Adapted from the poster for I Am Greta
(a documentary film dir. Nathan Grossman, 2020)
I.
Byung-Chul Han says that the idiot has all but vanished from our society. But Han is not using the term idiot in its familiar modern sense (i.e., to
refer to a stupid person).
Rather, he's returning to the ancient Greek
term from which it derives - ἰδιώτης - which refers to a
private individual who prefers to think their own thoughts rather than
simply subscribe to common sense or conform to popular opinion (even at the risk of
appearing ignorant or foolish).
For Han, the idiot is thus a type of outsider or heretic; not so much uninformed as unaligned with any party or cause; someone who values freedom and opposes the violence of consensus [1]. The idiot, in brief, is the kind of person attracted to philosophy, a practice born - like psychology - of idleness and characterised - like art - by its uselessness [2].
II.
Unfortunately, however, there's more than one type of idiot in this world.
And if the type of useless philosophical idiot privileged by Byung-Chul Han has all but vanished from contemporary society, the political idiot who prides themselves on their allegiance to a cause, party, or ideology and happily makes themselves useful to such is, it seems, proliferating in number ...
Some commentators may clutch their pearls - or even reach for the smelling salts - when they hear the term useful idiot [3], but it's a widely accepted term within political discourse [4] to refer to someone who believes they are fighting for a just cause and have history on their side, without fully appreciating the consequences of their actions or the extent to which they are being cynically manipulated by nefarious forces.
Many supporters of Extinction Rebellion, or Black Lives Matter, or those we currently see larping for Palestine on streets and campuses across the Western world, are probably well-intentioned idealists; i.e., perfectly sincere in their views, but they are politically naive to the point that idiocy hardly even covers it; closing their eyes to reality and shutting their ears to reason, they unwittingly assist in the destruction of their own culture, history, and society.
Notes
[1] See Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler, (Verso, 2017). And see also the post 'On Heresy and Philosophical Idiotism' (20 Nov 2021): click here.
[2] Nietzsche famously asserts in Twilight of the Idols (1889) that idleness is the beginning of psychology (and is therefore the result of vice).
Oscar Wilde, meanwhile, writing in a Preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) claimed: "All art is quite useless." He later explained in a letter what he meant by this: "Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way." Similarly, philosophy is simply intended to open up a space for thinking - nothing else. Wilde's letter can be read in full here.
[3] For those gentle souls who prefer a slightly less harsh-sounding term, it might be noted that some commentators speak of useful innocents, whilst those within the intelligence community apparently refer to unwitting agents.
[4] Frequently used during the Cold War to describe those
susceptible to communist propaganda and manipulation, the phrase useful idiot was
(ironically but mistakenly) attributed to Lenin by the Russian human
rights activist and
Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. Lenin may have liked to use it, but
he certainly didn't coin it, and nor is it found in any of his writings.
It perhaps won't have escaped the attentions of committed readers of (and in my case an occasional guest writer for) TTA that, re this evocation of the 'idle philosopher', the very first post put up on the platform back in 2012 disembowelled the writer Tom Hodgkinson for espousing exactly that thesis, calling him not merely a 'useful idiot', but (with a nice swerve into misogynistic abuse) an 'idle cunt' . . .
ReplyDeletehttps://torpedotheark.blogspot.com/2012/
As this post usefully draws attention to through its familiar polemics, these two apparent extremes (so close, in fact, that, as Jung might put it, 'les extremes se touchent') actually represent, of course, the two poles of beginning to think through the concept of idiocy (rather than crudely and cruelly rushing to judgment as we see in the final paragraph above in strokes so broad they might as well have been laid on with a trowel). The idiot differs from him/herself in that s/he may be construed as either aristocratically disengaged (or solipsistically self-centred) - it was this kind of idiocy that Wittgenstein exposed in his 'private language' argument, depicting it as by definition incoherent - or 'usefully innocent/stupid/coopted'. What counts, in any event, is to hold together this duality on a single tightrope rather than fall through the supposed chasm between its two poles.
To hold the tension of this splayed presentation (and all thinking holds a tension of such kind or just sinks into declamatory embarrassment), what's first required is to examine the prejudice about thinking as fundamentally inactive, which is of course mainly indicative of a refusal to think about thinking. In fact, original thinking is explosive, propulsive, and pulls one in new directions: an incisive adventure, not a leisurely stroll in the park. As for art for art's sake, it's odd in the extreme to see Wildean aestheticism and late Nietzsche juxtaposed in the same footnote, given the latter's attack on 'art for art's sake' in Twilight of the Idols. One can only suppose this attests to the self-division of the writer in this domain.
If the concept of idiocy can generate judgments as both/either inhabiting its own proud/private/foolish world and/or submitting itself to mindless service, the true idiot, in my view, is the one who jumps to identify him/herself with one image or the other. Greta Thunberg, the writer's fascination with/fear of whom is clear from the above satirical picture, might be a true ecoprophet or misguided angel (she might well be both), but only an idiot would make a premature judgment about her one way or another.
Personally, given the choice, I'd rather be useful and idiotic (whether serving poetry or philosophy or anti-fascism or peace, and thus committing to life in its vitality and mystery) rather than merely self-serving and sneering on the sidelines, as if I were somehow immune to and not myself part of the problem of anything and everything I criticise (i.e susceptible to the same or different kinds of isms - shall we say cynicism, fascism, nihilism - as anyone else). Then again, I guess I'm the 'wrong' kind of idiot by this writer's metric, or even worse - one 'so mentally deficient as to be incapable of ordinary reasoning'.
You do have a long memory!
DeleteThough not quite an infallible one; the post on Tom Hodgkinson (29 Dec 2012) was actually the 25th to be published on TTA and not the first.
And I didn't so much reject the philosophical concept of idleness, as Hodgkinson's commercial exploitation of the idea.
Putting that to one side, I'm glad you found the latest post on idiocy of interest.
The antithesis of idiocy, presumably, is continuous criticality - which begins and ends in self-criticality. The need to take up 'positions' is really just another kind of idiocy in the end in its resistance to the terrors of complexity.
ReplyDelete