“Standing behind your phrase”: Arendt and Jaspers on the (post-)metaphysics of evil

Abstract

This article turns to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem in order to illustrate the difficulties involved in approaching the (formerly) metaphysical concept of evil as a secular phenomenon. It asks how the advocate of plurality, natality and forgiveness could also vouch for the death sentence of Eichmann based on a rhetoric of retribution and revenge. It then shows that Arendt's surprisingly consistent view of evil is based on a quasi-ontological understanding of the human condition that allowed her to negate Eichmann's humanity. Rather than simply unmasking a metaphysical account in disguise, however, the article develops an alternative perspective that emerges from the conversation between Arendt and Jaspers. It argues that Jaspers's interpretation of Kant offers a way to defend the idea of secular evil and judge Eichmann on the basis of his thoughtlessness.

Keywords

Arendt Jaspers evil post-metaphysical thinking political ontology plurality crimes against humanity sovereignty

Introduction

When Eichmann in Jerusalem was initially published in 1963 as a five-part article in The New Yorker, Hannah Arendt was viciously attacked. She was accused of exonerating Eichmann, relativizing the Holocaust and blaming the Jews for bringing about their own extermination. While the intensity of agitation has waned almost 60 years later, the controversy remains (Benhabib, 2014; Bernstein, 2018; Robin, 2014; Stangneth, 2014; Wolin, 2014a, 2014b). This paper investigates some of the puzzling and, at times, contradictory dimensions of Arendt's “banality of evil” thesis by focusing on an underexplored dimension of her book, namely the transition from her diagnosis of thoughtlessness to her verdict of Eichmann on the last page. It is disconcerting, I argue, that the advocate of plurality, natality, and forgiveness also vouched for the death sentence of Eichmann based on a rhetoric of retribution and revenge. How can we make sense of this shift and explain the extent to which Arendt moves so close to those she had always opposed, namely those who saw in Eichmann a degree of wickedness and perversion beyond the human pale?

A few theorists have addressed the mismatch between Arendt's diagnosis of thoughtlessness and her final judgment of Eichmann. Yet, the problem is either analyzed without explicating its deeper causes and structural implications (Coutinho, 2015; Luban, 2015; Norrie, 2008) or it is interpreted as a reflection of her irony rather than a substantial commitment (Butler, 2011). I contend that neither Arendt's rhetoric nor the frequently raised inconsistency of her thought can clarify the consistency with which conflicting definitions of evil remain intertwined. The center of the controversy gravitates around the question of totalitarian evil. Against which standard do we measure the action of those who claim they acted in accordance with the law of totalitarian regimes? Is a totalitarian crime only deducible from the outside, or in the aftermath, or can we subordinate a law of the land under a universal law that acts in the name of humanity; and if so, how do we define humanity?

On the one hand, Arendt's thesis of the banality of evil is revolutionary because it proposes a solution to the problem at the heart of these questions: to judge evil in the absence of rules. In her view, Eichmann as well as other functionaries in charge of or complicit in mass murder were not lacking the capacity to distinguish between right and wrong. They were not stupid, vicious, or extraordinarily egoistic; they were rather strangely detached from their own action. The banality of their evil is expressed in a thoughtless indifference, which substitutes the certitude of rules for the plurality and contingency of human life. There is something fundamental happening in this claim to mastery, which can no longer be explained as the effect of personal weakness or the privation of the good. In defining evil as shallow, Arendt breaks with a long metaphysical tradition that has predominantly interpreted evil as deficiency.¹

On the other hand, Arendt's “banality of evil” thesis is not revolutionary at all. Her transition from radical evil to its secular variant reflects a common trend in the history of political thought. It is particularly symptomatic of how post-war political theory has sought to divorce itself from metaphysics by way of translating formerly metaphysical concepts into secular terms.² This critique of metaphysics amounts to a rejection of universal foundations, which it seeks to replace by a focus on difference, plurality, and contingency. However, this “migration into the profane” (Adorno, 1966: 393) is not easy,³ and I turn to Arendt's reflections on evil to illustrate some of the difficulties involved. Why is it, I ask, that in the moment of judgment the disdained foundations reappear? How is it possible that Arendt becomes a spokesperson of humanity that determines who should and who should not inhabit the world—ultimately considering Eichmann deficient in being human and vouching for the enemy's destruction?

In a second step, I suggest that these Schmittian reverberations are not accidental, but avoidable. On first view, Arendt's powerful critique and simultaneous affirmation of the deficiency model seem to play into Schmitt's hands. Her account of evil seems to confirm that metaphysical foundations stand behind political concepts no matter how secular they appear. Yet, if we bring Arendt's long-term mentor and friend Karl Jaspers into the picture, who represented for her a model detrimentally opposed to Eichmann, the contradictions at work become productive. In particular, I suggest that their dialogue (a) points to a possibility to judge Eichmann on the basis of his thoughtlessness; and (b) offers a critique of both the common trend toward post-metaphysical thinking as well as the contrary assumption that modern thought represents the continuation of theology by other means. Jaspers cautioned Arendt to pay attention to what stands behind the banality of evil. Rather than return to “radical evil” in a theological, substantial, or naturalist form, however, he followed Kant and conceptualized uncertainty in terms that allow for universal judgment. The non-foundational metaphysics he developed in turn enabled him to shift—more rigorously than Arendt—from a model of deficiency to a model of choice and hold Eichmann responsible as a fellow human being.

