Skip to main content

Eichmann and Immanuel Kant



During his notorious trial in Jerusalem in 1961, Adolf Eichmann described himself as a sort of Kantian. But, he also said, Kant's thinking was too deep for him so he had devised a whittled-down Kantianism suitable for his mind, and THAT involved taking the Fuhrer's Word to be an expression of Duty.

This explanation had no impact on the outcome of the trial. Eichmann was executed, and he would presumably also have been executed had he declared himself a utilitarian or anything else ending with "ian" or "ist" or the like. Or if he had never sought to wax philosophical at all.

But it did have three consequences that interest me at the moment:

1) it helped persuaded Hannah Arendt that Eichmann's mind was "banal,"
2) it was taken by some (Leonard Peikoff) as proof of the badness of Kantian ethics,
3) It has stimulated research into what if anything Eichmann can be found to have said about deep philosophical subjects when he WASN'T on trial for his life.

Document disclosures and research since then, some of it under the third of those heads, has undermined the conclusions drawn under the first and second.

Eichmann was quite confident, living in Argentina, that he had made a clean getaway. He had a circle of associates who like himself were unrepentant former Third Reich officials (though none had been so high-ranking as himself) and he talked freely among them.

What we now know is that Eichmann, when he wasn't on trial for his life, was not a Kantian at all. He rejected Kant as a German who wasn't truly German. It was the universality of Kantian ethics that irked him -- it could on its terms apply to everyone, thus it treated everyone as an equal, thus it was misguided dreck.

Further, the research since that trial undercuts the idea that Eichmann was "banal." He seems to have been a reasonably bright individual (not on Heidegger's level philosophically of course, or on Arendt's, but still ...) who consciously adopted an evil perspective on life that enabled his eventual notoriety.

Some have said (and I think this right) that Arendt's formula wasn't wrong, it was simply applied wrongly. Banality had a lot to do with the success of Nazism, for so long as it was successful. The empty headed "just follow orders" mindset she latched on to in her coverage of his trial was very real, but Eichmann wasn't a good example of it. The Kantian and the mindless conformist were two of the masks he put on due to the drive to survive.

A few days ago I put forward here my own view that the disastrous philosophical influence was not Kant, but Hegel. Of course, one can say "without Kant, no Hegel," but one could as easily say without Rousseau, no Kant. Without Pufendorf no Rousseau. So blame it all on Pufendorf, or else just go back and so on back and back, to Thales. The distortions in the human spirit that we associate with modern totalitarianism are distinctly traceable to Hegel, and at odds with (among much else) the keynote of epistemological modesty in Kant.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak