Today’s NYT op-ed about Stangneth’s book on Eichmann (Eichmann before Jerusalem, translation of a 2011 book in German), focusses on Hannah Arendt. Seyla Benhabib, philosophy professor at Yale, argues Arendt didn’t get it wrong regarding Eichmann, as Stangneth herself agrees, if somewhat cautiously. What was not seen by Arendt perhaps was the depth of Eichmann’s antisemitism. But his “thoughtlessness” (heedlessness?), Gedankenlosigkeit, which was a concept important for Heidegger, and that Arendt perhaps kept for that reason, is not to be confused with Eichmann’s lack of intellectual ability or drive. For Arendt, it was a fundamental absence of reliance on reason (not sure of my formulations here), hostility to it actually, exemplified by the twisted understanding Eichmann showed he had of Kant’s moral imperative, at the trial in Jerusalem:

She [Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem] quotes Eichmann saying, “I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws.” But Arendt notes that Eichmann’s meaning perverts Kant’s Categorical Imperative: Whereas “In Kant’s philosophy the source, that source was practical reason, in Eichmann’s household use of him, it was the will of the Führer.”

Seyla Benhabib defends the concept of banality of evil inasmuch as Eichmann’s fanatical antisemitism was banal and widespread among National Socialists.

So, I ask myself, no hidden last play by Eichmann? I’m still curious to know if anything happened in his youth when he abandoned (slid off?) the Christian beliefs (which exactly) of his parents? Or did his parents already have strange volkish, anti-universal beliefs? In other words, from what world did nazism’s belief “system” emerge and why did it find such a powerful mix of sympathy, cowardice, heedlessness, and efficient bureaucratic power? I grant it is important not to go along with so much fantastic Western thinking concerning “evil” and ascribe it to demonic, irrational forces. I don’t think it is enough either to ascribe it to an inability or refusal to think à la Kant (or à la Heidegger?). I keep coming back to this crux: how could a Christian country, profoundly antisemitic but also reminded daily by its Christian structures both of human fallability and divine forgiveness, come to abandon this latter part of its ideology completely and revert to a notion of justice and morality that looked no further than blood and narrowly defined nation?