Thoughtlessness and Resentment: Determinism and Moral Responsibility in the Case of Adolf Eichmann

Article

Philosophy and Social Criticism 2014, Vol. 40(2) 127–144 ª The Author(s) 2014 Thoughtlessness and Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav resentment: Determinism DOI: 10.1177/0191453713518323 and moral responsibility psc.sagepub.com in the case of Adolf Eichmann

Benjamin A. Schupmann Columbia University, New York USA

Abstract Is a devoted Nazi or a zombie bureaucrat a greater moral and political problem? Because the dangers of immoral fanaticism are so clear, the dangers of mindless bureaucracy are easy to overlook. Yet zombie bureaucrats have contributed substantially to the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century, doing so seemingly oblivious to the monstrous qualities of their actions. Hannah Arendt’s work on thoughtlessness raises a dilemma: if Eichmann, the architect of the Nazi Final Solution, truly was a thoughtless ‘cog’, lacking in intentionality, can one really hold him morally accountable for the evil qualities of his acts? This article relates Arendt’s ‘thought’ and Strawson’s and Bilgrami’s discussion of ‘reactive attitudes’ and Sartre’s concept of ‘bad faith’. To find a basis for moral accountable in seemingly thoughtless cases like Eichmann’s. Although Arendt’s Eichmann is an extreme example, finding a basis to hold him accountable is valuable because ‘little Eichmanns’ will persist as long as impersonal forces structure and depress reactive attitudes.

Keywords Hannah Arendt, Adolf Eichmann, reactive attitudes, Jean-Paul Sartre, P. F. Strawson, thoughtlessness

No necessity compels a man to walk, who voluntarily moves steps forward; yet when he steps forward, he must of necessity walk. So everything that is present to the eye of Provi- dence must assuredly be, although there be nothing in its own nature to constitute this necessity. (Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, book V)

Corresponding author: Benjamin A. Schupmann, Department of Political Science, Columbia University, USA. Email: [email protected] 128 Philosophy and Social Criticism 40(2)

Introduction Is a devoted Nazi or a zombie bureaucrat a greater moral and political problem? The answer may seem too obvious at first: the devoted Nazi. Yet zombie bureaucrats, which is to say ‘thoughtless’ or ‘sleepwalking’ people, represent a far more substantial and ubi- quitous problem than they may appear to at first. They too have contributed to the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century; however, they have done so apparently oblivious to the monstrous qualities of their actions. They seem to lack any immoral intentions, even any intentionality at all. This thoughtlessness makes responding to the zombie bureaucrat, and addressing the moral and political threats he poses, substantially more difficult than responding to the devoted Nazi. Thus, thoughtlessness presents a serious and unique philosophical problem. This article builds on Hannah Arendt’s account of Eichmann, taking seriously her characterization of him as an exemplar of the phenomenon of thoughtlessness, and seeks to find a space for agency and moral accountability in a world where external, impersonal forces increasingly constrain and even dominate our decisions and actions. Arendt depicts Eichmann as one of the greatest criminals of the 20th century not because he was committed to the values of Nazism and anti-Semitism, but precisely because he was just a bureaucratic ‘cog’. This article aims to move beyond Arendt, however, by answering a dilemma her account raises: if Eichmann, an architect of the Nazi Final Solution, truly was a thoughtless ‘cog’, lacking in intentionality, can we really hold him morally accountable for the evil qualities of his acts? To answer this dilemma and find a basis to hold him accountable, this article looks to relate Arendt’s ‘thought’ to discussions in analytic philosophy, in particular, P. F. Strawson’s discussion of ‘reactive attitudes’, the normatively charged reactions others adopt to one’s acts, and Akeel Bilgrami’s relation of agency, normativity, intentionality and self-knowledge to one another through the lens of reactive attitudes. Their work unpacks and deepens our understanding of thought. Having unpacked thought, this article then finds a basis to hold Eichmann accountable in Sartre’s concept of ‘bad faith’. Although Arendt’s Eichmann is undoubtedly an extreme case of thoughtlessness, finding a basis to hold him accountable is valuable precisely because ‘little Eichmanns’1 exist and will continue to exist as long as impersonal forces structure and depress reactive attitudes. This article is organized into five sections. The first describes Arendt’s typology of ‘thought’ and its antithesis ‘knowledge’. The second unpacks ‘thought’, clarifying some blurred boundaries in Arendt’s account using concepts from Strawson and Bil- grami. The third section outlines three modern structures of domination and the unique challenges they present to thought, describing how they condition ‘thoughtlessness’. The fourth analyses Eichmann, arguing thoughtlessness is a far deeper problem than Arendt realized: Eichmann was not just unintentionally evil but had lost the possibility to behave intentionally. Finally, the fifth section shows that, by analysing him through Sartre’s concept of bad faith, Eichmann can nevertheless be held morally accountable. It argues that, although Eichmann was a victim of domination, his decision to objecti- vize himself and allow himself to become a victim of this structure – to stop adopting self-reactive attitudes – was his and his alone. Through appeal to bad faith, this article finds a basis to hold even the most extreme cases of thoughtlessness accountable, Schupmann 129 providing a mechanism to reconcile such cases of apparent determinism and moral responsbility.

