Compare and evaluate Schelling's and Arendt's accounts of evil
Submitted for PH143 (Existence, Experience, History: Key Topics in Continental Philosophy) Coursework.
In this essay I shall compare the approaches and insights of Hannah Arendt and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling on the question of evil. In particular, the views I attribute to Schelling are those expressed in his 1809 essay, “Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Matters Connected Therewith”; and I shall primarily consider Arendt’s account as put forth in her 1963 book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”, but also how it relates to her 1951 book, “The Origins of Totalitarianism”. By considering the distinct contexts and philosophical traditions within which each approaches the issue, as well as criticisms and defences of each that are formulated in various secondary sources, I shall argue that both perspectives are rich and coherent, but that Arendt’s is ultimately the more persuasive.
Schelling was, alongside Hegel and Fichte, one of the key thinkers of the so-called “German Idealist” tradition, a philosophical movement that sought in various ways to extend and react to the foundational project of Immanuel Kant. Among other things, Kant had argued that humans possess a dualist nature: simultaneously a part of nature, and a moral being with individual agency. In man’s capacity as the former, he is the passive object of forces outside of one’s control, slave to his animalistic impulses. But there is another sense in which one is the author of one’s actions. Kant reflects on “the moral law within me”, which he perceives as unambiguously as “the starry heavens above me” (Kant & Abbott, 1788, p. 256). This is the other part of man’s nature: a higher, rational capacity (perhaps gesturing at an immortal soul), that governs one’s moral decisions. Thus, only moral actions are free actions. By acting not as an animal, but in alignment with this internal moral law, true human autonomy can be realized.
It is against this background that Schelling develops his own philosophical narrative, particularly regarding the nature of evil – which in his conception, is intimately connected to the question of human freedom. (Schelling, 2006, pp. 48-49) considers three distinct views of freedom and dismisses them for failing to account fully for the complexity of human agency. The “common concept of freedom”, that it consists in the ability to make arbitrary choices “without any compelling reasons” collapses human agency to contingency and randomness rather than genuine autonomy. Determinism reduces choice to an illusion; there is no freedom if all actions are determined by external events. Even the Kantian synthesis – that my rational self can initiate moral actions independently of the causal nexus – leads back to the problem of contingency. If there is a universal moral law, then the moral quality of an action, whether good or evil, is predetermined. This law can describe which actions are generically good or bad, but does not necessarily motivate one’s particular actions unless one already values being good. Therefore, the choice of whether to carry out a good or an evil action is an arbitrary choice between fixed alternatives, precisely the contingent “common concept of freedom” dispensed with earlier.
A free act, contrary to these three prevailing views, is one that accords with one’s own inner nature; when one is compelled to act against this nature, the action is unfree. And nor is that inner nature determined from without, by God, for example. Anticipating some of the later existentialist doctrines, Schelling holds that man is “in the initial creation … an undecided being”, who “eternally” makes moral choices that determine his nature (Schelling, 2006, pp. 50-52). Incidentally, he seems to suggest that these choices are made outside the temporal order, but this is best understood as meaning that the determination of one’s essence is a continual process throughout one’s life, not made at any one time (Alderwick, 2015). Thus, we see how intertwined Schelling’s account of evil is with his conception of freedom: everyone is born with the capacity for evil, and so true freedom is necessarily inseparable from the possibility of its realisation. The potential for evil is endogenous not only to our animalistic selves, but also (contra Kant) to our intelligible, rational character. An evil act is not merely a lapse, but a deliberate choice by an individual exercising his human freedom – the freedom to possibly be evil. An evil person is one who habitually exercises this freedom to manifest evil.
This account contrasts sharply with the conception of evil put forth by Hannah Arendt, a 20th century political philosopher who sought to analyse the many evils that had been perpetrated in that period. In particular, she wrote an analysis of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi who was the main administrator of the Holocaust. Having observed the proceedings for many months, her determination was that Eichmann was psychologically “normal”, citing for corroboration the same diagnosis from “half a dozen psychiatrists”. Moreover, in her judgement, he was no rabid anti-Semite; he was not possessed of any particular predilection for evil or harm; he was “neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical”. His behaviour, in short, was precisely how a normal person would be expected to react to the political conditions of the Third Reich (Arendt, 1994, pp. 25-26). And in those conditions, this outwardly respectable, bourgeois, law-abiding citizen unthinkingly became a functionary to a crime of unimaginable magnitude – the phenomenon Arendt describes in the subtitle of her book as “the banality of evil”.
