MATTI KUUSI
Concerning Folk Paradoxes
There is a diference between
mere inconsistency and paradox. Inconsistent ideas
generally disappear from circulation as soon as their
fatal defects are revealed, and if they are to pass
muster even for a while their faults must be somewhat
hidden. An absurd term or self-contradictory proposition
that continues to function in serious, systematic
thought, although its logical scandal is patent, is
paradoxical. The inconsistent ideas involved in it
conflict with each other because they are actually
distorted. Properly formulated they would not be mutually
contradictory. They are misconceived, and consequently
their union is misconceived, but it is motivated by a
sound sense of their importance and logical connection.
The word "paradox" bespeaks this peculiar status; both
contradictory elements are "doctrinal", i.e. they are
really accepted and the conjunction of them is admitted,
even though it is not understood.
Wherever the "rich mud of vague
conceptions" that is the spawning ground of human reason
yields a genuine paradox, such as "fictional truth" or
"self-representing systems" or "impersonal feelings", we
are faced with a direct philosophical challenge. Paradox
is a symptom of misconception; and coherent, systematic
conception, i.e. the process of making sense out of
experience, is philosophy. Therefore a paradoxical idea
is not one to be discarded, but to be resolved. Where
both elements of an obvious antinomy maintain their
semblance of truth, their pragmatic virtue, and both can
claim to originate in certain accepted premises, the
cause of their conflict probably lies in those very
premises themselves. It is original sin. The premises, in
their turn, are often tacit presuppositions, so that the
real challenge to the philosopher is to expose and
analyze and correct them. If he succeeds, a new
scheme of the dominant ideas will be found implicit,
without the paradoxical concepts of the old perspective
(Langer 1959, 15-16).
The paradox is perhaps the strangest stylistic feature of
our culture. It is an unbearable exaggerater, a gravedigger
for sound old convictions, it teases and irritates
right-thinking brains, it picks a quarrel with the reader by
turning things on their heads and claiming that only thus
are they the right way up. 'If any man come to me, and hate
not his father, and mother and wife, and children, and
brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot
be my disciple' - this and dozens more of Jesus's paradoxes
cause unending trouble for serious-minded pastors who find
themselves having to explain to children both large and
small that it is not necessary for the Christian to
hate his children, cut off his right hand, sell his
apartment, leave his father's body to be buried by 'the
dead', forgive his enemies 70 x 7 times, neglect to provide
for the future, exchange his well-paid position of trust for
the role of 'servant of all', etc, etc.
'There is not enough religiosity in the world even to
destroy religions,' quipped Friedrich Nietzsche, whom Egon
Friedell paradoxically calls the last great church father
(Friedell 1933, 504). At its heart, this paradox, too,
exploits its semantic liminality: a narrow, sharp wedge is
pushed between 'religiosity' and 'religions', questions
their apparently obvious unity - the power of traditional,
conventional religious institutions rests, according to
Nietzsche, on the lack of religiosity (the spiritual quality
common to, for example, Jesus and Nietzsche), not its
ubiquity. The thesis is para doxa, a confounding of
expectations, in which half is truth.
The central role of paradox in western culture perhaps
derives from the model of the New Testament. Credo quia
absurdum, said the church father Tertullianus. Not
decently and reasonably: 'I believe even though it is
absurd', but defiantly and paradoxically: 'I believe because
it is absurd'. Adolf von Harnack's aphorism follows in the
true Christian stylistic tradition: 'Only that which we long
for is our own. That which we own we have already lost.' The
outgrowth of the Sermon on the Mount, however, is observable
more in non-ecclesiastical than ecclesiastical slogans: for
example, 'la propriÈtÈ c'est le vol'[1], teidän lakinne ja oikeutenne - niitähän
minun piti ampua (your law and your justice - it was
them I set out to shoot)[2]. It
was for good reason that the English press baron Northcliffe
forbade the cultivation of the paradox in his newspapers:
the majority of humanity cannot tolerate the truth,
according to the advice of Oscar Wilde, being made to dance
on the tight-rope. But this serious mode of amusement holds
a strange fascination for many. I believe that the mental
stimulation provoked by a daring paradox is kin to the spark
of joy that one experiences following a virtuoso's brief
visit to the extremes of his dangerous, illicit,
norm-breaking skill. Kaarlo Marjanen writes:
The full text of
this article is published in De
Proverbio - Issue 7:1998 & Issue
8:1998, an
electronic book, available from amazon.com and other leading Internet booksellers.
Like proverbs in general, folk paradoxes most often grow
in bunches. Thus alongside the first-mentioned
Romano-Finnish proverb is a cluster of laconisms cast in the
same mould:
Maksettu heritetty haava (A wound threatened is a wound avenged).
