| Abstract | In Arendt's presentation the Nazi regime was based on a grotesque inversion of the Kantian categorical imperative. The categorical imperative -- which has been quoted earlier -- demands that one's acts be motivated by duty rather inclination. It is a formal principle designed to universalize dignity and respect among human beings and prevent that anyone instrumentalize anybody else. Contrary to Eichmann's own claim to having abandoned the attempt to live according to this Kantian principle when he was put in charge of the extermination of the Jews, Arendt argues that [Eichmann] perverted rather than rejected the categorical imperative -- she speaks of an "unconscious distortion"-- when carrying out the Final Solution.(44) As she puts it: "in one respect Eichmann did indeed follow Kant's precepts: a law was a law, there could be no exceptions...this was proof that he had always acted against his `inclinations,' whether they were sentimental or inspired by interest, that he had always done his `duty'."(45) According to Arendt, what Eichmann preserved from Kantianism was "the demand that a man do more than obey the law, that he go beyond the mere call of obedience and identify, his own will with the principle behind the law -- the source from which the law sprang." However, Arendt also points to the important distinction which separated Kant's ethical design from Eichmann's reading of it: "In Kant's philosophy, that source was practical reason; in Eichmann's household use of him, it was the will of the Führer."(46)
All descriptions of moments of elation and enjoyment in Eichmann's life that Arendt mentions in her book involve references which he made to his own death and the death of others. As she recounts, shortly before the war was over Eichmann bragged to his associates: "I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews [or `enemies of the Reich,' as he always claimed to have said] on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction."(51) According to Eichmann's own statement, it gave him "an extraordinary, sense of elation to think that [he] was exiting from the stage in this way."(52) When his moment of death finally arrived, he bid the world goodbye with the following words: "After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them." As Arendt comments: "In the face of death, he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows, his memory played him the last trick; he was `elated' and he forgot that this was his own funeral."(53) It takes a strange sense of irony and a great calm to tell one's executioners in the last minutes of one's life that they, too, are bound to die. Moreover, one has to have a bizarre personality to cherish one's execution as a final moment of elation. However, such passages evoke the impression that the idea of dying gave Eichmann pleasure.
Here we return to the connection between Arendt's concept of radical evil in The Origins of Totalitarianism and that of banal evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem. As we have seen, in the former book she argues that "radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally superfluous."(54) Her statement indeed applies to all human beings, perpetrators and victims alike -- albeit in a significantly different manner: while the latter are exterminated physically, the former merely have come to regard their own individuality as superfluous. It is by making themselves superfluous in this fashion that they become capable of committing their evil deeds without feeling guilty, as Arendt illustrates in the chapter in Eichmann in Jerusalem on the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 where the decision on the Final Solution was taken and at which Eichmann acted as secretary. Arendt sums up and quotes from Eichmann's testimony in order to portray the moment at which he realized that the established civil servants of the Third Reich "were vying and fighting with each other for taking the lead in these `bloody' matters. `At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt.' Who was he to judge? Who was he `to have [his] own thoughts in this matter'?"(55) As Arendt presents it, Eichmann was incapable of being an autonomous individual. He could not stick to his own thoughts in the presence of others; instead, his thinking simply mirrored theirs; and by subordinating his moral judgment to that of others, he silenced his internal moral spectator.
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