Adolf Eichmann: Banality of Evil

[Impenitent]

the philologist said, "there is no original text," much to the chagrin of his father...

-Imp

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Your assumption, then is that "function" determines the value of things? That looks like a very human-centered universe. But since we neither created ourselves nor have any means of controlling the day of our death or the practical circumstances of our lives, that would seem to be rather a lot of hubris...and not much more.

I would certainly say that function is one of the terms of value or valuation. Yet what you are really saying (I think?) is that you understand that all value was sort of pre-created? God created the Universe and so God will also be seen to have created all value, or the possibility of value? Would you then fall into the category of those who, like the Vedists, understand that revealed scripture descends directly from a higher world and must be taken as such?

If you like a "story," then it's true? And if you don't, it's not?

I weave toward and then away from what appear to be two poles of conception. I tend to see, or to imagine, that all possible meaning and all possible value, have in a sense a predetermined 'answer'. I have thought that in our universe, and infinite numbers of times, beings have confronted all that we confront and have 'solved' the issues we face. So, it is really then a question of 'plucking down' out of the Universe a way of being, and even perhaps what I understand you to mean when you speak of 'guidance' or turning one's will over to God, or perhaps cooperating with God.

The Gospels are a very clear example of a story-organization, the novelisation of a group of imagined events. It is presented as an eye-witness account but I think that many/most recognise that that can't be true. Once one has begun, so to speak, to unravel that ball of string it tends to just keep unravelling. Then, to hold to the *value* which the symbols seek to express, requires the use and employment of another style of mind. But the story elements in and of themselves: demons jumping into a herd of pigs and then running over a cliff, a voice that chimes from the sky voicing preferences, and really a whole structure of storied metaphors, simply become impossible to sustain. In this sense Story has collapsed. But I do not think that meaning has collapsed. But it would appear that a description of a world, and to various extents the metaphors that uphold and express the operative metaphysic, that has collapsed. I think it will continue to collapse. Collapse is death, yes, but then (and this is another ironic Nietzschean trope) it all points to ... resurrection.

What I would like to be able to speak about, and what really interests me, is that resurrection-cycle. I don't know if it is a radical going-back (as in Traditionalism)(and I like some of those ideas) or a radical going-forward.

It seems to me that the question you ask (or the way your 'question' must be rephrased)---though your question is in bad-faith---is: What truth stands behind all story? What stands behind the utterance? The symbol? That to me is a very valid and important question. That IS the question in fact. The whole Christian endeavour, as many religious endeavours, is to attempt an answer, to put *meaning* into a form that men can *operate*. Certainly men have something to do with this process even if, as with the medium on the mountain top, some powerful event is experienced.

Is this such a criminal description? I am I really breaking rules here? I think I am actually attempting to salvage meaning.

Old language forms are meaningless?

What I meant is old organisations of language. The old forms that people seem often to want to recur to. Excuse the metaphor but it seems like our 'new wine' cannot fit into 'old skins'. No part of what I am saying has to do with decimating spirituality, and in no sense do I think that The Masses can be allowed to flail in uncertainty. What I see when I look around me is a whole world of people who seek and require illusion. So I have no other option but to begin to conceive that the 'higher truths' about things---all things---are not truths that can be shared. And since this seems to me to be true I would logically posit a sort of esotericism.

What you don't grasp is that I am pointing in the direction of the formulation of a new metaphysical model. What seems to me to be perfectly cogent and an idea that is quite supportable, definitely is not well received by you. But when I read Basil Willey and others of that school, they all talk in similar terms, and they are very much a part of the Christian school of thinking.

...as a theorist, I find you entirely opaque.

It is just a given that those we don't agree with seem opaque to us.

[Immanuel Can]

It is just a given that those we don't agree with seem opaque to us.

Too easy. One can agree with a person because one understands, or you can find someone perfectly understandable and yet decide not to agree. But opaque, that's a different issue. It's not a given at all.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Let me try to express it another way since I do agree with what you have written ("One can agree with a person because one understands, or you can find someone perfectly understandable and yet decide not to agree. But opaque, that's a different issue").

Smeared, blurry, cloudy, misty, hazy: these are some synonyms for opaque. Though I think that I have described, and relatively well, the points I wish to bring to the fore, I have the sense that you desire to find them smeared, blurry, cloudy, misty, hazy or what-have-you rather than to recognise the cogency in the ideas expressed. It often happens in those cases that one assigns a term like 'opaque', but unjustifiably.