Given Jaspers' significance for Arendt's work, it is surprising that he has remained an acutely neglected thinker.⁴ Arendt scholars focus more on her side of the correspondence, and they frequently fail to explore the intersubjective dynamic between two distinct philosophical perspectives. Thus, the controversy over the extent to which Arendt's concept of evil is Kantian or Heideggerian (Benhabib, 2014; Wolin, 2014a, 2014b) has regrettably left the connection to Jaspers unexplored, even though Arendt considered Jaspers “the only successor Kant has ever had” (1968: 74; see also 1992: 7) and affirmatively referred to him multiple times in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1994: 104, 252, 269–279) while Heidegger is not mentioned once.

I argue that Jaspers' position is essential in clarifying Arendt's conflicted indebtedness to Kant and Heidegger. In what follows, I first introduce Arendt's intellectual development in coming to terms with evil and situate her thinking between Heidegger and Jaspers. I show that Arendt failed to defend her concept of evil in non-metaphysical terms and contrast her condemnation speech with Jaspers' own imaginary verdict of Eichmann. My analysis then points to concrete political consequences of Jaspers' judgment, discusses why Arendt missed Jaspers' immanent critique, and considers implications for our understanding of evil in politics today.

Arendt between Jaspers and Heidegger

In 1990, Margaret Canovan aptly described a fundamental tension that runs through Arendt's work. Arendt, she argued, might have wished philosophy to be more like Jaspers' dialogical thought, but feared that it is closer to Heidegger's brilliant, yet lonely thinking.

When Arendt is focusing on Plato or Heidegger she is inclined to fear that philosophy is intrinsically solitary, antipolitical, and sympathetic to coercion, whereas when she concentrates on Socrates or Jaspers she is tempted to believe that true philosophy may be communicative and in harmony with free politics.

(Canovan, 1990: 150)

Arendt repeatedly emphasized that Jaspers was the first philosopher who focused on the essential significance of communication by insisting that “all thoughts could be judged by this touchstone question, do they aid or hinder communication” (Jaspers, 1981: 85). When Arendt delivered her laudatio at the occasion of the award of the German Book Trade's Peace Prize to Jaspers in 1958, Arendt associated her teacher and friend with the sense of humanitas that transcended all ideological, religious, and national boundaries. For Jaspers, she argued, “responsibility is not a burden and has nothing whatsoever to do with moral imperatives,” because he was “at home” in what Arendt called “this space forever illuminated anew by a speaking and listening thoughtfulness” (Arendt, 1968: 74–75). Because thinking to Jaspers was a practice that occurs between individuals, and communication is not secondary to truth—not mere representation but the essential mode of philosophizing itself—, Arendt found in him a living example of the enlarged thought which shaped her own reading of Kant. Thus, when Seyla Benhabib emphasizes that Arendt, in her analysis of the Eichmann trial, is firmly on Kant's and not on Heidegger's side, she correctly draws a direct line from Arendt's definition of the banality of evil as thoughtlessness to her Kantian interpretation of enlarged thought (2018: 70–75). Against Richard Wolin's claim, that Heidegger's critique of thoughtlessness as a result of the increasingly rational and technological thinking since Plato had ultimately determined Arendt's interpretation (Wolin, 2014a; 2014b), Benhabib convincingly distances Arendt's understanding of evil from theological sinfulness, natural law, and Heidegger's ontology of Seinsvergessenheit. Yet, this view misses how Kantian thoughtfulness loses weight in pivotal moments of Arendt's thinking. I argue that Jaspers' “speaking and listening thoughtfulness” provides a key to unlock these moments and understand when and why Heidegger is given priority.

The literature offers two contrasting perspectives on the two concepts of radical evil on the one hand, introduced in The Origins of Totalitarianism, and the banality of evil on the other hand, developed in Eichmann in Jerusalem and thereafter. These different concepts of evil are either viewed as compatible and complementary to one another (Bernstein, 1996; 2002: 220–224, 232; Ophir, 1996: 114–16), or as distinct and mutually exclusive (Hartouni, 2012: 116–120; Villa, 1999: 55–56). I believe that a careful reading of Arendt finds good reasons for both interpretations. We do indeed see a shift from radical to banal evil, and yet the former also clearly presupposes the latter.

The confrontation with Eichmann led Arendt to revise her earlier view that had identified the horror of the concentration camps with an inhuman system of radical and absolute evil. She now criticized the metaphysical and theological gravitas of the term “radical” and considered the most pressing question to be: “How can we approach the problem of evil in an entirely secular setting?” (Quoted in Kohn, 1996: 155). Not devils but humans had caused unspeakable horror. Similarly, in a well-known letter to Gershom Scholem, Arendt argued that evil was “only extreme, never radical” because only what is good has depth. In addition, she maintained that even Kant's concept of “radical evil … doesn't mean much more than ordinary baseness, which is a psychological rather than a metaphysical concept” (Arendt and Scholem, 2017: L133, 20 July 1963).

Initially, however, before Arendt secularized evil, she had taken Scholem's position of demonic evil. Writing to Jaspers in 1946, Arendt rejected the category of criminal guilt for Nazi crimes.

The Nazi crimes, it seems to me, explode the limits of the law; and that is precisely what constitutes their monstrousness. For these crimes, no punishment is severe enough. It may well be essential to hang Göring, but it is totally inadequate. That is, this guilt, in contrast to all criminal guilt, oversteps and shatters any and all legal systems.

