Na obra Eichmann em Jerusalém – um relato sobre a banalidade do mal, Hannah Arendt descreve em determinada passagem que o réu Otto Adolf Eichmann invoca o imperativo categórico de Immanuel Kant, na busca de justificar sua conduta criminosa no massacre ocorrido na Alemanha nazista. Inertes numa sociedade desfigurada e que apresentava novas leis, tanto o réu quanto os demais criminosos viviam sob um véu de cegueira, que não poderia, porém, ser fundamento para a barbaridade cometida. Pretende-se com esse (...) artigo elucidar o imperativo categórico de Kant empregado na ótica das leis da razão e, analisar o mau uso da autoridade de Kant por Eichmann. (shrink)

What I learned from you and what helped me in the ensuing years to find my way around in reality without selling my soul to it the way people in earlier times sold their souls to the devil is that the only thing of importance is not philosophies but the truth, that one has to live and think in the open and not in one's own little shell, no matter how comfortably furnished it is, and that necessity in whatever form (...) is only a will-o'-the-wisp that tries to lure us into playing a role instead of attempting to be a human being.On YouTube, you can find a recording of Flannery O'Connor reading "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." It is fun to hear the audience erupt in laughter when O'Connor, in her thick southern accent, has... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Eichmann, Empathy, and LolitaLeland de la DurantayeISometime in late 1960 or early 1961 Adolf Eichmann, jailed and awaiting trial in Jerusalem, was given by his guard a copy of Vladimir Nabokov's recently published Lolita, as Hannah Arendt puts it, "for relaxation." After two days Eichmann returned it, visibly indignant: "Quite an unwholesome book"—Das ist aber ein sehr unerfreuliches Buch—he told his guard. 1 Though we are not privy (...) to, and nor does Arendt speculate upon this officer's intentions, it is difficult to imagine that they were limited to procuring Eichmann a little "relaxation." The tale of a homicidal madman writing under observation and awaiting a trial that will consign him either to death or prolonged imprisonment—which fate spares him by felling him with a heart attack—could hardly have been very relaxing for someone at that moment writing his own memoirs and himself awaiting a trial with similar stakes.We might imagine other intentions on the part of Eichmann's guard. Could the gesture have been ironic? Or was it motivated by a dark curiosity—something of the order of an experiment? The sulphurous halo of Nabokov's book was still burning brightly in the popular consciousness of 1960. 2 Might Eichmann's guard have seen Lolita as a sort of litmus test for radical evil, and wanted to see whether the real-life villain—he who impassively organized the transport towards certain death of countless innocents—would coldly, even gleefully, approve the various and vile machinations of Nabokov's creation?This is all only speculation. In Arendt's account, she congratulates Eichmann for his indignation and moves on to other matters. In any event, given Eichmann's radical conventionality one could hardly imagine him liking—or even very well understanding—much of the book. As [End Page 311] Eichmann himself avowed, during his adult life he had read only two books, one of them being Theodor Herzl's The Jewish State. But whatever the motivations of Eichmann's guard, whatever Eichmann's degree of comprehension, and whatever congratulations Eichmann might have deserved for his disgust, the incident raises a question for the study of Nabokov's finest work which has yet to be answered.IIBefore turning to this question, let us remain with Arendt and her notorious reader for a moment. Arendt notes elsewhere that it appeared to her that Eichmann was nearly "aphasic." She comments that, "when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché," and that, "his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else." Arendt offers here nothing less than a definition of thought itself. "To think" is glossed ("... namely") by Arendt as, "to think from the standpoint of someone else." Though as a definition of thought, it is hardly impressive, it nevertheless expresses something essential about Arendt's conception of thought and thinking. (3) In her view, thought is to be placed under the sign of intellectual empathy, under the sign of living in the strangeness and wonder of another's world. (Though Arendt does not mention the connection, both the language she wrote Eichmann in—English—and her native one—German—make special provision for such a sense, as he or she who is "thoughtless" is not her or she who is incapable of some form of cognition or calculation, as "thoughtless" people can indeed be very clever and very clever people have been capable of great "thoughtlessness.")Thought is thus a communal, not individualistic, thing. 4 This point is important as, though Adolf Eichmann was unlikely to have seen much of himself in the irreverent and urbane genius of Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, nor in the latter's strange eloquence, Eichmann the man and Humbert the character of the first part of the novel (to leave the repenting Humbert of the book's last pages out for the moment), share an essential trait. What Eichmann the man shares with Nabokov's literary creation is the inability or unwillingness "to think from the standpoint of somebody else." The evil they share is the... (shrink)

The immediate purpose of this article is to examine Hannah Arendtʼs analysis of Adolf Eichmann in order to point out the groundlessness of her argument that evil, whether in the person of Eichmann himself or in general, can be treated as banal. The wider purpose of this article is to divest any argument that is based on the concept that evil is banal, ordinary, or trivial of any valid grounding. To develop the immediate purpose, the article begins with a (...) close analysis of the word ‘banal’ in the context of discussions of evil to highlight the immense (and dangerous) power of language. It discusses plausible reasons for Arendt’s choice of ‘The Banality of Evil’ as part of the subtitle of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. It then addresses two major questions: How did Arendt obtain the impression of the banality of Adolf Eichmann in the first place? What are the consequences of considering evil as trivial? The argument is made that Arendt communicated, regardless of her intention, that evil was trivial. Moreover, Arendt’s description of evil as banal and trivial directly contradicts evidence that Arendt presented in Eichmann in Jerusalem. The article then turns to address the widespread adoption of Arendt’s account in the prominent literature on Eichmann and the Holocaust as a ‘thoughtless’ move, pointing out that this is precisely the kind of perverse account of evil that such subtle and evil mind as Eichmann’s would want us to entertain. To introduce its wider purpose, the article concludes with a discussion of the pernicious consequences of equating evil with banality and of the need to abandon definitively this point of view. The argument is made that ordinariness is not and should never be an excuse for crime, for doing so is akin to inviting evil into our homes and shrugging our shoulders upon its entrance. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's political philosophy, focused on her works "The Human Condition", "Origins of Totalitarianism" and "Eichmann in Jerusalem", provides a theoretical framework for understanding the shattering and reconstruction of the public sphere in the face of the totalitarian experiences of the 20th century. The aim of this research is to present a legal-philosophical analysis of the trials of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg and Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, revealing Arendt's perceptions of the public sphere as a space of (...) plurality, reconciling it with responsibility and justice in the protection of human dignity. Finally, we discuss the consequences for the creation of the International Criminal Court as a permanent criminal institution. (shrink)

