, ‘Some Questions’ is based on two series of lectures which Arendt gave. 12 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 78. 13 See for example Arendt’s discussion in ‘PR’, in Arendt, R&J, 17–48. 14 See Jones, Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust, 99–119. 15 There is an important caveat to be borne in mind: the position I am describing here is that of an extreme, strict moral relativist. A more nuanced moral relativism would make a distinction between the

established, long-evolving moral cultures of reasonably open societies and the coercive, centralized, propaganda-driven machine of Nazism. The case of killing Jews in the Third Reich is not the same as, for example, the acceptance of slavery in ancient Greek society – the ‘moral culture’ of the Third Reich did not believe it good to kill Jews in the same way that ancient Greek moral culture accepted slavery. However, the acceptance of slavery had developed in Greece, it was an acceptance held in reasonably open conditions which even tolerated dissent – some thinkers in ancient Greece questioned the justice of slavery. The Nazi appeal to murder innocent Jews was, in contrast, advanced by a systematic, centralized, violent and propaganda-driven Nazi regime. Indeed, perhaps the fact that Nazism required such a machinery to introduce its ideas and the concomitant fact that despite this machine it was far from universally successful in indoctrinating the population, is an indication that it is not the case that people simply accept moral codes in the way that strict relativism would suggest. 16 The central question of moral epistemology is: How is moral knowledge possible? How can we know what the right thing to do is? There are a number of differing positions in the field of moral epistemology. Several include the ontological claims of moral irrealism, relativism and scepticism: moral knowledge is not possible because there is no moral reality, no moral facts to which this kind of knowledge could have recourse. A sceptical position need not, however, entail the claim that there are no such things as moral facts – it is possible to assert that there is a moral reality and concurrently hold that we do not have access to knowledge of that reality, or at least, our access is impeded and uncertain and therefore knowledge of it is doubtful. 17 Arendt , ‘SQ’, 61. 18 Ibid., 62. 19 Arendt, ‘PR’, 22. 20 Plato, Protagoras, 361b. 21 Ibid., 358d. 22 Ibid., 357e. 23 An overview of this can be found in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – see Sarah Stroud, ‘Weakness of Will’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2008 Edition, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/weakness-will. As Stroud explains, important modern treatments of the question of akrasia can be found in the works of R. M. Hare, who defends a Socratic position which denies weakness of will – see for example R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952) and R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963) – and Donald Davidson who maintains that akrasia is possible – see for example D. Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). 24 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 75. 25 Ibid. 26 For example by Callicles in the Gorgias and by Glaucon in The Republic. 27 See the discussion in Plato, The Republic from Book II to Book VII, and also Book IX. 28 Kolnai quoted in Gaita, Good and Evil, 61–2. See also Aurel Kolnai, Ethics, Value and Reality (London: Athlone Press, 1977), 87. 29 Kolnai, Ethics, Value and Reality, 87. 30 Gaita, Good and Evil, 62. 31 Ibid. 32 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 79. 33 See for example G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903). Other thinkers in this vein include H. A. Prichard and W. D. Ross. 34 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 51.

35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 78. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 86. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 87. 41 Ibid., 88. 42 Ibid., 89. 43 See for example Arendt, ‘SQ’, 92. 44 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 90. See also Arendt, ‘SQ’, 100 – here again Arendt explicitly links the Socratic paradox ‘it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong’ with Socrates’ other statement that it is better to be at odds with the world than with oneself. 45 Ibid. See also Plato, Gorgias, 482b–c. Arendt makes this same argument in ‘TMC’ – see 181. 46 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 91. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 97. 49 Ibid., 108. 50 Ibid., 124. 51 Ibid., 101. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 110. 54 Ibid., 97. 55 Kant [4:439] – see Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Lara Denis (Canada: Broadview, 2005). 56 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 125. 57 Ibid., 130. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. See also Arendt, LMT, 191: ‘Bad people … are not “full of regrets”.’ 60 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Helen Zimmern (Maryland: Serenity, 2008), 39. 61 Brightman, Between Friends, 18–19. 62 Ibid., 22. 63 Ibid., 27. 64 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead or Prison Life in Siberia (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1911), 65. 65 Dostoyevsky, House of the Dead, 66. 66 Ibid., 66–8. 67 William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, Act 5, Scene 3, Lines 183–9. 68 Arendt, ‘TMC’, 161. 69 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, Part V, Chapter IV, trans. Constance Garnett (Project Gutenberg eBook), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2554/2554-h/2554-h.htm. 70 Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid.

73 Ibid. 74 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7, Lines 80–3. 75 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 34–5. 76 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 71–2. 77 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 2, Lines 19–21. 78 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4, Lines 94–7. 79 Shakespeare, M acbeth, Act 5, Scene 3, Lines 37–8. 80 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 5, Lines 15–19. 81 Peter Taylor, Loyalists (London: Bloomsbury, 2000). 82 Taylor, Loyalists, 5–6. 83 Ibid., 11. 84 Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, Part III, Chapter VI. 85 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3, Lines 135–43. 86 Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 283. 87 Sanders, The Dramatist, 311. 88 Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 29. 89 Arendt, ‘PR’, 45. 90 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 90. 91 Ibid., 91. 92 Ibid., 108. 93 Arendt, ‘TMC’, 184–5. 94 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 76. 95 Ibid., 90. 96 Arendt, ‘PR’, 45. 97 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 78. 98 Ibid. 99    Arendt, ‘SQ’, 278 (note 10). 100 Arendt, ‘PR’, 45. 101 See for example Anscombe’s seminal essay: G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Philosophy, Vol. 33, No. 124 (1958): 1–19. See also R. Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and R. Crisp, ed., How Should One Live? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 102 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 125. 103 Galen Strawson, ‘The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility’, in Philosophical Studies, Vol. 75, No. 1/2 (1994): 5. 104 Strawson, ‘The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility’, 12–13. 105 Damian Cox, Marguerite La Caze, and Michael Levine, ‘Integrity’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2013 Edition, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/integrity/. 106 For these definitions and other, related definitions, see Cox, La Caze, and Levine, ‘Integrity’. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid.

110 Bernard Williams, ‘Persons, character and morality’, in Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973 – 1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 12. 111 Williams, ‘Persons, character and morality’. 112 Cox, La Caze, and Levine, ‘Integrity’. 113 Ibid. 114 Bernard Williams, ‘Utilitarianism and Moral Self-Indulgence’, in Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973 – 1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 49. 115 Williams, ‘Utilitarianism and Moral Self-Indulgence’. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid.

4 Nonparticipation

Arendt’s work includes a fourth approach to understanding the mass complicity of many ordinary people in the crimes of the Third Reich and the particular moral features of those relatively few people who remained untarnished by collusion with the regime: the idea of ‘nonparticipation’ – those who avoided complicity in Nazi evil are, for Arendt, nonparticipants. Arendt emphasized (in her work on the subject of the Holocaust and in her own personal reflections on the experience of persecution) the small number of people who retained their moral scruples in the Third Reich, who resisted or refused to participate, and whose good moral principles were deeply offended by crimes sanctioned by the state. These few people are worthy of praise and free of moral responsibility for the atrocities committed. Arendt holds the remainder of the population – the complicit masses – accountable as participants in a murderous society. Indeed, early on in her thinking on these matters Arendt asserts that the totalitarianism of the Third Reich caused ‘the existence of each individual in Germany to depend either upon committing crimes or on complicity in crimes’.1 Furthermore, a defining feature, the ‘horrible thing’ about totalitarian Nazi society, was ‘that everyone, whether or not he is directly active in a murder camp, is forced to take part in one way or another in the workings of this machine of mass murder’.2 These comments were made in an early essay of Arendt’s written in 1945 and she had elaborated (and tempered) her views by the time she wrote the later pieces on ethics which make reference to these few, virtuous nonparticipants. In this earlier essay Arendt seems to be suggesting that ordinary people were ‘forced’ to participate, that their existence depended upon participation. By the time Arendt comes to discussing the virtuous few in her later works – she makes a brief mention of these actors in Eichmann in Jerusalem and considers the issues more extensively in ‘Personal Responsibility

