Adolf Eichmann of Nazi Germany
“Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet–and this is its horror–it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.”― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”― Hannah Arendt
As there is an inner connection between consciousness and conscience, there is also an inner connection between the ability or inability to think and the problem of evil. Since thinking’s end is to bring to presence, to bring to unconcealment, evil abhors this effort since evil abhors the light. Evil requires shadows, illusions, obfuscations; it is the enemy of truth and unconcealment, and such unconcealment is “consciousness”. Evil abhors the light and flies from the light which is “consciousness” itself. Contrary to the “nothingness” of evil that Arendt finds (this is merely its nihilism), we find that evil is ubiquitous and that its presence is everywhere. This ubiquity makes evil only appear to be banal and contributes to its banality. Because of the horror shown in its unconcealment, it remains unspoken and is, literally, the ‘unspeakable’. If there is anything demonic about evil, it is its ‘unspeakableness’.
For Arendt, the faculty of thinking (the dynamis of thinking, the possibility and “potentiality” of thinking) is not the erotic “thirst” for knowledge; it is a potentia of every human being and not the privilege of only a few. (This is a somewhat erroneous view of Plato and of Aristotle since both see ‘the desire to know’, the eros for knowledge, as the essence of human being itself and not just a characteristic of the few.) The roots of Arendt’s thinking are to be found in the neo-Kantians of 19th century Germany, the Hermann Cohen school of Kant at Marburg, Germany where Arendt famously (and notoriously) attended classes held by Martin Heidegger.
Arendt believes that if Kant is right and the faculty of thought has a “natural aversion” against accepting its own results as “solid axioms” (because they are merely the “opinions” of Plato), then we cannot expect any moral propositions or commandments, no final code of conduct from the thinking activity, least of all a final definition of what is good and what is evil. For Arendt, good and evil are “values” which the thinking activity creates as principles for its conduct from out of the principle of reason (technology), and not self-existing realities which thinking must attempt to comprehend. If it is true that thinking deals with invisibles, it follows that it is “out of order” in Arendt’s view since Arendt believes that we move in a world of appearances in which the most radical experience is that of the disappearance that is our death. By ‘radical’, we interpret Arendt to mean ‘most real’, ‘most deep’, ‘most grounded’. Contrary to Arendt’s thinking, the most radical experience for the ‘thinker’ is the experience of the absence of God which later becomes ‘the death of God’.
Arendt’s analysis of evil focuses on the evils which result from systems put in place by totalitarian regimes. That these regimes are predicates of the subject technology as we have stated here, the systems that those regimes put in place must also contribute to the “metaphysical” ends of that technology which are the logistics in preparation for warfare. In her early analysis, she does not address the character and culpability of individuals who take part in the perpetration of evil within those systems.
In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt turns her attention to individual culpability for evil through her analysis of the Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann who was tried in Jerusalem for organizing the deportation and transportation of Jews to the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Arendt went to Jerusalem in 1961 to report on Eichmann’s trial for The New Yorker magazine. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she argues that “desk murderers” or “schedulers of trains” such as Eichmann were not motivated by demonic or monstrous motives. They were motivated merely by ambition and recognition, common motives among human beings. Instead, according to Arendt, “It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed Eichmann to become one of the greatest criminals of that period” (Arendt 1963, 287–288). According to Arendt, Eichmann’s motives and character were banal or trite rather than monstrous. She describes him as a “terrifyingly normal” human being who simply did not think very deeply about what he was doing.
Plato distinguishes between thinking and knowing, between reason with its representational images composed of numbers and words (logos), the eros the urge or need to think and to understand, and the intellect which is capable of certain, verifiable knowledge. Plato separates knowing from thinking as knowing is an action or event that has occurred in the past (gnosis), while thinking is an action that occurs in the present. Knowing and thinking are associated with our being- in- time, and it is through our knowing (gnosis) with the aid of memory that we are able to transcend time.
Historically, thought has become understood and dominated by the idea that it is “reason” due to the Latin understanding and translation of logos as “reason” and the subsequent essence of human beings’ being described as the animale rationale. As we have tried to show up to this point, in the modern, thought is determined as logic and logistics, the theoretical episteme of “knowing” and the logistike or technai of “making” or “making happen”.