If there is some particularly smeared, blurry, cloudy, misty or hazy part that you would like to focus on, please include your ideas about that, and how it might become perspicuous, unambiguous and comprehensible. I would certainly like to read your thoughts. Find one expressed idea and focus on it. And provide your chosen---cogent---alternative.

It is possible that I am blurry but it is not that I do not have clear ideas to express. Nearly everything is experimental for me.

[Immanuel Can]

It is possible that I am blurry but it is not that I do not have clear ideas to express. Nearly everything is experimental for me.

Yes. You seem to speak in what McLuhan called a "memes" or "probes" style rather than to make propositions.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

This seems like a diversion, IC.

Quite honestly I am not attempting propositions here, I think I am only interested in questions. Defining a problem perhaps. Most of what I have written about, in these recent exchanges, have been about clarifying what I understand to be a problem: Story that has collapsed. This is a significant and a real Christian problem. I can't comment on what LcLuhan was interested in or how he communicated. I have never been able to make any sense at all of him.

Speaking with you, and over some months, I get the sense that you are not even slightly interested in explorations that might take you off of your base. I cannot say that this does not make sense to me. To move from that base is to cease to be what you define yourself as. Are there simply two options here: 1) Assent to the understanding you have, or 2) Cease conversation?

Some people simply can't make a bridge, and perhaps they shouldn't. But if you come into a space like this---a preacher in a philosophy forum?---it seems to me that you'd have to expect something like what you get from me.

Are you saying that I should make propositions ... for you?

[Immanuel Can]

honestly I am not attempting propositions here,

Yep. That's more or less what I said. You're floating poetry, or something analogous to that. "Experimental" you call it. The problem is that no one can agree or disagree with poetry. It just is what it is...whether just noise or something else. Being aesthetic, it's beyond objective rational judgment. Only if it dissolves into some kind of proposition can it be judged on the basis of rationality, not merely taste.

And that's funny. Because you seem to want to indict me for failing to...what is it...capitulate? mindlessly enthuse? buy in? to your statements, and you assert that as evidence of closed-mindedness...and yet by your own testimony, you don't make propositions. Without a proposition, there's nothing for anyone to agree with, and no one can be at fault if they don't. All they can really say is, "Yeah, nice words; but they don't mean much." For propositions are the basis if reason. There is no failure of reason if no proposition is available. No one has been closed-minded, because nothing propositional has been said.

So yes, you should make propositions. Or perhaps not, and go and join the "Random Emoters" website if they have one. But one thing you cannot do without being inconsistent...make the proposition that you shouldn't make propositions.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

I think IC you are still employing diversionary tactics to diffuse a focus on my core 'proposition': That Story has collapsed. And that this is a real crisis within Christianity. One that is dramatic and intense. I assert that to rescue *meaning* from within a collapsing system that some radical measures are required. I describe, perhaps indirectly, that there is a problem and I point toward some possibilities to be able to salvage *meaning* and *value*. Overall, this is a difficult conversation. On one side is the atheistic crowd who are filled (often) with their peculiar but pointed ressentiment. And on the other---like you---is the hard-core Believer whose personality is constructed within an inherited system that will allow no modifications.

The Poet, according to Plato in Ion:

• "Is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him."

And I contend, with all manner of different qualifications, that the Gospel Story, and the Gospels themselves, nearly in their entirety, are poetic constructions. I mean it in this sense:

• The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
  Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven.
  And as imagination bodies forth
  The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
  Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
  A local habitation and a name.
  Such tricks hath strong imagination,
  That if it would but apprehend some joy,
  It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
  Or in the night, imagining some fear,
  How easy is a bush supposed a bear! [Midsummer Night's Dream]

Your desire, perhaps because of the way your mind is organized, is to envision your Christian Story as if it is a 'rational' set of ideas, or propositions. I sense that you attempt to function like Francis Schaeffer, to define a 'rational' platform. But 'reason doth buckle and bowe the Mind unto the Nature of things' and is a different sort of tool. I focus on man's imagination and thus can say that man lives in his 'metaphysical dream of the world'. Imagination is not unreal, and poetic meaning is not unreal either, but it is not to be confused with 'the Nature of things'. These are two realms of knowing and very certainly two realms of expression of what is known.

You of all people should have greater clarity about this material.