(Arendt and Jaspers, 1992: L43, 17 August 1946)

In his response, Jaspers questioned Arendt's depiction of Nazi crimes as monstrous. While he agreed that evil can be radical in its consequences, it nonetheless, or precisely for this reason, belongs to the human sphere and might be utterly banal.

You say that what the Nazis did cannot be comprehended as ‘crime’ — I’m not altogether comfortable with your view, because a guilt that goes beyond all criminal guilt inevitably takes on a streak of ‘greatness’ — of satanic greatness — which is for me inappropriate for the Nazis as all the talk about the “demonic” element in Hitler and so forth. It seems to me that we have to see these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality, because that's what truly characterizes them. Bacteria can cause epidemics that wipe out nations, but they remain merely bacteria.

(Arendt and Jaspers, 1992: L46, 19 October 1946, emphasis mine)

Arendt (and Jaspers) may have ironically forgotten the source of that phrase when, almost two decades later, in a striking turnabout, Arendt made use of the exact terms to describe Eichmann. Unlike most scholars, however, who either endorse or reject Arendt's shift from the demonic to the surface phenomenon, I contend that Arendt did not make this shift entirely. Arendt was aware that it is no simple task to stop viewing Eichmann's evil in its satanic greatness. A belief in original sinfulness represents a more convincing teleology of good and evil, because the ultimate triumph of the good remains divinely guaranteed. Seeing evil in its banality involves confronting reality and one's own implications in it (Villa, 1999: 55–60). Against the theological reasoning of thinkers like Martin Buber, Arendt turned to the law to question the narrative of Eichmann as the devil incarnate. The law, she pointed out, presupposes “that we have a common humanity with those whom we accuse and judge and condemn” (1994: 229). No one stands above the law, can cut through the messiness of its interpretation or determine its future. The law, while providing guidance to everyone, remains contested and can itself not be grounded on natural principles. It is the absence of metaphysical rules that informs Arendt's secularization of evil and her interpretation of Eichmann as thoughtless: a person who lives under the assumption that the multiperspectivality of politics can be denied and replaced by the certainty of one perspective converted into universal law. Yet, how does this attempt at secularization bear out in her own judgment of Eichmann, when Arendt has to come to a decision in the absence of rules?

Arendt first homed in on Eichmann's factual deeds and defined them as genocide, the worst crime against humanity. Independently of whether Eichmann was thoughtless and had reasons for it, his action aimed at destroying the human condition and manifested a radical assault on life's inescapable plurality. On this basis, Arendt turned the tables on Eichmann and announced the following logic: Because Eichmann was actively destroying human plurality, the human race now has to destroy him—with fatal finality.

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

(Arendt, 1994: 279)

What makes Arendt speak for the entire human race against one of its members? How can she assume the voice of a “we,” become the spokesperson of the “we” and place Eichmann outside the law disqualifying him as a human being? Why should humanity, constituted by plurality and thus the impossibility to claim one absolute truth, speak a verdict that can hardly be distinguished from victor's justice or the application of natural principles? In short, what happened to Arendt's secular concept of evil and her argument that ordinary people become complicit in totalitarian structures as they choose not to think and reject the world?

Arendt did not respond to these questions in Eichmann in Jerusalem, but her other writings offer at least two tentative answers. (1) Vengeance and retribution were not Arendt's primary motivation. (2) Instead, she implicitly adopted a Heideggerian strategy and returned to the model of evil as deficiency: Eichmann's inability to think becomes his inability to be.

(1) Arendt has always consistently claimed that totalitarian crimes are both unforgivable and unpunishable. In “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship” (2003a), an essay published one year after her Eichmann book, Arendt reiterated a line from Origins and The Human Condition: People are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and they can only punish what can be accepted into the web of human relations. We can forgive acts of trespassing, but extreme evil “will be taken care of by God in the Last Judgment, which plays no role whatsoever in life on earth” (Arendt, 1958: 239–240). Extreme crime “dispossesses us of all power” so we can “only repeat with Jesus: ‘It were better for [the criminal] that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea’” (241). This powerlessness results in an argumentative logic that sounds remarkably similar to Arendt's judgment of Eichmann:

Just as the victims in the death factories … are no longer ‘human’ in the eyes of their executioners, so this newest species of criminals is beyond the pale of solidarity in human sinfulness.”

(Arendt, 1973: 459)

Likewise, Arendt justified a “barbaric” interpretation of justice as the basis for the capital punishment of Eichmann because “evil violates a natural harmony which only retribution can restore” (1994: 277).

In “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship” (2003a), Arendt explained this notion of evil in more detail. In cases like Eichmann, she reiterated, we cannot really speak of punishment because none of the usual justifications, such as the rehabilitation of the criminal, the dissuasive force of the example, or the protection of society, are valid here. In contrast to her earlier view, however, she stressed that this does not imply that we are powerless. Nor are we interested in revenge. On the contrary, the law “appeared on earth in order to break the unending vicious circle of vengeance.” Weighing these different positions, Arendt ended on an inconclusive and slightly tragic note. She suggested that, in struggling to find the right punishment, we have to listen to our sense of justice even though “this same sense of justice informs us that all our previous notions about punishment and its justifications have failed us” (Arendt, 2003a: 26).

