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Beyond ‘The Banality of Evil’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Barry Clarke
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Extract

Although the relevance of evil to politics occupies a large part of the history of political thought few modern political theorists have paid sustained attention to the relationship between the political evils of our times and our understanding of the concept of evil. A major exception to this is Hannah Arendt. For Arendt the evils of totalitarianism, genocide and ‘administrative massacre’ have provided the material for the basic questions to which her thinking has been directed. In the posthumously published The Life of the Mind Arendt appears to depart from her concern with the evils of mass society; the work is outwardly a phenomenological account of some aspects of the history of Western thought. It is, however possible to see this work as a metaphysic for her more overtly political work. Viewed in this way it can also be used to deepen understanding of her concept of the ‘banality of evil’. This notion, which she first introduced in her report of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, became central to her understanding of one part of the Nazi phenomenon.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , October 1980 , pp. 417 - 439
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

1 Arendt, Hannah, The Life of the Mind (2 vols) Volume I, Thinking; Volume 2, Willing (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1978).Google Scholar The book was originally planned to include a section on ‘judging’, but Arendt died before this was begun. However, Arendt's literary executor, Mary McCarthy, has provided a short appendix on ‘judging’ taken from Arendt's lecture notes on Kant and this provides some indication of the general direction of her thinking in this area.

2 Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1976).Google Scholar

3 ‘I…can well imagine that an authentic controversy might have arisen over the subtitle of the book; for when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial.’ (Arendt, , Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 278.)Google Scholar In fact there have been few ‘authentic’ responses to her report on the trial. Many of the responses were directed at the author rather than the arguments she put forward. Some of these attacks were savage and even vitriolic. The development of the ‘Arendt controversy’ can be followed in several issues of the journal Partisan Review for that period.

4 It has often been held that Kant's ethical theory is too individualistic to apply to those political offences which reveal strong causal dependence or necessary connections. Such offences are, it is argued, better assessed in terms of a consequentialist ethical theory such as utilitarianism. The utilitarian approach, however, has the disadvantage that it weakens the concept of agency and precludes an adequate account of the intentions which are required for truly moral responsibility. Intentional action may not always be relevant to theories of politics, but it is more often relevant than is sometimes granted and is entirely appropriate here.

5 Quoted by Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 247.Google Scholar

6 Arendt, , Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 276.Google Scholar

7 Arendt, , Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 278.Google Scholar

8 Arendt, , Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 279.Google Scholar

9 Arendt, , Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 252.Google Scholar

10 Arendt, , Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 258.Google Scholar Arendt argued that the book was a report on the trial and nothing more. She does, however, concede that the epilogue considered more general matters than just the trial.

11 The relationship between thought and evil was also explored by Arendt, in ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture’, Social Research, XXXVIII (1971), 417–46.Google Scholar

12 Arendt, , The Life of the Mind, Vol. 1, p. 3.Google Scholar

13 Arendt, , The Life of the Mind, Vol. 1, p. 4.Google Scholar

14 Arendt, , The Life of the Mind, Vol. 1, p. 4.Google Scholar

15 Arendt, , The Life of the Mind, Vol. 1, p. 5.Google Scholar

16 Quoted in Arendt, , Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 48.Google Scholar

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18 Quoted in Papadatos, Peter, The Eichmann Trial (London: Stevens and Sons, 1964), p. 29.Google Scholar

19 Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 5.Google Scholar

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22 Arendt, , The Life of the Mind, Vol. 1, p. 70.Google Scholar

23 Arendt, , The Life of the Mind, Vol. 2, p. 258.Google Scholar

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25 Arendt, , The Life of the Mind, Vol. 2, p. 149.Google Scholar

26 In his earlier ethical writings Kant relied on a conception of autonomy which he later revised. He claimed in ‘The Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals’ that persons who acted on their desires or preferences were not acting autonomously but heteronomously. Autonomous actions have to be chosen for their own sake – in accordance with the moral law. But this connects autonomy and morality too closely for all wrong-doing was thus absorbed into the class of heteronomous action – and was thus not morally assessable. Kant's later two-fold notion of the human will is a response to this difficulty.

