philosophy s.xx - hanna arendt - on conscience and evil. en a.j. 2001)

8/8/2019 Philosophy s.xx - Hanna Arendt - On Conscience and Evil. en A.J. 2001)

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Arne Johan Vetlesen

Hannah Arendt on

conscience and evil

Abstract Though there exists a vast literature dealing with HannahArendts thoughts on evil in general and Adolf Eichmann in particular, fewattempts have been made to assess Arendts position on evil by tracing itsconnection with her reflections on conscience. This essay examines thenature and significance of such a connection. Beginning with her doctoraldissertation on St Augustine and ending with her posthumously publishedstudies in The Life of the Mind, Arendts oeuvre exhibits strong thematiccontinuity: the tr iad thinkingconscienceevil forms its most enduring core.A puzzling core, to be sure, considering the controversies triggered, es-pecially regarding her notion of the banality of evil. By placing the role ofconscience at the very center of Arendts lifelong reflections, this essayexplores the in many ways related influence exerted by St Augustine andHeidegger. H eideggers concept ion of conscience in Sein und Z eitis identi-fied as a crucial source for understanding so the claim holds why Arendtfound Heideggers philosophy particularly want ing as regards the questionof evil.

Key words Arendt Augustine conscience evil Heidegger Socrates thinking

Conscience does not figure among the topics for which HannahArendts work is most known. One searches in vain for an essay or abook of hers devoted to it. To present-day readers, Arendt is associatedfirst of all with the notion the banality of evil, coined in her 1963 bookEichmann in Jerusalem (cited as EJ). Arendts endeavour, nay struggleto come to terms, philosophically if not morally, with Eichmann andhis kind of (doing rather than being) evil, forced her to consider againand again the interrelation between thinking, willing and judgment, onthe one hand, and evil-doing, on the other. It may be said that her

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undertaking was to see how much light philosophy meaning thinkingas such, not the academic discipline can throw on evil.

So what about conscience? As I said, conscience is no salient topic

in Arendt. However, this is not the whole truth. As soon as one startsto trace Arendts reflections on evil in her oeuvre, one finds that shefrom early on explored a connection now overshadowed by the afore-mentioned one between thinking and evil namely, a connectionbetween conscience and evil. Once we learn to appreciate this, we realizethat conscience is the thematic fellow-traveller of evil in Arendts workfrom beginning to end, so that if evil is regarded as the most constantand as it were ubiquitous theme in her work, conscience accompaniesthat theme as its inseparable, though often neglected, shadow.

In this essay, the task I set myself is to bring the significance of con-science out into the open. My thesis is not that doing so will enable usto sort out all the puzzles and dissolve all the aporias for which Arendtsreflections on evil are famous. My claim is weaker: that drawing sys-tematic attention to how conscience figures in the latter will help us toattain a better grasp not only of her view or rather views on evilbut also of the nature of Arendts philosophical relationship toHeidegger. The issue of evil and, as we will see, conscience providesus with a head-on way of assessing some crucial differences betweenArendt and H eidegger contra a provocative thesis that I shall consider,which was put forward by David Luban.

In what follows, I shall start by bringing in some excerpts fromArendts first major work, her doctoral dissertation on St Augustine. Ithen move to her late meditations on The Life of the Mind, in the courseof which Arendt, on the reading I shall develop, works out two d istinctmodels of conscience and its link to evil-doing, one associated withSocrates, the other with Heidegger.

Assessing the influence of Augustine

Love and Saint Augustine (cited as LAS) is Arendts 1929 Heidelbergdissertation. Its long second part is entitled Creator and Creature: TheRemembered Past. I shall quote the central passages where Arendt laysout St Augustines understanding of conscience:

Against the security of habit, the law calls on conscience. Conscience is ofGod and has the function of pointing to the Creator rather than to thecreature. Since conscience is of God, it lets us refer back directly to the

Creator. . . . In the human world established by man, the individual nolonger stands in isolated relation to his very own whence; rather, he livesin a world he has made jointly with other men. He no longer hears whathe is from conscience, which is of God, but from anothers tongue (aliena

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lingua). He has turned himself into a resident of this world, one who is nolonger of God alone but owes what he is to this world which he helped toestablish. This alien tongue determines mans being, whether good or evil,

from outside and from what man has founded. Conscience speaks in our-selves against this alien tongue, and it speaks so that the one addressedcannot escape: An evil conscience cannot flee from itself; it has no placeto which it may go; it pursues itself.. . . Conscience directs man beyondthis world and away from habituation. As the voice of the Creator, con-science makes mans dependence on God clear to him. What the lawcommands, conscience addresses to the one who has already succumbed tothe world in habit. The voice of the law summons him against what habitpreviously entangled him in. The estrangement from the world is essen-tially an estrangement from habit. While man lives in habit, he lives in view

of the world and is subject to its judgment. Conscience puts him coramDeo, into the presence of God. In the testimony of conscience, God is theonly possible judge of good and evil. This testimony bears witness to mansdependence on God, which he finds in himself. The world and its judg-ments crumble before this inner testimony. There is no fleeing from con-science. There is no togetherness and no being at home in the world thatcan lessen the burdens of conscience. (LAS, 84f.)

Since no part in this universe, no human life and no part of this life, canpossess its own autonomous significance, there can be no evil (malum).There are only goods (bona) in their proper order, which may merely seem

evil from the transient perspective of the individual. This quality ofgoodness does not arise from the particular things themselves, but isbestowed upon them by the universe. . . . Being is for Augustine, as it wasfor the Greeks, the everlasting, forever lawful structure and the harmonyof all the parts of the universe. The appropriate interpretation of wicked-ness . . . is then as follows: . . . that person is wicked who tries to escapethe predetermined harmony of the whole. (LAS, 60f.)

We gather from these quotes that Arendt is referring to Augustinesmature, post-Manichean position on evil. As Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott

and Judith Chelius Stark remind us, Augustine moved from a belief inthe material reality of evil during his Manichean period ( De Libero

Arbitrio) toward his mature position in which evil is described as abondage to habitual sin, a worldliness that free will is powerless to break(De N atura et Gratia) (Scott and Stark, 1996, in LAS, 130). In City ofGod (cited as CG), Augustine wrote that to seek for the cause of evilis like trying to see darkness or to hear silence (CG, 480). God is exist-ence in a supreme degree (CG, 473), and the only contrary nature isthe non-existent (ibid.). Hence evil, the contrary nature to the

supremely good God, is not a matter of efficiency, but of deficiency; theevil will itself is not effective but defective (CG, 479). In this way, evilis denied a specific reality to itself; ontologically, it has no standing, nofacticity at all. This Augustianian notion of evil as ontologically null

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Vetlesen: Hannah Arendt on conscience and evil


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and void, as non-being, as sheer negativity, is unmistakably present inArendts 1963 exchange with Gershom Scholem over Eichmann. Tryingto explain what she meant by speaking about the banality of evil,

Arendt points out that Only the good has depth and can be radical.Hence thought, the moment it concerns itself with evil, is frustratedbecause there is nothing (Nach Auschwitz, 1989; cited as NA, 78).

But let us not get ahead of ourselves. What matters, at this point,is that in her doctoral dissertation on Augustine, Arendt deals with con-science only in light of its connection with evil or, to be more precise,its connection with the distinction between good and evil. This distinc-tion emanates from the law; it is not for man to author it, only to receiveand observe it. As we saw, conscience is what puts man into the presence

of God; in the testimony of conscience, God is the only possible judgeof good and evil.For my purposes, the influence on Arendts thought emanating from

Augustines description of evil as a bondage to habitual sin is particu-larly significant. What leads man away from God is what leads maninto sin, into evil namely, to succumb to the world in habit. Theworlds language is another tongue than that of the law, of God; it isevil to the extent that it determines mans being, whether good or evil,from outside and from what man has founded (LAS, 82). Arendt quotesAugustines contention in his Confessions that the law of sin is the forceof habit. Through habit, covetousness constantly seeks to cover [mans]real source by insisting that man is of the world, thereby turning theworld itself into the source. Thus mans own nature lures him into theservice of things made instead of to the service of their Maker (ibid.).Sin springs from insistence on our own will. Arendt cites Augustinescentral claim that humankinds inclination to value its sins is not somuch due to passion itself as to habit. To which Arendt adds, by wayof summing up Augustines doctrine:

The inclination to sin springs more from habit than from passion itself,because the world man has founded in covetousness is consolidated inhabit. The creature, in the search for its own being, seeks security for itsexistence, and habit, by covering the utmost limit of existence itself andmaking today and tomorrow the same as yesterday, makes it cling to thewrong past and thus gives it the wrong security. (LAS, 83)

I have dwelled on Arendts detailed exegesis, and indeed affirmation,of Augustines understanding of the nature of evil because recent com-mentators on Arendt have set out to argue that her approach to Adolf

Eichmann is distinctly Augustinian. The claim is that her early pre-occupation with Augustine commands much more than merely his-torical interest. In fact, it can be seen to exert an enduring impact uponArendts thinking. Nowhere is this more evident than in Arendts

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analysis of Eichmann, of Eichmanns kind of evil, put on paper morethan 30 years after the dissertation on Augustine. Or so the claim hasit.