Here is one of Schaeffer's statements I could employ as a support for the points I am interested in focussing on:

• "The present chasm between the generations has been brought about almost entirely by a change in the concept of truth. Wherever you look today the new concept holds the field. The consensus about us is almost monolithic, whether you review the arts, literature or just simply read the newspapers and magazines [...] On every side you can feel the stranglehold of this new methodology---and by ‘methodology’ we mean the way we approach truth and knowing. [...] And just as fog cannot be kept out by walls or doors, so this consensus comes in around us, till the room we live in is no longer distinct, and yet we hardly realise what has happened." [From The God Who Is There.]

There are many Schaeffer quotes that could be inserted into this conversation, if only to indicate that I am not interested in destroying *meaning* but am interested in revealing that *meaning* will have to de salvaged out of defunct systems of presentation. If it turns out to be an error of perception (that I see Stories as collapsed) well then my problem is not so large: I need only be convinced that the Story or a Story, despite what I think, indeed still functions intact.

Bacon, in The Advancement of Learning, writes that poetry

• "...was ever thought to have some participation of divenesse, because it doth raise and erect the Minde, by submitting the shewes of things to the desires of the Mind, wheareas reason doth buckle and bowe the Mind unto the Nature of things."

The whole issue of a shift in how 'truth' is grasped is what is at issue here. It is a huge and important problem. The link, above, to Basil Willey's book Seventeenth Century Background, in the first chapter, lays it out quite nicely.

My purpose, and the main area of my interest, is to propose that, and to begin to find ways to speak about, the ways in which 'conceptual pathways' that uphold certain meanings (and perhaps also something as hard to speak about but yet very relevant to us: our own Self) have become disconnected with the transcendental, or with something universal. In this sense I am on Schaeffer's side because I am sure there are very important things to be defended and preserved.

I have ONLY QUESTIONS though about what is to be done. My position has integrity and what I do in this issue and problem I do in 'good faith'. I will suggest---tentatively---that you seem to operate less in good faith than you should. You wish to divert the focus from this relevant and difficult area to conserve something, or to hold back advance, and I confess I do not understand what exactly---I do not understand at all---what you are up to.

[Immanuel Can]

Gustav:

That Story has collapsed

Yeah, some people say that. It doesn't make it true. It's just wish-fulfillment on their part...kind of Freudian, actually.

Your elaborate claims not to be making any propositions are framed in about two dozen identifiable propositions of your own -- categoricals, mostly. That's the self-defeating nature of the argument that reason can disprove reason. If it succeeds, it has proved something, which means it fails. If it fails, it isn't true, and thus it fails again. There's just no way to make that claim succeed. You need -- and repeatedly make -- propositions.

You insist I don't treat your claims as propositions, and that if I do so I'm operating in "bad faith." Ironically, you think that confers on your position some sort of "integrity": a claim you frame by the categorical proposition, "My view has integrity." It can't even keep faith with itself! It IS a proposition.

As such it can be challenged. But if I challenge it, you'll just allege bad faith again.

On the flip side, you propose to "threaten" my view with that handful of daisies, the "imagination"? Pardon me for not trembling in my boots.

Either you use reason, and advance propositions, or you're not asking anyone to believe you. You're just writing pretty poems. Even the claim, "My poems connect to reality" is a proposition, so you're really, really up the creek on that one.

But you are right -- this is all a digression. Have you anything relevant to say about Eichmann? Please say it, and be concise. And use a proposition or two: you'll find you can't avoid it anyway.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Just for the record: I have no problem at all with critical analysis of anything I say and any formulations. Criticism is divine, after all!

Your elaborate claims not to be making any propositions are framed in about two dozen identifiable propositions of your own -- categoricals, mostly. That's the self-defeating nature of the argument that reason can disprove reason. If it succeeds, it has proved something, which means it fails. If it fails, it isn't true, and thus it fails again. There's just no way to make that claim succeed. You need -- and repeatedly make -- propositions.

If there are 'identifiable propositions' your own statement has defeated your initial accusation. I do what I do in an effort to communicate my meanings and my views. It is absurd and I think false that you claim I am trying to, or am interested in, 'using reason to disprove reason'. I am saying that an inner structure in the Stories upon which religious faith is constructed has significantly eroded, for various reasons, and that the specifics in these stories are now, generally, understood to be false claims: lies if you will. Thus, the whole edifice of the classical religious position is in significant danger.