Under Dictatorship’ and ‘Collective Responsibility’ – her approach has shifted markedly: now she underscores the uncoerced nature of much of the participation of ordinary people in the crimes of Nazism. This is clear from the extent to which she insists upon the (personal) moral responsibility of the individuals involved, a responsibility Arendt views them as bearing by virtue of their participation in Nazi society rather than emanating from their active or direct commission of evil deeds. Arendt’s approach in identifying ‘nonparticipation’ as a rubric for explaining behaviour in the Third Reich is rather different from the traditional characterizations of Holocaust studies: Arendt does not focus on the inaction of those countless individual citizens who did not protest against Nazi persecution of Jews or resist it, and who did not come to the aid of their Jewish neighbours. For Arendt, the core of understanding the complicity of the citizenry turns on the issue of participation. Thus Arendt does not pose the question of why so many people were reluctant to act to stop the persecution and attempted destruction of the Jews; rather, she asks, why were so many people prepared to participate in it to varying degrees? She shifts the focal point of the discussion from that of action versus inaction to that of participation versus nonparticipation. In modifying the discussion to focus on participation, Arendt implicitly rejects the notion that, at least after a certain point, resistance on a scale which would have halted the Nazi murder machine was a genuine possibility. Yet this is not to say that, given the limited practical possibilities for active resistance at the time the ‘Final Solution’ was instigated, an average German citizen had no choice other than to participate. For Arendt, those who resisted (and by extension those who risked their lives to rescue victims) were particularly good people – they were heroes and saints. These individuals were not typical, they were exceptional. And, as Arendt states, ‘it is obviously not everybody’s business to be a saint or a hero’.3 If particularly good individuals who attempted resistance and rescue occupy one end of the spectrum of actions and attitudes in the Third Reich, then the other end must be populated by those people who were particularly bad: the sadists and fanatics who drove the murderous goals of the regime and enjoyed the cruelty inflicted on innocent people. Indeed, this is the picture which Arendt presents: ‘Ordinary criminals’ were able to ‘do with impunity under the Nazi system what they had always wanted to do’.4 The extreme ends of the continuum necessarily only account for relatively small proportions of the population – most ordinary citizens occupied the space between these radically opposite

poles. Most were neither saints nor sadists, but somewhere in-between. Arendt’s approach tacitly takes into account prevailing circumstances for most ordinary people: she recognizes the violence and terror of Hitler’s totalitarian regime and the pervasive fear this instilled in the population. She seems to appreciate the dangers and difficulties of resisting on a mass scale, at least during the later stages of the regime’s rule, and concludes that those who did were especially courageous people. She acknowledges that it is certainly not the case that everyone can be legitimately expected to behave with such bravery in circumstances where one’s life or the lives of one’s family could be threatened as a result. Yet, Arendt’s account emphasizes that for those ordinary people, choices remained and these were choices which could make someone more or less culpable in the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis. The choice that Arendt presents is that of participation versus nonparticipation. While Arendt seems to imply that one cannot necessarily be blamed for not organizing active resistance, one certainly can be condemned for choosing to participate. It is important to note that Arendt defines participation broadly. She does not limit the terms of participation to those who actively pursued violent duties and engaged in killing, such as the members of the Gestapo, SS and the Einsatzgruppen. Indeed, at least some of those who actively sought murderous duties arguably belonged to the group of sadists and fanatics who defined that extreme end of the spectrum of culpability: their wicked motivations are no doubt incomprehensible to most normal people who do not take pleasure in cruelty. Yet from an ethical viewpoint the inclinations informing their actions are fathomable: fanatics operate with a warped world view whereby they are totally convinced by the ultimate utility or ‘goodness’ of their goals. So committed and fanatical Nazis would simply have asserted that the destruction of the Jews was a good in itself and all actions completed in the pursuance of this goal, even murdering innocent people, were good and right (though possibly unple asant) actions. Similarly, a sadist is prompted to commit acts of cruelty because of the ultimate ‘good’ produced, that is, the pleasure the sadistic individual feels in committing acts of cruelty. Indeed, as Arendt makes clear, those ‘sadists and perverts’5 in the regime simply continued to do as they had always done though they were now sanctioned in their actions by the powers above them. The category of ‘participant’ therefore includes, but does not concentrate on, sadists and fanatics, the impetus for whose actions is undoubtedly despicable yet intelligible. Rather, Arendt’s interpretive category of ‘participant’ is much broader. It includes those who actively participated up to a point, that is, those

who became members of Nazi organizations, including the elite formations such as the SS, but who did not relish the cruelty of their duties. Eichmann, or at least the characterization of Eichmann which Arendt presents, may be counted among their number. So also may be the men of reserve police battalion 101 whom Christopher Browning famously called ‘Ordinary Men’ and whom he described as normal, middle-aged, working-class men who were neither Nazi zealots nor devilish fiends and who nonetheless followed orders to round up and kill Jews in occupied Poland.6 Yet Arendt’s category of participant extends even further – not only does it include those who gained membership of the machinery and, both willingly and unwillingly, implemented its murderous policies, but it also consists of those who participated in the tainted public life of Nazi Germany, even if they were far from being complicit in the violence and murder that the state and party were committing. As Arendt explains, in a regime of totalitarian domination, ‘whoever participates in public life at all, regardless of party membership or membership in the elite formations of the regime, is implicated in one way or another in the deeds of the regime as a whole’.7 Thus, for Arendt, the term ‘participant’ applies not only to the members of the Gestapo, SS and other formations but also to those civil servants, lawyers, journalists, academics and artists who gained positions of prominence or continued in their previous jobs despite the ‘coordination’ (Gleichschaltung) of all offices and areas of public life with the ruling principles of the Nazi Party.8 Contrasting sharply with this group in Arendt’s schema of culpability are the nonparticipants. The category ‘nonparticipant’ does not denote those who actively resisted and rebelled, those who were not only unwilling to participate but who were committed actually to fighting against the regime. As mentioned earlier, for Arendt, active resisters were particularly good and courageous people. They were exceptional. Nonparticipants were not exceptional in this respect. Arendt states that ‘nonparticipants were not resisters and … they did not believe that their attitude had any political consequences’.9 They did, however, deviate from the norm – that is to say, from the mass complicity of very many ordinary people – by choosing not to participate. Not only did nonparticipants choose not to join the party or indeed its militia organizations, they chose furthermore not to engage in any aspect of tainted public life in the Third Reich. Arendt states that in the totalitarian Nazi state, only people who completely withdrew from public life could avoid being implicated.10 It seems clear that Arendt is hinting at a distinction between the behaviours of two of her former

teachers in Germany: while Karl Jaspers retreated from public and university life during the Third Reich, Martin Heidegger notoriously joined the NSDAP and accepted the post of rector at Freiburg University.11 For Arendt, nonparticipants are those who shun the system – they withdraw their tacit consent from the form of government and its policies. Nonparticipants reject positions of ‘responsibility’, that is, positions within the tainted public system, since they cannot assent to the new ruling principles whose acceptance (at least implicitly) is a requirement of those offices.12 Karl Jaspers represents for Arendt the nonparticipant par excellence. Indeed there are other individuals for whom Arendt’s category of nonparticipant seems most apt. Johannes Fest, for instance, father of the German historian Joachim Fest, was a headmaster of a Catholic primary school in Berlin at the time and was dismissed for his lack of support for the regime. Though this caused hardship and the family struggled with poverty during the Nazi years, Johannes Fest refused to participate in the tainted public life of the Third Reich. There was ‘some quirk in his personality’, as Barry Gewen puts it, which ‘made him a fierce Weimar republican, ready to sacrifice himself, even his family, to principles he knew to be right even as everyone around him was yielding to mass hysteria’.13 As Gewen explains, the example of Fest ‘reminds us that simple human decency is possible even in the most trying of circumstances’.14 Arendt’s concept of nonparticipation certainly seems fitting in cases such as those of Jaspers and Fest – she seems to capture correctly something about the ways in which people who avoided active resistance nonetheless courageously withheld their participation because of their moral commitments. In addition, on Arendt’s understanding, the propensity to become a nonparticipant is not dependent upon educational background or class, social or cultural milieu; nonparticipants could be found in all walks of life, as could participants.15 Intellectual ability was no guarantee against capitulation to the Nazi ideology and its murderous policies and nor was a well-regarded upbringing.16 One simply could not predict who would and would not conform to the regime and its goals. Arendt repudiates the tendency to associate moral fortitude with either intelligence or class and this rejection is borne out by the sheer extent of the capitulation to Hitler’s regime by the German upper classes and intellectuals – she refers to functionaries in the Third Reich who led upstanding family lives and read Hölderlin while employed as murderers.17 In that it requires us to reformulate the pertinent moral questions, Arendt’s thought helps us to achieve a more accurate understanding and portrayal of the