Through history, the pistis or “faith” and “trust” established by the schema, the metaphysical underpinnings of representational thinking that has become technology, the framing, requires the certainty and correctness of the correspondence between the mind’s thinking and the object that is thought. This agreement is the correspondence theory of truth. The technological is one aspect of being’s revealing. The irony is that it is through this view of reason that we have discovered that human beings’ essence may not, in fact, be reason; and because of this, in the ‘eye of reason’ so understood, human beings have become dispensable, usable, and disposable resources. Nietzsche is the philosopher who thought through this and shows this most clearly.
The metaphysical underpinnings of representational thinking attempt to ‘stamp becoming with the character of being’, which Nietzsche asserted as technology, the ‘highest form of the will-to-power’. For Nietzsche, technology as will-to-power requires a thinking and a willing that is beyond good and evil. We can see how this view of thinking and willing can be derived from Plato’s Divided Line if we view it from only one direction, with only one side of the face of Eros. In such thinking, the other face of Eros simply does not exist for it has not been experienced.
“Consciousness” and “conscience” (“with knowledge”) in Plato are the same thing; one cannot be ‘conscious’ and not have a ‘conscience’. The two have become separated, and “conscience” ceases to be the word of the logos in the soul and becomes Kant’s “practical reason”. A man such as Eichmann was simply not ‘conscious’ (in a Platonic sense) and therefore had no ‘conscience’ even though Eichmann insisted that his moral position derived from Kant, perhaps revealing the inadequacies of Kant.
The interior dialogue of thought which is true consciousness can only be done when one has gone home and examines things, when one takes a moment to stop and think. This stopping to think is antithetical to technology. Thinking, reflection, attention and contemplation is a private act and so technology bores ever more into the privacy of individuals to destroy it. Someone who does not know the discourse of the interior dialogue or monologue between the “me and myself” will not mind nor care about contradicting himself and he will never be able or willing to give an account of what he says or does, nor will he mind committing any crimes since he is sure they will be forgotten the next moment. Such was the condition of Adolf Eichmann, and such is the condition of Donald Trump. Social pathologies are present in both and they were there before they arrived on the scene. In these pathologies, they mirror the societies of which they are members.
Thinking in its non-cognitive, non-specialized sense is a natural need eros of human life and is given to every human being. Specialists in thinking are also subject to the inability to think as it is an ever present possibility for everybody. However, this non-wicked “everybody” is capable of infinite evil. As Arendt notes regarding Eichmann: “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.” The lack of a “conscience” was present in its absence just as “consciousness” was present in its absence among the many, the “everybody” and the “nobodies”.
The most massive moral failure of European history was “the final solution of the problem of the Jews”. This “final solution” was made possible through technology and was a predicate of that technology. The Jews were perceived as ‘a problem’ that needed to be fixed; successfully fixing this problem was the motivation behind Adolf Eichmann’s ambition in the day-to-day details of his life. The ‘fixing’ of this problem first required the eradication of any consciousness that the Jews were, in fact, other human beings. They might just as well be coal or any other resource that the regime needed at the time to ‘fix a problem’. The “otherness” of the Jewish people as human beings, as neighbours, had to be taken away from them. Once this was done, ‘conscience’ had no role to play since “consciousness” was no longer present, and Eichmann remained unrepentant for the remainder of his life for he believed he had done nothing wrong and was ‘only following orders’ or directives from the higher-ups in the regime.
As human beings, we all have the potential to think…or not to think, to be conscious or not be conscious. This is the essence of our freedom as was shown in our discussion of the Meno. For a great many human beings, the need to earn their daily bread causes them to be caught up in massive corporate or bureaucratic structures that enable evil’s flourishing. These structures are the products of, or the outcomes of, the technology that has led to their being; just as our computers and handphones are the tools made possible by that technology and which owe their being to that technology: they are not technology itself. The eradication of human beings is the ultimate goal required by technology and, thus, the destruction of “conscience” and “consciousness” is a requirement for this realization for these are the essential elements of what human beings are. As this decaying and eradicating process slowly unfolds, human beings become less humane.
