Adolf Eichmann
HANNAH ARENDT AND KANT ON EICHMANN AND THE BANALITY OF EVIL By Haim Marantz *** The Montréal Review, January 2025 |
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Hannah Arendt’s most controversial book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, began life as a series of articles for The New Yorker on the trial of a person who was the principal organizer and administrator of the Final Solution. What she produced was an account that seemed to many to stand truth on its head by denying Eichmann’s responsibility and blaming the Jews themselves for the catastrophe that befell them. This interpretation of Arendt’s argument was unfair. However, I am sure, it was this misinterpretation of Arendt’s book that was largely responsible for the fact that we in Israel had to wait until the year 2000 to have a Hebrew translation of it. In this essay I shall explore one theme not only of Arendt’s Eichmann book but also one that was central to all her political thinking. It is a theme that also found expression in the infamous subtitle of the Eichmann book—“the Banality of Evil”. The use of this expression by Arendt caused offense to many, who clearly failed to grasp her meaning. I believe that Leora Bilsky accurately captured Arendt’s intention when she wrote: “what she means by this expression is not that Eichmann’s deeds were banal or that we should mitigate his responsibility, rather that his motivation for doing what he did do were banal. Eichmann was not motivated by an insane hatred of Jews, nor by a belief in their innate wickedness, nor by any ideological conviction and/or psychiatric pathology, but rather by the ordinary job-holders' concern with success, promotion, the esteem of his co-workers and most especially the praise of his superiors. It was this banal motivation, which stands in stark contrast to his deeds, that could only be sustained through a deliberate refusal to relate to others and through radically isolating himself from the reality of his victims”. (Bilsky, 1996, p. 150). * * * * * Eichmann presented the judges of the Jerusalem Court with a twofold difficulty. Firstly, the formal and/or legal grounds on which to judge him were far from clear; secondly, there was no obvious explanation, moral or psychological, as to why he allowed himself to become an instrument of mass murder. The prosecution at Jerusalem failed to show that Eichmann had personally killed or, as far as is known, directly ordered the killing of any specific and nameable person. The court, however, concluded that:
Eichmann was found guilty on several accounts of offences against the Jewish people and “crimes against humanity” as well as on other counts. While Arendt regarded Eichmann’s conviction and punishment as correct, she denied that he was a monster, and she accepted his oft-repeated claim that he was not aware, nor did he understand, the precise nature of the wrongdoing he was being tried for. She wrote that
While she concluded that the judgment of the Jerusalem court was correct, Arendt was severely critical of the grounds on which the judges’ verdict was reached and so she sketched an alternative and imaginary judgment. The judges, in her view, should have said to Eichmann something like: “We are concerned here only with what you did, and not with the possible noncriminal nature of your inner life and of your motives”. (Arendt, 1976, p. 278.) She then concluded that the political nature of his crimes can be grasped only by those who realize that
On 31st May, 1962, Eichmann was executed by hanging. Arendt wrote of his last cliché-ridden words:
Arendt’s gloss on this was:
But, despite this, Arendt made it clear, especially in the postscript she appended to the book on Eichmann, that that book was not [principally] meant to be a “theoretical treatise on the nature of evil”. (Arendt, 1976, p. 285.) Nevertheless, in the introduction to her posthumously published The Life of the Mind (1978, Vols. 1 and 2) Arendt wrote that
What mainly struck Arendt about Eichmann the man was his
She argued that what permitted Eichmann to do great evils was “not [his] stupidity but [his] thoughtlessness”. (Arendt, 1978, Vol. 1, p. 4.) She asks:
Her observation of the Eichmann trial convinced her that Eichmann’s appearance of banality revealed an underlying thoughtlessness. This thoughtlessness was shown in various ways, not least of which was his constant repetition of trivial and empty truths. However, it would not be consistent with Arendt’s depiction of Eichmann to regard him as someone who lacked a mental life. She was aware that Eichmann did calculate and reason. It is quite clear from her account of Eichmann that Arendt was aware that he had knowledge and that he judged, and that he reasoned and that he willed. If he had failed to successfully employ any of these faculties, then, like any other human being who lacks knowledge, judgment, reason and/or the ability to will he would have had extreme difficulty in getting along in most social worlds. However, not only did Eichmann not have such difficulties; there was at least one social world, that of the Third Reich, where he was a comparative success. Hence, Arendt’s claim that the source of Eichmann’s behavior—his inability to think—seemed to many somewhat strange, given the capacities he successfully employed to rise up the Nazi bureaucratic ladder. To explain this, I first need to say something about Arendt’s views as to the nature of human mental capacities. * * * * * Arendt’s claim that Eichmann did not think also mirrored a central theme of her diagnosis of the ills and dangers of the bureaucratic ills threatening human life modern mass societies. For Arendt, Eichmann was a single extreme paradigm example of the dangers of a type of thoughtlessness often displayed by many bureaucrats working in modern institutions. What is more, she claimed that one of the poignant characteristics of the human condition throughout the twentieth century was a
