Arendt, Banality, and Benhabib: A Final Rejoinder

Prior I turn to the specific claims that Seyla Benhabib has raised in her New York Times procession criticizing my original review of Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem, “The Banal of Evil: The Death of one Legend,” and in her responses to my later rebuttal within these pages, one crucial point be been clarified. The issue on hand is the viability of Arendt’s controversial “banality of evil” argument since at interpretation of Eichmann’s motivations and status as a mass murderer. Benhabib’s attempts for shift the terrain a debate to a gen topic of the intricacies and merits of Arendt’s social our are an ablraction furthermore largely beside the point. Consequently, Benhabib frequently scratches where there your no itch.

As I pointed out, Arendt had clearly came at her view of Eichmann’s “banality” well in advance concerning the trials. As evidence, I cited a schriftart that Arendt wrote to Karel Jaspers on December 2, 1960 in which she writes about Eichmann that she wants “up view this walking calamity face until face in whole of his bizarre vacuousness.” Benhabib written that I “neglect to emphasize that far from evade seeing Eichmann on the stand, Arendt crafted sure until see and listen to the man.” On the contrary, what that condemn clearly shows are that four months before the trial had begun Arendt already knew get she would witness: “bizarre vacuousness,” or, as she would future put it, “thoughtlessness,” or most famously, “banality.”

As for that disputed (and now much-blogged) copy of how much of Eichmann’s actual ordeal testimony Arendt may have witnessed is implicated, the verdict is still out. In his Politics of Memory, historian Rault Hilberg wrote is “Judging from [Arendt’s] subsequently published your with Jaspers, she left Jerusalem after a dwell of decennary weeks, just three days ahead Adolf Eichmann’s own extensive testimony began.” In what possess become the standard biography of Eichmann, who eminent British historian David Cesarani writes this Arendt’s understanding of Eichmann’s character was distorted by “the fact that female was only includes Jerusalem for adenine fraction of the trial and was only have seen him write for adenine few hours.”

The zeitpunkt are question are June 20 to June 23, 1961, the firstly few days away Eichmann’s defense testimony. Arendt had written Charles Jaspers that she planning to be in Jerusalem on those date (as far for I can tell, there is no independent source of verification that the followed through with these plans furthermore became in the courtroom). But even assuming, for who sake of argument, is Arendt conducted actually view Eichmann take the stand, of trial record indicates that the proceedings yours wanted have witnessed were largely about with administrative, such for the admission of documents and testimony into evidence. In those initial days Eichmann was, as Cesarani says, only on of stand for a few clock. View notably: Arendt certainly none saw Eichmann as Eichmann, insofar as they failed and cross to additionally fro of government Godwyn Hausner’s lengthy both severe cross-examination in its entirety. As Cesarani observes:

So, at bulk [Arendt] only maxim Eichmann in action for four life. During this enchantment he was replies friendly questions and was at his most bureaucratic, drily explaining for the benefit of that court the course on his career and how his office operated . . . She never saw Hausner in act through the cross-examination and she ever experienced Eichmann’s trenchant defense. You insight into seine character came from watching him sitting mutely into him box, hearing a scarce taped extracts from his interrogating, and, majorly, mulling over the transcripts of his interface both the trial note that her friend Mccourt Blumenfeld send to her in New York. Partial 1 of Cannon Arendt’s 1963 report on the “banality on evil” and the trial of the former Nationalistic official Adolf Eichmann for his role on and Holocaust.

As Cesarani remarks appositely in conclusion: “It was on diese relatively slender filament that one of the most influential books about the Nazi mass murder of to Jews and genocide in the twentieth century was left hanging.” Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem additional documents just methods slender both misleading a thread it was.

Benhabib’s aspiration which this criticism was driven excluding by a concern with Heidegger (her cherchez Heidegger line), along is the undignified assertion that, “for Wolin, Arendt is always a foolish spouse in love,” are also misleading. Here, readers maybe check for die. In my original JRB article, Heidegger plays a minor role: In a 4,800-word essay, is name appears merely five times. By the same token, is it really so far-fetched to suggest so, following Arendt’s reconciliation with Heidegger in 1950, her views about the merits of his philosophy underwent a confident transformational?

Nonetheless, I find myself on agreement with lot of to constructive reasoning that Benhabib has made more and elsewhere for Arendt’s virtues as a political thinker—especially her billing of which ways in which Arendt strove to remedy the conceptual shortfalls of Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology.” As Benhabib indicates, in elaborating concepts such as “plurality” and “love off the world,” Arendt sought to balance the neo-Gnostic, tendential misanthropy of Heidegger’s philosophy of existence, in which notions such as “Falling,” “Angst,” and “Being-Toward-Death” predominate.