Arendt notes of Eichmann that he was certainly ambitious: he maintained “an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement”. But it was the ordinary ambition characteristic of bureaucrats everywhere, not underscored by malice – “he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post” (Arendt, 1994, p. 287). Rather, it was an expression of duty, as Eichmann repeatedly insisted before the court. He obeyed both the orders he was given, and the law of the land as it was at the time, and his conscience would have forbade him from acting otherwise. Indeed, when questioned by the prosecution about an occasion that he had helped a Jewish cousin, he became “openly apologetic” and expressed guilt (Arendt, 1994, pp. 135-137). This is what Arendt considered so banal about the whole affair: it was a thoughtless conformity to the existing political order, not malevolence, that enabled evil on such a grand scale. Far from an exercise of human freedom to will evil, Eichmann “never realised what he was doing”. Arendt observes that there is a “strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil”, so that the political evil of totalitarian systems is in a mutually reinforcing relationship with the individual evil of psychologically ordinary people like Eichmann, with his apparent inability for moral judgement. Evil is not a simply individual decision or an exercise in human freedom. It is a fundamentally political concept, in the sense that it is a product of a political system in which a mass of people become superfluous, and are dehumanised to become “mere cogs in the administrative machinery” (Arendt, 1994, pp. 287-289).
Arendt may be criticised for propounding two distinct accounts of evil that are not easily reconcilable. On the one hand, she maintains that evil emerges from thoughtlessness, and is consequently banal; on the other, she holds that it is tied to the mass production of superfluousness (Birmingham, 2019, p. 148). With respect to the latter thesis, (Arendt, 1994, p. 288) remarks on the fact that the beginning of Hitler’s “extermination program” began with the granting of mercy killings to the incurably ill, and was to end with the killing of Germans with genetic heart and lung problems. Yet, this would indicate that the systematic killings undertaken by the Nazis stemmed not from thoughtlessness, but from the logical application of perverse eugenicist ideologies. In her earlier book, “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, she seems to support this view, noting that “factories of annihilation … demonstrate the swiftest solution to the problem of overpopulation, of economically superfluous and socially rootless masses” (Arendt, 1951, p. 459).
In a 1963 letter to Gershom Scholem (who criticised her conception of the banality of evil), (Arendt, 2007, p. 470) suggests that these are in fact two distinct accounts, writing, “You are quite right: I changed my mind … [evil] possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension”. Nevertheless, these two seemingly disparate components of Arendt’s account of evil are not in such tension as it may appear, but converge and complement each other considerably. (Birmingham, 2019, pp. 156-161) examines the motivation that Arendt attributes to Eichmann for allowing himself to (in Arendt’s words) “act as [a cog] in the mass-murder machine”, submitting that “her description of Eichmann’s thoughtless banality must be understood as an account of … the economically superfluous who found remedy by becoming thoughtless functionaries of that production”. If there is some mystery in Arendt’s description of how an otherwise ordinary person could carry out such heinous acts, it is resolved by noticing that Eichmann’s own economic and political superfluousness was the cause of his thoughtlessness. As the totalitarian structure of Nazi Germany led his individuality to be submerged into the collective, his individual agency and judgement too were rendered superfluous. This demise of his political personhood drove him to seek refuge in the Nazi Party, which provided him with a career, social standing, and a sense of historical significance. But it also precipitated the death of his moral personhood, as his conscience too was killed, lest it interfere with the role that gave his life purpose and meaning; and he thus came to manifest the moral thoughtlessness necessary to be a functionary to the radical evil of the state (Ibid.).
Therefore, Arendt’s analysis is not contradictory, but rather integrates insights about evil at the level of both the individual and the polity to offer a comprehensive account of the dual nature of evil. In contrast, one might criticise Schelling’s account for being much narrower in scope, and ostensibly saying too little. With his focus on the metaphysics of individual freedom, it appears that his conception of evil is blind to how external socio-political conditions shape one’s choices and affect the realities of how evil is perpetrated. As a result, his account is too abstract and difficult to apply to everyday moral dilemmas and broader societal issues. Arendt’s account, by showing that a particular set of political conditions creates evil men and evil deeds, is implicitly prescriptive: it advises societies to avoid totalitarianism and the associated mass of superfluous men. Critics may contend that the difficulty of extracting corresponding practical recommendations from Schelling’s analysis reflects its shortcomings in addressing the concrete manifestations of evil, rather than its theoretical abstraction.