As a remedy for the ills of modern society, this prima facie was a curious position for Arendt —a student not of psychology but of politics—to have taken. She claimed that “the principle by which we [each] act and the criteria by which we [each] judge and conduct our lives depends ultimately on the life of the mind”, (Arendt, 1978, Vol. 1, p. 71.) She also asserted that “in our world there is no clearer or more radical opposition than that between thinking and doing”. (Arendt, 1978, Vol. 1, p. 71.) She regarded the mental activities of thinking, of willing and of judging as separate and autonomous, and agreed with Hume that reason alone cannot move the will. (See Arendt, 1978, Vol. 1, p. 70.) In separating thought and action in this way, Arendt was attempting to show that there is an unbridgeable dichotomy between the solitariness of thought (the essence of which she regards, following Socrates, as a form of “inner dialogue between me and myself”) and action which for her was all necessarily community dependent. This distinction between the solitariness of thought and the communality required for action was centrally crucial to Arendt’s political thought. For her, politics was not confined to bureaucrats in highly structured organizations. Politics, for Arendt, is primarily to be found in communal action in the public realm, in what she referred to as “the space of appearance”. (Arendt, 1958, p. 220.) It is the decline of the public spaces—the spaces in which individual men and women can singularly and also in concert with other individuals act as citizens, that is, as conscious members of their own communities—that, she believed, has led to the decline in the standing of politics among members of the general public as well as to the dangers brought about by the growth in the number and influence of bureaucratic institutions in contemporary modern mass societies. Arendt’s view of the psyche of individual human beings rested on a specific metaphysic that separated not only “thought” but also “judging” and “willing” from action as well as each of them from each other. She contrasted the individuality of the will with freedom and community action, just as she contrasted the detachment required for judgment with communal participation. Thus, the faculties of the mind were seen by Arendt as conditions which enabled each individual person to identify the boundaries beyond which each of them will not act because they each cannot do so, rather than as the causal antecedents of particular actions. So when she claimed that thinking was among those conditions that lead men and women to abstain from doing evil, she was pointing not to the particular decisions taken by specific individuals not to engage in particular types of actions, but rather to a conceptual relation of thinking to those actions each individual person will not perform simply because he and/or she is unconscious of them in the sense that those types of actions fail to fall within the province of that specific individual’s conscious thought. Similarly, she argued that the striking feature of judgment is that it is a general standpoint, “a viewpoint from which to look upon, to watch, to form judgments”: or as she herself quoting Kant, wrote “to reflect upon human affairs, it—thinking—does not tell you how [precisely] to act…” (Arendt, 1978, Vol. 2, p. 258.) The will, Arendt believed, was not only distinguishable, but also separable, from action. For Arendt, action was always public and communal, while the will was, in her view, the most private of all the mental faculties. This view was then, and still is, a quite distinctive view of human action. Arendt did, however, regard the will as directly related to politics in one important respect. The will, for her, provides each self with the grounds they each need for their own individuation of themselves. But rather than seeing this as promoting freedom, she viewed “this individuation brought about by the Will… [as breeding] new and serious trouble for the notion of freedom”. (Arendt, 1978, Vol. 2, p. 195.) Such freedom she regarded as solipsistic and so any action resting only on an unmodified exercise of the faculty of the will could—and often did—result in the uncoordinated pursuit of private and selfish interests. Such egoistic pursuit tends to turn away from their own communities within which both communal political action and also political freedom are to be found and hence she regarded them as not only as a-political but also as antipolitical. For Arendt, the mental faculties of thinking, willing and judging, taken separately and in isolation are, respectively, non-political, anti-political and a-political. * * * * * It was this general perspective on the “life of the mind” that influenced Arendt’s misreading of Kant and led her to interpret Kant’s moral philosophy, in my humble opinion, in an idiosyncratic way. And it was this idiosyncratic reading of Kant that permitted her to adopt a view of free action that ultimately,in myview, undercuts the ground of some of her moral and political assessments. Her [mis]reading of Kant particularly influenced her [mis]understanding of the faculty of willing and of the faculty of judging. Arendt wrote that