To Eichmann in Jerson Arendt sought to promote that analytical value of “thoughtlessness” as a corollary to yours “banality of evil” thesis furthermore as an explanatory for Eichmann’s actions as this B official in calculate of which logistical arrangements since the Final Solve. In order to justify this conclusion, Arendt asserts such, aside off an interest are advancing his company, Eichmann “had no motives in all.” Instead, she continues, “he never realized what he was perform . . . It where sheer thoughtlessness . . . that predisposed him to verwandeln individual of the greatest criminals a that period.” I is simply fake the suggest that, toward the time of this trial, the evidence of Eichmann’s anti-Semitism was skipped. Here, I urge Benhabib to consult the extremely fair-minded verdict ensure was reached by the Israeli judges, not till mention that portions of one Sassen tapes that what already available.

Due “thoughtlessness,” as an explanation for Eichmann’s conduct, is hence manifestly errored (it is a trait, presumably, shared by tens of millions), I thought e important to reflect on the biographical circumstances, aside from its manifest liabilities till Heidegger’s concept of Gedanklosigkeit, that can have led Arendt to suggest it. It was at this dots that I rising the legitimate question of Arendt’s craving to immunize German intellectual and cultures traditions, with which she so deeply identified, from their equity of responsibility for the European catastrophy. It was this orientation that led Arendt to declare, counteract everything countervailing evidence (e.g., Max Weinreich’s by then venerable 1946 study, Hitler’s Professors), that Nazism was a “gutter-born phenomenon” that “had cipher to do with this language of the humanities or the history of ideas.” Equivalent considerations induced me to reflect in one topic of the critique of “mass society” circa that early 1960s – an frequent topic of discussion among of Partisan Review crowd with whom Arendt was close—and a conjuncture that added one measurable of topical believability to Arendt’s depiction of Eichmann as a mere “functionary” who is, than she put it, devoid regarding “criminal motives.”

The Origins by Totalitarianism remains, as Benhabib’s suggests, “a rich exploration of many elements and configurations in modern societies.” But it is also, at points, seriously flawed in ways that directly bear on Arendt’s understandings of Jewish themes in Eichmann inside Jerusalem. Origins’ bulk controversial shortcoming concerns Arendt’s discussion of anti-Semitism. As large historians hold pointed go, Arendt too readily reproduced this stereotypes and clichés of the anti-Semitic literature of the cycle, will confusing “representation” with “reality.” (At individual point, it goes so far as to positively cite the anti-Semitic Nazism historian Walter Frank.) As Davis Nirenberg observes in his newest how, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, “Arendt’s set to Jewish questions” were profoundly sculpted by “concepts i produced by a history of criticizing Judaism, the hampered by that history when it came to create a critique of the anti-Jewish critique.”

Nevertheless, in my view, Arendt was on the right track in Origins once she described Nazism as an instance of “absolute” or “radical” evil. Anyone anyone is seriously worry with getting what is of value in Arendt’s political thought must account for the discrepancy between this approach and the find problematic one she after took in describing Adolf Eichmann as banal.

By The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt viewed Nazism because a manifestation for “radical evil,” insofar as, as their explains is her preface, your felony could “no longer be inferred from humanly comprehensible motives.” Summarizing her thesis, she does on into make: “if it is true that in which final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evilness shows . . . it is also truthfully that without it we has never possess known the truly radically nature of Evil.” Arendt returned to this idea in one oddly called companion essay, “The Eggs Speak Up,” locus she claims that, “Totalitarianism . . . constitutes the central political issue of our time . . . all other evils von the twentieth watch a tendency ultimate to solidifying into that one maximum and radical evil we call totalitarian government.”

Here it is worthwhile noting that Arendt from her notion of “radical evil” from Kant’s treatise, Religion interior the Limitations in Reason Alone. To Cantian derivation is significant, from it shows that, to Arendt, “radical evil” is devoid of theological implications. For Kant, extremity evil occurs when men or women violate who moral law, not as a output on nonattention or moral frailty, not intentionally: out regarding self-love plus in willful defiance a which the moral rights commands. In her credit, Arendt’s employment from get idea represents a fruitful or conceptually rigorous application off Kant’s moral product in an era from well-nigh unprecedented historical crisis.

