[lit-ideas] Word-and-thought-defying banality of Evil
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 08:02:18 -0700
No, no. It wasn?t a rhetorical question. It was quite genuine ? well
maybe not genuine in the sense of expecting an answer but genuine in the
sense of questioning Hannah Arendt whom I take to be suggesting the idea.
She doesn?t however do it as a philosophical precept but as an observation
about Eichmann with perhaps an implied wider application to people of this
sort and this sort of evil in general, and I can?t say that I?ve completely
grasped her meaning yet. Here is the way she describes Eichmann?s death:
Page 252: ?Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. He had
asked for a bottle of red wine and had drunk half of it. He refused the
help of the Protestant minister, the Reverend William Hull, who offered to
read the Bible with him: he had only two more hours to live, and therefore
no ?time to waste.? He walked the fifty yards from his cell to the
execution chamber calm and erect, with his hands bound behind him. When the
guards tied his ankles and knees, he asked them to loosen the bonds so that
he could stand straight. ?I don?t need that,? he said when the black hood
was offered him. He was in complete command of himself, nay, he was more:
he was completely himself. Nothing could have demonstrated this more
convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words. He began by
stating emphatically that he was a Gottglaubiger, to express in common Nazi
fashion that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death.
He then proceeded: ?After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again.
Such is the fate of all men. Long life Germany, long live Argentina, long
live Austria. I shall not forget them.? In the face of death, he had found
the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows, his memory played
him the last trick; he was ?elated? and he forgot that this was his own
funeral.
?It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that
this long course in human wickedness had taught us ? the lesson of the
fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.?
I take her to be saying that the conducting of such evil, this crime against
humanity (the new crime described at Nuremburg) could not have occurred
without people who functioned on this banal, cliché-ridden level. She
describes the difficulty of perpetrating this crime when confronted by
defiance. The Nazis had neither the manpower nor the will to send Jews to
the gas chambers when confronted by defiance. She has several examples of
this. Defiance in Germany itself wouldn?t have eliminated the death of
German Jews but it would have reduced the number of deaths. So not only
are the perpetrators of the evil banal, so cooperate in their murder.
Lawrence
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 7:05 AM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] All cliche is metaphor
"All slang is metaphor" (Chesterton)
Note below -- as per OED ps -- that 'cliche' is (mostly) metaphor, too!
L. Helm is reading a book and has posed an interesting question to the list.
To wit:
>[The author] is in the process here of building support for her
>contention that [X] was "a stupid man". But can we
I perceive a rhetorical question here:
>generalize? Can we assert that people who in speech can't
>progress (or don't want to progress) beyond clichés are incapable
>of (or have difficulty) seeing reality from another person's
>perspective?
Well, you are dealing with translations into various languages, and I have a
problem with the word 'cliche' in any case.
I believe that an exclusively cliche speaker (or utterer) as I prefer, would
be quite a sight to see.
On the other hand, most language learning is done _through_ cliches -- think
of the silly nursery rhymes that are supposed to give Geary fluency in the
verbal forms, "Its fleece was white as snow -- and ... the lamb was sure to
go").
If Mothers (with their Motherese) were _not_ relying on cliches -- as My
Mother Did Not -- you get MONSTERS, not real nice, sociable and personable
people.
The problem with cliches is that sometimes they have a LITERALLY false first
meaning. Think of 'winged words', or to use an example by Grice, "pushing up
the daisies".
Grice was obsessed with cliche ways of expressing that someone was dead.
There's not just 'kick the bucket" and "push up the daisies", but things
which are "less cliche". His example, "fertilizing the daffodils".
In any case, he liked to play with the ambiguity of:
(1) "If I shall be then helping the grass to grow,
PROTASIS
I shall have no time for reading."
APODOSIS
Literally, he explains, in the William James Lectures at Harvard -- for the
Spring term of 1967,
"It would be approximately true to say that the utterer means (has as one of
its meanings):
(2) If I shall then be assisting the kind of things
of which lawns are composed to mature,
PROTASIS
I shall have be protected from the horrors of the world"
APODOSIS.
He is playing with the idea that both protasis and apodosis have multiple
'meanings' and in the end it's a matter of wild guess as to what the speaker
means.
I'm sure it's the same with the author your author is discussing.
Some people love an idiom, so I disagree with your comment:
Those who cannot go
>beyond clichés are incapable
>of (or have difficulty) seeing reality from another person's
>perspective?
But that's precisely what a cliche gives you -- another person's perspective
-- indeed, the whole human race -- of the language which is your form of
life -- and their perspective on things.
I will grant that "Curiosity killed the cat" is a cliche. By sticking to the
cliche, you are sticking to the received opinion, to the wisdom of the ages.
It takes some effort to see reality not from ANOTHER person's perspective
but from your OWN. After all, as Castaneda, the Guatemalan philosopher used
to say, Philosophy is written IN THE FIRST PERSON and FOR the FIRST PERSON.
The English language -- unlike perhaps the German -- is so rich in cliches
that you will find one that contradicts the other. Spanish too:
"No por mucho madrugar se amanece mas temprano"
-- tricky to translate, but something to the effect that early rising does
not mean early _dawn_.
But English has,
"The early bird catches the worm"
-- and a few others.
I suppose there must be cliches FOR and AGAINST heavy drinking, or less
strongly, the enjoyment of alcoholic beverages.
It is said that Homer relied too much on cliches -- like 'epea pteroenta',
winged words. The reason, I contend, is that he was part of an 'illiterate',
oral tradition, and these cliches -- as the ones you find in Bewoulf --
allowed the oral poet to keep the audience engaged. Gauchos do the same
thing in Argentina.
A cliche like that is worth examining in detail. In Anglo-Saxon J.L. Borges
has studied them in detail -- they were called "kenningar" in Old Norse.
Modern theories of figurative language express the view that there are
prototypes and SCHEMES -- this is Turner's word -- at play in such cliches.
Indeed, the imagery of German and anti-German, Semitic and anti-Semitic
speeches has been well documented by discourse analysts.
I wish I had a cliche to hand to title this -- by Wilde preferably, ...
Interesting question. Maybe others can provide further thoughts. Castaneda's
idea of the first person to the first person is interesting. It does not
really SAY it's from the first person of the utterer to the first person of
the utterer, but, perhaps to the first person of the addressee. This is what
one should 'feel', say, when reading Plato -- in the Loeb, for how else will
you listen to his _voice_?
The idea of communication as communion is a good Greek and Christian and
Judeo-Christian if you wish, one. We have to wait till Wittgenstein with his
scepticism when he felt that there was nobody around who could _feel_ his
pain when he said,
"I have a toothache".
-- Saying that, and in German too, to a bunch of curious privileged students
at King's, Cambridge -- got them into thinking that Wittgenstein was
_reviving_ the 'cogito ergo sum' and the Cartesian solipsism, and it took a
few English practical philosophers (notably John Wisdom in Cambridge) to set
things back on the right track.
Cheers,
JL
---
from the OED
1832 BABBAGE Econ. Manuf. xi. (ed. 3) 95 A process for copying, called in
France clichée. 1850 Art. Jrnl. 219 Cliché is also applied to the French
stereotype casts from woodcuts. 1868 C. DARWIN in Life (1887) III. 87
Engelmann has..offered me clichés of the woodcuts.
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