Lack of self-knowledge and thoughtlessness go hand in hand. In the technological, the logos that distinguishes human beings from all other beings is brought to presence as cliches, stock phrases, and the adherence to standardized codes of expression and conduct. (Meno’s learning from Gorgias as an example; Eichmann’s responses to the questions put to him at his trial; Donald Trump’s media events.) The human being is made to fit the “brand” or image of the corporation or public entity to which they belong; if they do not, they are not “true Nazis” or RINOs. When they do not do so, they will no longer be a part of that entity.
The corporations (and the higher institutions of learning that have modelled themselves upon it such as the Harvards and Yales of the world who have so obviously failed in their goal to “educate” the public) have replaced the polis as the determiner of the character of those who belong to it; the regime in which the corporation happens to be placed is secondary. This ‘fitting in’, this ‘fittedness’ (the perverse, evil, ersatz form of ‘justice’) has the socially recognized function of protecting us against “reality” by giving to us an ‘alternative reality’ against consciousness and conscience when we come up against reality. The individual’s thinking attention is an inhibitor and an enemy to the efficiency and effectiveness of the technology that interprets the “reality” (gives it its meaning) that the facts and events make by virtue of their existence in their certain way. (Arendt, The Life of the Mind). As Arendt notes, “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” Arendt is here describing the technological human being, or humanity in the technological age.
There appears to be a clear connection and relationship between the fact-value distinction (the separation and distinction between judgements of “fact” from judgements of “value” so necessary for the seeing and thinking of our modern day social sciences), and the separation of “consciousness” and “conscience” as it reveals itself in our day-to-day lives. Since science is unable to objectively prove the existence of a person’s “moral character” or “conscience”, science is unable to pass judgements on the actions that human beings are capable of committing or on the acts that human beings have committed. Science, by necessity, must be morally obtuse. The terms “good” and “evil” simply have no meaning for it because they are “values” not real existent things or beings; they are surface phenomenon only. In this they follow Nietzsche’s influence on 19th century thought, but its roots are from much earlier in Western thinking.
As we have shown in our discussion of the Meno, this inability to determine what human excellence is is at the root of the lack of a “moral compass” among so many human beings living today. Since the modern day social sciences are a predicate of the subject technology, this is an example of technology’s determining or shaping of the logos or language over the last several centuries. In the USA, the American Psychological Association’s application of the Goldwater Rule towards the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump is an example. The APA is fully capable of giving advice with equal alacrity to tyrants or monarchs (and because it does so, it receives its annual grants and dispensations from various sources, primarily the pharmaceutical industry, to carry on as it does. Drugs are a necessity to counteract the mass meaninglessness that the technological society has produced.)
In describing the evil that was Adolf Eichmann, that separation of ‘consciousness’ and ‘conscience’, Arendt stated in Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil regarding Eichmann: “For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain.’ Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.” (italics mine). In her description of Eichmann here, Arendt is careful to make a distinction between Eichmann and the other Germans who were caught up in the events of their time. She strongly asserts that “if all are guilty, then none are guilty”. Eichmann is specifically guilty because his thoughtlessness as a ‘scheduler of trains’ put him in the position of committing the greatest evils. His actions showed him to have lived out his life within the ring of Gyges. As Arendt stated: “…the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons”. By not being a person one is, in a sense, invisible, anonymous.
The difficulty we have with Eichmann is whether or not to conclude that there is an Eichmann in each of us waiting for the appropriate socio-historical conditions to emerge. This, at least, urges us to thoughtfulness and provides us with the moral mission to prevent a repetition of genocidal murder by shaping the world’s political systems to allow for and to protect individual rights and freedoms, things that are currently in great danger of being lost in the USA today.
Eichmann was shaped by the forces of Nazism, and as a “follower” this determined his sense of identity as a self. Under the conditions prevailing during the Third Reich, only “exceptions” could be expected to react “normally”. The Nazi regime was not “normal”. While on the stand before the court in Jerusalem, Eichmann could not reveal anything new about himself because he had chosen an “unchanging” identity, an identity as a starting point by which he established his “self-knowledge” (as was seen in the character of Meno) and not the end point which reveals the true knowledge of the self that is gained through thinking. This lack of self-knowledge leads to an inability to think which leads men like Eichmann to act in the way that they do: erroneously and horribly.