I shall mention two instances of how this argument is made in recentArendt scholarship. In their interpretive essay accompanying the 1996English publication of Arendts disseration, editors Scott and Starksuggest that it was Arendts renewed encounter with Augustine in theearly 1960s which enriched her examination of the paradox of evilwhich is not radical but pedestrian, bourgeois, and seemingly rootedin everydayness (LAS, 120). They continue: Augustines paradigm ofimmobilized will entrapped in habituated worldliness could perhaps beapplied to Eichmann, the routinely civilized bureaucrat incapable of the

critical distance necessary for moral judgment (LAS, 121).The second instance is David Lubans essay Banal Evil and RadicalEvil (1997; cited as BE). Quoting the Augustian idea that the inclina-tion to sin springs more from habit than from passion itself, apparentlyaffirmed by Arendt in her discussion of it (cited above), Luban drawsthe conclusion that this idea perfectly fits Arendts Eichmann (BE, 10).

The influence beginning to loom large here, is not only that ofAugustine but that of Martin Heidegger. Whereas Scott and Starkrestrict themselves to a brief indication of the Heideggerian flavour toArendts notion of the banality of evil as applied to Eichmann, Lubanmakes its Heideggerian heritage into a major interpretative thesis of his.And on an interpretive level, there is nothing far-fetched about thissuggestion. Augustines influence on Arendt is already accounted for;moreover, I agree with Scott and Stark that Arendt in all probabilityrenewed, perhaps even reinforced, her debt to Augustines (mature)views on evil at the time of her pondering over the case of Eichmann.Allowing for all this is tantamount to conceding Lubans claim aboutthe no less crucial and again enduring impact exerted by Heidegger.The bridge, as it were, between the different observations made here, is

that Heidegger himself started out strongly influenced by Augustine.And it is well known that the young Arendt who pursued an interest inAugustine, did so while still studying with Heidegger (though personalreasons were to force her to leave Marburg and take her dissertation toKarl Jaspers in Heidelberg), the Heidegger who for his part was stillyoung enough to be under the philosophical influence of Augustine.

Lubans thesis is twofold. First, it holds that Arendts dissertationpresents an account of the moral psychology of sin that, apart fromdrawing explicitly on Augustine, contains phrases that are straight out

of Being and Time, Heideggers 1927 magnum opus, the preparatorylectures for which Arendt attended in the mid-1920s while a student ofHeideggers in Marburg. Luban singles out two ideas in particular, whichhe takes to be unmistakably Heideggerian: namely, the idea that the

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human creature masks the utmost limit of existence by everydayroutines; and the idea that the sinner is seeking a secure existence andthat he does so by trying to make everything routine (BE, 10). The second

part of Lubans thesis is that young Arendts AugustinianHeideggerianaccount of sin perfectly fits Arendts Eichmann (ibid.), as I said above.I think that Lubans thesis is partly right, partly wrong. To be sure,

the chains of influence in play are beyond dispute, the AugustineHeidegger one no less than the HeideggerArendt one. However, themost interesting, indeed the provocative, part of Lubans thesis i.e. thatArendt, albeit largely implicitly, found the philosophically appropriateframework for understanding Eichmann the sinner, the evil-doer, inHeideggersBeing and Time is something I find very problematic. Why?

My reasons are several. The parts ofBeing and Time alluded to inLubans thesis are to be found in that works famous section on dasMan. Here, Heidegger introduces and explains his notions of fallenness(Verfallenheit), everydayness (Alltglichkeit), idle talk (Gerede),ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit), curiosity (N eugier), and on a moreexistential level, by way of summing up what being immersed in thesephenomena amounts to inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit). Space for-bids me to go further into these notions here; I must assume their famili-arity, as I must assume that of Being and Time in general. What isdecisive, in my view, is this: Heidegger situates the phenomena referredto, as well as the attitude or mode of being-in-the-world of the indi-vidualDasein they comprise, in the public sphere (die ffentlichkeit).Indeed, the link he establishes between the two inauthenticity and thepublic sphere is so intimate as to render the two inseparable. Theyend up as two sides of the same coin.

This being so, the question is where this leaves Arendt. My criticalclaim as against Lubans thesis is that Arendt, throughout her writings,leaves the reader in no doubt as to the low esteem in which she holdsHeidegger as a th inker of matters moral and political. Even granted that

he is a great thinker, the areas of morality and politics are those in whichhe erred most, with the gravest consequences; the greatness of hismistakes here holds both on a personal plane (i.e. his long-standing andnever publicly regretted support for the Nazi regime) and on a theor-etical and philosophical one, the latter being what matters most for myargument.

I cannot possibly want to become my own adversary: the

Socratic bottom line

With this we may start to appreciate the irony contained in Lubansthesis: that Heidegger, of all philosophers, is held to be the one upon

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whose account Arendt draws when she is searching for a philosophi-cally satisfactory understanding of the evil brought by the Nazi regimein the Gestaltof one of its chief perpetrators, Eichmann. For one thing,

we must bear in mind that Arendt was determined that understandingsuch evil was no value-free or normatively neutral task; understandinghere necessarily would entail condemnation of the object at hand.Setting aside for once her temperamental reluctance to elaborate onmethodological issues, in Arendts 1953 reply to Eric Voegelins criti-cisms of her study of totalitarianism she says that she quite consciouslyparted with the tradition ofsine ira et studio when writing on evil. Con-ditions which are against the dignity of man can be properly studiedonly on the condition that one permits ones indignation to interfere.

The indignation she as author feels when studying man-made evil orexcessive poverty is an adequate response to the inherent qualities ofthe subject-matter (see 1994, Essays in Understanding, p. 403; cited asEU). As far as I and, I suspect, Arendt can see, there is no trace ofsuch a methodological stance in Heidegger, as is brought out in, say,Adornos complaint about Heideggers ontologization of merely onticphenomena such as human suffering. Second, that ausgerechnetHeidegger should be the one to stand forward as having worked out aproper framework for the appreciation of what evil is, of how it isorchestrated and enacted in the 20th century, is not only ironic. It isimprobable and in need of more substantiation than offered by Luban.

But so is my dismissal. Though demonstrably ironic, Lubans thesismay still be valid. To help us see the reasons why it is not valid, otherworks of Arendts need to be consulted.

In the important Introduction to the first volume of her post-humously published trilogy The Life of the Mind, entitled Thinking(1978a; cited as LM, I), Arendt herself provides the link between thepuzzle her early-1960s encounter with Eichmann had left her with andher look for a possible answer in philosophy, that is to say, by way of

an inquiry into the faculties of the mind. Arendt writes:The question that imposed itself was: Could the activity of thinking as such,the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attractattention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity beamong the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or evenactually condition them against it? (The very word con-science, at anyrate, points in this direction insofar as it means to know with and bymyself, a kind of knowledge that is actualized in every thinking process.)And is not this hypothesis enforced by everything we know about con-

science, namely, that a good conscience is enjoyed as a rule only by reallybad people, criminals and such, while only good people are capable ofhaving a bad conscience? (LM, I, 5)

Late Arendt seems to echo early Arendt in at least one crucial

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respect: she cannot inquire into evil without simultaneously invokingthe role of conscience. True, in her last reflections the presence ofSocrates overshadows that of Augustine. But this shift of explicit debt

should not mislead us so far as her substantial approach to evil is con-cerned. To see this, consider the following passage:

Because thoughts quest is a kind of desirous love, the objects of thoughtcan only be lovable things beauty, wisdom, justice, and so on. Uglinessand evil are almost by definition excluded from the thinking concern. Theymay turn up as deficiencies, ugliness consisting in lack of beauty, evil, kakia,in lack of the good. As such, they have no roots of their own, no essencethat thought could get hold of. If thinking dissolves positive concepts intotheir original meaning, then the same process must dissolve these negative

concepts into their original meaninglessness, that is, into nothing for thethinking ego. That is why Socrates believed no one could do evil voluntar-ily because of, as we would say, its ontological status: it consists in anabsence, in something that is not. . . . It looks as though Socrates hadnothing more to say about the connection between evil and lack of thoughtthan that people who are not in love with beauty, justice, and wisdom areincapable of thought, just as, conversely, those who are in love with examin-ing and thus do philosophy would be incapable of doing evil. (LM, I, 179)

Though dealing here with Socrates rather than Augustine, the pointhighlighted by Arendt is one on which the two concur: namely, that evilpossesses no positive ontological status, only a negative one. However,the overall thrust of Arendts reflections here is clearly inspired more bySocrates than by Augustine. Arendt, that is, concentrates her attentionon the initially only hypothesized connection between thinking andevil, whereas Augustine, we may say somewhat more traditionally, hadfocused on the connection between willing and evil.