Christoph Menke has followed Arendt's suggestion and convincingly argues that Eichmann in Jerusalem is written from this paradoxical position. He reads the book as a radical self-reflection of the law in which the law is situated above the highest court of law but internal to law itself.

[T]he court [of Jerusalem] could not fully see the fundamental problem of law that is raised here, namely, that the acts of Eichmann problematize or even put in question law as such. Yet, while the court half-misrecognized and half-repressed this point, it still judged correctly: Eichmann must hang.

(Menke, 2014: 589)

Why has the court judged correctly according to Menke? — Because it judged freely. The legal form of judgment had to be suspended, because Eichmann's thoughtlessness led him to confuse morality and legality and turn the law of the land into the moral law: he violated the human condition of plurality. The judges, in order to realize the form of law in this situation, had to judge freely: without recourse to rules, in their absence. “At the point where judging in accordance with law encounters its limit, in the crisis of law, free judging is revealed as the ground of law” (592). Menke clearly noticed the decisionism inherent in his interpretation. What does he make of it? He eventually argued that what takes the place of the legal form is what Arendt described as the experience of “speechless horror” in face of “monstrous events” (Arendt, 2003a: 23; 2003b: 55). With these phrases, Arendt had alluded to the impossible distance between ourselves and totalitarian events—they cannot be represented as objects. However, can we refer to this existential reality as the ground of “free” judgment? Does it not imply that Arendt's imaginary condemnation at the end of the book intends to disengage from reflection and pay tribute to the speechless horror that defies all thinking? While for Menke, this form of free judgment is compatible with Arendt's account of the banality of evil (2014: 605–06), I contend that speechlessness is precisely what Arendt sought to resist. As Jaspers correctly noticed, Arendt's diagnosis of thoughtlessness is most fundamentally directed against self-deception and “life-sustaining lies” that are buried in silence (Arendt and Jaspers, 1992: L337, 22 October 1963). Focusing on the paradox of law can therefore allow us to see the decisionist elements in Arendt's account, but it equally conflates the radicality and banality of evil and leaves us in a state of numbness.

(2) Yet, Mencke comes close to what I suggest myself. In order to do justice to the banality of Eichmann's evil, Arendt chose a Heideggerian strategy of secularizing metaphysical concepts. If traditional metaphysics had placed Dasein on the path to perfection purifying the deficiencies of immanence, Heideggerian phenomenology sought to deepen immanence in light of non-objectifiable being. According to this translation of metaphysics, evil is not viewed as deficiency. Evil conceals being; like a sickness it distorts the body of human life (Capobianco, 1991). Relatedly, Heidegger had emphasized in Being and Time that “the inauthenticity of Dasein does not signify a ‘lesser’ being or a ‘lower’ degree of being” (1996: 40). Despite this emphatic rejection of the logic of deficiency, Heidegger's philosophy remains curiously indebted to the Aristotelian definition of metaphysics as ontology which famously focuses on the perfectibility of beings in relation to being. Even if Heidegger reversed the directionality of critique and identified human finitude and thrownness as the source of disclosure, the event of disclosure itself expresses a resoluteness that leaves little room for doubt, ambiguity, or failure. On this view, it makes sense that Heidegger is most notorious for developing a hierarchy of more and less authentic Dasein as he turned peasants, Romantic poets, and Heraclitan philosophers into shepherds of being and declared the rest to drown in shallowness.

Even though Arendt's idea of shallowness, and its opposition to Kantian enlarged thought, is clearly different from Heidegger's inauthentic “they-ness” of das Man, Arendt might have adopted parts of Heidegger's negative ontology, namely the idea that being is revealed not by way of intuition or pure consciousness but through the encounter of its opposite: nothingness. Similar to Menke's free judgment earlier, this critique of traditional metaphysics gives rise to an existential decisionism in which “the Nothing is the vacancy that remains after the death of God” (Gordon, 2012: 83).

To be sure, this is not how Arendt would have put the matter in her own language. However, the central problem at the core of the Eichmann case – addressing the paradox of law and judging a crime without the certainty of principles – invites a negative ontology of the kind Heidegger proposed. In particular, it allows her to forgo the stickiness of satanic greatness and transform the moment of powerlessness into an affirmation of humanity without resorting to revenge. In doing so, she had to (re)subscribe to the definition of evil as the privation of the good.⁵

In this light, Arendt's later statements make sense. The problem with Eichmann, she claimed, “is entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think” (1971: 417, emphasis mine). His evil is thought-defying because thought tries to go deeper and is frustrated where it finds nothing – only the absence of depth. The banality of evil negates the good which, in the case of Eichmann, is framed in terms of the plurality of the human condition. In other words, Arendt tied evil to an ontological idea of what it means to be a human person. Against this background, in her manuscript “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy” from 1965/1966, she could associate Eichmann's shallowness with rootlessness. Narrativizing himself through clichés and stock phrases shows that there was no self behind his deeds and, consequently, no person that could be either punished or pardoned for them: “in rootless evil there is no person left whom one could ever forgive” (Arendt, 2003b: 95). This way, Arendt successfully combined her earlier and her later understandings of evil.

