On Stupidity by Robert Musil (2.10.2026)

Musil:

Ladies and gentlemen!
Anyone who presumes to speak about stupidity runs the risk today of coming to harm in a variety of ways; it may be construed as presumption, it may even be construed as an obstruction of contemporary development. I myself wrote a number of years ago: »If stupidity did not look so confusingly like progress, talent, hope or improvement, no one would want to be stupid.«

That was in 1931; and no one will dare deny that the world has seen further progress and improvements since then! Thus the question gradually acquires a certain urgency: what, in fact, is stupidity?

Nor would I wish to overlook the fact that, as a poet, I have known stupidity for much longer; indeed, I might even say that I have at times been on collegial terms with it! And as soon as a man opens his eyes in the realm of literature, he moreover finds himself confronted by an almost indescribable resistance that seems capable of assuming every form:

whether a personal one, such as the dignified form of a professor of literary history who, accustomed to aiming across uncontrollable distances, fires disastrously wide of the mark in the present;

or one as diffuse as air, such as the transformation of critical judgement into commercial judgement since God, in His goodness so difficult for us to comprehend, also bestowed human language upon the producers of talking pictures.

I have previously described one or another of several such phenomena; but there is no need to repeat or complete this (and apparently it would even be impossible in view of the tendency towards magnitude that everything has today): it is enough to stress, as a certain conclusion, that the inartistic constitution of a people manifests itself not only in bad times and in crude ways, but also in good times and in every conceivable way, so that oppression and prohibition differ only in degree from honorary doctorates, appointments to academies and the awarding of prizes.

I have always suspected that this many-shaped resistance of a people that prides itself on its love of art to art and the finer spirit was nothing but stupidity, perhaps a special kind of it, a particular art-stupidity and perhaps also feeling-stupidity; at any rate, that it expressed itself in such a way that what we call fine-mindedness would at the same time be fine-stupidity; and even today I do not see very many reasons to abandon this view.

Naturally, not everything that deforms so fully human a concern as art can be blamed on stupidity; as the experience of recent years in particular has taught us, room must also be left for the various forms of lack of character.
But one must not object that the concept of stupidity has no place here because it refers to the intellect and not to feelings, whereas art depends on the latter.
That would be an error.
Even aesthetic pleasure is judgement and feeling. And I ask your permission not merely to append to this great formula, which I have borrowed from Kant, the reminder that Kant speaks of an aesthetic power of judgement and a judgement of taste, but also to repeat at once the antinomies to which it leads:

Thesis: The judgement of taste is not based on concepts, for otherwise it would be possible to dispute about it (to decide it by proof).

Antithesis: It is based on concepts, for otherwise it would not even be possible to argue about it (to seek agreement).

And now I should like to ask whether a similar judgement, with a similar antinomy, does not also underlie politics and the confusion of life as such? And may we not expect, wherever judgement and reason are at home, their sisters and little sisters too, the various forms of stupidity?
So much for their importance. Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote in his delightful and still unexhausted »Praise of Folly« that without certain stupidities man would not even come into the world!

*

Many people reveal a sense of the rule stupidity holds over us, at once so violating of shame and so powerful, by appearing pleasantly and conspiratorially surprised when they hear that someone in whom they place their trust intends to summon this monster by name.
I was able not only to experience this myself at first, but soon also learned of its historical validity when, in my search for predecessors in the treatment of stupidity—of whom, strikingly, very few became known to me; but the wise apparently prefer to write about wisdom!—a learned friend sent me a printed copy of a lecture delivered in 1866 whose author was Joh. Ed. Erdmann, Hegel's pupil and a professor in Halle.
This lecture, entitled »On Stupidity«, begins by saying that even its announcement had been greeted with laughter; and since learning that such a thing can happen even to a Hegelian, I have been convinced that there is something peculiar about this human attitude towards those who wish to speak about stupidity, and I find myself deeply uncertain in the conviction that I have challenged a powerful and profoundly ambivalent psychological force.

I would therefore rather confess at once the weakness in which I find myself in relation to it: I do not know what it is. I have discovered no theory of stupidity with whose help I might presume to redeem the world; indeed, even within the bounds of scientific restraint I have not found an investigation that made it its subject, or so much as an agreement that had arisen, for better or worse, concerning its concept in the treatment of related matters. This may be due to my ignorance, but it is more likely that the question »What is stupidity?« conforms as little to present habits of thought as do the questions of what goodness, beauty or electricity might be.

