massrock

Well-known member
The most effective ideas are the lightest, the ones which are able to spread without heavy machinery, or under the sheltering presence of higher values.
Effective at spreading maybe. Maybe effective is the wrong word.

I'd love it to be true that the best ideas are the simplest ones or the easiest to transmit but I don't think that is the case. Some things are hard and counter-intuitive at first. There's a lot to be said for packaging though.

It's easy to deal with the pig headed and the ignorant but that doesn't mean you'll get much productive out of it.
 

massrock

Well-known member
Are these questions for philosophy -

Should we value intelligence and awareness over ignorance and stupidity?

Can those things be measured?

Does it matter?

What can we do about it?

Is it hip to be square?
 

four_five_one

Infinition
It's easy to deal with the pig headed and the ignorant but that doesn't mean you'll get much productive out of it.

Is it better to be happily ignorant pighead, or to be an unhappy Socrates? -- Regarding trolls, the sophists were vital for Socrates, and as Joseph K. has demonstrated in the course of this thread, still as crucial...
 

empty mirror

remember the jackalope
Wow this ignorance thing really works. No wonder it's so popular.
in untimely meditations, nietzsche says that "intentional stupidity" is the only refuge for those students of history that imagine themselves to be at the end of history (such as hegelians).
 

four_five_one

Infinition
in untimely meditations, nietzsche says that "intentional stupidity" is the only refuge for those students of history that imagine themselves to be at the end of history (such as hegelians).

The age of intentional stupidity is over... Nietzsche is a great lover of ignorance, though, isn't he? It's continually praised in Genealogy Of Morals.
 

massrock

Well-known member
Ignorance isn't the opposite of knowledgeable. Ignorance happens in real time, has very little to do with knowledge, no?
 

empty mirror

remember the jackalope
The age of intentional stupidity is over... Nietzsche is a great lover of ignorance, though, isn't he? It's continually praised in Genealogy Of Morals.
as i understand him, ignorance is required to overcome the paralysis that comes with a familiarity with history etc.
 

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
There was a very good book called "Stupidity" by Avital Ronell which undertook to examine the transcendental dimensions of the problems. Ronell suggests in the book that stupidity is, at heart, dogmatism, or a certain inflexibility vis-a-vis language. And Deleuze, actually, was very interested in stupidity as well.
Should we value intelligence and awareness over ignorance and stupidity?

It isn't clear what any of those terms means by themselves, and it also isn't clear what "value" means...
 

massrock

Well-known member
Ronell suggests in the book that stupidity is, at heart, dogmatism, or a certain inflexibility vis-a-vis language. And Deleuze, actually, was very interested in stupidity as well.
This sounds very much like Korzybski's thing. Isness is an illness. 'Philosophy IS arguing'...

Imprecise langague (or language, or even lasagne) CAN lead to problems with thinking.
He thought that certain uses of the verb "to be", called the "is of identity" and the "is of predication", were faulty in structure, e.g., a statement such as, "Joe is a fool" (said of a person named 'Joe' who has done something that we regard as foolish). In Korzybski's system, one's assessment of Joe belongs to a higher order of abstraction than Joe himself.
 
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josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
Korb: Burroughs was really into him, if I'm not mistaken...

One thing that I think increasingly strongly is that overly-scientific terminology and jargon (such as Badiou's) is highly anti-philosophical: philosophy has to take place in the spaces in-between languages ("paroles") not through the imposition of a royal vocabulary.

In this sense, over-precision is as much of problem as precision. Imagination is key.

I came across this on my travels which I think is a good example:
The artistic miracle of the Quoran is one of its many miracles. The Quoron portrayes an amazing capacity for describing different concepts by relating to the power of human being’s imagination. The Quoran uses images, stories and tales both for conveying hard and important concepts such as the after life, good and evil and the belief in God and the prophet.

VIA
 
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