AESTHETICS OF EVIL
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commonness of bragging, Miss Arendt ignored completely the content
of Eichmann's brag. How many people in the history of the world
have ever boasted of having killed five million people?
Do we not have traditional moral norms by which we can judge
Eichmann's actions? Greek thought, which still affects our moral
evaluations, maintained that if a man kills another man even by
accident his soul is stained by the act. Consider then a man who has
killed approximately five million people without having meant to do
so. Would not his soul, from the Greek view, be stained indeed?
A
man with such a past would have been considered accursed,
for how could he have been so unlucky? But Adolf Eichmann
did not kill his millions of Jews by chance or accident. The highest
position he ever held in life was to be in charge of their execution.
How could the man not have been morally monstrous? And all the
more a monster if he did not know he was one! But when the
Lutheran minister Heinrich Gruber testified that in his dealings with
Eichmann he found him like a "block of ice" and like "marble,"
Miss Arendt, as Marie Syrkin notes, dismisses the minister's descrip–
tion of Eichmann, saying that Gruber was full of "pat judgments."
Against a moral judgment of Eichmann's character, which I
think
would have to call it monstrous, Miss Arendt pits her own
fundamentally aesthetic judgment of the man, which points mainly
to his comical characteristics. And Eichmann was indeed in some
sense a clown, which Miss Arendt is easily able to show by a number
of interesting anecdotes about him, most of which ring true to me.
But is there any contradiction between being morally monstrous
and also comical? I am inclined to think that there is none, that
anyone who considers the comical traits of lago and Richard III
must be of my opinion. And speaking of Shakespeare's villains, I am
reminded that T. S. Eliot once said that Parolles, the clownish
intermediary in
All's Well That Ends Well,
seemed more sinister
and frightening to him than Shakespeare's gigantic villains. Let me
add that Soren Kierkegaard, whose moral discriminations were so
extraordinary, also saw no contradiction between the morally mon–
strous and the comical. In describing Judas, Kierkegaard says he
must have been the sort of man who, when being paid for selling