But Arendt was, I believe, only partially correct when she claimed that Kant’s spontaneity resided wholly in thought. Spontaneity, for Kant, did reside in thought, but not only in thought. The basis of individual men and women’s ability to act in accordance with their transcendental freedom, that is, with their spontaneity— what Kant referred to as Willkür—arbitrariness. Arbitrariness, for Kant, is the basis of the capacity of all individuals to begin a new, under-determined series of actions in time. Without this capacity to initiate actions human individuals would not, Kant believed, be capable of moral action. Thus Willkür, for Kant, was taken to be the basis of all free, i.e. spontaneous human action. An action, however, can be free and yet not autonomous. In his later moral writings Kant developed a theory of the will which linked autonomy not to freedom but to the moral law. The moral law is made known to Willkür through the Wille—the will. The Wille itself is unable to choose between alternatives, and so cannot by itself alone bring about action. Wille presents the rational and moral purpose of the universe which the Categorical Imperative (the duty to “act only on that maxim that any human individual should do only those actions about which he and/or she can sincerely claim that it should become a universal law. (See Kant, 1964, p. 421.) Wille can lead to rational and moral action only when the Willkür freely acts in accordance with Wille; as when it does so, each individual’s specific actions are not only spontaneous they are also autonomous and so nontrivially moral. In choosing to ignore this distinction that Kant drew between Wille and Willkür led Arendt, in my view to misinterpret Kant’s notion of Wille and saw it as subordinate to reason. But the ground of spontaneity was, for Kant, not only a characteristic of the will it was, also a characteristic of thought. It is Arendt’s misreading of Kant that in my view rendered his notion of will “irrelevant” to her discussion of Eichmann. If Kant’s conception of will was, as she asserted it was, subordinate to reason, then it could not be anti-political. Willkür, for Kant, was its own cause and so is antipolitical when the actions it brings about only on the basis of personal desire and/or conditionally can, though it need not ,also act according to reason also as well as the moral law dictates it should. So, far from being necessarily antipolitical, the spontaneous exercise of will was, for Kant something that could, meaningfully be said to be seen to express both reason and autonomy and so furnish those conditions within which true political freedom—in Kant’s view—can emerge. That is, for Kant, political freedom could not emerge if the will of the various individual men and women acted only heteronomously and never autonomously. A similar consequence would follow if the will acted without the mediation of judgment. Without judgment the will would indeed be antipolitical. Arendt’s reading of Kant’s notion of judgment, on which she seemed to have relied almost completely for her remarks on “judging”, was unfortunately partial and so misleading as was her reading of his theory of the will. In the first volume of The Life of the Mind Arendt explicitly made use of what she referred to as Kant’s notion of “reflective judgment—the ability which ascends 'from the particular to the universal' by deciding, without any over-all rules…” (Arendt, 1978, Vol. 1, p. 69.) But the inference she drew from this—that judgment does not tell anyone how precisely to act, while narrowly correct, is also misleading in some crucial ways which I shall now to sketch. In Kant’s view, prior judgment is required for any action to occur. He divided judgments into two kinds, determinant and reflective. A determinant judgment is made when a universal rule and/or principle, and/or a law is given as that in terms which the particular empirical facts are being subsumed [classified] under. (Kant, 1952, p. 18.) This type of judgment was for Kant also the basis of knowledge, whose limits Kant famously discussed in The Critique of Pure Reason. But that for Kant was a type of judgement that was also required for morality, especially for the application of any maxim of action required a prior determinant judgement in order that it shall be acted upon. I remind my readers that reflective thinking was identified by Kant also as a form of judgement
Through the making of reflective judgments, individuals singularly and also collectively—with other individuals—form conscious assumptions about the designs of nature and so they come to formulate postulates they each require for their own understanding which they each need to navigate successfully the empirical world and also they also to formulate moral maxims to help guide their moral actions in the social world. These two kinds of judgment, the determinant and the reflective, were for Kant jointly required for an action to be free and also autonomous. Without determinant judgment we cannot know, let alone evaluate the nature of our circumstances and their likely effects of our plans and of our actual and possible future actions. A person who completely lacked the capacity for determinant judgment would permanently exist in a chaos of undifferentiated apprehensions. Without the ability to make reflective judgments an individual person could not think spontaneously about the nature of his or her plans for the