平庸之恶 维基百科

50年前，新学院(New School)的哲学教授汉娜·阿伦特(Hannah Arendt)写了一本小书，名叫《耶路撒冷的艾希曼：伦理的现代困境》(Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil)。这本书所引发的巨大争议，超过了她之前以及之后的任何一本书。就像批评家欧文·豪(Irving Howe)说的那样，这本书在上西区的知识分子中挑起了“一场内战”，引发了恶毒的争论，毁掉了一生的友谊。它卖出了10万多本，重塑了人们对大屠杀、种族灭绝和罪恶之谜的思考方式。

人们把这场不断升级的争论简称为“论战”。这场论战如今已几乎被人遗忘了，它所引起的强烈怨恨现在看起来似乎是不可思议的。但是一部关于这个事件的新电影《汉娜·阿伦特》(Hannah Arendt)周三（指5月29日——编注）在电影论坛(Film Forum)放映，重新激活了那些辩论和那个时代。

本片导演玛格丽特·冯·特罗塔(Margarethe von Trotta)是德国新电影运动的资深导演。十年前一个朋友建议她拍摄这部电影的时候，她有点犹疑。“我的第一反应是，一部关于哲学家的电影怎么拍呢？要知道哲学家大部分时候就是坐着思考，”她在巴黎的家中接受电话采访时回忆道。

她和美国编剧帕梅拉·卡茨(Pamela Katz)写了一个情节大纲，覆盖了阿伦特的一生，但是它太长了，太分散了。因此她们决定把重点集中在艾希曼事件上。“对电影制作人来说，有一个冲突事件比只有抽象的概念，要好一些，”冯·特罗塔说。

1960年5月，“二战”快结束时逃往阿根廷而存活下来的最后一位纳粹头目阿道夫·艾希曼(Adolf Eichmann)被摩萨德的特工们绑架后送往耶路撒冷，因反人类罪接受审判。

阿伦特是德国犹太难民，也是著名的学术巨著《极权主义的起源》(The Origins of Totalitarianism)的作者。她提出要以《纽约客》记者的身份报道这次审判（她的书最初是一篇由5部分组成的文章）。

她提出了两个极有争议的观点。第一个是，艾希曼作为纳粹党卫军的高级军官，不是像以色列检察官指控的那样，是纳粹死亡集中营的蓄意组织者，而只是机械执行命令的普通官员；阿伦特说他只是“时代旋风中的一片叶子”，说他“不是恶魔”，而只是“一个小丑”。那本书被广为引用的副标题“平庸的恶”也由此而来。

阿伦特的第二个观点是德国和波兰的“犹太委员会”与纳粹串通一气大规模谋杀自己人。他们帮助纳粹集合受害人，没收他们的财产，把他们送上通往死亡的列车。阿伦特写道，如果没有这些犹太领导人，“会出现骚乱和很多痛苦，但是受害者的总人数很难达到450万至600万”。她补充说，“对犹太人来说，犹太领导者所扮演的角色，无疑是整个黑暗的故事里最黑暗的一章。”

因为这些观点，阿伦特被嘲弄为一个憎恨本族人的犹太人。反诽谤联盟发出信件，敦促拉比们在赎罪日谴责她。犹太团体付钱让研究者们仔细找出她书中的错误。她的一些最亲近的朋友从此以后很多年，甚至一辈子，都没再跟她说过话。

那时候，以色列刚成立15年：它幼小、脆弱、贫穷。当时的总理大卫·本-古里安(David Ben-Gurion)为了给羽翼未丰的新国家寻求支持，为了让人们接受大屠杀的教训，大肆宣传艾希曼的审判，那是第一批全球媒体事件之一。当时在美国，随着黑名单和配额的消失，犹太专业人才，特别是学术界的专业人才，刚刚得到应有的尊重。而这时伟大的学者汉娜·阿伦特却轻视他们的伟大复兴，宣扬他们的丑事。

对阿伦特的某些攻击过于偏激，比如说她同情艾希曼或者说她认为犹太受害者比纳粹杀手更像魔鬼。不过阿伦特的某些观点也同样偏激，尤其是她对艾希曼的描绘。她的“平庸的恶”的论点基于一种假设，这种假设就是艾希曼做这些事情的时候没有意识到自己在作恶，他甚至不带有反犹太主义的恶意。而实际上，很多证据表明艾希曼非常清楚自己在做什么，这些证据有些是当时就为人所知的，有些是之后才被发现的。

1957年在阿根廷，一个名叫威廉·扎森(Willem Sassen)的前纳粹党卫军军官详细采访了艾希曼。采访的录音带几年前才被发现，艾希曼在其中吹嘘自己帮助起草了传达“屠杀方案”(Final Solution)的信件，还说有几次同事请求他释放一个受到优待的犹太人，他拒绝了。

“我不断点燃人们仇恨的火焰，”他说，“我不只是接受命令。如果我是那样的，那我就是低能儿。而实际上我是个理想主义者。”

