Stupidity

Near the end of 1945, just a few weeks before his execution, Dietrich Bonhoeffer laid his thoughts to illegal scraps of paper in what eventually became part of the posthumous collection of writings entitled Letters and Papers from Prison. Bonhoeffer believed that the citizens of Germany had been “made stupid” by the smothering social atmosphere and pageantry of the Nazis. Unable to make sense of their realities, too many people were unable to recognize the horrors they were complicit in. Fortunately, “stupidity” is not all powerful and recent experiments in cognitive science seem to show that developing efficient accuracy in the connection between our thoughts, beliefs, and reality is not impossible, but takes a lot more time, practice, and discipline than our common assumptions would have us believe. Furthermore, there are few better places than the social constructed space of a church context capable of providing the support and encouragement needed to burn away the fog of stupor resulting from propagandistic efforts. Bonhoeffer believed “only an act of liberation not instruction, can overcome stupidity,” and that this internal cognitive liberation could only proceed via external liberation. A liberation possible only by living a “responsible life before God,” self-sacrificing, and devoted to radically serving and loving one’s neighbor. In light of this, I make the claim that it is an ethical imperative for those declaring devotion to God to do their best to provide and cultivate space for the possibility of a liberation from “stupidity.”

Drawing on current research in anthropology, cognitive psychology, neuro-science, and the humanities, Understanding the Human Mind explores how and why we, as humans, find it so easy to believe we are right-even when we are outright wrong. Humans live out their own lives effectively trapped in their own mind and, despite being exceptional survivors and a highly social species, our inner mental world is often misaligned with reality. In order to understand why, John Ed-ward Terrell and Gabriel Stowe Terrell suggest current dual-process models of the mind overlook our mind's most decisive and unpredictable mode: creativity. Using a three-dimensional model of the mind, the authors examine the human struggle to stay in touch with reality-how we succeed, how we fail, and how winning this struggle is key to our survival in an age of mounting social problems of our own making. Using news stories of logic-defying behavior, analogies to famous fictitious characters, and analysis of evolutionary and cognitive psychology theory, this fascinating account of how the mind works is a must-read for all interested in anthropology and cognitive psychology. John Edward Terrell is internationally known for his pioneering research and publications on human biological and cultural diversity, social network analysis , human biogeography, and the peopling and prehistory of the Pacific Islands. Gabriel Stowe Terrell is studying industrial relations with an emphasis on conflict resolution techniques, organizational behavior, and labor history.

Thinking from the basis of individuation as an infinite identity-beyond-identity, this essay offers both an exhortative critique of being oneself as all-too-human psychic error and a gestural intervention between philosophy and mysticism with respect to their contested claims to knowledge of reality. Where mysticism fails and becomes fraudulent via forgetfulness of philosophy’s insistence upon science as an extra-subjective event, the non-correlational experience of the experiment, philosophy symmetrically fails and becomes fraudulent via ignorance of the mystical core of speculation, according to which the truth of theory is always in excess of thought. The brilliantly dark fact of individuation itself is at once an absolute secret and the real theory at the center of knowledge. 

[forthcoming in Speculation, Heresy, and Gnosis in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion: The Enigmatic Absolute, eds. Joshua Ramey and Matthew Harr Farris]

Unexpectedly for those not thoroughly familiar with the Lacanian corpus, Jacques Lacan regularly discusses stupidity in its myriad guises. On my reading, the ultimate upshot of Lacan's meditations on matters stupid is a recasting of psychoanalysis as the very antithesis of what it usually is taken to be, namely, a hermeneutic depth psychology in search of the most profound meanings of persons' intimate inner lives. This commonplace notion of analysis sees it as a movement from the ridiculous to the sublime, from the superficial to the deep. In Lacan's hands, analysis instead is an anti-hermeneutic operation transforming pathos into bathos. The analytic process is a sort of thoroughgoing reduction-to-the-absurd of subjects' thinking, being, and suffering. My modest ambition in what follows is simply to unpack Lacan's reflections on stupidity and related topics (such as foolishness, knavery, ignorance, meaninglessness, bullshit, and nonsense). As far as I know, there has not been to date an exhaustive tracking and meticulous reconstruction of the numerous things Lacan says along these lines. Considering how central his struggle against renditions of analysis as a depth-psychological hermeneutics is for his "return to Freud" and its consequences, a systematic interpretation of stupidity in the Lacanian oeuvre is long overdue.

