Hello, brother bloggers and sisters scripters.Well, this is where I am with assignment four. This is NOT the finished product, but I thought it wise to share anyway.
1) My question:
Who or what is the Devil? Can the word “Devil” be defined--categorically? or is it like the word “game”?: Ludwig Wittgenstein posited that the term game eludes definition (see below*). If this is the case, if the term is indeed fated to the same terminal plasticity, then what do we mean when we use it?
2) How did I arrive at this question?
This is complicated. I have always been fascinated by the Devil. Who is he? Where did he come from? And –most importantly—how did a being created in goodness, out of goodness, become evil? The standard explanations that rely on free will and hubris are unsatisfactory. 3) Where I think this question might lead:
At this time, my line of question points at one of two conclusions: either the term “Devil” is 1) terminally plastic, or 2) it is not.
If “it is not,” then why not? That is, if it is not fluid, then there must be a fixed definition out there, which I will, through an examination of various texts, attempt to discover and provide.
*Consider for example the proceedings that we call "games". I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? -- Don't say: "There must be something common, or they would not be called 'games' "-but look and see whether there is anything common to all. -- For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look! -- Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost.-- Are they all 'amusing'? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! sometimes similarities of detail.--Section 66, Philosophical Investigations.
Perhaps you’re making too much of a muchness out of the multifarious appearances of the Devil. I don’t think we need Wittgenstein and his “tea-tasting” definitison. Let’s just split the Devil into two versions, DevilOne and DevilTwo.
ReplyDeleteDevilOne is an actual supernatural being opposed, in some way, to God, usually in monotheistic religions. He, or It, is God’s Other. His characteristics are set by the religion, meaning that Satan in Christianity will be different from Ahriman in Zoroastrianism, etc. Whatever the characteristics, the concept will be policed, sometimes quite strictly, by the authorities of that religion. Witches in the C17 could be burned for having sex with the Christian DevilOne, but in other religions having sex with the DevilOne would be an outlandish impossibility.
DevilTwo is the Devil as a literary character. Manifestations of DevilTwo would be based approximately on the local DevilOne, that is, Goethe’s Mephistopheles is based on Luther’s Teufel. But any DevilTwo can have characteristics (e.g., a sense of humor) that are not part of the religious concept. DevilTwo can exist and indeed thrive in societies where actual belief in DevilOne has become rare or nonexistent, and especially where this is true we would expect wild differentiation of this character. Basil Davenport edited, a few decades ago, an anthology of stories called Deals with the Devil, containing a number of short fictions by minor literary figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Lord Dunsany, Anthony Boucher, John Collier, Sheridan Le Fanu, Henry Kuttner, John Masefield, and Max Beerbohm. As literary characters, versions of a single character type, they differ, but not more than other character types appearing in genre fiction (the dumb blonde, the hard-bitten policeman); some are sinister, some are comic figures.
Wry comedy is often a feature of DevilTwo stories (and there are also DevilTwo films like Bedazzled and plays like Damn Yankees). But not always: Thomas Mann uses his DevilTwo as an allegory for the Faustian bargain that Germany made when it brought Hitler to power—Mann’s Doktor Faustus is complex and difficult and ironic but not, in the last analysis, comic at all.
Does this help?