New German Critique

The Holocaust and Hannah Arendt’s

Philosophical Critique of Philosophy:
Eichmann in Jerusalem

Michael Mack

This essay discusses how Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem grew

out of her effort to come to terms with the particular and unprecedented
aspects of the Holocaust in light of her general political philosophy. This
attempt at coming to terms with the Holocaust in light of her understand-
ing of politics may account for her idiosyncratic approach. Seyla Benhabib
has drawn attention to the “terminological infelicities on Arendt’s part.”1
What does she mean when she calls Adolf Eichmann “thoughtless”? To call
Eichmann (and in a different context Martin Heidegger) “thoughtless” in
the sense of absentmindedness evidences a thoughtless usage of the English
language.
Arendt’s linguistic register is, however, highly idiosyncratic, and one
can do justice to it only by relating her discussion of Eichmann’s acts of mass
murder to the treatment of action and thought within the larger body of her
work. This is one of the main tasks of the present essay. Arendt certainly

I am most grateful to Anson Rabinbach for his helpful criticism of a previous version of this essay
and to the Leverhulme Trust, whose funding supported much of my work.
1. Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, new ed. (London: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2003), 180.
New German Critique 106, Vol. 36, No. 1, Winter 2009
DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2008-020 © 2009 by New German Critique, Inc.

35

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36 Arendt’s Philosophical Critique of Philosophy

does not attempt to trivialize Eichmann’s crimes,2 but her use of the English
language might be taken as such an attempt.
What I propose to do here is to offer an alternative reading that takes
Arendt’s terminology seriously. The apparent contradictions between Arendt’s
Eichmann book and her political philosophy arise from Arendt’s attempt to
develop a political philosophy in response to the Nazi genocide while under-
mining “philosophy” as a discipline hostile toward diversity and the plural
realm of politics. In her political philosophy Arendt critiques logic—which is
of course an important component of philosophy as a discipline—as part of
her analysis of ideology. Arendt describes how Nazism presented itself as
meaningful and consistent. This distortion of itself as “meaningful” charac-
terizes the deception of ideology. According to Arendt, ideology is the logic
of the idea: “‘Die Idee ergreift die Massen’—nämlich durch die Logik, deren
Unausweichlichkeit zum Halt wird—wie der Strick dem Gehängtem” (“The
idea captivates the masses”—namely, through its logic, whose inevitability
turns into a stable support structure [Halt], like the rope for the hanged man).3
In Eichmann in Jerusalem and in the larger body of her work Arendt sets
out to undermine “philosophy” via a philosophical approach: she uncovers
the philosophical aspects of ideology as the logic of the idea. She responds to
the all too “meaningful” deception of ideology by tolerating contradictions—
apparent or real—within her own writing and thought.

Shifting Back and Forth between the Metaphysical and the Empirical
Arendt avoids giving a straightforward reply as to why Eichmann and his
fellow perpetrators acted as they did. She feels unable to account for his
actions by connecting them to anti-Semitic indoctrination or a life filled with
violence and hatred: “Worse, his [Eichmann’s] was obviously also no case of
insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical anti-Semitism or indoctrination of any
kind.” Eichmann does not have a personal motive for organizing the system-
atic killing of European Jewry: “He ‘personally’ never had anything whatso-

2. Apropos Arendt’s apparent attempt to accuse the Jewish Elderly Council of cooperation with
Nazi authority, Jennifer Ring rightly argues that Arendt “was clear about the fact that it was the
Nazis who were solely responsible for creating the impossible situation, which forced decisions,
which no people should have to make. She did not imply any shared guilt for the death camps: they
were entirely the doings of the Nazis” (The Political Consequences of Thinking: Gender and Juda-
ism in the Work of Hannah Arendt [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997], 88).
3. Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950 bis 1973, ed. Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann, vol. 1
(Munich: Piper, 2002), 193. Hereafter cited as D. All translations in this essay are mine unless other-
wise noted.

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Michael Mack 37

ever against Jews: on the contrary, he had plenty of ‘private reasons’ for not
being a Jew hater.”4 Having “never harbored any ill feelings against his vic-
tims” (E, 30), Eichmann meticulously set about killing all of them. How can
we account for seemingly motiveless mass murder? This is one of the driv-
ing questions behind Arendt’s report on the banality of evil.
However, Arendt seems to tread on slippery ground at those select
instances in her book when she attempts to engage philosophically with Nazi
Germany’s crimes. She is aware of the uncertain nature of her undertaking.
Indeed she argues that Nazism imposed its murderous order on continental
Europe by dint of its mendacity.5 Eichmann and other Nazi perpetrators con-
structed a world of lies. This transmogrification of reality into a lie has serious
consequences for the philosophical observer. To come to terms with these dif-
ficulties, Arendt writes ambiguously and ironically.
Critics have so far ignored how the linguistic instability of Eichmann in
Jerusalem reflects the absence of legal and moral stability that is the very sub-
ject of the book. Arendt nevertheless opens not with general reflections but
with a legal focus on the person of the perpetrator. She clearly does not relegate
the Nazis’ crimes to a metaphysical level that is private and thus separated
from the public sphere of a criminal court room. Here she strikingly differs
from her onetime mentor, Karl Jaspers, who distinguishes between collective
responsibility and moral guilt, which is a question that concerns the individual
person rather than the German postwar body politic. As Anson Rabinbach
acutely points out, “Arendt rejected Jaspers’s definition of criminal guilt as
inappropriate to encompass the kind of murder committed by the regime.”6 In

4. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Pen-
guin, 1992), 26. Hereafter cited as E.
5. As Lisa Jane Disch astutely puts it, “The problem is that in the wake of a political regime that
exercised power by means of the fabrication of reality, it must be acknowledged that ‘truth’ can be
a construct of power” (Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy [Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1994], 113). For a detailed discussion of this topic, see Jeffrey Andrew Barash, Poli-
tiques de l’histoire: L’historicisme comme promesse et comme mythe (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 2004), 231–44.
6. Anson Rabinbach, “German as Pariah, Jew as Pariah: Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers,” in
Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven E. Aschheim (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001), 301. Rabinbach shows how Jaspers’s separation between public responsibility and the private
realm of moral or metaphysical guilt proved paradigmatic for Germany’s postwar Vergangenheitsbe-
wältigung. It also explains Jaspers’s refusal to confront Heidegger and other Nazi collaborators in a
public setting: “Despite two occasions on which he was publicly challenged to do so, Jaspers never
criticized Heidegger’s stance in any public forum, and he made sure that his autobiographical chapter
on Heidegger was withheld until both men were dead. In part, the reasons for his reticence can be
found in Die Schuldfrage itself, where Jaspers demands ‘collective responsibility’ but consigns the

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38 Arendt’s Philosophical Critique of Philosophy

Eichmann in Jerusalem Arendt discusses criminal guilt, but she does not
avoid larger philosophical issues. Why does she feel the need to refer to her
philosophical expertise in what is, after all, a journalistic report? The focus on
criminal guilt is not enough, because the Nazi genocide distorted legal and
moral standards by which one could judge crimes in the past. The unprece-
dented nature of the atrocities under discussion requires philosophical reflec-
tion. Contrary to Jaspers, she clearly holds that the two issues of criminal guilt
and of metaphysical or moral guilt are intricately connected.
At first sight, however, Arendt concentrates on criminal guilt. She begins
and ends her account with a critique of the Jerusalem House of Justice. She
criticizes the prosecutors for their concern with the general phenomenon of
anti-Semitism rather than with the defendant’s specific actions:

