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PurlieuA Philosophical JournalEichmann in Inferno: An Examination of

Conscience in Dante's Commedia

J. Douglas Macready

University of Dallas

When Hannah Arendt travelled to Jerusalem in 1968 to cover the trial of Adolf

Eichmann, she enrolled in a “long course in human wickedness,” where she

would learn “the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of

evil.” Like the pilgrim Dante in the Commedia, Arendt's journey through the trial

of Eichmann was a transformative experience. What she discovered in the Beth

Hamishpath was soul-changing, and her reports that appeared in The New

Yorker became a type of ethical psychagogy that led readers into the darkness

of the Shoah, revealing a monster more shocking than Dante's three headed

Satan: a normal, everyday desk-murderer.

Through recovering Dante's notion of conscience in his Commedia, this essay

attempts to rethink Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann and to offer a renewed

understanding of Eichmann's conscience. I will argue that Dante is engaged in

a psychagogical (soul-leading) project in the Commedia, which aims at a

specific form of psychopoiesis (soul-making), namely, the mimetic formation of conscience. Dante's psychopoiesis operates through the mimetic deformation,

reformation, and transformation of conscience. Through this recovery it will be

possible to rethink Arendt's description of Eichmann as a "thoughtless" person

who lacked imagination and understand that Eichmann's conscience was

mimetically deformed through the absence of a contemplative dimension. The

lack of a contemplative dimension led to the construction of an illusory self and

suggests that Eichmann was in Inferno long before he was in Jerusalem.

pp: 9 - 26 / 79

Volume 1. Issue 2. (Spring 2011)

Editors: Dennis Erwin, Matt Story

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p.o. box 2924 denton, texas 76203Copyright Purlieu Ltd. 2010-11

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ISSN 2159-2101 (print)

ISSN 2159-211X (online)

Purlieu: A Philosophical Journal Spring 2011

1

J. Douglas Macready is a doctoral student of Philosophy at the University of Dallas where he is

currently focusing his research on the ethical thought of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and

Emmanuel Levinas at the intersection of cinema, technology, and the Shoah. His work has appeared in

Film-Philosophy and Borderlands, and he is the author of the blog The Relative Absolute.

Introduction

When Hannah Arendt travelled to Jerusalem in 1968 to cover the trial of Adolf

Eichmann, she enrolled in a “long course in human wickedness,” where she would

learn “the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”1 Like the

pilgrim Dante2 in the Commedia, Arendt's journey through the trial of Eichmann was a

transformative experience. What she discovered in the Beth Hamishpath3 was soul-

changing, and her reports that appeared in The New Yorker became a type of ethical

psychagogy that led readers into the darkness of the Shoah, revealing a monster more

shocking than Dante's three headed Satan: a normal, everyday desk-murderer.

Through recovering Dante's notion of conscience in his Commedia, this essay

attempts to rethink Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann and to offer a renewed

understanding of Eichmann's conscience. This project employs a post-Shoah re-

reading of Dante's Commedia that takes seriously George Steiner’s admonition that we

need to continually "remind ourselves that we live after [the Shoah],"4 and the

suggestion of Robert Eaglestone that "our way of thinking, criticizing, doing history

itself, the discourses that our debates inhabit and the horizons which orient these

debates, are still striving to respond to the Holocaust."5 In short, all modern re-reading

and rethinking is done under the shadow of the Shoah, and this essay will therefore

Eichmann in Inferno

2

offer a responsive reading of Dante's Commedia that takes its orientation from that

horizon.

In this re-reading, I will argue that Dante is engaged in a psychagogical (soul-

leading)6 project in the Commedia, which aims at a specific form of psychopoiesis

(soul-making), namely, the mimetic formation of conscience. Dante's psychopoiesis

operates through the mimetic deformation, reformation, and transformation of

conscience. In the Inferno, conscience is deformed by fraud; in Purgatorio, conscience

is reformed through art; in Paradiso, conscience is transformed by Divine Love. In

each stage of Dante's psychopoiesis, the mimetic formation of conscience has a

linguistic character in which the imaginative creation of metaphor contributes to the

development of conscience and moral reasoning, and yet this imaginative activity

ultimately points beyond them both. By recovering Dante's understanding of the

mimetic formation of conscience, it will be possible to rethink Arendt's description of

Eichmann as a "thoughtless" person who lacked imagination and whose use of stock

phrases, clichés, and slogans served to insulate him from reality.7

Eichmann

One of the central moral questions raised during Eichmann’s trial was whether he had

a conscience. Was it possible for someone to have a fully functioning conscience and

commit monstrous acts of evil? According to Arendt, Eichmann maintained

throughout the trial that he did have a conscience. In fact, he claimed that he had a

