A Parable of Two Idiots
The old idiot wanted the truth, but the new idiot wants to turn the absurd into the highest power of thought– in other words, to create. The old idiot wanted to be accountable only to reason. The new idiot, closer to Job than to Socrates wants account to be taken of “every victim of history.” The old idiot wanted, by himself to account for what was or was not rational, what was lost or saved. The new idiot wants the lost, the incomprehensible, and the absurd to be restored to him…..The first idiot has to lose reason so that the second rediscovers what the other in winning it, had lost in advance: Descartes goes mad in Russia?
—excerpt from What is Philosophy by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari page 63
3 thoughts on “A Parable of Two Idiots”
Perhaps this posting should be followed up with the Parable of Seven Billion Idiots, for our interactions on a personal level are but a microcosmic mirror of our species at large. Despite what we think we know, we are blind to the truth for we all live in Plato’s cave. I don’t know if it is possible to for us to really see or understand the daylight.
To my recent thought on this post I add the following from Shakespeare’s MacBeth:
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
and then is heard no more. It is a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.”
This may be a bleak and pessimistic take on our time here on earth, but the saddest part is that we could have been so much more, a true beacon of enlightenment and curiosity. We have achieved so much, yet cannot seem to get out of our own way in order to move through Wilson’s Bottleneck of Ignorance. Perhaps nature will give life on this planet a Mulligan and the next time around a more rational creature (methinks the Platypus would be a good choice) could be less arrogant, self-righteous and see the world through fewer filters of egotism.
With us humans, rationality and irrationality are potential within the same creature. At least that is the point of the quotation from Deleuze and Guattari. Thus human beings can be quite magnificent, as well as “demonic”. We can easily cite examples of both. Let us not lose heart but carry on. The future is contingent, not subject to fate.