27 Kant, Immanuel, ‘The Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals’, translated Paton, H. J., The Moral Law (London: Hutchinson, 1953), p. 421Google Scholar (pagination of Prussian Academy edition).

28 Arendt, , The Life of the Mind, Vol. 1, p. 69.Google Scholar

29 Kant, Immanuel, The Critique of Judgment, translated Meredith, James Creed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 18.Google Scholar

30 Kant, , The Critique of Judgment, p. 19.Google Scholar Kant defines judgment in general as ‘the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the universal’ (Kant, , The Critique of Judgment, p. 18).Google Scholar He defines reflection as ‘that state of mind in which we first set ourselves to discover the subjective conditions under which (alone) were are able to arrive at concepts’ (Kant, , Critique of Pure Reason, translated Smith, Norman Kemp (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1976), B 316).Google Scholar

31 Kant, Immanuel, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, translated Green, Theodore M. and Hudson, Hoyt H. (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), p. 40 (Kant's emphasis).Google Scholar

32 Kant, , Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, p. 16.Google Scholar

33 The phrase ‘radically evil’ refers not to any particular type of evil but rather to the underlying maxim of evil which a radically free being may adopt. Thus the evil done may or may not be great; what is significant is that it be freely done from a maxim of evil. This, however, would not seem to cover Eichmann's type of wrong-doing. It is an undoubted weakness of Kant's presentation of radical evil that he fails to discriminate sufficiently between differing cases. The view I propose here of ‘heteronomous’ evil is developed from and is entirely consistent with Kant's writings, but is nowhere developed by Kant himself. Heteronomous evil as developed here rests on radical freedom but not on an underlying maxim of evil.

34 A phrase of Heidegger's quoted by Arendt, in The Life of the Mind, Vol. 2, p. 172.Google Scholar

35 Kant, , The Critique of Judgment, p. 152.Google Scholar These three maxims of ‘common human under standing’ appear to correspond to the three main formulations of the Categorical Imperative given in ‘The Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals’. They can best be seen as informal guides to the cultivation of the moral life.

36 Kant, , The Critique of Judgment, p. 152.Google Scholar

37 Kant, , The Critique of Judgment, p. 152.Google Scholar

38 Kant, , The Critique of Judgment, p. 151.Google Scholar

39 ‘By the name sensus communis is to be understood the idea of a public sense…’, (Kant, , The Critique of Judgment, p. 151).Google Scholar

40 Kant, , The Critique of Judgment, p. 84.Google Scholar

41 Kant, , The Critique of Judgment, p. 84.Google Scholar

42 Kant, , The Critique of Judgment, p. 151.Google Scholar See also p. 84, ‘experience cannot be made the ground of this common sense, for the latter is invoked to justify judgments containing an “ought”… Hence common sense is a mere ideal form.’ This ideal form or what Kant calls a typic is characteristic of Kant's manner of working.

43 Kant, , The Critique of Judgment, p. 151.Google Scholar

44 Kant, , The Critique of Judgment, p. 152.Google Scholar

45 An act which is done heteronomously may have good results; indeed it may even be a right act. But it cannot, in Kant's view, be morally worthy. A person cannot when acting heteronomously also fulfil the demands of the moral law which Wille expresses. The Tightness (or wrongness) of heteronomous acts therefore depends on the external circumstances and principles which guided the act. Here I follow Kant and take ‘external’ in the broadest possible sense. It thus excludes the autonomous self but includes personal desires as well as the subjective (or intersubjective) desires of others.

