[lit-ideas] Re: From the banal to the bizarre
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2007 18:49:29 -0700
It would be inadequate to say that Arendt didn't know what the "banality of
evil" meant and leave it at that. The reaction to her book did cause her
to want to explore the concept more fully. Eichmann to her was obviously
banal, but not so to her interlocutors who preferred seeing him as the
epitome of demonic evil. What I meant when I wrote, "she apparently wasn't
completely sure what she meant," was that she wrote something she
intuitively knew was true, but probably would concede that she hadn't
developed the idea well enough. She hadn't thought enough about it to
develop it fully - that is what I take her to imply in her introduction to
Thinking, in which she wrote,
"The immediate impulse [for writing this book] came from my attending the
Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. In my report of it I spoke of 'the banality of
evil.' Behind that phrase, I held no thesis in doctrine, although I was
dimly aware of the fact that it went counter to our [I take her to mean
"Western" rather than Jewish by 'our'] tradition of thought - literary,
theological, or philosophic - about the phenomenon of evil. Evil, we have
learned, is something demonic; its incarnation is Satan, a 'lightning fall
from heaven' (Luke 10:18), or Lucifer, the fallen angel ('The devil is an
angel too' - Unamuno) whose sin is pride ('proud as Lucifer'), namely, that
superbia of which only the best are capable: they don't want to serve God
but to be like Him. Evil men, we are told, act out of envy; this may be
resentment at not having turned out well through no fault of their own
(Richard III) or the envy of Cain, who slew Abel because 'the Lord had
regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no
regard.' Or they may be prompted by weakness (Macbeth). Or, on the
contrary, by the powerful hatred wickedness feels for sheer goodness (Iago's
'I hate the Moor: my cause is hearted'; Claggart's hatred for Billy Budd's
'barbarian' innocence, a hatred considered by Melville a 'depravity
according to nature'), or by covetousness, 'the root of all evil' (Radix
omnium malorum cupiditas). However, what I was confronted with was utterly
different and still undeniably factual. 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 trial and throughout the pre-trial police
examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidly but
thoughtlessness."
The above is from pages 3 and 4 of her introduction to her volume Thinking.
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
Sent: Saturday, November 03, 2007 6:10 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] From the banal to the bizarre
The banal of banal.
L. Helm quotes from Thomas Mann (incidentally, his daughter -- Thomas Mann's
-- married my favourite gay poet, W. H. Auden!):
"The common scum has taken power, accompanied by vast
rejoicing on the part of the masses."
Helm ventures a critical apparatus and modestly asks:
Could we not insert 'banal' prior to 'masses'
without altering the sense of what Thomas Mann wrote?
Personally, I think Mann's prose is heavy and pompous enough without having
to *insert* anything. I would actually *ex*ert a thing or too.
But again, 'banality' is a concept that Arendt didn't know what it meant,
either.
It's a neo-Latin word.
The OED etymological note goes:
"banal", adj. From the French, banal, in Cotgrave spelled bannal,
ultimately from ban and derived from mediaeval Latin bannum:
see "ban" and -al]
So, I think the idea is that 'banal' means 'prohibitive' (from 'ban'). But I
wouldn't call the masses theirselves [sic] prohibitive! Stupid at most, and
'common scum' is a pretty strong Teutonism if you axes me, too -- coming
from such a poetic spirit as the author of the screenplay for my favourite
film ever, "Tode in Veniz".
When Grice was president of the American Philosophical Association, he
delivered the required 'presidential address', and entitled, "from the banal
to the bizarre", which is a title -- and a passage I _love_ (and it's also
"French", 'bizarre').
Cheers,
JL
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