Justice demands that the accused be prosecuted, defended, and judged, and
that all the other questions of seemingly greater import—of “How could it
happen?” and “Why did it happen?,” of “Why the Jews?” and “Why the Ger-
mans?,” of “What was the role of other nations?” and “What was the extent of
co-responsibility on the side of the Allies?” of “How could the Jews through
their own leaders cooperate in their own destruction?” and “Why did they go
to their death like lambs to the slaughter?”—be left in abeyance. (E, 5)7

This concern with actions is of course of a legal nature, but it is also related
to Arendt’s differentiation between Christian and Jewish approaches to mat-
ters of guilt, revenge, and reconciliation.
Arendt implicitly shifts from the discourse about empirical guilt to the
metaphysical discussion of the difference between the Jewish and the Chris-
tian worlds. Critics have so far neglected the relevance of an early essay by
Arendt (in the Denktagebuch of June 1950) on what she understands as the
Jewish notion of reconciliation, which is premised on a preoccupation with
action. She contrasts what she sees as the Jewish understanding of recon-
ciliation with a Christian type of politics that is divided into either forgiveness

‘moral and metaphysical’ notions of guilt to the private sphere, while criminal and political guilt alone
remain public matters. The separation of German guilt into two distinct spheres, moral/metaphysical
and criminal/political, gave tacit support to the so-called silent Vergangenheitsbewältigung, coming
to terms with the past, of the immediate postwar years” (304).
7. Arendt closes her report with a hypothetical statement with which she argues that the judges
should have addressed Eichmann, showing that the only valid punishment for his actions was capi-
tal punishment. Like the opening of this book, this statement focuses on Eichmann’s actions: “We
are concerned here only with what you did, and not with the possible noncriminal nature of your
inner life and of your motives or with the criminal potentialities of those around you” (E, 278).

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Michael Mack 39

or revengefulness: “Innerhalb der christlichen Welt ist in der Tat die Alterna-
tive zwischen Verzeihung—d.h. christlichem Verzicht auf irgendein Tun in
der Welt—und der Re-aktion der Rache unausweichlich” (Within the Chris-
tian world there is indeed the inevitable alternative of either forgiveness—that
is, a Christian renunciation of any kind of action in the world—or revenge)
(D, 6). This limited choice between two extremities—namely, forgiveness and
revenge—is “gegründet auf dem fundamentalen Misstrauen in die mensch-
liche Substanz” (based on a fundamental suspicion of human nature) (D, 6).
The notion of reconciliation, in contrast, stipulates human beings who act and
sometimes act unjustly, but it also posits “keine vergifteten Menschen” (no
poisoned humanity) (D, 7). In other words, a Christian form of politics based
on either forgiveness or revenge presupposes poison as the core of human
nature, whereas Judaism’s concern with reconciliation allows for a nonfore-
closed, open-ended form of intersubjectivity premised on the unpredictable,
and not to be prejudged, nature of action.
How is all of this relevant to a more-nuanced understanding of Arendt’s
Eichmann book? As has been intimated above, Arendt focuses on Eichmann’s
actions. It is only by analyzing his actions that one can pass judgment on his
crimes. Arendt’s notion of actions is, however, closely linked to her under-
standing of politics. Her approach to politics has, in turn, a philosophical
undertone. She defines herself as a political theorist to distance herself from
philosophy’s hostility toward plurality, which is, according to her, synony-
mous with politics.8 Plurality has its abode in the public sphere of actions. As
Arendt puts it in The Human Condition, politics and actions are closely
interconnected: “The calamities of action all arise from the human condition
of plurality, which is the sine qua non for that space of appearance which is
the public realm. Hence to do away with this plurality is always tantamount
to the abolition of the public realm itself.”9 Eichmann and the Nazis set out to
do precisely this: through enacting the Nazi genocide, they attempted to abol-
ish plurality.
Arendt takes issue with a similar, though different, kind of hostility
toward plurality when, at the end of the first chapter of The Human Condi-
tion, she criticizes Plato’s idealist philosophy:

8. For a detailed discussion of Arendt’s philosophical critique of philosophy and of her identity
as political theorist, see Margaret Betz Hull, The Hidden Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (New
York: Routledge Curzon, 2002).
9. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998), 220.

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40 Arendt’s Philosophical Critique of Philosophy

One thing is certain: it is only in Plato that concern with the eternal and the
life of the philosopher are seen as inherently contradictory and in conflict
with the striving for immortality, the way of life of the citizen, the bios poli-
tikos. The philosopher’s experience of the eternal, which to Plato was arrhe-
ton (“unspeakable”) and to Aristotle aneu logou (“without word”), and which
later was conceptualized in the paradoxical nunc stans (“the standing now”),
can occur only outside the realm of human affairs and outside the plurality of
men, as we know from the Cave parable in Plato’s Republic, where the phi-
losopher, having liberated himself from the fetters that bound him to his fel-
low men, leaves the cave in perfect “singularity,” as it were, neither accompa-
nied nor followed by others. Politically speaking, if to die is the same as “to
cease to be among men,” experience of the eternal is a kind of death, and the
only thing that separates it from real death is that it is not final because no
living creature can endure it for any length of time.10

The philosopher’s death to the world is only temporary. More important, the
philosopher is the opposite of the political actor. Eichmann was certainly
someone who acted rather than reflected. Arendt famously makes his inca-
pacity to think responsible for his inability to realize the criminal gravity of
his actions. Is there not a contradiction between the above critique of philoso-
phy’s hostility to plurality and how she accentuates absence of thought as the
main culpable factor in Eichmann’s acts of mass murder? As Dana R. Villa
and George Kateb note vis-à-vis a discussion of Arendt’s response to Heideg-
ger’s Nazi activities at Freiburg University (1933), there is a “strange alliance”
between the philosophical and the thoughtless.11 This curious union between
philosophy and thoughtlessness “is manifest in the way their respective modes
of alienation from the world (thinking withdrawal versus unthinking absorp-
tion in everydayness) issue in the same result: the death of judgment.”12 The
philosopher Heidegger turns thoughtless when he withdraws from the plural-
ity of everyday life.
This assessment does not, however, take into account the wider range of
Arendt’s critique of “thoughtless thought.” What she understands by thought-
lessness is the fixation with one’s singularity that is impervious to any realiza-
tion of the isomorphism of particularity and universality. As rector, Heidegger

10. Ibid., 20.

11. George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and
Allanheld, 1984), 195.
12. Dana R. Villa, “The Banality of Philosophy: Arendt on Heidegger and Eichmann,” in Han-
nah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1996), 192.

