![]() ![]() ![]() As a result, Arendt objected to a specific nation-state conducting a trial of Eichmann exclusively in the name of its own population.Īt this historical juncture, for Arendt, it became necessary to conceptualise and prepare for crimes against humanity, and this implied an obligation to devise new structures of international law. Just as the failure to think was a failure to take into account the necessity and value that makes thinking possible, so the destruction and displacement of whole populations was an attack not only on those specific groups, but on humanity itself. This fact was not banal at all, but unprecedented, shocking, and wrong.īy writing about Eichmann, Arendt was trying to understand what was unprecedented in the Nazi genocide – not in order to establish the exceptional case for Israel, but in order to understand a crime against humanity, one that would acknowledge the destruction of Jews, Gypsies, gay people, communists, the disabled and the ill. So, in this first instance, she feared that what had become "banal" was non-thinking itself. ![]() To have "intentions" in her view was to think reflectively about one's own action as a political being, whose own life and thinking is bound up with the life and thinking of others. She did not think he acted without conscious activity, but she insisted that the term "thinking" had to be reserved for a more reflective mode of rationality.Īrendt wondered whether a new kind of historical subject had become possible with national socialism, one in which humans implemented policy, but no longer had "intentions" in any usual sense. Did the courts have to prove that Eichmann intended to commit genocide in order to be convicted of the crime? Her argument was that Eichmann may well have lacked "intentions" insofar as he failed to think about the crime he was committing. The first problem is that of legal intention. There were at least two challenges to legal judgment that she underscored, and then another to moral philosophy more generally. ![]()
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