Alfred Jarry Smart Dumbness

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Alfred Jarry’s imaginary science Acting intentionally dumb doesn’t always have to be seen as an ironic gesture, but instead could perhaps be seen as a strategy for understanding something from a different perspective. By asking questions in a different language or rhetoric we get different answers. Perhaps by simplifying a complex idea you might get a simplified answer. You could also do the opposite, by over complicating you can stretch the limits and put pre-existing concepts into doubt. The latter is something that French Writer Alfred Jarry does with his concept ‘pataphysics. In Jarry’s novel Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll he provides us with a couple of definitions of ‘pataphysics. 'pataphysics, preceded by an apostrophe …show more content…

This chapter will attempt to further strengthen true dumbness in favour of smart or smart dumbness by comparing the smart vs dumb scenario to Aristotle’s potentiality vs. actuality and Søren Kierkegaard’s possibility vs necessity. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle believes every action or process to be incomplete, therefore dumbness, the incomplete intellect, has the potentiality of smartness. For example actions such as walking, learning, building etc. are all incomplete actions, these incomplete actions have potentiality. Shouldn’t this example prove that all states of being, being dumb and being smart, are incomplete actions and therefore potentialities? Aristotle also makes the point that every potentiality is simultaneously the potentiality of the negation of what it is the potentiality of. Meaning that something with a potentiality for being can admit of both being and not being, because it is neither or. According to this statement in makes sense to jump to the conclusion that dumbness should have the potentiality for smartness and vice versa. This is not the case however and is so for one reason. Rationally speaking in terms of a progression dumbness will always have the potentiality to become smartness, but smartness, coming from dumbness, is a human faculty which cannot be unlearned. Once you become smart there is no turning back to dumbness. Dumbness can admit both of being and of not being dumb, something that smartness cannot do. Aristotle gives an example that a box made from wood isn’t described as being wood but as being wood-esque because it is wood that is potentially a box. This is why something that is smart can appear to be dumb but not the other way

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