A grain of stupidity
There is an odd myth about the love of wisdom and the love of beauty, the bewildering wrong-headedness of which can only be matched by its unquestioned ubiquity. This myth is that philosophy and art have anything at all to do with what we moderns mean by the word intelligence. I defy anyone who claims to possess a definitive, coherent notion of what this term means with any explanatory power. However, taking the popular conception of it—something like a raw, penetrating power of the mind to learn, categorize, and discover—I outrightly reject this myth, and, in fact, posit the opposite. I propose, in fact, that to be a true philosopher or artist, one must have a certain form of irremediable stupidity.
Two loci lend aid to my argument: Book VII of Plato’s Republic and an essay entitled “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” by Flannery O’Connor. The first demonstrates that one must be a fool in order to be a philosopher; the latter, that dullness of perception is the key to great art.
Book VII of the Republic is obviously centered on the allegory of the Cave, an allegory of which, through the contempt of familiarity, we tend to only remember half. The first image is one we know well:
See human beings as though they were in an underground cave-like dwelling with its entrance, a long one, open to the light across the whole width of the cave. They are in it from childhood with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the bond to turn their heads all the way around. Their light is from a fire burning far above and behind them. Between the fire and the prisoners there is a road above, along which see a wall, built like the partitions puppet-handlers set in front of the human beings and over which they show the puppets…Then also see along this wall human beings carrying all sorts of artifacts, which project above the wall, and statues of men and other animals wrought from stone, wood, and every kind of material; as is to be expected, some of the carriers utter sounds while others are silent (Allan Bloom’s translation).
Those bound from childhood in the cave would take the shadows, images, and echoes on the walls to be the sum and substance of reality. But imagine, says Plato, that by some unnamed compulsion, some of those who were imprisoned were released and stood up. This liberated proto-philosopher does not, as some perhaps remember, immediately begin to ascend toward the light in a noble fury of righteous indignation, crawling upward with the holy frenzy of those who have at last entered fully into truth.
Plato's allegory of the cave by Jan Saenredam, according to Cornelis van Haarlem, 1604, Albertina, Vienna
Rather, for Plato, the man who first finds himself freed from his chains is much like the man who wakes late for work, checks his alarm, and rolls over. Plato uses such flattering language as “dazzled,” “in pain,” “at a loss,” and convinced that “what was seen before is truer than what is now shown.”
The man who first turns away from the shadows to the light is not at all the noble intellect of popular conception who, with high chin and keen vision, wrenches his eyes away from the phantoms and falsehoods to set them, by his own volition, on the good and the true. It is significant, first and foremost, that Plato’s man does not escape his bondage. What it is that “releases” him and “compels” him to stand is an infamous ambiguity; what is clear is that, whatever it is, the motive force is not the man himself.
Beyond being the unwilling patient of philosophical transformation, the man who is released from his chains does not experience joy, delight, or wonder (at least as we conceive of the word) at the revelations he has received. He instead feels distress and stupefaction—a slack-jawed, cow-eyed, uncomprehending daze.
This first unfortunate encounter with reality is, of course, not the only one which will render the philosopher a laughable specter. Two more—each more shameful than the last—follow in quick succession.
First, though, as Plato tells us, the eyes of the lately born philosopher quickly adjust to the new light, he does not thereby actually achieve any real clarity. This is because, in proportion with the adequation of his vision to the splendor of truth, the brightness of the truth which he perceives also increases. Furthermore, for Plato, the philosopher does not willingly engage this crescending light, but is seized forcibly and hauled forth from the comfort of his cave. He writes:
And if," I said, "someone dragged him away from there by force along the rough, steep, upward way and didn't let him go before he had dragged him out into the light of the sun, wouldn't he be distressed and annoyed at being so dragged? And when he came to the light, wouldn't he have his eyes full of its beam and be unable to see even one of the things now said to be true?”
Notice what is missing from this picture. Notice that there is no raucous exultation in the thrill of new discovery, no resplendent vindication for the tortured genius who touches the unknown. Instead, the philosopher is a blind fool who unwillingly finds himself unceremoniously manhandled by the truth.