I What is thought? For Hannah Arendt, one of the great problems of modernity was the disappearance of thought from life. This disappearance, the phenomenon of thoughtlessness, was responsible for some of the worst catastrophes the world has known.2 She thought it stemmed from confusion about the nature of thought and knowledge, and the modern tendency to reduce thought to knowledge. Against this reductive tendency, she argued that, in fact, one could know very much yet still be completely thoughtless.3 ‘Thought’ has nothing to do with what one does, say, when presented with a math problem or trying to recall what someone said yesterday – she considered these to be examples of ‘knowing’ not ‘thinking’. Arendt sought to conceptually distinguish thought and knowledge, thinking and knowing, to make clear thought’s importance in order to then restore its place in human life. Arendt credits Kantwith first distinguishing thought and knowledge through his concepts Vernunft and Verstand.4 Although they are often translated as reason and rationality, respectively, Arendt translated Vernunft as thought and Verstand as knowledge.5 She conceived of Verstand as representing the rationalism of the Enlightenment, an immediate and complete view of truth. It implies deductive or syllogistic knowledge, something verifiable.6 Doubt about its truth can be overcome by appealing back to the original deductive process and demonstrating it again. Because of its deductive, truth-oriented nature, Arendt believes that knowledge concludes in the ‘irresistible force of necessity’: once one knows such a truth, one cannot help but abide by it.7 In addition, because of its deductive and verifiable nature, knowledge has affinities with instrumental rationality (Weber’s Zweckrationalita¨t).8 Thus, in Arendt’s typology, knowing also implies means-ends reasoning, the reasoning one adopts to realize a goal. Yet there are questions that the object-oriented reasoning of knowledge cannot solve. For example, Kant’s antinomies of reason or presuppositions of practical reason cannot be determined through the reasoning of Verstand. Arendt sees Vernunft, thought, as its necessary complement. She identifies thought with Socrates’ dialectical reasoning; dia- lectic drives one beyond the limits of what can be known, examining and challenging the premises and assumptions underlying one’s beliefs in an attempt to expose contradic- tions and inconsistencies.9 Thought is reflexive, it adjusts and changes itself through this reflexivity. Thought is not means-ends reasoning but ‘of itself’: it is the subject thinking and rethinking its thoughts as a subject. Arendt argues that thought lacks the object- orientation knowledge has and engages in an evolving, rather than static, process. Thus, the product of thought is not irresistible or complete truth, but something different. She thinks thought is value-oriented. In her typology, thought seems to relate to value- rationality (Weber’s Wertrationalita¨t) and it is the mode of reasoning one adopts in order to analyse and evaluate one’s relationship, and the relationships of others, to the world as agents.10 As knowledge implies necessity, thought implies freedom for Arendt.11 Arendt believed Socrates exemplified the nature of thought. She has in mind the Socrates who wandered the agora, debating everyone he met and driving them into 130 Philosophy and Social Criticism 40(2) aporetic frustration. To illustrate what thought was, she looks at the three similes Socrates uses to describe himself: gadfly, midwife and ray. As a gadfly, Socrates arouses Athenians, who would otherwise sleep on undisturbed, from their quotidian lives. Similarly, the ray implies that Socrates interrupts a normalized, mechanical rou- tine of life. But the ray paralyses, triggering an interruption that provokes investigation into the rationale for what is being scrutinized. The gadfly arouses one out of a com- fortable, habitual life; the ray’s paralysis causes doubt and questions about what had become almost natural. As a midwife, Socrates purges Athenians of their ‘stillborn’ ideas, confronting beliefs taken for granted to see whether they could survive critical engagement. All three examples show that thinking is about overcoming the routiniza- tion of life, ordinary habits in behavior and language, ideology and prejudice. She thought Socrates’ goal was to inculcate thought in his fellow Athenians, who were by no means stupid but had come to take for granted the presuppositions that structured their lives. While revealing, Arendt’s typology of thought and knowledge is not without problems. Knowledge seems to combine three conceptually distinct activities of reasoning. As noted, it first implies a priori deductive reasoning. Second, it implies an a posteriori process-orientation of instrumental reasoning. Finally, it implies inductive reasoning. Yet all three of these forms of reasoning are conceptually distinct and deal with very different processes and outcomes. Similarly, Arendt’s thought seems to combine several categorically distinct concepts of reasoning. At times it implies normativity in its evalua- tive disposition toward phenomena. It also implies agency. Finally, it embodies a type of non-syllogistic, dialogical reasoning. Arendt’s concepts of thought and knowledge seem to try to do too much.

II Unpacking thought with reactive attitudes Arendt’s inclination to subsume these seemingly distinct concepts under the broader categories of thought and knowledge was not wrong, however. By appealing to a discussion begun by P. F. Strawson, and continued by Akeel Bilgrami, of the relationship between reactive attitudes and concepts of agency, value, intentionality and self- knowledge, ‘thought’ can be both unpacked and strengthened.12 Unpacking Arendt’s thought with this discussion shows that, in dealing with any one analytic concept, one actually deals with them all and thus thought and knowledge are appropriate umbrella concepts for a series of essential and interrelated questions from moral philosophy. Because they will be shown to be interrelated, any one facet can be used to link them together and to link them to Arendt’s ‘thought’; here, intentionality is used as this bridge. Intentionality can be defined as ‘the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs’.13 It deals with questions of how a mind thinks things and how it is possible for a mind to introduce causes into the world. Arendt argues thought orients a human subject, as a mind, toward the world. Intentionality is a distinctly human capacity and it adheres from that subjective status: an object cannot think something, let alone orient itself toward it. Only a subject can have intentional properties. Schupmann 131