This paper discusses Roger Scruton's theory of kitsch and investigates it relation to totalitarianism, through the figure of stupidity as discussed by Robert Musil. This threefold relationship, Scruton conceptualizes as a "spiritual disease". It is rendered possible through a distortion of the relation of modern communities to transcendence and redeemed through a restoration of the idea of beauty.

"Twisted feet, snapped heads, jarring, abrupt movements, rhythmic stomping and trembling. In the end, death by exhaustion, the staged sacrifice for the heathen sun god. Dancing – excessive, powerful, disturbing.

The premiere of “Le Sacre du Printemps” at the Parisian Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 29 May 1913 shocked audiences. Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography and Igor Stravinsky’s music created one of the greatest scandals in 20th-century dance history. Performed on the eve of World War I, the ballet uncannily foreshadowed the slaughter on the battlefields: “Le Sacre du Printemps” – a dance over trenches.

One hundred years later, an international and interdisciplinary conference has addressed the special role that “Le Sacre du Printemps” played in dance modernity and as a cultural-historical phenomenon. The debate focused on the aspects of victims and sacrifice, the relationship between abstraction and ornamentation, and the peculiar interweave of modernism and primitivism. What exactly caused the uproar at the premiere in 1913 and what relevance does the piece have today?

More than 500 visitors participated in debates and discussions, and over 2,000 people watched the performances staged at RADIALSYSTEM V and the HAU Hebbel am Ufer theatre. One of the artistic highlights of the congress was the reconstruction of Mary Wigman’s “The Rite of Spring” (1957), performed by the dance ensembles at the theatres in Osnabrück und Bielefeld. Another highlight was “The Autumn of Le Sacre du Printemps”, a reconstruction of Nijinsky’s choreography performed by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer together with 20 members of the Sasha Waltz & Guests dance company. The scenographer Detlef Weitz and artist Dominique Müller presented a video installation created especially for the congress, featuring clips of various performances of “The Rite of Spring”. Earlier this year, the HAU Hebbel am Ufer launched an open call for treatments of the “Rite of Spring” by young choreographers. A selection of these contemporary approaches to the “Dance over Trenches” was presented at the congress.

With: Jan Assmann, Gabriele Brandstetter, Laurent Chétouane, deufert&plischke, Christine Gaigg, Lynn Garafola, Jack Halberstam, Millicent Hodson, Stephanie Jordan, Herfried Münkler, Sasha Waltz, Sigrid Weigel and others."

Hello fellow geniuses. We are rare and wonderful, stuck in a world of stupidity and irrationality that causes us pain, sorrow, and loneliness. I am writing this brief biography to help you realize that you are not really alone, even though it often feels that way.

This thesis undertakes a comparative study of the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Ludwig Wittgenstein to elaborate three related problems in what in Deleuze calls, ‘transcendental empiricism’. The first chapter deals with the problematic of the dimension of sense in language, and culminates in a concept of the event. The second details the immanence of stupidity within thought and culminates in a practice of showing through silence. The third investigates the consequences of aesthetics for the theory of Ideas, and culminates in the concepts of ‘late intuition’ and of a form of life. Each argues for a new way of broaching the subject of realism.

This article advances a new analysis of stupidity as a distinctive form of cognitive failing. Section 1 outlines some problems in explicating this notion and suggests some desiderata. Section 2 sketches an existing model of stupidity, found in Kant and Flaubert, which serves as a foil for my own view. In section 3, I introduce my theory: I analyse stupidity as form of conceptual self-hampering, characterised by a specific aetiology and with a range of deleterious effects. In section 4, I show how this proposal meets the desiderata and I clarify how it diverges from existing accounts. My position is close to a 'public health approach', in contrast to the virtue/vice framework employed by Engel or Mulligan.

This book is the first to articulate and challenge the consensus on the right and left that knowledge is the key to any problem, demonstrating how the left’s embrace of knowledge productivity keeps it trapped within capital’s circuits. As the knowledge economy has forced questions of education to the forefront, the book engages pedagogy as an underlying yet neglected motor of capitalism and its forms of oppression. Most importantly, it assembles new pedagogical resources for responding to the range of injustices that permeate our world. Building on yet critiquing the Marxist notion of the general intellect, Derek R. Ford theorizes stupidity as a necessary alternative pedagogical logic, an anti-value that is infinitely mute and unproductive.