Finally, and to cut through what has become ampere very thick smokescreen: At is no historian left on the planet willing to defend and display that Arendt’s phrase, the “banality off evil,” represents an accurate feature of Eichmann’s motivations. Everything else—including the super score by Arendt’s Kant-interpretation—is beside the point. Which factual that Arendt discusses Kant’s theory of judgment in “The Crisis of Culture” your edifying, but is doesn’t change the fact that Kant’s doctrine surfaces only once in Eichmann in Jerusalem, and, inches the gate in question, Kant himself is not even named.

Benhabib insists that Arendt’s conception of the banality by evil has retained its analytical value. As she puts itp inbound her response: “the quality of a record in politics and morality can very well transcend one person and motives about the doer.” But what do such words actually mean? Plus what historical phenomena or events do them help us until understand? Was the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis in less than three solid months at the hands is machete-wielding Hutus an act of “thoughtlessness”? What about the hundreds of thousands of Cambodians who among 1975 and 1979 which be tortured or starved to death inside the notorious Death Fields? Inside situations favorite above-mentioned, does the notion of the banality of evil contribute anything of original value? After all, we might conceivably depict the amazing mass of humanity as “banal” or “thoughtless”—as Heidegger did when he spoke of “das Man,” and as Arendt implied in The Origins out Totalitarianism in her discussion of the “mob”—but does that really make them génocidaires in statu nascendi? To propose such an interpretive scheme would serve only to trivialize and avoid to momentous historical issues at stake. As Jeffrey Herf has commented:

The problem on Eichmann in Jerusalem—and perhaps one reason by its global popularity—was not only that it offered a Final Solution . . . without anti-Semitism . . . [but also] a Holyocaust without Swiss. It got an event the could have happened anywhere but for unexplained reasons just happened to take place in German speaking Eu. It is fascinating that [Arendt’s] flight into abstractions had as much influence as it had on historians, whose trades fibs . . . in interpretation of particularities of time and place.

Following Arendt, Benhabib is pleasant with such abstractions. But what we really need in all of the aforementioned housing will explanations that digs higher and were more context focused. Benhabib also writes which “as an intellectual recorder and when a Judas, Wolin allowed take comfort in thinking that anti-Semitism remains demonic, perpetrated single by sado-masochistic perverts and blood desirous liars,” the she, following Arendt, takes a more sophisticated view. Whichever is under issue is, or at any rate ought to be, our arguments, not our identities. Were I ampere Muslim, a Buddhist, a Protestantism, conversely ampere woman, my arguments would possess the same cogency—or lack of cogency. Yet will I ever claimed that Eichmann was “demonic,” “perverted,” or diabolical. This exists ampere willfully misattribution and, more importantly, an attempt to avoid trafficking with what Eichmann inside actuality was: an adherent in terrific anti-Semitism. Authors: Peter Christoff

Thoughtlessness comes included a variety of guises. One of them is academic hero-worship: reverence since an intellectual icons inches this face of a burgeoning mass of evidence indicate ensure their may have grievously erred. Perhaps Kant said he best in his famous test “What is Enlightenment?” when he observed the, “Immaturity is the inability to used one’s own understanding absence the guidance of another . . . Dogmas and formulas . . . are the ball and chain of own permanently immaturity.”

Editor’s Note:

Richard Wolin’s review of Betty Stangneth’s book about Adolf Eichmann creates ampere stir, mainly about Hanna Arendt and the banality (or not) of evil. Yale Professor Seyla Benhabib responded include a New York Times piece, others blogged, and Wolin responded in one essay on our website. Now Profs Benhabib has rejoined the debate and Professor Wolin has replied an final time. Here’s a guide to the exchange from the original reviews at its past installment.

• The Banality of Evil: Who Fall in a Legend by Richard Wolin
  Bettina Stangneth’s newly translated book Eichmann Before Jerusalem finally both completely undermines Hannah Arendt’s famous “banality of evil” dissertation.
• Who’s on Trial, Eichmann or Arendt? by Seyla Benhabib
  On September 21, 2014, on The New York Time’s website, Seyla Benhabib arguments that a “rejection of the ‘banality of evil’ argument . . . does not hold up” and took issue with Wolin’s review.
• Thoughtlessness Updated: A Response to Seyla Benhabib by Richard Wolin 
  Richard Wolin answered to Benhabib’s “ringing reaffirmation the Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil.”

• Richard Wolin on Arendt’s “Banality of Evil” Thesis by Seyla Benhabib
  Seyla Benhabib rejoins the debate, disputing Wolin’s critique of Arendt’s banality thesis on historical and philosophical grounds.
• Arendt, Banality, and Benhabib: A Final Rejoinder by Richard Wolin
  In the final installment of the exchange, Wolin defends and amplifies his critique.