Yet even this is not the ultimate indignity which the philosopher must suffer. According to Plato, the man whom the truth discourteously removed from the comfort of his cave will, once that man has become minimally accustomed to the light, then with equal discourtesy send that man back down into the cave. Plato writes:
"Now reflect on this too," I said. "If such a man were to come down again and sit in the same seat, on coming suddenly from the sun wouldn't his eyes get infected with darkness?...And if he once more had to compete with those perpetual prisoners in forming judgments about those shadows while his vision was still dim, before his eyes had recovered, and if the time needed for getting accustomed were not at all short, wouldn't he be the source of laughter, and wouldn't it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and that it's not even worth trying to go up? And if they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead up wouldn't they kill him?"
The life of the philosopher is a life of blind frustration, of long, often fruitless, blinking and staring both at the light of truth and at the darkness of image and shadow. It is a life of mystic compulsion, of exile, of wandering by convoluted and circuitous routes, only to, in the end, wind up where many others have already arrived by far less taxing courses.
Flannery O’Connor makes a similar claim about the artist—the novelist in particular—in her essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction.” She writes:
But there’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it’s well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world, no matter how limited his particular scene.
O’Connor here illuminates both the essential kinship and difference between the artist and the philosopher. On the one hand, the artist and the philosopher both share a form of insurmountable dullness about reality which is the efficient cause of their proper activities. Philosophy and art both involve a kind of paralyzing, ontological déjà vu, a rapturous start of sudden recollection called forth from the distant past or from the far reaches of being that fixes them where they stand.
The blindness of the philosopher stems from a ceaseless oscillation between the unapproachable splendor of the things which are above and the indeterminate lack of substance characterizing those things which are below.
The blindness of the artist is of a different kind, however. The artist continues to stare fixedly at all those things which others have seen and passed by, for they have not quite seen what everyone else seems to have seen. It takes much longer for the true artist to stop seeing the world as strange, wild, and unexpected, to stop seeing even the most elementary and mundane objects of human experience as freakish and alien.
The artist, as O’Connor says in another letter, “does not know a thing until [he’s] written it.” The artist requires a higher form of analysis, a form of knowing beyond the ordinary so that he may be satisfied with his seeing—that is, he must have a hand in its making to be know he is knowing.
For O’Connor, this “grain of stupidity” has an indispensable purpose. It forces the artist into those conditions under which true, transcendent beauty is able to shine forth from the particular and be seen. Beauty is not the sort of thing which can be summoned at will, reached out and taken by force. It appears at its pleasure, and never immediately. But when it does appear, it is not only the beauty of that object itself, but the beauty of the whole created order ineffably present in the beauty of its part. For O’Connor, all beauty is a microcosm, and the artist, to the extent that he at last receives the beauty of his object, receives the beauty of all things inchoate.
In the Introduction to Degrees of Knowledge, Jacques Maritain expresses all this again with an enviable precision and poetic zeal. He writes:
The birthright of the metaphysician as of the poet is a grace of the natural order. The one, who throws his heart into things like an arrow or a lighted match, sees by divination—in the very stuff of the sensible, inseparable from it—the flash of the spiritual fight which shines for him with the glance of God. The other, turning away from the sensible, sees by science, in the intelligible detached from perishing things, that same spiritual fight held captive in some idea...Both living by the rays which fall from the creative Night, the one feeds on a fixed intelligibility multiform as the reflection of God in the world, the other on a like intelligibility only divested and determined by the very being of things. They play see-saw together, each rising to heaven by turns. The spectators mock at this game; they arc sitting on the solid earth (emphasis mine).
These final lines are paramount. To the extent that they fulfill their roles authentically, the philosopher and the artist are buffoons, jesters, clowns, objects of mockery and laughter for the world. And it is precisely as such that they have been given places of special honor in the history of the Catholic Church. Indeed, it was St. Paul himself who claimed that he had become a “fool for Christ’s sake” and that the “foolishness of God is wiser than men.”
It is not the great man, the man of intelligence, the man of sharp eye and sharper mind that is the choice vessel of Christendom’s restoration. Rather it is the man drug by his hair out of the underworld, the man thrown off his horse by a blinding light, the man who can’t take his eyes off the simplest leaf or water-drop, and the man who strips naked before the eyes of the world and runs off into the forest to preach and pray. When the Church calls her children today to a revitalization of culture through philosophy and the arts, she is not calling for a host of effete, tweed-laden taste-mongers, quietly patting themselves on the back for their subtlety and cultivation. She is calling rather for a community of holy fools, of half-blind hot-blooded prophets. It is no coincidence that, closer to the heart of Mother Church than any innovator, original thinker, or fashionable luminary, is that Dumb Ox who, at the instigation of his teasing Dominican brother, believed for a moment that pigs could fly.