In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt aims to secure a more adequate understanding of the new crime of genocide so that it can be prosecuted in a manner that better serves justice. She criticizes the Nuremberg Trials and, to a lesser extent, the Jerusalem trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for miscasting this unprecedented crime in terms of familiar concepts and thereby obscuring it. Arendt claims that this atrocity, instead, demanded original (...) thinking that emanated from a closer grappling with these new experiences. I argue that her criticism reflects Heideggerian phenomenology. This approach questions absolute concepts from a position more consciously planted in the world, which Heidegger considers the source of original thinking. However, Arendt extends this approach to the domain of ethics and law and confronts genocide instead of aligning with those who perpetrated it. (shrink)

With Eichmann in Jerusalem, we have, I would admit, a most unlikely case study for use in a business ethics classroom. The story of Eichmann is already some sixty years old, and his activities in his career as a Nazi were far beyond the pale of even the most egregious cases found in the typical business ethics case books. No doubt, there is some truth to the fact that introducing Eichmann’s story into an applied ethics class would inevitably depict an (...) unseemly analogy between the practices of latter day corporations and the bureaucracy of the Nazi era. My argument here, though, is that the story of Adolf Eichmann, as depicted in Hannah Arendt’s well-known Eichmann in Jerusalem, offers a philosophically cogent account of judgment and ethical decision-making that future business managers and employees would do well to heed. Indeed, Eichmann in Jerusalem, originally a series of press accounts for New Yorker magazine, deserves consideration alongside the Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, and other classic ethics texts in a business ethics syllabus. This is not to say that Arendt’s work is uncontroversial; there are serious questions to be raised about both her depiction of Eichmann and her conclusions about “the banality of evil.” Nevertheless, her account of ethics, which, with its account of ethical duties and its case study of Eichmann’s character, shows both its Aristotelian and Kantian influences, is a warning to readers who would conflate morality with state laws and their duties with the needs of superiors. In short, I argue that, despite her well-known critique of modern large scale economies and her general avoidance of discussions of post-industrial corporations, Arendt may be a business ethicist of the first order. (shrink)

Este texto plantea un estudio comparativo desde la tesis de “la banalidad del mal” de Hannah Arendt, a partir de dos personajes inscritos uno desde la literatura y el otro desde la filosofía moral. Por un lado, el personaje del poeta y piloto de la Fuerza Aérea en la dictadura militar de Augusto Pinochet, Carlos Wieder, que aparece en la novela Estrella distante (1996), del escritor chileno Roberto Bolaño, y, por el otro, el oficial nazi Adolf Eichmann y el (...) conflicto político que generó su juicio penal en Jerusalén en 1961, luego de su captura en un suburbio de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, en 1960. De esta manera, propongo un diálogo entre ambos personajes: uno literario, basado en aconte- cimientos históricos y ficticios, y la crítica desarrollada por la filósofa alemana Hannah Arendt, con indicios de filosofía política y moral, al acusado por críme- nes al pueblo judío, contra la humanidad y crímenes de guerra durante el régi- men nazi en la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Las reflexiones de Arendt, elaboradas ante la invitación a realizar un “relato de hechos” sobre el caso para la revista estadounidense The New Yorker durante el periodo del juicio, se publicaron en: Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil, en 1963. (shrink)

Vanaf het moment dat Ian Buruma als dertienjarige over de veroordeling van de beruchte SS-functionaris Adolf Eichmann las, heeft het kwaad als fenomeen hem niet meer losgelaten. Hoewel het geweld van de Holocaust het ijkpunt is geworden voor ons hedendaagse begrip van het kwade, ziet Buruma dat er nog veel ontbreekt aan onze opvatting van het kwaad. Hij duikt opnieuw in Hannah Arendts analyse van het proces-Eichmann en komt zo via haar ideëen over de banaliteit van het kwaad en (...) over het totalitarisme uit bij het onbarmhartige kwaad zoals we dat in onze tijd aantreffen in vluchtelingencrises, vreemdelingenhaat en complottheorieëen. 'Politieke tegenstanders zijn niet langer mensen met een ander standpunt, of met andere belangen, maar immorele schurken die men het liefst uit de weg zou willen ruimen. Als bange mensen overtuigd zijn dat ze te kampen hebben met boze machten, dan is het hek van de dam, want dan is alles geoorloofd om zich daartegen te verweren.'"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Simone de Beauvoir incorporates a significantly altered form of the Hegelian master/slave dialectic into "The Ethics of Ambiguity." Her ethical theory explains and denounces extreme wrongdoing, such as the mass murder of millions of Jews at the hands of the Nazis. This essay demonstrates that, in the Beauvoirean dialectic, the Nazi value system (and Hitler) was the master, Adolf Eichmann was a slave, and Jews were denied human status. The analysis counters Robin May Schott's claims that "Beauvoir portrays the (...) attitudes of the oppressor as defined fundamentally in relation to the oppressed" and that her use of the dialectic is "inadequate to account for how human beings create extreme situations of evil, such as that of genocide.". (shrink)