The sense of self-identity in Eichmann was weak: his lack of success in his education and his lack of natural gifts led to his lies about himself about who he really was. “Bragging had always been one of his cardinal vices.” (Arendt, Eichmann p. 49) Eichmann appears to share this vice with Meno and Donald Trump, the other figures that we are exploring in our attempt at a portrait of evil. The facts surrounding Eichmann’s background are varied. Eichmann never harboured any ill feelings against his victims and he made no secret about this fact. He was an ambitious man and his early life failed to realize those ambitions. Like Donald Trump, he was not a reader of books but read newspapers and was a fan of the films of Leni Riefenstahl. He was someone who was prepared to sacrifice everything and everybody for an “ideal” and that ideal had been given to him by the Nazi party.
The distinction between a “movement” and a “party” is that a “movement” is not bound by a policy or program. Nazism was such a movement. (The Republican party of the USA is not bound by a “program” or “policy” currently, and they have no specific one that can be pointed to as their goal. They have devolved from the ‘party of Lincoln’ into a “movement”. The result is a chaos that mirrors the chaos of German politics prior to Hitler’s coming to power. When in power, the regime unified itself behind the military-industrial complex with the goal of righting the wrongs of the Treaty of Versailles.)
It has been noted by biographers that Eichmann was lacking any sense of “otherness”; he was unable to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view. (Arendt Ibid, p 65) He dwelt within the “bubble” of the “world” created for him by Nazi propaganda. Modern propagandists or “sophists” differ from ancient sophists. As we saw with Meno, the ancient sophist was satisfied with a verbal victory in the moment at the expense of truth whereas the modern propagandist/sophist wishes for a more lasting victory at the expense of reality or the revealing of truth. The truth must, of necessity, remain hidden.
The dual discourse that is the logos shows itself in the modern as it did in ancient times. “Officialese” became Eichmann’s language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché, much in the manner of Meno. He could believe that he was not lying and not deceiving himself for he and his world were in perfect harmony. Trump and his MAGA followers experience this same harmony of lies. The implementers of the “final solution” were not ignorant of what they were doing; they were just prevented from equating it with their “normal” knowledge of murder and lies for their sense of “otherness” had been destroyed.
As was pointed out previously in Part I, the multitude or the “mob” or the “social collective” is what Plato described as the Great Beast. In his day, this was perceived as the polis and the deme that constituted the polis, the town and country. Today we see it as the State, the Nation, etc. The Great Beast that is the collective (no matter which name it goes by) requires “the big lie”, whether it be “the noble lie” of Plato or “the Big Lie” of Joseph Goebbels or that being created by Donald Trump in the USA today, the ‘us vs. them’ lie.
Plato’s “noble lie” is the founding myth of the civic identity of a people grounding that identity in the natural brotherhood of the entire indigenous population (they are all autochthonous, literally “born from the earth”, from before conscious memory), making the city’s differentiated class structure a matter of divine dispensation based on the arete or “excellence” of each individual soul in its ability to carry out its work or function (the demiourgos who molds them puts different elements in their souls in varying strengths such as fire, air, and water; the body is composed of the element of earth). If people can be made to believe that they are brothers, they will be strongly motivated to care for their city and for each other because one’s chief concern is for “one’s own”.
In the Nazi vision of the world, the lack of autochthony of the “wandering” Jews was at the root of the German belief that the Jews were “poisoning the blood” of the German people and could justifiably be exterminated because they were perceived as a threat. They were perceived as aliens and enemies, and certainly not one’s brothers. African and Native Americans were made to suffer the same fate in the USA.