Unohdettu maksettu velka (A loan forgotten is a
loan repaid).
Ansaittu anottu lahja (A gift promised is a gift
given).
Ansaittu anottu ruoka, syöty leikattu pala (Food begged is food earned, a piece cut is a piece
eaten).
The grammatically similar verb-forms give the noun two
attributes whose juxtaposition combines unexpectedness with
common sense: beginning is indeed often so decisive and
difficult a phase that 'a job begun' can be described as
'done'; the promise of a gift is so binding an action that a
promised gift can be considered as certain as if it has
already been given; and so on.
A more viable form of Finnish paradox is that which lies
behind the following examples:
Paha on olla palkollisna,
paha palkan maksajana (It is bad to be a wage-earner,
bad to be the payer of wages).
Paha seppä palkatonna, paha suuren palkun kanssa (It is bad to be a smith unwaged, bad too waged).
Paha on olla parratonna, paha pitkän parran
kanssa (It is bad to be beardless, bad to wear a long
beard).
Vaiva vaaralla asua, vaiva vaaran liepehellä (It is hard to live on the mountain, hard to live on
its slopes).
Vaiva on olla valkeatta, vaiva valkean varassa (It
is hard to live without fire, hard to tend a fire).
Kihki lapsi kirkkoon, kihki kirkosta kotiin (Eager
the child going to church, eager the child coming home
from church).
Hyvä mieli miehelle mennä, hyvä
mieheltä kotia (It's pleasure to get married,
pleasure to come back).
Työtä hengen tullessa, työtä
hengen lähtiessä (It is work when you are
born, it is work when you die).
Väki väärää tekee, väki
väärän oikaisee (The folk do wrong,
the folk put wrongs right).
Taka tekee taitavaksi, taka taitamattomaksi (Reserves teach skills, reserves take skills
away).
Tattari taloksi tekee, tattari talottomaksi (Buckwheat earns a man a house, buckwheat makes him
homeless).
Työstä tuntee taitomiehen, työstä
taitamattomankin (You can tell a good craftsman by
his work, and a bad one).
Merestä nälkä tullee, mereen
nälkä menee (The sea brings hunger, the sea
takes hunger away).
Idän päivä ensimmäinen, idän
päivä viimeinenkin (The sun rises in the
east, even on the last day).
Ahven kudun alkaa, ahven kudun lopettaa (The perch
begins spawning, the perch ends spawning).
Matti pihdin nostaa, Matti pihdin kaataa (Matti
lifts the splint, Matti drops the splint).
The proverbs are made up of two stereotypically opposed
phrases. Sometimes they are only apparently in antithesis:
thus in the last example the first Matti refers to the
so-called mukulamatti, the autumn St Matthew's day,
celebrated on 21 September, while the second means talvimatti, 24 February, between which times splints
were burnt indoors - this is a pun rather than a paradox.
Generally these proverbs are content to state the two sides
of a question. The intellectual knot remains rather loose:
the paradox is really nothing more than a little stylistic
manoeuvre, the quasi-polemic culmination of two opposing
points of view from which can easily spring a synthetic
realisation of the whole, a golden-mean compromise, a view
of life that smiles sympathetically upon both opposing
directions.
The full text of
this article is published in De
Proverbio - Issue 7:1998 & Issue
8:1998, an
electronic book, available from amazon.com and other leading Internet booksellers.
Parempi yksi näkijä
kuin kuusi kuulijaa (One witness is better than six
hearers ).
The paradoxical statement, 'one is more than six' serves
only as a stylistic emphasis to the real thesis of the
proverb: the testimony of an eye-witness is worth more than
that of someone who has only heard. Rarer is the simpe
comparative formula, 'a little is better than none', 'better
found than stolen' used in a paradoxical way:
Parempi kuolla kuin kitua
(kerjätä) (It is better to be dead than
wretched [beg]).
Parempi leipä kuin kulta (Bread is better
than gold).
Parempi vieras kuin vähän sukua (A
stranger is better than a distant relative).
A completely separate type is the paradox Parempi paha
valeena kuin totena (Evil is better as a lie than
truth).
A paradoxically sharp emphasis of value can also take the
following form: Rikka raha rauhan suhteen (Money is
useless compared with peace), Roska raha onnen rinnalla (Money is rubbish compared with happiness), Rapaa on
raha jumalanviljan suhteen (Money is mud compared with
corn).
Certain proverb statements expressed through symbols of
impossibility are related to comparative paradoxes:
Ennen kaitsee kapan kirppuja
kuin yhden tyttölapsen (It is easier to shepherd
a flock of fleas than a single girl-child).