A brief reminder is in place. After witnessing Eichmann during thecourt proceedings in Jerusalem, Arendt was and for ever remained struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to

trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots ormotives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer . . . was quiteordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous (LM, I,4). This reasoning, based on her impressions of Eichmanns conduct, ledArendt to the idea that the only notab le characteristic of his was some-thing entirely negative: it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness (ibid.).Hence the characteristically Augustinian path to exploring man-madeevil, that of willing evil, of doing it as a voluntary, chosen act (recallConfessions VIII, 5, 12: It was by [the minds] will that it slipped into

the habit), is not embarked upon in the course of Arendts philosophi-cal struggle with the case of Eichmann. Her reason for deciding againstthis path seems, at least at first, to be of an impressionistic, indeed adhoc, nature: it became decisive for her choice of strategy tha t Eichmann,

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seemingly so indifferent, so mediocre, so unaffected by any deeperinner motives, appeared more driven by something negative than bysomething positive: by thoughtlessness rather than by a strong will (be

it a wicked one).Before I proceed, three brief observations. First, it is probablycorrect to say that Arendt, the thinker, never entertained the thoughtthat thinking emphatically per se could lead to evil: that thinkingmay actively side with or even produce evil. That is to say, she neverpondered the hypothesis that there might exist and indeed might beexemplified by Eichmann a positive or even necessary connectionbetween thinking and evil-doing. She built into her idea of thinking theunscrutinized axiom (a philosophers predilection, to be sure) that

thinking is good if and when morally assessed. As against this, onecould suggest, as does Zygmunt Bauman (personal communication,2001), that Eichmann was an exemplarily thoughtful man, though Iwould add that his thoughtfulness was one constrained by the demandsof Weberian Zweckrationalitt: it was suited to practical-technicaltasks such as organizing the most efficient means to attaining a givenend, instead of questioning or determining that end as such. Hence, ifit was because Eichmann was so rational that he could be such an effec-tive executor of evil (Bauman), the rationality implied is the restrictedone of instrumental reason. Secondly, it must be said that Arendt frombeginning to end inquired along an overtly intellectualist path, with noattention being given to the alternative hypothesis that Eichmannsfailure may have been one of lack of feeling (empathy) rather than lackof thinking (see the case for this made in Vetlesen, 1994). Finally, thebanality Arendt speaks of in connection with evil via the Holocaust,does not mean that the evil committed here is banal, but that men withbanal (as opposed to deep-seated, monstrous) motives (loyalty,careerism) may commit it. Hence the pair banalityevil is not meant tobe an equation. It lacks the symmetry that is expected of equations.

Rather, what I take to have puzzled Arendt so much, is the blatant dis-symmetry between the deed and (one of) the doers. Banal men, menwith banal motives, can perfectly well commit radical evil. Thoughperhaps surprising, even shocking, this is, strictly speaking, no paradox,as Luban finely observes at the end of his essay.

So much for Arendts choice to inquire into thinking, as opposed towilling, when reflecting upon evil la Eichmann. However, this doesnot entail that Arendt follows in Socrates footsteps without qualifi-cations. Though arguably criticizing Plato more than Socrates (telling

the difference being notoriously hard), Arendt hastens to add the follow-ing to the passage quoted above: If there is anything in thinking thatcan prevent men from doing evil, it must be some property inherent inthe activity itself, regardless of its objects (LM, I, 180).

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Let us return to our main concern, Arendts understanding of howexactly the relevance of conscience to evil is to be appreciated. Toapproach the heart of the matter, Arendt takes us back to Socrates

teaching in Gorgias, where according to her we come across the onlyinstance in his many dialogues where we are justified in speaking of ateaching in the positive sense:

The two positive Socratic propositions read as follows: It is better to bewronged than to do wrong. The second: It would be better for me that. . . multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, beingone, should be out of harmony with myself and contradict me. . . . Itwould be a serious mistake, I believe, to understand these statements as theresults of some cogitation about morality; they are insights, to be sure, but

insights of experience (LM, I, 181), arising out of the thinking experienceas such. (LM, I, 183)

Arendt goes on to remind us that the only criterion of Socraticthinking is agreement, to be consistent with oneself; its opposite, to bein contradiction with oneself, actually means becoming ones ownadversary (LM, I, 186). The principle behind th is criterion is explicatedin Aristotles formulation of the famous axiom of contradiction. It isdeemed axiomatic in that we must necessarily believe it because . . . itis addressed not to the outward word [exo logos, that is, to the spokenword addressed to someone else, an interlocutor who may be eitherfriend or adversary] but to the discourse within the soul, and thoughwe can always raise objections to the outward word, to the inward dis-course we cannot always object, because here the partner is oneself,and I cannot possibly want to become my own adversary. This insightis won from the factual experience of the thinking ego (LM, I, 186).

Thinking, then, is that peculiar soundless dialogue between me andmyself that I am , referred to by Socrates as my being one, and whichhighlights the even more peculiar fact that I can think only by way of

being, indeed enacting (my) two-in-one. In thinking, I always returnto myself, since I am my own partner. To repeat, the Socratic bottomline is that I cannot possibly want to become my own adversary: thisis Socrates experientally won insight into a peculiarly normative featureof the human existential predicament. Whatever I do, in the externalworld where actions are performed, the ineliminable and unchosen fact is that I am forever condemned to returning to myself, to live withmyself. And that is precisely what I must will, so to speak: I must willto live with myself, reconciled with myself and the acts I have done,

which define me, who I am, who I aspire to be, as opposed to livingagainstmyself. The famous bottom line, in short, is that if I choose tocommit murder, I condemn myself to living in the company of amurderer for the rest of my life: and who can possibly will such a fate?

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Conscience and temptation

This brings us, and Arendt, back to conscience. Although we have not

yet employed the term, conscience is what links up with thinking as justunderstood. Arendt writes:

Later times have given the fellow who awaits Socrates in his home the nameof conscience. . . . Conscience, as we understand it in moral or legalmatters, is supposedly always present within us, just like consciousness.And this conscience is also supposed to tell us what to do and what torepent; before it became the lumen naturale or Kants practical reason, itwas the voice of God. Unlike this ever-present conscience, the fellowSocrates is talking about has been left at home; he fears him, as the mur-

derers in [Shakespeares]Richard IIIfear conscience as something that isabsent. Here conscience appears as an after-thought, roused either by acrime, as in Richards own case, or by unexamined opinions, as in the caseof Socrates. . . . What causes a man to fear it is the anticipation of thepresence of a witness who awaits him only if and when he goes home.Shakespeares murderer says: Every man that means to live well endeav-ours . . . to live without it, and success in that comes easy because all hehas to do is never start the soundless solitary dialogue we call thinking,never go home and examine things. This is not a matter of wickedness orgoodness, as it is not a matter of intelligence or stupidity. A person who

does not know that silent intercourse (in which we examine what we sayand what we do) will not mind contradicting himself, and this means hewill never be either able or willing to account for what he says or does; norwill he mind committing any crime, since he can count on its being for-gotten the next moment. Bad people Aristotle to the contrary notwith-standing are not full of regrets. . . . Everybody may come to shun thatintercourse with oneself whose feasibility and importance Socrates first dis-covered. . . . A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to developits own essence it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthink-ing men are like sleepwalkers. . . . Consciences criterion for action will not

be the usual rules, recognized by multitudes and agreed upon by society,but whether I shall be able to live with myself in peace when the time hascome to think about my deeds and words. Conscience is the anticipationof the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home. (LM, I, 191)

What merits emphasis in this passage is Arendts acute awarenessof the precariousness of the thinking process, and by implication of theauthority yielded by conscience understood as premised upon thethinking activity as such. As Arendt notes, Socrates presupposition isof course: if you are in love with wisdom and philosophizing; if you

know what it means to examine (LM, I, 182; emphasis added). Thoughman is the thinking animal, to engage in thinking, in the strong senseof letting thinking take its own course, without being able to tell, letalone control, where that course will eventually end, is not something

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every human individual is likely to do. Socrates detected a peculiarlynormative feature of his human existence because he engaged inthinking; through thinking, he discovered an unchosen feature of his

existence - i.e. the need to remain ones own friend, not to become onesown adversary. But although what he discovered is prior to what isoptional, that by which he discovered it thinking is something it ispossible to shun. Not that Arendt wants to restrict thinking to a smallelite, be it philosophers or intellectuals. Arendt is not an elitist in thisrespect. What she is getting at is a lesson learned by hard-earned experi-ence: in committing oneself to thinking, in committing oneself to stayloyal to what conscience, the by-product of thinking, upholds as rightand wrong, the individual takes it upon himself to think, judge and act

according to his own standard only. This is one reason why Socratesremains the towering historical example: in thinking, in following whatit takes to judge and act so as to remain friends with oneself, the indi-vidual must be prepared to carry the all-too-likely consequence: that heor she comes to be at odds with society.

