Arendt, Hannah - [on] On conscience and evil. (Vetlesen, A.J. 2001).pdf - Arendt - MKTK

Arne Johan Vetlesen

Hannah Arendt on

conscience and evil

Abstract Though there exists a vast literature dealing with Hannah

Arendt’s thoughts on evil in general and Adolf Eichmann in particular, few

attempts have been made to assess Arendt’s position on evil by tracing its

connection with her reﬂections on conscience. This essay examines the

nature and signiﬁcance of such a connection. Beginning with her doctoral

dissertation on St Augustine and ending with her posthumously published

studies in The Life of the Mind , Arendt’s oeuvre exhibits strong thematic

continuity: the triad thinking–conscience–evil forms its most enduring core.

A puzzling core, to be sure, considering the controversies triggered, es-

pecially regarding her notion of the ‘banality of evil’. By placing the role of

conscience at the very center of Arendt’s lifelong reﬂections, this essay

explores the – in many ways related – inﬂuence exerted by St Augustine and

Heidegger. Heidegger’s conception of conscience in Sein und Zeit is identi-

ﬁed as a crucial source for understanding – so the claim holds – why Arendt

found Heidegger’s philosophy particularly wanting as regards the question

of evil.

Key words Arendt · Augustine · conscience · evil · Heidegger · Socrates ·

thinking

Conscience does not ﬁgure among the topics for which Hannah

Arendt’s work is most known. One searches in vain for an essay or a

book of hers devoted to it. To present-day readers, Arendt is associated

ﬁrst of all with the notion ‘the banality of evil’, coined in her 1963 book

Eichmann in Jerusalem (cited as EJ). Arendt’s endeavour, nay struggle

to come to terms, philosophically if not morally, with Eichmann and

his kind of (doing rather than being) evil, forced her to consider again

and again the interrelation between thinking, willing and judgment, on

the one hand, and evil-doing, on the other. It may be said that her

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 27 no 5 • pp. 1–33

[0191-4537(200109)27:5;1–33;018613]

PSC

Philosophy & Social Criticism 27 (5)

undertaking was to see how much light philosophy – meaning thinking

as such, not the academic discipline – can throw on evil.

So what about conscience? As I said, conscience is no salient topic

in Arendt. However, this is not the whole truth. As soon as one starts

to trace Arendt’s reﬂections on evil in her oeuvre , one ﬁnds that she

from early on explored a connection now overshadowed by the afore-

mentioned one between thinking and evil – namely, a connection

between conscience and evil. Once we learn to appreciate this, we realize

that conscience is the thematic fellow-traveller of evil in Arendt’s work

from beginning to end, so that if evil is regarded as the most constant

and as it were ubiquitous theme in her work, conscience accompanies

that theme as its inseparable, though often neglected, shadow.

In this essay, the task I set myself is to bring the signiﬁcance of con-

science out into the open. My thesis is not that doing so will enable us

to sort out all the puzzles and dissolve all the aporias for which Arendt’s

reﬂections on evil are famous. My claim is weaker: that drawing sys-

tematic attention to how conscience ﬁgures in the latter will help us to

attain a better grasp not only of her view – or rather views – on evil

but also of the nature of Arendt’s philosophical relationship to

Heidegger. The issue of evil – and, as we will see, conscience – provides

us with a head-on way of assessing some crucial differences between

Arendt and Heidegger – contra a provocative thesis that I shall consider,

which was put forward by David Luban.

In what follows, I shall start by bringing in some excerpts from

Arendt’s ﬁrst major work, her doctoral dissertation on St Augustine. I

then move to her late meditations on The Life of the Mind , in the course

of which Arendt, on the reading I shall develop, works out two distinct

models of conscience and its link to evil-doing, one associated with

Socrates, the other with Heidegger.

