Stupidity in Politics

Its Unavoidability and Potential

Nobutaka Otobe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429960468
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Stupidity permeates our perception and practice of politics. We frequently accuse politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, voters, "elites," and "the masses" for their stupidities. In fact, it is not only "populist politicians," "sensational journalism," and "uneducated voters" who are accused of stupidity. Similar accusations can be, and in fact have been, made concerning those who criticize them as well. It seems that stupidity is ubiquitous, unable to be contained within or attributed to one specific political position, personal trait, or even ignorance and erroneous reasoning

Undertaking a theoretical investigation of stupidity, this book challenges the assumption that stupidity can be avoided. Otobe argues that the very ubiquity of stupidity implies its unavoidability—that we cannot contain it in such domains as error, ignorance, or "post-truth." What we witness is rather that one's reasoning can be sound, evidence-based, and stupid. In revealing this unavoidability, he contends that stupidity is an ineluctable problem not only of politics, but also of thinking. We become stupid because we think: It is impossible to distinguish a priori stupid thought from upright, righteous thought. Moreover, the failure to address the unavoidability of stupidity leads political theory to the failure to acknowledge the productive moments that experiences of stupidity harbor within. Such productive moments constitute the potential of stupidity—that radical new ideas can emerge out of our seemingly banal and stupid thinking in our daily political activity.

1 Problematizing

Deleuze on the image of thought, and stupidity as an endogenous problem of thinking and politics

Introduction

This chapter aims at formulating the problematic of stupidity. By “problematic,” I mean the locus and ways stupidity matters to our political lives—especially to political thinking in theory and practice. As such, a problematic constitutes a constellation of interconnected themes that does not come to the level of systematic thought. One of the fundamental problems in my attempt to tackle stupidity is the deficiency of the studies on this matter. Due to this deficiency, it is hard to see not only where the problematic lies but also even the extent to which stupidity constitutes a problematic or whether stupidity is a problem for our politics or political thought at all. Thus, it is inevitable that a question arises: is stupidity really an important topic for political theory?¹ Indeed, one of the central purposes of the present study is to respond to this question through a problematization of the relationship between politics, thinking, and stupidity.² For this task of problematization, I start by articulating the following two theses, which constitute the problematic of stupidity:

• IStupidity is an inherent problem of thinking; we become stupid because we think. As an internal problem, stupidity resists any attempt of demarcation. Thus, it is impossible to distinguish stupid thought from other more sophisticated kinds of thought by any pregiven standard.³
• IINot only a problem of thinking, stupidity is also an inherent problem of politics; stupidity reveals the political character of thinking. Against a conventional dichotomy between thinking and politics, which holds the former as a solitary activity and the latter as a plural one, stupidity attests to a political, i.e., plural character of thinking.⁴

In arguing for the above theses, I draw upon Deleuze’s remarks on stupidity in Difference and Repetition, which stands as one of the most insightful accounts of stupidity. It is true that his remarks on the matter consist only of several paragraphs in the more than three hundred pages of Difference and Repetition, with a few more sentences found elsewhere. In his later works, such as two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia—works more explicitly political and popular among political/social/cultural theorists—Deleuze no longer writes about stupidity.⁵ Hence, it may appear that stupidity occupies only a minor role in Deleuze’s philosophy, or even that it is discarded in his later thought. But his remarks on stupidity in Difference and Repetition are neither instances of poetic rhetoric nor marginal to his thought. Rather, they are situated at the center of his philosophical project in his magnum opus, showing the internal relationship between stupidity, philosophy, and thinking.⁶ The phenomenon of stupidity exposes elements Deleuze critically analyzes in the entire Difference and Repetition: the emergence and abortion of representation and the emergence of thinking. Moreover, as this chapter demonstrates, his insights help us to clarify the political relevance of stupidity, even though Difference and Repetition almost exclusively concerns philosophy.⁷

In the next section, I analyze Deleuze’s remarks on stupidity in Difference and Repetition and formulate the problematic mentioned above. Then, in the rest of the chapter, I attempt to reveal the relevance and utility of Deleuze’s insights. First, I defend my exploration against other interpretations of Deleuze and ambiguities within Deleuze’s texts. This clarification will mainly illuminate the first thesis. Next, I defend and clarify the second thesis by comparing it with another candidate for the explanation of stupidity, that is, Arendt’s notion of “thoughtlessness.” Though it is not on stupidity as such, her observation on Eichmann’s thoughtlessness shows an affinity with Deleuze’s account of stupidity; both Arendt and Deleuze respectively find the distinctive characteristic of thoughtlessness and stupidity in the use of stock phrases and clichés. Then, why should I not employ Arendt’s notion of thoughtlessness? After all, the notion of thoughtlessness was originally coined to explore one of the most disastrous political events in history—totalitarianism and the Final Solution—one might ask whether her notion of thoughtlessness would be more relevant for the revaluation of the relation between politics and theory. While Arendt’s notion of thoughtlessness appears to be more relevant for politics, in fact, a brief comparison between Deleuze and Arendt will reveal a certain flaw in Arendt’s orientation toward thinking—that is, her presupposition of the innate righteousness of thinking activity. This presupposition in turn makes it difficult to grasp the internal problematic of thinking as an activity and thereby occludes the interrelation between thinking and politics.