Nevertheless, there is no small attraction in the desire to form this concept and to answer as soberly as possible such a preliminary question of all life; and so one day I too succumbed to the question of what stupidity might »really« be, rather than how it parades itself, which it would have been far more my professional duty and skill to describe. And since I wished neither to help myself in a poetic manner nor could do so in a scientific one, I tried in the most naive way, as always suggests itself in such cases, simply following the use of the word stupid and its family, seeking out the commonest examples, and endeavouring to bring together whatever I happened to write down.

Unfortunately, such a procedure always has something of a cabbage-white hunt about it: what one believes oneself to be observing is indeed pursued for a time without being lost, but since other, quite similar butterflies approach from other directions along exactly the same zigzag paths, one soon no longer knows whether one is still following the same one. Thus the examples from the family of stupidity will not always allow us to distinguish whether they are still genuinely related at their root, or merely lead the inquiry outwardly and inadvertently from one thing to another; and it will not be entirely easy to bring them under one hat of which it can be said that it truly belongs to a fool.

*

Under such circumstances it is almost immaterial how one begins, so let us begin somehow: best, perhaps, directly with the initial difficulty that anyone who wishes to speak about stupidity, or to attend such a discussion with profit, must assume of himself that he is not stupid; and thus displays that he considers himself clever, although doing so is generally regarded as a sign of stupidity!

If we now enter into the question of why it is considered stupid to display that one is clever, an answer first suggests itself that seems to bear the dust of ancestral household goods: it holds that it is more prudent not to show oneself clever. It is probable that this deeply suspicious caution, at first quite incomprehensible today, derives from conditions in which it really was cleverer for the weaker person not to be regarded as clever: his cleverness could cost the strong man his life! Stupidity, by contrast, lulls mistrust; it »disarms«, as people still say today.

Traces of such ancient cunning and stupid slyness are in fact still to be found in relationships of dependence where power is so unevenly distributed that the weaker party seeks salvation in pretending to be more stupid than he is; they appear, for example, as so-called peasant cunning, then in the dealings of servants with their education-tongued masters, in the relation of soldier to superior, pupil to teacher and child to parents. It irritates the person who has power less if the weak man cannot than if he will not. Stupidity even drives him »to despair«, and thus unmistakably into a state of weakness!
It accords with this most admirably that cleverness easily puts him »up in arms«! Cleverness is indeed valued in a subordinate, but only so long as it is joined to unconditional devotion. The moment it lacks this certificate of good character and it becomes uncertain whether it serves the ruler's advantage, it is less often called clever than immodest, insolent or treacherous; and a relationship often arises as though it were at least an affront to the ruler's honour and authority, even when it does not actually threaten his security.

In education this is expressed in the fact that a rebellious gifted pupil is treated with greater vehemence than one who resists out of dullness. In morality it has led to the notion that a will must be all the more evil the better the knowledge against which it acts.

Even justice has not remained entirely untouched by this personal prejudice and usually judges the clever execution of a crime with particular disfavour as »cunning« and »unfeeling«.

And everyone may take his examples from politics wherever he finds them.

But stupidity too—it will no doubt have to be objected here—is capable of provoking and by no means pacifies under all circumstances.

To put it briefly, it ordinarily arouses impatience, but in unusual cases it also arouses cruelty; and the loathsome excesses of this pathological cruelty, commonly described as sadism, often enough show stupid people in the role of victim.
This clearly stems from the fact that they fall prey to the cruel person more easily than others; but it also seems connected with the fact that their defencelessness, palpable in every direction, drives the imagination wild as the smell of blood does the lust for the hunt, enticing it into a wasteland where cruelty goes »too far« almost merely because it encounters no boundary anywhere.

This is an element of suffering in the inflictor of suffering himself, a weakness embedded in his brutality; and although the privileged indignation of offended compassion seldom allows it to be noticed, cruelty, like love, nevertheless also requires two who suit one another! To discuss this would certainly be important enough among a humanity plagued as the present one is by its »cowardly cruelty towards the weak« (which is surely also the most common paraphrase of sadism); but in view of the main line of the connection being pursued and in this hasty gathering of the first examples, even what has been said about it must count as a digression, and on the whole no more can be gained from it than that it may be stupid to praise oneself as clever, but it is not always clever to arouse a reputation for stupidity.