In the history of misinformation there is probably no other document which has caused more evil than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (which many neo-Nazis today still believe to be fact) and which became a “gospel” of world-wide anti-Semitism. This writing which originated in Russia in 1905 remains as well-read today as it was during its early period. The Protocols is entirely a work of fiction, intentionally written to blame Jews for a variety of ills. It claims to document a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. The conspiracy and its alleged leaders, the so-called Elders of Zion, never existed. In 1903, portions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were serialized in a Russian newspaper, Znamya (The Banner). The version of the Protocols that has endured and has been translated into dozens of languages, however, was first published in Russia in 1905 as an appendix to The Great in the Small: The Coming of the Anti-Christ and the Rule of Satan on Earth, by Russian writer and mystic Sergei Nilus. (Holocaust Encyclopedia)
At the heart of Nazi propaganda was “the Big Lie” as it was formulated by Joseph Goebbels: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” Lies, particularly the Big Lie, and the suppression of truth are necessary for the Great Beast to thrive, for truth is the greatest enemy of the Great Beast. The Great Beast requires the Anti-Logos for its health.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt states what the impacts of the Big Lie were and could be:
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
Her words are prophetic for what is currently happening in America. The Internet and social media has exacerbated the effects of the Big Lie among those who do not wish to take on the responsibility of thinking.
The great wars of the 20th century were the “technological wars”. Their outcomes were determined by technology. From the catastrophe of WW I, totalitarian regimes emerged. The totalitarian regimes of the 20th century are not the same as the tyrannies spoken of by the ancient Greeks, and the essential difference between the two is the presence of technology. Within the technological, the evil that came to presence and showed itself in Nazism and in the events of WW II, entered the world stage. The evil that showed itself as Adolf Eichmann is an ever-present strife for all human being-in-the-world, for an Eichmann is present in all of us waiting only for the proper historical circumstances and contexts to come forward. Who among us is not motivated by ambition and a “good reputation” (eudoxa)?
As we have seen from our earlier discussions of Plato’s Divided Line “morality”, when conceived as a fixed body of principles and aims for conduct based on trust and faith fixed by an authority or by choice whether collective or individual (arete as “orthodoxy”), is distinguished from “philosophy” and thinking. Thinking does not prescribe norms or “values”; it is itself the “ethical”, a radical ethics, in that the course of “action” or praxis is already determined and made present by the thinking.
The representational thinking that is the essence of the technological (the “picturing” and “framing”), the lower form of Eros, delivers technological human beings over to mass society that can only find meaning through the gathering and ordering of all their activities and plans (logos) in a way that corresponds to technology. This has resulted in the “mass meaninglessness” characteristic of technological societies at their apogee. This also is the essence and danger of artificial intelligence; it is the precursor to the great evils to come since it will be destructive of the essence of humanity and of any sense of human “excellence”.
What is the relationship between thinking and practical behaviour? Thinking is a praxis a deed, an activity, but it surpasses all other types of praxis in that it is part of the essence of what “human excellence” or “virtue” is, that which allows human beings to surpass and overcome their mere humanity . Thinking itself is two-faced. On the one hand, it permeates action and production and measures these by their grandeur and the utility of their outcomes. At the same time, thinking illuminates itself in its humility, in ‘knowing that one does not know’.
As was shown in the Divided Line, the praxis of thinking can be either theoretical or practical thinking, the enframing application of thought as techne, and the conjunction of these two ways of being-in-the-world. Thinking is also meditation, contemplation, and attention with careful concern for the logos, for speech and its truth. Thinking is not merely a “producing” or “bringing forth” activity, but is rather the arete of the essence of human being. Thinking, when compelled by eros the urge to know, is not “of its own”. When thinking is of its own, it is not always productive of truth. When it is productive of truth, it does so because it is given a “dispensation”. Under the conditions of tyranny, it is far easier to act than to think. “Just do it” is a very apt slogan for the human being-in-the-world under the tyranny of technology. As Socrates notes in the Meno: “what is being miserable but desiring evil and obtaining it?”
The “knowing” and “making” and “making happen” that is technology (that combination of the Greek words techne and logos) shows itself to us as no mere “means” but as a way of revealing the world and thus a way of being-in-the-world. Through the history of Western philosophy and science, the world came to reveal itself as a ‘disposable object’, a picture, an idea of producing, a product of the imagination and reason. (We have attempted to show this in our previous discussion of the Divided Line.) The West at some point (perhaps in that period known as the Renaissance) made a choice that it would concern itself with the lower form of eros and attempt to bring about that justice that appeared absent from the Necessity of the world’s “reality”. Science became “the theory of the real”. Human beings became the centre of that world; but at the same time, they themselves became an object within that world-view.