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Michael Mack 41

expels Jews from Freiburg University not simply because of his “thinking
withdrawal” from the world but because he reduces plurality to what he takes
to be his proper philosophical roots in the particularity of the Greek, which he
associates with the German. Here, clearly, roots are self-enclosed entities that
have become utterly separated from the universal. Mutatis mutandis, a more-
nuanced approach is also required for a better understanding of Arendt’s analy-
sis of Eichmann’s involvement in the Nazi genocide.
Arendt distinguishes between the tripartite cluster of action-under-
standing-reconciliation, on the one hand, and loneliness, speechlessness, and
tyranny, on the other. Eichmann’s acts are criminal and, at least according to
Arendt, accompanied by speechlessness. Arendt describes Eichmann’s inabil-
ity to master the German language as a “mild case of aphasia” (E, 48). This
deficiency in the ability to communicate does not bespeak stupidity. It is, how-
ever, related to what Arendt understands by the inability to think. Eichmann
cannot put himself into someone else’s position. This shift of perspective is
what Arendt understands by thought. She therefore maintains that Eichmann’s
“inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to
think from the standpoint of someone else” (E, 49). In the postscript to the
Eichmann book Arendt defines this lack of both speech and thought as a fail-
ure of the imagination:

It was precisely this lack of imagination which enabled him [Eichmann] to

sit for months on end facing a German Jew who was conducting the police
interrogation, pouring out his heart to the man and explaining again and
again how it was that he reached only the rank of lieutenant colonel in the
S.S. and that it had not been his fault that he was not promoted. . . . He was
not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical
with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest crimi-
nals 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, that is still far from calling it commonplace. (E, 287–88)

By saying that the meaning of the word banality is not the same as that con-
noted by the term commonplace, Arendt makes clear that she does not equate
Eichmann with the man on the street, that is, the average citizen. Yet neither
is Eichmann a demonic character à la Macbeth, Richard III, or Iago. In con-
trast to these protagonists of radical evil, Eichmann acts seemingly without
motive. If one can speak of any motive, according to Arendt, it must be career
advancement. This is certainly banal but is not commonplace, because it has
lost any relation to communality. Nazi ideology has erased in Eichmann any

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42 Arendt’s Philosophical Critique of Philosophy

connection with reality as it is constituted by human plurality: he sees the out-

side world in terms of the uniformity of Nazi racism, which, by killing those
perceived to be other, destroys human diversity. He is capable of mass mur-
der only after retreating from a world of communality and understanding. It
is this retreat from the multiplicity of humanity rather than absentmindedness
(a term that Villa uses in relation to Arendt’s discussion of both Heidegger’s
and Eichmann’s Nazi affiliations) that Arendt has in mind when she uses the
term thoughtless.
To think means to understand, at least according to Arendt. Her linguis-
tic usage is here, as well as in her use of the term thoughtless, highly idiosyn-
cratic. In a brief essay of March 1953 Arendt thus makes it clear that under-
standing has nothing to do with forgiving, even though the former is often
associated with the latter: “Through understanding, reconciliation with the
world takes place, which precedes action and enables every action in the first
place [die erst alles Handeln erst ermöglichende, vorgängige Versöhnung mit
der Welt]” (D, 331). She goes on to stress that this affiliation with reconciliation
separates understanding from its commonly assumed association with forgiv-
ing: “Understanding has nothing to do with forgiving. Forgiving always implies
only: We do not know what we do [Wir wissen nicht was wir tun]. Reconcilia-
tion means: ‘to come to terms with’” (Arendt uses the English expression to
come to terms with) (D, 331). Forgiving presupposes the Christian paradigm of
inaction or at least of an action of which we are not conscious. Reconciliation,
on the other hand, has as its focal point a concern with the possibility of action
within the world: “I reconcile myself with reality as such [Realität als solcher]
and belong from now on to this reality as someone who acts [und gehöre von
nun an dieser Realität als Handelnder zu]” (D, 331). Action that results from
reconciliation is not necessarily logical: it fully knows what it does, but what it
does may not conform to standards of logic and consistency.
Reconciliation presupposes understanding that is not necessarily logi-
cal: it does not make sense; that is, it does not make available an experience
of the world as consistent and significant, but instead offers insight into the
often meaningless reality that is presented in its distorted, namely, ideological,
form as proffering meaning: “Understanding does not understand meaning
[Verstehen versteht nicht Sinn] and does not produce [erzeugt nicht] mean-
ing” (D, 331). Arendt here touches on the difference between the real and the
meaningful.
The real demands of us the act of knowing, but knowledge of the real
does not bestow meaning on the world: on the contrary, it brings to the fore its
inconsistency and its meaninglessness, and this knowledge of inconsistency

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Michael Mack 43

enables the work of critique and judgment. In her speech about the eighteenth-
century thinker and writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Arendt applies this
distinction between the meaningful and the knowable to a critique of the
postwar German ideal of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (mastery of the past).
She maintains that mastery of the past implies imputing meaning into crimes
committed by Nazi Germany. The meaningful emerges from constructing
consistent narratives: “The meaning of a committed act is revealed only when
the action itself has come to an end and become a story susceptible to narra-
tion. In so far as any ‘mastering’ of the past is possible, it consists in relating
what has happened.”13 This story about the Nazi past offers consistency and
meaning, but it does so at the price of the knowable and thus prevents under-
standing and reconciliation. Arendt therefore goes on to stress that the post-
war German attempt at mastering the past “solves no problems and assuages
no suffering” (M, 21). Here she evokes the concept of reconciliation in con-
trast to the fabrication of consistency that characterizes narrations that have
lost touch with the real and have thus become clichés: “We can no more mas-
ter the past than we can undo it. But we can reconcile ourselves to it” (M, 21).
Those who reconcile themselves to the past do not discover meaning in the
past. Rather, they understand (in the sense of know) what has happened,
however illogical and recalcitrant to attaining knowledge the subject matter
might be: “The best that can be achieved is to know precisely what it was,
and to endure this knowledge, and then to wait and see what comes of know-
ing and enduring” (M, 20). The patience that goes along with this endurance
of knowledge is what Arendt understands by the term reconciliation (and
one form of this patient activity is storytelling).
While it is true that Arendt distances thought from the abstractions of
categories and concepts and affiliates philosophy with the particularity around
which different stories focus their attention, she nevertheless undermines
the traditional image of narration as purveyor of consistency and meaning.
Arendt’s approach to storytelling is strange. As Lisa Jane Disch points out,
Arendt undermines the idea that narratives bring to the fore continuity.14

13. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harvest Book, 1993), 21. Hereafter cited
as M.
14. “In the context of Western political tradition, it is strange to describe critical thinking as
storytelling. Much of that tradition has always taken it for granted that conceptual thought is the
principal weapon against the prejudices carried out by ‘old fashioned’ stories. It is even stranger to
associate storytelling with discontinuity, to argue that the time to tell stories is when the past has
‘lost its authority,’ given the belief that stories preserve continuity, transmitting tradition from one
generation to the next” (Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, 110).

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44 Arendt’s Philosophical Critique of Philosophy

For Arendt, stories like thought are concerned not with meaning but with
common knowledge, however traumatic and disruptive it might be. This is
why she appraises a documentary literary style as found in Rolf Hochhuth’s
Deputy, a play about the Catholic Church’s affiliation with Nazi Germany.
Here she found a narrative that does not forgive but understands and thus
reconciles itself to a traumatic past by patiently engaging with the knowable.
Understanding manifests itself in Hochhuth’s “most factual literary work.”15
Understanding pierces the seemingly consistent presentation of the
world as proffered in different ideologies. If political meaning establishes its
hold over those who believe in it through the neat (though of course arbitrary)
confrontation between the self and the other, understanding perforates the
surface of reality (i.e., its ideological distortion as consistent and meaningful)
and delves into the depths of the chaos of the real, and in this chaos it discov-
ers the interconnection of what ideology has separated into neatly distinct enti-
ties. Understanding thus grasps humanity’s common, though chaotic, ground,
and this is why Arendt affiliates understanding with reconciliation: it knows
and reconciles what differs from itself. By virtue of its reconciling force, “Ver-
stehen ist die spezifisch politische Weise des Denkens” (Understanding is the
specifically political form of thinking) (D, 332). Arendt adds in brackets the
English expression the other fellow’s point of view. “The other fellow’s point
of view” can point either to the other that is part of the self—here the self dif-
fers from itself—or to the other of another person. In these two cases we
encounter the human as the inconsistent: a unity that does not coincide with
itself. The ability to live with this inconsistency distinguishes politics as rec-
onciliation from the Christian notion of forgiveness and revenge. Politics
engages with the plural, the inconsistent; it has to move back and forth between
the self and its other (be it the internal or the external other). Politics as under-
standing thus grapples with the illogical reality of contradictions: it can-
not remain in one place but has to take account of “the other fellow’s point
of view.”
In two aphoristic essays of March 1953 Arendt makes understanding
the sine qua non of politics as such (not only of thought but also of action):
“Understanding creates depth not meaning. Politically, this is the same as
becoming, making oneself, at home in the world. It is the process of Ver-
wurzelung [i.e., striking roots]” (D, 332; English in original). In her Origins
of Totalitarianism, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, and in the essay and lectures

15. Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken,
2003), 214. Hereafter cited as R.

