I was trying to figure out what to call our cultural sense that we can’t judge something dangerous without a “study” to demonstrate the danger, but I’ve realized it’s simply that we do not believe in the faculty of judgment. Kant’s third critique outlines judgment as the faculty that brings together the realms of nature and freedom, and the need for a study to determine an obvious dangers reveals a failure to recognize just this capacity. If we don’t recognize the capacity we’ll do little to develop it, making the problem worse.
The two most important and at the same time most controversial judgments Arendt made were simple, but both carried complex challenges. She reported Eichmann’s story, noting his bureaucratic mentality and boastful claim that “officialese is my only language,” and she judged him incapable of telling right from wrong. Thus, she implied that the Jerusalem court’s “guilty” judgment, with which she certainly agreed raised general questions about the role of motivation in deeds such as Eichmann’s. Eichmann did what the laws of his state, justified by raisons d’état, asked of him—without knowing the laws to be wrong. The concept of mens rea (intent), so crucial to modern legal philosophy and procedure, has never been adequately associated with a “law of humanity” higher than state law. Even though she accepted and approved the Israeli legal proceedings, Arendt felt that only with such a “law of humanity,” only with new legal and moral categories, could justice truly be rendered to individuals involved in state-instigated crimes or “administrative massacres.” Secondly, Arendt reported how the moral corruption of the Nazis’ totalitarian regime affected other countries and societies, including the society of the Jewish victims, and concluded that such corruption poses unprecedented challenges to judgment in general—past and present. She wrote of the past, but she addressed the crisis of judgment she saw in the present. As she put the matter to [Karl] Jaspers: “Even good and, at bottom, worthy people have, in our time, the most extraordinary fear about making judgments. This confusion about judgment can go hand in hand with fine and strong intelligence, just as good judgment can be found in those not remarkable for their intelligence.” Inability to judge and refusal to judge were her themes in Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Hannah Arendt offered her report and her own judgments in full awareness that both would be controversial and that she would be accused of arrogance for making judgments in a time when anxiety about judging was so widespread. In a set of rough notes she made for a public discussion of the book, she linked her awareness to the phenomena—past and present—she had studied; she named the sources of her own lack of anxiety about judging. “For conscience to work: either very strong religious belief—extremely rare. Or: pride, even arrogance. If you say to yourself in such matters: who am I to judge?—you are already lost.”