moral choices faced by citizens during the Third Reich. Traditional approaches focus on inaction and pose the question: Why did citizens not resist and rebel? Arendt, by contrast, asks why did citizens participate? In turning the question on its head, her method implicitly recognizes that most ordinary people cannot realistically be expected to resist when the consequences of such resistance would be dire, both for the individual concerned and in all likelihood for his or her family and associates. Courageous resistance is, for Arendt, the preserve of those very few especially good people who might be called heroes. She tacitly acknowledges that to ask ordinary people why they did not bravely risk their lives in order to resist is an unfair and useless question. Resistance was an option not open to many. And yet, that is not to say that ordinary people had no choice but to become involved in the Nazi machine. While active resistance may have ended in severe punishment, active nonparticipation rarely did. This was thus a course of (in)action open to many ordinary people and they were unlikely to suffer sanctions as a result. To participate or not to participate was rarely a question of life or death.18 Hence Arendt presents this as an active choice – those who withdrew from public life because they could not assent to the principles now governing it purposefully chose not to participate. And therefore, on the other side of the equation, those who continued in their positions in public life as civil servants or judges or academics were making a clear choice to participate, to conform and consent to racist Nazi ideologies. In contrast to conventional treatments of this matter where inaction (i.e. not resisting) is met with moral contempt, in Arendt’s schema, inaction (i.e. nonparticipation) is considered a mark of moral fortitude. Regarding questions of culpability, Arendt’s analysis again presents an alternative rendering: in traditional understandings of the matter all individuals who did not actively resist are collectively held to be culpable (to greater or lesser extents) for the crimes of the regime. According to Arendt’s meta-matrix of culpability, contrastingly, only those who participated can be considered culpable – she does not hold ordinary citizens morally responsible for not actively rebelling since on her understanding one must be extraordinarily good to belong to that group; rather, she attributes responsibility to all those who chose to participate in public life and therefore to consent to the brutal racist principles which ruled the public sphere in the Third Reich. This distinction Arendt makes between participants and nonparticipants and the respective responsibility which can be attributed to them, is a political concept: it concerns participation or nonparticipation in public life. In so far as

Arendt applies this notion to the political life of the Third Reich one might question its suitability and fairness. First, it seems fair to relocate the issue of complicity to the level of participation versus nonparticipation rather than blaming ordinary people for not actively resisting Nazi policies, or indeed, rather than presuming, as Daniel Goldhagen does, that the relative scarcity of active resistance must indicate active support on the part of the people.19 Second, it certainly seems plausible to claim that participation or nonparticipation was a viable, non-life-threatening choice for a number of ordinary citizens. Arendt’s broad view of participation, however, poses problems: it seems clear that one could fairly attribute blame to those lawyers, judges and civil servants who participated in a public life defined by racism and violent discrimination. Would it be fair, however, to ascribe blame to ordinary Germans who were very far removed from politics and from the Nazi crimes? Would a farmer in a small village in Bavaria be considered to be participating in the tainted public life of the Third Reich by selling his goods in a Nazi-directed economy? What about a gardener employed to tend to the gardens of high-ranking Nazi officials? Can these types of ordinary people be viewed as ‘participants’ in Arendt’s sense? One might answer these objections by stating that Arendt did not have these kinds of actors in mind. Yet her broad definition of participation makes it difficult to see where exactly the lines of culpability should be drawn – what constitutes ‘public life’ and ‘participation’ in it?

Individual (moral) guilt and collective (political) responsibility Arendt’s work in general, but particularly where it examines the boundaries between the moral and the political, is permeated by the juxtaposition of the individual self and the collective group. Her reinvigoration of older political concepts – the renewal of a focus on the importance of action (and indeed of power generated through acting in concert) in politics for example – owes much to her desire to express the value of the public, political, collective realm and to criticize the denigration this sphere has received from a philosophical tradition entrenched in the world of the individual self. And yet her work is also imbued with concern for the individual self in general and, often, a focus on particular individuals. She is concerned with ‘persons – how they lived their lives, how they moved in the world, and how they were affected by historical time’.20 And it is particular individuals, rather than any movement borne out of collective

political action or any theory of politics, who light our way in troubled times: Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and … such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth.21 In addition, when it comes to matters of explicit morality, to questions of good and evil, Arendt’s thinking is located very much at the level of the individual self. As we have seen, Arendt’s idea that living with oneself can preclude evil depends on a concept of unity or harmony within the self. Furthermore, she is occupied with questions of individual moral responsibility. On that note, there is a further distinction Arendt makes between the ethical and the political which she conceives as essentially being about a distinction between the individual and the group: individual (moral) guilt versus collective (political) responsibility.22 In ‘Collective Responsibility’, Arendt advocates a ‘sharper dividing line between political (collective) responsibility, on one side, and moral and/or legal (personal) guilt, on the other’.23 One of Arendt’s aims in this piece is to argue against the notion of collective guilt, for ‘where all are guilty, nobody is’.24 For Arendt, guilt remains ‘strictly personal’.25 Yet, ‘there is such a thing as responsibility for things one has not done; one can be held liable for them’.26 What Arendt has in mind here is a kind of collective political responsibility as opposed to an individual moral responsibility. It is worth examining what this could mean in light of the notion of nonparticipation that Arendt espouses. On this understanding, nonparticipants bear no moral or legal guilt and therefore no individual, personal moral responsibility. They do, however, bear a collective (political) responsibility. This is not a fully formed idea in Arendt’s work and in some respects seems unsatisfactory as an account of political responsibility, and yet it offers a way to hold not only individual wrongdoers, but also the whole Nazi system of wrongdoing responsible. It is perhaps a way for Arendt of recognizing that though in a moral or legal sense it would be wrong to put the system on trial instead of particular individuals, there is a general responsibility for the existence of the system to be borne by those whose community engendered it. Arendt would certainly not favour Daniel Goldhagen’s approach to collective responsibility – to attribute an eliminationist anti-Semitism to the whole German population. She insists on considering individual crimes committed by individual people and the accompanying moral responsibility and

guilt. Yet through the political concept of collective responsibility Arendt offers a way to acknowledge that the political, social and cultural community of Germany, in some sense gave rise to an evil eliminationist anti-Semitism. Even the praiseworthy nonparticipant cannot escape the responsibility he or she bears as a member of a group which committed such blameworthy, heinous acts: ‘No moral, individual and personal, standards of conduct will ever be able to excuse us from collective responsibility.’27

Moral incapacity Though nonparticipation is generally expressed as a political concept by Arendt, there is a recognizable moral philosophical element – in ascribing moral responsibility and alluding to praise and blame Arendt is clearly considering participants and nonparticipants as not only political, but also moral, actors. It is my contention that Arendt’s characterization of nonparticipation represents the political expression of a moral idea found in Arendt’s work on ethics: that of moral incapacity. Though Arendt never uses this particular moral philosophical term, it seems clear that in her discussions of the issue of participation and the difference between participating and nonparticipating actors, she emphasizes the incapacity to participate experienced by those whom she deems praiseworthy. What motivated a person to remain actively outside of public life and society in order not to be involved in the crimes of the Nazi world? Arendt’s explanation is to state that these people simply could not participate. Arendt explains thus, If you examine the few, the very few, who in the moral collapse of Nazi Germany remained completely intact and free of all guilt, you will discover that they never went through anything like a great moral conflict or a crisis of conscience. They did not ponder the various issues – the issue of the lesser evil or of loyalty to their country or to their oath, or whatever else there might have been at stake. Nothing of the sort. They might have debated the pros and cons of action and there were always many reasons that spoke against the chances of any success in this direction; also they might have been afraid, and there was much to fear. But they never doubted that crimes remained crimes even if legalized by the government, and that it was better not to participate in these crimes under any circumstances. In other words, they did not feel an obligation but acted according to something which was self-evident to them even though it was no longer self-evident to those around them.28