Assessing the inﬂuence of Augustine

Love and Saint Augustine (cited as LAS) is Arendt’s 1929 Heidelberg

dissertation. Its long second part is entitled ‘Creator and Creature: The

Remembered Past’. I shall quote the central passages where Arendt lays

out St Augustine’s understanding of conscience:

Against the security of habit, the law calls on conscience. Conscience is ‘of

God’ and has the function of pointing to the Creator rather than to the

creature. Since conscience is of God, it lets us refer back directly to the

Creator.... In the human world established by man, the individual no

longer stands in isolated relation to his very own ‘whence’; rather, he lives

in a world he has made jointly with other men. He no longer hears what

he is from conscience, which is of God, but from ‘another’s tongue’ ( aliena

Vetlesen: Hannah Arendt on conscience and evil

lingua ). He has turned himself into a resident of this world, one who is no

longer of God alone but owes what he is to this world which he helped to

establish. This alien tongue determines man’s being, whether good or evil,

from outside and from what man has founded. Conscience speaks in our-

selves against this alien tongue, and it speaks so that the one addressed

cannot escape: ‘An evil conscience cannot ﬂee from itself; it has no place

to which it may go; it pursues itself.’ . . . Conscience directs man beyond

this world and away from habituation. As the voice of the Creator, con-

science makes man’s dependence on God clear to him. What the law

commands, conscience addresses to the one who has already succumbed to

the world in habit. The voice of the law summons him against what ‘habit

previously entangled him in’. The estrangement from the world is essen-

tially an estrangement from habit. While man lives in habit, he lives in view

of the world and is subject to its judgment. Conscience puts him coram

Deo , into the presence of God. In the testimony of conscience, God is the

only possible judge of good and evil. This testimony bears witness to man’s

dependence on God, which he ﬁnds in himself. The world and its judg-

ments crumble before this inner testimony. There is no ﬂeeing from con-

science. There is no togetherness and no being at home in the world that

can lessen the burdens of conscience. (LAS, 84f.)

Since no part in this universe, no human life and no part of this life, can

possess its own autonomous signiﬁcance, there can be no ‘evil’ ( malum ).

There are only ‘goods’ ( bona ) in their proper order, which may merely seem

evil from the transient perspective of the individual. This quality of

goodness does not arise from the particular things themselves, but is

bestowed upon them by the universe. . . . Being is for Augustine, as it was

for the Greeks, the everlasting, forever lawful structure and the harmony

of all the parts of the universe. The appropriate interpretation of wicked-

ness . . . is then as follows: . . . that person is wicked who tries to escape

the predetermined harmony of the whole. (LAS, 60f.)

We gather from these quotes that Arendt is referring to Augustine’s

mature, post-Manichean position on evil. As Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott

and Judith Chelius Stark remind us, ‘Augustine moved from a belief in

the material reality of evil during his Manichean period ( De Libero

Arbitrio ) toward his “mature” position in which evil is described as a

bondage to habitual sin, a worldliness that free will is powerless to break

( De Natura et Gratia )’ (Scott and Stark, 1996, in LAS, 130). In City of

God (cited as CG), Augustine wrote that to seek for the cause of evil

‘is like trying to see darkness or to hear silence’ (CG, 480). God is ‘exist-

ence in a supreme degree’ (CG, 473), and ‘the only contrary nature is

the non-existent’ (ibid.). Hence evil, the ‘contrary nature’ to the

supremely good God, ‘is not a matter of efﬁciency, but of deﬁciency; the

evil will itself is not effective but defective’ (CG, 479). In this way, evil

is denied a speciﬁc reality to itself; ontologically, it has no standing, no

facticity at all. This Augustianian notion of evil as ontologically null

Philosophy & Social Criticism 27 (5)

and void, as non-being, as sheer negativity, is unmistakably present in

Arendt’s 1963 exchange with Gershom Scholem over Eichmann. Trying

to explain what she meant by speaking about the ‘banality’ of evil,

Arendt points out that ‘Only the good has depth and can be radical’.

Hence thought, ‘the moment it concerns itself with evil, is frustrated

because there is nothing’ ( Nach Auschwitz , 1989; cited as NA, 78).

But let us not get ahead of ourselves. What matters, at this point,

is that in her doctoral dissertation on Augustine, Arendt deals with con-

science only in light of its connection with evil or, to be more precise,

its connection with the distinction between good and evil. This distinc-

tion emanates from the law; it is not for man to author it, only to receive

and observe it. As we saw, conscience is what puts man into the presence

of God; ‘in the testimony of conscience, God is the only possible judge

of good and evil’.

For my purposes, the inﬂuence on Arendt’s thought emanating from

Augustine’s description of evil as ‘a bondage to habitual sin’ is particu-

larly signiﬁcant. What leads man away from God is what leads man

into sin, into evil – namely, to succumb to the world in habit. The

world’s language is another tongue than that of the law, of God; it is

evil to the extent that it ‘determines man’s being, whether good or evil,

from outside and from what man has founded’ (LAS, 82). Arendt quotes

Augustine’s contention in his Confessions that ‘the law of sin is the force

of habit’. Through habit, ‘covetousness constantly seeks to cover [man’s]

real source by insisting that man is “of the world”, thereby turning the

world itself into the source. Thus man’s own nature lures him into the

service of “things made” instead of to the service of their Maker’ (ibid.).