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Michael Mack 45

that emerged from the Eichmann controversy, Arendt pinpoints the lack of
depth (i.e., the opposite of Verwurzelung) as the rootless root of genocide.
Evil cannot be radical, she writes in the 1965–66 lecture series “Some Ques-
tions of Moral Philosophy,” because it lacks roots: “For human beings, think-
ing of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots
and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may
occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptations. The greatest evil is not
radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots, it has no limitations, it
can go with unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world” (R, 95).
In the 1960s Arendt abandons the Kantian term radical evil, because evil has
no roots: it is rootless and thus banal. The rootlessness of evil is precisely what
Arendt understood by the term banality of evil.16
In her Denktagebuch of March 1953 Arendt links the striking of roots
to what she sees as the Jewish political notion of reconciliation: “The dimen-
sion of depth is created by striking roots, that is, understanding in the sense
of reconciliation” (D, 332; cf. the above discussion of the Denktagebuch of
June 1950). The one who thinks understands, and understanding links the sin-
gular to the communal. This linkage is implied by Arendt’s use of the term
striking roots: she is not referring to traditionalism for tradition’s sake or,
worse still, to an ethnocentric fixation with “one’s roots”—to strike roots does
not mean sinking into the myopic world of self-enclosed particularity. This
is why Arendt uses the terms understanding and reconciliation to describe
what she means by striking roots. The opposite of understanding (and of its
political form, which is reconciliation) “is the blind insistence on the particu-
lar that I am and the negation of the common” (D, 315; English in original).
The universal is always already the site of the singular, and the singular can-
not emerge without cognizance of the universal. The striking of roots is related
to Arendt’s notions of both reconciliation and understanding. These two related
terms contrast with the purported stability of meaning as found in ideology.

16. As Richard J. Bernstein clearly shows, it is, however, the same lack of roots (and thus limi-
tations) that Arendt describes in The Origins of Totalitarianism when she refers to radical evil.
Bernstein analyzes the congruency between Arendt’s notion of radical evil in the Origins and the
banality of evil in her Eichmann book: “Radical evil differs from the main traditional understand-
ings of evil because it has nothing to do with humanly understandable ‘evil motives’—indeed, it has
nothing to do with human motives at all” (Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question [Oxford: Pol-
ity, 1996], 145). “In considering what Arendt means by ‘the banality of evil,’” Bernstein concludes,
“I have tried to show that although there is a significant change of focus in her questions concern-
ing evil, the concept of the banality of evil is compatible with her earlier thoughts about radical
evil. What she had done is to shift her emphasis from superfluousness to thoughtlessness” (184).
Both the superfluous and the thoughtless, however, attempt to destroy human plurality.

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46 Arendt’s Philosophical Critique of Philosophy

The one who reconciles and understands embarks on a seemingly contradictory

undertaking: he or she moves from the singular to the communal and from a
particular community to the plurality implicit in Arendt’s neo-Kantian inter-
pretation of universalism.
The above discussion enables us to understand how Arendt’s analysis
of the conditions that facilitated Eichmann’s acts of mass murder are closely
linked to larger metaphysical concerns found elsewhere in her work. This
copresence of the philosophical in a purported journalistic “report” about
a legal case conflicts with the empiricist proclamations that seem to delin-
eate the book’s methodology. We are nevertheless able to understand properly
Arendt’s usage of words like thoughtless only by attending to the interrela-
tions between her Eichmann book and the larger philosophical body of her
work. How does this metaphysical subtext relate to the often-noted empiri-
cist and legal focus on the perpetrators’ actions? On one level Arendt seems
to exclude the larger picture—that is, anti-Semitism, Nazism, the question of
the Allies’ indifference, the question of the Germans’ collective guilt, and so
on—to focus on what Eichmann actually did. Yet this impression is decep-
tive, because Arendt switches from an empiricist to a historicist analysis of
the Nazi genocide. Larger issues indeed lie at the heart of Arendt’s attempt to
direct matters of judgment exclusively onto the perpetrator’s deeds. This shift
to the large, from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic, from the narration
of particular crimes to philosophical reflections on pre- and post-Holocaust
modernity, constitutes the apparent contradictions at the heart of Eichmann
in Jerusalem. As this section of the essay has indicated, however, this contra-
dictory setup might indeed constitute the chaos of the real: politics and a polit-
ical mode of thought, according to Arendt, achieve not consistency but knowl-
edge of the contradictory plurality that is humanity.
Arendt’s methodology is to unravel this inconsistency. Her mode of
writing is ironic: it says more than what it says, and what it says is not what it
seems. The ironic is what is not self-consistent; it allows for the presence of
multiple voices. Arendt’s plea for the primacy of action not only is part of her
concern with legal matters but, as the discussion of her essay on a Christian
type of politics illustrates, also is tied up with her understanding of a Jewish
approach to anthropology: one that allows for the unpredictable and the not-
to-be-prejudged nature of humanity. When she writes that “on trial are” Eich-
mann’s “deeds, not the suffering of the Jews, not the German people or man-
kind, not even anti-Semitism and racism” (E, 5), Arendt does not lose track of
these larger issues, even though she seems to exclude them with considerable
rhetorical force.

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Michael Mack 47

Arendt’s Plural Universalism

In the epilogue to Eichmann in Jerusalem Arendt indeed addresses questions
of universality. That is, her interest in the particular originates from a con-
cern for the fate of the universal in a genocidal age. This concern lies behind
her criticism of the Jerusalem court: “At no point, . . . either in the proceed-
ings or in the judgment, did the Jerusalem trial ever mention even the possi-
bility that extermination of whole ethnic groups—the Jews, or the Poles, or
the Gypsies—might be more than a crime against Jewish or the Polish or the
Gypsy people, that the international order, and mankind in its entirety might
have been grievously hurt and endangered” (E, 276). The analysis of crimes
against the particular has a universal relevance. What is therefore required of
the reporter Hannah Arendt is to shift from the particular to the universal
and from the universal to the particular until the interconnection between
these two entities has been clearly established.
This unstable switching back and forth is encapsulated in the book’s
very title. Here we first read about the individual Eichmann in the particular
city of Jerusalem, where he is judged for his specific involvement in specific
acts of mass murder, then we confront the general statement about the famous
or rather infamous “banality of evil.” The limelight that falls on Eichmann’s
deeds thus illuminates general human history. Eichmann’s self reveals the hor-
ror of normality that was Nazism.
This horror in turn has ramifications not only for the German perpetra-
tors, their collaborators, and their victims but for an understanding of humanity
in general. Is humanity in fact poisonous—a view that, as I have shown, Arendt
ascribes to a particular Christian anthropology? This question comes most
clearly to the fore in the epilogue, where she differentiates between the meaning
of expulsion and genocide. One has a more-limited sphere of relevance, whereas
the other concerns humanity in its entirety: “Expulsion and genocide, though
both are international offences, must remain distinct; the former is an offence
against fellow nations, whereas the latter is an attack upon human diversity
as such, that is, upon a characteristic of ‘the human status’ without which the
very word ‘mankind’ or ‘humanity’ would be devoid of meaning” (E, 268–69).
Much of the scandal associated with Arendt’s Eichmann book arises from this
shift from the particular to the universal, from the empiricist to the historicist.17