I do not, however, offer solutions to the problematic of stupidity thus formulated and clarified in this chapter. In fact, one of the most significant points to be made about the problematic is that we cannot solve it. As an endogenous predicate of thinking and politics, stupidity haunts us as an internal and therefore permanent problem. But this does not mean that we are helpless to tackle the problematic or that we do not have to consider the problematic. Toward the end of the chapter, I articulate three questions that the problematic poses to our current practice and theory of politics, to which I respond in the following chapters without aiming to solve them.

Stupidity as a transcendental problem for thinking and the political

In Difference and Repetition, the theme of stupidity appears in the third chapter, “The Image of Thought.” While the scope of Deleuze’s remarks goes beyond what is covered in the third chapter, here I want to start with the context within which they appear.

The main theme of “The Image of Thought” is to criticize the conventional way of philosophy for its inability to dissociate itself from presuppositions, that is, unexamined, pre-philosophical doxa. Philosophy typically tries to be free from doxa by starting without any presuppositions. In this attempt, it has been relatively successful in starting without what Deleuze calls “objective presuppositions,” those presuppositions contained in concepts employed by philosophy. For example, Descartes in Meditations denies that he starts with the pregiven concept of human being as rational animal because that conceptualization would already presuppose what “rationality” and “animal” are.⁸ Such presuppositions contained in concepts are called “objective” because they are external to the process of thinking. However, according to Deleuze, expelling objective presuppositions is not enough to truly begin philosophy. In fact, it still retains “subjective presuppositions.” What are subjective presuppositions? Again, in the case of Descartes’ Meditations, even after his denial of any pregiven concepts, his famous cogito still expresses unexamined presuppositions about the thinking activity itself. In so doing, cogito presupposes that we already know what thinking is before we begin to think. In particular, Deleuze identifies two major presuppositions. The first is the assumption of the good will in thinking, which Descartes calls “good sense”; since we are equipped with the good will, we can reach the same conclusions as long as we think. “Good sense is of all things in the world most equally distributed” (Descartes 1956, 1). The second assumption, which is even more relevant to the problem of stupidity, is that we are all endowed with the faculty of thinking; this righteous faculty for thinking leads us to the truthful conclusions. However, what assures those two assumptions? Deleuze argues that they actually express an unexamined “common sense.” As such, the Cartesian cogito results in reproducing doxa in its image of thought, which Deleuze calls “orthodoxy,” or the “dogmatic image of thought.”

In the chapter on the “Image of Thought” Deleuze examines such subjective presuppositions under eight postulates, one of which is the negligence of stupidity as the negative of thought, or the exemplary failure of what thinking is supposed to do.⁹ In terms of our present purpose of articulating the problematic of stupidity, we do not have to delve into each of the eight postulates. But a couple of implications for stupidity are observable in the overall framework of the chapter. First, subjective presuppositions concern the internal character of thinking. More precisely, those presuppositions blanket the process of thinking with the assumption that to think constantly brings about right and unobjectionable conclusions for everybody. In fact, such an assumption is not without question, and as I argue in what follows, due to this presupposition, philosophy ignores or defers the internal problem of thinking, which appears as stupidity.

Second, Deleuze’s description of those presuppositions as constituting the “dogmatic image of thought” suggests why stupidity appears as clichés. The dogmatic image of thought takes the form of “everybody knows”: we all know what we mean by thinking. By implicitly assuming it, the dogmatic image of thought reproduces what is already known to us—that is, people’s opinions—even when thinkers believe they set thinking free from those opinions. This is nothing but a mechanism of clichés that, as I pointed out in introduction, a few pioneering writers such as Flaubert always attribute to stupidity. As the dogmatic image of thought lies in its initial reproduction of people’s opinions without the people themselves being aware of it, stupidity manifests as clichés we make when we speak the words of others without realizing we are doing so. Cliché, in other words, illuminates how what we think is an independent and spontaneous thought is intruded upon by the voices of others.