What is intelligence and what is stupidity? Why do we laugh at those who are stupid and why do we make fun of wise people? These are the fundamental questions in Diego Lanza's book, Lo stolto. Di Socrate, Eulenspiegel, Pinocchio e altri trasgressori del senso comune, which appeared in 1997 and has just been republished by Petite Plaisance. The purpose of this article is to re-read the questions raised by Lanza's book in the light of the current concepts of 'intelligence' and 'artificial intelligence'.

Esse texto foi apresentado na 3a edição do Summer of Theory, organizado por Émile Fromet de Rosnay na Universidade de Victoria (Canadá). O evento, que tem como ambição a criação de um espaço aberto à reflexão de um modo mais flexível que aquele comumente encontrado nos espaços acadêmicos (sendo aberto a apresentações artísticas, performances e outras formas de experimentação), teve como tema a seguinte pergunta: "Who is this?" Os participantes do SOT3WIT tiveram liberdade para criar qualquer coisa a partir de tal tema. Em minha apresentação, decidi levar às últimas consequências uma hipotética discussão com um defensor do modelo da Terra plana, que rebate seus interlocutores com um pedido muito simples: "prove para mim que a Terra é redonda." ///////    This text was presented in the 3rd edition of the Summer of Theory, organized by Émile Fromet de Rosnay at the University of Victoria (Canada). The event, which aims to create a space open to reflection in a more flexible way than that commonly found in academic spaces (being open to artistic presentations, performances and other forms of experimentation), had as its theme the following question: " Who is this?" SOT3WIT participants were free to create anything from that theme. In my presentation, I decided to carry out a hypothetical discussion with an advocate of the flat Earth model to its ultimate consequences, who counters his interlocutors with a very simple request: "Prove to me that the Earth is round."

The desire for certainty has often pushed philosophy and the arts towards a blind acceptance of the superiority of science as a form of knowledge, or to seek some unvarying truth by distinguishing falsehood and error according to the criterion of exactitude. Not only has this constrained their own self-affirmation and diminished the joy of experimentation, but it has led these disciplines down the path of a bad kind of repetition, where expression becomes the means by which to endlessly test identities and prove certainties. But can we not imagine some other kind of pursuit of knowledge and sense, linked instead to uncertainty and to the unknown that allows the emergence of singularity? Perhaps we ought begin to heed the call that comes from some other kind of outside, and that manifests itself as symptoms of pain on our bodies. An act worthy of their violence would be one that takes care of stupidity as the wound that produced it, which will, in its turn, condition the style of writing.

Ius vigilantibus scriptum est / Nec stultis solere succurri / Ignorantia iuris.
Roman jurist Papinian paraphrased his master’s saying and incorporated it into the imperial rescript. The maxims: Scaevola’s "vigilantibus iura scripta sunt" and Papinian’s "nec stultis solere succurri" are parallel, embodying the same principle. "Nec stultis solere succurri" differs not only because it is cynical or sarcastic. Its formulation is self-explaining and for that reason more convincing. Yet, it is not less general, therefore the question about its nature remains essential. The maxims were not designed to declare the law, i.e. they cannot be considered legal rules. They rather reveal a general feature of the Roman way of treating individuals and organizing social life. Scaevola and Papinian articulated it centuries before Herbert Spencer pronounced his social evolutionism. In ancient Rome, it was not a theory. It allowed legal institutions to operate in public and private life. Thus, the desired organization of society could be achieved. The principle embodied in both maxims was therefore a matter of practice.

Alexander Schwan geht in seinem Beitrag über Igor Stravinskys Ballett »Le Sacre du Printemps« der Frage nach, inwieweit sich in Vaslav Nijinskys legendärer Choreographie der Uraufführung das primitivistische Konstrukt einer archaischen Vergangenheit mit Elementen der Avantgarde-Ästhetik verbindet. Ausgehend von Jacques Rivières im November 1913 publiziertem Essay über das Ballett, den Schwan als Manifest des Modernismus im Tanz liest, rekonstruiert der Beitrag Nijinskys innovativen Umgang mit dem Ornament, stellt Bezüge zwischen der geometrisch-angularen Formensprache seiner Choreographie und der zeitgenössischen Architektur (Adolf Loos) sowie Anthropologie (Cesare Lombroso) her und deutet das Gesamtkonzept Nijinskys als offensive Absage an traditionelle Ideale tänzerischer Grazie und Schönheit. Der im Zeichen des Primitivismus stehende ästhetische Normbruch bringt so auf subversive Weise das Kunstverständnis der Pariser Homosexuellenszene der 1910er Jahre zur Geltung.