Before we proceed to see what light this may throw on the task ofcoming to grips with Eichmann, two dense passages from The Life ofthe Mindaptly sum up Arendts findings:

If thinking the two-in-one of the soundless dialogue actualizes the

difference within our identity as given in consciousness and thereby resultsin conscience as its by-product, then judging, the by-product of theliberating effect of thinking, realizes thinking, makes it manifest in theworld of appearances, where I am never alone and always too busy to beable to think. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge;it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And this, atthe rare moments when the stakes are on the table, may indeed preventcatastrophes, at least for the self. (LM, I, 193)

The silent sense . . . in practical and moral matters it was called con-

science, and conscience did not judge; it told you, as the divine voice ofeither God or reason, what to do, what not to do, and what to repent of.Whatever the voice of conscience may be, it cannot be said to be silent,and its validity depends entirely upon an authority that is above andbeyond all merely human laws and rules. (LM, I, 215)

Thinking is utterly demanding and absorb ing, and yet ut terly pre-carious; a life without it is not only possible, but more common thanwe like to think (sic). Conscience, the by-product of the activity ofthinking, likewise is utterly demanding and uncompromising, and yet

utterly precarious; to disavow its authority is only too tempting,especially at times when society all around unanimously articulates amessage that goes in the opposite direction to the silent inner voiceof conscience.

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This, of course, marks Eichmanns proper entry into the picture. Asfor his conscience, Arendt does not have that much to say of it in herEichmann in Jerusalem. Yet what she does say is head-on:

Eichmanns conscience was indeed set at rest when he saw the zeal andeagerness with which good society everywhere reacted as he did. He didnot need to close his ears to the voice of conscience, as the judgment hasit, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with arespectable voice, with the voice of respectable society around him. Thatthere were no voices from the outside to arouse his conscience was one ofEichmanns points. (EJ, 126)

One of the disquieting lessons to be learned from Eichmann, Arendttells us, is that it is perfectly possible for conscience to be so co-opted,so corrupted by (a corrupt) society, that it completely ceases to yield thekind of subversive authority ascribed to it in the Socratic model, towhich, as we have seen, Arendt subscribes. Her depiction of how thishappened in N azi Germany is a classic:

And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of con-science tells everybody Thou shalt not kill, even though mans naturaldesires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitlersland demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: Thou shalt kill,although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is

against the normal desires and inclinat ions of most people. Evil in the ThirdReich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it the qualityof temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelm-ing majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob,not to let their neighbours go off to their doom. . . . But, God knows, theyhad learned how to resist temptation. (EJ, 150)

Though highly suggestive, I believe that this passage reveals at leastone major shortcoming in Arendts approach. On the positive side,Arendt demonstrates her grasp of the dramatic shiftin evil, in the way

evil comes about, that is so crucial to understanding the Holocaust.What I have in mind is the societal normalization, the making intoroutine, along so many dimensions and within so many institutions, ofthe multitude of decisions and actions that in sum facilitated theimplementation of the so-called Endlsung. In so many ways, the tablesare being turned: instead of the murder counting as socially, legally andmorally illicit, instead of the murderer appearing as a breaker of expec-tat ions, rules and laws, what we find here is murder being given a differ-ent status altogether: as socially upheld, as legally sanctioned, nay

demanded, and as morally praiseworthy. Conversely, we find thatdeciding not to murder, not to rob, is the conspicuous stance, the onefor which an explanation will be sought, the one for which the indi-vidual in question carries the onus of proof, the burden of argument.

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The non-murderer by choice, by conviction, is suddenly the odd oneout, the one against the many.

To repeat, this is well captured by Arendt; indeed, few have captured

the enormity of the shift so clearsightedly, and so early, as Arendt. Aswe know, she spent her entire post-Holocaust life wrestling with theconsequences politically, morally, philosophically.

As indicated, however, the famous passage cited is also one wherewe may start recognizing the limits to Arendts approach. Her reason-ing here is based on the notion of temptation. Evil having becomeroutine, the novel normalcy, a matter of run-of-the-mill as opposed tosomething outrageous, something subverting the integration of societyand posing a severe threat to the well-entrenched socio-political goals

of order, predictability, Parsonian pattern-maintenance, and the like, evilinstead has so thoroughly taken hold in the entire fabric of society asto permeate and corrupt it to the core. In short, evil as (the novel)normality means that evil loses its characteristic quality of temptation.Supposedly the attraction exerted by (doing) evil lay precisely in itsquality of being forbidden, taboo, dangerous.

So being forbidden can no longer be the lure of evil. With the tablesso thoroughly turned, temptation would have to shift object, as it were:it would move from murder to not-murder, the latter now representingthe socially forbidden act. But this temptation is the one a majority ofmodern individuals evidently has today learned to resist, at least ina totalitarian society.

The steps in Arendts reasoning appear logical enough. My criticalquestion is whether she, in invoking the role of temptation at both sidesof the shift (before as well as after), is not losing track of a vital insight.

My first claim is that temptat ion is not a necessary or indispensablepart of (doing or not-doing) evil. In a sense, to say this is to repeat, andthus confirm, Arendts own finding. What remains problematic, how-ever, is her hermeneutic prejudice that temptation is apt to lead us to

where evil is. My trouble, otherwise put, is not with her finding i.e.that we have evil here without having temptation as such but with hersurprise at it. M y hunch is that the prejudice she brings to bear on evil,Nazi (Eichmann) style, is part of a heritage from Augustine: that is tosay, a moral psychology of evil (or sin) centred on how the humanindividual, due to a more or less sinful nature, due to his natural desiresand inclinations (yes, we are getting close to the Triebfederof Kant), isso to speak constitutionally susceptible to a temptation to do wrong(evil), meaning to break the law as laid down by God, to turn away

from God, to set up and cherish his own world, neglecting that createdby God. In a word, the Fall, and what follows in its wake.In deliberately phrasing it thus, we are landed in the Heideggerian

territory, not only the Augustinian one: the Fall as the world permeated

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and levelled by idle talk, by shallowness and flight; or post-Kehre aworld eaten up by techne and W ille zur Machtrun amok. But let us tryto take one point at a time; we shall return to H eidegger in due course.

It is tempting (sic) to suggest that Arendts expectation to find that wherethere is evil there will invariably, due to mans nature and the moral psy-chology erected on (those assumptions about) that nature, also be temp-tation, is an expectation of religious (Christian) origin, manifest inAugustine. Arendt should not be so surprised tha t the evil orchestratedby the Nazis, and by Eichmann in particular, representing the form evilmay assume in a modern, secular society, as ideologically inspired by asecular Weltanschauung, turns out to be an evil unaccompanied by thequality of temptation. When the latter is not found, this is so because

the expectation to find it belongs within a religious outlook and society now dated.But this doesnt take us very far. It suggests that the evil Eichmann

participated in is secular evil, and that such evil may be enacted withouttemptation being what drives these evil-doers to their doing evil. Thusput , the suggestion is predominantly negative. It holds temptat ion to beabsent; it leaves the obvious question What made them do it if temp-tation did not? unanswered.