future let alone reflect on the moral significance of his and/or her actions. Reflective judgment was for Kant clearly open-ended and spontaneous. He identified the ability to make moral judgements as an active faculty which was required for all self-determined action. Judgment, for him while being a spectator of action, was not exclusively so. Kant argued that the faculties of mind are actively integrated in all autonomous action. But that is contrary to Arendt’s view that the faculties of mind occupy separate domains; a view which she also mistakenly appears to have believed was also Kant’s. The principal difficulty with Arendt’s phenomenology of the psyche is that, when she applied it to Eichmann, it accounted only for his appearance of thoughtlessness. There is, undoubtedly, more than some truth in her claim that Eichmann’s main fault was thoughtlessness. He did appear thoughtless. But this would have significance, she claimed only if the relation between thought and action were of the kind that Kant suggests and which Arendt explicitly rejected. “Thoughtlessness” and its opposite “thoughtfulness” can be morally and politically significant only if the connection between thinking and action is close—distinguishable but not separable. Spontaneity of thought can provide the grounds of all moral assessment only if that self-same spontaneity can meaningfully be said to underlie all action. But Arendt explicitly denied this. In the next section, I shall outline a view of political evil based on the integration of all the faculties of the mind with all actions. I hope this will enable me to clarify both Eichmann’s apparent thoughtlessness and his moral culpability more effectively than Arendt did. Then, in the section following that one I shall sketch different ways in which some social bureaucratic institutions can meaningfully be said to have something like causal powers. Like Arendt I shall begin by returning to Kant. * * * * * The distinction between the spontaneity of Willkür (which all humans have) and the autonomy of Wille (which is exhibited only in morally good actions) provides the basis of Kant’s answer to the ancient question as to what the moral nature of humanity is. On Kant’s view, humans are neither innately good nor innately bad. A human individual is free to become good or bad. A human individual for Kant is radically free and must, therefore, choose his own nature. “Man himself must make or have made himself into whatever, in a moral sense, whether good or evil, he is or is to [shall] become.” (Kant, 1960, p. 40.) Given this notion of “radical freedom”, the determination of whether an individual human person becomes to be evil or good depends solely on the person himself and/or herself, but a person is not evil merely simply because he or she performed evil acts. Whether a person is evil depends not only on his or her actual actions but also on maxims he or she acted in accordance with. In order, then, to call a man evil, it would have to be possible a priori to infer from several evil acts done with [while being] consciousness of their evil, or from one such act [acting on], an underlying evil maxim; and further, from this maxim to infer the presence in the agent of an underlying common ground, itself a maxim, of all particular morally-evil maxims. (Kant, 1964, p. 16.) In this way Kant indicated that one corollary of “radical freedom” is the possibility of individual humans becoming “radically evil”. If Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann is even partially correct, it would be scarcely possible to regard Eichmann as “radically evil” in any strict Kantian sense of that term. That notion may possibly apply, although even here some modification would be needed, to render it applicable to the major war criminals of the Third Reich (the Arch Nazis), for their actions were often guided by vicious and evil intentions. But viewing what the Arch Nazis did in this way has led to some identifying their evil actions as nothing but an extreme form of parochial criminality. But for the unthinking support of Eichmann and the very many like him the Holocaust would not have occurred. Arendt in my view was undoubtedly correct in characterizing Eichmann’s appearance as banal, but, if that banality of appearance reflected anything of Eichmann’s inner condition, then he could hardly have been held culpable for his actions, for we would have to assume that the apparent absence of these faculties in his appearance were due not to incapacity but to conscious abnegation. The faculties of thinking, willing and judging may be freely abnegated and/or the opportunities available to cultivate and develop them freely passed by. That actions of abnegation and of neglect can be free is guaranteed by Willkür, which, on Kant’s account, is a type of awareness possessed by all mature sane humans and so is something which they are unable to abnegate. This means that, for Kant, even those who “will not-to-will” are responsible for their inaction. Kant regarded spontaneity as given but believed that autonomy was capable of both development and restriction. He presented three maxims of “common human understanding”. (Kant, 1952, p. 152.) These were the maxims of understanding, of judgment and of reason respectively. They advise each individual to “think for oneself; to think from the standpoint of everyone else; always to think consistently [i.e. logically]”. (Kant, 1952, p. 152.) By following these maxims, a person can expand their mind and perhaps even become enlightened. Failure