Between Eichmann and Kant: Thinking on Evil after Arendt

The web of action seems as chaotic and dangerous as a post-modern disintegrated public sphere. But this is simply because we are speaking of freedom; hence the lack of structure and order, hence the danger. [Hannah Arendt]'s theory of action is first and foremost an account of what I would like to call "the immanent plurality of freedom," or "the immanent freedom of the plural," which for her was (I think) the ultimate political value. There are two principal directions which Arendt pursues in order to think positively about this condition. The first is historical. She seeks political forms of society(12) which could make room for and contain the immanent plurality of freedom. At the same time, she tries to develop a scheme for a political history of the West, in which different political forms are examined in the light of the need to make room for the immanent plurality of freedom. This explains, I believe, her strong attachment to an idealized Greek polis (ignoring slavery, the exclusion of strangers and the oppression of women upon which the polis was built); but it also explains her critique of "the social" in modernity, which is a reduction of the plural to the many (the masses, the mob), and of the many to the one (the emergence of statistics, "the average," processes of "normalization," and above all the tyranny of the totalitarian state).(13) The second direction is phenomenological.(14) Arendt seeks in the sphere of human action, and in the history of the discourse about it, elements of cohesiveness that compensate for lack of order and certainty in the public realm, the sphere in which the immanent plurality of freedom is realized and comes to the fore. These elements are universal, belonging to the human condition in general. They may take different forms in different historical and cultural settings, but this does not affect their cohesive function. Mutual visibility is one such element, and Arendt's insistence on it in various places in the book should be interpreted in this light.(15) Three other elements are introduced by Arendt as different mechanisms for the stabilization of human action: forgiveness, punishment, and promise. It is in the context of the discussion of these three that Arendt's remarks on radical evil appear, and it is to this context that we now turn.
The famous "black flag" which is supposed to "fly above" criminal orders which are "manifestly unlawful"(68) was now raised above unfaithful interpretations. In general, from the totalitarian point of view, betrayal had become the chief kind of "evil." A regime that demands unconditional obedience to the law of the land (of the State, the Party or the Führer) is capable of turning every gesture into a possible sign of contemplated or actual disobedience. The Jerusalem Court should not have been surprised that [Eichmann] hardly ever paid any attention to what the court considered a "black flag", i.e. the flag rising above willed violation of the moral law, for there was no such flag available in the entire Third Reich, certainly not in Eichmann's surroundings.(69) When (Kantian, or any other humanist) morality is reduced to and enclosed in the realm of inclinations, as under the Nazis, only the law can distinguish right from wrong. All Nazi crimes took place within the legal order. There was a reversal of the relation between exception and the rule: crime had become the rule; yielding to the temptation to disobey the rule was the exception. Eichmann "acted in accordance with the rule, examined the order issued to him for its manifest `legality,' namely regularity."(70) He could not have used the principle of "a manifestly unlawful order" for his orders were not manifestly unlawful. They were even more than lawful -- they were (or were presented to him as) the realization and epitome of the raison d'être of the state that made things lawful in the first place. The "normal" Nazi criminal, Eichmann included, intended to do what he did, and he knew that what he did was awfully wrong from an "ordinary" moral point of view, but he did not do what he did in order to do wrong. He rather strove to do the right thing -- that which was dictated to him by the Führer's order.