Arendt did not pose the question for herself in this manner. Nonethe-less, she does make some observations that help to illuminate it. To her,Eichmann was a conformist. His conformity with the demands madeupon him by his social environment was to persist no matter how extremethat with which he conformed was. Indeed, his undiminished prepared-ness to go along with, even to outstrip, the most extreme of orders, inmy opinion spells Eichmanns fanaticism, though Arendt refuses to usethe word. Eichmann elevated the laws of the party, or, more to the point,the (spoken more often than written) words of the Fhrer, to the statusof law, a law standing above all other moral or legal authorities andbodies, be they religious or secular or whatever. He lived according to

the dictum that Fhrerworte haben Gesetzeskraft. Needless to say, thisthoroughgoing conformism of his is part of the reason why Eichmannappeared so normal, so terrifyingly normal, so inconspicuous a figurein his times, a loyal member of his society, in all matters a law-abidingcitizen, to quote Arendts phrase. Commenting on Eichmanns stubborndetermination to proceed at all costs with the implementation of theEndlsung in the late fall of 1944, whereby he disobeyed the order fromhis superior Himmler to the effect that he (Eichmann) contribute tostopping the killings (as part of an arrangement with the Allies Himmler

was involved in at the time), Arendt concludes the following fromEichmanns unfailing loyalty to Hitler: The very uncomfortable truth ofthe matter probably was that it was not his fanaticism but his very con-science that prompted him to adopt his uncompromising attitude during

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the last year of the war (EJ, 146). Even when tempted by Himmler totake part in finding a way out, a way to save himself in the face of theimminent Totalverlustof the Third Reich, Eichmann demonstrated what

in his own view amounted to his untainted moral character, his unfail-ing subscription to the Kadavergehorsam he boasted of with referenceto the SS. No ordeal was to prove too demanding for him; no tempta-tion was such as to make him yield and become a detractor. As Arendtputs it: No exceptions this was the proof that he had always actedagainst his inclinat ions, whether they were sentimental or inspired byinterest, that he had always done his duty (EJ, 137).

According to Dana Villa (in his essay Conscience, the Banality ofEvil, and the Idea of a Representative Perpetrator), what primarily

interested Arendt in Eichmann was not the absence of conscience;rather it was the fact that Eichmanns conscience did not function in theexpected manner since it was based on a conflation of morality withlegality. As a result, he was troubled only by the temptat ion to do good,that is, to disregard his duty under the laws of a criminal regime andbe soft (Villa, 1999: 45).

Granted that Villa has succeeded in stating Arendts position cor-rectly, his way of articulating it helps us spot its shortcomings. It is notclear to me from the documentation available about Eichmanns per-sonality and conduct that doing good in any meaningful, and bio-graphically correct, way represented a temptation to him. Besides,Villas use of good is question-begging. To imply tha t non-participationin the final solution would amount to doing good, not only by ourcurrent standards, but (more importantly here) in the eyes of Eichmannhimself, is to implicitly ascribe to Eichmann the belief that what he diddo was bad and what he did not do was wrong. But this is to pre-suppose that the standard by reference to which Eichmann distinguishedright from wrong is the very same standard that we who find his deedsimmoral in the extreme and who condemn him on that score use;

indeed, use in our very act of condemning him. My counter-claim heregoes in the opposite direction from Villas. If we are at all to employthe term the psychological category of temptation to Eichmannsbehaviour, we would have to bend it to the other side, as it were. Whattempted Eichmann in a manner visible on the overt level of his behav-iour, seems to have been this: to excel, to do even more than expectedand demanded of him by his superiors. This then is Eichmanns per-verted version of the phenomenon known as supererogation: Eichmannwas constantly seeking to go beyond the call of duty. But he was never,

it seems to me, tempted to go in the opposite direction, the one withwhich Villa associates temptation namely, to make decisions andcommit actions that would amount to his going againstthe call of duty,as he understood it. For reasons I shall return to when discussing iek,

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Eichmann in my view exemplifies a coinciding (Zusammenfall) of whatis strictly opposed in Kant namely, his inclinations on the one hand andthe commands of the (Nazified, not Kantian) law on the other. In that

case, Eichmann was two-in-one (Socrates), only the two desire andduty, or id and super-ego were not in conflict but were allied forces,seeing to it that he never wavered from his course once he embarkedupon it. Hence, no remorse, no pangs of bad conscience, no combatinwards, no opposition outwards. In a word, a fanatic.

Did Eichmann have a conscience?

However, the more fundamental question to ask is whether Arendt isconsistent when she attributes a conscience to Eichmann. In her import-ant 1971 lecture Thinking and Moral Considerations (1971; cited asTMC), Arendt raises the same set of questions that I quoted from herIntroduction to Thinking. Immediately preceding her often-citedquestion Could the activity of thinking as such . . . be of such a naturethat it conditions men against evil-doing?, she formulates a no lesscrucial question, regrettably omitted in her later work: Do the inabil-ity to think and a disastrous failure of what we commonly call con-science coincide? (TMC, 418).

Now where does this lead us as regards my question about whetherArendt is consistent in presuming a conscience in Eichmann? Recall hercentral claim: Eichmann was thoughtless; mere thoughtlessness, asopposed to wickedness of heart, in her view turns out to be at the coreof his evil-doing. The notion about the banality of evil as epitomizedby Eichmann follows from this finding.

Return to my question. If thinking and conscience are interdepen-dent to the point of coinciding; if, in other words, conscience is the by-product of thinking; then it seems to follow that the absence of the one

must imply the absence of the other. As applied to Eichmann: whenArendt holds him to be thoughtless, to not-engage in the soundless innerdialogue called thinking, then she is logically compelled to hold alsothat he has no conscience, that no authority of the type termed con-science is operative in him.

If this is correct, it appears that Arendt (and later Villa) is contra-dicting herself when she attr ibutes his depicted uncompromising attitudeto his very conscience. Her own premises i.e. her understanding ofthe intimate connection between thinking and conscience disallows

her (and everyone desiring to follow her) presupposing as a matter offact that he had a conscience. Hence it appears that Villa gets it plainwrong: absence of conscience is what we must assume in Eichmann, ifwe are to follow through on Arendts own logic.

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But though logically consistent in this Arendtian sense, is not thenot ion suggested here that Eichmann lacked conscience, and that thislack perhaps signifies the core of his moral failure outright implaus-

ible? Doesnt every individual have a conscience a conscience of somesort, tha t is, be it a courageous and oppositional one (Socrates springsto mind), or be it a corrupt and conformist one (Mitluferof all kindsspringing to mind)? In this vein, Villas conclusion is that Eichmannscase demonstrated how conscience . . . is perverted: it no longer tellsindividuals what is right and what is wrong. But neither is it totallysilenced, for it continues to tell people like Eichmann what theirduty is (Villa, 1999: 45) the trouble being tha t the duty in questionentails participating in deeds that are outrageously immoral, and that

the conscience assumed to be operative in Eichmann is unable toidentify them as immoral (again, when judged by ourstandards, thatis).

Let us examine the common assumption hinted at: that we expectconscience to sanction resistance against evil, not to condone evil, letalone encourage or even demand participation in it. Now of course,once articulated like this, the assumption strikes us as historicallynaive: it has been proven empirically wrong in so many cases as tomerit losing its initial plausibility. Indeed, in putting it like this we arenot in virgin territory. In recent history, the tendency to view con-science as less than heroic, and instead as the moral authority typicallyadhered to by those lacking in courage, resolve and life-affirmingvitality, is famously inaugurated by Nietzsches account of slave (asopposed to master) morality. Nietzsches contempt of conscience beit religious, be it secular, it doesnt matter is matched, in fact, byHitlers; Hitler who repeatedly said that conscience is a Jewish inven-tion, that it advocates pity and softness where unsentimental harsh-ness is called for, and hence elevated to a salient N azi virtue, one ofteninvoked in Himmlers moral rhetoric regarding the extermination of

the Jews. Now Freud, in linking the peculiar authority of consciencewith the superego, which in its turn he understood as the individualsinternalization of the (normative) standards of behaviour laid down inhis or her society and as typically transmitted to the child by theparents, formulated what is probably the most widespread notion ofconscience in modern secular society. More recently, a host of authorswriting loosely within a psychoanalytic tradition have been only tooeager to apply this notion of Freuds to the case of Nazi immorality.Thus, in their book Die Unfhigkeit zu trauern, Alexander and Mar-

garete Mitscherlich speak of the Fhrer as the externalized superegoand the immensely idealized object of the loyal Nazi. Although suchan externalized superego can succeed in guiding the individuals inner-most thoughts and aspirations only insofar as it is being internalized,