Arendt emphasizes that the common link between those who avoided participation in the tainted public life of the Nazi period was not a shared educational background or social milieu, they could be ‘found in all walks of life and, more specifically, with all degrees of education and noneducation’.29 Nor could religious observance or adherence to traditional values be any indicator of an individual’s capacity to participate – those who did not were ‘by no means iden tical with those persons who continued to abide by old values, or who were guided by a religious belief’.30 Rather the common feature of this group of nonparticipants is to be found in their incapacity to participate in the deeply corrupted life of the Third Reich – they simply could not join in. There are a couple of key passages in Arendt’s work on ethics where this notion is expressed. First, in ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, when discussing the few ‘who in the moral collapse of Nazi Germany remained completely intact and free of all guilt’.31 Arendt states that their conscience, if that is what it was, had no obligatory character, it said, ‘This I can’t do,’ rather than, ‘This I ought not to do.’ The positive side of this ‘I can’t’ is that it corresponds to the self-evidence of the moral proposition; it means: I can’t murder innocent people just as I can’t say, ‘two and two equal five’. You can always counter the ‘thou shalt’ or the ‘you ought’ by talking back: I will not or I cannot for whatever reasons. Morally the only reliable people when the chips are down are those who say ‘I can’t.’32 Second, there is a similar passage in the footnotes to ‘Some Questions’ which includes variations in the lecture series which comprise the published piece: There are always a few with whom it [the pressure to conform with those others in Nazi society] did not work. … But why? First, who were they? Those who conformed to the new order were by no means those who were revolutionary, who were rebels, etc. Obviously not, for they were the overwhelming majority. … Those who resisted could be found in all walks of life, among poor and entirely uneducated people as among members of good and high society. They said very little and the argument was always the same. There was no conflict, no struggle, the evil was no temptation. They did not say, we are afraid of an all-seeing and avenging god, not even when they were religious; and it would not have helped because the religions had become quite nicely adjusted too. They simply said, I can’t, I’d rather die, for life would not

be worthwhile when I had done it.33 In ‘Collective Responsibility’ Arendt asserts that the nonparticipants were characterized by a certain kind of inability: If I would do what is now demanded of me as the price of participation, either as mere conformism or even as the only chance of eventually successful resistance, I could no longer live with myself; my life would cease to be worthwhile for me. Hence, I much rather suffer wrong now, and even pay the price of a death penalty in case I am forced to participate, than do wrong and then have to live together with such a wrongdoer.34 Arendt’s description of those who did not participate, those on whom one could rely when the chips were down, heavily underscores the idea that they could not participate – that they experienced some moral limit to their capacity to act in certain immoral ways. Moral incapacities are, as Bernard Williams explains, not ‘an incapacity to engage or be engaged in moral life, but, on the contrary … incapacities that are themselves an expression of the moral life’.35 Although Arendt does not use the term ‘moral incapacity’, it seems clear that she has something like this in mind when defining the inability of particular individuals to participate and become complicit in Nazi crimes. Arendt does not elaborate much on this notion, nor does she discuss in depth the ways in which it is possible to possess a moral incapacity. Yet by concentrating on the ‘I can’t’ nature of the refusal to collaborate on the part of nonparticipants, Arendt touches on this vein of thought in moral philosophy and furnishes it with an excellent example of moral incapacity: individuals in the Third Reich who, despite great pressure to conform, found themselves simply unable to do so. The literature on moral incapacity can provide some useful guidance on thinking about this. First, as Bernard Williams explains, ‘a moral incapacity belongs to the species: incapacity to do a certain thing knowingly’.36 A moral incapacity is thereby distinguished from, for example, a physical or intellectual incapacity such as being incapable of lifting an extremely heavy object or completing a very demanding quantum mechanics equation in one minute. Both of these are examples of something which, if an agent cannot do it, she simply cannot do it whether she knows herself to be doing it or not. Williams gives examples of other incapacities which are predicated upon knowledge: walking on a narrow plank over the Avon Gorge or eating roast rat.37 I might very well claim that I am incapable of eating roast rat, that I simply cannot do it, and yet

my incapacity is of the kind which requires knowledge that I am eating roast rat since it is quite possible that I could eat a roast rat if I thought it was lamb. Second, according to Williams, this caveat pertaining to the knowledge of an action does not yet specifically define a moral incapacity since other incapacities also ‘take the form of one’s being unable to ɸ if one knows that one is ɸ-ing’.38 There is, rather, a further distinction: whether or not one could try to do the action in question. Examples such as eating roast rat are of the form: ‘If I have this incapacity, then if I were to try to do the thing in question, I would fail.’39 Yet moral incapacities are different in that ‘it is not necessarily true that if I tried I would fail. If I tried, I might well succeed. The moral incapacity is revealed in the fact that for the appropriate kinds of reaso ns, I will never try.’40 Even this, however, is not specific enough as a definition of moral incapacity in comparison to other kinds of incapacity for Williams. He further suggests that, when it comes to deliberating, ‘other kinds of incapacity, if known to me, are inputs into decision’.41 A moral incapacity, on the other hand, is expressed not as an input into a deliberative process but as a conclusion in itself: ‘With other incapacities, while the agent cannot remove them at will, he may coherently set about trying to remove or overcome them, but with a moral incapacity he cannot do this, because a fundamental way in which a moral incapacity expresses itself is in the refusal to undertake any such project.’42 Craig Taylor offers an alternative understanding of the notion of moral incapacity which does not focus on deliberation as Williams’s does. Rather, for Taylor, ‘a genuinely moral incapacity often turns not on the idea of deliberation but on the way certain primitive responses and more specifically certain primitive incapacities for action are connected to a larger pattern of response in an agent’s life, a pattern of response that itself helps to constitute our conception of that agent’s character’.43 An objection might be raised here that Taylor is incorrect in attributing to Williams a ‘deliberative’ understanding of moral incapacity since Williams does not argue that in all cases an actual deliberative process is entered into in order to reveal a moral incapacity. Yet Taylor in fact concedes this: ‘Williams does not mean merely certain deliberative conclusions an agent actually does reach, but also … conclusions he would reach.’44 According to Taylor, for Williams, even where an actual process of deliberation does not occur, there exists the idea of a possible deliberation on the part of the agent.45 Hence Williams’s account can, for Taylor, be understood as deliberative since it implies that deliberation is always possible, if not always actual, in revealing moral incapacity.

Taylor illustrates his point with the example of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn in which Huck decides not to tell on Jim, the runaway slave, even though he believes it is wrong for Jim to have run away and that the right thing would be for him to return to his owner. Taylor’s point can be summarized thus: there is no kind of deliberation (actual or possible) apparent in Huck’s decision not to reveal Jim’s whereabouts. Indeed, the arguments which Huck articulates to himself are on the other side – with a conscience warped by racist society, Huck’s rational deliberations proclaim the rightness of handing Jim over. And yet, when the moment is upon him, he simply cannot do it. For Taylor this is a ‘primitive response’, that is, one which ‘cannot be explained in terms of some deliberation over his dispositions and commitments’.46 But for Taylor, despite the explanation having no recourse to any deliberation, this is a definite moral incapacity.47 Let us return to Arendt’s idea of nonparticipants. Arendt’s portrayal of the praiseworthy few who were not complicit in Nazi crimes is a description of individuals who experienced a moral incapacity – Arendt emphasizes their inability or incapacity to participate, the fact that they simply could not do it. Arendt does not elaborate on her notion to include any of the distinctions discussed in the literature between moral and other kinds of incapacity. Nonetheless, it seems clear from her portrayal of those not implicated in Nazi evil that she considers the kind of incapacity they experienced to be specifically moral. Her idea corresponds to Williams’s description of moral incapacity: the kind of incapacity nonparticipants experienced was indeed an expression of the moral life; it took the form of an incapacity to knowingly participate in Nazi evil and, indeed, never to even try such a thing. And this moral incapacity was definitely a conclusion in itself – it was not an input into a decision process about something else, nor was it something to be overcome. It was an expression of a nonparticipant’s moral sense of self. Of the differing models for understanding moral incapacity advocated by Williams and Taylor, what Arendt describes is closer to Taylor’s conception than to Williams’s since she accentuates the lack of deliberation, or possible deliberation, on the part of the nonparticipants. According to Arendt, nonparticipants experienced no ‘great moral conflict or … crisis of conscience’48 ; they felt ‘no conflict, no struggle, the evil was no temptation’.49 Arendt’s approach here seems, again, to undermine her thinking thesis – it is difficult to preserve a link between thinking and good moral conduct while simultaneously emphasizing that the defining moral feature of the most blameless people in Nazi Germany was the fact that