Intentionality can be more deeply articulated by appealing to Spinoza’s distinction between the first- and third-person perspectives. These perspectives respectively form the poles of agent and spectator.14 The first-person perspective is agential: one adopts it when one forms intentions toward the world and acts accordingly.15 It is only from the first-person perspective that one is able to perceive value in the world, because it is only from an agential perspective that the value-properties of the world become apparent at all. The third-person perspective is instead transcendent or objective; it is detached and predicates what an object will do next, deduced from that object’s properties or nature.16 Like knowledge, it deals with non-normative factual accounts of objects in the world.17 It deals with these, because objects have no mind – they are predetermined by and reducible to their physical properties. Objects cannot adopt an intentional attitude. Intentional states imply agency: only a subject can adopt intentional attitudes toward the world.18 A subject lacking agency would perceive the world as completely determined and, as such, would construct his or her thoughts about the world in a purely passive vernacular: ‘[X] happened/is happening/will happen (to me).’19 Because of this passive stance, the subject – if she or he can even be described as such – would be incapable of forming intentional attitudes. The passive subject would be unable to form commitments toward the world, i.e. beliefs and desires he or she would be willing to defend.20 This is because, insofar as the world is determined, forming commitments to it makes little sense. The third-person perspective perceives non-normative facts about the world and understands these facts in strictly causal, rather than intentional, terms. When one adopts, not the first-, but the third-person perspective, one represents oneself as an object proceeding along a predetermined course. Conversely, forming intentions toward the world presupposes agency and the ability to perceive the world through the first-person perspective. The possibility to affect the world allows one to position one’s intentions toward the world in such a way so as to represent facets of the world. Thus, the two themes of agency and intentionality are linked – when one adopts the agential perspective, one must be capable of intentionality. Following its relation to intentionality, thought perceives the world from the agential perspective and allows one to form value-commitments and perceive oneself as affecting the world. Normativity can be linked to agency. Traditional accounts of agency build upon a meta- physically grounded, truly free will. Against such accounts, Strawson famously argued that one need not seek out some independent non-normative, metaphysical source for agency. He instead shows how a pragmatic approach can ground moral responsibility in agency through a category of acts classified as ‘reactive attitudes’. Reactive attitudes are simply those cases when we hold someone accountable or responsible for an act; for example, by blaming them, praising them, or showing resentment toward them. So, rather than determine whether something could be attributed causally to an agential act and then evaluate its normative quality, Strawson reverses this process and grounds freedom in a structure of reactive attitudes: he looks at when others hold someone responsible for an act – the others’ reactive attitudes denote one’s responsibility for one’s actions; from the presence of this reaction, it can imputed that one was free when acting because a normative quality is attached to one’s acts.21 Our practice of holding ourselves and others responsible for our actions is independent of non-normative metaphysical requirements. Instead, they express an essential feature of human life in its intersubjective nature. Our agency is affected by 132 Philosophy and Social Criticism 40(2) our evaluation of our acts, by holding one another responsible for our actions.22 We natu- rally manifest these reactive attitudes, literally perceiving the intentional acts others, and ourselves, perform. And reactive attitudes are normative because they evaluate the quality of actions as well as the quality and character of the agent responsible while conferring agency. Here, value and agency are co-implicatory. Intentionality, value and agency are all facets of the same underlying phenomenon. Because of the interrelationship of these issues, it becomes clear that Arendt did indeed legitimately subsume those seemingly different concepts under the single concept ‘thought’. By showing these questions both are interrelated and have affinities to aspects of Arendt’s work on thought, ‘thought’ is shown to have a stronger foundation and a deeper reach. The analytic account draws out and adds a great deal to Arendt’s typology. It guides our attention to the relationship between language and intersubjectivity and our sense of our own agency. This can be illustrated through the example of raising a child. When one raises a child, it is only through one’s teaching her that her actions have normative qualities that she comes to see herself as responsible for them and to understand her acts’ intersubjective effects. Through this process, she comes to understand her own power and agency while appreciating the responsibility it carries. By appealing to the intersubjective quality of reactive attitudes, and involving the relationship of pragmatics and the core of language in agency, Arendt’s account of thought explodes. Unfortunately, the inverse holds too: the absence of reactive attitudes undermines conditions for agency, particularly when we lose our self-reactive attitudes.23 If a society were wholly to lack reactive attitudes and conceive of itself in strictly deterministic terms, it would be to ‘change the subject to something other than our [human] selves’.24 Although reactive attitudes are natural, they are natural in the way language is natural, as a social practice. Here, Arendt’s thoughtlessness enters into the picture. If we were to stop reacting to the normative and agential qualities of the world, we would gradually stop perceiving them in ourselves and others. External conditions that depress reactive attitudes, that depress the attribution of responsibility, would affect one’s understanding both of one’s agency and one’s sense of value in the world.

III Sources of domination in modernity Drawing on Max Weber, Arendt is concerned about several phenomena unique in the 20th century that dominate human behavior and self-perception, affecting, by extension, reactive attitudes. This section briefly outlines the most significant phenomena in the back- ground of Arendt’s discussion of thoughtlessness: rationalization, disenchantment and scientism, to lay the groundwork for discussing their practical effects on reactive attitudes.

1 Rationalization Rationalization, briefly, is the domination of human life by impersonal abstractions and structures; it limits the will through external constraints. Rationalization can be defined as the reorientation of action toward abstract formal rules; the reorientation of human life toward an impersonal and objective order.25 It spawns the recognition that ‘one can, in principle, master all things by calculation’.26 Modern bureaucracy is the Schupmann 133 institutionalization of rationalization. It is the optimization of administrative functions according to purely objective considerations.27 Bureaucratization is similar to the changes in the production process Marx identified with modernity: the separation of the worker from the material means of his activity,28 the separation of the worker from his human or private character,29 and the increasing specialization of the work performed.30 From this process, an institution can proceed according to calculable rules, without regard for persons, and sine ira ac studio – without anger or bias.31 The drawback is that rationalized institutions become autonomous, dominating their human creators like Frankenstein’s monster and acting without regard for their ‘master’s’ original purpose.32 While there are many ways bureaucracy can dominate human life, what matters most for this discussion is how the bureaucrat is dominated by the material means of his activity and the organization as a whole.33 The bureaucrat’s interests, in employment and promotion, come to reflect the interests of the institution. The individual bureaucrat is completely ‘ready to subordinate himself to his superiors without any will of his own’.34 However, even if a bureaucrat wanted to revolt, there is little he could actually do. The nature of specialization makes the bureaucrat myopic and impotent. He is myopic because he knows only how to perform his own specialized duty. He is impotent because he does not know enough to affect or impede the institution’s operations. Thus, there is both a positive reason (material and ideological provisions) and a negative reason (helplessness) for the bureaucrat to conform to the institution’s impersonal laws.

