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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Winged Words6/06/2006 08:47:19I wish I had the book (Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil) with me but I don't - as I travel in Austria and elsewhere I have been remembering Arendt's talk about Eichmann's "winged words," by which she means the way that he could become enraptured by his own eloquent affirmations and maxims. This is a question of satisfaction, of sorts. According to her, he would find a situation satisfied if he could make some statement about it that he found compelling. Through this the moral and aesthetic demands of the moment would be satisfied. She takes note of his maxims and repeated assertions like this and observes that sometimes the contradict each other, or seem totally irrelevant. Yet to him they make do on the day to day level, shepherding him minutely along the way to mass murder followed by a staged trial in which he is able to imagine himself doing some sort of good for the German youth. For one thing these "winged words" are a terrifying reminder of how moral problems are not always (are often not) phrased by us as moral questions. Doing so sometimes requires training, or an intervention of some sort from the outside, if doing so is even possible. Arendt ends up feeling frustrated that the courtroom itself was unable to phrase the problem in this way either. For its purposes, Eichmann had to be seen on technical, legal terms, not moral ones. As a result, only rarely is he forced to see his actions on moral terms (how they pan out in this light given their institutional nature to begin with is of course a very difficult and painful question). The question of morality is a choice, and one that must be taken up by a person and a society consciously. It is encouraged probably by certain features of our biology, but does not come ready-made. Abstract morality (particulary in the language of "natural law") is a funny dogma of Enlightenment secularism, in part the result of Kant's assertion that moral laws could be derived a priori apart from God. It would be a wonderful thing it it worked but to do so it needs more narrative claws, winged words of its own perhaps, tentacles that force it onto our attention, songs that we learn as children, and archetypes that shake our bones in old age. Then would it remain abstract? Without it the statement (in effect, not in words) of the Israeli government against Eichmann is all we have: my god has condemned you. This might be enough. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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