It's Almost Always The Case That Those Who Mouth Arendt's Most Famous Phrase Have No Idea Of What She Meant
A COUPLE OF MONTHS ago I was thinking of reading more of Hanna Arendt's writing than I'd managed to read. I had never read all of the horrifying and wrenching Eichmann in Jerusalem, which is a serious defect in my education, unfortunately I don't yet own a copy of the book but I did go look up the original at the New Yorker yesterday, I'll order the book used, most of the articles are behind a pay wall. Even the complete first section is a formidable piece, I don't think I've ever read such a complex piece of reporting and commentary, with such a depth of insightful observation and commentary and presentation of citation as journalism. It's good to remember that today, in the degradation that journalism is that there were once such reporters. And along with that almost every line of it is capable of opening up its own line of consideration and thought. Arendt was a great thinker and the model of what journalism should but almost never is, especially in the wake of All The Presidents Men and the rise of news as infotanement when the profession was filled with air-brushed air-heads without any background, intellectual or, most seriously of all, moral.
But the objection to my noting that the Nazi genocide was from start to finish a product of the theory of natural selection that motivated this post is that "the Holocaust was caused by Christian anti-semitism." That is something that I've dealt with exhaustively so I want to try a different angle from an author who certainly cannot be accused of having that particular axe to grind. For which I'll present this paragraph from Arendt's article because it is so telling, not merely revealing of the putrid Eichmann but of the entire Nazi ethos.
Eichmann was born on March 19, 1906, in Solingen, in the Rhineland—a German city that is famous for its knives, scissors, and surgical instruments. Fifty-four years later, indulging in what had become his favorite pastime—writing his memoirs—he described this memorable event as follows: “Today, fifteen years and a day after May 7, 1945, I begin to lead my thoughts back to that 19th of March of the year 1906, when at five o’clock in the morning . . . I entered life on earth in the aspect of a human being.” According to his religious beliefs, which had not changed since the Nazi period (in Jerusalem, he declared himself to be a Gottgläubiger—literally, a believer, but the Nazi term for those who had broken with Christianity—and he refused to take his oath on the Bible), this event was to be ascribed to a “Höheren Sinnesträger,” or “Higher Bearer of Meaning,” an entity somehow identical with “the movement of the universe,” to which human life, in itself devoid of “higher meaning,” is subject.
Excuse me for interrupting but, in answer to your objection, this reminds me of nothing so much as some of the neo-Nazi garbage of the professional physicist-atheist author of the American Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries, William L. Pierce, specifically some of the similar stuff in his tax-haven "religion" Cosmotheism. Which I've written about in those scores of posts mentioned in the post which you are whining about. "The movement of the universe," is, of course, an exact description of the material universe as it is conceived of in merely human physics and chemistry and under materialist-atheist-scientism, the de facto religion of a large percentage of English-language and other materialist-atheists no matter what other ideological commitments that leads them to. So if, for example Himmler thought of a god, it was nothing else but the god of Dawkins and Pinker and Dennett, of Russell and Ayer and Grayling, the material universe. Keeping in mind the serious ideological boundaries mentioned above which they will consciously or unconsciously hold to in using the word, "nature." There is nothing in the Nazi non-metaphysics that doesn't fully conform with the famous declaration by Dawkins that I witnessed so many online atheists pledge fidelity to during the atheism fad of the 00s
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
Anyone holding such a view of the universe, when presented with even the most obvious moral reality has absolutely no reason to care about its morality or, conversely, the immorality of any act. That is, I am quite convinced a necessary prerequisite for doing the most clearly evil things.
In that Dawkins parrots quite precisely what Ernst Haeckel said about things in The History of Creation, a book cited by Darwin as being a far superior statement of what he said in his second major book The Descent of Man, positively citing Haeckel on some of his most genocidal statements, advocating things the Nazis put into practice six decades later.