O propósito deste artigo é trazer à luz os pressupostos românticos que animam o livro de Hannah Arendt de título Eichmann em Jerusalém. De maneira a fazê-lo, explorarei na parte II a concepção romântico-alemã de “cultura” enquanto formação subjetiva da alma ; após isso, abordarei na parte III determinadas teses de cunho romântico articuladas por diferentes pensadores do século XIX relativas ao processo de massificação e, no seu entender, ao esvaziamento dos indivíduos na modernidade; por fim, na parte IV, a (...) sutil reelaboração arendtiana de várias dessas teses. Argumentarei, portanto, que o conceito romântico de “cultura” opera como premissa central na interpretação que Arendt fez do criminoso nazista Otto Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann, em suma, teria cometido os crimes que cometeu por não ter sido formado, cultivado, como um verdadeiro ser humano. (shrink)

By posing a heuristically provocative question, this essay compares and explores in some detail the testimonies of three infamous perpetrators from the Nazi period—Albert Speer, Rudolph Hoess, and Adolf Eichmann—for what they reveal about their motives, ideological thinking, and strategies of denial and self-deception, as well as influences from their social, political, and cultural context. The conclusion drawn is that many of the external and internal factors at work in them are recognizable to us as features of our own (...) moral experience and, further, that this recognition is particularly important for motivating self-scrutiny in our own lives for any hints of impending complicity with moral evil. (shrink)

Is a devoted Nazi or a zombie bureaucrat a greater moral and political problem? Because the dangers of immoral fanaticism are so clear, the dangers of mindless bureaucracy are easy to overlook. Yet zombie bureaucrats have contributed substantially to the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century, doing so seemingly oblivious to the monstrous qualities of their actions. Hannah Arendt’s work on thoughtlessness raises a dilemma: if Eichmann, the architect of the Nazi Final Solution, truly was a thoughtless ‘cog’, lacking in (...) intentionality, can one really hold him morally accountable for the evil qualities of his acts? This article relates Arendt’s ‘thought’ and Strawson’s and Bilgrami’s discussion of ‘reactive attitudes’ and Sartre’s concept of ‘bad faith’. To find a basis for moral accountable in seemingly thoughtless cases like Eichmann’s. Although Arendt’s Eichmann is an extreme example, finding a basis to hold him accountable is valuable because ‘little Eichmanns’ will persist as long as impersonal forces structure and depress reactive attitudes. (shrink)

Crisis occupies an ambiguous place in the writings of Hannah Arendt. Not only does crisis undermine categories of judgment, but in doing so it eliminates prejudices as well, forcing us to judge without them. Although Arendt never had an opportunity to fully develop her understanding of judgment, we know that she considered it to be ‘the most political of man’s mental abilities,’ and her writings on education reflect this. In her essay, ‘The Crisis in Education’ she draws a connection between (...) judgment and crisis, linking it to the work of the classroom. It is this relationship, between crisis and judgment, that I examine. In doing so, I turn to two figures central to Arendt’s work – Immanuel Kant and Adolf Eichmann – each of whom embody opposing aspects of what it means to judge, epitomized by a conceptual tension between example and cliché. (shrink)

O tema central deste artigo é a persuasão e como ela aparece no pensamento político arendtiano. Nos ocuparemos desta tópica no intuito de mostrar sua fecundidade e seus limites no que concerne à esfera dos assuntos humanos. Em Arendt, as reflexões sobre a persuasão são suscitadas em referência à atividade política do discurso e ao papel da argumentação persuasiva. Nossa aposta é que uma investigação acerca das nuances da persuasão em Arendt comporta duas direções distintas e, portanto, assumiremos duas linhas (...) de pensamento que nos possibilitarão uma incursão neste debate. Com efeito, examinaremos a perspectiva arendtiana no que concerne à persuasão, por um lado, quando o tema aparece na recuperação da experiência da _polis_ grega, por outro, quando ele é tangenciado pelo relato do julgamento de Adolf Eichmann. Isto posto, nossa principal pretensão é explorar como a questão da persuasão é formulada de maneira contrastante no pensamento arendtiano. Para tanto, a modulação constitutiva do debate será demonstrada a partir de considerações pontuais no tocante à presença da persuasão em dois espaços de natureza pública, quais sejam, a _ágora_ grega e o tribunal. (shrink)

Kant’s rejection of rebellion as a political right seems to be problematic for his concept of duty. The paper discusses the trial of the Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann as a possible case against Kant’s political philosophy. It argues, however, that Kant in his Critique of Judgment and in his philosophy of religion has articulated a very sophisticated point of view.

