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ABSTRACT
Contemporary accounts of evil attempt to identify features or properties that transform an act of wrongdoing into an act of evil. What is missing from the discussion, however, is a phenomenology of evil that engages with the standpoint of the subject that undergoes evil. This paper discusses basic themes for a phenomenology of evil through a critical comparison between Hannah Arendt and Jean Améry’s respective conceptions of evil. Central for this discussion is a claim Arendt and Améry share: evil destroys subjectivity and undermines trust in the world. Furthermore, both argue that the perpetrators of evil inhabit a distorted moral framework. They differ, however, insofar as Améry foregrounds the subject that undergoes evil, a standpoint that remains tacit in Arendt’s account. Recounting his torture by the Gestapo, Améry reveals how embodied subjects experiences evil and how it is in light of these experiences that perpetrators of evil should be understood.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers as well as C. Skirke and J. Bendik-Keymer for their thoughtful remarks and probing criticisms that helped me improve this paper.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Levinas, Entre Nous, 92.
2 Formosa, ‘Different Substantive Conceptions of Evil Actions’. Formosa’s article gives a comprehensive overview of standard positions on evil,
3 For example, Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought; Chignell, ‘Evil, Unintelligibility, Radicality’; and Mahony, Hannah Arendt’s Ethics.
4 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism; Eichmann in Jerusalem.
5 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits.
6 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 443 et passim; compare Birmingham, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Double Account of Evil’, 149.
7 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 451.
8 Ibid., 451; compare Birmingham, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Double Account of Evil’, 155.
9 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 455.
10 Arendt, The Human Condition, 51.
11 Ibid., 339.
12 Ibid., 342.
13 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 455.
14 Ibid., 451, 456.
15 See de Wijze, ‘Defining Evil’; Russell, ‘Evil and Incomprehensibility’. Russell is critical of the incomprehensibility criterion.
16 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 445.
17 Ibid., ix,459.According to Kant, radical evil is the yield of our wayward inclinations and appetites, our fundamentally “perverted attitude of mind” or a “perversity of the human heart” (Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 60, 54).
18 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 459.
19 Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 62.
20 See Bernstein, Radical Evil; Formosa, ‘Is radical evil banal? Is banal evil radical?’; and Birmingham, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Double Account of Evil’.
21 Birmingham, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Double Account of Evil’.
22 Arendt asks: “Is wickedness, however we may define it, this being ‘determined to prove a villain,’ not a necessary condition for evil-doing?” (TheLife of the Mind, 4–5).
23 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 33, 48–49, 55.
24 Ibid., 135.
25 Ibid., 26, 146; compare Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem. Stangneth shows that Eichmann was, in fact, a devoted anti-Semite and Arendt’s perspective was limited to the information available to her at the time that she wrote her report on the Eichmann trial.
26 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 288.
27 Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem, 3–4; compare Burdman, ‘Between Banality and Radically’. Burdman contrasts Eichmann’s distorted moral and existential landscape with sadism. As we will see, however, for Améry, an inverted normative outlook is precisely a feature of existential sadism.
28 See Kant’s famous formulation: “I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law” (Groundwork, 67).
29 “Reason must look upon itself as the author of its own principles independently of alien influences” (ibid., 109).
30 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 136.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 When Eichmann changes the normative grounds of his actions from his own reason to Hitler’s law, he violates Kant’s categorical imperative in its most basic sense. For Kant, it is immoral to act on maxims that are external to one’s own reason (Groundwork, 66).
34 Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights, 109.
35 Ibid.
36 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 150.
37 Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 5.
38 Ibid., 185.
39 Ibid., 5.
40 Ibid., 187.
41 Yeatman, ‘Politics and Personal Responsibility’, 65.
42 Ibid., 67.
43 Loidolt, Phenomenology of Plurality.
44 Gilroy, ‘Fanon and Améry’, 24.
45 See Shuster, ‘A Phenomenology of Home’; Ataria, ‘Total Destruction’. Shuster and Ataria offer exemplary phenomenological readings of Améry’s work, but they do not discuss his concept of evil. Améry’s specifically phenomenological standpoint on evil is not addressed in much detail in the literature.
46 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, xi.
47 Ibid.
48 Compare Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty contrasts phenomenological description with an examination of phenomena as if they are wholly external, that is without regard for the perspective of lived experience (as in empiricism). Descriptive approaches also contrast with conceptual explanations that are disconnected from their beginnings in lived experience (as in intellectualism).
49 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, xi.
50 Améry would firmly disagree with Jaspers’s suggestion that “Nazi crime is properly a subject for psychology and sociology, for psychopathology and jurisprudence only” (Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 62).
51 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxx; Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, vi-vii.
52 Améry,At the Mind’s Limits, viii-ix, xiii, 64.
53 Ibid., 70.
54 Ibid.
55 Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, 28.
56 Arendt, RahelVarnhagen.
57 Villa, ‘Genealogies of Total Domination’, 7.
58 Loidolt, Phenomenology of Plurality, 83.
59 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 252.