大卫·切萨拉尼(David Cesarani)在2004年的传记《成为艾希曼》(Becoming Eichmann)中披露了艾希曼在1937年讲过的一段话，这位理想主义者明显“被一种幻觉控制着，认为犹太人阴谋对抗德国”，认为他们是应该被毁灭的敌人。

艾希曼在战争快结束时对同伴说：“我将高兴地跳进坟墓，因为我知道德意志帝国的500万个敌人已经像牲口那样被杀死了。”审判时，这句话被一再强调。阿伦特在书中说他只是在“吹嘘”，对此豪的评论是“官僚主义机器中一个平凡的齿轮是不会说这种吹嘘的话的”。

杰出的以色列记者阿莫斯·埃隆(Amos Elon)总的来说是支持阿伦特的，不过他在介绍她的书的平装版时说，阿伦特“习惯于依据不确凿的证据得出绝对的结论”。

艾希曼是平庸的——这一结论所依据的不确凿的证据，就是他在证人席上充满陈词滥调的证词。“语言能力的缺失与他思考能力的缺失紧密相关，也就是说，他不能从别人的角度思考，”她写道。他说他只是不假思索地在做自己的工作，阿伦特相信了他。

甚至连阿伦特的朋友们也提到了她的自命不凡。这一次，她对艾希曼糟糕语言的鄙视蒙蔽了她，使她没有看到其他人都看到的明显事实：为了保命他在撒谎。

阿伦特看错了艾希曼，但是她无意中触碰到了一个更大的命题，那就是普通人是如何成为残酷的杀手。战后年轻一代的德国人受到阿伦特的书启发，开始对抗自己的父母，因为在战争期间他们的父母也许没有亲手杀死犹太人，但是他们知道在发生什么事情，却没有伸出援手。

在美国，抗议者援引“平庸的恶”来指责那些表面上正派、顾家的男人，他们往北越南丢炸弹，或者坐在核弹发射井里，随时准备按下按钮。抗议者说他们就是阿伦特所说的“办公桌边的谋杀者”，只不过是冷战版的。

冯·特罗塔以拍摄特立独行的坚强女性而成就了一番事业，这些女性有时会孤立于周围所有的人。《罗莎·卢森堡》(Rosa Luxemburg)讲述的是一个共产主义反对派，她与党内所有派别的观点都不一致。《灵视》(Vision)讲述的是宾根的希尔德加德(Hildegard of Bingen)，她是12世纪的一个神秘主义修女，她创作的音乐超越了任何时代（这两个人物以及阿伦特，都是由芭芭拉·苏科娃[Barbara Sukowa]扮演的，她在新电影中看起来真的像是陷入深思的哲学家）。

“我与这些女人是一样的，”冯·特罗塔说，“也许是因为我从小都没有国籍。”

（她母亲来自俄国的一个贵族家庭，在革命爆发后逃往柏林定居，玛格丽特就是在那里出生的，不过按照德国法律，她不具有公民身份。）

“汉娜也差不多是一样，”她继续说道，“纳粹上台后，她离开了德国。在法国她因为是德国人而入狱。她一直觉得自己没有家，直到来到美国。然后人们对艾希曼一书的攻击感觉像是对她的第三次流放。”

“我不是个传教士，”她补充说，“我拍电影不是要传达什么理念。我只是拍我喜欢或者感兴趣的人。但是如果说这部电影有什么理念的话，那就是你应该独立思考，不要追随某种观念或者时尚。汉娜说这是‘不受束缚的思考方式’。”

Can one do evil without being evil? This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organising the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in support of the Nazi’s Final Solution.

Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong’.

Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann ‘the banality of evil’: he was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless, a ‘joiner’, in the words of one contemporary interpreter of Arendt’s thesis: he was a man who drifted into the Nazi Party, in search of purpose and direction, not out of deep ideological belief. In Arendt’s telling, Eichmann reminds us of the protagonist in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942), who randomly and casually kills a man, but then afterwards feels no remorse. There was no particular intention or obvious evil motive: the deed just ‘happened’.

This wasn’t Arendt’s first, somewhat superficial impression of Eichmann. Even 10 years after his trial in Israel, she wrote in 1971:

I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer [ie Eichmann] which 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.

The banality-of-evil thesis was a flashpoint for controversy. To Arendt’s critics, it seemed absolutely inexplicable that Eichmann could have played a key role in the Nazi genocide yet have no evil intentions. Gershom Scholem, a fellow philosopher (and theologian), wrote to Arendt in 1963 that her banality-of-evil thesis was merely a slogan that ‘does not impress me, certainly, as the product of profound analysis’. Mary McCarthy, a novelist and good friend of Arendt, voiced sheer incomprehension: ‘[I]t seems to me that what you are saying is that Eichmann lacks an inherent human quality: the capacity for thought, consciousness – conscience. But then isn’t he a monster simply?’

The controversy continues to the present day. The philosopher Alan Wolfe, in Political Evil: What It Is and How to Combat It (2011), criticised Arendt for ‘psychologising’ – that is, avoiding – the issue of evil as evil by defining it in the limited context of Eichmann’s humdrum existence. Wolfe argued that Arendt concentrated too much on who Eichmann was, rather than what Eichmann did. For Arendt’s critics, this focus on Eichmann’s insignificant, banal life seemed to be an ‘absurd digression’ from his evil deeds.