"good" conscience that had not been disturbed in the least by engineering the mass

extermination of men, women, and children. On the contrary, he said “he would have

had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do.”8 He

maintained his undisturbed conscience by following orders that required a kind of

"thoughtlessness."9

Arendt's description of Eichmann also revealed a startling contradiction within

him. Although at one point, Eichmann had bragged that he would “jump into [his]

grave laughing” because he had “the death of five million Jews . . . on [his]

conscience,” during his trial he claimed that he would gladly hang himself "as a

warning example for all anti-Semites on this earth"; he appeared incapable of seeing

the contradiction in these two statements.10 In the end, he did not run and jump into

the noose, nor did he "gladly" ascend the gallows, and as Arendt observed, “if he had


3

anything on his conscience, it was not murder.” Arendt's descriptions of Eichmann

call traditional western notions of conscience into question. If conscience is simply a

consciousness of right and wrong, then how should Eichmann's conscience, in which

moral categories operate in reverse (right becomes wrong and wrong, right,) be

understood? More importantly, what led to this inversion of conscience that allowed

Eichmann to routinely engineer the death of millions of people? To answer these

questions is to re-enroll in the “long course in human wickedness,” and in the

European canon, there is perhaps no better guide to the landscape of human

wickedness and the development of conscience than Dante Alighieri's Commedia.

Mimesis, Poiesis, and Comedy

In his Poetics, Aristotle defined poetry (ποίησις: to make, fabricate, create,

compose) as a mode of imitation (μιμήσεις: to mimic, imitate, represent) of human

action and character through the medium of language.12 Poetry as mimesis is,

therefore, the creative imitation of human action and character through the medium of

language. This mimetic activity takes place through an arrangement of episodes,

which Aristotle calls plot (μῦθος: word, speech, tale, story, narrative).13 To adequately

understand a poem, it is necessary to understand its plot.

In Dante's Commedia, the plot is comic. Louise Cowan has suggested that while

"the paradigms of comedy are manifold," it is important to note that comedy is

primarily a genre that expresses "the basic gestures—the actions—of the soul."14

Cowan's insight builds upon M.M. Bakhtin's theory of sociological poetics, in which

the human orientation to reality is structured by a "series of inner genres." Bakhtin's

explanation of this theory is worth quoting at length:

We think and conceptualize in utterances, complexes complete in themselves.

As we know, the utterances cannot be understood as a linguistic whole, and its forms

are not syntactic forms. These integral, materially expressed inner acts of man's

orientation to reality and the forms of these acts are very important. One might say

that human consciousness possesses a series of inner genres for seeing and

conceptualizing reality. A given consciousness is richer or poorer in genres, depending

on its ideological environment . . . Literature occupies an important place in this

ideological environment. As the plastic arts give width and depth to the visual realm

Eichmann in Inferno

4

and teach our eye to see, the genres of literature enrich our inner speech with new

devices for the awareness and conceptualization of reality.15

Comedies can therefore be understood as mimetic psychomythologies; that is,

they imitate the inner emplottments of the soul. Dante's Commedia can thus be viewed

as imitating the inner landscape of a soul undergoing transformation. But there is a

mythos to Dante's mimesis. He intends to lead the soul of the reader on a similar

journey of transformation. Dante is thus, engaged in a psychagogical (soul-leading)

project which aims at initiating in his reader a specific form of psychopoiesis (soul-

making), namely, the mimetic formation of conscience. Dante's psychopoiesis takes a

comic form in which the mythos operates through the mimetic deformation,

reformation and transformation of conscience.

Inferno

For Dante, conscience is mimetically formed through poiesis; that is, conscience is

formed through the imaginative activity of poetic representation—specifically, the use

of metaphor. Metaphor, as Aristotle notes, is the "intuitive perception of the similarity

in dissimilars."16 Metaphors redeem meaning out of chaos and provide a bridge

between the sensory and non-sensory realms of human experience. They join the

worlds of being and appearance and allow one to navigate inner landscapes. The dark

side of this claim is that conscience can also be de-formed through misrepresentation

or dis-figurement—the extinguishing of the poetic imagination. This erosion of

imaginative capacities leads to an ethical crisis, which Dante saw occurring in what he

represents in his text as the sin of fraud.