Abstract: Obstinate actions-oriented behaviour is the study of learning and practicing behaviour theoractively, which is acquired from the content based, process based learning and spawning critical reflexivity to the learnt theoretical phenomena into practical actions. Obstinate actions-oriented behaviour is a multi-faceted behaviour that is generally
applied to gain success and to become effective through the ontology of theoractive learning. Obstinacy actions-orientation, in this study, is viewed in a positive light; and denotes a self-willed, natural and nurturing action towards the tenacious pursuit of a self-desired goal. This action is achieved by applying learning theories to practice, thus displaying theoractiveness, with self-willed obstinacy towards the individual goal or the organizational goal. Theoractive learning is grounded in content and process learning in order to generate critical reflexivity with which to judge and evaluate the learnt behaviour of an individual. This paper is conceptually designed and accumulates various relevant theoretical literature within organizations and leadership with a purpose to support the conceptual commentary. Terminologies used in this paper are precisely described and illustrated. The meanings were elucidated and supported by integrating the leadership theories. Theoretical consciousness can play a pivotal role in shaping an individual’s
competences, and in generating a theoractiveness; however, theories are often limited to content learning. Nonetheless, process-based orientation subconsciously implements these theories at a higher educational level. Obstinate actions orientation consists of both an
art-obstinacy and a science-obstinacy. Teaching by the “what method” is a science obstinate action, whereas, teaching by the “why and how” method is an art-obstinate action. Actions-oriented behaviour enables followership movement towards the leader’s desired conducive climate, creating a dominant leadership style within the context, and maintaining a leadership style fix.

Keywords: Content learning, process learning, critical reflexivity, leadership theories, action-oriented behaviour, theory and practice.

This work dealing with philosophy, non-philosophy and artificial intelligence (but also stupidity and various powers and weakness, alienations and servitudes, etc.) started in 2006 has remained in abeyance since and perhaps deserves to be repeated.
I'm sharing it for possible collaboration.

In thinking the passage from the “all-human cerebrum” (H.G. Wells) to what one might call the contemporary “all-too-human” cerebrum in neo-liberal societies and beyond to the “all-too-transhuman” cerebrum in the cybernetic society, in contrasting Wells’s idea of a new world order with the dystopia of the disordering un-world (Nancy in The creation of the world or globalization, State University of New York Press, Albany, 2002/2007), in considering the prospects of a “world brain” faced with the realities of the “global mnemotechnical system” (Bernard Stiegler), in highlighting the differences between the global and authoritarian instrument of “control” in Wells and the descriptions of the control society by Deleuze, and finally, in critiquing the “unifying of the general intelligence services of the world” in Wells (World brain, Methuen & Co., Ltd., London, 1938, pp. 3–4) and the capturing of the “general intellect” (Wark in General intellects: twenty-one thinkers for the twenty-first century. Verso Books, London, 2017), this paper maps the contemporary prospects of the “world brain” against the backdrop of the worldweariness of the present.

Within the context of philosophy as an embodied practice I would like to take up Gilles Deleuze's notion of the image of thought. In particular I argue that the image of thought is best understood as part of the process that Michel Serres calls "hominization." According to Serres what characterizes hominid bodies is a de-specialization that requires the development of culture. This development of culture is marked by what I call "judgment" understood etymologically as "originary division." It is here that we can locate the image of thought.

What happens when the best in us is mistaken for the discriminated average, the ignored mediocre, the bullied so-so, the manufactured fringe median?
There is growing trend today to mock the epic, the heroic, the romantic, the masculine, the feminine, the intellectual and anything that is far off from our secular, shabby, so-so ordinary lives.
Everything needs to be toned down so that in your group or "tribe" nobody is creepy or sticking their head out too much to break the organic and efficient unity of "tribes."

Cosa spinge una persona a
esibirsi in una figura di merda monumentale? Che fine ha fatto il timore di avere torto, di
essere sbugiardati in pubblico? Perché lo scemo del villaggio ora è sindaco? Cercando una risposta,
ho capito che è una questione ampia e ha che fare con i social, la cultura e la società. Partiamo
dall'aspetto più conosciuto.