60 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 25–26.Améry’s phrase “coming face to face” is reminiscent of Husserl’s manner of speaking that, in simple intentional experiences, we encounter things themselves “in person” (Husserl, Ideas, 92).
61 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 25; Améry’s position echoes Sartre’s, one of his major influences, who argues that the imagination gives us the “quasi-sensible”, with the objects pictured in the imagination “like silhouettes drawn by children” (Sartre, The Imaginary,125). The object of the imagination, for Sartre, is indeterminate, second-order, and lacking in topographical depth (ibid., 127, 137). And for Sartre, like Améry, “the logical and existential priority [belongs] … to constituent elements”, the objects of primary intentions encountered in lived experience (ibid., 137).
62 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 25.
63 Ibid., 26.
64 According to Husserl, the traditional alignment of perception with imagination (both conceived as representation) amounts to a “fundamental error” because imagination is a “founded apprehending”, a second-order act, whereas perception is an “immediately intuitive act” (Ideas, 92–93).
65 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 25.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid., 70. For Améry, the first-personal is indispensable part of what he elsewhere calls the “moral truth”, of the violence of the Holocaust.
70 Mahony, Hannah Arendt’s Ethics, 45.
71 According to Kant, the three “maxims of common human understanding” jointly constitute enlarged thinking: “1) To think for oneself; 2) To think in the position of everyone else; 3) Always to think in accord with oneself”– each maxim corresponds to thought that is unprejudiced, broad-minded, and consistent, respectively (Kant, Critique of Judgment, 174; for Kant’s use of the term “enlarged thought” see ibid., 379, footnote 13).
72 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 220.
73 Ibid., 220–221.
74 Benhabib Citation1988; Schwartz, Citation2016.Benhabib and Schwartz note that the relationship between thinking and judging – and the moral and political realm to which these capacities belong respectively – in Arendt’s work remains contentious.In TheLife of the Mind, Arendt describes thinking and judging as distinct but related: “If thinking-the two-in-one of the soundless dialogue-actualizes the difference within our identity as given in consciousness and thereby results in conscience as its byproduct then judging, the by-product of the liberating effect of thinking, realizes thinking, makes it manifest in the world of appearances” (Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 193).
75 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 287, 49.
76 Tyner, ‘Action, Judgment, and Imagination’, 526–528.
77 Geddes, ‘Banal Evil and Useless Knowledge’, 109–110.
78 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, viii.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid., 28.
81 Ibid.
82 The attitude of trust that Améry describes is akin to Wittgenstein’s conception of “certainties” – those propositions that are beyond doubt which, as hinges of a door, enable our actions, attitudes towards, and thoughts in and about the world (Wittgenstein, On Certanity, 341). In both cases, these certainties are outside the traffic of doubt (or knowledge) and, furthermore, enable/shape one’s orientation in the world.
83 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 28.
84 Ibid.
85 Utley, ‘A Phenomenology of Trust ‘, 206.
86 The contrast between transcendental and empirical is ultimately Kantian (see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A27–28/B44). In this context, I use this contrast purely heuristically: it is meant to highlight the relevant phenomenological point about trust without incurring further commitments to transcendental idealism.
87 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 28.
88 Ibid. (my emphasis).
89 Améry quotes the biblical principle of reciprocal justice ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ (ibid.).
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid., 27; compare Arendt, The Life of the Mind. It could be argued that Amery and Arendt disagree on their account of intersubjectivity, the former endorsing the view that intersubjective relations are fundamentally reliable and the latter arguing for their unpredictability. The unpredictability of action partly stems from the fact that spontaneous and free agents like myself can thwart one’s course of action. This being said, action occurs in a political realm – the torture situation, by contrast, is not a realm within which subjects stand in reciprocal relations. Within this situation, the torturer is the only free and spontaneous agent – the tortured is radically deprived of freedom and spontaneity.
92 Arendt, The Human Condition, 51, 114.
93 Levinas, ‘Transcendence and Evil’, 180; Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B131–136.
94 Levinas, Entre Nous, 93–94.
95 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 33.
96 See Doerr-Zegers et al, ‘Torture: Psychiatric Sequelae and Phenomenology’.
97 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 40, 95.
98 Ibid., 35.
99 Ibid., 47.
100 Kant describes sensus communis as “communal sense, i.e., a faculty of judging that in its reflection takes account (a priori) of everyone else’s way of representing in thought” (Critique of Judgment, 173). Aristotle’s conception of sensus communis in De Anima refers to the power which distinguishes between the five senses and unites various sense perceptions as nevertheless belonging to the same object (Complete Works, 426b17–427a5). Arendt’s phenomenological account contains features of both the Kantian and the Aristotelean conception of sensus communis.
101 Arendt,Origins of Totalitarianism, 475–476.
102 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 34, 35.
103 Ibid., 36.
104 Ibid., 34.
105 Ibid., 35.
106 Arendt, The Human Condition, 51.
107 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 35 (my emphasis).
108 Ibid.
109 Ibid., 70.
110 Ibid., 30–31.