The line about human live being devoid of "higher meaning" is a direct and conscious rejection of Christianity and, in fact, the Jewish tradition of which Christianity must be a part if it is to have any coherent existence. It is, in fact, the whole point of the monotheistic tradition. Its negation is, in short, an unavoidable consequence of believing in materialist-atheist-scientism if you go through what would be internally considered a meaningless logical necessity of following that ideology to its logical conclusion. It was the in-house ideology of the inner-circle of Darwin, himself,(though typically he demurred when it came to admitting it, ol' Chuck was a moral coward), his children, Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel (who probably followed those futile logical conclusions farther than anyone of that generation and on into the Nazism that started within a year of his death. It was held by the next generation in direct intellectual descent from the Darwinians of the first generation who actually and who are documented as collaborating with and providing intellectual and even financial help to the Nazis as they developed their genocidal eugenics, Karl Pearson, Leonard Darwin, Alfred Ploetz, Eugen Fischer, and myriads of other then famous scientists and thinkers.
Any professing Christian who was part of Nazism was certainly violating the most basic aspects of Christianity. Going over just the most serious part of Nazi ideology that was directly a repudiation and rejection of Christianity, Jesus was a Jew, Paul was a Jew, Peter, John, . . . even Judas Iscariot were Jews, the Romans mocked Jesus as "The King of the Jews" as they tortured him and as they killed him on the cross. The High Priest and the Sanhedrin identified him as a Jew, Herod identified him as a Jew. In the infancy narratives, Mary, his mother identifies herself and her son as Jews, the Magi identity him as a Jew, Herod (père) does. He and his followers are repeatedly identified as Jews in even what is considered the source of "Christian antisemitism" the Gospel of John. In one of the more misunderstood and disturbing stories in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus specifically tells a foreign woman that his mission is to the Jews, not gentiles (someday I'll go over that story because I think almost no one gets it). Acts presents it implies that Peter and the Apostles are those responsible for converting Jews, Paul is given the responsibility of converting the gentiles. When Nazi collaborators in the Lutheran Church sought to cut out anything in the New Testament that was Jewish, they chopped about sixty-percent of the New Testament out. You could not be faithful to the Gospel and be a Nazi, you could be an atheist and be a Nazi, in fact much of the higher echelon were either overt atheists or they professed belief in a materialistic cult that was violently opposed to Christianity as Eichmann claimed allegiance to in 1963.
Arendt's use of Eichmann's profession of belief in a Nazi articulation of that in her evaluation of Eichmann and how he did what he did, using him as an example of what was a very new class of crime and criminal, one for which the theory of law and its practice was and still is unprepared to identify and prevent, is an excellent example of what I started out with, that her thinking is rigorously intellectual, transcendently sharp, precise, unrelentingly honest and refusing to leave aside any detail as unimportant.
The terminology is quite suggestive. To call God a Höheren Sinnesträger meant, linguistically, to give him some place in the military hierarchy, because the Nazis had changed the military “recipient of orders,” the Befehlsempfänger, into a Befehlsträger, “bearer of orders,” indicating, as in the ancient phrase “bearer of ill tidings,” the importance and the burden of responsibility that were supposedly conferred upon those who had to execute orders. Moreover, Eichmann, like everyone else connected with the Final Solution, was officially a Geheimnisträger, or “bearer of secrets,” as well, which in the way of catering to self-importance was certainly nothing to sneeze at. But Eichmann, not very much interested in metaphysics, remained silent on any more intimate relationship between the Bearer of Meaning and the bearer of orders, and proceeded to a consideration of the other possible source of his existence, his parents: “They would hardly have been so overjoyed at the arrival of their first-born had they been able to watch how in the hour of my birth the Norn of misfortune, to spite the Norn of good fortune, was already spinning threads of grief and sorrow into my life. But a kind, impenetrable veil kept my parents from seeing into the future.”
If you think he meant by that the complete evil his entire existence was to other people, don't worry, he had no such capacity of imagining others as he could himself, he was apparently mostly interested in pitying no one but himself. Though, I think it was more his idea of literary artistry than of meaning.