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what is thus internalized, speaking as it were within the individualwith the voice of conscience, is a law whose origin is heteronomousnot autonomous, to employ the Kantian distinction. The commands

the individual obeys are not of his own making; they are the commandsaddressed to the individual from without i.e. the Fhrer as a factu-ally existing authority and law-maker, an inner-wordly or mundaneone yet standing above all other authorities but qua internalizedthey merge with body and mind of the individual at their receivingend. By investing all their moral energies into the Fhrer, by seekingto overcome their impotency by merging with and partaking of theomnipotency of the Fhrer, the individual is nothing, is empty andastray without him, just as the Fhrer declares himself as being nothing

without his chosen peop le. A symbiosis of sorts then, albeit an asym-metrically structured one.More recently, the Slovenian School associated with Slavoj iek

has taken this model a step further. iek speaks of the Fhrer as amaster onto whom the individual deposits his conscience-cum-superego. This radicalizes the notion of Entlastung upon which theMitscherlichs study, as well as Erich Fromms Escape from Freedombefore it, were premised. When conscience its origins as well as itssubstantive content, its whence as well as its specific demands isdeposited in the fashion proposed by iek, the individual is its recipi-ent in the radically passive manner of seeing him- or herself as its mereexecutioner. There is less of a need here to identify, to the point ofidentity-blurr ing symbiosis, with the Fhrer. Rather, what is psychicallyin play is the desire of the individual to be the obedient instrument ofthe desire (Lacans jouissance) of someone else, i.e. the master. Onieks analysis, the attractiveness of totalitarianism for many of itsmost ardent followers consists in precisely this motif: the Fhrer, incommanding evil-doing, often of a kind involving self-sacrifice, offersthe individual perpetrator a legalized, positively sanctioned space for a

peculiar sadism the sadism of experiencing joy by way of enhancingthe joy of the master whose elected victims are now being tracked downand inflicted pain upon by his loyal followers-cum-instruments.Choosing to take up a position as a mere instrument for the will of theBig Other is termed the truly perverse attitude by iek (1997: 222);it entails the Sartrean bad faith that its not me, doing what comes topass; its none of my responsibility. According to iek, this is pre-cisely what is strictly forbidden within Kantian ethics. In this scenario,the voice of conscience is again effectively that of the master, its

internalized external source. But more radically than in the Mitscher-lich model, assumption of personal responsibility for the conscienceobeyed is altogether shunned. This individual is a mere instrument frombeginning to end, one never aspiring to any higher status.

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The role of conscience in Being and Time

This psychoanalytically inspired analysis is in fact wholly compatible

with observations made by Arendt (despite her well-known misgivingsabout Freud). I wish to bring this out by focusing on three points inparticular.

As already noted, the conscience we are dealing with here is proofof the individuals heteronomy not autonomy. It inverts the Kantiannotion of conscience in the further respect of presenting the individualas a mere means (to the ends set by others). Actively put: in making theends of a master into his own ends, the individual allows himself to turninto a mere means in his persecution and eventual killing of persons

who are regarded not as (Kantian) ends in themselves but as meremeans. What results is a double dehumanization, in which that visitedupon the victim is echoed in that self-inflicted by the executioner.

To appreciate how close this is to Arendts own analysis, we needonly recall her account of the murder of the moral person in man inThe O rigins of Totalitarianism (1951; cited as OT):

The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous . . . robbeddeath of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. . . . This attack on themoral person might still have been opposed by mans conscience which tells

him that it is better to die a victim than to live as a bureaucrat of murder.Totalitarian terror achieved its most terrible triumph when it succeeded incutting the moral person off from the individualist escape and in makingthe decisions of conscience absolutely questionable and equivocal. When aman is faced with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering hisfriends or of sending his wife and children, for whom he is in every senseresponsible, to their death; when even suicide would mean the immediatemurder of his own family how is he to decide? The alternative is no longerbetween good and evil, but between murder and murder. Who could solvethe moral dilemma of the Greek mother, who was allowed by the Nazis to

choose which of her three children should be killed? Through the creationof conditions under which conscience ceases to be adequate and to do goodbecomes utterly impossible, the consciously organized complicity of all menin the crimes of totalitarian regimes is extended to the victims and thusmade really total. The SS implicated concentration-camp inmates crimi-nals, politicals, Jews in their crimes by making them responsible for alarge part of the administration, thus confronting them with the hopelessdilemma whether to send their friends to their death, or to help murderother men who happened to be strangers, and forcing them, in any event,to behave like murderers. The point is not only that hat red is diverted fromthose who are guilty (the capos were more hated than the SS), but that thedistinguishing line between persecutor and persecuted, between themurderer and his victim, is constantly blurred. (OT, 452f.)

Arendt is fond of citing David Roussets observation that victim

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and executioner are alike ignoble; the lesson of the camps is the brother-hood of abjection (OT, 453). One must realize the rad icalness of whatis contended here: it belongs to the very logic of totalitarian terror that

todays executioner may become tomorrows elected victim. No one,regardless of sides taken so far, of merits achieved, of loyalty demon-strated and sacrifices carr ied, shall feel safe. Arendt calls this the utmostproof of the superfluousness of man the total exchangeability andindispensability of todays follower as well as todays victim whichNazism on her view starts out ideologically asserting and ends by allbut nearly having made into the truth about human beings.

The second point is closely related to the first. In Willing, the secondvolume ofThe Life of the Mind(1978b; cited as LM, II), Arendt notes

that willing was sometimes understood as the principium individuatio-nis, the source of the persons specific identity. Now in her 1971 lectureas well as in Thinking, Arendt singles out Socrates as the philosopher

par excellence to demonstrate, by example, that conscience that is,Socrates daimon can function as the persons principium individua-tionis. In staying loyal to what precisely and emphatically his daimontold him, come what may, Socrates has gone down in history as onewho epitomizes conscience, that inner voice, as an authority standingabove and thus, in times of conflict, defying what the many societyaround him, including positive law hold as right and wrong.

But in Willing Arendt points to another philosopher who, on theface of it, attributed much the same significance to conscience as didSocrates (or rather, as we do with reference to Socrates). This philoso-pher is Heidegger, and the work in question is Being and Time. Arendtstresses how the self, in that work, becomes manifest in the voice ofconscience ( Ruf des Gewissens), which calls man back from hiseveryday entanglement in the Man and what conscience, in its call,discloses as human guilt, a word ( Schuld) that in German meansboth being guilty of (responsible for) some deed and having debts in the

sense of owing somebody something (LM, II, 184). Arendt explains:

The main point in Heideggers idea of guilt is that human existence is guiltyto the extent that it factually exists; it does not need to become guilty ofsomething through omissions or commissions; [it is only called upon] toactualize authentically the guiltiness which it is anyhow. . . . The conceptof being thrown into the world already implies that human existence owesits existence to something that it is not itself; by virtue of its very existenceit is indebted: Dasein human existence inasmuch as it is has beenthrown; it is there, but notbrought into the there (da) by itself. (ibid.)

What conscience demands, then, according to Heidegger, is that theindividual accept his indebtedness. H e who defies the call of conscienceis in effect he who takes himself to be the source of his existence. In

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actuality, however, existence is given, is thrown at one, is received byone, in a non-optional, ineluctive manner. Of whom does this remindus, if not Augustine? What we encounter here is what I shall call

Heideggers secularized Augustianism.To H eidegger, defying and denying mans indebtedness on the funda-mental level of existence, of mans very being-in-the-world, is not theupshot ofhubris, or of the free will man is endowed with (according toAugustine). Instead, inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) is what causesthe individual to forget Being and to remain distracted by the super-abundance of mere entities. Inauthenticity as the characteristic sign ofwhat it means to not-hear the cry of conscience points to das Man, thethem, the plurality of men, in two directions, as it were: first, in-

authenticity is nourished, sustained and reinforced by the individualsmembership in and everyday partaking ofdas Man; second, inauthen-ticity means that das Man is turned into what is conceived as the onlyway to be in the world and to frame, orient and understand ones being-in-the-world. The individual exists only in the manner ofdas Man; das

Man determines his every manner ofconceiving his own being includ-ing the whence the ontological source of that existence, which isheld to be neither some transcendent source (say, a creator God, as inAugustine) nor the individual himself (which would entail a completelymundane ontology la early Sartre). Rather, what constitutes the indi-vidual according to das Man is something entirely vague, impersonaland anonymous.

Heideggers notion of inauthenticity as the individualDaseins aban-donment to das Man can be regarded as his (again secular) equivalentto the inner-wordly phenomena and modes of conduct Augustine desig-nated by the word habit. Now, whereas in Augustine the life of habitpresupposes and thus manifests the will the will as precisely a will freeto defy the law of God, mans creator in Heidegger the inauthenticitytantamount to a life in habit reveals not the individuals capacity for

strong and as it were defiant resolve, but the opposite: it reveals a kindof decision that is such that the one who makes it conceals its status asa decision, since to identify with das Man is to enact das Man i.e. (a)nobody as distinguished from a somebody in particular.