2 Disenchantment Disenchantment is the disappearance of definite value in the world; it affects agency by depriving it of its value-orientation. Disenchantment is an outgrowth of modern scientific method.35 A modern bias, at times called ‘naturalism’, is that the sole measure of epistemic legitimacy is conformity with scientific method.36 While this approach has indisputably increased factual knowledge of phenomena, Weber did not think that it was without problems. For this discussion, the central problem with disenchantment is that it has undermined our ability to perceive immaterial qualities. There are two outcomes of this. First, it leads to an infinite process of the accumulation of facts.37 This directionless nature comes about in part through the increasing specialization of scientific discovery.38 This growth of knowledge has allowed humanity to attain substantial control over its environment and the conditions necessary to prolong life and create better conditions for it. Second, the understanding of and control over phenomena that scientific knowledge engenders does not yield underlying meaning. To the contrary, Weber feared that scientific knowledge robs the world of meaning because it shows there is nothing happening ‘behind’ phenomena.39 If the world is nothing but material causal sequences, then the problem of where substantive value adheres enters the picture. Modern science seems to have eliminated unscientific modes of understanding the world, yet it does not appear to have any means of filling the void they have left behind. Weber puts the problem suc- cinctly saying: ‘Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’’’40 The disenchantment of the world dominates life negatively. It does not deprive humans of their 134 Philosophy and Social Criticism 40(2) freedom and agency directly, as a rationalized institution does. It leaves agents the freedom to do as they wish, but it deprives that freedom of any meaningful orientation.

3 Scientism The disenchantment of the world has ‘scientistic’ implications. Scientism shows a different problem arising from disenchantment.41 Scientism shows that, insofar as matter is reducible to its constituent pieces and antecedent causes, everything is already in motion and determined; it denies the will altogether. The domination scientism exhibits can be articulated with the distinction between the first- and third-person perspectives.42 The first- and third-person perspectives respectively correspond to an enchanted, normatively rich and free world and a causally determined world of phenomena. The first-person, enchanted world allows one to feel normatively engaged with it in a non-arbitrary way. One perceives value in it and reacts to perceived values by practically engaging with them.43 Conversely, a disenchanted world lends itself to the detached third-person perspective. This detached perspective constitutes, and is a necessary condition for, scientific method. The third-person perspective is what allows for the understanding and mastery of phenomena, the positive outcome of modern science. Scientific distance is not a problem when one perceives the world from this detached, non-normative perspective sometimes. But when it becomes difficult or impossible to perceive the world from anything but the third-person perspective, our perspective has become perverted and a source of domination. In such a world, the most normative engagement agents can have is a sense of utility, gain and desire.44 Disturbing in itself, this myopia has a wider implication: one cannot perceive agency or value, only antecedent causes. Everything appears predetermined. By accumulating enough knowledge of antecedent causes, everything will be in principle knowable and controllable. And there will be no limits to what can be accomplished. The predominance of the third-person perspective in modernity progressively undermines the possibility for human agents to perceive themselves as agents, to perceive value in the world and to form intentions. Rationalization, disenchantment and scientism represent different effects of the same underlying problem of the third-person perspective’s predominance in the modern world. Rationalization imposes an external constraint on human agency due to its imposing structure. The disenchantment of the world imposes a peculiar, negative constraint: it deprives acts of substantive meaning so that freedom, insofar as it is real, becomes meaningless having no values toward which it may be oriented. Scientism imposes an internal constraint on human agency by structuring one’s perspective so as to see the world only in detached, causal terms, undermining the perception of agency and responsibility altogether. Wherever they are present, they all contribute to diminishing the basis for and practice of reactive attitudes – and by extension, thought.

IV ‘We would cease to be agents if we ceased to have reactive attitudes’ The extreme predominance of knowing, i.e. this third-person perspective, alarmed Arendt because it signaled a corresponding disappearance of thought. While the theoretical Schupmann 135 implications of the above three sources of domination were enough to trigger this alarm, Arendt was more concerned for its clear practical effects. Above all, she believed the case of Adolf Eichmann exemplified thought’s disappearance. She coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe his thoughtlessness and its accompanying, peculiar moral ignorance. The reactive attitude ‘core’ of thought allows an even more radical and insidious conclusion to be drawn from Arendt’s diagnosis: not only were individuals becoming able to perform the most monstrous deeds without any sense of immorality at all, but, with the decline in reactive attitudes, they were losing their faculty of thought altogether. I have argued that reactive attitudes are essential to human development by allowing one to perceive one’s normative, intentional, agential and reflexive faculties. But this relationship can also be inverted: ‘[W]e would cease to be agents if we ceased to have reactive attitudes.’45 If an individual’s behavior is determined externally, it implies he or she is morally irresponsible – and to adopt reactive attitudes toward such behavior would be irrational. And this difficulty presents a deep problem for the attribution of responsibility, such as when we seek to hold a Nazi bureaucrat responsible for his central role in constructing and executing Hitler’s the Final Solution. The implication is that those external structures of domination associated with Arendt’s analysis of thoughtlessness, i.e. rationalization, disenchantment and scientism, besides their direct qualities of domination, were progressively determining human life. By displacing reactive attitudes, they were undermining the conditions that enable thought in the first place. And individuals were becoming truly irresponsible in the process.