Third, building from the last point, we now get a glimpse of the political character of thinking and stupidity. Deleuze’s criticism reveals that our activity of thinking is not solitary but indeed immersed in opinions of people. If we define the political as a plurality of people, can we not see a political character in such intrusion of people’s doxa into cogito? Indeed, Deleuze writes that we need “the new power of politics” in overturning the image of thought (Deleuze 1994, 137; 1968, 179). What does this new power of politics look like? I will turn to it later in this chapter and explore its potential more in the subsequent chapters. But for now, I want to focus on Deleuze’s writings on stupidity, moving to the analysis of the postulate of stupidity.

Among the eight postulates of the image of thought as presented by Deleuze, stupidity concerns the fifth: the postulate of taking error to be the sole negative of thought. According to Deleuze, the orthodox and dogmatic image of thought fails to address stupidity as an internal negative of thinking. In so doing, the dogmatic image keeps the presupposition that thought leads us to the right conclusion insofar as we start to think. It is true, nonetheless, that the image of thought acknowledges no negative or failure in thinking. Indeed, the failure of thought is a constant concern for philosophy. Plato’s Theaetetus already takes up the problem of error, which leads to an aporetic conclusion. Kant, in his transcendental dialectic in the Critique of Pure Reason, deals with the internal illusion of reason and the antinomies as the cul-de-sac of reason. Or rather, we can see the extent to which his acknowledgment of our finite ability to think moved his entire project of critical philosophy when we read the very first sentence of the Critique of Pure Reason:

Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.

(1998a, Avii)

In a sense, Kant speaks of a problematic here: speculative reason is fine within its limit, but it compulsively tends to go beyond the limit. Nevertheless, according to Deleuze, these cases of the negative of thought, including Kant’s internal illusion, become endorsements for the image of thought by being reduced to error: “Error, therefore, pays homage to the ‘truth’ to the extent that, lacking the form of its own, it gives the form of the true to the false” (Deleuze 1994, 148; 1968, 193). In errors, we miscalculate (e.g., answering “three” to the question of what one plus one equals) and misrecognize (e.g., saying two o’clock to be three). But taking miscalculation and misrecognition to be exemplary cases of the negative of thought, the dogmatic image of thought caricatures the negative of thought and thereby expels the problematic that the image of thought actuality has. Who actually makes such simple errors? Certainly, we may. But is it a paradigmatic case where we lapse into the negative of thought? In fact, “Error acquires a sense only once the play of thought ceases to be speculative and becomes a kind of radio quiz” (Deleuze 1994, 150; 1968, 195). Errors turn thought into a “radio quiz” where thought is reduced to the matter of making right reasoning or right cognition.

A more serious problem is that those errors are taken from the most banal of empirical facts. In so doing, they fail to raise the transcendental question about thinking, the question quid juris whether thought is truly possible. It is true that Kant, for example, comes closest to posing the transcendental question in the beginning of his First Critique, which I quoted above. Kant even goes further to analyze the “internal illusion” of reason appearing in antinomies of pure reason. Notwithstanding this, Kant’s transcendental dialectic of pure reason brings the question back to a matter of error. This is because he attributes internal illusion to the wrong use of a faculty. Internal illusion, for Kant, appears when, for example, reason as the faculty of ideas, and not understanding as the faculty of categories, misconceives that it can directly grasp the world. As such, internal illusion falls under the control through the correct use of faculties, whose harmonious collaboration Kant grounds in the de facto model of common sense, sensus communis.¹⁰ His retreat from the transcendental question is observable as early as the second sentence of the First Critique: “Reason falls into this perplexity [that it can neither avoid nor solve certain kinds of questions] through no fault of its own” (Kant 1998a, Avii). Even if reason often prompts such misuse of itself, the problem of thinking is not reason’s own fault. It is due to its improper use. To become dissociated from the dogmatic image of thought, we need to look for a different negative of thought that is also transcendental and hence internal to thinking as such.

It is because of this need for the internal negative that Deleuze introduces stupidity:

One is neither superior nor external to that from which one benefits; a tyrant institutionalizes stupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed within it … Cowardice, cruelty, baseness and stupidity...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Citations and Translations
• Introduction: the unavoidability of stupidity
• 1 Problematizing: Deleuze on the image of thought, and stupidity as an endogenous problem of thinking and politics
• 2 Tracing: democracy and intensified problematic of stupidity in Rousseau, J. S. Mill, Tocqueville, and Flaubert
• 3 Facing/missing: the problematical thinking and Kant’s critical project
• 4 Being: Kobayashi and his unrepentance of wartime critique
• Conclusion: potential of stupidity
• References
• Index