Your 'bad faith' is only that you (seem) to be doing all that you can to divert the conversation into an area that you can manage more successfully. The terms of Aristotelian logic perhaps? I again want to make it known to you: I have no problem with any criticisms of the structure of my ideas. Feel free to make any critique you feel is valid.

It is a false-statement, it is a trick-statement, to claim that I attempt a serious thing (against you) with what cannot be taken seriously ('a handful of daisies') You devilish rhetorician! I 'threaten' you with a very serious claim and one that has and is having serious effect in our world.

Even the claim, "My poems connect to reality" is a proposition, so you're really, really up the creek on that one.

Apparently, I am up an imagined creek in your imagination!

More rhetorical trickery: I did not make that statement and have and have no interest in making it. You rephrase me ... for your own purposes. That is called 'bad-faith', IC.

But you are right -- this is all a digression. Have you anything relevant to say about Eichmann?

I did not say 'this is all digression'. Everything here is completely relevant. Well, at least what I am endeavouring to bring out. You are apparently saying 'This is all digression'. And Eichmann is, for you, your emblem of ontological malevolence. What more need be said?

To have a conversation about Nazism and Eichmann (as I understand things at this point) would involve clarifications that likely move beyond those occurring, or being attempted, here. I have the sense that these questions and issues bring us to the very heart of very important and considerable issues. It seems to require fortitude to move in, and though, this territory.

[Immanuel Can]

The terms of Aristotelian logic perhaps?

And wouldn't it be terrible if we had to arbitrate matters that way?

To have a conversation about Nazism and Eichmann (as I understand things at this point) would involve clarifications that likely move beyond those occurring, or being attempted, here.

Feel free to clarify, then. So far, opaqueness.

I have the sense that these questions and issues bring us to the very heart of very important and considerable issues.

Agreed.

It seems to require fortitude to move in, and though, this territory

It's not the "fortitude" I have hesitations about: it's the "attitude."

If a prerequisite to exploring Eichmann is the abandoning of logic and the resort to mere poetic flourishes, then we shall meander, perhaps, but not explore. I would fain take a critical attitude to Eichmann, and feel quite justified in doing so; the poetic mode can mere rehearse his "achievements," but lacking logic, has no basis for judging them morally.

So let us cut to the chase: let me invite you to provide your anthropological description for what makes an Eichmann happen. You may also free to pass moral judgments as required; I regard them as attempts at factual predicates too.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

I have determined that speaking to you is a waste of time, overall. I think I have described why that is so. It became obvious in our PM exchanges and then more apparently here. I really have so many things to do---reading mostly---that the time sacrificed to a futile conversation outweighs the advantages. (It is obvious that our recent conversation has not had to do with Eichmann.)

[Immanuel Can]

Ummm...check the header for the strand?

Cornered?

Or just don't have a theory about Eichmann?

[Hobbes' Choice]

There was nothing unthinking about the Holocaust..

There is a holocaust going on right now. Whilst we all benefit from the machinations of corporate monsters. When you fill up your car, you are spending money to dispossess Kenyan children who have their rivers and fields posioned by oil deposits.
How many times do you 'think' about that?
And this is exactly the reflection the Arendt warns us to pay heed to. That Eichmann was not more guilty that the officer delivering his edicts, the secretary writing his letters and the car driver delivering the paper.
The legitimate machine offers each a place, including the Jews; justified by the legislative authority.

Eichmann was no architect of the holocaust but a pen pusher doing his job to avoid disapprobation of his bosses.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

It's a cop-out to dismiss certain individuals as 'evil'. Actually they are just human, and that's how humans tend to behave when they have too much power. People rarely fight back either. For some reason we don't recognise (or are unwilling to use) the power in numbers (except when we are in a mob, and then the same power-madness takes over a group instead of an individual). Social change tends to come about with a whimper that's barely noticed, rather than a roar. There were only a few Nazis, but very few were willing to stand up to them. Dictators understand this. People can be easily manipulated and intimidated en masse.
Take the mob salivating over Trump. They are too pea-brained to see that the man's a cynic who has contempt for them. He's not even being a politician, except at the most base level. He's performing for the lowest common denominator, and it's working. He's tapped into the mob mentality and moronic yank paranoia. I doubt if he even particularly wants to be President of the US. He probably just thought that it might be mildly amusing to do something other than making money and trampling on people all day.