If there is one lesson that Hannah Arendt drew from her encounter with Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem it was that the moral and political dangers of thoughtlessness had been grossly underestimated. But while thoughtlessness clearly “has its perils”, (LMT 177) as the example of Eichmann illustrates, thoughtfulness has its own problems, as the example of Heidegger illustrates. In the course of her 1964 interview with Günter Gaus, Arendt recalls her distaste for “intellectual business” that arose from witnessing the widespread (...) and “relatively voluntary” Gleichshaltung (co-ordination) of German “intellectuals” with the Nazis in 1933 (EU: 10). This was the year that Heidegger, Arendt’s former teacher and friend, “entered the Nazi Party in a very sensational way” (EU: 187). But Heidegger is for Arendt also a paragon of thoughtfulness who exposes the “incomprehensible triviality” (or banality) of “the they” and their “mere talk” (MDT: ix). This raises the following question: how can thoughtfulness, in the guise of Heidegger, and thoughtlessness, in the guise of Eichmann, both (though to a very different extent) lead to ‘co-ordination’ with the Nazis? What does this tell us about the relation between thinking and evil? (shrink)

La question du mal politique est devenue un thème central dans la pensée de Hannah Arendt. Lorsqu'elle travailla sur la compréhension du phénomène du totalitarisme, Arendt utilisa l'expression kantienne de «mal radical» afin de rendre compte de l'apparition d'une nouvelle forme extrême de mal politique. À la suite du procès du criminel nazi Adolf Eichmann, auquel elle assista à titre d'envoyée spéciale pour le New Yorker, Arendt se retrouva face à un nouveau concept, celui de «banalité du mal». Cet (...) article propose donc de faire état de ces deux conceptions du mal en demandant si le passage d'un concept à l'autre marque une rupture ou une continuité dans l'oeuvre de Arendt. (shrink)

Confronted with Adolf Eichmann, evildoer par excellence, Hannah Arendt sought in vain for any 'depth' to the evil he had wrought. How is the philosopher to approach evil ? Is the celebrated criterion of impartiality ill-equipped to guide judgment when its object is evil - as exhibited, for instance, in the recent genocide in Bosnia? This essay questions the ability of the neutral 'third party' to respond adequately to evil from a standpoint of avowed impartiality. Discussing the different roles (...) of perpetrator and victim, I argue that in any knowledge about evil the victim is the supremely privileged source; this being so, the non-party to the occurrence of evil must privilege the testimony of the victimized - even at the cost of strict impartiality of moral judgment. Key Words: Arendt • evil • genocide • Goldhagen • impartiality • judgment • Kant • Levinas. (shrink)

Each of the books that Hannah Arendt published in her lifetime was unique, and to this day each continues to provoke fresh thought and interpretations. This was never more true than for Eichmann in Jerusalem, her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she first used the phrase “the banality of evil.” Her consternation over how a man who was neither a monster nor a demon could nevertheless be an agent of the most extreme evil evoked derision, outrage, (...) and misunderstanding. The firestorm of controversy prompted Arendt to readdress fundamental questions and concerns about the nature of evil and the making of moral choices. Responsibility and Judgment gathers together unpublished writings from the last decade of Arendt’s life, as she struggled to explicate the meaning of Eichmann in Jerusalem. At the heart of this book is a profound ethical investigation, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy”; in it Arendt confronts the inadequacy of traditional moral “truths” as standards to judge what we are capable of doing, and she examines anew our ability to distinguish good from evil and right from wrong. We see how Arendt comes to understand that alongside the radical evil she had addressed in earlier analyses of totalitarianism, there exists a more pernicious evil, independent of political ideology, whose execution is limitless when the perpetrator feels no remorse and can forget his acts as soon as they are committed. Responsibility and Judgment is an essential work for understanding Arendt’s conception of morality; it is also an indispensable investigation into some of the most troubling and important issues of our time. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's rich and varied political thought is more influential today than ever before, due in part to the collapse of communism and the need for ideas that move beyond the old ideologies of the Cold War. As Dana Villa shows, however, Arendt's thought is often poorly understood, both because of its complexity and because her fame has made it easy for critics to write about what she is reputed to have said rather than what she actually wrote. Villa sets (...) out to change that here, explaining clearly, carefully, and forcefully Arendt's major contributions to our understanding of politics, modernity, and the nature of political evil in our century.Villa begins by focusing on some of the most controversial aspects of Arendt's political thought. He shows that Arendt's famous idea of the banality of evil--inspired by the trial of Adolf Eichmann--does not, as some have maintained, lessen the guilt of war criminals by suggesting that they are mere cogs in a bureaucratic machine. He examines what she meant when she wrote that terror was the essence of totalitarianism, explaining that she believed Nazi and Soviet terror served above all to reinforce the totalitarian idea that humans are expendable units, subordinate to the all-determining laws of Nature or History. Villa clarifies the personal and philosophical relationship between Arendt and Heidegger, showing how her work drew on his thought while providing a firm repudiation of Heidegger's political idiocy under the Nazis. Less controversially, but as importantly, Villa also engages with Arendt's ideas about the relationship between political thought and political action. He explores her views about the roles of theatricality, philosophical reflection, and public-spiritedness in political life. And he explores what relationship, if any, Arendt saw between totalitarianism and the "great tradition" of Western political thought. Throughout, Villa shows how Arendt's ideas illuminate contemporary debates about the nature of modernity and democracy and how they deepen our understanding of philosophers ranging from Socrates and Plato to Habermas and Leo Strauss.Direct, lucid, and powerfully argued, this is a much-needed analysis of the central ideas of one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Konrad Morgen: The Conscience of a Nazi Judge recounts the wartime career of Georg Konrad Morgen (1909–1982), a judge who prosecuted crimes committed by members of the SS in Nazi concentration camps, including Buchenwald, Dachau, and Auschwitz. In 1943, Morgen discovered the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He tried to throw sand in the works by prosecuting concentration camp officials for lesser crimes. He charged the chief of the Auschwitz Gestapo with for 2,000 murders, and even sought an arrest (...) warrant for Adolf Eichmann. Yet he worked within the ethos of the SS and continued to defend its reputation after the war. The book is a moral biography of Morgen, focusing on how he felt, thought, and deliberated about the moral challenges of his unique position. It explores Morgen’s moral and legal reasoning by drawing on his wartime papers as well as his postwar interrogations and testimonies at war-crimes trials. What emerges is a case study in moral complexity. (shrink)