Susan Neiman astutely discerned the ontological dimension implicit in Eichmann in Jerusalem. “Arendt undertook to defend something whose justification should make us more than a little uneasy.” This defense, she continued, was not only directed at German war crimes, or Jewish complicity in them, it rather addressed “Creation itself” (Neiman, 2001: 66). Mary McCarthy also sensed traces of a theodicy or divine promise in Eichmann in Jerusalem. She wrote to Arendt that reading the book produced an exhilaration akin to hearing Figaro or The Messiah, “both of which are concerned with redemption.” Arendt emphatically welcomed this reaction. She told McCarthy that she was “the only reader to understand what otherwise I have never admitted—namely that I wrote this book in a curious state of euphoria” (Arendt and McCarthy, 1995: 166, 168).

This euphoria might derive from the deposition of a king exposed as pseudo-profound (Mathewes, 2001: 168). Eichmann no longer needed to have a wicked character to be conquered, because he had no character at all. In asserting Eichmann's nothingness, Arendt was able to reveal creation as the deep plurality of the human condition. To do so, Arendt had to dehumanize Eichmann, deprive him (and the world) of his natality, and ensure that, for eternity, he will not be forgiven. Eichmann no longer is a Dasein worthy of asking the question of being; he is instead, as Jean Bethke Elshtain put it, “the unbearable lightness of non-being” (Elshtain, 1995: 81). Comparable to a Benjaminian notion of divine violence, Arendt's judgment of Eichmann's evil redeems without revenge.

To sum up, while Arendt's earlier account of satanic greatness differs from the later account of banal thoughtlessness, the argumentative structure behind both concepts remains ontological. In turn, Arendt did not view the radicality and banality of evil as two aspects of the same phenomenon, as Jaspers will advise, but as contradictory notions that she nevertheless unwittingly held together. It is ironic that, as a result, Arendt's verdict of Eichmann shares much with her critics Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, who embedded evil in a theological discourse with clear Heideggerian intimations.

Jaspers, truth and politics

Unlike Arendt, Jaspers was convinced that only what cannot be forgiven can call for forgiveness. Forgiveness, in this sense, is impossible and only on this basis real.⁶ Their differences in opinion notwithstanding, Jaspers vehemently defended Arendt's report on Eichmann, especially against those who argued she lacked love of Israel and had trivialized the crimes committed by Eichmann. This defense involved unusually forceful measures that reflect the fundamental trust and intellectual depth so characteristic of their friendship. For instance, Jaspers saw himself forced to break with his close friend Golo Mann and exclude him from attending meetings at his house after he had attacked Arendt personally in a tendentious review of her book.⁷ Jaspers also spoke publicly on Arendt's behalf in various interviews.⁸ The most committed sign of support represents a book that Jaspers devoted to Arendt's mode of thinking.⁹

It has to be stated, however, that Jaspers' defense of Arendt's Eichmann coverage focused mainly on Arendt's Denkungsart and her emphasis on thoughtlessness. What has remained underexposed so far is that Jaspers' perspective reveals a novel critique of Arendt's judgment of Eichmann. An immanent critique emerges from the truth-loving interaction that Arendt and Jaspers had established over many decades. Since critique and disagreement were encouraged as essential and most natural parts of their conversation, it came as no surprise, and without any harshness perceived on either side, that Jaspers pointed to a problem in Arendt's response to Scholem in which she had argued that evil was only extreme, never radical because only what is good has depth.

The point is that this evil, not evil per se, is banal. I wasn't altogether happy with your phrasing of this point in your response to Scholem. What evil is stands behind your phrase characterizing Eichmann. And that question is indeed one we will probably never be quite able to answer adequately. Your answer in your letter struck me as too combative and too weak at the same time.

(Arendt and Jaspers, 1992: L345, 13 December 1963)

Jaspers' well-intentioned critique can arguably be viewed as a bomb placed at the core of Arendt's defense of the banality of evil. Her answer to Scholem was too combative because it generalized evil and it was too weak because this generalization deflects from the difficulty in grounding thoughtlessness independently of supernatural or psychopathological explanations. In alluding to the question what stands behind our understanding of evil while simultaneously raising doubts about our ability to answer this question, Jaspers implicitly referred to his own interpretation of Kant's radical evil (1951). Therein, he followed the later Kant in claiming that evil derives from choice and not from lack. To understand radical evil as the extreme lack of depth confuses the effect with the cause. Thoughtlessness does not signify a deficiency in being human; it is not equivalent to Heideggerian shallowness. It rather conceals an active choice, which is a fundamental and irreducibly human act. Before thoughtlessness can spread like an epidemic, people choose to be thoughtless; they voluntarily submit to servitude and actively will to be incapable of willing. This radical evil stands behind Arendt's depiction of Eichmann's banality.

Like Kant, Jaspers viewed human freedom as noumenal and therefore independent of ethical, political, or ontological principles. Good and evil manifest fundamental possibilities of human freedom which remain, in the last instance, inscrutable. We will never be quite able to answer which evil results from the radicality of choice that grounds it. Evil cannot be privation because choice is not a faculty that we may lack. In shifting from deficiency to choice, Jaspers agreed with Arendt that thoughtlessness is indeed a form of self-denial and a rejection of one's freedom. However, this lack of self is still encompassed by human freedom just as good actions and enlarged thinking are. It is not possible to find a maxim that explains the adoption of evil action, because such a maxim would cease to be freely chosen and could not be imputed to an individual person who is responsible for it (1951: 101). Jaspers adopted this Kantian insight and concluded that it is the denial of this fundamental inscrutability and the impossibility to answer the question of what stands behind our action which motivates the choice of thoughtlessness.

