The key points in this "speaking":
Everyone has a defining insecurity. We build our lives through exclusion of particular qualities.
We think that if we say "no" to particular qualities, we can build a good life, a successful life, or just a safe life.
To be a human being is to be in direct and dangerous contact with time.
Perhaps there is something beneath time and eternity that makes this duality possible. But this cannot be thought (can be sensed, but not conceptualized).
We build identities based on exclusion so we don't have to dissolve into everything. Just as every person excludes traits from their identity—from fear and insecurity— so do professions.
In academia, that excluded fear/ characteristic is stupidity. Lately, I've been wanting to embody this shadow. Not stupidity as the opposite of intelligence, but rather as a spaciousness of mind, a wide unknowing.
Even though this blankness may seem to be a kind of stupidity, it's in fact the key to using intelligence (as a tool) effectively, holding paradoxes, and being willing to change your mind.
Other Notes:
"It is not enough to recognize in what ignorance man and animal lives; you must also possess the will to ignorance. You must understand that without such ignorance life itself would be impossible, that under this condition alone does the living preserve itself and flourish." —Nietzsche
Stupidity might be called the necessary negativity (counterpart, absence) to the positivity/ presence of intelligence. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han sees the total transparency of this information age as a denial of the dialectic that holds presence and absence, negativity and positivity, hiddenness and light in tension. In an age in which everything is laid bare, open, and exposed, nothing can be kept in the depths, selves become uniform, and affect flattens. In this age of the flat screen, flat emotions, and flat ontologies, I introduce "joy" as the revolutionary reclamation of the flux of emotional diversity (there is a section on Joy in my upcoming book Wakings).
Listener Insights:
What is the "no" that has defined your life? What "no" still defines your life?
If you want your insights to be shared (with your name or anonymously), comment on this blog post, email me, or answer the Spotify questions attached to the episode.
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