On Small Talk
Heidegger, Arendt, Marcuse, Torah
How should we think about the role that small talk plays in our lives?
Is small talk:
A) A necessary evil
B) Perfectly fine form of social politeness
C) An evasion of genuine conversation
D) An baby step towards deeper engagement
E) A form of bad faith
F) Something that serious people should flee like the plague
II. Heidegger, Arendt, Frankfurt School
For Heidegger, most conversation is “small talk.” Small talk involves not just talking about the weather or rehearsing our polished scripts about what we do and where we’re from, but any discussion that is obvious, unoriginal, superficial, regurgitated. Most discussions about politics, for example, are just a repetition of talking points we’ve assimilated from watching TV, reading the paper, or scrolling Facebook.
Heidegger is not alone in his mostly negative assessment of small talk. He is joined by Hannah Arendt (his friend, lover, and student), who traces Eichmann’s “banality of evil” to his inability to have original thoughts. Eichmann’s speech is one cliche after the next. For Arendt, the cultural root of totalitarianism is, in some sense, small talk.
Other thinkers who share Heidegger’s suspicion of small talk are Frankfurt School thinkers, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse (who studied under Heidegger). Marcuse took Heidegger’s conservative critique of society in a more leftwing, Marxist direction. In One Dimensional Man, he argues that our false consciousness, and our inability to engage in meaningful or genuine connection, speech, and desire, is an outgrowth of living in a one-dimensional culture, that is a culture that puts technological progress above all else, while failing to examine the forms of domination and injustice on which society is founded. Cliched thought and speech are a consequence not of our fear of death or our forgetting of Being, per Heidegger, but of our repression of the pain caused by dominating and being dominated.
III. Jewish Tradition and Yeshiva Culture
Jewish yeshiva culture has a term for small talk, as well. Scholars regard discussions of profane matters as “bittul Torah,” literally, a negation of Torah. For example, in ultra-Orthodox settings, a discussion of the Yankees game is considered bittul Torah, as it is time and energy not spent learning Torah. But what if the Yankees game serves as an example to teach a matter of law or a moral lesson? Then, perhaps, it is no longer bittul Torah. The problem is baseball as baseball; but baseball as Torah is Ok.
But what if talking about the Yankees game is a way of reaching a student who comes alive at sports, but whose eyes glaze over at discussions of goring oxen? What about talking about the Yankees game while visiting a sick person who doesn’t have access to the game and wants to know who won?
In Jewish tradition there is a radical expression that (“The negation of Torah is its fulfillment.”) There are cases in which it is not only permissible, but desirable to engage in bittul Torah, understood, here, to be a kind of small talk. A classic example from tradition: a sage is obligated to put down his books to attend a wedding—the obligation to help a new couple rejoice overrides the obligation to study. Still, for the radical idea to mean anything—and for it to retain its radicalism—we would need to say that this is an emergency measure. The norm is Torah study; the exception is bittul Torah (the negation of Torah study).
IV. Carl Schmitt, Zen, and Exceptionalism
In the terms of Carl Schmitt, the sovereign is the one who decides on the exception. That is, the sovereign is the one who decides when the suspension of Torah is a fulfillment of Torah. Small talk can be undesirable much of the time and also be the exception that preserves the rule of seriousness. Sovereignty and responsibility are thus expressed not in always talking about deep matters, but sometimes in lowering oneself to matters profane and ephemeral.
Small talk is avoidance and connection at the same time.
Thus, the Zen saying fits:
“When I was young, I thought small talk was small talk;
When I was on the path, I thought small talk was not small talk;
Now, in my Enlightenment, I understand small talk is small talk.”
V. Listening > Speech
The insight that small talk can be meaningful is also found in Heidegger’s thought. For Heidegger argues that the ontic and the ontological are not two distinct domains of enquiry, but two ways of looking at the same thing. Our discourse is always about both beings and the Being of beings. Because our discourse is always about both, it has elements that are profane and elements that are elevated, elements that are superficial and elements that are philosophical.
The fundamental question, then, is not what should we say to keep our conversations genuine, but how should we listen, so that even in small talk we hear the still small voice of Being.
Heidegger, Arendt, Marcuse, and a certain austere version of yeshiva culture are quick to judge the non-scholar, the non-contemplative, the non-thinker, as someone who has brain worms. But from a higher level, the onus is on us, to find in all encounters, even with those who think and speak in cliches, a spark of individuality, an echo of the questions we all face: Who am I? What am I here for?