to follow these maxims leads respectively to prejudice (literally pre-judging), to narrow-mindedness, and to superstition and blindness. The latter makes “the need of being led by others and consequently the passive state of the reason, preeminently conspicuous”. (Kant, 1952, p. 152.) If all the maxims of common human understanding are absent in a person then he or she would be completely deficient in their understanding, reasoning ability and his or her ability to make judgments and so to live their life. Kant also claimed that that making judgment requires consciously acting on a principle, which he labeled the sensus communis, through which the judgment “in its reflection takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of all other men in thought”. If this “public sense” (Kant, 1952, p. 151.) were not available, human beings would share only a mutually impenetrable isolation. There would be no shared world, let alone communication and/or interaction. As Kant put it, a common sense [a shared common understanding] is assumed “as the necessary condition of the universal communicability of our knowledge”. (Kant, 1952, p. 84.) This claim about judgment may seem to make it appear that is a shared public faculty and so to contradict Kant’s maxim that everyone should think for themselves. This is not, however, the case. Kant was clear that judgment is an individual faculty which is exercised by each individual. But the principle which underlies this judgment, although only subjective, “[is] yet assumed as subjectively universal (a necessary idea for everyone)”. (Kant, 1952, p. 84.) This principle finds its practice through reflections of the members of a community discussing their community’s interest. These types of discussions are not based on experience, but instead take on an idealized form as they are discussion about possible rather than actual judgments. (See Kant, 1952, p. 151.) In the Critique of Judgment Kant sketched an idealized picture of the relation between the faculty of judgment and the faculties of understanding and of reason. Although Kant did not develop the thought, it seems clear that his theory left open the possibility of a depraved or impure form of the exercise of these faculties. This is particularly clear in the case of judgment. If the pure form of judgment is to be “accomplished by weighing the judgment not so much with actual as rather with the merely possible judgments of others”, (Kant, 1952, p. 151.) then the depraved or impure exercise of judgment might arise by confining the weighing of the judgment to do only what is actually socially acceptable and and/or the personally preferable and fail to consider the possibility other forms of action. Not only judgment but also understanding and reason can be exercised in an impure or depraved form. To avoid the dangers of prejudice, narrowmindedness and inconsistent thought, all three “maxims of common human understanding” must be adopted and acted upon. However, a person might fail to adopt one or more of these maxims and would then exercise only one or two of these three faculties in an impure way. Not adopting all three faculties of understanding, judgment and reason can, Kant believed, prevent any individual person from living something that is universally recognizable as a form of human life. These mental faculties are, to adopt a non-Kantian idiom, contained within the extension of “human being” and hence fall within the extension of “person” In such cases we are entitled to enquire as to what may come about, should any of these faculties not be present in any instance of action by a human being. Kant’s theory can help us only partially at this point. His theory does not allow, as many would expect, for any situation in which the faculties would be completely absent in any living, mature human individual; but it does allow us to distinguish a proper exercise of these faculties from a deficient form of their exercise. This latter affects judgment and comes about when any individual person defers in deciding how to act in any situation to the actual judgments of something other rather than the ideal of the sensus communis. Dependence of judgment occurs when judgments are conditioned by personal interest or when any individual person fails to “detaches himself [or herself] from the subjective personal conditions of his [or her] judgment”. (Kant, 1952, p. 153.) In Kant’s view autonomy, and hence morality, can occur only when the maxim of an act is unconditioned by any subjective or any personal considerations. Hence the inverse of an autonomous act is, therefore, a heteronomous act. But it is also clear from Kant’s three maxims that a person who permitted his or her reason, understanding and judgment to be conditioned by “subjective personal conditions” would retain at best only a conditioned or heteronomous use of his or her faculties. But were this is already the case, a person would not be able to act in accord with the demands of pure practical reason as presented through Wille and would, therefore, be determined by “subjective personal conditions”, which are more likely to be bad in the conditions of the Third Reich than they would be in the conditions of a Trappist Monastery. These conditions of complete personal heteronomy can be met in most personal circumstances. It is necessary to distinguish someone who is “merely heteronomous” from someone who is heteronomously evil. Someone is merely heteronomous when his or her acts are conditioned. This is true, incidentally, of all