46 Quoted in Arendt, , Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 28.Google Scholar

47 Kant, , Critique of Pure Reason, B 172.Google Scholar

48 Kant, , Critique of Pure Reason, B 173.Google Scholar

49 Kant, , Critique of Pure Reason, B 172.Google Scholar

50 Kant, , Critique of Judgment, p. 152 (Kant's emphasis).Google Scholar

51 Kant, , The Critique of Judgment, p. 152.Google Scholar

52 Kant, , The Critique of Judgment, p. 152.Google Scholar

53 Arendt, , Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 49.Google Scholar

54 Quoted in Arendt, , Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 144.Google Scholar

55 Papadatos, , The Eichmann Trial, p. 29.Google Scholar

56 Quoted in Arendt, , Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 136.Google Scholar

57 Papadatos, , The Eichmann Trial, p. 30.Google Scholar

58 Arendt, , Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 136.Google Scholar Hans Frank was the Nazi Governor-General of Poland and the party's leading ‘jurist’.

59 Kant, , Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, p. 32.Google Scholar

60 Kant, , Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, p. 22.Google Scholar

61 Arendt, , The Human Condition, p. 241Google Scholar (my emphases). It is far from clear what Arendt means in the latter part of this claim. She does, however, seem to reject Kant's theory that all evil is based on desire: ‘experience has proved time and time again that the propaganda value of evil deeds and general contempt for moral standards is independent of mere self-interest’ (The Origins of Totalitarianism: Part III (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), p. 5).Google Scholar Elsewhere Arendt claims that Hitler, was a ‘non-person’.Google Scholar See her essay, ‘Rosa Luxemburg’ in Men in Dark Times (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin Books, 1973), fn. p. 5.Google Scholar

62 Arendt, , Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 16.Google Scholar

63 Arendt, , Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 277.Google Scholar

64 The concept of moral distance has been experimentally explored by Milgram, S., Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (London: Tavistock, 1974).Google Scholar Milgram argues ‘The most far-reaching consequence of the agentic shift is that a man feels responsible to the authority directing him but feels no responsibility for the content of the actions that the authority prescribes’ (p. 145). And, ‘I must conclude that Arendt's conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine’ (p. 6).Google Scholar The argument I am putting forward here shows firstly, how this appearance of banality is consistent with an underlying maxim or intention, and is therefore morally explicable, secondly, how this capacity for ‘elective heteronomy’ is fostered, indeed exploited, by modern political systems and thirdly, (see the following section) that the heteronomic structure of modern government cannot of itself provide the grounds for unquestioning loyalty.

65 Arendt, , The Human Condition, p. 220.Google Scholar

66 Arendt, , The Life of the Mind, Vol. 2, p. 199.Google Scholar

67 Arendt, , The Life of the Mind, Vol. 1, p. 192 (my emphasis).Google Scholar

68 Arendt, , The Life of the Mind, Vol. 1, p. 192 (my emphasis).Google Scholar

69 Arendt, Hannah, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 4.Google Scholar

70 Arendt, , The Life of the Mind, Vol. 1, p. 193 (my emphasis).Google Scholar

71 Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 98.Google Scholar

72 Arendt, , Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 278.Google Scholar

73 Arendt's last public comment on this is contained in her short article ‘Public Rights and Private Interests’ in Mooney, M. and Stuber, F., eds., Small Comforts for Hard Times: Humanists on Public Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

74 Arendt, , The Life of the Mind, Vol. 1, p. 13.Google Scholar

75 The regularity model of causation is based on Hume's contention both in The Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and in A Treastise of Human Nature that causation is to be understood as a constant conjunction of resembling events. On this view the causal maxim ‘every event has a cause’ is synthetic and contingent. Freedom, whether it is construed as depending upon free will or as requiring merely the absence of coercion is compatible with the Humean view of causality as regularity of appearances. Kant, who insists that freedom must be based on free-will and that it cannot be construed merely as the absence of coercion, puts forward a stronger view of causation than Hume's. For Kant the causal maxim is a synthetic a priori principle and causation involves non-analytic necessity. Thus while Hume's view of causation is epistemological and Kant's is metaphysical both are compatible with Kant's view of free will. Ironically, in view of the many debates on compatibilism it is easier to construct forms of compatibilism than it is to construct a genuine form of incompatibilism.