1 Eichmann’s thoughtlessness In 1960, Mossad agents captured Adolf Eichmann, a former lieutenant-colonel in the Nazis’ Schutzstaffel (SS), in Argentina and brought him to Israel where he stood trial for the crimes against humanity he committed in ‘the Final Solution to the Jewish Question’. As transportation administrator, Eichmann directly and substantially contributed to the Holocaust Genocide. While covering his trial for The New Yorker, Arendt was taken aback by his self- perception as morally irresponsible for the Holocaust, which then served as the basis for her articulation of the problem of thoughtlessness. Inspired by his lack of moral accountability, she defined the banality of evil as ‘evil deeds, committed on a grand scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological convic- tion in the doer, whose only personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary shallowness’.46 The paradox of modern immorality is that the most extreme evil manifests along with a very peculiar innocence. Eichmann saw himself simply as unquestioningly obedient. His duty was transportation administration and he dutifully administrated transportation – his duty just happened to include the construction and administration of a system for the mass deportation of Jews first to ghettos and then to concentration camps for the purpose of genocide. Eichmann believed he had the ‘ill-fortune’ to be the bureaucrat handling this task, but whether to construct this system was not his decision. His task was merely to engineer how to do it best. At his trial, Eichmann insisted on his innocence: he never intended to commit any crimes, to do anything illegal, or to act 136 Philosophy and Social Criticism 40(2) immorally. He saw himself as a good man and thought his being on trial was as arbitrary as his participation in the Final Solution! Eichmann believed he was guilty only in terms of strict liability. Eichmann’s explanation seems preposterous and it is natural to ask ‘How could he expect anyone to believe his claim to innocence?’ But to brand Eichmann a ‘liar’ would be to miss Arendt’s point and to ignore the depth of the problem of thoughtlessness. Arendt argues that not even a hint of deliberate self-deception ever came forth; he was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’.47 He convinced Arendt that he really had not ever intended to perform monstrosities or crimes against humanity; the only thing he intended was to do his duty as a law-abiding bureaucrat and citizen. Arendt believes Eichmann wholly lacked the capacity to conceive of his situation as anything but one of his duty to follow commands and laws – he never thought to evaluate the meaning, qua value-rationality, of the Final Solution at all. On those terms, he actually did his ‘duty’ and solved ‘the problem’ he was given – all with cheerful innocence. He simply could not see the monstrous qualities of his actions or of the institution of which he was a member. ‘[Eichmann] never realized what he was doing ... He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.’48 He understood himself to be, and behaved as, a cog in a bureaucratic machine; he was a predetermined part of a whole capable only of his particular specialized role within that and incapable of perceiving the big picture or understanding the implications of his actions.49 Thus, he practically realized evil without ever intending that his actions have an evil quality at all. This is why Arendt sees him as a man whose only real distinction was extraordinary shallowness. But even if Eichmann had a will to do otherwise, Arendt argues that, under totalitarian systems, resistance is an impossibility because it is utterly meaningless.50 It would not create meaningful practical change. Neither would the moral statement of resistance have any substantial ripple in such a system. Moreover, because of the type of specialization entailed by rationalization, it is difficult even to see how one could meaningfully resist. Faced with such a system, human action is compelled toward conformity and submission. But beyond that, the ethical and social structure above Eichmann further com- pounded the situation: the bureaucrat was ordered to perform a legal but immoral act. As such, Eichmann’s behavior was first wholly in accord with the law and wholly in accord with what was expected of him; ‘he did not have to fall back upon his conscience’.51 He simply aligned himself with the demands and expectations of those around him. Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil’ suggests something further for Eichmann’s situation: he could have been virtually anyone. Any alternative ‘cog’ would have proceeded exactly as Eichmann had. The conclusion of Arendt’s diagnosis is how easily humans can be conditioned and made complacent in the most outrageously immoral situations.52 Eichmann lacked mens rea altogether. His evil acts were banal because he acted with complete thoughtlessness. Noting that the ability to speak is related to the ability to think, Arendt draws our attention to how Eichmann spewed out ‘stock phrases and self-invented cliche´s’ at his trial, evidence of the extent to which he had become completely thoughtless.53 Because he no longer thought, his language itself had become mechanized and empty. Voicing words Schupmann 137 but failing to communicate, Eichmann seems like a living, breathing Chinese Room. His language had been reduced to vacuous sound. Thoughtlessness appears mechanized: Arendt describes unthinking men as ‘sleepwalkers’.54 She wrote: ‘Kant once observed that ‘‘stupidity is caused by a wicked heart.’’ This is not true: absence of thought is not stupidity; it can be found in highly intelligent people, and a wicked heart is not its cause; it is probably the other way round, that wickedness may be caused by absence of thought.’55 The novelty that the 20th century has introduced for immorality and catastrophe is that both could now arise out of thoughtlessness – the mechanization of human life – and are committed unintentionally.

2 Thoughtlessness and resentment Arendt’s diagnosis of the cause of thoughtlessness in modernity points to the rationalization Eichmann underwent as a bureaucrat. But this alone cannot explain how he, with cheerful innocence, could tell himself and the world that he was neither causally nor morally responsible for the Final Solution, let alone that he was a good man. By returning to the concept of reactive attitudes, it can be explained how Eichmann completely lost his faculty of thought. The absence or significant diminution of reactive attitudes would have a corresponding effect on an individual’s agency, sense of value, and intentionality. As discussed above, in a world in which reactive attitudes are depressed, thought is correspondingly depressed.56 And without thought, one loses one of the most essential qualities of what it is to be human. By leaning on the relationship between reactive attitudes and thought, the case of Eichmann can move beyond Arendt’s characterization of him as a rationalized bureaucrat in a totalitarian state and society, who performed his highly specialized job sine ira ac studio by taking the truth of his moral disposition. By admitting that Eichmann was a sleepwalker without the intent to commit immoral acts, we come to see that Eichmann did not really intend anything whatsoever. Eichmann saw himself in his role as determined and adopted the corresponding self-reactive attitude. In perceiving himself as an object, he no longer experienced his intentionality or his agency and he was no longer able to perceive moral qualities in the world – all he could see were the processes sur- rounding him, in which he was just a mediating cog. Eichmann had lost the first-person perspective altogether. So he became precisely that: a reliable, rationalized cog with no power to act on its own, merely situated between and determined by its antecedents. With this self-reactive attitude and the reactive attitudes of others, it should be unsur- prising that Eichmann gave the impression that he was shallow. But he genuinely believed in his innocence for reasons besides being shallow. In the absence of any reactive attitudes that would hold him morally accountable, Eichmann adopted the third- person perspective toward himself. As an ideal-type, Eichmann demonstrates the extreme case of what can happen to individuals in a thoroughly rationalized context. He implicates the relationship between reactive attitudes and freedom. Given the link between reactive attitudes and thoughtlessness, a disenchanted or a naturalized world has troubling moral implications: the most horrific deeds can be committed by the most banal actions and the individuals doing them will not be responsible. 138 Philosophy and Social Criticism 40(2)