Featuring essays by some of the most prominent names in contemporary political and cultural theory, _Sovereignty in Ruins_ presents a form of critique grounded in the conviction that political thought is itself an agent of crisis. Aiming to develop a political vocabulary capable of critiquing and transforming contemporary political frameworks, the contributors advance a politics of crisis that collapses the false dichotomies between sovereignty and governmentality and between critique and crisis. Their essays address a wide range of topics, such as (...) the role history plays in the development of a politics of crisis; Arendt's controversial judgment of Adolf Eichmann; Strauss's and Badiou's readings of Plato's _Laws_; the acceptance of the unacceptable; the human and nonhuman; and flesh as a biopolitical category representative of the ongoing crisis of modernity. Altering the terms through which political action may take place, the contributors think through new notions of the political that advance countermodels of biopolitics, radical democracy, and humanity. Contributors. Judith Butler, George Edmondson, Roberto Esposito, Carlo Galli, Klaus Mladek, Alberto Moreiras, Andrew Norris, Eric L. Santner, Adam Sitze, Carsten Strathausen, Rei Terada, Cary Wolfe. (shrink)

‘Banality of evil’ was a concept introduced by Hannah Arendt in order to characterize a new form of wickedness embodied in people as Adolf Eichmann and others nazis criminals. Arendt thougt that this perverseness was very awey from the one of ‘radical evil’, a notion built by Kant and employed by Arendt herself in former works. This article seeks to point out that concepts of radical evil and banality of evil are closer than Arendt recognizes.

In this paper, I provide an account of the way in which practices of punitive justice in the United States permanently foreclose the possibility of an open future for the punished. I argue that participation in a system where those forms of punishment are utilized is an act of bad faith because it involves the denial of the existential freedom of others as well as our own. Using Hannah Arendt’s account of Adolf Eichmann, I show how such acts of (...) bad faith are both natural modes of thought as well as inherently dangerous. Finally, I demonstrate that existentialism provides us with the ability to recreate our relationship to others and resist acts of bad faith, especially when it comes to crime and punishment. (shrink)

According to Hannah Arendt, the first impetus for her final project, The Life of the Mind, was her astonishment at the apparent lack of thought at the root of Adolf Eichmann’s crimes against humanity—a “manifest shallowness” which, nevertheless, “was not stupidity, but thoughtlessness.” This spectacle of the absence of thought, in the light of the immeasurable harm done to the victims of the Nazi regime, motivated her to get to the bottom of what it means to think. Since thinking (...) is often portrayed by philosophers as a withdrawal from the world, Arendt raises the question “Where are we when we think?” In pursuit of an answer, she provides a reading of Kafka’s parable “HE,” which she interprets as a description of the “region of thought” as a battleground between the past and thefuture. This parable enables Arendt to understand the activity of thinking in terms of temporality. While Kafka’s protagonist dreams of rising above the conflict and adopting a position outside time, Arendt argues that thoughtful reflection happens in the “gap between past and future” which philosophers have called the nunc stans or the moment. Rather than being timeless, in her view, thinking moves along a diagonal “thought-train” emerging from this gap. Arendt sheds more light on thinking by considering how its temporality differs from that of willing, which is determined by a primacy of the future. This difference between thinking and willing produces a conflict between them, which many philosophers have struggled to resolve. Arendt presents Hegel as a case in which this conflict is resolvednot, as we might expect, by a triumph of thought, but rather a triumph of the will. Arendt’s reflections on the temporality of thinking in Kafka and Hegel enable us to distinguish several different forms of thoughtlessness according to their dominant tense. Although Arendt does not spell out these distinctions herself, they make it possible to develop a deeper understanding of Eichmann’s thoughtlessness and its relation to evil. (shrink)

There has been much recent debate concerning how Hannah Arendt's concepts of radical evil and the banality of evil `fit together', if at all. I argue that the first of these concepts deals with a certain type of evil, in particular the evil that occurred in the Nazi death camps. The second deals with a certain type of perpetrator of evil, in particular the banal `nobody', Eichmann. As such, bar a localized incompatibility in regard to Arendt's early account of the (...) motivation of perpetrators of radical evil, these two concepts are independent but nonetheless highly complementary. Key Words: Hannah Arendt • banality of evil • Adolf Eichmann • evil • forgiveness • Immanuel Kant • punishment • radical evil. (shrink)

I consider two essays by Joel Feinberg: his treatment of the moral obligation to obey the law, and his exploration of the evils of the Holocaust.

If sociology is about society must it not also be about morality? In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the identification between sociology and morality was clear cut; Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Spencer, and Veblen all dealt with moral issues and one might argue that they saw themselves as engaged in a moral vocation. Now, one might argue that the connections between sociology and moral currents have become more tenuous. Moral Culture examines what it means to be moral in contemporary social (...) and cultural life. Author Keith Tester takes the highly original and revealing step of exploring how violence today, and throughout history, affects the relatively safe and secure people who live in the west and who tend to know horror only through television and cinema screens. The book raises questions about the meaning and significance of massacres in the Balkans, Rwanda and, rather more historically, the Holocaust, and the slaughter of Vietnamese peasants by American soldiers in My Lai. It also discusses how Adolf Eichmann and the men of Charlie Company might be different from or similar to us. It answers questions about whether this is a time of moral decay or more seriously, the collapse of moral Civilization. Sociologists often claim that they make a virtue of being relevant and objective, but few have attacked these issues with the urgency and originality that Keith Tester displays in this work. Each chapter provides a historically aware account of a moral problem making it especially relevant reading for students of cultural studies, sociology, political science, and moral philosophy. (shrink)