17. Steven E. Aschheim notes Arendt’s universalism in her discussion of modern Jewish history
in The Origins of Totalitarianism: “Her capacity to remove the Jewish experience from parochial
settings, to lift it from a ‘ghettoized’ frame and integrate it into the marrow of the world (or what
was virtually synonymous, European or Western) history, indeed to make the former virtually

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48 Arendt’s Philosophical Critique of Philosophy

According to Arendt, genocidal crimes against Jews, Poles, and Gypsies are
crimes against humanity as a whole: crimes against humanity attack human
diversity. As such, they seek to annihilate what Arendt’s notion of natality
attempts to describe: the human capacity to begin anew, to act in entirely novel
ways. Eichmann deserves the death penalty precisely because of his murder-
ous hostility to human plurality:

And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share
the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other
nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who
should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is,
no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth
with you. This is the reason, and the only reason you must hang. (E, 279)

Arendt wishes that “the judges had dared to address” Eichmann with these
words (E, 277). She foregrounds the importance of this hypothetical pro-
nouncement of judgment on Eichmann’s crimes by placing it at the end of her
epilogue. These significant sentences illustrate that she was searching for a
way both to describe and to circumscribe the damage that the Nazi genocide
has wreaked on the foundations of the world. While this hypothetical judg-
ment might sound as though it propounds an argument in favor of revenge, it
is concerned less with punishing an individual (Eichmann) than with salvag-
ing humanity from the poison implicit in the crimes committed by Eichmann
and his fellow perpetrators. Clearly, executing one person cannot be consid-
ered an adequate act of retribution for the killing of millions. Rather than
advocate the talon law of an eye for an eye, Arendt is concerned with salvaging
humanity from the suspicion of a predetermined poisonous nature of which
the executed (Eichmann) could serve as proof positive. The crimes of the Nazis
do not stop at the point where they were perpetrated: according to Arendt, they
have a much larger reach, with repercussions for humanity’s life on this earth
and at this time.
While this universal approach to the Nazi genocide seems quite contro-
versial, it is related to Arendt’s Jewish identity. As has been intimated above,
she focuses on specific actions on account of her trust in the nonpoisonous core
of humanity, which she differentiates from the Christian doctrine of original

constitutive of the latter, provided a kind of dignity and importance to an existence that had come
perilously close to extinction” (“Nazism, Culture, and The Origins of Totalitarianism: Hannah
Arendt and the Discourse of Evil,” New German Critique, no. 70 [1997]: 119).

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Michael Mack 49

sin, namely, humanity’s sinful or poisonous predisposition. In a February 1952

entry in her Denktagebuch, she distinguishes between the Christian under-
standing of the Fall and the account of Adam’s expulsion from paradise as
found in the Hebrew Bible. Adam is not condemned to original sin: “Arbeit ist
ursprünglich Dienst an der Erde, am Acker, Adamah. Dies ist die Bestimmung
des Menschen bereits im Paradies” (Labor is originally service rendered to
the soil, to the fields, the earth. This is already man’s destiny in paradise) (D,
189–90). “Der Fluch macht aus dem Dienst die Knechtschaft” (It is only the
curse of expulsion from paradise that turns his service into servitude) (D, 190).
It does not, however, corrupt human nature. His name relates Adam to the
earth (Adamah) already in paradise. Outside paradise he only deepens his
human destiny, which is to work the earth. According to Arendt, human work
(Awodah) “means to be of service to the earth [Dienst am Irdischen]” (D, 190).
It is humanity’s place on this earth, however, that Arendt sees ultimately threat-
ened by the unprecedented crimes of the Nazi genocide.
This attack on the very foundation of human diversity violates not only
Jewish but also Christian and pagan traditions: it is quite clear that Arendt does
not dismiss Jesus’ teaching of forgiveness as hostile to human diversity. Indeed,
in The Human Condition Arendt relates Jesus’ notion of forgiveness to her
understanding of politics as action and natality. Whereas revenge is predict-
able, forgiveness is the radically new: “In contrast to revenge, which is the
natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which because of the irrevers-
ibility of the action process can be expected and calculated, the act of forgive-
ness can never be predicted.”18 Moreover, Arendt clearly links her account of
natality to a variety of foundation myths, from the account of creation in Gen-
esis via Virgil’s Aeneid to Augustine’s Christian philosophy of human birth. In
On Revolution Arendt comments on “what the Christian philosopher Augus-
tine in the fifth century A.D. was to articulate in conceptual and Christianized
language: Initium ergo ut esset, creatus est homo—‘That there be a beginning,
man was created,’ and what finally must have become apparent in the very
course of the revolutions of the modern age.”19

18. Arendt, Human Condition, 241. Arendt in fact links Jesus’ notion of forgiveness to the Jew-
ish concept of t’shuvah: “The original meaning of aphienai is to ‘dismiss’ and ‘release’ rather than
‘forgive’; metanoein means ‘change of mind’ and—since it serves also to render the Hebrew shuv—
‘return,’ ‘trace back one’s steps,’ rather than ‘repentance’ with its psychological emotional overtones;
what is required is: change your mind and ‘sin no more,’ which is almost the opposite of doing pen-
ance” (240n78).
19. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990), 211.

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50 Arendt’s Philosophical Critique of Philosophy

In this modern context Arendt singles out the primeval theme of begin-
ning and, associated with it, human plurality as the founding myth of the
American and French Revolutions:

What matters in our context is less the profoundly Roman notion that all
foundations are reestablishments and reconstructions than the somehow
connected but different idea that men are equipped for the logically para-
doxical task of making a new beginning because they themselves are new
beginnings and hence beginners, that the very capacity for beginning is
rooted in natality, in the fact that human beings appear in the world by virtue
of birth.20

In Arendt’s account, the relative stability of the U.S. Constitution owes its
success not only to the Montesquieuan separation of powers but also (con-
comitantly) to a refusal to break with the earthly foundations of the past:
“The outstanding characteristic of the modern age was that it turned once
more to antiquity to find a precedent for its own new preoccupation with the
future of the man-made world on earth.”21 Here we encounter the same pre-
occupation with humanity’s place on earth as at the end of the epilogue to
Eichmann in Jerusalem. Nonviolent modernity revives the ancient concept
of new beginnings in this world. As a new beginning, it preserves past begin-
nings and thus sustains human plurality. Human culture on this earth is thus
composed of diverse births (i.e., beginnings), which have an intrinsic right to
survive death and destruction.
In her Eichmann book Arendt takes up the theme of a new beginning,
of revolution, but in an entirely perverted context. What Eichmann and his
perpetrators did was unprecedented: it was an absolute break with past cus-
toms and norms and turned this abnormality into normality—made a new
norm of it. This collapse of morality constitutes the very instability of Arendt’s
subject matter in her report on the banality of evil. With lightning speed, as it
were, the commandment not to kill is turned upside down into the command
to kill:

And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of con-
science tells everybody “Thou shalt not kill,” even though man’s natural
desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler’s
land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: “Thou shalt

20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 230.