By re-reading the general intellect, particularly the work of Paolo Virno, this chapter rewrites the general intellect in order to formulate a communist theory of writing. Such a theory isn’t concerned with the contentof writing, but rather the characterof the actof rewriting, one that is patient and occurs along a general line between intellect and stupidity, speech and silence, and knowledge and thought. This theory response emerges from several rewritings of the general intellect. The chapterbeginswith Jean-François Lyotard’s theory of rewriting—which distinguishes between rewriting as remembering and rewriting as working through—and introduces the role of digital technologies in rewriting. I then turn to Virno’s rewriting of the general intellect, which expands the concept beyond determinate capabilities and knowledges, yet at the same time compresses it into a fundamental and linguistic truth that lacks an antagonism to capital. In the remainder of the chapter, I rewrite the general intellect again, returning it to its indeterminacy by positing a general and postdigital (squiggly) line between intellect and its other.

Roland Breeur's new book "Lies-Imposture-Stupidity" Margins, a new philosophy series, is dedicated to exploring unconventional avenues of thought. In addition to stimulating the mind with unique takes on topics in philosophy, Margins also aims to please the eye with its similarly unconventional design. In terms of length, this series features monographs between long journal articles and short books. The books in this series do not aim to be stereotypically scholarly, and if the quality of the insights reaches the level of inspired scholarship, they do so by circuitous routes of imagination and inspiration. This series does aim, however, to publish books that will provide readers with pleasurable intellectual experiences and open readers up to new philosophical roads to travel. "What is new in our 'era' is perhaps the fact that truth no longer has any authority. Today, the truth is not just weak but faint, pointless, insipid, futile; the truths that are proclaimed are superficial, contain clichés, and therefore cannot withstand the exuberant and pseudo-deepness of our contemporary liars. The danger of 'post-truth' lies not in the lie, then, but in the futile, weak, and shabby nature of the truth. And yes, those who proclaim futile truths are complicit in and therefore responsible for the proliferation of untruths." What is the truth? How do we determine what is true versus what is false? How can we assure ourselves and others that we are speaking truthfully? In his new book L.I.S.: Lies-Imposture-Stupidity, Roland Breeur takes a 21st Century perspective on the history and the potential future of truth-its meaning, its function, and its value. From Donald Trump and the "post-truth" era to the philosophical musings of Deleuze and Arendt, from political conspiracies to familial deceptions, Breeur insightfully explores the psychological mechanisms at work in lies and dissimulations of facts and fictions as well as the philosophical significance, and validity, of the search for truth. At once a historical survey of individuals who have spun webs of lies, on stages big and small, and a philosophical disquisition on truth past, present, and future, Breeur brings nuance and insight to discussions that have been had many times in many

This article brings forth a new perspective concerning the relation between stupidity and thinking by proposing to conceptualise the state of non-thinking in two different ways, situated at the opposite ends of the spectrum of thinking. Two conceptualisations of stupidity are discussed, one critical which follows a French line of continental thinkers, and the other one which will be called educational or ascetic, following the work of Agamben. The critical approach is conceptualised in terms of seriality of thinking, or thinking captured by an apparatus, whereas the ascetic- educational approach is discussed by tracing the links between studying and stupidity. Both accounts assume that stupidity as non-thinking is a condition for thinking, either placed before thinking emerges or as an after-thought. However, the political implications concerning the role of philosophy in the public realm are divergent: for the critical approach, the task of the philosopher is to criticise the world, whereas for the ascetic approach, the task is to work on one’s own self and hope that the world will be changed through thinking. The wider aim of this article is to contribute to the debate concerning the public role of the intellectual starting from the assumption that there is a duty to think publicly and then clarifying what this duty entails in relation to the self and the others.

What is intelligence and what is stupidity? Why do we laugh at those who are stupid and why do we make fun of wise people? These are the fundamental questions in Diego Lanza’s book, Lo stolto. Di Socrate, Eulenspiegel, Pinocchio e altri trasgressori del senso comune, which appeared in 1997 and has just been republished by Petite Plaisance. The purpose of this article is to re-read the questions raised by Lanza’s book in the light of the current concepts of ‘intelligence’ and ‘artificial intelligence’.