V Bringing agency back in: Bad faith and moral accountability Although an extreme case, Eichmann suggests that humans really can be rationalized, behaving as mere objects whose end is determined by someone or something else. This raises some questions. As structures of domination become more pervasive, as the world is further rationalized and disenchanted and reactive attitudes are correspondingly numbed, where does that leave human agency? What place is there for any sort of meaningful, human existence? Is there some way to re-enchant the world by finding a locus of responsibility and agency – grounds by which to hold individuals accountable and thereby adopt reactive attitudes? These questions bring us to the limits of Arendt’s account of thoughtlessness. Her account does not provide a strong basis to salvage moral responsibility: insofar as Eichmann really was thoughtless, there really does not seem to be a way to hold him accountable for his actions except through strict liability – but strict liability is, normatively speaking, no different than putting a driver on trial for an accident caused by the car’s mechanical failure. Neither, then, is there a space to attribute agency to Eichmann. For if Arendt is correct and Eichmann never intended anything, how could one force him to stand trial and be executed?

1 Eichmann’s bad faith Fortunately, there is a way to salvage thought and moral responsibility without denying the validity of Arendt’s account. Jean-Paul Sartre would have no problem accepting Arendt’s account of Eichmann’s irresponsibility at face value while still recoiling against his cheerful innocence and holding him responsible for his crimes. By following Sartre, we can have our cake and eat it: we can attribute responsibility to Eichmann without dismissing the depth of the problem of thoughtlessness. Confronted with the case of Eichmann, Sartre might have said that Eichmann was acting in bad faith,meaning Eichmann deceived himself about his agency. The reason why the case of Eich- mann is counter-intuitive is because, when reactive attitudes cease, it is not agency that disappears but the perception of agency. Thus, the problem of thoughtlessness is not that Eichmann or those around him actually lacked agency, they merely ceased to think of themselves as agents and ceased perceiving their world as laden with normative qualities. Bad faith changes the diagnosis of thoughtlessness: while Eichmann may have really seen himself as a cog in a machine and, thus, as not morally responsible for his actions, this perception is correct only as a first-order conception of decision-making and accountability. But, on a prior second-order level, Eichmann’s apparent lack of agency hinged on his self-perception as a being without agency: he chose to believe in and embrace his objectified status as an obedient, predetermined being.57 Eichmann had, in a sense, conceptually divided himself into a factual and a normative self.58 He surren- dered his agency when he decided to stop adopting self-reactive attitudes and retreat into the sheer facticity of the third-person perspective. As the self-abnegation of one’s agency, it means he fled from the demands of agency and decisions. Schupmann 139

Eichmann took refuge in the fact that it was not he who willed the Final Solution; it was someone else who willed and caused it: the Nazi leadership culminating into Hitler.59 He saw the Nazi leadership, the first cause, as the one intending and acting immorally in this case. Factically, Eichmann saw himself as a cog in a bureaucratic machine. He thought his situation was determined by antecedent conditions over which he had no control. Because of this, despite the immorality of the situation, this quality was never within Eichmann’s responsibility. He had no say in what happened. And, impressively, Eichmann seems to have recognized that the Final Solution, among other things, was morally wrong.60 But it was not his immoral decision. The above account is true only after a bad faith ‘bifurcation’ has occurred, which allows Eichmann neatly to separate himself and see himself only as a factical being. His bad faith allowed him to flee the necessity of making decisions, of exercising agency, or being morally responsible. It allowed him to see his acts as non-choices, the only possible thing to do in such a situation. Eichmann deferred his moral responsibility and his agency in this false bifurcation. Eichmann freed himself from the burden of his existen- tial decision-making by objectifying himself.61 In doing so, Eichmann became like Pon- tius Pilate: faced with a deep moral decision and responsibility, he washed his hands of the matter altogether. Returning to the first- and second-order conceptions, on that first-order, Eichmann really was an object. He saw himself as an object and could not think of alternatives to what was determined. But on the second-order Eichmann chose to see himself from that third-person perspective, to objectify himself, and to allow his situation to determine what he was and what he would do. He adopted the corresponding self-reactive attitudes that one would hold to an object rather than a subject.62 This second-order act was his decision, a decision against his agency. His world was constituted by others who had made the same decision about him and about themselves. Arendt’s sleepwalkers are these men acting in bad faith: capable of committing the absurd and most horrific crimes without ever ‘intending’ anything evil, they are still complicit because of their abnegation of their moral duty to decide. By recognizing where agency lies in this situation – and how it is possible for a human being to become ‘thoughtless’ – one can reattribute agency and responsibility to them and re-enchant the world, at least in part. One can, with Arendt’s analysis, accept Eich- mann’s claims and admit that he really never intended to commit evil acts. But our moral outrage, our intuition that Eichmann must be somehow responsible, is saved by recognizing that Eichmann was responsible on the second-order and that it was bad faith on his part to adopt the third-person perspective toward himself, for by allowing the third-person perspective to dominate his self-conception he failed to live up to the real conditions of agency and intentionality.63 His culpability and immorality lie in the second-order decision to believe that he was merely an object, a cog, within the Nazi bureaucratic apparatus. There is no one to blame but himself for that decision.