In Canto XVII of Inferno, Dante mimetically incarnates the pernicious sin of

fraud in the monster Geryon. In Geryon, the vile becomes flesh. As John Freccero has

noted, "abstractions are turned into bodies virtually everywhere in the Inferno."17 This

incarnation is a dis-figuring—an image out-of-order. Dante imagines Geryon as a

"filthy effigy [imagine] of fraud."18 This mimetic construction of fraud incorporates

multiple natures in a single form—a metaphor of fraud. Dante describes the multiple

natures and species that make up Geryon in the following way:

The face he wore was that of a just man;

so gracious was his features' outer semblance;


5

and all his trunk, the body of a serpent;

he had two paws, with hair up to the armpits;

his back and chest as well as both his flanks

had been adorned with twining knots and circlets.19

Geryon is a "monstrous combination" of human, reptile, and beast.20 The

human face masks the serpent body, and thus, the semblance of justice conceals a

Satanic core. Paolo Cherchi has suggested that Dante's Geryon "brings to a climax the

theme of monstrosity" in a text that has previously depicted the combination of

natures in "the Minotaur, the Centaurs, the Harpies, and the souls of the suicides."21

Geryon represents a poetic climax in which fraud is the climax of vice—the vice of all

vices, the paragon of sin.

In Canto XI, Virgil states that fraud is a distinctly human vice that "eats away

[mordere] at every conscience [conscienza]."22 The word translated as "conscience" is

derived from the Latin word conscientia, and denoted a joint or common knowledge (to

know—scire; together—com). Conscientia was later used to denote a moral sense that

guided judgment and agitated consciousness when one acted contrary to it. Cicero

appealed to conscience (conscientia) as an agitating (perterreo—to frighten thoroughly)

witness in his speech Pro Cluentio.23 He understood conscience as an eternal inner

witness to virtue that if violated, would haunt and frighten a man until he confessed

his error and satisfied justice. Dante is less confident and has a much darker view of

conscience. Conscience, as Dante knew from his own experience, could atrophy in a

human being and cause one to lose his or her way until one is imprisoned in a

"shadowed forest [selva obsura]."24 Dante was clear: conscience can be devoured so

that it no longer agitates or frightens the soul. Conscience is a mode of ethical

knowing that is illuminated by rightly directed love or darkened by love gone astray.

To the extent that love is rightly directed, conscience can bear witness to the good and

the beautiful, but when love goes astray, conscience is consumed by darkness.

In Inferno, conscience is nibbled by incontinence, bitten by violence and

devoured (modere) by fraud. Returning to the dis-figure of Geryon in Canto XVII, and

taking note of its location in Inferno, the psychagogical purpose in Dante's poetics

becomes clear. Dante has made a steady descent from incontinence to violence and

now to fraud, where he confronts it face-to-face in the form of Geryon. Virgil's

Eichmann in Inferno

6

signaling of Geryon to come ashore is a mimetic representation of a moral intervention

by a teacher on behalf of his student to guide the latter to look into the mirror of his

soul and see himself as he truly is.25 When Dante describes Geryon, he is

metaphorically constructing an image of himself through Virgil's guidance. He is

"fac[ing] the truth which seems a lie”—that Dante himself is a fraud.26 Dante, like

Geryon, wears a mask that conceals his satanic core, and Virgil directs Dante to look

into a poetic mirror to see his Geryonic reflection. Dante's conscience has been

devoured by fraud for seventeen cantos and is now revealed in all of its monstrosity.

But confrontation is only the beginning in Dante's psychopoietics. Witnessing must

lead to action.

Ever the master-teacher, Virgil mounts Geryon and bids Dante to do the same,

filling Dante with fear.27 Summoning all of his moral courage to "be strong and daring"

for this task, Dante courageously mounts his own conscience, eaten away by fraud,

and descends upon its back into the hellish depths of his soul.28 Virgil protects Dante

from the sting of Geryon's tail and mimetically leads his conscience to the roots of his

penchant for vice—fraud. 29This Virgilian psychopoiesis becomes paradigmatic in

Dante's Commedia. The trope of descent, however, is Janus-faced in Inferno. There is

descent that humbles and descent that crumbles. The former prepares the soul for

reformation through destabilization, and the latter destroys the soul through

petrification.

Walter Benjamin suggested that the manifestations of the imagination are best

understood as "the de-formation [Entstaltung—de-stabilization] of what has been

formed."30 The products of imagination—images, metaphors, sculptures, paintings,

poems—begin, Benjamin argues, through the negative activity of the imagination in

which it "plays a game of dissolution with its forms."31 This game is creative in

character, not destructive, and serves as the ground floor not only of art, but also of

moral reasoning. As Mark Johnson has argued, "Moral reasoning is . . . basically an

imaginative activity" that metaphorically structures reality in order to facilitate moral

judgments.32 This process of moral reasoning begins with the destabilization of

reality—a stepping back from reality to reflect and reconfigure. There must be dissent

(descent) before there can be assent (ascent). The descent of Inferno represents an

imaginative gesture that is the genesis of all artistic expression.


