Dear Readers,
I moved this past week, and at the moment, my books remain boxed up, and the internet isn’t properly set up at my new apartment (I’m posting from my very slow mobile hotspot.) As such, I will not be able to provide much of a newsletter this A.M. I appreciate your patience as I get situated in my new environs: I should be up and running by early this coming week.
But I did like Will Davies’s piece “Stupidology” in the new n+1 this week:
“Deficiency in the faculty of judgment is really what we call stupidity, and there is no remedy for that.” So remarked Kant, in a peculiar footnote to the Critique of Pure Reason. The “faculty” Kant referred to is the mental capacity on which, according to his philosophy, all knowledge and morality depends: the ability to apply general principles to particular cases. Judgment of this kind is what allows us to take the concept of a rabbit and correctly identify a creature with big ears and a fluffy tail, or to take the principle that “one should tell the truth” and apply it to a concrete social situation. Kant argued that there are various ways of avoiding the individual exercise of judgment, such as conformity to dogma, allowing people to hide their stupidity. The same theme appears in his well-known definition of enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” And immaturity, in turn, “is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.” Kant saw this pivotal capacity to judge as an innate and unequal endowment of individual minds, providing a prototype, perhaps, of the eugenicist imagination that would take hold in the statistical sciences a century later.
Kant’s footnote was picked up by Arendt in her essay “Understanding and Politics,” which appeared in 1953, two years after The Origins of Totalitarianism. Her reflections partly echoed the pessimism of Frankfurt School critiques of the “culture industry”:
Since the beginning of this century, the growth of meaninglessness has been accompanied by loss of common sense. In many respects, this has appeared simply as an increasing stupidity. . . . Stupidity in the Kantian sense has become the infirmity of everybody, and therefore can no longer be regarded as “beyond remedy.”
If Kant’s version of enlightenment was now a distant memory, a glimmer of hope remained: stupidity on a social scale had to be remediable, if only because, absent some eugenicist paranoia, it was no longer explicable as a mere cognitive deficiency among individuals. People en masse — intellectuals as much as “the masses” — had stopped exercising their powers of judgment, regardless of their ability to do so.
Until very soon!
John