The article analyzes the ethical studies of Hannah Arendt on the origin of totalitarianism. The author considers the conditions for the formation of a “total state” and the role in these processes of both society as a whole and an individual. Based on the works of Hannah Arendt, the author analyzes the features of the totalitarian transformations of the individual and society, as well as their interaction with the regime at different stages of the functioning of the “total state”. According (...) to Hannah Arendt, totalitarianism is a system of mass terror, which is a phenomenon of the twentieth century. Totalitarianism is realized in the conditions of the destruction of political space and human interaction. It is the result of the alienation of a person from political life, that is, the “atomization” of society against the background of a deformation of basic ethical standards and established ideas about morality in general. Considering the problem of the emergence of totalitarianism, Arendt turns to the anthropological plane, where she explores the way in which violence enters the public sphere, and politics turns into an instrument for achieving certain goals and serving private interests. Hannah Arendt also analyzes the phenomenon of the “banality of evil,” which lies at the base of the so-called “respectable society”. Such a society easily becomes a weapon of totalitarianism along with “grassroots executors of orders”, as the example of Adolf Eichmann demonstrates. Hannah Arendt believes that the actions of such “executors of orders” should always be assessed as the actions of a person, and not just a “social tool”, from which responsibility for crimes is thus removed. Hannah Arendt identifies various areas of ethical, where there is a division into personal and political responsibility, and also studies the problems of preventing a possible repetition of totalitarianism. The “means” for such prevention, according to Hannah Arendt, are on an ethical plane. This is, firstly, the possibility of independent judgment and critical thinking, which create personal principles. And secondly, the presence of a public sphere, which provides the possibility of free action in a common social space. This is what actualizes moral issues and ensures the formation of moral principles. (shrink)

The public perception of decision‐making procedures as fair processes is a central means for establishing their legitimacy to make difficult resource allocation decisions. According to the ethical framework of accountability for reasonableness (A4R, hereafter), which specifies conditions for fair healthcare resource allocation, disagreements about what constitutes relevant considerations are a central threat to its perceived fairness. This article considers how an ethical principle grounded in the public memory of past traumatic events may become the topic of such disagreements. I demonstrate (...) this through an anthropological case study of a recent public de bate concerning an Israeli healthcare allocation committee (HAC, thereafter), which determines state subsidies for new medical technologies as part of Israel’s public healthcare system. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork about the HAC, I show how the public memory of Adolf Eichmann’s trial constitutes a bioethical problem for the committee’s legitimacy. Based on Arendt’s and Bauman’s writings that Nazi bureaucrats’ manner of “following orders” was an ethical transgression, some patients contended that the committee has a historical responsibility to question its strict adherence to bureaucratic procedures. Since the committee did not have a direct link to the events of the Holocaust, other considerations seemed to them more relevant. I then present an offer that can settle this disagreement and maintain the HAC’s legitimacy according to A4R. I conclude by discussing the contribution of empirical data to models of bioethical legitimacy. (shrink)

"After observing the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt articulated her controversial concept of the "banality of evil", thereby one of the most chilling and divisive moral questions of the twentieth century: How can genocidal acts be carried out by non-psychopathic people? By revealing the full complexity of the trial with reasoning that defied prevailing attitudes, Arendt became the object of severe and often slanderous criticism... [This book] explores the ways in which [Arendt] "unlearned" recognized trends and patterns - (...) both philosophical and cultural - to establish a theoretical praxis all her own. Through an analysis of the social context and intellectual influences - Karl Jaspers, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger - that helped shape Arendt's process, Knott has formed a historically engaged and incisive contribution to Arendt's legacy."--Jacket. (shrink)

The perplexing relationship between two of the twentieth century’s most important philosophers, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, has been the subject of much speculation within academic circles. For Arendt, Heidegger was at once, her mentor, her lover, and her friend. In this paper, we juxtapose Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil against her relationship with Heidegger in an effort to consider the question: How does corporeality inform theorizing? In answering this question, we repudiate the conventional reading of the banality (...) of evil, which attributes the theory to Arendt’s analysis of Adolf Eichmann during the latter’s criminal trial for the actions that he perpetrated in the operation of the Holocaust. Instead, we argue that the theory is, more compellingly, reflective of Arendt’s deeply personal attempts at making sense of Heidegger’s decision to affiliate himself with the German Nazi Party in the years preceding, and during, the Second World War. Through this revisionist account of the banality of evil, we animate the idea that theorizing is the discursive corollary, and belongs within the phenomenological parameters, of corporeality. Finally, we contend that any constructive understanding of how corporeality informs theorizing will only be realized, when there is a collapsing of the seemingly impervious philosophical boundaries that demarcate between ontology and epistemology. (shrink)

This chapter recalls not only what Arendt says about judgment, but also of how she herself goes about judgment by revisiting her judgment of Adolf Eichmann and his trial. By calling attention to the theatrical quality of the Israeli House of Justice and the trial staged there, Arendt subtly underlines a claim she makes at the beginning of Eichmann in Jerusalem, a claim that is not often considered by critics but one that introduces an argument for which Arendt's account (...) of the trial continues to receive much criticism. The claim is that a trial resembles a play. The argument is that the trial in Jerusalem was a failure. (shrink)

This article compares Hannah Arendt's famous essay on Adolf Eichmann's trial in Israel in 1961 to Simone de Beauvoir's little studied piece, "An Eye for an Eye," on the trial of Robert Brasillach in France in 1945. Arendt and Beauvoir each determine the complicity of individuals acting within a political order that seeks to eliminate certain forms of otherness and difference, but come to differing conclusions about the significance of the crimes. I explain Beauvoir's account of ambiguity, on which (...) she draws in her judgment of Brasillach and elaborates in her 1948 Ethics of Ambiguity, ana measure it against Arendt's account of Eichmann's thoughtlessness and its effects on the destruction of conditions of worldly plurality. Linking the failure of ethical judgment on the part of individuals to prior systemic political conditions, Beauvoir helps us recognize struggles over the meaning of bodies and conditions of inequality as central to politics. (shrink)