Sin springs from insistence on our own will. Arendt cites Augustine’s

central claim that ‘humankind’s inclination to value its sins is not so

much due to passion itself as to habit’. To which Arendt adds, by way

of summing up Augustine’s doctrine:

The inclination to sin springs more from habit than from passion itself,

because the world man has founded in covetousness is consolidated in

habit. The creature, in the search for its own being, seeks security for its

existence, and habit, by covering the utmost limit of existence itself and

making today and tomorrow the same as yesterday, makes it cling to the

wrong past and thus gives it the wrong security. (LAS, 83)

I have dwelled on Arendt’s detailed exegesis, and indeed afﬁrmation,

of Augustine’s understanding of the nature of evil because recent com-

mentators on Arendt have set out to argue that her approach to Adolf

Eichmann is distinctly Augustinian. The claim is that her early pre-

occupation with Augustine commands much more than merely his-

torical interest. In fact, it can be seen to exert an enduring impact upon

Arendt’s thinking. Nowhere is this more evident than in Arendt’s

Vetlesen: Hannah Arendt on conscience and evil

analysis of Eichmann, of Eichmann’s kind of evil, put on paper more

than 30 years after the dissertation on Augustine. Or so the claim has

it.

I shall mention two instances of how this argument is made in recent

Arendt scholarship. In their interpretive essay accompanying the 1996

English publication of Arendt’s disseration, editors Scott and Stark

suggest that it was Arendt’s renewed encounter with Augustine in the

early 1960s which enriched her ‘examination of the paradox of evil

which is not “radical” but pedestrian, bourgeois, and seemingly rooted

in everydayness’ (LAS, 120). They continue: ‘Augustine’s paradigm of

immobilized will entrapped in habituated worldliness could perhaps be

applied to Eichmann, the routinely civilized bureaucrat incapable of the

critical distance necessary for moral judgment’ (LAS, 121).

The second instance is David Luban’s essay ‘Banal Evil and Radical

Evil’ (1997; cited as BE). Quoting the Augustian idea that ‘the inclina-

tion to sin springs more from habit than from passion itself’, apparently

afﬁrmed by Arendt in her discussion of it (cited above), Luban draws

the conclusion that this idea ‘perfectly ﬁts Arendt’s Eichmann’ (BE, 10).

The inﬂuence beginning to loom large here, is not only that of

Augustine but that of Martin Heidegger. Whereas Scott and Stark

restrict themselves to a brief indication of the Heideggerian ﬂavour to

Arendt’s notion of the ‘banality’ of evil as applied to Eichmann, Luban

makes its Heideggerian heritage into a major interpretative thesis of his.

And on an interpretive level, there is nothing far-fetched about this

suggestion. Augustine’s inﬂuence on Arendt is already accounted for;

moreover, I agree with Scott and Stark that Arendt in all probability

‘renewed’, perhaps even reinforced, her debt to Augustine’s (mature)

views on evil at the time of her pondering over the case of Eichmann.

Allowing for all this is tantamount to conceding Luban’s claim about

the no less crucial – and again enduring – impact exerted by Heidegger.

The bridge, as it were, between the different observations made here, is

that Heidegger himself started out strongly inﬂuenced by Augustine.

And it is well known that the young Arendt who pursued an interest in

Augustine, did so while still studying with Heidegger (though personal

reasons were to force her to leave Marburg and take her dissertation to

Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg), the Heidegger who for his part was still

young enough to be under the philosophical inﬂuence of Augustine.

Luban’s thesis is twofold. First, it holds that Arendt’s dissertation

presents an account of ‘the moral psychology of sin’ that, apart from

drawing explicitly on Augustine, contains phrases that ‘are straight out

of Being and Time ’, Heidegger’s 1927 magnum opus , the preparatory

lectures for which Arendt attended in the mid-1920s while a student of

Heidegger’s in Marburg. Luban singles out two ideas in particular, which

he takes to be unmistakably Heideggerian: namely, the idea that ‘the

Arendt, Hannah - [on] On conscience and evil. (Vetlesen, A.J. 2001).pdf

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