2 Eichmann’s negligence With Sartre’s concept of bad faith, we can now discuss Eichmann’s responsibility beyond strict liability. Eichmann’s defense rested on his lack of responsibility: holding 140 Philosophy and Social Criticism 40(2) someone accountable for acts caused by someone else, acts the agent had no intention to commit, is unreasonable. The driver of a car is not accountable when her mechanic forgets to install brake pads properly and her car causes an accident. Neither should Eichmann be punished for something he never intended. Perhaps. But, what Eichmann can and should be punished for is his gross moral negligence in the face of the foreseeable consequences of his second-order decision and the subsequent first-order actions that it implied. And it is here that the cog metaphor falls apart. Eichmann’s second- order renunciation of agency and his decision not to decide on an obviously morally loaded issue is something for which he is responsible. That is, circumventing the case of strict liability and his self-objectification, Eichmann can be held accountable not for the acts that he committed as an object but for his very ignorance and refusal to decide – an unreasonable and grossly negligent ignorance, carrying the correspondingly appropriate reactive attitudes – of having done the immoral acts that he did. Through this second-order consideration of responsibility, agency and normativity are shown to be still in the picture, even in someone who is as objectified as Eichmann was. Through this, there is a legitimate way to hold Eichmann responsible for those acts he commits in his objectified status. It was too obvious that, by blindly obeying whatever orders came his way, Eichmann would be implicated in atrocities. Eichmann implicitly signed on with Hitler and genocide through his second-order decision. He was indeed morally responsible for his acts. Eichmann’s gross negligence brings us back to the original question of whether a zombie bureaucrat is worse than a devoted Nazi. A devoted Nazi can be easily recognized and dealt with. A zombie bureaucrat, lacking in any substantive ethos and sub- mitting to his environment, is a far more difficult problem. Taken in the abstract and individually, a zombie bureaucrat may be harmless. Yet there are substantial barriers to dealing with them because of the difficulty of addressing the underlying problem of reactive attitudes. And given the power that a bureaucratic order grants to whomever happens to climb to the top, a society comprised of thoughtless, zombie bureaucrats, a society of little Eichmanns, represents a profound danger to itself and those around it. Combined, they become an army capable of anything and impervious to any moral reasoning. Their total neutrality with regard to whomever is at the helm of the bureaucratic apparatus attributes an enormous power to that leader. Individuals who abandon their will to structures of domination end up becoming powerful ‘tools’ in the service of aims that they are unable to dissociate themselves from. As a zombie bureaucrat led by devoted Nazis and, doubtlessly, working with countless other zombie bureaucrats, Eichmann achieved an evil so great that it still characterizes our world today. While I would be hard-pressed to argue a zombie bureaucrat is worse than a devoted Nazi, the question of which is a greater threat is far less one-sided and obvious than it seems at first.

3 A totalized first-person perspective? A natural concern is that, while saving agency, this account risks totalizing the first- person perspective and rendering someone accountable for literally everything, even in cases of clear compulsion. The problem, then, is the question of how to leave space Schupmann 141 for agency and freedom in the first-person perspective, without veering in the opposite direction of the dilemma and obscuring the third-person perspective? There are legitimate constraints, legitimate instances of the third-person perspective. In other words, of course agents also have non-normative and sometimes unconscious dispositions that also determine their behavior. Although this is beyond the scope of this article, an outline of the limits of both first- and third-person perspectives would be a valuable philosophical contribution. Given the external structures of domination outlined in the third section of this article, the world that confronts us today is far removed from one that risks a totalized first- person perspective. To the contrary, our mind recoils at the case of Eichmann precisely because it is so plausible that he really was thoughtless, yet we are still morally incensed by what he did. The aim of this article has been to resolve an aporia in Arendt’s thought: is there space for agency and moral accountability in a world where we are increasingly confronted by external structures that constrain or even dominate our decisions and actions? By examining the case of Eichmann, by finding a basis to hold him accountable even when he truly was ‘thoughtless’, I hope to have provided a way out of that aporia and saved agency, even in the face of the most thoroughly rationalized institutions of modernity.

Conclusion: Re-enchanting our world? Freedom hinges on one’s ability to decide by deliberating on the qualities one perceives in the world. Part of becoming freer lies in recognizing qualities in the world one could not perceive before. Perceiving oneself and one’s actions under a richer description, laden with a greater number of qualities, expands the basis for deliberation and the grounds for an informed and even rational decision. Greater self-knowledge is, in the end, greater freedom because of the implications it holds for the questions it is related to, agency, normativity and intentionality, as well as why it is related to them. Likewise, when our perception of the world is impoverished, qualities like ‘thought’ are impoverished too. Adolf Eichmann’s thoughtlessness carries disturbing consequences. As Arendt con- cluded, from thoughtlessness, the greatest catastrophe and evils can be committed unintentionally. Eichmann lost the ability to perceive the normative qualities of his actions, coming to see himself as an unfree bureaucratic ‘cog’ in the process. He could see only the structural constraints of his rationalized world. His second-order decision against deciding may defer his liability for his actions as a bureaucrat, but the responsibility for his decision not to be responsible, as well as the foreseeable consequences, was his alone. And when one considers it in context, Eichmann’s negligence is overwhelming. We can and must hold him accountable for it. His decision was the weakest and most cowardly decision of them all. Although Eichmann tried to flee his responsibility, and his rationalized world abetted him, he could not. In the end, the banality of evil hinges on a decision to blind oneself to the moral qualities of the world and to stop seeing its dilemmas as requiring real decisions. And the case of Eichmann reveals the danger of attempting to perceive our world only in the third-person perspective, today being rebottled and valorized as naturalism or ‘scientific’ naturalism.64 142 Philosophy and Social Criticism 40(2)

Our world is imbued with moral qualities – a world in which ‘God is dead’ simply means the responsibility to determine the meaning of our existence hinges on our capacity to deliberate on and act in the way we see as consistent with our highest human capa- cities. Insisting upon perceiving the moral qualities of the world – and reacting to others’ intentional acts as such – is part and parcel of re-enchanting the world.

