On Heresy and Philosophical Idiotism

 

Detail from a poster designed by Maciej Hibner 

for the film The Idiot (dir. Ivan Pyryev, 1958)

 The idiot has no soul: he is like a flower - an existence open to sunlight ... Botho Strauss

 

 

I. 

 

Derived from the ancient Greek term haíresis [αἵρεσις], heresy originally meant choice and thus implied the exercise of free will. 

 

And so one will readily understand why the heretic - he who chooses to hold views which are at variance with the orthodox position or party line - is so despised by those whose authority is challenged. 

 

For formal heretics deliberately cause division and sow discord and, according to the Church, are spiritually cut off from the Truth, even before they have been officially excommunicated (or burnt at the stake). 

 

Their sin is obstinancy rather than error; a persistent adherence to falsehood.  

 

 

II. 

 

Now, whilst I share certain traits with heretics, I'm not sure I would count myself among their number. 

 

For one thing, when presented with the blackmail of choice (either/or), I choose not to choose and affirm neither/nor. For some, this makes me an idiot, like Bartleby, but as we'll see below, that might not be so terrible.

 

Secondly, whilst a heretic may not subscribe to dogma, in choosing to believe something else, they remain persons of faith and often as fanatic in their belief (and their hatred) as those who accuse them of heresy - Martin Luther is a good example of this [1].     

 

Having said that, I sympathise with Byung-Chul Han's call for a form of heresy - based on what he terms idiotism - that might challenge the New World Order: 

 

"Today, it seems, the type of the outsider - the idiot, the fool - has all but vanished from society. Thoroughgoing digital networking and communication have massively amplified the compulsion to conform. The attendant violence of consensus is suppressing idiotisms." [2] 

 

Han continues: 

 

"In light of compulsive and coercive communication and conformism, idiotism represents a practice of freedom. By nature, the idiot is unallied, un-networked, and uninformed. The idiot inhabits the immemorial outside [...] 

      The idiot is a modern-day heretic. [...] As a heretic, the idiot represents a figure of resistance opposing the violence of consensus. The idiot preserves the magic of the outsider. Today, in light of increasingly coercive conformism, it is more urgent than ever to heighten heretical consciousness." [3]

 

That's a nice expression. And I do like this vision of an idiot, veiled in silence, refusing to identify himself or bow down to the neoliberal demand for total self-exposure. Today, the only way to resist the world is via silence, secrecy, and solitude. 

 

And it is philosophical idiotism alone which "erects spaces for guarding silence [...] where it is still possible to say what really deserves to be said" [4].

 

 

Notes 

[1] Nietzsche's changing view of Luther is interesting. He began as an admirer, but his favourable attitude undwent radical revision after Human, All Too Human (1878) and in his late writings Nietzsche offers a scathing denunciation of Luther as a moral fanatic. Essentially, for Nietzsche, Luther is the man who in reforming Christianity restores it to power and thereby terminates the hope of a neo-pagan Europe which the Renaissance had tantalisingly held out.  

[2] Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler, (Verso, 2017), p. 82.

      Clearly, Han is not using the term idiot in its modern sense (i.e., to refer to a stupid person). Rather, he's returning to the ancient Greek term from which it derives - idiōtēs [ἰδιώτης] - which refers to a private individual who prefers to think their own thoughts rather than simply subscribe to common sense or public opinion (even at the risk of appearing ignorant or foolish). For Han, "the history of philosophy is the history of idiotisms" [p. 81].

 

[3] Ibid., p. 83. 

 

[4] Ibid., p. 84.

      Han acknowledges that this politics of silence was already being called for by Deleuze thirty years ago. See 'Mediators', in Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin, (Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 121-34, where Deleuze writes: 

      "It's not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don't stop people from expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying." [129]