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# On banality

by kyrenaios, on 01 January 2021
Filed under: philosophy

There is an interesting quirk about philosophy. In no other field of study are
the practitioners as little concerned with being wrong - of course, philosophers
don't relish being wrong either, but it can be awfully hard to find a common
ground (a "language game" for you Wittgensteinians) for two philosophers to
accuse each other meaningfully of being wrong; just think Kant and Spinoza, for
instance. Thus calling a philosopher's works "wrong" often simply falls on an
admission of difference - or, perhaps, by some appeal to political effects: so-
and-so's theory led to Nazism, and so on. While this latter approach carries
some weight, in its extreme conclusion it simply falls back on a moralistic
nihilism: nothing ever leads to anything good ever. Since no one, I believe,
considers a moralistic-nihilistic dystopia a "positive" political outcome, it is
self-evident that this kind of criticism sabotages its own ground.

Yet for all that, I submit that what would be the unifying factor for all
philosophers - no matter the creed - is the universal desire to avoid being
banal. Philosophers absolutely abhor banality. One will go a lot further
accusing a philosopher of being a mere "epigone" of some earlier, presumably
more "perfect" exemplar of whatever doctrine they propose. The fundamental
principle applying to philosophers is, to reverse that well-known formula of
Hannah Arendt's, "the evil of banality". Banality is what belongs to the
unwashed common folk and his "folksy wisdom". The philosopher aspires to being
something more, to a qewrhtikh\ e)pisth/mh beyond that of mere e)mpeiri/a. Think
thoughts as of yet unthought! Create radically new concepts (pace Deleuze &
Guattari), or forever be deemed - gasp! - a "banal thinker"!

One does not have to be a follower of Zizek to agree with his assessment that
this sort of vision of unshackled creativity in philosophy is not more than a
disguised mirror of the neoliberal appetite for endless expansion; and one can
only add to it that neoliberalism is far from the cause of this anemie de la
nouveaute contemporary thought suffers from, lest we fall into the opposite trap
of placing it entirely in some sort of imagined opposition between "ancient" and
"modern" that certain Straussians delight in.

For, however much the corporatization of academia and the pressure for
philosophers to justify themselves in the "market" (truly a way to make sure
that no philosophy will again be done in the universities in a thousand more
years) did us not a whit of good, the aversion to banality belongs to a certain
self-conceptualization of philosophy that did not begin and probably will not
end with the capitalist world order.

Our thinkers churn out volumes upon volumes of books on the subject of "what is
philosophy?" without ever pausing to ask themselves: "what is banality?" Because
it is in no way a banal question.

We know the saying "common sense is uncommon" so well that it has itself become
a worn-out cliche. Yet that doesn't make it any less true.

If the absolute proliferation of conspiracy theories in our age taught us one
thing, it is that we fool ourselves best when we imagine ourselves too smart to
be fooled by anything. "Les non-dupes errent" - there, too, is a species of
Gallic banality that never lost its bite, despite the best efforts by a certain
individual who claims the mantle of being his heritier principal.

We may as well indict Kant, too, for all the philosophical nonsense that have
been produced in this direction; for we neither possess nearly as much of this
fabled Urtheilskraft as we'd like to think, nor have need of it. This whole
schtick, this so-called "critical philosophy", we may not have much to mourn for
if we were to jettison it in its totality.

For when it comes down to it, philosophy isn't much more than that which says a
few banal things. But it in no way means that the "folksy common Joe", who only
exists in a particular fantasy anyway, is now our model of a philosopher.

In truth, none of this mystical band of "common folks" is worthy of philosophy,
and we can't even hope to educate our way out of this quagmire. Education only
makes things worse. "polumaqi/h no/on e)/xein ou) dida/skei," said Heraclitus in
his inimitable way: much learning does not teach you to have sense - no/on
e)/xein, this phrase in Greek, it refers to exactly the kind of "banal" common
sense that, as it turns out, is the most elusive above all. Then he continues:
"*(hsi/odon ga\r a)\n e)di/dace kai\ *puqago/rhn au)=tis te *cenofa/nea kai\
*(ekatai=on": otherwise, it would have taught even Hesiod, Pythagoras,
Xenophanes and Hecataeus - a veritable pantheon of the greatest thinkers and
writers by his time.

Diogenes Laertius1 reported this saying with all the breathlessness of a tabloid
paparazzo: look at the guts of this man, who so casually throws around such
hallowed names in an insult that seems almost an afterthought? But then again,
would Heraclitus be the philosopher we all know and love, if he didn't possess
exactly this much pugilism?

We may rejoice in knowing that another thinker from roughly the same time, but a
totally different civilization, happened to make exactly the same gutsy
statement - we understand these earliest of the ancient thinkers too little,
because we never let them speak to us in their own way. We never learn their
language, and when we do, we still let the things we already know cloud our
hearing. Again that damned polumaqi/h.