Hence, when Jaspers enthusiastically exclaimed in a letter to Arendt, “Now you have delivered the crucial word against ‘radical evil’,” he also added, “against gnosis!” (Arendt and Jaspers, 1992: L337, 22 October 1963). In Jaspers' work, gnosis indicates the decision to stop thinking in light of uncertainty—the desire to eliminate choice and surrender to the law of mastery.

The radical difference between a philosophy which intends to know the absolute …—hence also grasp the nature of evil—and Kantian philosophy is that the latter remains insufficient as content and becomes meaningful only in the human being who thinks and realizes it.

(Jaspers, 1951: 108, translation mine)

A self chooses self-deception and turns the law of the land into the moral law because she intends to be certain about the good and the bad. She actively denies that “I can only know the legality of my action, never the morality of my conviction” (100, translation mine). As a result, however, this denial of uncertainty is paradoxical because the active choice of thoughtlessness conceals the activity of choosing from the one responsible for it. The more Eichmann affirmed he had surrendered all personal feelings and self-interest to the objectivity of the law, the more he also claimed he was morally blameless and without choice. In other words, the effect of Eichmann's radical choice of thoughtlessness was its banalization through clichés and abstract rules that insulated him from critique and allowed him to present himself as a law-abiding citizen. As a result, Jaspers provides us with an alternative view of evil that understands the banality and radicality of evil as two vital aspects of the same phenomenon: “the fact that evil-doing stems from a free choice, which makes it ‘radical’, goes together with a concealment of such choice, which makes it ‘banal’” (Burdman, 2019: 175).

What subtly plays out in Jaspers' comment, “What evil is stands behind your phrase,” is a crucial disagreement about how to respond to the problem of judgment in the absence of rules. Here, a divide between the three existentialist thinkers—Arendt, Heidegger, and Jaspers—becomes visible. Burdman rightly alludes to Arendt's indebtedness to her two mentors due to their “original notion of responsibility, which is not subordinated to pre-given norms, but is rather the pre-condition for any norm” (forthcoming: 102). Yet, this pre-condition is conceptualized differently in Jaspers and Heidegger. If Heidegger remained within a negative ontology that predicates the disclosure of authentic being on the confrontation with nothingness, Jaspers was more interested in the conditions of possibility that allow for uncertainty. He criticized metaphysical certainty not from a standpoint of negative ontology but from a standpoint of what he called periechontology, the logic of the encompassing of being.¹⁰ The question that motivates much of Jaspers' work is therefore how we can experience and express the independence of being of the thought that thinks it.

Much like her two mentors, Arendt saw in the desire for certainty the source of modern evil. But unlike Jaspers and more like Heidegger, she turns plurality, contingency, and uncertainty into generalizable conditions. Harking back to the late Kant, Jaspers emphasized instead that judgments are universal not by virtue of applying a rule, be it based on plurality or unity, but by virtue of realizing the ineffable ground of our freedom and responsibility. Thus, humanity itself cannot act, it is individuals and groups who act in the name of humanity, and this name remains contested. Since being is not revealed through non-being, we become aware of not knowing when we continue to exist in communication and express ourselves in myths, rituals, and metaphors, which pluralize what they take for granted. Jaspers also termed this mode of expression cipher language.

[Ciphers] do not transcend in a forward direction, so to speak, away from all objects toward something that lies beyond, but in a backward direction, away from all consciousness of objects, toward the ground of possibility of this diverse objectiveness.

(Jaspers and Bultmann, 2005: 53)

In other words, ciphers are not driven by ontological certainty; the objectivity they announce takes itself back thereby opening a space of transformation.

This non-foundationalist metaphysics represents a highly uncommon and underrated position in postwar thought. Jaspers cautioned against the wholesale rejection of metaphysics. The question for him was not whether we choose to think metaphysically but how. It is less important whether a phenomenon is conceived in secular or theological terms. If the underlying metaphysics remains ontological, Schmitt's critique proves correct and modern philosophy represents the continuation of theology by other means.

Arendt and Jaspers touched on their differences at various points in their conversation. When Arendt subscribed to Heidegger's critique of Plato, for instance, Jaspers feared an ontological turn to a political existentialism that unwittingly essentializes a certain view of the human condition. He thus objected in the strongest words:

Your view is almost entirely bleak. Your reference to Heidegger seemed to me symptomatic of something in this mode of thought that I can't follow. I find the fact of Heidegger's distinction between ‘correctness’ and ‘truth’ excellent. But the way he arrives at that distinction strikes me as deceptive.

(Arendt and Jaspers, 1992: L184, 12 April 1956)

Philosophy for Jaspers speaks an evocative language; its main power is to question, diagnose, and appeal. In erecting a contrast between truth as unconcealedness and truth as correspondence, Heidegger's philosophy becomes the place where the truth of being is at stake, the place which discloses language as “the house of being.” In a letter to Heidegger, Jaspers shared his critique and insisted that “we can only talk – and communicate – within the oppositions, in the appearances of the infinite” (Heidegger and Jaspers, 2003: 17 August 1949, 174) — the house needs windows. This “deceptive mode of thought” does not only differ entirely from the independent mode of thought which Jaspers associated with Arendt, it is also fundamentally at odds with Plato's dialogues.¹¹

Jaspers tried to convince Arendt of an alternative reading of Plato that pays tribute to the complexity of his writings, and he warned that attributing the rise of totalitarianism to the loss of a vita activa caused by Plato's destruction of truth as openness could preclude rather than advance our understanding of truth. However, Arendt disagreed and argued that Heidegger was ultimately right “when he says that in the presentation of the cave simile, truth is transformed on the sly into correctness” (Arendt and Jaspers, 1992: L187, 1 July 1956). Eventually, she signaled that she did not want to discuss this matter further. Although Jaspers urged her to continue this “very fundamental” conversation, they neither revisited their disagreement nor changed their views afterwards.