Other recent critics have documented Arendt’s historical errors, which led her to miss a deeper evil in Eichmann, when she claimed that his evil was ‘thought-defying’, as Arendt wrote to the philosopher Karl Jaspers three years after the trial. The historian Deborah Lipstadt, the defendant in David Irving’s Holocaust-denial libel trial, decided in 2000, cites documentation released by the Israeli government for use in the legal proceeding. It proves, Lipstadt asserts in The Eichmann Trial (2011), that Arendt’s use of the term ‘banal’ was flawed:

The memoir [by Eichmann] released by Israel for use in my trial reveals the degree to which Arendt was wrong about Eichmann. It is permeated with expressions of Nazi ideology… [Eichmann] accepted and espoused the idea of racial purity.

Lipstadt further argues that Arendt failed to explain why Eichmann and his associates would have attempted to destroy evidence of their war crimes, if he was indeed unaware of his wrongdoing.

In Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2014), the German historian Bettina Stangneth reveals another side to him besides the banal, seemingly apolitical man, who was just acting like any other ‘ordinary’ career-oriented bureaucrat. Drawing on audiotapes of interviews with Eichmann by the Nazi journalist William Sassen, Stangneth shows Eichmann as a self-avowed, aggressive Nazi ideologue strongly committed to Nazi beliefs, who showed no remorse or guilt for his role in the Final Solution – a radically evil Third Reich operative living inside the deceptively normal shell of a bland bureaucrat. Far from being ‘thoughtless’, Eichmann had plenty of thoughts – thoughts of genocide, carried out on behalf of his beloved Nazi Party. On the tapes, Eichmann admitted to a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde dualism:

I, ‘[t]he cautious bureaucrat,’ that was me, yes indeed. But … this cautious bureaucrat was attended by a … a fanatical [Nazi] warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood, which is my birthright…

Arendt completely missed this radically evil side of Eichmann when she wrote 10 years after the trial that there was ‘no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives’. This only underscores the banality – and falsity – of the banality-of-evil thesis. And though Arendt never said that Eichmann was just an innocent ‘cog’ in the Nazi bureaucracy, nor defended Eichmann as ‘just following orders’ – both common misunderstandings of her findings on Eichmann – her critics, including Wolfe and Lipstadt, remain unsatisfied.

So what should we conclude about Arendt’s claim that Eichmann (as well as other Germans) did evil without being evil?

The question is a puzzle because Arendt missed an opportunity to investigate the larger meaning of Eichmann’s particular evil by not expanding her study of him into a broader study of evil’s nature. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), published well before the Eichmann trial, Arendt said:

It is inherent in our entire [Western] philosophical tradition that we cannot conceive of a ‘radical evil’…

Instead of using the Eichmann case as a way forward to advance the tradition’s understanding of radical evil, Arendt decided that his evil was banal, that is, ‘thought-defying’. By taking a narrow legalistic, formalistic approach to the trial – she emphasised that there were no deeper issues at stake beyond the legal facts of Eichmann’s guilt or innocence – Arendt automatically set herself up for failure as to the deeper why of Eichmann’s evil.

Yet in her writings before Eichmann in Jerusalem, she actually took an opposite position. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she argued that the evil of the Nazis was absolute and inhuman, not shallow and incomprehensible, the metaphorical embodiment of hell itself: ‘[T]he reality of concentration camps resembles nothing so much as medieval pictures of Hell.’

By declaring in her pre-Eichmann trial writings that absolute evil, exemplified by the Nazis, was driven by an audacious, monstrous intention to abolish humanity itself, Arendt was echoing the spirit of philosophers such as F W J Schelling and Plato, who did not shy away from investigating the deeper, more demonic aspects of evil. But this view changed when Arendt met Eichmann, whose bureaucratic emptiness suggested no such diabolical profundity, but only prosaic careerism and the ‘inability to think’. At that point, her earlier imaginative thinking about moral evil was distracted, and the ‘banality of evil’ slogan was born. Moreover, Arendt died in 1975: perhaps if she had lived longer she could have clarified the puzzles surrounding the banality-of-evil thesis, which still confound critics to this day. But this we shall never know.

Thus we are left with her original thesis as it stands. What is the basic confusion behind it? Arendt never did reconcile her impressions of Eichmann’s bureaucratic banality with her earlier searing awareness of the evil, inhuman acts of the Third Reich. She saw the ordinary-looking functionary, but not the ideologically evil warrior. How Eichmann’s humdrum life could co-exist with that ‘other’ monstrous evil puzzled her. Nevertheless, Arendt never downplayed Eichmann’s guilt, repeatedly described him as a war criminal, and concurred with his death sentence as handed down by the Israeli court. Though Eichmann’s motives were, for her, obscure and thought-defying, his genocidal acts were not. In the final analysis, Arendt did see the true horror of Eichmann’s evil.