Ennen seitsemän paria härkää
kääntää kuin pahan ämmän
pään (It is easier to turn seven pairs of
oxen than the head of a bad woman).
Ennen susikin suostuu ihmiseen kuin savolainen (A
wolf is more easily persuaded than a man of Savo).
Ennen viina jäätyy ennenkuin piika paleltuu (Liquor will freeze before a maid will feel the
cold).
Ennen maa repee kuin huora häpee (The earth
will open before a whore will repent).
These proverbs, in other words, play with the idea that
even the impossible is more likely than something that is
generally not considered completely impossible. On the other
hand: Kun kovalle pannaan, niin koiraskin poikii (In
a tight spot, even the male beast will whelp).
The symbol of impossibility is, like the pun, a
multi-purpose stylistic element that can be used as a tool
of paradox. The published seminar studies of Simo Konsala
and Eeva Laaksonen use many examples to throw light upon the
generally emphatic use of symbols of impossibility and of
the pun, which is often used as an enticement to wit
(Konsala 1956, Laaksonen 1958). The pun is to the fore in
the following examples of proverbs verging on the
paradoxical:
Kyllä härkä
jäniksen tapaa - jos ei muualla niin kattilassa (The bull certainly meets the hare - in the pot, if
nowhere else).
Kyllä maailma opettaa - jos ei muuta niin hiljaa
kävelemään (The world certainlly
teaches a lesson - to walk slowly, if nothing else).
Jotainhan sitä on köyhälläkin
antamista - jos ei muuta niin kättä (Even
the poor have something to lend - their hands, if nothing
else).
Apu hiirestäkin on - jos ei muualle niin
syömään (Even a mouse can be of some
help - if nothing else, in eating).
The folk paradox is not one of the best pigeon-holes of
the systematic categorisation of proverbs: there are more
borderline cases, dependent on interpretation, than there
are 'pure' paradoxes. Muna kanaa neuvoo (The egg is
wiser than the hen) is undoubtedly a paradoxical expression,
but lacks a suddenly opening intellectual knot. Isännän silmä hevosta lihottaa (The
master's eye fattens the horse), Kieli maan leikkaa (The tongue cuts the ground), Lihainen kieli leikkaa
luisen kaulan (The tongue breaks bones, though itself
have none, T 403) and many other daring linguistic images
are a kind of quasi-paradox that is used to season otherwise
fairly conventional experiential truths. Only linguistic
dexterity, not a revaluing of values, is offered for example
by Hyvä tapa tappelussa: se lyö ken
kerkiää (Good manners when fighting: hit when
you can). On the other hand, the statement Flikk on jo
enemä äitis muatone ko äit ite (The girl
looks more like her mother than her mother herself) may be a
true paradox: the mother as she is remembered from her youth
and the mother as she is now differ so much from one another
that half of the utterance is true. I would hold the
following proverbs to be true paradoxes:
Tehden työt
leviää, tekemättä soukkenee (Work
spreads in the doing, thins when left undone).
Hyvä sydän huoraksi saattaa, vapaa tahto
varkahaksi (A good heart makes a whore, free will a
thief).
Ei kirja kiellä helvetistä, paperi pahalta
tieltä (The book does not save from hell, nor
paper from the slippery slope).
Ei ole huolta hävinneellä, työtä
maansa myynehellä (The loser has no cares, he
who has sold his land no work).
Kyllä tyhjä puolensa pitää (Emptiness stands up for itself).
The full text of
this article is published in De
Proverbio - Issue 7:1998 & Issue
8:1998, an
electronic book, available from amazon.com and other leading Internet booksellers.
A relatively small proportion of Finnish folk paradoxes
obey the norms of classic Kalevala metre. It seems that many
international paradoxes subside into non-paradoxes on their
arrival in Finland: 'Kleider machen Leute' becomes Vaate
varren kaunistavi (Clothes beautify the body), etc. Only
through a general analysis of Finnish loan-proverbs would it
be possible to decide the question of when, whence and in
what form Finns took their earliest paradoxes, or whether
they were born indigenously, without international
influences. The crystallisation of an observation that
strays from the path of conventional opinion into a clever
manipulation of reason cannot have been the easiest of
developments in the path of progress of our peasant
culture.
1962
Matti Kuusi
Helsinki
Finland
NOTES
*Reprinted from Mind and Form in
Folklore. Selected articles of Matti Kuusi. Ed. by Henni
Ilomäki. Studia fennica. Folkloristica 3. Suomalaisen
Kirjallisuuden Seura. Helsinki 1994, pp. 131-141.
- P. J. Proudhon, Qu'est-ce que la
propriété, 1840.
- A remark trom the Finnish playwright Minna Canth's
play Työmiehen vaimo (The worker's wife,
Canth 1885).