they did not have to think. As with the idea of living with oneself, Arendt’s thinking thesis seems to be contradicted here. The idea of moral incapacity is at the heart of Arendt’s ethics – it is these praiseworthy individuals who are among the best and the most virtuous. They are the shining examples of moral fortitude in a landscape of shabby complicity. These people did not allow petty self-serving intentions to make them complicit in evil (they did not express the banality of evil), they did not have to think, and they may or may not have been people who lived with themselves but what was striking about them was that they could not participate, they encountered a moral incapacity which saved them from collaboration in evil. The extract from ‘Collective Responsibility’ above demonstrates that Arendt appears to relate the idea of an incapacity to participate to her notion of living with oneself. Here she seems to conflate the two, contending that the incapacity to participate is predicated upon the idea that one could not live with oneself if one were to participate. Here we encounter a problem which we have already seen and which affects both the idea of living with oneself as morally relevant and the idea of individual moral incapacity: one must already be the kind of person who could not live together with a wrongdoer in order for wrongdoing to be a cause of inner turmoil and a motivating reason for refraining from wrongdoing. Similarly, in order to experience moral incapacity when complicity in crime is demanded, one must already be the kind of person who possesses this kind of incapacity (although one may or may not know this to be the case). In other words, it does not seem that moral incapacity, or at least the form of it which Arendt describes, can be learned or created or developed – one simply has it or one does not. This seems to come down to a question of character, a question which Arendt neither asks nor answers. For both Williams and Taylor moral incapacities are inextricably bound up with one’s character or, simply, the kind of person one is. Moral incapacities are, in fact, themselves an expression of a person’s character (or at least a part of that person’s character). Not only does it seem that moral incapacity, on Arendt’s understanding, cannot be created but also that it cannot be discerned. Arendt’s idea that at least some of those who did not participate in the Third Reich experienced a kind of moral incapacity represents a very credible account of the moral landscape of Nazi Germany, but she does not furnish us with an explanation as to why that was the case for those particular individuals. Why it is that certain people have certain moral incapacities and others do not remains inscrutable – it depends on who such people are, their characters, their moral senses of self and so on. Arendt’s

idea of nonparticipation is subjective – there is no universalizable moral standard available here and nothing that might help to prevent similar atrocities in the future. One has the sense that this is not a position which would have left Arendt satisfied. Finally, the issue of moral responsibility is again raised: if the grounds of moral incapacity in an individual are ultimately unfathomable and cannot be developed or learnt, then can we fairly attribute blame to those who do not possess the moral incapacity and praise to those who do? As we saw with Galen Strawson’s account of character and moral responsibility, if we cannot choose our own characters (or who we are, or our moral sense of self) in any meaningful sense, and if our actions issue from those characters, then we encounter serious problems when trying to attribute moral responsibility for those actions.

The morally unthinkable Arendt’s account of nonparticipation also pertains to another idea in moral philosophy – that of the morally unthinkable. In describing nonparticipants, Arendt contends that they experienced no struggle or conflict – they simply realized or somehow perceived that their moral incapacities would prevent them from participation in the immoral acts of the regime. In a sense then, to participate was morally unthinkable to them. They never entertained the notion in the slightest. It is not the case that they engaged in a long process of thought and deliberation, either characterized as a dialogue within the self or in any other way, and arrived at the conclusion that they could not participate. Rather, they simply knew it to be the case – the notion of participation could not be contemplated, it could not be an object of thought – it was simply unthinkable. This exposes the weakness in Arendt’s argument linking thought and morally good behaviour: If some of those among us who are morally praiseworthy, the nonparticipants, do not need to think in order to conclude that a given action is morally unacceptable to them, but rather simply apprehend it as such, rendering the commission of the act in fact unthinkable, how can there be any deep connection between thinking and morally good behaviour? There are a number of ways in which ‘unthinkable’ could be meant and the moral philosophical literature provides guidance in this direction. Michael J. Zimmerman points out that ‘unthinkable’ could mean ‘cannot be thought of’ or ‘inconceivable’.50 This is not the sense in which ‘unthinkable’ can be relevant to morality since there are imaginable instances in which one might declare an

action unthinkable yet nonetheless be able to conceive of it. I might claim, for example, that it would be unthinkable for me to ignore the pleas of a badly injured person whom I happen to encounter on my way to work. This is not to say that I cannot conceive of ignoring his or her entreaties and continuing on my way to work. It is, rather, that to me, such a course of action would be out of the question. Zimmerman also emphasizes that something could be unthinkable in this ‘out of the question’ sense ‘for a variety of reasons, not just moral’.51 The earlier example of eating roast rat is applicable here – I could claim that I find eating roast rat unthinkable yet it would be highly unlikely that this would be for moral reasons. Much more likely, it would be because I felt disgust at the notion, or deeply concerned about possible disease transmission. In so far as something is out of the question for moral reasons, it can be considered morally unthinkable. But what exactly does this mean? Does it mean, for example, that one thinks about something first before concluding that it is unthinkable? If what is meant here is to think thoroughly or to deliberate or reason about something, then this seems nonsensical for how can one, through thinking, conclude that something is unthinkable? Indeed, if the conclusion here is that one finds something morally unthinkable, then surely one could not bear to consider it. As Williams explains, ‘Entertaining certain alternatives, regarding them indeed as alternatives, is itself something that [one] regards as dishonourable or morally absurd.’52 So the process involved in finding something morally unthinkable cannot entail an in-depth examination – if one finds something unthinkable then one does not seriously think about it. Zimmerman describes it thus: ‘To say that someone finds an action unthinkable … is to say that he cannot countenance it as a serious option.’53 It is precisely this notion of the unthinkable which applies to Arendt’s work. It is clear that in emphasizing the lack of deliberation or evaluating of alternatives on the part of the few who refused to be complicit in Nazi evil, Arendt is demonstrating that for these individuals, participation was never a course of action which they could have seriously contemplated. To them, it was unthinkable in exactly this sense: it never presented itself as a serious option to them. Here we can see Arendt’s thinking as furnishing moral philosophy discourse with a useful example of the morally unthinkable: the nonparticipants of the Third Reich. Similar problems to those detailed above arise in applying the idea of the morally unthinkable to the moral landscape of the Third Reich: subjectivity and responsibility. What one individual finds unthinkable and cannot consider a

serious option may prove perfectly thinkable and a definite option to another. The difference in attitudes and actions in Nazi Germany is testament to that. What one finds morally unthinkable seems, once again, to be a question of character or one’s personal moral sense of self. And once again why it is that some people found it morally unthinkable to participate in Nazi society and others did not remains unintelligible. In terms of responsibility, again, if what we find morally unthinkable depends in the end upon who we happen to be, something we do not, in any meaningful sense, choose, can we be responsible for not finding a particular course of action unthinkable? Arendt, I think, would like to answer yes, though her work yields no convincing argument to that effect. This touches upon another element in the moral philosophy discourse, namely Raimond Gaita’s view that ‘some thoughts are, and should be, unthinkable’.54 In his article on Gaita’s notion of the morally unthinkable Jonathan Glover states that for Gaita, ‘To think some of these thoughts one would have to be either a crank or insane. To think others one would have to be evil.’55 As Glover explains, Gaita’s premise is that some acts are evil and that ‘we reject some thoughts simply because we judge them evil’.56 The thought that, for example, the torture of a child is acceptable is something we simply rule out of consideration – ‘Such a conclusion would be a reductio ad absurdum of any argument that led to it.’57 Indeed, the very concept of morality is based on the sense that we do not consider everything to be acceptable but rather exclude some things from contemplation; Glover observes that these boundaries it is unthinkable to cross are part of the framework that makes sober moral judgment possible. If we have no such boundaries or framework, then we will be able to believe anything, and the consequences of this may be disastrous.58 Arendt would sympathize with this depiction of moral life and it seems clear that the notion of the morally unthinkable underlying her work on ethics involves this commitment that some things should be morally unthinkable. Those who did not think and did not have to deliberate before refusing to be complicit in the Holocaust are those who found collaboration unthinkable, and these are the virtuous few for whom Arendt reserves praise.