individual persons on some occasions and, significantly, of some persons on all occasions. The merely heteronomous may include a large proportion of the population of societies in which human potential is suppressed through extreme deprivation or brutality. Heteronomy may be fed and sustained by a vicious circle of deprivation. People in such circumstances cannot reasonably be thought of as being heteronomously evil. Three conditions, Kant claimed, must be met before someone can be described as “heteronomously evil”. First, his or her behavior must bring about evil consequences. Second, he or she must have adopted a maxim of heteronomy. Third, he or she must have deferred in act, will and judgment to some evil person, tradition or practice. The first condition distinguishes between intent and event. Those who are heteronomously evil inflict evil on the world but have not independently obtained an evil maxim, nor need they possess any actively evil disposition. Heteronomous evil requires only an evil act and not also a “worthless” character. The second condition distinguishes between those who are merely heteronomous and those who have chosen heteronomy—a decision to avoid further choosing. Such a maxim need not be consciously formulated; it can be expressed—indeed, best expressed—in the activity and manner of a person’s life. The third condition distinguishes those who defer to some relatively harmless, or even good, external judgment from those who defer to some evil or potentially evil judgment. By virtue of their fundamental maxim, those who have chosen heteronomy cannot initiate significant action. The rightness or wrongness of their action will depend on the rightness or wrongness of that to which they have deferred. Those who defer to a generally good person, tradition or practice will often act rightly even though acting heteronomously; those who have deferred to a morally indifferent person, tradition or practice may often act indifferently though heteronomously. Those who defer to an evil person or to an evil tradition and/or evil practice will tend to act evilly and can be characterized as “heteronomously evil”. The “heteronomously evil” can be free ,in Berlin’s negative sense , but they cannot be autonomous in Kant’s sense. Each of these three conditions must be satisfied before someone, according to Kant, can justly be described as “heteronomously evil” and Eichmann seems to be an almost paradigmatic case of someone falling into this category. Eichmann showed an almost complete conformity to the ideals and dictates of his masters. It was the conformity of a total and passive acceptance of those visions which many of his masters held only in cynical, manipulative and inhumanly evil ways. The ground of Eichmann’s moral, and not merely his legal, culpability was established when it was shown that he was a free and willing tool of his master’s rather than some involuntary automation; and this his prosecutors readily established. In all important respects he deferred to the faculties of others, limiting the use of his own faculties to the implementation of the wishes of his superiors. In the circumstances in which this took place, the outcome was great evil. Although Eichmann did do great evil, he did this not so much because he in fact consciously adopted a fundamental maxim to do evil, but because he acted as if he had adopted a fundamental maxim not to make a personal choice, or take a stand, in situations where this was required if he was to retain his autonomy. That this is a moral choice is easily understood within the framework set up by Kant’s distinction between Wille and Willkür. Eichmann’s claim “that he was no longer master of his will” (Papadatos, 1964, p. 30.) would be on Kantian analysis refer not to Willkür but to Wille. What Eichmann surrendered was only his autonomy but not his spontaneity— Kant’s Willkür. The evil of Eichmann was made possible through the heteronomous use of his mental faculties and the clear implications of this act is that, fundamentally, it was his free choice to follow the command of others. It is because this analysis permits the retention of spontaneity that Eichmann’s moral culpability is clear. Had he been able to surrender spontaneity to others, or had there been no distinction between spontaneity and autonomy, then there would have been no truly moral culpability. In that case, any legal decision as to Eichmann’s culpability would have had to be based on some notion of strict liability and questions of mens rea would be inappropriate. However, there would be no need to resort to a strict liability theory of punishment if Eichmann’s evil were seen as heteronomous. This kind of evil is of great political significance; heteronomous agents present a permanent possibility of political evil. “Administrative massacre” is an extreme consequence of the policies of administrative evil and those policies are dependent upon the assistance of the heteronomously evil. History is full of examples of large-scale murder, but Eichmann’s crime, as Arendt understood, was new not only because of its unprecedented scale but also because of the means of its implementation. These means permitted many of those who were active in executing the policies of genocide to stand at what first looks like a significant “moral distance” from the offences in which they participated. They argued, and perhaps even sincerely believed, that any evil lay either in the intentions of their superiors or in the direct violence of their subordinates, but that their