7

The mythos of Inferno, through which Dante mimetically represents the

devouring of conscience, also serves as his psychagogical ploy to lead the reader in

confronting his or her own Geryonic reflection, allowing Dante to become the reader’s

Virgil. Just as Virgil was Dante's "master" and "author," Dante wishes to become the

same for the reader.33 This penchant for guides is likely rooted in Dante's advocacy for

monarchial rule in his De Monarchia, where he argues that if "mankind is ordered to

one goal . . . there must therefore be one person who directs and rules mankind, and

he is properly called 'Monarch' or 'Emperor.'"34 Dante situates himself as the poetic

Monarch who guides his readers, and perhaps himself, to their one goal: Paradise,

where they will discover their ultimate Guide. Dante will protect them from the sting of

Geryon's tail and prepare them for the next stage: reformation of conscience.

Purgatorio

In Purgatorio, conscience is re-formed through art. Whereas in Inferno conscience had

been "eaten."35 In Purgatorio, conscience becomes active and begins to sting and gnaw

the pilgrim's soul.36 The preparatory mimetic descent of humility prepares Dante's

conscience for mimetic re-formation. The process of re-formation is suggested in the

opening canto of Purgatorio where Dante calls upon Calliope, the goddess of poetry, to

revivify his infernal poetics, that is, to give new life and new form to his poetry.37 The

psychopoiesis of purgatorial poetics will aim at the reformation of conscience—a

refiguring of moral reasoning through art. Conscience, now awakened by humility,

must fine-tune its vision of the good and the beautiful in order to prepare itself to see

their Source.

In Purgatorio, music is one of the primary arts that mimetically reforms

conscience. Songs permeate this canticle and serve as a revivification of the screams

and wails of the Inferno.38 Song guides the intellect towards wholeness and prepares

the soul to receive, and possibly provides, meaning. As Dr. Donald Cowan notes in his

essay, "The Three Moments of Learning,"

. . . music is important also in imparting to the intellect a recognition of

ontological unity. What comes to the mind through sight is perceived as

meaning, but what comes in through sound is sensed as form. . . . Poems

must be apprehended as wholes before meaning is evident.39

Eichmann in Inferno

8

Song offers the preparatory form for Dante and the reader to prepare for the

meaningful vision that awaits them in Paradiso. The love that will eventually

transform Dante's conscience in Paradiso is incarnate, i.e., takes form in music in

Purgatorio. Song conveys in meter and rhythm what cannot be expressed in words,

and this mimetic representation of love in song parallels the ultimate psychagogical

aim of Dante's Commedia: he wants to convey in his poem what is beyond the reach of

philosophy, art and theology. Dante wants his poem to be revelatory—and he believes

it is.40

In Canto II, Casella sings the opening stanza of Dante's second canzone in Book

III of his Convivio with such sweetness that Dante confesses that the "sweetness" still

sounds within him.41 It is the mode, and not the words, which sound within him. It is

the meter and rhythm of the song that fill Dante with a longing, a yearning that is

meant to spur him on to his eventual goal.42 But love is a pharmakon that can lead to

virtue or vice.43 As Virgil explains to Dante in Canto XVII, "love is the seed in you of

every virtue and of all acts deserving punishment."44 Love can so intoxicate a person

that good and beautiful objects are mistaken for their Source. This is precisely the

cause for Cato's rebuke of Dante in Canto XVII. Dante has become so enraptured in

listening to the siren’s song of love that he has stopped seeking its Source. This is the

first lesson of art in Purgatorio: the song is not the Singer.

Music prepares the conscience to have its vision corrected through the plastic

arts. In Canto X, Dante encounters sculptural depictions of Mary, David and Trajan

that he refers to as "speech made visible" and as "effigies [l'imagini] of true humility."45

Dante converts biblical texts into images, and these images into poetic texts, for the

purpose of psychopoiesis.46 This mimetic process of reimaging reforms Dante's

conscience. Whereas, in Inferno, there was a deformation in the "filthy effigy of fraud"47

(Geryon), in Purgatorio, there is a reformation through the "effigies of true humility."48

After love has provoked the soul to seek it, love must train the eyes to see it.

In Purgatorio, Beatrice becomes the mimetic representation of beauty and

goodness that points beyond herself to the Beautiful and the Good. She is an icon

instead of the idol she had been in Dante's Vita Nuova, where he described her as a

goddess whose power over him was so total that her "image . . . remained constantly"

with him and was "Love's assurance of holding" him.49 But just as Dante's love of


9

Casella's song required reformation so that he could ascend to the Singer, so also

Dante's love for Beatrice must be reformed. His vision of her must be corrected so that

he can see God through the goddess, the Beautiful behind her beauty and the Good

behind her goodness.