I do find that Arendt is such a complex and exhaustive analyst that even some of the major themes in her writing are more easily given in a condensed form from those who have read her in depth. One of those is the American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler. She's also a serious thinker so a lot of her text has to be cited to quote her responsibly:
Fifty years ago the writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt witnessed the end of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major figures in the organisation of the Holocaust. Covering the trial Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil", a phrase that has since become something of an intellectual cliche. But what did she really mean?
One thing Arendt certainly did not mean was that evil had become ordinary, or that Eichmann and his Nazi cohorts had committed an unexceptional crime. Indeed, she thought the crime was exceptional, if not unprecedented, and that as a result it demanded a new approach to legal judgment itself.
There were at least two challenges to legal judgment that she underscored, and then another to moral philosophy more generally. The first problem is that of legal intention. Did the courts have to prove that Eichmann intended to commit genocide in order to be convicted of the crime? Her argument was that Eichmann may well have lacked "intentions" insofar as he failed to think about the crime he was committing. She did not think he acted without conscious activity, but she insisted that the term "thinking" had to be reserved for a more reflective mode of rationality.
Arendt wondered whether a new kind of historical subject had become possible with national socialism, one in which humans implemented policy, but no longer had "intentions" in any usual sense. To have "intentions" in her view was to think reflectively about one's own action as a political being, whose own life and thinking is bound up with the life and thinking of others. So, in this first instance, she feared that what had become "banal" was non-thinking itself. This fact was not banal at all, but unprecedented, shocking, and wrong.
By writing about Eichmann, Arendt was trying to understand what was unprecedented in the Nazi genocide – not in order to establish the exceptional case for Israel, but in order to understand a crime against humanity, one that would acknowledge the destruction of Jews, Gypsies, gay people, communists, the disabled and the ill. Just as the failure to think was a failure to take into account the necessity and value that makes thinking possible, so the destruction and displacement of whole populations was an attack not only on those specific groups, but on humanity itself. As a result, Arendt objected to a specific nation-state conducting a trial of Eichmann exclusively in the name of its own population.
At this historical juncture, for Arendt, it became necessary to conceptualise and prepare for crimes against humanity, and this implied an obligation to devise new structures of international law. So if a crime against humanity had become in some sense "banal" it was precisely because it was committed in a daily way, systematically, without being adequately named and opposed. In a sense, by calling a crime against humanity "banal", she was trying to point to the way in which the crime had become for the criminals accepted, routinised, and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance.
If Arendt thought existing notions of legal intention and national criminal courts were inadequate to the task of grasping and adjudicating Nazi crimes, it was also because she thought that nazism performed an assault against thinking. Her view at once aggrandised the place and role of philosophy in the adjudication of genocide and called for a new mode of political and legal reflection that she believed would safeguard both thinking and the rights of an open-ended plural global population to protection against destruction.
What had become banal – and astonishingly so – was the failure to think. Indeed, at one point the failure to think is precisely the name of the crime that Eichmann commits. We might think at first that this is a scandalous way to describe his horrendous crime, but for Arendt the consequence of non-thinking is genocidal, or certainly can be.
Of course, the first reaction to such an apparently naive claim may be that Arendt overestimated the power of thinking or that she held on to a highly normative account of thinking that does not correspond to the various modes of reflection, self-muttering, and silent chatter that goes by that name.
Indeed, her indictment of Eichmann reached beyond the man to the historical world in which true thinking was vanishing and, as a result, crimes against humanity became increasingly "thinkable". The degradation of thinking worked hand in hand with the systematic destruction of populations.
Although Arendt focuses on Eichmann's failure to think as one way of naming his ultimate crime, it is clear that she thinks the Israeli courts did not think well enough, and sought to offer a set of corrections to their way of proceeding. Although Arendt agreed with the final verdict of the trial, namely, that Eichmann should be condemned to death, she quarreled with the reasoning put forward at the trial and with the spectacle of the trial itself. She thought the trial needed to focus on the acts that he committed, acts which included the making of a genocidal policy.
I would point out one thing that this doesn't state, that thought apart from truth is not functionally different from the kind of non-thinking Arendt attributes Eichmann's genocidalism to.