More important than the differences from Augustine now emerging,though, are the differences from Socrates. For the fact is that Arendtfinds only Socrates, and not Heidegger, to present us with a valid modelof conscience as a principium individuationis. Why? Arendt states herreason in the following parenthesis in Willing: It apparently never

occurred to Heidegger that by making all men who listen to the callof conscience equally guilty, he was actually proclaiming universalinnocence: where everybody is guilty, nobody is (LM, II, 184).

On the face of it, this objection, principal and general as it is, can

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easily be made to target Augustine as well as Heidegger. This is so inthe sense that it takes issue with every model of conscience and by thesame token, of guilt which introduces and situates guiltiness at so

basic a level of mans existence as to originate in the sheer fact of thatexistence as such. Put more simply, if being guilty is a predicate, as itwere, of factually existing in the world, then every human individualwho ever lives, regardless of what he or she thinks and does, must bedeemed equally guilty. It follows that such guilt, call it generic, is clearlyunsuited to function as a principium individuationis, especially so in amorally and politically relevant manner.

In Sein und Zeit (1979; cited as SZ), Heidegger reinforces thisimpression when he focuses on the cry of conscience and on anxiety

(Angst) as experiences which nicht und nie von uns selbst, wedergeplant, noch vorbereitet, noch w illentlich vollzogen w erden (SZ, 275),but which, for all that, are the experiences without which insight intothe crucial Schuldigsein des Daseins is impossible. The cry of con-science is the privileged access to appreciating ones (Daseins) originalguilt, understood as the N ichtmchtigkeit gegenber dem eigenen Sein(Merker, 1988: 189). In starting out with guiltiness, with guilt as partof mans essence (Wesen), Heideggers scenario is that of the worldafter the Fall, that is to say, a world in which authenticity can be attainedonly by way of negating what is given. The cry of conscience thus hasthe function of awakening individual Dasein from its factual inauthen-ticity, as if from a deep sleep. So instead of inauthenticity prevailing asthe result of authenticity having been negated, it is the other way round.Though there may have been a haven, and a universal innocence, priorto this all-pervading guilt and inauthenticity that we now are in themidst of (das Man as Heideggers secularized post-Fall human con-dition), such a state is only in abstracto, a kind of Ursprungsmythoswithout existential relevance. What counts is that authenticity requiresa conversion from what is, meaning from what we all equally are.

But there is more. Arendts terse yet sharp remark that where every-body is guilty, nobody is is worth dwelling upon not only in its ownright but especially so in the context of discussing Heidegger. Readersof Arendt will know that this is the very remark she was to reiterateagain and again when commenting on the Nazi regime in general andthe Holocaust in particular. To those who proclaimed that all Germans or less crudely, all Nazis were equally guilty, she objected that inthat case, nobody is. To her, collective guilt is a non-starter when itcomes to understanding, not to mention punishing, the crimes in

question. However, the real thrust of her objection cuts deeper. Arendtwas convinced that in holding (all members of) a collective to be guilty,those eager to condemn totalitarian crimes in fact unwittingly echoedand cognitively repeated the very logic producing those crimes in the

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first place. Elsewhere, I have analysed this (genocidal) logic in terms ofcollectivizing the notion of human agency, including the notions ofresponsibility and guilt (Vetlesen, 2000). The basic fault with the offered

reasoning consists in locating the category of guilt at a level presumablypreceding the level of individually made decisions and actions. Accord-ing to Nazi (or Stalinist) logic, all Jews (or kulaks) are equally guilty.Guilt here designates collectively as opposed to individually, be it byreference to race or class (or, today, ethnicity). What is effaced here intheory is only too likely to be later effaced spritually and physically: thedistinctiveness of the human individual, associated by Arendt with everymans natality, every individuals capacity to begin something new in theworld.

It may be said that there is a place for genuine individuality inHeideggers notion of conscience. Individuality in its emphatic qualityis manifested in the how , that is to say, in the particular way in whichan individual, as opposed to others, chooses to relate to a guilt whichis common to all individuals because it is at a generic level (the level ofexistence pure and simple). Indeed, in put ting it like this we may identifya notion of individuality, as well as of authenticity, shared by religiousand secular (or outspokenly atheistic) philosophies alike: in Kierke-gaard, say, each individual will relate to his indebtedness to God in hisown distinct manner; in Sartre, say, each individual will relate to his(generic) predicament as a being whose existence precedes its essence.

While doubtless true, this rejoinder will not satisfy Arendt . The indi-viduality she is after is not to be confined to the level or area ofrelating-to; i.e. to something given, and given in the same basic way toeach and everyone, at that. For Arendt, not only the how but also thewhatof that which guilt is taken to be about, to refer back to, has tobe something truly of the single individuals own making: something heor she has brought about him- or herself, as opposed to something given;something that could have been otherwise, but which is brought into

the world by way of the human capacity for action. When it comes towhat constitutes individuality, what makes it into a morally relevantcategory, there is no prior or deeper level say, an ontological one tothat constituted by AristotelianArendtian praxis. To put it a bit toosimply: whereas Heidegger locates individuality, and indeed freedom, atthe level of being, Arendt locates these notions on the level of action.The difference is seminal. When Dana Villa, in his very fine bookArendtand Heidegger: The Fate of the Political, argues that Heideggersadvocacy of thinking freedom existentially and ontologically, that is,

as a mode of being rather than as a capacity of the subject, is partof what Arendt took over, or rather appropriated, from Heidegger, Ithink he is wrong (see Villa, 1996: 118f.). Freedom as well as the seriesof capacities flowing from it, judging and acting in particular is a

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capacity of the subject on Arendts view, with the Hegelian qualificationthat the subject be seen as constituted from the very first by its partakingof intersubjective relations.

This takes us to the third point I wish to make. Once we say guilt,once we assume the existence of guilt in some individual, we implicitlyassume a conscience. A bad conscience is the paradigm, so to speak,of declared guilt; the latter is facilitated by the former. I take this to holdfor both religious and secular/atheistic metaphysical outlooks; con-science and guilt are not the prerogatives of the former.

Arendts advocacy of the Socratic model of conscience

Having established this, we are ready to discuss the specific feature ofSocrates model anticipated above. In Thinking, Arendt makes a dis-tinction between two types of conscience. She observes that It tooklanguage a long time to separate the word consciousness from con-science. . . . Conscience, as we understand it in moral or legal matters,is supposedly always present within us, just like consciousness (LM, I,190). She then continues: Unlike this ever-present conscience, the fellowSocrates is talking about has been left at home; he fears him . . . as some-thing that is absent. . . . This conscience, unlike the voice of God withinus or the lumen naturale, gives no positive prescriptions (even theSocratic daimon, his divine voice, only tells him what not to do); inShakespeares words it fills a man full of obstacles (ibid.).

The Socratic type of conscience identified here is noteworthy for thecrucial characteristic it shares with what Arendt elsewhere emphasizesabout thinking that is to say, for its sheer negativity, its posing a not,a N einsagen, instead of issuing positive prescriptions in the sense oftelling us what to do. Thinking as such is out of order, writes Arendtin her 1971 lecture, citing Heidegger (TMC, 424). Thinking is result-

less by nature. The consequence is that thinking inevitably has adestructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values,measurements for good and evil, in short on those customs and rules ofconduct we treat of in morals and ethics (TMC, 434). Instead of guidingour action, thinking paralyses it; as the saying has it, we stop and think,thinking being so demanding, so transcending of what is at hand, whatis present thanks to our senses, as to effectively interrupt all otheractivities and undo all achievements, question all established certainties.Though quite possible, a life without thinking, according to Arendt, is

not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers (LM, I, 191).This last remark immediately takes us back to Eichmann. WhatEichmann lacked beyond the shade of doubt, is conscience of the typeepitomized in Socrates. His lack of such conscience dovetails with his

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lack of thinking; the two lacks are inseparable. Thus it is that Arendt,true to these premises, was so struck in the Jerusalem court withEichmanns conspicuous lack of spontaneity, of life, of being real and

alive in a basic human sense. It is as though his entire life had been liveddevoid of the quality of negativity in the sense brought out in the aboveaccount of thinking and conscience. His had been a life framed bypositivity, by loyalty to positivity. Unlike the Kantian moral law, whichin the standard Hegelian critique is castigated for its formalism, itsemptiness and indeterminacy, the laws, rules and instructions by whichEichmann lived and to which he continued clinging long after doing sobecame dysfunctional, were always of a kind telling him what to do.Hence the laws by which Eichmann lived disallowed for phronesis, the

act of judgment by which the agent endeavours to bring what is formaland indeterminate to bear upon what is concrete and particular, namelythe situation at hand. In the Nazi universe, by contrast, such mediation-by-judgment is effectively foreclosed. The subversive power of negation,of doubting, of questioning, are all conspicuous by their absence. InArendtian terms, the faculty of judgment is inoperative because theindividuals its exercise presupposes are virtually non-existent. Thefaculty of judgment is eminently precarious in this historical-politicalsense.