In Canto XXI, Beatrice gazes at a Griffin that is described in Chalcedonian

terms as having "two natures, but one person."50 The Griffin is a figure of Christ, a

mimetic representation of God incarnate. Dante’s longing for Beatrice is refined in the

purgative fire of Love's flames, and Beatrice becomes transfigured before him so that

the source of her beauty and goodness is revealed "like the sun within a mirror."51

Beatrice, subsequently, is a revelation of the Revelation. The re-formation of Dante's

conscience takes place through the refinement of his aesthetic gaze. He learns to see

beyond Beatrice; she becomes an icon instead of an idol. This reformation prepares

him for the final leg of his journey: the transformation of his conscience.

Paradiso

In Paradiso, conscience is transformed by Divine Love. In the proem of Paradiso,

Dante writes of “[t]he glory of the One who moves all things permeates the universe

and glows in one part more and in another less.”52 John D. Sinclair links this opening

passage with the concluding passage of Paradiso where Dante says that his desire and

will were moved “by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”53 By linking

“the One who moves” in Canto I with “the Love that moves” in Canto XXXIII, it

becomes clear that the glory that “permeates the universe” is Divine Love, and this

love is reified in each creature depending on their proximity to God. The love of God is

in diaspora and can be found flickering even in the mud and rocks.54

This poetic vision of Divine Love in diaspora is not available to a deformed

conscience, or even to a reformed conscience. This vision requires a move beyond

human capacities such as reason—even imagination. It requires a transformed

conscience illuminated by Divine Love. In Paradiso, Dante’s psychagogical poetics

makes a leap beyond the human into the realm of contemplation. The conscience that

was salvaged in Inferno, and purged in Purgatorio, will now be transhumanized and

transfigured in Paradiso. As Allen Mandelbaum notes: “The events in Paradiso are

different in kind from all others, even from those of Inferno and Purgatorio, far

surpassing all human capacity.”55 However, as Dante notes, this “passing beyond the

Eichmann in Inferno

10

human [trasumanar]” cannot be expressed in words.56 Conscience, mimetically

formed, must take its leave of images, words and guides, giving way to contemplation

whereby conscience, transformed by Divine Love, becomes a mirror of the ultimate

Guide: Divine Wisdom. Wisdom begins where conscience ends.

The final transformation of Dante's conscience into a desire moved by Love

takes place through the poetics of prayer. Specifically, Bernard of Clairvaux guides

Dante to focus on the perfect image of the Good and the Beautiful—Mary—whose face

"is most like the face of Christ."57 Prayer becomes the mechanism for moving beyond

moral reasoning and imagination to an awareness of Love itself, and this use of prayer

in Paradiso suggests a contemplative dimension to the mimetic formation of

conscience. Reason, imagination, and metaphor all fail to fully "penetrate" the

"radiance" of "Primal Love.”58 The transformation of conscience by Love requires an

openness to grace, that is, a vulnerability to the presence of the Other. Without this

contemplative orientation, conscience wavers on the boundary between deformation

and reformation. In the final canto of Paradiso, the formation of conscience from the

"shadowed forest" of Inferno to the "Highest Light" of Paradiso is not the result of one's

own perseverance, nor even strictly Divine intervention, but rather through a

cooperation with Divine Love founded upon a receptivity to grace.

Rethinking Eichmann's Conscience

In the final years of her life, Arendt returned to her experiences at the trial of Adolf

Eichmann in order to explore the relationship between thinking and evil. In The Life of

the Mind, Arendt drew a sharp distinction between Eichmann and his deeds. She

described Eichmann's actions as "monstrous," but Eichmann himself as "ordinary"

and "thoughtless":

I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible

to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or

motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer—at least the very

effective one now on trial—was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither

demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological

convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic

one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the


11

trial and throughout the pre-trial police examination was something entirely

negative: it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness.59

Behind the mask of the "architect of the Final Solution" stood an ordinary human

being who had thoughtlessly facilitated the mass extermination of European Jews by

anaesthetizing himself against the moral claims that thinking imposes with "clichés,

stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and

conduct."60 Eichmann seemed to be possessed of an ethical void.

This ethical void was the end product of a steady deformation of Eichmann's

conscience. It is clear from Arendt's account of Eichmann that he initially recognized

the unnatural and horrifying barbarism of the Final Solution. Eichmann had been

ordered to visit Chelmno, a death camp in northwestern Poland, where mobile gas

vans were used to exterminate Jews.61 Eichmann witnessed the entire extermination

process: Jews were stripped, forced into the back of vans equipped with a hose

running from the exhaust pipe into the back of the van, and subsequently gassed with

carbon-monoxide while in route to an open ditch where the corpses were dumped,

some still alive.62 Eichmann had been invited to look through an observation hole in

the van to witness the dying victims, but he refused.63 Eichmann related that he could

hardly look at what was occurring and that he "had had enough" and was "too

upset."64 Later in Minsk, he witnessed the mass execution of Jews by shooting, and

his "knees went weak."65 In Lwów, Eichmann saw a mass grave gushing blood "like a

fountain."66 All of this led Eichmann to complain to his superiors that German soldiers

were becoming sadistic by killing women and children in these barbaric ways. Arendt

quotes him as saying, "How can one do that? Simply bang away at women and

children? That is impossible. Our people will go mad or become insane. . . . "67

Eichmann's statement indicates the initial presence of an active conscience, but

things eventually changed.