Now I maintain that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good. What sort of face does radical evil have? What strikes Hannah Arendt, as she sought to profile Adolf Otto Eichmann, is how completely ordinary he appeared in court. She describes him as medium-sized, middle-aged with receding hair, ill-fitting teeth, and nearsighted eyes. Yet this was the man who had meticulously organized the mass deportation of Jews to the extermination camps during the Holocaust. Like his appearance, his (...) personality seemed so typical that it led her to coin the phrase the “banality of evil.” Paradoxically, banality can be so extraordinary to the point that Eichmann appeared completely impersonal and inhuman, which.. (shrink)

The vast majority of studies of Hannah Arendt's thought are concerned with her as a political theorist. This book offers a contribution to rectifying this imbalance by providing a critical engagement with Arendtian ethics. Arendt asserts that the crimes of the Holocaust revealed a shift in ethics and the need for new responses to a new kind of evil. In this new treatment of her work, Arendt's best-known ethical concepts - the notion of the banality of evil and the link (...) she posits between thoughtlessness and evil, both inspired by her study of Adolf Eichmann - are disassembled and appraised. The concept of the banality of evil captures something tangible about modern evil, yet requires further evaluation in order to assess its implications for understanding contemporary evil, and what it means for traditional, moral philosophical issues such as responsibility, blame and punishment. In addition, this account of Arendt's ethics reveals two strands of her thought not previously considered: her idea that the condition of `living with oneself' can represent a barrier to evil and her account of the `nonparticipants' who refused to be complicit in the crimes of the Nazi period and their defining moral features. This exploration draws out the most salient aspects of Hannah Arendt's ethics, provides a critical review of the more philosophically problematic elements, and places Arendt's work in this area in a broader moral philosophy context, examining the issues in moral philosophy which are raised in her work such as the relevance of intention for moral responsibility and of thinking for good moral conduct, and questions of character, integrity and moral incapacity. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's well-known examinations of the problem of evil are not contradictory and they are central to her corpus. Evil can be banal in some cases (Adolf Eichmann) and radical (the phenomenon of totalitarianism) in others. But behind all expressions of evil, in Arendt's formulations, is the imperative that it be confronted by thinking subjects and thoroughly historicized. This led her away from a view of evil as radical to one of evil as banal. Arendt's ruminations on evil are (...) illuminated, in part, by concerns that she shared with her fellow New York intellectuals about the withering effects of mass culture upon individual volition and understanding. In confronting the challenges of evil, Arendt functioned as a suggesting profitable ways that historians might look at history from a moral perspective. Indeed, her work may be viewed as anticipating a currently afoot in the historical profession. (shrink)

Georg Konrad Morgen (1909–1982) war von 1941 bis 1945 Richter in der SS-und Polizeigerichtsbarkeit. Er ermittelte gegen hochrangige SS-Offiziere wegen Korruption; ab Juni 1943 ermittelte er auch wegen Verbrechen in den Konzentrationslagern (Buchenwald, Dachau, Auschwitz). Im November 1943 konnte sich Morgen persönlich von den Vernichtungsanlagen in Auschwitz-Birkenau überzeugen. Nach eigenen Angaben versuchte er im Rahmen seiner Möglichkeiten als SS-Richter gegen diese Verbrechen vorzugehen. So verhaftete Morgen den Chef der Gestapo in Auschwitz, Maximilian Grabner, und er versuchte auch, einen Haftbefehl gegen (...) Adolf Eichmann zu erwirken. Dennoch war Morgen der SS verbunden. Das Buch versteht sich als moralische Biographie eines zutiefst ambivalenten Charakters: es zeichnet anhand der verfügbaren Archivmaterialien nach, wie Morgen dachte und urteilte. In der theoretischen Einleitung und im Nachwort analysiert das Buch den philosophisch-normativen Kontext des Falls Konrad Morgen. (shrink)

This essay reconsiders the category of “Holocaust denial” as the marked indicator of ethical transgression in Holocaust historiography within American civil religion. It maintains that the present category excludes and thereby enables other violations of responsible Holocaust historiography. To demonstrate the nature and gravity of such violations, the essay engages the widespread claim that Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, the former mufti of Jerusalem, was an instigator, promoter, or “driving spirit” of the Nazi genocide against Jews, and the associated suggestions of (...) wider Arab and Muslim complicity. The essay uncovers the history of the Husayni narrative in question, the dramatic circumstances in which it emerged, its role in the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, and its rediscovery and misuse within American popular and political circles over the past two decades. Such misuse, it concludes, corrodes Holocaust recognition within American civil religion and demonstrates the need for a revision of the socially accepted ethical boundary for responsible Holocaust historiography. (shrink)

In the search for an understanding of the complexities that could have led such a “banal” man as Adolf Eichmann, to stand trial in Jerusalem for crimes against Humanity – in the humanity of the Jewish People – one ought to go beneath the surface of contemporary events into the roots of an overwhelming hatred that enslaved Europe for far too long and with consequences beyond what imagination could have conceived within the limits of reason alone. In the pursuit (...) for the “black hole” that brought European nations to a virtual ethical collapse, seriously damaging the capacity to exercise judgment, this article approaches one of the background dimensions of anti-Semitism which enabled the actions of men to structure evil in all but a “banal” manner. The second part of this study seeks alternative ways to conceive a relation between Judaism and Christianity. (shrink)