About 10 years later, however, at the age of 82, Jaspers shared with Arendt an illuminating afterthought. “You know how much I would like to write a short book about Heidegger. At the center of it would be the room that is as good as empty today, that is, metaphysics, and in which one meets Heidegger” (Arendt and Jaspers, 1992: L378, 16 June 1965). Jaspers was convinced that the connection of thoughtlessness and ontology could be studied in Heidegger. The metaphor of the empty room called metaphysics, where Jaspers imagined to meet Heidegger, can serve as a subtle illustration of this point. Jaspers would have argued that Heidegger, despite and because of his emphatic break with metaphysics, remains a fundamentally metaphysical thinker whose philosophy, however, has become gnostic and incapable to reflect its own premises. The room is emptied out, step by step, until nothing remains but silence. However, truth must appear in communication; it requires a room filled with traditions and hermeneutical tools. Otherwise, to speak against self-deception and life-sustaining lies will either be interpreted as a violent act of aggression or not heard at all.

A second example that illustrates their differences goes back to the time when Arendt was working on Origins. Jaspers read parts of it and was enthusiastic about the book, but he ended his letter with the question: “Hasn't Jahwe faded too far out of sight?” (Arendt and Jaspers, 1992: L108, 15 February 1951). For those unfamiliar with Jaspers' writings on the Axial Age and philosophical faith, this question can be easily misunderstood as an appeal to return to religion. Yet for Jaspers, the Jewish people were among those cultures that had identified transcendence with an idea of inscrutable oneness, which involved a widely practiced resistance to idolatry and an openness to a broad range of philosophical voices, including atheism. Jaspers found here resources for expressions of learned ignorance.

Arendt thought deeply about the question Jaspers raised. In her response, she wrote candidly, “Your question … has been on my mind for weeks now without my being able to come up with an answer to it.” She then asserted her skepticism of traditional religion which she believed can no longer respond to evil because “modern crimes are not provided for in the Ten Commandments” (Arendt and Jaspers, 1992: L109, 4 March 1951). Arendt further associated both modern crimes and monotheism with the tendency to render human beings superfluous. At this point, she drew a direct line between the omnipotence of God in monotheism which “makes him ONE,” and the desire of omnipotence among modern individuals. Both ideas of oneness leave “no reason why men in the plural should exist at all.”

This response to Jaspers' question reflects the backbone of Arendt's critique of metaphysics, yet it also testifies to its ontological dimension. Jaspers shared her critique of omnipotence and the way it is conserved in secularized versions of monotheism. However, her answer reveals that she did not understand his question as a subtle critique of her dismissal of metaphysics. According to Jaspers' periechontology, the idea of the many presupposes the idea of the one. Difference cannot be imagined without an encompassing horizon. What Jaspers' question seeks to communicate, in other words, is that the opposite of plurality is not the one but the elimination of choice motivated by the will to certainty.

Sovereign non-sovereignty

How did Jaspers' position affect his views on Eichmann? The correspondence between Arendt and Jaspers reached one of its high points during the trial. In one of the many letters they exchanged, Jaspers explicitly welcomed Arendt's definition of a crime against humanity and, after consulting with her again, adopted it for his interview with François Bondy in April 1961 (Jaspers, 2006). Arendt, in turn, prominently cited this interview in the final chapter of her report on Eichmann. It becomes apparent, however, that the two friends use “humanity” in profoundly different ways and, as a result, come to strongly diverging verdicts. Jaspers might have been aware of the differences when he sent the interview with Bondy to Arendt adding, “I hope that you are not angry about it” (Arendt and Jaspers, 1992: L284, 3 April 1961). Arendt, on her part, did not express such sensitivity in her response: “Thank you for the interview. I won't write anything about it because it seems to me that I agree with everything in it. The only thing I’m afraid of is that we’ll stand more or less alone with this view of things” (Arendt and Jaspers, 1992: L285, 13 April 1961).

They were indeed standing alone in their rejection of the demonic character of Eichmann who they found, in his banality, responsible for crimes against humanity. What remained unnoticed by Arendt, though, is that Jaspers came to an altogether different judgment. Like Arendt, he believed that “it is mankind itself that has been attacked through the Jews.” This implied, however, that it would be impossible to ask a particular state, group, or individual to be the spokesperson of humanity. A judgment of this crime can only be passed by a political institution representing humanity. Since we lack this representation, Eichmann cannot be killed. Putting himself in the place of the Israeli court, Jaspers said:

We shall keep [Eichmann] in custody until a judicial body [that is legitimized to sit in judgment] requests his extradition from us. We cannot release this man, but we cannot — on our own — sentence him to death, either.