own activities were morally insignificant—after all they were only following orders. But it is this class of evil doing that is politically probably the most significant, for it appears to occur only in certain modern, large scale , highly bureaucratically structured institutions. such as the military, the police and other governmental organizations as well as amongst the workers of large international non-governmental private companies like Google, Ford, and Amazon. * * * * * The policy of genocide during the Third Reich produced three kinds of evil individuals. The first is represented by Arch Nazis. These were the people responsible for the invention and initiation of policies of genocide and in every sense they each “knew what they were doing”. They mostly did not personally participate in the massacres. The second is represented by Eichmann —individuals who neither initiated the policy of genocide nor directly participated in the killings. But if Eichmann and his ilk did not do what they in fact did the killings could not have taken place. The third is represented by those who actually carried out the killings dictated by the policies and orders of their superiors. In this essay I am concerned primarily only with the second of these categories. That category displays the meditative role of human beings in institutions that do evil. The interest presented by Eichmann is that his case clearly shows the meditative potential of human beings. Mediation is required to explain interactions between human actions of completely different kinds. One of the functions of a recognized social role is to provide that mediation. A human individual acts, but so do social organizations such as bureaucracies, states, legislatures. Roles stand between individuals and social organizations. Role terms themselves do not identify or even indicate any essential personal property of the individuals to which they apply. Hence the relationship between any particular human individual and any particular social organization is always a contingent one. But mediation requires that the individual who is acting as a mediator behave in certain structured ways and use their faculties in certain defined ways. The extreme and evil case represented by Eichmann is scarcely typical, but use of this “ideal” (I chose that term purposely) example of any specific bureaucrat can be best understood in his and/or her own bureaucratic environment, in the almost “ideal” bureaucracy (technically speaking). The basis of the “ideal” bureaucracy is—as Max Weber explained—is that those who work in them strictly follow rules in a formal sense. The interpretation of rules, that is the interpretation of the bureaucracy’s formal rules, requires judgment. Any attempt to dispense with the judgment of individuals in the interpretation and application of rules they do follow must—logically must—end in failure since as Kant was well aware
It is primarily the function of individuals working in bureaucracies to make specific determinant judgments about applying specific rules to particular cases. Hence, determinant judgment is indispensable for effective bureaucratic performance. While a determinant judgment involves applying rules to particular cases, the rule of any principle itself cannot be so obtained as it can only be obtained by reflective judgment, the ability to ascend from the particular to the universal. In Kant’s view, each individual possesses the primary responsibility for identifying those specific rules which he or she will apply and act upon. But it is also clear that the right to choose which of these rules and their interpretations is often, in practice, taken away from individuals. The bureaucratic form of organization is well suited to doing this; indeed, in its pure form, it demands that rules given by superiors in the hierarchy are unhesitatingly accepted and acted in strict accordance with by all individual subordinates. In the real world in many institutions individuals working in such organizations do not always act in conformity with their organization’s rules in any strict way to the extent that many organizations do come to depend on nonconformance implemented through informal structures. But pure bureaucracy is a form of organization which, as far as the goals of the organization are concerned, requires the suspension of reflective judgment by its members. The bureaucrat according to the Weberian ideal type of bureaucrat does not reflect on the larger issues surrounding his or her work and his or her role—on the contrary, his or her fundamental maxim can indeed be expressed in the form that Eichmann gave it: “Ich sass am Schreibtisch und machte meine Sache”. (Papadatos, 1964, p. 29.) In bureaucratic structures the effects of what they do are not readily visible to many bureaucratic workers. This permits a certain appearance of moral distancing to take place. This appearance of moral distance is built into the structure of all ideal bureaucracies. This partially explains why vast numbers of ordinary citizens so frequently obey, and even publicly embrace, what they themselves regard are bad and sometimes even evil policies. The appearance of moral distance, both from the origination of policy and from the consequences of actions, is increased when the chain of command becomes larger and more rigid as in military structures and in certain kinds of crises. The final consequence of this appearance of “moral distancing” through “structured heteronomy” is the possibility of world destruction through military and