On at least one occasion, in September 1941, Eichmann appears to have tried

to "save Jews" from the horrors he had witnessed in Chelmno, Minsk and Lwów. He

was ordered to send 20,000 Jews and 5,000 Gypsies from Germany to Russia where

they would be murdered. Instead of complying with this order, Eichmann diverted the

transport to the ghetto in Lódz, but the ghetto was overcrowded, and the person in

Eichmann in Inferno

12

charge of the ghetto complained about the unscheduled transport to Heinrich

Himmler.68 Himmler turned a blind eye to Eichmann's disobedience, and Eichmann,

taking this as a warning, never attempted to disobey or circumvent orders again. As

Arendt puts it, “[Eichmann] had a conscience, and his conscience functioned in the

expected way for about four weeks, whereupon it began to function the other way

around."69

Eichmann's conscience began to de-form and function in reverse when he

ceased to think for himself and allowed Hitler's orders to replace the voice of his

conscience. Arendt comments that "evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by

which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation."70 The unlawful had become

lawful, and the lawful unlawful. Eichmann had learned to resist the temptation not to

murder. The will of Hitler, embodied in his orders, had not only become the law of the

land but also the voice of Eichmann's conscience. Eichmann, who had originally

recognized the dissonance between his conscience that said "Thou shall not kill" and

Hitler's order, "Thou shalt kill," eventually learned to resist the temptation of his

conscience to not kill.71 Eichmann surrendered his will to the will of the Fuhrer and

began his dark descent into a fraudulent existence. Interestingly, during Eichmann's

trial, he tried to convince the court that he had lived his life according to Kant's

Categorical Imperative until he was ordered to carry out the Final Solution.72

Eichmann claimed that once he was ordered to carry out the Final Solution, he ceased

being "the master of his own deeds" and therefore could no longer live according to

Kantian principles. But as Arendt points out, Eichmann had not renounced Kantian

morality but distorted and dis-figured it. Eichmann reformulated the Categorical

Imperative as something telling him to "Act in such a way that the Fuhrer, if he knew

your action, would approve it."73 Arendt draws an interesting conclusion from

Eichmann's reformulation, namely, that whereas Kant had envisioned practical reason

as the principle behind law, Eichmann substituted reason with "the will of the

Fuhrer."74 Eichmann's complicity with genocide began with his abandonment of

practical reason, as well as the extinguishment of his moral imagination, given that

moral reasoning is an imaginative act that allows one to step back from the world and

metaphorically restructure it in order to make judgments. Thus, Eichmann's

thoughtless obedience to the will of Hitler was the product of his lack of imagination.

His conscience had been devoured by Nazism, leaving it deformed and dis-figured.


13

Eichmann had become a fraud. Where there had previously been the glimmer of a

conscience, now only an ethical void existed.

Conclusion

Thomas Merton once described contemplation as "spiritual wonder" that engenders a

knowledge of the Source of life and being.75 For Merton, to be a "fully awake" human

being is to live out of this contemplative awareness. The counter to this mode of living

is to be what he called a "false-self”—the "private self that wants to exist outside the

reach of Gods' will and God's love—outside of reality and outside of life . . . such a self

cannot help but be an illusion."76 This description of the "false-self" that seeks an

existence outside of reality parallels Arendt's description of Eichmann's "remoteness

from reality" that was capable of wreaking "more havoc than all the evil instincts taken

together."77 Karl A. Plank has noted that when Merton reflected upon Arendt's report

on Eichmann, his diagnosis was that Eichmann lived as a "false-self."78 Without

mentioning Eichmann by name, Merton seems to have captured the essence of

Eichmann's conscience when he wrote of the "collective enthusiasm, in a totalitarian

parade: the self-righteous upsurge of party loyalty that blots out conscience and

absolves every criminal tendency in the name of Class, Nation, Party, Race or Sect."79

Eichmann's conscience had been blotted out—devoured—by the fraudulent idols of

Race and Nation. His "inner genres" had become impoverished in the ideological

environment of Nazism. In the words of Walter Benjamin, Eichmann's "lack of

conscience and . . . lack of imagination combine[d] to strangle the moral abundance of

ideas with the obscure generality of a principle."80 In Dante's terms, he was a fraud

whose conscience had been devoured by the cultivation of a false self that, according

Merton, is empty and hollow.81

If we rethink Arendt's description of Adolf Eichmann as a "thoughtless" person

who "lacked imagination" and whose use of stock phrases, clichés, and slogans served

to insulate him from reality, in light of Dante's notion of conscience as a mode of

ethical thinking mimetically formed and ordered by love through contemplation, it

becomes possible to argue that Eichmann's conscience was mimetically deformed

through the absence of a contemplative dimension. The lack of a contemplative

dimension led to the construction of an illusory self and suggests that Eichmann was

in Inferno long before he was in Jerusalem.