This criticism exposes the difference in the nature of the projects Schelling and Arendt are undertaking. While Arendt is formulating an account of the psychology of individual evil and its drivers at a political level, Schelling is concerned primarily with the problem of evil, which is to say, the question of how evil can exist at all. Its very existence is difficult to reconcile either with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God (the ‘traditional’ problem of evil), or with a Kantian conception of freedom as rational self-determination, as previously outlined (Alderwick, 2021, pp. 137-138). At this level, Schelling’s objective is not to analyse evil directly, but rather to dissect the broader worldly and metaphysical framework within which it can exist. Nevertheless, this exploration demands underlying assumptions about evil as such, and yields definitive conclusions about its nature. In particular, Schelling begins with the assumption that accounts of evil as privation – that is, as having no positive reality, and merely being an absence of good – are in contradiction with our experience in the world, where it manifests as a real force carried out by putatively rational individuals (Alderwick, 2021, p. 138). Only by understanding evil as the positive opposite of good can Schelling’s system address the tangible effects of evil and impute responsibility to those who make morally wrong choices, thus recognising the existence of evil individuals (Kosch, 2006, p. 91). Proceeding thence, he resolves the Kantian version of the problem of evil by concluding that evil must be a live option for rational agents. Moreover, this means that responsibility for evil always lies solely with its perpetrator, not with God; and he further argues that evil is a necessary condition for God’s existence. Thus his account also provides a solution to the traditional problem of evil (Alderwick, 2021, pp. 148-149).
Hence, the criticism that there is a poverty of substance in Schelling’s account of evil is largely misguided, though his focus on abstract questions regarding human freedom may indeed make his insights appear less relevant for addressing moral dilemmas in social and political contexts. On this point, however, a defender of Schelling may argue that his approach, which robustly defends individual autonomy, is preferable to Arendt’s, which could be seen as denuding individuals of their freedom. If her conception of evil is true, then Eichmann and his ilk could not be held to account for their crimes; in fact, it would be right to see them as victims. (Arendt, 1994, p. 290) makes the following remark upon the argument that one sovereign state may not sit in judgement upon another: “if it were accepted, even Hitler, the only one who was really responsible in the full sense, could not have been brought to account – a state of affairs which would have violated the most elementary sense of justice.” But this argument may be said to apply equally to her entire understanding of evil, if the evil of men is attributable to a helplessly thoughtless conformity to external conditions. Some have argued that Arendt was fooled by Eichmann’s attempt to exonerate himself by claiming that he had no choice (Stangneth, 2015). But the judicial system requires that we insist, as Schelling does, that wrongdoers are responsible for the crimes that they commit.
It may be true that Arendt presents her case with an undeserved generality, and it is unclear whether her account is correct as far as Eichmann himself is concerned. However, it is not defeated simply by asserting that her conclusions are unpalatable. This is the critical flaw in Schelling’s account – he assumes that certain logically conceivable possibilities are false simply on the basis that he would prefer them to be false. He assumes axiomatically that human freedom is a necessary truth and proceeds to build his system. But it may be the case that in spite of how vividly we perceive ourselves to be free, our actions are in fact heavily influenced (or even determined) by external factors in a manner that is unacceptable to Schelling, and would lead to a different conception of evil. For this reason, Arendt’s methodology in analysing the nature of evil is preferable to that of Schelling; and by extension, so too are her conclusions.
In this essay, I have delineated the accounts of evil articulated by Schelling in his essay on human freedom, and by Arendt in two germane books. I have shown that the two seemingly distinct conceptions of Arendt – that evil is the banal product of thoughtless conformism, and that it is the result of mass superfluousness – cohere and converge. The result is a plausible analysis of evil as it manifested in the period she was focussed on, but largely neglects other times and places, so her argument is not fully general. Furthermore, I concede the criticism that her account strips individuals of full moral agency and accountability, though I leave open the possibility that she may, in certain cases, be justified in doing so. My description of Schelling’s account is that he is overwhelmingly concerned with this very point about individual freedom, seeing evil as a free choice made by rational agents, contrary to Kant’s identification of acting freely with acting rationally, and so following the moral law. Though I defend Schelling from the charge that he says too little about evil, showing that his account is quite rich, it is true that his conception of evil is abstract – but this is by design. More fatally, his analysis presupposes the existence of human freedom as a universal, apodictic truth when this is unwarranted. The result is that where his account clashes with Arendt’s, the temptation is to defer to her observations and arguments, which may be flawed but at least proceed more or less from first principles. On the whole, although neither’s account is entirely persuasive, it is Arendt’s concrete exposition of the interdependence of individual and political evil that emerges superior.
Bibliography
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