bureaucratic structures which are absolutely dependent for their effectiveness on those who work in them continually deferring their own of personal judgments to those higher up the chain of command. Elective heteronomy—the choice to let someone else choose for one, the choice to give up one’s autonomy—is more and more the condition sine qua non of working in modern governmental and non-governmental bureaucracies. Evil can be, but is not necessarily, one of its consequences. This qualification that evil is not necessarily the consequence of elective heteronomy is important. Indeed, as I pointed out earlier, heteronomy can even sometimes lead to good consequences. What is significant in the present context is less the consequences of heteronomous action than the meditative function of heteronomy. It is the surrender and abnegation of the mental and active faculties to some principle of activity which allows some social organizations to present the appearance of having causal powers. But those social organizations do not, even in this AI age, have ability to exist and act without completely without some input from human individuals. Human individual persons are still necessary for the existence of social kinds; that is persons who possess the capacities for thought, judgment and action which they employ autonomously or can also be used by others—even exploited by others—in the furtherance of some task which is not the goal of the individuals acting to implement that goal he and/or she has each autonomously arrived at. It is this distinction we can use to draw the between spontaneity and autonomy—without even accepting the Kantian metaphysics of the self. The former is a property which all individual people have, while the latter is only a potential which may or may not be developed and may or may not be suppressed by social arrangements. The distinction between spontaneity and autonomy allows us to identify and to describe one type of situation in which some causally undetermined agents can in one sense not be free, and yet meaningly be said to act heteronomously. A case such as that of Eichmann , whose biography clearly showed that he had the opportunity to avail himself of the means to develop his autonomy and he possessed sufficient autonomy to recognize those means for what they were, and so he could be held responsible his actions. In other possible cases there may have been no opportunities to develop autonomy, and this would presumably be an excusing condition if untoward consequences followed from the actions of such a person. But in cases where the opportunity for development has been available it is possible to see how the regularity-causal model of explanation in the social sciences is fully compatible with accounts of action which rely on the freedom of the will. Both autonomous and heteronomous choices presuppose spontaneity; equivalently, true freedom of choice presupposes freedom of the will, and a person can use the freedom of his or her will to avoid choosing altogether rather than using it to choose autonomously. If he or she does so by spontaneously choosing to follow the will of another, his or her action is heteronomous in the particularly strong elective sense, for then not only does he or she relinquish his or her autonomy, but he or she also makes his or her choice dependent on the choosing of others. The implication of this is that the meditative function of individual people may also be suppressive of full personal development. The goals of any and every structured social forms of life are achieved through social organizations. But those structured social organizations, while possibly requiring the development of individual personal capacities, also requires some surrender of those self-same capacities. Any human organization such as a bureaucracy is not specifically totally structured, and possibly is not even totally structurable, in such a way so as to allow each individual member of it both able and willing to set his and/or her own goals and/or even to ensure that the activities of those individuals who work in it are sufficiently coordinated to insure central goals of that bureaucracy shall be met. Nevertheless, some organizations are better at acknowledging the existence of autonomy than others and there is no doubt there are lessons to be learnt from that. But in times of crisis the demands and pressures to conform do become much greater than at other times and, in the end, the consequences may be the complete surrender not only of autonomy but also of the severe curtailing of the area occupied by the political realm; the only place, identified both by Kant and by Arendt, in which the ideal of balancing the exercise of autonomy as well as achieving some sense of community. In times of crisis some individuals may surrender autonomy or community, or in the worst outcome, they may even surrender of both their autonomy and community. This, unfortunately, is what happened in Nazi Germany.
*** Bibliography of works quoted in the essay
*** MORE FROM HAIM MARANTZ
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DOSTOYEVSKY’S SOLUTION TO KANT’S PROBLEM OF RECONCILING BELIEF IN GOD WITH THE RECOGNITION OF THE EXISTENCE OF EVIL The Montréal Review, July 2024
READING SOLZHENITSYN FOR THE FIRST TIME The Montréal Review, May 2024 *** POLITICAL FOOTNOTES TO EUSEBIUS CONTRIBUTION OF THE EARLY CHURCH TO POLITICAL THOUGHT The Montréal Review, December 2024 *** The Montréal Review, December 2024 *** |
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