The Telos Press Podcast: Nir Evron on Hannah Arendt, Thinking, and Metaphor

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Nir Evron about his article “Hannah Arendt, Thinking, Metaphor,” from Telos 196 (Fall 2021). An excerpt of the article appears below. In their conversation they discussed how Arendt understands the difference between a metaphorical and a literal view of the world; her view of metaphor as a bridge between the thinking ego and the social and political world that it inhabits; the tension in Arendt’s The Life of the Mind between her desire to move beyond metaphysical assumptions and her unwillingness to let go of the philosophical tradition; the consequences for morality of her conception of metaphor; the impact of the Eichmann trial on Arendt and how it prompted her to explore the connection between thoughtlessness and evil; and her belief that the individual’s ability to think in a critical fashion might serve as a check on the descent into totalitarianism. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 196 are available for purchase in our online store.

From Telos 196 (Fall 2021):

Hannah Arendt, Thinking, Metaphor

Nir Evron

Much of Hannah Arendt’s late writing can be read as an attempt to formulate a positive answer to the question she poses at the beginning of The Life of the Mind, her last, unfinished book: “Could the activity of thinking as such . . . be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually ‘condition’ them against it?”^[1] As Arendt tells it, what had prompted her interest in the relation between thinking and evil was the experience of observing Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Here was a man whose monstrousness, she famously and controversially concluded, was the result not of sadism or stupidity but of his unmitigated thoughtlessness, his inability to think with and for himself. The most conspicuous evidence for this debility, according to Arendt, was the “macabre comedy” of Eichmann’s language, a dull procession of “clichés, stock phrases, [and] standardized codes of expression,” whose primary function seems to have been to shield their producer from any genuine contact with reality.^[2] To watch the former SS officer respond to his Israeli interrogators, she writes, was to see a man waging a “heroic fight with the German language, which invariably defeats him”—a spectacle that would have been comical if it were not for the horrors that it bespoke.^[3] For Eichmann’s “inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think,” which, in turn, is what made him into such an efficient cog in the Nazi machine.^[4] This ludicrous bureaucrat, who always said the same things using the same words, was, for Arendt, the embodiment of the banality of evil.

Though Arendt does not claim that linguistic creativity is a sufficient condition for moral conscientiousness, her account of thinking does imply that it is a necessary one. For if the capacity to think with and for oneself is “among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing,” and if the ability to resist or break out of standardized patterns of speech and thought is a prime indicator of the presence of such a capacity, then there seems to be an intimate connection between the individual’s potential for linguistic unorthodoxy and her ability to resist the pressures exerted by her social environment. This problem—the problem of whether human beings can arrive at spontaneous moral judgments that run athwart of the prevailing norms and codes in their societies—was one that exercised Arendt throughout her writing career, and she evidently saw the question of language, of its uses and misuses, as central to it.

Arendt, to be clear, never argues that adherence to linguistic conventions—which anyway cannot be avoided—is blameworthy in itself. She does, however, insist that one of the reasons people often cling to stock phrases or embrace bureaucratic officialese is that such standardized language “[protects us] against the claim on our thinking attention which all events and facts arouse by virtue of their existence.”^[5] What distinguished Eichmann, who was “genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché,” was his utter obliviousness to the existence of such a claim—living proof, for Arendt, of the connection between the stultification of language under totalitarianism and state-sponsored violence.^[6]

Given the strong connection that Arendt sees between the incapacity for linguistic originality and the propensity for evildoing, it is not surprising that she devotes two full sections of The Life of the Mind, arguably her most philosophically ambitious book, to the subject of metaphor. Whatever thinking, in the exalted sense that she strives to clarify in her book, might mean, metaphor, it seems, is integral to it. We can see its importance in passages like the following:

No language has a ready-made vocabulary for the needs of mental activity; they all borrow their vocabulary from words originally meant to correspond either to sense experience or to other experiences of ordinary life. This borrowing, however, is never haphazard or arbitrarily symbolic (like mathematical signs) or emblematic; all philosophic and most poetic language is metaphorical.^[7]

Metaphor, Arendt is claiming here, is not merely a feature of poetic discourse; it is a fundamental component of all “mental activity” up to and including philosophical speculation. With this provocative insistence on the primacy of metaphor for philosophy, Arendt is knowingly positioning her account in the teeth of a long-standing philosophical animus against figurative speech. Explicitly rejecting this tradition, Arendt proceeds to make far-reaching claims for the epistemological and ethical significance of metaphor as a necessary tool, not only for making sense of the world but also for morally comporting oneself in it.

Arendt’s attempt to reverse the ancient philosophical suspicion against metaphor aligns her late work not only with Heidegger’s, whose shadow falls heavily on the pages of The Life of the Mind, but also with a diverse range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophers, hailing from both sides of the analytic-continental divide, and who have likewise sought to rescue figurative language from Platonist and positivist attacks.^[8] On the philosophical consensus that began to emerge around the time Arendt was writing her final book, metaphor is neither ornamental nor superfluous but a vital resource of language and thought. To use figurative language, most contemporary accounts of metaphor agree with Arendt’s, is not to engage in the anti-philosophical and morally suspect activity that Socrates condemns in the Republic, nor is it to muddle meaningful literality with empty rhetoric, as the positivists had charged. Rather, it is to say or do something that cannot be said or done by any other means. On this view, were we to follow Plato’s advice and eschew metaphorical speech, we would be severely handicapping—not purifying—our ability to deal intelligently with ourselves and our world.

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Notes

1. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 2 vols. (San Diego: Harcourt, 1978), 1:5.

2. Ibid., 1:4.

3. Hannah Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 46.

4. Ibid., p. 47.

5. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 1:4.

6. Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 49.

7. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 1:102. Emphasis mine.

8. Among the prominent philosophical statements that make up this broad reevaluation of the meaning and value of metaphor are Max Black, “Metaphor,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 55 (1954–1955): 273–94; Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (1978): 31–47; Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, S.J. (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1978); Paul de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (1978): 13–30; Mary Hesse, “The Cognitive Claims of Metaphor,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2, no. 1 (1988): 1–16; Richard Moran, “Metaphor,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, ed. Bob Hale and Crispin Wright (London: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 248–68; Denis Donoghue, Metaphor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2014).