Eichmann in Inferno

14

Arendt's description of Eichmann's use of stock phrases, clichés, and slogans to

resolve his "crisis of conscience" can be understood as an extinguishing of the light of

imaginative powers by which conscience navigates moral quandaries through the use

of metaphor. But it was Eichmann's Virgil, Hitler, who dealt him the fatal blow by

bidding him to board Geryon but not shielding him from the sting of its tail, and,

consequently, Eichmann's descent was catastrophic and permanent.

Eichmann lacked a conscience transformed in contemplation that would have

made him capable of seeing the Good and Beautiful in the world around him. His

conscience functioned in reverse because he could not poetically and contemplatively

move beyond his construction of reality through stock totalitarian phrases and clichés.

He was not willing to engineer a "holocaust" of his own conscience wherein took

place "a steady burning to ashes of old worn-out words, clichés, slogans,

rationalizations! . . . a terrible breaking and burning of idols, a purification of the

sanctuary, so that no graven thing may occupy the place that God has commanded to

be left empty: the center, the existential altar which simply 'is.'"82 Instead, Eichmann

engineered the holocaust of millions of men, women and children, and the shadow of

his deeds has fallen on us all. If we have learned anything from this "long course in

human wickedness," it is that conscience has a spiritual core and we deny it at our

own peril.

To comment or respond to the above essay, please send an

email to : [email protected]

Responses will be sent to the author, with some published

online and/or in the Fall 2011 issue of Purlieu.

Notes

1. Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem.(New York: Penguin Books, 1963), 252.

2. I will distinguish between Dante the pilgrim (Dante), Dante the poet (Dante), and a third

Dante which I will call metamorphic Dante (DANTE)—the Dante who changes as the poem is

composed. I am grateful to Dr. Scott Crider for providing me with these distinctions between

the three voices in the poem during his Fall 2010 lectures on The Divine Comedy at the

University of Dallas.

3. Hebrew: "House of Justice."

4. Steiner, George, "Postscript," In Language & Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 168.

5. Eaglestone, Robert, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (New York: Oxford University Press,

2004), 2-3.

mailto:[email protected]�


15

6. I am grateful to Dr. Scott Crider (University of Dallas) for highlighting this term in Plato's

Phaedrus, and its application to The Divine Comedy.

7. Arendt, Eichmann, 287, 288.

8. Arendt, Eichmann, 25.

9. Arendt would later explore thoughtlessness in her unfinished The Life of the Mind, written in

the final years of her life. (Arendt, Hannah, "Thinking," In The Life of the Mind (New York:

Harcourt Brace & Company, 1978), 4.)

10. Ibid., 53.

11. Ibid., 46.

12. Aristotle, Poetics,Vol. 2, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), I.1447a.15;1448a.1-4.

13. Ibid., I.1450a.4-5.

14. Cowan, Louise, "Introduction: The Comic Terrain," In The Terrain of Comey (Dallas: The

Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1984), 7.

15. Bakhtin, M.M., and Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship:

A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrlem (Baltimore: John Hopkins

University Press, 1978), 134.

16. Aristotle, Poetics, XXII.1459a.7-8.

17. Freccero, John, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1986), 106.

18. Alighieri, Dante, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno, trans. Allen Mandelbaum

(New York: Bantam Dell, 1980), XVII.7-8.

19. Dante, Inferno, XVII.10-15.

20. Cherchi, Paolo, "Canto XVII: Geryon's Downward Flight; the Usurers," In Lectura Dantis:

Inferno, eds. Allen Mandelbaum, Anthony Oldcorn and Charles Ross (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1998), 225.

21. Ibid., 225.

22. Dante, Inferno, XI.52.

23. Cicero, Marcus Tullius, Pro Cluentio, ed. George G. Ramsay (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1889), XIII.38.

24. Dante, Inferno, I.4, 2.

25. Ibid., XVII.5.

26. Ibid., XVI.124.


28. Ibid., XVII.81.

29. Ibid., XVII.83-84. The best teachers are capable of saving students from themselves long

enough for them to learn the dangers themselves.

30. Benjamin, Walter. Imagination, vol. 1: 1913-1926, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings,

eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: The Beknap Press of Harvard

University Press, 1996), 280.