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If you aren't thinking about the American context today, Trump, Republican-fascism, the media, especially the most potent, electronic media which has trained two generations of Americans to not think, not think deeply, to make non-thinking of the kind that Arendt was disturbed to recognize in Eichmann, she was wasting her time and the terrible experience of reporting on the trial. If you don't understand that what she saw in Eichmann is ubiquitous today as the "death of truth" that is the primary mode of operation in the Republican-fascist Party, in the Washington Press Corps, in many of our law courts, the Supreme Court, you're wasting your time.
If there is one thing that is important about the truth, the truth and telling it and realizing it being what is most important about thought, its role in human minds and human life is gained by people making, not an intellectual but a moral choice for the truth and for valuing it enough to pursue it through honest, evidenced, rigorous thought. The very act of such thought relies on a choice that has to come before all of the rest of that, a choice for what is right and a rejection of what is wrong.
I have to break in here and point out that though she is considered as an important philosopher, at least at one point she eschewed that and said she was a political thinker, I think her political thought is some of the most important that I've ever read.
But that's the problem with her approach. Politics inevitably is a creation of minds that are not and never will be prepared to deal with things at her level of thought. In a democracy, voters will not come to a reliable moral result on the basis of her impressive though impotent thinking. No matter how great and important her thinking on these things is from a rational and logical point of view, politics will never effectively be conducted at that level of intellectual rigor and, given the disastrous results of most of her colleagues in philosophy, most of which is done far below her level, when they deal with politics in that manner and those who pretend to (Victor Davis, to name one and only one of dozens I could off the top of my head) I don't really trust it as a general activity.
What that takes is a conscious and habitual choice to choose moral absolutes that are absent from the world of such rationalistic intellection.
What she saw as the mode of mental activity that facilitated the greatest crimes of the 20th century and any inadequacy of the Israeli Court to appreciate and deal with that is rampant in the modern secular world - in case you wonder what's behind the resurgence of violent, determined fascism just now - AND THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION, JUDICIAL AND LEGAL SYSTEMS ARE NOT ONLY MORE INADEQUATE THAN THE COURT THAT SENTENCED EICHMANN TO DEATH BUT FAR, FAR MORE INADEQUATE. I think that is a product of the de-religionizing of thought and life under American secularism being made more than just the formal impartiality of the state but as the de facto requirement of social secularism and intellectualism.
The consequences of that for logical consistency are important and such rigorous, "impartial" intellection can lead to terrible places. I have pointed out to the horror of a number of secular liberals of my generation that no less a figure in that system than President Kennedy in his 1950s book "Profiles in Courage" praised the repulsive Republican Robert Taft for his opposition to the Nuremberg trials on the same defense that Eichmann would try to, that nothing he did was illegal in Nazi Germany, that Hitler's word was the highest law and that no external force, national or international could try the Nazi genocidalists because there was no legal mechanism for doing that. To add more evidence to my late adult conclusion that John Kennedy was a lot less admirable than his PR machine sold him as being. To demonstrate how that works in reality, the same man who praised the depravity of Robert Taft, Hannah Arendt points, out gave a very public thumbs up for the cameras to the Judges in Jerusalem for doing exactly what Robert Taft said was a violation of law, which he believed was laudable as "courage." Don't get me wrong, I think that Arendt's obviously respectful treatment of the three Judges conduct even among her criticism of the conduct of the trial is a fascinating study in her attempt to be honest even as that conflicted with the official standards of trials.
I also believe that even as she was thinking of and writing her reports that she knew she was saying things that would be deeply controversial and would land her in a lot of trouble outside and inside of Israel.
It is one of the more remarkable things about such discussion of the rightness or wrongness of putting some of the most obvious and most dangerous criminals in human history through a judicial process, a trial, is the extent to which putting things in a nice order and wrapping them up in a tidy package, as academic intellectualism and, especially the empty formalities of the law demand flies in the face of obvious, informal reality and the exigencies of punishing such criminals as a means of discouraging those who would imitate them. Of course, that's especially dangerous because there are those with vast wealth and, so, power who like and profit (and with the rich those are one in the same) from what such criminals do and, so, they want to get them off. And while that is going on the intellectuals and lawyers and, most pudding-headed of all, the journalists want to argue form and formal niceties. Trump, the least intellectual of all our presidents, is an absolute master at tying the courts and the law in knots by exploiting those forms and formalities. He is a creation of the same entertainment industry that runs "the news." That he can use both as he does is an indictment of the Constitutional system that is incapable of preventing that use of it.
