From: <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca>
Subject: Re: HAB: Brave New Conditionality
Date: Sun, 14 Jan 2001 09:36:33 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)



On Sat, 13 Jan 2001 13:20:51 -0500 kelley <kwalker2-AT-gte.net> wrote:

> :)  we have a game of taking quotes from philosophers etc and replacing the 
> word reason or rationality with "stoopidity".  it can be quite funny and, 
> best, it requires some sophistication to really get just how funny it is.

For example, I just randomly opened up Hegel's Phenom of Stoopidity... 
paragraph 546: But this silent, ceaseless weaving of stoopidity in the simple 
inwarndess of its lack of understanding, stoopidity concealing its action from 
itself, is only one side of the true incompetence of pure idiocy. Its diffusion 
consists not merely in the fact that like goes together with like, stupid is, 
stupid does, nor is its actualization merely an expansion in which there is no 
antithesis. On the contrary, the action of the negative essence is no less 
essentially a developed, self-differentiating moment which, being an act of 
complete incompetence, must give its moments a definite manifest existence and 
must appear on the scene as a sheer uproar and a banal struggle with its 
antithesis.

or from Habermas's essay "Some Further Clarifications of the Concept of 
Communicative Stoopidity" - "There is a peculiar stoopidity, inherent not in 
language as such but in the communicative use of linguistic expressions, that 
can be reduced neither to the epistemic stoopidity of a lack of knowledge nor 
to the purposive-stoopidity of incompetence action. This communicative 
stoopidity is expressed in idiot speech oriented toward avoiding 
understanding...

truth and invalids,
ken



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