This article compares the concepts of judgment of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida. At first glance, there are a number of striking parallels between the two. Both draw on Immanuel Kant’s reflections on judgment but reject his transcendentalist premises and his exclusive focus on aesthetic concerns in order to turn judging into a practice at the intersection of law and justice. Beneath these parallels, however, there are significant differences. This, we argue, is nowhere clearer than in Arendt’s and Derrida’s contrasting (...) positions on the death penalty. The article is structured as follows. We begin by outlining the main features of Arendt’s theory of judgment and then turn to her thoughts on the trial against Adolf Eichmann, which we consider a radicalization of this theory. We show that although Arendt claims that it is our sense of justice that demands that Eichmann be brought to trial, she ultimately does not clarify what a just verdict might be in his case. Instead, she opts for the death penalty as a last resort for dealing with those who have committed crimes against humanity. Next, we discuss Derrida’s reflections on judgment. For him, the tension between law and justice is asymmetrical. Law should be understood as arising from the demand of the Other and must always remain responsive to it, despite its attempts at universalization. From this it follows, according to Derrida, that judgments ought to be open to criticism and revision. Since the death penalty does not meet this requirement, it must be rejected. (shrink)

Though there exists a vast literature dealing with Hannah Arendt's thoughts on evil in general and Adolf Eichmann in particular, few attempts have been made to assess Arendt's position on evil by tracing its connection with her reflections on conscience. This essay examines the nature and significance of such a connection. Beginning with her doctoral dissertation on St Augustine and ending with her posthumously published studies in The Life of the Mind, Arendt's oeuvre exhibits strong thematic continuity: the triad (...) thinking-conscience-evil forms its most enduring core. A puzzling core, to be sure, considering the controversies triggered, especially regarding her notion of the 'banality of evil'. By placing the role of conscience at the very center of Arendt's lifelong reflections, this essay explores the - in many ways related - influence exerted by St Augustine and Heidegger. Heidegger's conception of conscience in Sein und Zeit is identified as a crucial source for understanding - so the claim holds - why Arendt found Heidegger's philosophy particularly wanting as regards the question of evil. Key Words: Arendt • Augustine • conscience • evil • Heidegger • Socrates • thinking. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s view of conformity comes in his description and understanding of Das Man or “the One”. There is controversy within Heidegger scholarship regarding the interpretation of Das Man as an existential mode. Most scholars interpret Das Man to mean the existential mode of inauthenticity and delineate the two modes of authenticity and inauthenticity in Heideggerian existentialism. Less popularly, scholars like Hubert Dreyfus and Michael Zimmerman interpret the positive and negative aspects of Das Man and suggest the third mode of (...) indifference in Heidegger’s _Being and Time_. This paper follows Dreyfus’ understanding of Das Man to posit indifference as a third mode of being that is structurally similar to inauthenticity but motivationally different from it. It then uses this difference to categorize two forms of moral conformity in Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the difference between a morality of custom and a morality of conviction. The problematic of this paper concerns the distinction between these two forms of moral conformity and the moral status of people like Adolf Eichmann whose actions Arendt describes as the banality of evil. Usually seen as preservative of morality, Arendt shows how conformity may be a site for moral conflict. (shrink)

In this article, I point Arendtian scholarship to important elements in the history of psychoanalysis that are relevant to explain Hannah Arendt’s known aversion to the discipline. I show how the political theorist relied on psychoanalytically-relevant concepts from her intellectual heritage—from Aristotle and St. Augustine to Hegel and Nietzsche. Afterward, I argue that Hannah Arendt’s critique of Adolf Eichmann was simultaneously a critique of his narcissism, or lack thereof. I show how her critique was truer to Freud’s original understanding (...) of the concept than that of psychoanalysts writing in postwar America; a time in which the term narcissism itself became misused. I finally marry Freudian and Arendtian concepts together to think about the banality of narcissism. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to examine the role that memory and oblivion, forgiveness and unforgiveness play in Hannah Arendt’s thought in relation to acts of violence in the political sphere. Political communities do not always decide to remember the crimes they have committed or the wrongs they have suffered, but neither can they always forget their mutual harms, even when there is already peace between them. Without striving to exhaust the entire subject matter of Arendt’s work, I would (...) like to illustrate the difficulty of understanding the role forgiveness plays in her thought as well as to indicate possible solutions when forgiveness becomes unachievable within the framework of her considerations. Her reflection can be divided into two stages. The first is a focus on the idea of radical evil and the need to forgive perpetrators for their crimes. Second, under the influence of the Adolf Eichmann trial, she developed the idea of the banality of evil. This idea points to situations so terrible that they transcend all human moral judgment, making forgiveness impossible. However, even when the moral possibility of individual forgiveness has been rejected, when the legal possibility of seeking justice has been exhausted and when victims and perpetrators in the community are still unable to live together peacefully, Arendt’s thought leads us to the possibility of political reconciliation. (shrink)

In this article, I bring together Hannah Arendt’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s respective theories of political judgment to evaluate the problems that arise from their accounts of judgment in praxis. To do so, I compare Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil on Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel and Beauvoir’s “An Eye for an Eye” on Robert Brasillach’s trial in France. In approaching the dilemmas of judgment in theory, both share a commitment to preserving freedom (...) by virtue of our human plurality. In practice, however, both respectively demand the death penalty for Eichmann and Brasillach. I identify three distinct failures of political judgment in praxis: from the accused, the courts, and Arendt and Beauvoir, respectively. I contend that Arendt and Beauvoir fail to appropriately judge Eichmann and Brasillach by arguing for their execution, because it constitutes a form of political violence that undermines their theoretical accounts of judgment. (shrink)