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Michael Mack 51

kill,” although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder
is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the
Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the
quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an over-
whelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to
rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom (for that the Jews were
transported to their doom they knew, of course, even though many of them
may not have known the gruesome details), and not to become accomplices
in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had
learned how to resist temptation. (E, 150)

The Nazi reign of terror illustrates the instability of traditional morality.

Arendt’s ironic tone is apposite vis-à-vis the duplicitous nature of her topic.
Within a few years, humanity’s diverse ethical traditions were turned on their
head. What once had been considered a temptation transmogrified into a duty,
and what once had been a duty transversed into a temptation. It is this duty to
kill and accept murder as the foundation of social, cultural, and political life
that Arendt describes when she coins the phrase banality of evil. It is banal
because during the Nazi reign of terror murder turned into a socially acceptable
norm. This is why Slavoj Žižek is not surprised by Eichmann’s Kantianism:

In him, the Kantian contrast between the subject’s spontaneous egoistic

strivings and the ethical struggle to overcome them is turned around in the
struggle between the spontaneous ethical strivings and the “evil” effort to
overcome these barriers which make it so difficult for us to accomplish a ter-
rible act of torturing or killing a human being, as in the short poem by Brecht
apropos of a statute of a Japanese demon, in which Brecht emphasizes the
immense effort it takes to be truly evil.22

The sudden normality of evil, that is, its normative nature, brings to the fore
the shaky (and rootless) foundation of traditional ethics from Socrates, on the
one hand, and the Ten Commandments, on the other, down to Kantian modern
moral philosophy.

The Contradictory Nature of Ethics

Reflecting on the Eichmann controversy, Arendt focuses on the instability of
ethical systems in her essay “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship.”
Greek and Jewish antiquity associated moral action with the well-being of

22. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 67.

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52 Arendt’s Philosophical Critique of Philosophy

the self. This implies that doing good is intimately bound up with self-interest
and thus does not need to be questioned by the moral agent. The Nazi geno-
cide has proven the irrelevance of this Socratic axiom. In the opening para-
graphs Arendt notes that before the rise of Nazism she “had somehow taken
it for granted that we all still believe with Socrates that it is better to suffer
wrong than to do wrong.” She admits that this “belief turned out to be a mis-
take” (R, 18). Whereas Greek and Jewish antiquity instituted the well-being
of the self as the standard of ethical action, Christianity shifted the focus from
self-interest to selfless love, namely, to the commandment to love your enemy.
As Arendt points out in “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” “‘Love thy
enemy’ is more than a mere intensification of the Hebrew precept,” because
here the emphasis shifts from the self to the other: “The aim here is by no
means to suffer rather than to do wrong, but something altogether different,
namely to do good to others, and the only criterion is the other” (R, 116). Of
course, the Nazis also overturned this new element that Christianity introduced
into reflections about morality.
In a perverse sense, Nazi perpetrators like Eichmann were at harmony
with themselves. Benhabib has criticized Arendt for being “too quick in
assuming that out of the self’s desire for unity and consistency a principled
moral standpoint could emerge.”23 As “Personal Responsibility under Dic-
tatorship” shows, Arendt was, however, aware of the invalidity of traditional
ethics, whether Jewish, pagan, or Christian. Eichmann attempted to harmo-
nize his unprecedented crimes with classical, Christian, and modern Kant-
ian ethical systems. As for the disharmony of his self, he was perfectly at
ease, “and as for his conscience, he remembered perfectly well that he would
have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered
to do—to ship millions of men, women, and children to their death with great
zeal and the most meticulous care” (E, 25). His mental health showed no sign
of a self ill at ease with itself: “Half a dozen psychiatrists have certified him
as ‘normal’” (E, 25). The perpetrator’s normality results from the social accept-
ability of mass murder: “His conscience was indeed set at rest when he saw
the zeal and eagerness with which ‘good society’ everywhere reacted as he
did” (E, 126). The same society that publicly affirmed the commandment not
to kill now publicly endorsed a new morality that championed the genocide
of those people whom it deemed “immoral.” Eichmann thus “did not need to
‘close his ears to the voice of his conscience,’ as the judgment [reached by

23. Benhabib, Reluctant Modernism, 190.

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Michael Mack 53

the Jerusalem court] has it, not because he had none, but because his con-
science spoke with a ‘respectable voice,’ with the voice of respectable society
around him” (E, 126).
This brings us to the purported “self-less” actions of Eichmann the mass
murderer. Not only does Eichmann have a self beyond self-reproach, which
seems to live up to the classical standards of ethics, but he also seems to fulfill
the Christian commandment to live a selfless life. By presenting himself as an
idealist, Eichmann attempts to make his crimes compatible with traditional
Christian as well as modern Kantian ethics. As an idealist, he sacrifices his
personal interests and emotions for the “selfless cause” of the Nazi idea, which
is genocidal: “The perfect ‘idealist,’ like everybody else, had of course his
personal feeling and emotions but he would never permit them to interfere
with his actions if they came to interfere with his ‘idea’” (E, 42). Arendt puts
the words idealist and idea in quotation marks to signal the instability these
notions have undergone after the Nazi genocide. The Nazis claimed them as
their own, and, like other elements of the moral universe, they have thus become
suspect, not because of what they might traditionally represent but because of
what they have come to represent in Nazi Germany and beyond.
Arendt’s sense “of the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused
in respectable European society” (E, 125) comes most strikingly to the fore
when she describes Eichmann’s claim to be a Kantian. She narrates that “to
the surprise of everybody, Eichmann came up with an approximately correct
definition of the categorical imperative” (E, 136). Eichmann describes his
Kantianism as follows: “I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle
of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general
laws” (E, 136). This is indeed a roughly accurate definition of Kant’s categori-
cal imperative. In a similar way, Eichmann does his best to bring his crimes
in harmony with traditional models of morality that center either on the self
(ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish) or on the other (Christian). The context
of genocide in which these moral statutes are uttered clearly proves that they
have become utterly perverted, that their foundations have turned shaky to
the point that one can hardly find firm ground beneath them.
Arendt emphasizes that Eichmann’s was a vulgar understanding of Kant’s
moral philosophy, and, as I have analyzed elsewhere, it was this popularized
Kantianism that helped make political anti-Semitism socially acceptable.24

24. For a detailed discussion of this topic, see Michael Mack, German Idealism and the Jew:
The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003).

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54 Arendt’s Philosophical Critique of Philosophy

Nonetheless, Arendt acknowledges that “there is not the slightest doubt that
in one respect Eichmann did indeed follow Kant’s precept: a law was a law,
there could be no exceptions” (E, 137). Here she touches on a point where
Kant is, in Richard J. Bernstein’s illuminating words, “at war with himself”:
“But some of Kant’s reflections on duty—especially the ‘absolute’ duty of citi-
zens to obey the sovereign power and the duty of a soldier to obey the orders
of a superior—are more than disappointing; they are disturbing.”25 On the one
hand, Kant theorizes the concept of freedom as the independence from nature
and from natural inclinations; on the other, he demands absolute obedience
to the powers that be. If one reads Kant as a political philosopher, there emerges
a disturbing sense in which these two aspects merge into one. In her Lessing
essay Arendt speaks of “the inhumanity of Kant’s moral philosophy” (M, 27).
This highly critical statement is striking in the oeuvre of an otherwise neo-
Kantian thinker. She takes exception to the “absoluteness” of the categori-
cal imperative: “The inhumanity which is bound up with the concept of one
single truth emerges with particular clarity in Kant’s work precisely because
he attempted to found truth on practical reason; it is as though he who had so
inexorably pointed out man’s cognitive limits could not bear to think that in
action, too, man cannot behave like a god” (M, 27). Eichmann’s vulgar Kant-
ianism is clearly related to the inhumanity of Kant’s moral philosophy: it is
hostile to plurality.26
Nevertheless Arendt sees an unqualified universalism at work in Kant,
one that appreciates plurality. As Bernstein has pointed out, she does so by
misreading Kant’s notion of judgment, which she transplants from Kantian
aesthetics into Arendtian politics.27 For Arendt, no difference exists between
the generality of Kantian moral philosophy and the appreciation of the par-