The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supplies energy that can be extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? Its sails do indeed turn in the wind; but they are left entirely to the wind’s blowing. The windmill does not “unlock energy” from the air currents in order to store it. Agriculture became the mechanized food industry and we have seen a number of counter movements to this view of agriculture such as the “organic food” movement. In the our daily activities, air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use. The earth and the human beings within it are viewed as “resources”, disposable resources.
There is a strange, uncanny interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil and that appearance which appears to be thought (the “imitative thought” of technology) and how it is related to the essence of evil. The 20th century’s greatest philosopher, Martin Heidegger, showed this uncanny relation in a comment made in his Black Notebooks which has made quite a scandal in academic circles and persists in being scandalous due to Heidegger’s silence regarding the Shoah in the post-war years: “Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of countries, the same as the production of hydrogen bombs”. To be clear, Heidegger does not say that the Holocaust is identical to modern agriculture. He is saying that they share the same ‘essence’, that is the essence of technology, what in German is called Gestell the ‘enframing’, the ‘schema’. What the essence of technology is is the banality-of-evil that Hannah Arendt speaks of, “the evil that spreads like a fungus” throughout everything. These aspects of evil share the same essence but they are not identical with evil itself nor are they identical to each other, just as an oak or a willow are not identical even though they share the same essence of treeness.
In The Human Condition Arendt says: “Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political forces.” Love, attention, thought deal with the private rather than the public sphere. The private and public spheres are constantly in strife with each other. It is the private aspect that gives to love the ‘unworldly’ character that Arendt speaks about. Since the public sphere is concerned with turning all that is into an “object”, the individual is faced with the constant challenge to remain engaged with it. One cannot love an object. Because the seeking of truth is what makes human beings human we can say that the seeking of truth, whether from the lower or upper forms of Eros, is done because it is good.
Corruption is an essential requirement for evil to flourish. Historical documents from the times of the Nazi regime show the horrible comedy of some of the meetings between Eichmann and the leaders of the Jewish communities in the various countries under German occupation. The shameful role of the Vatican throughout the Holocaust exemplifies the lack of morals and ethics that occurs when one compromises with the “earthly powers” of geo-politics: the Church’s concern for its members in Germany allowed them to overlook what was occurring to the Jewish people even though they were well aware of it. (As a note, Martin Heidegger was a Catholic.)
The issue of thinking and thought and its relation to evil asks the question of whether or not it is “possible” to carry out evil “thoughtlessly”. Socrates long ago asserted that “no one knowingly does evil”, and this assumes that there are two types of “thinking” being discussed by those who assert that Eichmann knew full-well what he was doing during his time as “the scheduler of trains” and those who assert that he was neither “conscious” nor had a “conscience” regarding his actions. In the Third Reich, evil had lost the quality by which most people recognize it–the quality of temptation, which is the ‘consciousness’ and ‘conscience’ in which it is commonly recognized. Eichmann was successful in organizing the chaos that was ‘the final solution’ because his office organized the “logistics”, the means of transportation that were behind the massacre. He did not determine who would work, or who would die for he did not hold any such extraordinary power. Doing evil became equated with ‘doing one’s duty’, with ‘getting on with the job’, and the evil involved in this was not discernable because there was no thinking involved in doing one’s job.
The success of the Nazi regime required the compliance of the Wehrmacht, the State, and the industrial bureaucracies: the military/industrial complex as a predicate of its subject technology wherein it finds its essence. This compliance was forthcoming due to the universal rage at the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The sheer injustice of the Treaty made this rage justified to some extent. Is the same justification for rage present in the followers of Trump and the Christian nationalists in the USA today? Is their rage dependent on their perceived loss of power in their country, their fear of the threat of becoming ‘meaningless’ in the country in which they were born, of their being ‘replaced’? what are the roots of their ressentiment? The USA is not autochthonous because its making as a country did not occur before conscious memory (as is the case with the polis in Plato’s ‘noble lie’ regarding autochthony or rootedness and with many European nations).