For Zhuangzi, whose name is also written Chuang-Tzu, is far from the "mere
interpreter" of the more celebrated Laozi (Lao-Tzu) that we imagine him to be.
Some scholars even go so far as to place him before the author of the Tao Te
Ching, whom they propose to be different from the historical Laozi that Zhuangzi
refers to. This question does not concern us; we will let it be settled by
textual scholars. But Zhuangzi is also considered by a good number of people,
Chinese scholars and western Sinologists, as, beyond the mystical wrapping he is
shrouded in, a rather banal writer. No doubt the Taoist religion, which appeared
much later and appropriated these thinkers as their gods and saints, nullified
much of their edge - by far the best way we know of to make a philosopher
harmlessly ineffectual is by making them a god, as the Athenians were quick to
do a generation after they gave Socrates the greatest honour and power - by
sentencing him to death.

Yet a cutting edge Zhuangzi most certainly possessed. Consider this passage,
which is worth quoting at length2:

>zhao1 wen2 zhi1 gu3 qin2 ye3, shi1 kuang4 zhi1 zhi1 ce4 ye3, hui4 zi3 zhi1
>ju4 wu2 ye3, san1 zi3 zhi1 zhi1 ji3 hu1! jie1 qi2 sheng4 zhe3 ye3, gu4 zai4
>zhi1 mo4 nian2. wei2 qi2 hao3 zhi1 ye3, yi3 yi4 yu2 bi3, qi2 hao3 zhi1 ye3, yu4
>yi3 ming2 zhi1 bi3. fei1 suo3 ming2 er2 ming2 zhi1, gu4 yi3 jian1 bai2 zhi1
>mei4 zhong1. er2 qi2 zi3 you4 yi3 wen2 zhi1 lun2 zhong1, zhong1 shen1 wu2
>cheng2. ruo4 shi4 er2 ke3 wei4 cheng2 hu1, sui1 wo3 yi4 cheng2 ye3. ruo4 shi4
>er2 bu4 ke3 wei4 cheng2 hu1, wu4 yu3 wo3 wu2 cheng2 ye3. shi4 gu4 hua2 yi2 zhi1
>yao4, sheng4 ren2 zhi1 suo3 tu2 ye3. wei4 shi4 bu4 yong4 er2 yu4 zhu1 yong1,
>ci3 zhi1 wei4 yi3 ming2.

Now the translation by A. C. Graham3, which is a very bad translation (as all
translations of philosophy are), but possibly the least bad:

>Chao Wen strumming on the zither, Music-master K'uang propped on his stick,
>Hui Shih leaning on the sterculia, had the three men's knowledge much farther
>to go? They were all men in whom it reached a culmination, and therefore was
>carried on to too late a time. It was only in being preferred by them that what
>they knew about differed from an Other; because they preferred it they wished
>to illumine it, but they illumined it without the Other being illumined, and so
>the end of it all was the darkness of chop logic: and his own son too ended
>with only Chao Wen's zither string, and to the end of his life his musicianship
>was never completed. May men like this be said to be complete? Then so am I. Or
>may they not be said to be complete? Then neither am I, nor is anything else.
>
>Therefore the glitter of glib implausibilities is despised by the sage. The
>'That's it' which deems he does not use, but finds for things lodging-places in
>the usual. It is this that is meant by 'using Illumination'.

That this cheng2 "complete" is applied to music is attested to by the Kangxi
Dictionary: good music knows to end in due time, not to ring on and overstay its
welcome. Beyond the occasional outburst of music, an ocean of illumination in
the realm of the usual. The realm of banality, where the sage "finds lodging-
places for things".

For, notwithstanding those rather influential attempts in the twentieth century
to dislodge metaphysics from the qro/nos filosofi/as in favour of some
obsessive-compulsive "writing machine" view of reality, there is yet space for
the beautiful itself to shine, not through the artifice of music and language
(for which we shall sooner or later need a Kantian theory of judgement-power),
but simply in itself, in the Divine Illumination Zhuangzi alluded to, in all its
banality - on account of which Plato declared his entire theory of naming
unsatisfactory because, in the last instance, it is simply the banality of
things that matter compared to the names that mislead us into thinking we may
ever "understand" anything about these things. And if that turns out to be,
after all, a more Kantian perspective than we gave him credit for, just as well:
no one knows as little as the one who knows half well.

The rest is silence. Did Zhuangzi dream of a butterfly? Did a butterfly dream of
Zhuangzi? What a banal question he asked, we may exclaim - and, in thus
exclaiming, verify a passing remark of Lacan's in one or another of his
seminars, that what the cryptic story about a dream and a butterfly proves is
simply that Zhuangzi is, after all, in no way whatsoever - an idiot.

## Notes

1: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 9.1. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0257%3Abook%3D9%3Achapter%3D1
2: << zhuang1 zi3 : nei4 pian1 : qi2 wu4 lun4 >> https://ctext.org/zhuangzi/adjustment-of-controversies/zh
3: Chuang Tzu, The Inner Chapters, translated by A. C. Graham, 1989, p. 55. https://www.hackettpublishing.com/asian-studies/the-inner-chapters

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