25. Richard J. Bernstein, “Radical Evil: Kant at War with Himself,” in Radical Evil: Contem-
porary Perspectives, ed. Maria Pia Lara (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 76.
26. Disch establishes a link between Arendt’s critique of the inhumanity of Kant’s moral phi-
losophy in the Lessing essay and her discussion of the Nazi genocide in the Eichmann book:
“Though Arendt knows of course that the race laws of the Third Reich could not be farther from
the spirit of Kantian critical theory, she nonetheless asserts that both contravene critique and resis-
tance by confronting the political subject with an imperative” (Hannah Arendt and the Limits of
Philosophy, 95).
27. Bernstein describes this transplantation as follows: “The reason why Arendt was so drawn
to Kant’s analysis of reflective judgment in the Critique of Judgment is because Kant analyzes a
type of judgment of particulars which is made without subsuming the particulars under a universal
principle or general rule. But whereas Kant was concerned primarily with aesthetic judgment,
Arendt is concerned more with moral judgment and wishes to extend his analysis to such particular
judgments as this is right, this is wrong” (Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, 175).

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Michael Mack 55

ticular as found in his aesthetics. Martin Jay clearly expounds the contrast
between the moral and the aesthetic understanding of the term judgment in
Kant’s writings:

Aesthetic experience mobilizes cognitive powers. . . . But it does so without

subsuming specific cases under discursive rules, a priori categories, or gen-
eral principles, as is the case with the determinant judgments of understand-
ing. The latter seem to come from above, as if through the coercive dictates
of a ruler. In contrast, aesthetic judgments, singular rather than categorical,
are allowed a kind of nonhierarchical, free play in which each of us can
make universal claims of beauty on the basis of analogical and paradig-
matic, rather than subsumptive or deductive, reasoning. We move from par-
ticular to particular rather than from universal to particular, as was the case
with the synthetic a priori judgments of cognition discussed in the First
Critique.28

In contrast to the term judgment in Kant’s moral philosophy, judgment in

his aesthetics (the Third Critique) does not subsume the particular under the
rule of the general. When Arendt uses the Kantian term judgment, she has
this aesthetic use in mind. Mutatis mutandis, when she employs the notion of
universalism, she does not refer to the generality implicit in Kant’s categori-
cal imperative; instead, her use of the term describes universality as an entity
constituted not by generality but by plurality. Arendt’s approach to Kant in the
Eichmann book and elsewhere is contradictory: on the one hand, she distances
herself from Kant’s interpretation of the universal as a general entity removed
from and indifferent to plurality (this is her position in the Lessing lecture
and in her analysis of Eichmann’s Kantianism), and, on the other, she char-
acterizes Kantian universalism as plural and diverse. In Eichmann in Jeru-
salem Arendt redeems Kant by interpreting his moral and political philoso-
phy from the aesthetic perspective of “judgment”: “Kant’s moral philosophy
is so closely bound up with man’s faculty of judgment, which rules out blind
obedience” (E, 136). Here she equates Kant’s aesthetic notion of judgment
with Kant’s moral philosophy (she characterizes the latter as inhuman in her
Lessing essay).
This discrepancy between the critique of Kant as found in the Lessing
essay and the neo-Kantianism that pervades Eichmann in Jerusalem can be
explained only by the Arendtian attempt to link aesthetics and morality or

28. Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Univer-
sal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 143.

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56 Arendt’s Philosophical Critique of Philosophy

politics. Arendt finds in Kant’s Critique of Judgment a universalism that does

not dismiss the particular and the contingent.29 In her Kant lectures she focuses
on the faculty of the imagination and finds what Eichmann and his fellow per-
petrators could not exercise: the imagination. It is this faculty that enables one
to understand someone else’s point of view: “Imagination, the ability to make
present what is absent, transforms the objects of the objective senses into
‘sensed’ objects, as though they were objects of an inner sense.”30 By dint of
the imagination, the subject realizes its insufficiency. It is not at one with itself.
Eichmann, however, follows not Kantian aesthetics but the absoluteness of
Kantian moral philosophy: he subscribes to the one-dimensionality of the
“a law is a law” slogan. Eichmann’s vulgar Kantianism wrongly identifies the
general law with the “law of the land” (i.e., German Nazi Law). Yet Eichmann
is true to Kant when he internalizes his perverted understanding of the univer-
sal with the core of his autonomy. As a result, Eichmann identifies with posi-
tive law as if he were its legislator.
The law of the land, in this case, is, however, nothing but the end of legal
stability: it makes lawful what in the past has been considered the epitome of
lawlessness (i.e., murder, robbery, etc.).31 Arendt faults the Jerusalem judges for
not grasping the collapse of what had been considered stable up to the Nazi
genocide. The instability of Arendt’s report on the banality of evil responds to
any attempt to downplay the totalitarian break with the past. According to her,
the Jerusalem judges misinterpreted the Nazi genocide as an event that fits into
the general drift of Jewish life in the Diaspora:

In the eyes of the Jews, thinking exclusively in terms of their own history,
the catastrophe that had befallen them under Hitler, in which a third of the
people perished, appeared not as the most recent of crimes, the unprece-
dented crime of genocide, but, on the contrary, as the oldest crime they knew

29. As Michael G. Gottsegen has acutely analyzed, Arendt particularizes the emphasis on gen-
erality in Kantian thought: “The dependency of the reflective judgment upon historically contin-
gent concrete examples serves to buttress Arendt’s non-Kantian conception of the sensus commu-
nis. Were the reflective judgment’s operations less grounded upon localized and context dependent
elements, then perhaps it would be appropriate to construe the sensus communis along universalist
lines” (The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt [Albany: State University of New York Press,
1993], 183).
30. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1977), 65.
31. Arendt discusses the lack of legal stability in the chapter on the deportations from the Bal-
kans: “Clearly the Nazis would not only have to enlighten them [the Bulgarian government] about
the requirements for a ‘solution of the Jewish problem,’ but also to teach them that legal stability
and totalitarian movement could not be reconciled” (E, 186).