The technological administrative massacres of Eichmann are not unique to the 20th century. The conquest of North America began with the genocide of its Native Peoples and the establishment of its colonies based on slavery. While these ‘facts’ are evil enough in themselves, the attempts to be ‘intentionally ignorant’ of those evils further exacerbates the difficulty of coming to some sense of self-knowledge of who one is as a North American, and it weakens the capacity and the capability of thinking regarding one’s own actions.
Within the parameters of the social sciences’ “fact/value” distinction, there are many people who want to abandon the concept of evil because they may be overwhelmed by the task of understanding and preventing evil or they are overwhelmed by the calling to do so and would rather focus on the less daunting task of questioning the motives of people who still use the term. This is part of the quixotic nature of the task of trying to make evil a visible phenomenon. This is strange, uncanny since evil is the most prominent of ‘surface phenomenon’ and has no depth. It, nevertheless, is ‘radical’ in nature. Arendt, following Kant, denies the radicality of evil.
The problem we have is that evil persistently refuses to be an abstract concept try as we might to make it as such. This is because evil is not a “value”, not something of human knowing and human making but something which has an essence of its own and exists as and in its own. Evil, like the idea of technology, has many predicates. We may try to look at “evil actions” and throw some light on them by contrasting them with arete or “human excellence”. We may look to the “evil personality” and try to show the agency of thoughtlessness behind evil’s flourishing. We may look at analyses of “evil institutions” and seek to determine the origins of evil in those places.
Those ‘fact/value’ scientists who are skeptical of using the term evil find that the concept of evil requires unwarranted metaphysical commitments to the notion of a devil or daemon, or notions of “possession” by dark spirits. We have tried to show here aspects of what “possession” may, in fact, mean through our discussions of the various faces of Eros and the Logos. The urge to turn all that is into an ‘object’ so that it will give us its reasons for being as it is causes many individuals to abandon any notion of trying to come to terms with evil for evil resists “explanation”; like life itself it remains uncanny, mysterious even though it surrounds us like the sea surrounds a fish. (A joke: Two young fish are swimming lazily when another older fish passes by and says “Morning boys, how’s the water?” The two young fish continue swimming for a moment when one turns to the other and says “What the hell is water?”)
The modern day social scientist is uncomfortable with “uncanniness”. The concept of evil is “useless” because of its uncanniness. In true modern day social scientific fashion, the American Psychological Association or APA, sees the concept of evil as harmful or dangerous when used in moral, political, and legal judgements or contexts, and so, it has recommended that it should not be used in those contexts, if at all i.e. the ‘fact/value’ distinction must rule. Modern day social science requires moral obtuseness.
The final stage of evil’s corruption is perversity or wickedness. Donald Trump’s speeches to his MAGA followers illustrate this aspect of evil’s projection onto others as Donald Trump constantly calls his political enemies ‘perverse’ and ‘wicked’. As we have seen with our discussion of the Meno, someone with a perverse will inverts the proper order of the incentives that might be present. Meno, instead of prioritizing the moral law over all other incentives, prioritizes self-interest over the moral law. His actions conform to the moral law only if they are in his perceived self-interest. Someone who acts only out of their perceived self-interest need not do anything wrong because actions which best promote their self-interest may conform to the moral law in place at the time. But since the reason he performs morally right actions is self-interest and not because those actions are morally right, his actions have no moral worth and, according to Kant, his will manifests the worst form of evil possible for a human being. Kant considers someone with a perverse will an evil person (Kant 1793, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone Bk I, 25).
For Arendt, radical evil involves making human beings as human beings superfluous. Again we reiterate: this is the end of technology. This superfluidity is accomplished when human beings are made into living corpses who lack any spontaneity or freedom, when “consciousness” and “conscience” are separated. According to Arendt, a distinctive feature of radical evil is that it isn’t done for humanly understandable motives such as self-interest, but merely to reinforce totalitarian control and the idea that everything is possible. Here we can see radical evil’s connection with technology. Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes are predicates of the subject technology. The future technological world, if it can come into being before it destroys itself, will be a great tyranny. The ‘mass meaninglessness’ required by it will fulfill Socrate4s’ saying regarding evil: “What is being miserable but desiring evil and obtaining it”.
Theory of Knowledge: An Alternative Approach 