Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Ethical Self

Christology, Ethics, and Formation

Clark J. Elliston

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781451496260
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506418940
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Dietrich Bonhoeffers work has persistently challenged Christian consciousness due to both his death at the hands of the Nazis and his provocative prison musings about Christian faithfulness in late modernity. Although understandable given the popularity of both narrative trajectories, such selective focus obscures the depth and fecundity of his overall corpus. Bonhoeffers early work, and particularly his Christocentric anthropology, grounds his later commitments to responsibility and faithfulness in a "world come of age." While much debate accompanies claims regarding the continuity of Bonhoeffers thought, there are central motifs that pervade his work from his doctoral dissertation to the prison writings.

This book suggests that a concern for otherness permeates all of Bonhoeffers work. Furthermore, Clark Elliston articulates, drawing on Bonhoeffer, a constructive vision of Christian selfhood defined by its orientation towards otherness. Taking Bonhoeffer as both the origin and point of return, the text engages Emmanuel Levinas and Simone Weil as dialogue partners who likewise stress the role of the other for self-understanding, albeit in diverse ways. By reading Bonhoeffer through their voices, one enhances Bonhoeffers already fertile understanding of responsibility.

5

Adolf Eichmann as Personification of Irresponsibility

Introduction

When Hannah Arendt covered the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann on behalf of The New Yorker, her account evoked an enormous public response. Not only did she, in the eyes of her critics, blame Jews for complicity with Nazi authorities, she also cast Eichmann in a sympathetic light. Yet, these concerns partially obscured the philosophical force of her argument. How does someone so average become so evil? This final chapter uses Arendt’s depiction of Eichmann to establish a “negative” of an attentive, responsible self. Specifically, Arendt’s Eichmann personifies an ideal that is the opposite of Weil’s attentive self,^[1] and Arendt’s Eichmann would also never be, in Bonhoeffer’s terms, “responsible as a human being.”^[2] We will consider three aspects of this personification.

First, the self captured in Arendt’s account of Eichmann is unable to escape vapidity and shallowness.^[3] This self enclosed upon itself manifests what Bonhoeffer describes as the cor curvum in se. The self’s enclosure is more than merely a passive state of being; it is also volitional. This dual passive and active refusal of otherness appears biblically as “hardness of heart.” This biblical metaphor characterizes the chosen closure of the self to the other. Eichmann’s own refusal of otherness, as Arendt demonstrates, presents an extreme challenge to all ethics.

Second, Eichmann’s actions demonstrate the ease with which ethical paradigms are misused. For example, while Eichmann explicitly claims to follow Kant’s categorical imperative for his moral direction, Arendt claims that he misuses Kant.^[4] While Eichmann disregards the role of judgment in Kant’s practical philosophy, Arendt maintains that anyone who follows Kant’s categorical imperative must think for himself.^[5] In fact, Eichmann admits that “he had ceased to live according to Kantian principles.”^[6] Arendt notes that Eichmann is unable to think, and so, he is an unthinking self. Although able to conduct day-to-day operations, Eichmann is singularly unable to make reflective judgments.

Third, Eichmann in his pseudo-Kantianism (under the second point above) displays his inconsistency, and, in this sense, a failure to think. But more than this, Arendt presents the complete lack of ethical awareness in Eichmann, insofar as he is both unable and unwilling to perceive the claim of the other upon himself. So, closed in on himself, he is inattentive to the other. But far from acting like a “monster,” the actions of Eichmann are banal.^[7]

I argue that inattentiveness and hardness of heart result in a lack of ethical orientation. An ethical self oriented to the other and, for Bonhoeffer, to Christ avoids the danger of self-contradiction and cannot evade human responsibility.^[8] Such a self is, in Bonhoeffer’s terms, a “single-minded” person.^[9] In contrast, Arendt’s Eichmann embodies the double-minded person of both Bonhoeffer and the biblical book of James.

Bonhoeffer’s double-minded person remains fundamentally disunited and fragmented. It can never “venture the free and responsible action” of a single-minded person. Only the attentively responsible human being embraces the freedom inherent in Christian life.^[10] Such freedom opens the way for genuine ethical agency, while also allowing for the responsive elements of Christian ethics. The self imprisoned within itself, on the contrary, has neither the creative resources to think beyond his circumstances, nor the will to hear the cries from those around him.