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Michael Mack 57

and remembered. This misunderstanding, almost inevitable if we consider

not only the facts of Jewish history but also, and more important, the cur-
rent Jewish historical self-understanding, is actually at the root of all the
failures and shortcomings of the Jerusalem trial. None of the participants
ever arrived at a clear understanding of the actual horror of Auschwitz, which
is of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past, because it appeared
to prosecution and judges alike as not much more than the most horrible
pogrom in Jewish history. (E, 267)

By focusing on the particularity of the victims, the Jerusalem court, in Arendt’s

view, distorts the crime’s specific and unprecedented nature: it endangers not
only specific ethnic groups but human life in its entirety. What is required is
therefore a seemingly contradictory movement back and forth between the
empiricist and the historicist, between the universal and the particular. The
Nazi crime was one against humanity: it “was perpetrated upon the body
of the Jewish people,” but it “was the choice of victims, not the nature of the
crime” that “could be derived from the long history of Jew-hatred and anti-
Semitism” (E, 269). This differentiation between the choice of the victims and
the nature of the crime does not mean that Arendt dismisses particularity as
such. Instead, she connects the particular to the universal so that the universal
is itself particular and the particular is itself universal.
According to Arendt’s analysis, particularity does not coincide with
itself, so a nation or people is far from being a self-contained entity. On the con-
trary, it inhabits plurality, and this is why Arendt objects to restricting the rel-
evance of the Eichmann trial to an Israeli or a Jewish orbit of discussion.
In Arendt’s view, the state of Israel is a nation among nations and is
therefore pluralistic and has the chance of putting an end to the religiously
based dichotomy of Jew and Gentile. Arendt criticizes David Ben-Gurion for
not realizing this dialectic between the particular and the universal, between
the self and the other. In Arendt’s view, nationhood refers to plurality rather
than to a monolithic sense of identity. She criticizes Ben-Gurion’s understand-
ing of nationhood as follows:

If Prime Minister Ben Gurion, to all practical purposes the head of the Jew-
ish State, meant to strengthen this kind of “Jewish consciousness” [based
on the dichotomy of Jews and Gentiles], he was ill-advised; for a change in
this mentality is actually one of the indispensable prerequisites for Israeli
statehood, which by definition has made of the Jews a people among peo-
ples, a nation among nations, a state among states, depending on a plurality
which no longer permits the age-old and, unfortunately, religiously anchored
dichotomy of Jews and Gentiles. (E, 11)

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58 Arendt’s Philosophical Critique of Philosophy

By questioning the opposition between Jew and Gentile, Arendt does not
advocate destroying identity formations. Neither does she plead for assimila-
tion or for an understanding of universality that generalizes and does not
allow for the flourishing of particular cultures.
As Bernstein puts it, “She knew all too well how this drive toward empty
universality can boomerang and explode into barbaric forms of ‘tribal nation-
alism,’ which grows out of an atmosphere of rootlessness.”32 In The Origins of
Totalitarianism Arendt defines “tribalism” and “racism” as “the very realistic,
if very destructive ways of escaping the predicament of common responsibil-
ity.”33 The tribal severs its link to the universal and in so doing abandons its
roots, because universality and particularity are interconnected at the points of
their origin. A singular entity that imagines itself as stable and self-enclosed is
rootless, because it is founded by the confluences of different formations that
constitute its selfhood. All singular entities are interlinked and thus constitute
a plural universality. This explains why what happens to one specific group is
relevant to the life of the universal body of human communities.
There is therefore yet another sense in which Arendt’s report on the
banality of evil focuses on contradictions: it analyzes how in the postwar era
criminals are not brought to justice in countries where they did not perpe-
trate their crimes. The criteria by which to reach legal judgments thus become
unstable: what is considered a crime if inflicted on the specific community to
which the judges belong turns out to be an “incident” that warrants a lenient
form of punishment if it concerns another ethnic group.
This is clearly a form of tribalism. Here again, the particular defines
itself as a stable, that is, self-enclosed, entity. Arendt emphasizes that the
postwar German courts downplayed the criminal significance of crimes
committed against non-Germans. “The commander of the Security Police, a
certain Dr. Emmanuel Schäfer, a special protégé of Heydrich,” is a case in
point: “For the gassing of 6,280 women and children, he was sentenced to six
years and six months in prison” (E, 184, 185). Those perpetrators who killed
“non-Germans” were judged as if their acts of mass murder were cavalier
incidents: “It is the same story repeated over and over again: those who escaped
the Nuremberg Trials and were not extradited to the countries where they
had committed their crimes either were never brought to justice, or found in
the German courts the greatest possible ‘understanding’” (E, 185). The vic-

32. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, 44.

33. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 236.

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 New German Critique

Michael Mack 59

tims’ ethnicity rather than the perpetrator’s deeds determines the sentencing
of the criminal.
Here, clearly, the particular has become tribal: it has lost any correlation
to the universal. German courts attempt to mete out adequate punishment for
Nazi crimes only if they were committed on the bodies of “German victims.”
This comes clearly to the fore in the case of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski,
former general of the Higher SS and Police Leader Corps, who was “sen-
tenced to life” for “the killing of six German Communists” (E, 15). Arendt
rhetorically asks, “Should German courts, on the pretext that war crimes are
not crimes, make ‘ethnic distinctions’?” (E, 15). By making “ethnic distinc-
tions,” the postwar German courts continue the lie that is anti-Semitism and
Nazism, because they uphold the mendacious divide between the German
and what is considered non-German. It is this racist lie that accounts for the
incongruity of their sentencing. The lie of anti-Semitism in particular and of
racism in general is the construction of a self-contained, that is, stable, iden-
tity that sees otherness as an enemy to be “eradicated” like vermin: Nazis in
fact dehumanized the Jews, calling them “rats,” “bugs,” and “weed.”34 Arendt
responds to this lie by shifting from the particular to the universal, by switch-
ing from an empiricist to a historicist discourse. She relates this apparent
contradictoriness of perspective to the act of thinking, which she finds want-
ing in Eichmann.
Her understanding of thought is highly idiosyncratic. In this way philos-
ophy can be thoughtless and totalitarian. In an illuminating note of November
1950 she anticipates the discussion of Eichmann’s thoughtlessness by distin-
guishing the plurality of politics from philosophy’s totalitarian hostility to
diversity: “If Man is the topic of philosophy and Men the subject of politics,
then totalitarianism signifies the victory of ‘philosophy’ over politics—and
not the other way round. It is as though the final victory of philosophy would
mean the final extermination of the philosophers” (D, 43; original in English).
Here philosophers are thinkers at odds with the thoughtlessness of “philoso-
phy,” which is monolithic and totalitarian.
This critique of philosophy is related to Arendt’s discussion of ideology
as the logic of the idea (see the introduction to this essay). The logical, accord-
ing to Arendt, furthers violence, because it isolates subjects from interlocutors:
“Logisches Denken führt daher immer in Gewalt. Logik spricht niemand an

34. For a detailed discussion of the Nazis’ attempt to dehumanize their victims, see Michael
Mack, Anthropology as Memory: Elias Canetti’s and Franz Baermann Steiner’s Responses to the
Shoah (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001).

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 New German Critique

60 Arendt’s Philosophical Critique of Philosophy

und redet über nichts. So bereitet sie Gewalt vor” (Logical thought leads
therefore always to violence. Logic does not speak to anyone and speaks
about nothing. In so doing it prepares the ground for violence) (D, 345). This
lack of a concern for the addressee of speech resembles Eichmann’s mild form
of aphasia. Arendt characterizes the absence of the faculty of understanding
as “talking in clichés which is a preliminary form of speechlessness” (D, 316;
English in original). Eichmann was “genuinely incapable of uttering a single
sentence that was not a cliché” (E, 48). It was through clichés that the Nazis
constructed a fabricated world of ideology. This world might have been a con-
sistent one, as Arendt argues in her Lessing essay, but it was one based on lies
completely removed from the inconsistency and plurality that characterizes
humanity.
Rather than be consistent and thus productive of meaning, thinking
confounds stable forms of identity: it sees the world askance, from another
perspective, from “the other fellow’s point of view.” Eichmann and his fel-
low perpetrators are completely at harmony with themselves, that is, with the
clichés through which they see “reality”: they prove incapable of perceiving
and engaging with another perspective, with another standpoint. Absence of
thinking denotes not stupidity but the impossibility of moving from the par-
ticular to the universal. Banality thus denotes the inability to converse with
difference and plurality, a precondition for the acceptance of mass murder as
a social norm.

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