Admittedly, if our conclusion after our long discussion is only andsimply that Eichmann was a man without conscience in the Socraticsense, disappointment may arise. Is this all there is to it? Doesnt thisconclusion only confirm what we expected right from the start?

There is more to it. To see what, we need to make a final return toHeidegger.

David Lubans thesis, we recall, is that Eichmann is a figure straightout ofBeing and Time. Eichmann, wrapped in his protective shell ofbureaucratic euphemism and jargon, confirms the idea found inAugustine and then in Heidegger that sin arises from habit rather

than passion (BE, 10). Eichmann epitomizes what it means to seeksecurity for his existence by devoting himself or abandoning himself so thoroughly to everyday routines that he never starts to conceiveand enact his possibilities of being-in-the-world in an authentic way.

On the basis of my discussion above, I do not find this part ofLubans thesis invalid. What I nevertheless (still) question, is his twofoldimplication that Arendt may have been inspired by Heideggers analysisofdas Man and of the public sphere no less than by Augustines expla-nat ion of evil as springing from habit rather than from passion (Arendts

wickedness of heart), and that Arendt would agree with him (Luban)that Heideggers analysis in Being and Time is to be regarded as a validunderstanding of evil or more to the point, of how evil-doing comesabout.

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As I said earlier on, it may be the case that Heidegger exerted aspowerful an influence upon Arendt in the relevant parts of her disser-tation as did its explicit topic, the thought of Augustine. However, the

issue I wish to take with Lubans thesis is not primarily concerned withthis interpretatory matter. It has to do with whether Heidegger canpossibly be held to have offered what in Arendts view is a valid analysisof the conditions under which evil-doing takes place. (It is worth notinghere that Heidegger, in Being and Time, nowhere talks about evil assuch; the connection made here between habit and what Heideggermight have said about evil, rests upon an interpretive extrapolation onLubans part. That said, Heideggers non-talking about evil is very muchpart of Arendts enduring problem with him.)

I have already mentioned one reason for holding Luban to bemistaken. This is the remark of Arendts to the effect that it is funda-mentally wrong-headed not to mention politically and legally danger-ous to speak of guilt in a generic (collectivized) sense, as opposed toa sense that from the very beginning views guilt as a matter of a distinctindividuals doing something he ought not have done (or not doing some-thing he ought to have done). Clearly the notion of guilt developed in

Being and Time, referring as it does back to mans indebtedness to hisvery existence as something given prior to any act flowing from his inten-tionality and volition, is a notion of guilt at what Arendt would deema pre-individual level, one prior to or deeper than ethics, morals andpolitics. Now the latter, of course, are precisely what matters for Arendt.

Someone may retort that Heidegger, especially the early one pri-marily intended in Lubans thesis, is an existentialist, and that, as partof that outlook, what he has to say about care (Sorge) and res-oluteness (Entschlossenheit) and the like must be understood in anemphatically individualist manner.

My answer is that this does not help. To the extent that it is true,interpretatively speaking, the individualism referred to in early

Heidegger is of a kind Arendt unequivocally disagrees with. When werealize this, we are much closer to seeing why on my reading Heideggers analysis ofdas Man and the public sphere on Arendts viewleads us astray when it comes to understanding the nature of evil andevil-doing.

The book of Arendts most relevant here is The Origins of Totali-tarianism . Arendt writes:

Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relation-ships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all

relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people havelost contact with their fellow-men as well as the reality around them; fortogether with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience andthought. (OT, 474)

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All thinking . . . is done in solitude and is a dialogue between me andmyself; but this dialogue of the two-in-one does not lose contact with theworld of my fellow-men because they are represented in the self with whom

I lead the dialogue of thought. The problem of solitude is that this two-in-one needs the others in order to become one again: one unchangeable indi-vidual whose identity can never be mistaken for that of any other. For theconfirmation of my identity I depend entirely upon other people; and it isthe great saving grace of companionship for solitary men that it makesthem whole again, saves them from the dialogue of thought in which oneremains always equivocal, restores the identity which makes them speakwith the single voice of one unexchangeable person. (OT, 476)

Two statements in particular are decisive for my argument. First,

ideological thinking of the kind chacteristic of totalitarian Nazism orStalinism is held by Arendt to succeed when people have lost contactwith their fellow-men as well as the reality around them; for togetherwith these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience andthought (OT, 474). In a totalitarian society, permeated by a terror whichrenders everyone insecure, experience and thinking are undermined tosuch a degree as to become effectively impossible. For want of these fac-ulties, and by implication of conscience la Socrates as a by-product ofthe inner dialogue of thinking, individuals become incapable of thinking,

judging and acting for themselves, in a fashion expressing their uniqueindividuality and manifesting their natality, their quality as beginners inthe world. As Arendt stresses, mans spontaneity is the crux of what total-itarian domination strives to eliminate. Now this is what may come topass, says Arendt, when people have lost contact with their fellow-menas well as the reality around them. There are two ways of designatingthe two objects of this contact in Arendt: most of the time, she locatesit in the public sphere, understood as the social arena where individualscome forward before an audience to be recognized in their uniqueness,to have their words remembered and their deeds retold after the speaker

and actor him- or herself has passed away. Thus phrased, the historicmodel Arendt alludes to is that of thepolis, of course. However, notablyin The Human Condition, Arendt developes a somewhat different modelto make much of the same point. In that work she speaks about thecommon world, the peculiarly human world set up between men andnature, as it were, as that Z wischenbereich which comprises the spiritualas well as artefactual (gegenstndliche) products of mens activities inthe world. The always-already-begun and always-continuing processwhereby the multitudes of men existing on earth contribute to erecting

and maintaining a common world between them, is a process in whichwhat is in reality an artificial (meaning thoroughly man-made) worldgains temporal permanence and a cognitive solidity or objectivity. Thecommon world is indispensable for mans ability to orient himself in his

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existence; from it, every individual will draw the resorces by means ofwhich he or she creates his or her meaning(s), values, beliefs.

The Hegelianism (objective spirit) implicit in Arendts notion of

the common world is, to my knowledge, never mentioned in her work.No wonder, considering how critical she was of Hegel, especially inmatters of political philosophy and Geschichtsphilosophie. I shall notbe going into that (see Vetlesen, 1995). For my present argument, itsuffices to point out the importance of her notions of the public worldand the common world as the two principal places in her thinking whereshe fleshes out her assertion that for the confirmation of my identity Idepend entirely upon other people (OT, 476). This is the second state-ment of hers that I find unmistakably Hegelian in spirit. In terms of a

general philosophical position, what these statements testify to isArendts version of intersubjectivist theory of selfhood and identity,indeed even of thinking and judgment. The latter two, as well as con-science, are not faculties of the mind which belong to each and everyhuman being independently of historical circumstance; rather, these are

precarious faculties, operative in the individual only when historic andsocio-political conditionspermitthem to be developed as was broughtout so dramatically in the event of totalitarianism. Norare the facultiesin question to be conceived of in an individualistmanner, as belongingto the individual as such, presupposing only that he or she in exis-tentialist manner is ready to listen to the call of conscience so as toview and enact his or her possibilities of being-in-the-world emphati-cally, meaning authentically, as his or her own that is to say, asreceived from and formulated by no one else, especially not das Man.

My allusion to Heidegger explicates the point that I am driving at:what in Heidegger is presented as the arena where habit flourishes,where inauthenticity reigns, and where evil-doing finds its social basis(Lubans thesis), is in Arendt the exact opposite namely, the spherewhere individuals are constituted as individuals berhauptcapable of

thinking and judging, thus of developing and displaying the facultiesrequired for resisting and opposing evil and evil-doing.

Of course, the issue is more complicated. Arendt was struck byEichmanns apparent craving for a secure existence and by his trying,to the point of obsession and at the cost of appearing ridiculous toothers, to make everything routine, to cite the features Luban high-lights in Heideggers

philosophy s.xx - hanna arendt - on conscience and evil. en a.j. 2001)

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