(Jaspers, 2006: 855)

If for Arendt, Eichmann casted himself out of humanity and erased the difference between humanity and its representation in the form of universal law, for Jaspers the punishers still need to represent humanity insofar as they are actually punishing Eichmann's crime. Until we lack institutions that can speak in the name of humanity, countries that have jurisdiction can only keep Eichmann in custody.¹²

Yet, who is sovereign if the representation of humanity remains a (necessarily) utopian vision? Jaspers did not wish to “deny to Israel the pride to be a sovereign state,” but argued that legitimate sovereignty defines itself by way of self-limitation. The legitimacy of a political order depends on its capacity to limit its own power and experience sovereignty as a cipher that gives way to “the possibility of [its] diverse objectiveness.” Jaspers insisted that sovereignty is experienced when we “renounce the feeling of power inherent in sovereignty” (Jaspers, 2006: 857), it involves the choice against sovereignty. Israeli Jews therefore have “the right … to renounce both their sovereignty and thereby the satisfaction of seeing one of the main perpetrators of the murder of Jews sentenced to death in their courts.”

Jaspers provided three reasons why this sovereign non-sovereignty should inform the way we judge Eichmann. First, he argued it may spark self-transformation and social change. Since the will to choose stands behind the epidemic diffusion of banal evil, there needs to be a “transformation of willing as such” (Jaspers, 1951: 100, translation mine). Structural factors are certainly important to explain the spread of evil, but inner action, conviction, and subjective experience are indispensable to grasp and respond to the phenomenon. Jaspers would have agreed with scholars who see a connection between Kant's concept of “radical evil” and his idea of “the sublime,” developed in the Third Critique and published 2 years earlier (Burdman, forthcoming, 122). Just as a sense of judgment might not derive from a law of humanity but rather from the sublime feeling aroused by the idea of humanity, Jaspers was convinced that the experience of uncertainty can motivate inner moral change. In this light, he imagined his verdict spoken by the court in Jerusalem as an “extraordinary embarrassment for the United Nations and for world public opinion.” It might enable the international community to act and change international law. Second, such a decision could give voice to an unconditional sense of experiential solidarity that Arendt herself had called the feeling of shame of being human.¹³ And finally, a sovereign subversion of sovereignty marks a clear commitment to democratic institutions which, unlike divine or natural law, have to make sure that new beginnings remain possible and decisions can be doubted and revised. The decision of capital punishment places itself beyond revision: it can no longer be rethought.

Arendt did not address Jaspers' diverging views. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she only discussed whether the court in Jerusalem, after hearing the factual evidence, could “waive” the right to pass sentence, declaring itself “incompetent” to do so (1994: 270). While she was sympathetic to the idea, she eventually dismissed the argument because she considered it unrealistic. She surmised that Israel could easily counter this argument with the fact that the UN General Assembly had twice rejected proposals to consider the establishment of a permanent international criminal court, and that Israel, in general, had “reacted against all these proposals with great violence” (1994: 271). In other words, and despite her criticism of Israel conducting the Eichmann case as a show trial, she ended up accepting the power-based rules of sovereignty for lack of a better alternative.

Conclusion

In this article, I have expanded the debate about Arendt's banality of evil thesis in focusing on Jaspers' engagement with Arendt's conflicting definitions of evil. This perspective illustrated the difficulty of, and opened up a possibility for, judging Eichmann on the basis of his thoughtlessness. In moving beyond the divide of secular versus metaphysical evil, Jaspers' Kantian approach makes room for radical evil behind Eichmann's thoughtlessness in the form of choice against the uncertainty of human life. The grounds of this choice remain inscrutable; they cannot be deciphered as symptoms of an inability to be good. Turning the tables on Eichmann and taking his life, as Arendt's verdict suggests, confuses choice with deficiency and determines a hierarchy of human existence, which ultimately rests on ontological foundations. I have argued that, in doing so, Arendt inadvertently adopted central elements of Heidegger's negative ontology. Jaspers' non-ontological metaphysics, by contrast, presupposes that “we have a common humanity with those whom we accuse and judge and condemn” (Arendt, 1994: 229).

Arendt and Jaspers both grappled with the question how to dismantle absolute certainties they found manifested in totalitarian rule and yet aspire to a universal sense of humanity that allows for judgment in the absence of rules. As much as Arendt followed Kant in her concept of thoughtlessness, she shied away from the Kantian insight most dear to Jaspers' interpretation of enlarged thought: that plurality is not threatened by our inability to think but by our choice to stop thinking. The enemy of Arendt's idea of the political might not be the one standing against the many but the mode of thought that thinks the one. As my analysis suggests, Jaspers is more than an aid to clarify this problem. Not only does he represent an important source for understanding the phenomenon of evil in modernity, but he may also have offered the only non-theological and non-ontological treatment of Eichmann at the time.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

I owe much thanks for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article to Anna Jurkevics, John Macready, Giulia Oskian, Veronika Vasterling, and Peter Verovšek. I received valuable feedback from audiences at two Hannah Arendt Workshops in Leiden in 2020 and 2021, and am particularly grateful to Lukas Entel and Matthew Longo for their support. I extend special thanks to Javier Burdman, with whom I have had the most inspiring conversations about central questions of this article. Finally, I am indebted to two referees for incisive comments, to the editorial team for the most careful guidance, and Robin Douglass's editorial feedback, all of which greatly improved the article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Carmen Lea Dege

Notes

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