Notes I am indebted to Akeel Bilgrami, Jean Cohen, Axel Domeyer, Mario De Caro, participants of the Columbia Political Theory Workshop and of the NPSA 2012 Panel on ‘Politics, Rationality and Philosophy’ and Andrew Poe for their help and suggestions that helped to improve this article. 1. Milgram’s famous ‘Behavioral Study of Obedience’ was designed to demonstrate scientifi- cally the thoughtlessness Eichmann exhibited. While aspects of this experiment have been contested, it did successfully demonstrate the extent to which normal individuals could become completely subservient to or dominated by an external ‘authority’ – even when such submission flies in the face of their ethical intuitions and reasoning. Stanley Milgram, Obedi- ence to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009); Stanley Mil- gram, ‘Behavioral Study of Obedience’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67(4) (1963): 371–8. 2. Jay Bernstein, ‘Arendt on Thinking’, in The Cambridge Companion to Arendt, ed. Dana R. Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 277–92 (p. 284). 3. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1977), pp. 287–8. 4. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1978), pp. 13–16; cf. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, ‘Existentialism Politicized: Arendt’s Debt to Jaspers’, The Review of Politics 53(3) (1991): 435–68 (460); Cf. ‘Reason and Understanding’, in A Hegel Dictionary, ed. Michael Inwood (Blackwell Reference Online, 2011), pp. 243–4. 5. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, p. 15. 6. Hannah Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), pp. 159–90 (p. 163); Arendt, The Life of the Mind, pp. 53–64. 7. ibid.: 60–1. 8. Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, pp. 163–4. 9. ibid.; Bernstein, ‘Arendt on Thinking’, p. 281. 10. ibid: 283. 11. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, p. 14. 12. Cf. Akeel Bilgrami, Self-Knowledge and Resentment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. xi–x. 13. Pierre Jacob, ‘Intentionality’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 14. Bilgrami, Self-Knowledge and Resentment, p. 254. 15. Akeel Bilgrami, ‘The Wider Significance of Naturalism: a Genealogical Essay’, in Mario De Caro and David MacArthur (eds) Naturalism and Normativity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), ch. 1 (pp. 24–5). 16. ibid. Schupmann 143

17. Bilgrami, Self-Knowledge and Resentment, p. 251. 18. ibid.: 291–3. 19. ibid.: 161. 20. ibid.: 225–6. 21. ibid.: 52. Pragmatism argues that the metaphysical justification of agency is a philosophical red herring: ‘the problem of determinism and freedom/responsibility is not so much resolved by showing that the objective conditions on being responsible are consistent with one’s being determined but rather dissolved by showing that the practice of holding people responsible relies on no such conditions and needs no external justification in the face of determinism.’ Andrew Eshleman, ‘Moral Responsibility’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 22. P. F. Strawson, ‘Freedom and Resentment’, in Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 1–28; Bilgrami, Self-Knowledge and Resentment, pp. 57, 61. 23. ibid.: 58–9. 24. ibid. 25. Jean L. Cohen, ‘Max Weber and the Dynamics of Rationalized Domination’, Telos 14(4) (1972): 63–86 (66). 26. Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 129–56 (p. 139). 27. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology,2vols,vol.2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 975. 28. Max Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order’, in Political Writings, ed. Peter Lasswell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 130–271 (p. 147); Cohen, ‘Max Weber and Rationalized Domination’: 74–5. 29. Weber, Economy and Society, II, pp. 968, 975. 30. Cohen, ‘Max Weber and Rationalized Domination’: 71. 31. Weber, Economy and Society, II, p. 975. 32. Karl Lo¨with, Max Weber and Karl Marx, trans. H. Fantel (Boston, MA: Allen & Unwin, 1982), p. 48. 33. Weber, ‘Parliament and Government’, p. 147; Cohen, ‘Max Weber and Rationalized Dom- ination’: 84–5; Weber, Economy and Society, II, pp. 987–8. Weber notes: ‘The individual bureaucrat cannot squirm out of the apparatus into which he has been harnessed ... In the great majority of cases he is only a small cog in a ceaselessly moving mechanism which pre- scribes to him an essentially fixed route of march ... [It] cannot be put into motion or arrested by him.’ 34. ibid.: II, p. 968. 35. I am indebted to Axel Domeyer for highlighting that disenchantment has a longer history and that, as Weber recognizes, its earliest form marked the very beginning of the possibility for rational thought at all and was an essential precondition for science and philosophy. 36. This should not be construed to challenge the validity of scientific method in general. 37. Weber, ‘Science’, p. 138. 38. ibid.: 135, 138; Max Weber, ‘Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions’, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 323–59 (p. 351). 39. Weber, ‘Science’, p. 139. 144 Philosophy and Social Criticism 40(2)

40. ibid.: 143, 144. 41. Enchantment does necessarily mean making the world ‘supernatural’; more narrowly, it can aim to reconcile normativity and agency in a way consistent with liberal naturalism. Cf. Mario De Caro and Alberto Voltotini, ‘Is Liberal Naturalism Possible?’, in Naturalism and Norma- tivity, ed. Mario De Caro and David MacArthur (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 69–86. 42. Cf. Bilgrami, Self-Knowledge and Resentment, pp. 251–5; Bilgrami, ‘Wider Significance of Naturalism’, pp. 26, 39. 43. ibid. 44. ibid.: 40. 45. Bilgrami, Self-Knowledge and Resentment, p. 58. 46. Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, p. 159. 47. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 246, 247, 276–7. 48. ibid.: 287–8. 49. Hannah Arendt, ‘Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship’, in Responsibility and Judg- ment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), pp. 17–48 (pp. 29–31); Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 289. 50. ibid.: 232. 51. Arendt, ‘Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship’, p. 41; Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 293. 52. Arendt, ‘Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship’, p. 37. 53. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 49; cf. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, p. 32. 54. ibid.: 191. 55. ibid.: 13. 56. Bilgrami’s provides a rich discussion of thoughtlessness’ effects on Muslims in light of colonial and neo-colonial discourse and how it crystallizes their status from within, shifting the locus of responsibility from merely the West to include also the Muslims themselves. Akeel Bilgrami, ‘What is a Muslim? Fundamental Commitment and Cultural Identity’, Critical Inquiry 18(1) (1992): 821–42 (835–8). His argument shows another side of this discussion: the depression of reactive attitudes can generate extreme victimization, in which individuals allow great evil to happen to them, seeing themselves as helpless victims of unstoppable processes. 57. Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘The Problem of Nothingness’, in Essays in Existentialism, ed. Wade Baskin (New York: Citadel Press, 1993), p. 144. 58. ibid.: 162. 59. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 246–7. 60. ibid. 61. Sartre, ‘The Problem of Nothingness’, p. 177. 62. ibid.: 182. 63. Bilgrami, ‘What is a Muslim?’: 836. 64. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (eds) Naturalism in Question (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (eds) Naturalism and Normativity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).