Eichmann’s Challenge for Ethics

Arendt’s account of Eichmann challenges contemporary theological ethics, not least through its remarkable banality. It is only with some difficulty that Arendt identifies the error of Eichmann’s ways, and even here, her thoughts are not absolutely clear. Obviously, Eichmann’s enthusiasm for the Final Solution provokes disgust. However, throughout Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt notes the chaotic circumstances that culminated in an incredible, and yet, widespread lack of perspective on the part of both perpetrator and victim.^[11] Furthermore, if Eichmann indeed did not kill anyone,^[12] gave no direct order to kill anyone,^[13] and possessed no particular antipathy for Jews,^[14] what then was Eichmann’s specific and egregious transgression? His great transgression was being, and remaining, complicit in a system predicated on the negation of otherness. As Arendt illustrates, to act differently required moral resources that few possessed. Even those who did manage some form of resistance did so in sectarian and in largely ineffective ways.^[15]

For Arendt, the incongruity of Eichmann’s trial wrestled precisely with the chasm between the prosecution’s attempt to portray Eichmann as a devilish sadist, while Eichmann himself appeared no more than a pawn in a larger game.^[16] He was not a psychopath; he was even described by psychiatrists before trial as “normal: ‘More normal at any rate, than I am after having examined him,’ one of them was said to have exclaimed.”^[17] Another said Eichmann’s mental state was “not only normal but most desirable.”^[18] The minister who visited him in prison said he was “a man of very positive ideas.”^[19] The incongruity of the portrayals hints at the ethical challenge provided by Eichmann’s example. The gulf between Eichmann’s alleged evil character, or the evil manifest by his person, is incommensurate with the evil consequences of his actions. Arendt observes the effect of this chasm in the judges’ responses to Eichmann:

And the judges did not believe him, because they were too good, and perhaps too conscious of the very foundations of their profession, to admit that an average, “normal” person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong. They preferred to conclude from occasional lies that he was a liar – and missed the greatest moral and even legal challenge of the whole case.^[20]

Eichmann’s working knowledge of basic Kantian philosophy further heightens this tension.^[21] How could someone who, even mistakenly, relates to Kant’s philosophy as a moral guide remain complicit with, and even supportive of, such policies? If Eichmann’s ethical failure is due to sheer ignorance of ethical paradigms, education resolves the challenge. However, when pressed, Eichmann “to the surprise of everybody . . . came up with an approximately correct definition of the categorical imperative.”^[22] He was, relatively speaking, far from ignorant about the idea of ethics. In a sense, Eichmann was even ethical. Even if, as Arendt alleges, he inappropriately interpreted Kant’s philosophy, this too could have been remedied by instruction.^[23] Instead, Eichmann admitted “he had ceased to live according to Kantian principles, [and] that he had known it.”^[24] Consequently, a lack of ethical awareness by Eichmann goes deeper than a mere misunderstanding of ethical paradigms.

The Challenge of Selfhood

Bonhoeffer conceives ethical selfhood as being single-minded and “whole” (τέλειος). The single-minded person “keeps in sight only the single truth of God.”^[25] The single truth is revealed in Christ; and, for Bonhoeffer, Christ is the human being par excellence. Crucially, Christ as the whole human being has a complete relation to others. Being for others is the wholeness (τέλειος) of human being.

Bonhoeffer develops the idea of the self as either whole (τέλειος) or double-minded (δἰψυχος). These twin images of wholeness and double-mindedness emerge beginning in Discipleship, where Bonhoeffer writes that τέλειος means “being determined, focused on a single goal; not simultaneously aiming for two goals; it means not being δἰψυχος.”^[26] This theme continues through the Ethics, where wholeness connects with both reality and sociality. Christ is the measure of reality, and so, the one who confesses to Christ partakes in that reality. Bonhoeffer writes,

Whoever confesses the reality of Jesus Christ as the revelation of God confesses in the same breath the reality of God and the reality of the world, for they find God and the world reconciled in Christ. Just for this reason the Christian is no longer the person of eternal conflict. As reality is one in Christ, so the person who belongs to this Christ-reality is a whole.^[27]

Having a vision of reality, based on relation to Christ, grounds the whole self. Only that wholeness prevents the tearing apart of the self, due to either “eternal conflict” or the injustice of the world.^[28] Returning full circle to the problem of ethical paradigms posed in the introduction, for the person justified by their own private virtue, only self-deception can prevent them from being destroyed by their own unwilling complicity in the injustice of the world. The choice they face is either self-deception or eternal conflict within themselves. Over against the person justified by his or her own power, Bonhoeffer offers the example of the person of simplicity and wisdom. He writes,

Only the person who combines simplicity wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Considering Contemporary Selves: Two Approaches
• Bonhoeffer and the Responsibly Oriented Self
• Bound to the Other: Bonhoeffer and Levinas in Conversation
• Weil’s “Attention” and the Other-Oriented Self
• Adolf Eichmann as Personification of Irresponsibility
• Works Cited
• Index of Subjects
• Index of References