Notes 1 Arendt, ‘Organized Guilt’, 124. 2 Ibid., 126.

3 Arendt, ‘PR’, 35. 4 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 59. 5 Ibid. 6 See Browning, Ordinary Men. 7 Arendt, ‘PR’, 33. 8 Ibid. 9 Arendt, ‘CR’, 156. 10 Arendt, ‘PR’, 34. 11 The debates about Heidegger’s Nazi past have come to the fore again with the recent publication of his ‘black notebooks’ (schwarzen Hefte). 12 See Arendt, ‘PR’, 47. 13 Barry Gewen, ‘A Fraught Childhood in Hitler’s Reich’, International New York Times, 1–2 March 2014. See also Joachim Fest, Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Other Press, 2012). 14 Gewen, ‘A Fraught Childhood’ 15 See Arendt, ‘PR’, 45 and Arendt, ‘CR’, 157. 16 See Arendt, ‘SQ’, 94 and 96. 17 Ibid., 96. 18 Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men demonstrated that even members of the Einstazgruppen could refuse to participate in the killing, a point Arendt emphasized in her correspondence with Gershom Scholem: ‘The SS murderers also possessed, as we now know, a limited choice of alternatives. They could say: “I wish to be relieved of my murderous duties,” and nothing happened to them.’ See Arendt, ‘A Letter to Gershom Scholem’, 469. 19 See his argument in Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. 20 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, vii. This collection of essays on different literary and political figures demonstrates Arendt’s ability to eloquently sketch and analyse the qualities of particular individual characters. Some of Arendt’s best and most-engaging writing takes this biographical tone. 21 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, ix. 22 Another similar distinction appears in Arendt’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ essay between individual (moral or religious) conscientious objection and collective (political) civil disobedience. Arendt asserts that ‘conscientious objection can become politically significant when a number of consciences happen to coincide, and the conscientious objectors decide to enter the market place and make their voices heard in public’. Hannah Arendt, ‘Civil Disobedience’, in Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1972), 67. 23 Arendt, ‘CR’, 150–1. 24 Ibid., 147. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 157. 28 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 78. 29 Arendt, ‘CR’, 157. 30 Arendt, EiJ, 295. 31 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 78. 32 Ibid., 78–9. 33 Ibid., 278 (note 10).

34 Arendt, ‘CR’, 156. 35 Bernard Williams, ‘Moral Incapacity’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 93 (1993): 59. 36 Williams, ‘Moral Incapacity’, 62. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 63. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 65. 42 Ibid. 43 Taylor, Sympathy, 60. 44 Ibid., 62. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 64. 47 There is perhaps a sense in which, one might argue, Taylor’s conception of moral incapacity is itself a more praiseworthy form than the deliberative account which he claims Williams provides: Taylor’s kind of moral incapacity is unmediated and instantaneous and seems perhaps, in some sense, more authentic than a moral incapacity expressed at the end of a deliberative process. 48 Arendt, ‘SQ’, 78. 49 Ibid., 278, (note 10). 50 Michael J. Zimmerman, ‘Responsibility Regarding the Unthinkable’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 20 (1995):204. 51 Zimmerman, ‘Responsibility Regarding the Unthinkable’. 52 Bernard Williams, ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’, in J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 92. 53 Zimmerman, ‘Responsibility Regarding the Unthinkable’, 204. 54 Jonathan Glover, ‘Insanity, Crankiness and Evil – and Other Ways of Thinking the Unthinkable’, in Philosophy, Ethics and a Common Humanity: Essays in Honour of Raimond Gaita, ed. Christopher Cordner (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 37. 55 Glover, ‘Insanity, Crankiness and Evil’. 56 Ibid., 44. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid.

Conclusion

Arendt’s idea of nonparticipation is a fresh and insightful account of moral motivations in Nazi Germany and can be seen as the culmination of her thinking on ethics: most of her work on ethics and morality is concerned with understanding mass complicity in the Third Reich, with trying to explain the collaborative actions of many ordinary, not particularly evil, people. Such a task requires, however, consideration of the few ordinary people who were not complicit, who provide a sharp contrast with the norm of mass compliance. Understanding the moral landscape of the Third Reich means as much to ask why some ordinary (rather than devilishly evil) people participated as to ask why other ordinary (rather than heroically good) people did not. Arendt’s ethical ideas prove revealing in explaining mass complicity: it seems likely that she was right about the banality of evil – many people who participated did so not because they were motivated by the evil goals of the Nazi regime but rather by petty, banal, self-serving concerns. The links she seeks to draw between thoughtlessness and wrongdoing and the great store she sets by living with oneself as preventing evil remain, however, unconvincing. Yet the implied notions of moral incapacity and the morally unthinkable which are present in her discussions of nonparticipants seem really to capture something true about the moral experience of ordinary people in Nazi Germany – for those who did not participate they simply could not; it was just unthinkable to them whether or not they were able to articulate specific reasons for this. Sometimes this is precisely how the moral experience presents itself and Arendt has furnished moral philosophy with an excellent example of how moral incapacity and the morally unthinkable can function. Yet the subjective nature of moral incapacity and the morally unthinkable remains problematic: it is very difficult to say why one person is morally incapable of an action which another has no qualms about. Arendt wants to show

us what distinguishes the good among us, the nonparticipants, from the rest and tries to do so using ‘thinking’ or ‘living with oneself’: the good people are those who think, or the praiseworthy people are those who live with themselves. But, as we have seen, she cannot conclusively show this and ends up instead guiding us to the conclusion that the good among us are those to whom evil is intuitively unthinkable and who therefore lack the capacity to become complicit in it. And the basis of the distinction between these virtuous few and the rest of us remains enigmatic and impenetrable. In this book I have sought to extract, analyse and assess all of Arendt’s moral philosophy claims, not merely those which are most famous (or indeed infamous). The bulk of study on Arendt’s ethics concerns only the notion of the banality of evil and, to a lesser extent, the link she posits between thoughtlessness and evildoing. I have expanded my survey of her ethics to include the previously untreated notions of living with oneself as a condition which can prevent evil and nonparticipation as morally praiseworthy. I have examined each of Arendt’s ethical ideas, beginning with the most well known – the banality of evil. Agreeing with Susan Neiman’s approach (and disagreeing with thinkers such as Améry for whom there can be no banality of evil or historians like Cesarani and Browning who think Eichmann was the wrong example), I consider the banality-of-evil thesis to be the plausible claim that evil deeds do not presuppose deeply evil motives, and that this accurately characterizes the form of evil which Adolf Eichmann represented. During the Eichmann controversy the essence of the banality-of-evil thesis was often obscured and insulting accusations were levelled against Arendt: that she sought to excuse Eichmann, or that she was a ‘self-hating’ Jew. Yet the fundamental point of Arendt’s claims about the banality of evil remained untouched – her account of the ordinary people who participated in extraordinary evil as neither sadists nor fanatics was credible. That credibility has only increased since, as others in her wake have put forward much less satisfactory readings of the moral landscape of Nazi Germany, such as Daniel Goldhagen’s assertion of an eliminationist anti-Semitic intention on the part of the German population as a whole. Arendt’s reading questions assumptions about the motivations of Holocaust perpetrators and outlines a credible account of ordinary people’s intentions which does not seek refuge in those dubious assumptions. I have built on Susan Neiman’s analysis of Arendt’s banality-of-evil idea, deepening the discussion of intention by further disassembling the concept of intention into the notion of committing evil because it is evil and the idea of