I read the tortured writing of Arendt on this and I feel her heart being ripped open by the necessities of taking both sides of that, her obvious and near first-hand witness to the crimes of the Nazis, she came very close to being one of the victims of them, she knew many people who were murdered in the industry of death the Nazis mounted. She was, as well, fully capable of fully appreciating the same crimes being done by other regimes, in other places, at other times (such as in Vietnam). I know that is always what is behind her writing as a highly trained thinker, a highly trained and extremely responsible intellectual, a moral thinker who feels they must uphold the established order of intellectual and legal procedure and who knows that to hold any credibility with such people as would read her writing, she could not violate those norms and procedures without it costing her credibility if she just stated the obvious. It is obvious that Eichmann was guilty as charged, if anyone deserved the death penalty it was someone like him and that the Judges had a higher law to enact, one which was not written in legal codes and which was not taught in university law schools and, in the 20th century, is even hardly taken that seriously in secular moral philosophy and that degraded topic "ethics."
I think one of the more telling things is her conflicted thinking about thinking, wondering how any thinking person could consciously think themselves into doing what Eichmann did. As Judith Butler condenses it:
But more than this, she faults him as well for failing to realise that thinking implicates the subject in a socialit or plurality that cannot be divided or destroyed through genocidal aims. In her view, no thinking being can plot or commit genocide. Of course, they can have such thoughts, formulate and implement genocidal policy, as Eichmann clearly did, but such calculations cannot be called thinking, in her view. How, we might ask, does thinking implicates each thinking "I" as part of a "we" such that to destroy some part of the plurality of human life is to destroy not only one's self, understood as linked essentially to that plurality, but to destroy the very conditions of thinking itself.
Many questions abound: is thinking to be understood as a psychological process or, indeed, something that can be properly described, or is thinking in Arendt's sense always an exercise of judgment of some kind, and so implicated in a normative practice. If the "I" who thinks is part of a "we" and if the "I" who thinks is committed to sustaining that "we", how do we understand the relation between "I" and "we" and what specific implications does thinking imply for the norms that govern politics and, especially, the critical relation to positive law?
I would invite you to contrast that intricate web of logical analysis that seems to come up with nothing but questions and no answers on a topic in which the answers must be arrived at and there is no possible resonsible, moral conclusion as to what the right answer is. Imagine if Franklin Roosevelt went through those mazes before he decided to covertly, perhaps "illegally" go in on the side of those who opposed the Nazis. In the end, unless you want to surrender to the worset, to wallow in indecision, unless you want to leave all such questions suspended as the world of action chooses the most easy and depraved of answers, you have to make a deliberate choice and that choice cannot be based in scientific method or mathematically precise reasoning or abstracted logicality. It has to be a choice made by a person and there is nothing in any of those aids listed in that last sentence that will lead to to the choice to believe The Law, the Prophets, the Gospels and Epistles, to believe that committing murder is wrong because Thou Shalt Not Kill is an absolute law imposed on human beings by God, that as soon as you start with mitigating that with "just war" theory or the one that is imposed on the most legitimate, the most necessary, the most egalitarian and democratic and impartial of police agencies, that they sometimes have to kill criminals to protect others, you are neck deep in trouble.
But as Arendt's brilliant reporting on the Eichmann trial shows, as Judith Butler's insightful analysis of her reporting shows, unless you make that initial choice to believe you're neck deep in it already. Darwinism isn't just neck-deep in it, it's way past the top of its head and so is a society in which it is the foremost formal framing of human and other life. Nazism was a thoroughly Darwinist political ideology, that was the science that Hess meant when he said National Socialism was nothing but applied science.