31. Ibid., 280.

32. Johnson, Mark, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1993), x, 2.

33. Dante, Inferno, I.85.

34. Alighieri, Dante, Monarchia, trans. Prue Shaw (New York: Cambridge University Press,

1995), I.v., 11.

Eichmann in Inferno

16

35. Dante, Inferno, XI.52.

36. Alighieri, Dante, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Purgatorio, trans. Allen Mandelbaum

(New York: Bantam Dell, 1982), III.7; XXXIII.93.

37. Dante, Purgatori., I.8.

38. Ibid., I.4; II.112-114;VII.93; X.61;XI.10; XIX.17; XXI.126; XXIII.64; XXVI.143; XXVIII.144;

XXXIII.137.

39. Cowan, Donald, Unbinding Prometheus (Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture,

1988), 85.

40. Alighieri, Dante, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Paradiso, trans. Allen Mandelbaum

(New York: Bantam Dell, 1984), XVII.130-132.

41. Dante, Purgatorio, II.112-114.

42. Alighieri, Dante, The Banquet, trans. Christopher Ryan (Saratoga: ANMA Libri & Co., 1989),

III.ii,77.

43. In the Phaedrus Socrates tells the story of the Egyptian god Theuth "who invented numbers

and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of

all, letters. Theuth recommended all of these arts to Thamus, the king of Egypt at that time,

but in his recommendation of letters he claimed that the letters were an "elixir [Greek:

pharmakon] of memory," but Thamus realized very quickly that the use of letters would result

in "forgetfulness" and not an enhanced memory. The letters, which is to say writing, would

prostheticize memory in a system of signs that could be read at one's leisure instead of recalled

through the practice of memory. Writing therefore, while offering a means of education, also

possessed the potential for mental atrophy. The word Plato uses for elixir (sometimes

translated "remedy") is pharmakon. Plato, Phaedrus, in Plato: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito,

Phaedo, Phaedrus, vol. 36, ed. J. Henderson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005),

274d, 275a. Derrida has pointed to the oppositional nature of this word. A pharmakon is at

once a poison and a cure. Derrida, Jacques, "Plato's Pharmacy," In Dissemination, trans.

Barbara. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 70.

44. Dante, Purgatorio, XVII.104-105.

45. Ibid., X.28-96; X.94; X.98.

46. I am grateful to Dr. Scott Crider (University of Dallas) for this insight.


48. Dante, Purgatorio, X.98.

49. Alighieri, Dante, Dante's Vita Nuova, trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1973), II, 4.

50. Dante, Purgatorio, XXXI.81.

51. Ibid., XXXI.118-123.

52. Dante, Paradiso, I.1-3.

53. Dante, Paradiso, XXXIII.145; Sinclair, John D, Dante: The Divine Comedy 3: Paradiso (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 27.

54. Robert Hollander has pointed to Dante’s Letter to Can Grande as an explication of this

passage. In this letter, Dante explains that the ontological status of everything in the universe

is derivative; that is, everything that is, derives its being from the Ground of Being—God.

Hollander has suggested that Dante’s poetic vision in Paradiso involves the awareness of an

ontological gradation in which of God’s being is refracted throughout the universe from greater

to lesser, with angels at the top and mud and rocks at the bottom. (Hollander, Robert,


17

Paradiso, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (New York: Random House, Inc., 2008),

12.)

55. Dante, Paradiso I.1-12, 308.

56. Ibid., I.70.

57. Ibid., XXXII.85-87.

58. Ibid., XXXII.142-143.

59. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 4.

60. Ibid., 4.


62. Ibid., 87.

63. Ibid., 88.

64. Ibid., 87.

65. Ibid., 88.

66. Ibid., 89.

67. Ibid.

68. Ibid., 94.


70. Ibid., 150.

71. Ibid.

72. Arendt, Eichmann, 136. (Kant put forward three formulations of his categorical imperative:

(1) Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should

become universal law, (2) Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in

that of another, always as an end and never as means only, and finally (3) Act as if you were

always through your maxims a law making member in a universal kingdom of ends. Kant,

Immanuel, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1997),4:421, 73, 4:429, 80, 4:434, 83.)

73. Ibid.

74. Ibid., 137.

75. Merton, Thomas,. New Seeds of Contemplation (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1961), 1.

76. Ibid., 36.


78. Plank, Karl A., "Thomas Merton and Hannah Arendt: Contemplation After Eichmann," The

Merton Annual 3 (1990): 121-150, 139.

79. Merton, New Seeds, 12-13.

80. Benjamín, Walter, Gershom Gerhard Scholem, and Theodor W. Adorno, The

Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940. Translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and

Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), Letter 123, 218.

81. Merton, New Seeds, 37.

82. Merton, New Seeds, 14.

References

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