acting evilly not because it is evil but nonetheless knowing it to be so. In short, I have attempted to develop a more nuanced approach, one indeed which for that reason ends up being less optimistic than Neiman’s – Arendt in my view does not outline a sufficiently new direction for the understanding of moral responsibility in the face of mass complicity. Neiman rightly identifies moral responsibility as the ultimate question posed by the banality-of-evil thesis, but is perhaps too hasty in seeing a definite answer to it in Arendt’s work. Arendt’s account is, rather, an example of the impasse one can reach in such matters. Yet for Arendt’s consideration of this matter to be valuable it need not provide a clear, new understanding of responsibility. The value lies in her drawing our attention to two important facts about moral responsibility under circumstances of mass complicity: first, in situations where people commit evil knowing it to be evil but not because it is evil (in a climate of general collaboration in evil), this complicates the picture of responsibility, and second, holding individuals fully morally responsible for the commission of those evil deeds is nonetheless the only appropriate moral response. Proceeding with a critical stance and partly guided by Joseph Beatty’s insightful analysis, I have also examined Arendt’s claims about thinking as morally relevant, concluding that the claims of commentators such as Roger Berkowitz that it is the ‘activity of thinking’ which ‘interrupts totalitarianism’1 are rather too optimistic: there is no good reason to suppose that thinking will invariably ensure morally good conduct. Arendt’s moral insights are not to be found in her claims about thinking, which form an example of a well-used trope in moral philosophy, or indeed, as Dana Villa puts it, ‘one of the most cherished prejudices’2 in Western philosophy, that has never been truly convincing: the notion that thinking makes us moral. Even a thinker as insightful and creative as Arendt cannot express a truly convincing argument for this proposition. The value of Arendt’s contribution to this philosophical ‘prejudice’ consists in her exposing its flaws. This can guide us in future considerations of reason and morality, by discouraging us from setting too much store by any deep or necessary connection between the exercise of reason and morally praiseworthy actions. The literature on Hannah Arendt’s ethics focuses entirely either on the banality-of-evil concept or on the posited link between thoughtlessness and evil. Arendt’s idea of living with oneself as a condition preventing wrongdoing has never been examined as the separate notion that it is. In my analysis I have sought to reinsert this missing element, even if it emerges that this claim is no

more successful than the thoughtlessness thesis in terms of preventing evil. Yet Arendt’s idea of living with oneself has phenomenological validity – it corresponds to a sense we have of ourselves as having a certain internal (moral) integrity, the transgression of which (by acting at odds with ourselves) causes internal dissonance, and, as such, it can provide a model for conceiving of our moral sense of self and its limits. Arendt interrogates that moral sense of self we possess as individuals and its relevance for our actions. Neither has the literature properly grappled with Arendt’s characterization of the morally praiseworthy during the Holocaust, on which the idea of nonparticipation is premised. She asks pertinent questions about the qualities of those who refused to participate in evil when circumstances made complicity the norm. In this book I consider this idea from a moral philosophical perspective, identifying it as a manifestation of moral incapacity. Furthermore, I reveal a strand in Arendt’s work which has previously been overlooked – it is the notion of nonparticipation that forms the answer to the question which the rest of Arendt’s work on ethics raises, that is, how could some ordinary people become complicit in Nazi evil while others could not? The realization that ordinary people without extraordinarily evil motives could commit great evil is the concept of the banality of evil. The thoughtlessness and living with oneself theses are unsuccessful attempts to account for this – the idea that Eichmann could participate despite his banal motives because he did not think or because he did not live with himself. What would it have taken for him not to participate? Arendt’s nonparticipation notion reveals that only the possession of some kind of moral incapacity would have sufficed. Those who did not participate were distinguished neither by their thoughtfulness nor the way in which they consciously lived with themselves. They were set apart because they experienced Arendt’s ‘I-can’t’ – constituting a clear sense of moral incapacity. Yet the enlightenment and understanding this revelation brings are tempered by the sense that moral incapacity and its ground seem inscrutable. Why Eichmann, or some of the real-life Soldaten quoted earlier, did not exhibit a moral incapacity while individuals such as Johann Elser, Karl Jaspers and Johannes Fest did, is not something that yields an obvious explanation. And it would seem to be something we need to explain if we are to engender it in order to prevent future horrors. Arendt’s great value as a moral philosopher – which has been overlooked – lies in her pointing us in this direction. Her revelation that it is the experience of moral incapacity which sets nonparticipants apart is an invaluable contribution to moral philosophy and Holocaust studies. Her work indicates a

new direction for considering ethics and the Holocaust: we need to find a way to account for the moral incapacity experienced by those who did not participate. Arendt’s work also prompts us to consider how the kind of moral incapacity which prevented individuals from becoming complicit in the Holocaust, could manifest itself in the contemporary world. Finally, Arendt’s moral philosophy urges us to ask how we can prevent evils like mass collaboration in the Holocaust by fostering this kind of moral incapacity. Arendt’s ethics have their roots in her reflections on evil in the wake of the Holocaust. Just as the Holocaust has an enduring significance as an event of indisputable evil and one of the darkest times in human history, Hannah Arendt’s ethics have a continuing importance as a response to those dark times, and as a guiding light, illuminating a pathway towards understanding how such evil may be prevented in the future.

Notes 1 See Roger Berkowitz, ‘Solitude and the Activity of Thinking’, in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, eds R. Berkowitz, J. Katz and T. Keenan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 237–45. 2 Villa, ‘The Banality of Philosophy’, 181.

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Index

Abel, Lionel here, here Action and Appearance: Ethics and the Politics of Writing in Hannah Arendt here Adenauer’s post-war Germany here Améry, Jean here, here criticisms here of Arendt’s banality-of-evil thesis here Gestapo torturer here–here ammunition here ‘amor mundi’ here And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight here anti-Semitic atrocities here anti-Semitic fanaticism here anti-Semitic policies here anti-Semitic rhetoric of Nazism here anti-Semitism here, here, here, here, here–here, here attribution of virulent here eliminationist here fanatical here murderous here, here Apology here Arendt, Hannah ‘amor mundi’ here banality-of-evil idea here characterization of Eichmann here, here, here, here of Socrates here claim here, here about Eichmann here concept of thinking here criticism here critics here depiction of Eichmann here, here on Eichmann here–here

ethical model of living here ethics here–here after Auschwitz here–here on living with oneself here–here mode of thinking here Neiman on here–here notion here of the banality of evil here of thinking here–here notion of living with oneself here, here same as thinking here–here thinking thesis here–here ultimate moral standard here–here portrayal of Eichmann here, here reflections on nature of evil here reversion to archaic justifications here scholarship here, here terminology here thinking and moral considerations here–here on thinking and morality here–here thinking in Eichmann in Jerusalem here view of Eichmann here–here, here, here work, meta-ethical positions here–here wrong about Eichmann here–here Argentina, Eichmann in here argument from conscience here Aschheim, Steven E. here Assy, Bethania here atrocities anti-Semitic here of Third Reich here totalitarian here attitudes, contemporary here Augustine, De Civitate Dei here Auschwitz here Arendt’s ethics after here–here ethical significance of here automatism here Ayer, A. J. here ‘bad political culture’ here, here banality-of-evil here, here, here, here–here Améry’s criticisms of here defenders of here–here idea here

notion here–here significance of here Barbie, Klaus here Bauman, Zygmunt here , here Beatty, Joseph here, here, here–here, here, here Ben-Gurion, David here Benhabib, Seyla here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here Berkowitz, Roger here–here, here Bernstein, Richard J. here–here, here , here ‘blaming-the-victims’-characterization here Böll, Heinrich here Borren, Marieke here, here Browning, Christopher here, here, here, here, here Buckler, Steve here Bundesrepublik here Calder, Todd C. here , here, here, here Cavell, Stanley here, here–here Cesarani, David here circumstantial luck here Coetzee, J. M. here ‘Collective Responsibility’ here, here, here, here, here conservatism here constitutive luck here contemporary attitudes here contemporary thinking here conversation here–here Costello, Elizabeth here–here The Course of German History (Taylor) here credible model here Crime and Punishment here Critique of Judgment here defenders of Arendt’s banality-of-evil thesis here, here–here deliberative democratic interpretations here The Destruction of the European Jews (Hilberg) here destructive thinking, for morality here dialogue, thinking as here–here Diamond, Cora here–here Dillon, John M. here discourse integrity, moral philosophical here diversity, of Eastern European Jewish communities here dominance, of political-theory interpretations here Dostoyevsky, Fyodor here, here, here dualism, Manichaean here–here

Eastern European Jewish communities, diversity of here Eichmann, Adolf here, here anti-Semitism here, here–here Arendt characterization of here, here, here, here Arendt claim about here Arendt depiction of here Arendt on here–here Arendt’s characterization of here Arendt’s portrayal of here, here Arendt’s view of here–here, here, here Arendt wrong about here–here in Argentina here biographical details here born here claims here comparative blameworthiness here controversy here–here evil here in Jerusalem (1961) here–here on Kristallnacht here as moral nonthinker here motivations here, here normality here–here observations of here portrait of here responsibility here SS career here subsequent reflections on ethics here thoughtlessness here trial here, here, here, here, here, here Eichmann before Jerusalem (Stangneth) here Eichmann in Jerusalem here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Arendt’s thinking in here controversy inspired by here expression in here Judenräte in here reality in here Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil here, here The Eichmann Trial (Lipstadt) here Einsatzgruppen here eliminationist anti-Semitism here, here Elon, Amos here Elser, Johann here Essays in Understanding here

ethical ideas here, here–here ethics after Auschwitz here–here Arendt here–here and politics here–here European Jewish Leadership here Evil in Modern Thought here extermination, Hitler’s program of here Ezorsky, Gerturde here Ezra, Michael here fanatical anti-Semitism here fanaticism, anti-Semitic here Fay, Michael here fermenta cognitionis here Fest, Joachim here Fest, Johannes here Frankfurt, Harry here Frank, Hans here Fraser, Nancy here, here French Revolution here Gaita, Raimond here, here, here Gedankenlosigkeit here Germany national identity here National Socialism in here Gestapo here torturer here–here Gewen, Barry here Giles, Billy here, here Glover, Jonathan here Goldhagen, Daniel here, here, here, here, here, here, here Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (Gaita) here Gorgias here, here, here Grenier, Elizabeth here , here Habermas, Jürgen here, here Haffner, Sebastian here Hamilton, Christopher here Handbook of Holocaust Studies here Hannah Arendt film (2012) here Hare, R. M. here Hart, James here Hausner, Gideon here

Heidegger, Martin here, here, here, here Hilberg, Raul here Himmler, Heinrich here , here Hitler here era here murderous programme here Nazi regime here program of extermination here regime here, here speeches here totalitarian regime here, here Hitler’s Willing Executioners (Goldhagen) here, here Holocaust here crimes of here Jewish councils in here legal-moral significance of here moral principles here perpetrators of here, here horrendous crimes here The House of the Dead (Dostoyevsky) here Huckleberry Finn (Twain) here The Human Condition here, here, here, here, here, here, here The Hungry Soul here ‘identity-conferring commitments’ here institutionalization here integrity, and living with oneself here–here intention here–here and moral responsibility here phenomenology of here intuitionism here Jaspers, Karl here, here, here Jay, Martin here Jerusalem, Eichmann in here–here Jewish councils here–here in Holocaust here The Jewish Frontier here, here Jewish organizations here Jewish Review of Books here Jones, David H. here, here Judenräte here, here in Eichmann in Jerusalem here Judeo-Christian ethics, Nietzsche’s critique of here–here Judging here

judging, thinking and here–here Kahn, Paul W. here Kantian philosopher here, here Kantian resonance here Kant’s model here Kass, Leon R. here Kessel, Joseph here Kohn, Jerome here, here Kolnai, Aurel here Kren, George M. here Lang, Berel here Lanzmann, Claude here The Last of the Unjust here Less, Avner here Levi, Primo here, here , here The Life of the Mind (Eichmann) here, here, here, here Lipstadt, Deborah E. here, here, here, here living with oneself, integrity and here–here logical reasoning here Lowell, Robert here Loyalists here Lozowick, Yaacov here Macbeth (Shakespeare) here, here, here, here MacDonald, Dwight here MacLachlan, Alice here, here Maier-Katkin, Daniel here , here Manichaean dualism here Manichaeanism here Manichean substantive dualism here May, Larry here McCarthy, Mary here, here, here, here Mengele, Josef here Meno here meta-ethical positions, in Arendt’s work here–here Mommsen, Hans here Moore, G. E. here moral incapacity here–here morality here contemporaneous conceptions of here destructive thinking for here and politics here–here thinking and here–here

moralizing activity, thinking here–here moral luck here Moral Luck here morally unthinkable here–here moral philosophical discourse integrity here moral philosophical ideas here, here moral philosophy here , here, here moral realism here moral relativism here moral relevance of thought here–here moral responsibility, intention and here Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust: A Study in the Ethics of Character (Jones) here moral restrictions here moral thinking here motivations here, here, here, here , here Mouffe, Chantal here murderous anti-Semitism here, here Murmelstein, Benjamin here Musmanno here Nagel, Thomas here, here Nakhnikian, George here Napoleon here National Socialism here, here crimes of here in Germany here National Socialist Party here Nazi/Nazism here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here , here, here, here, here, here anti-Semitic policies here, here bureaucracy here crimes here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here dictatorship here evil here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here fictional reality here indoctrination here leadership here period here, here, here policy here principles here regime here, here, here, here society here, here, here totalitarianism here totalitarian regime here totalitarian system here negativity argument here

Neiman, Susan here, here, here, here, here, here–here on Arendt here–here argument, lesser-claim version here claims here contention here interpretation of Arendt here Neitzel, Sönke here The New York Times here Nietzsche’s critique, of Judeo-Christian ethics here–here ‘nonparticipation’ here, here, here, here, here Nuremberg Trials here On Revolution here, here Ordinary Men (Browning) here, here The Origins of Totalitarianism here, here, here, here, here , here, here, here Partisan Review here ‘Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship’ here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here philosophy and politics here–here and theology here Philosophy and Animal Life (Diamond and Cavell) here Platonic model here political existentialism here political theory here political-theory interpretations here, here dominance of here politics ethics and here–here morality and here–here philosophy and here–here post-war German government here Prima facie here privation argument here professional thinkers here Protagoras here, here psychic disharmony here public thinker, for public discourse here Raatzsch, Richard here Radical Evil: A Philosophical Investigation (Bernstein) here Raskolnikov here, here, here Rassenschande here realism, moral here

reality interconnected nature of here Nazis’ fictional here thinking and here–here relativism, moral here Republic here responsibility here–here individual (moral) guilt and collective (political) here–here moral here thinking and here–here Responsibility and Judgment (Eichmann) here, here, here, here resultant luck here–here Robinson, Jacob here Rousset, David here Russian Jews here Sanders, Wilbur here Sassen, Willem here Schäfer, Emanuel, Dr. here Schmitt, Richard here Scholem, Gershom here, here Schreibtischtäter here sexual intercourse here Shakespeare, William Macbeth here, here, here, here, here Titus Andronicus here Shklar, Judith here Slovakian Jews here Socrates, Arendt’s characterization of here Socratic approach here Socratic model here Socratic paradox here ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’ here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here Stangneth, Bettina here, here, here, here Statman, Daniel here Stern, J. P. here Stevenson, C. L. here Strawson, Galen here, here, here Streicher, Julius here, here Syrkin, Marie here Taylor, A. J. P. here Taylor, Craig here, here, here Taylor, Peter here terrible crimes here

theology, philosophy and here The Republic here thinking here–here, here characterizing here destructive here–here, here aimless and without result here–here destructiveness here as dialogue here–here interconnected nature of here and judging here–here model for Arendt’s notion of here–here model of here moral here and morality here–here moralizing activity here–here notion of here process lead one to moral truth here–here and reality here–here and responsibility here–here Thinking here ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’ here ‘thinking attention’ here Third Reich here, here actions and attitudes in here atrocities of here crimes of here, here criminal sanctions in here despicable actions in here evil in here ideology of here mass complicity in here moral scruples in here motivations in here Nazi culture of here perpetrators in here responsibility in here thought dialogue of, characterizing here–here moral relevance of here–here thoughtlessness here Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare here totalitarian atrocities here totalitarianism here, here Nazi here political phenomenon of here

totalitarian regime here Hitler here totalitarian system here ‘Truth and Politics’ here Twain, Mark here tyrannis here vita contemplativa here von Trotta, Margarethe here Wannsee conference here Welzer, Harald here Western philosophy, tradition of here Williams, Bernard here–here, here, here, here, here, here Williams, Garath here Willing here Wolin, Richard here, here , here, here Wo warst du, Adam? (Böll) here ‘Yes/No’ reading here, here Young, Marion here Zimmerman, Michael J. here Zweig, Stefan here

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