Nothing can be generalised from this; or the only generalisation already admissible would have to be that the cleverest thing is to attract as little notice as possible in this world! And indeed this final line beneath all wisdom has not infrequently been drawn.

Even more often, however, this misanthropic conclusion is used only halfway or merely by symbolic proxy, and it then leads the inquiry into the sphere of commandments of modesty and still more comprehensive commandments, without entirely leaving the realm of stupidity and cleverness.
Both from fear of appearing stupid and from fear of offending propriety, many people consider themselves clever but do not say so. And if they nevertheless feel compelled to speak of it, they circumlocute, saying of themselves, for instance: »I am no more stupid than other people.«
Still more popular is to make, as dispassionately and objectively as possible, the observation: »I think I may say that I possess normal intelligence.« And sometimes the conviction of one's own cleverness also appears by the back door, for example in the phrase: »I won't let anyone make a fool of me!«

All the more remarkable, then, is the fact that not only does the secret individual regard himself in his thoughts as exceedingly clever and well equipped, but the person who acts in history, as soon as he has the power to do so, says or has it said of himself that he is clever, enlightened, worthy, exalted and gracious beyond measure, chosen by God and called to history.
Indeed, he also likes to say it of another by whose reflection he feels illuminated. It has been preserved in petrified form in titles and modes of address such as Majesty, Eminence, Excellency, Magnificence, Grace and the like, and is scarcely animated by consciousness any longer; but it immediately displays itself in full vitality again when man today speaks as a mass.

A certain lower middle class of mind and soul in particular is utterly shameless in its need for arrogance as soon as it appears under the protection of party, nation, sect or artistic movement and is permitted to say We instead of I.
With a reservation that goes without saying and may be left aside, this arrogance may also be called vanity; and the soul of many peoples and states today is indeed ruled by feelings among which vanity undeniably occupies a foremost place. But there has been an intimate relationship between stupidity and vanity since ancient times, and perhaps it offers a clue. A stupid person ordinarily appears vain for the very reason that he lacks the cleverness to conceal it; but in fact even this is unnecessary, for the kinship between stupidity and vanity is immediate: a vain person gives the impression that he achieves less than he could; he resembles a machine that lets its steam escape through a leak. The old saying, »Stupidity and pride grow on the same wood«, means nothing other than this, as does the expression that vanity »blinds«.

It really is the expectation of diminished performance that we associate with the concept of vanity, for the word »vain« in its primary meaning says almost the same as »futile«. And this diminution of performance is expected even where performance is in fact present: vanity and talent are not seldom found together; but we then receive the impression that still more could be achieved if the vain person did not obstruct himself. This tenacious idea of diminished performance will later also prove to be the most general idea we have of stupidity.

Vain behaviour is, however, known to be avoided not only because it may be stupid, but chiefly also as a disturbance of propriety. »Self-praise stinks«, says a pithy proverb, and it means that bragging, talking a great deal about oneself and boasting are regarded not merely as unwise but also as indecent.

If I am not mistaken, the demands of propriety violated by it belong to the many-shaped commandments of restraint and keeping one's distance, which are intended to spare self-conceit, on the assumption that it is no less present in another than in oneself. Such commandments of distance are also directed against the use of overly candid words, regulate greetings and forms of address, do not permit people to contradict one another without apology, or a letter to begin with the word I; in short, they require certain rules to be observed so that one does not »come too close« to another. Their task is to balance and smooth social intercourse, to facilitate love of one's neighbour and of oneself, and, as it were, to maintain a medium temperature in human relations; and such prescriptions are found in every society, even more in the primitive than in the highly civilised, and indeed the wordless society of animals knows them too, as may readily be read from many of its ceremonies.

In the spirit of these commandments of distance, however, it is forbidden not only to praise oneself but also to praise others importunately.
To tell someone to his face that he was a genius or a saint would be almost as monstrous as claiming it of oneself; and to smear one's own face and tear one's hair would, by present-day feeling, be no better than insulting someone else. One contents oneself with observing that one is not exactly more stupid or worse than others, as has already been mentioned!
It is evidently the immoderate and undisciplined expressions that are under a ban in ordered conditions.

And since vanity was spoken of earlier, in which peoples and parties today overreach themselves with regard to their enlightenment, it must now be added that the majority giving itself free rein—just like the individual megalomaniac in his daydreams—has not only leased wisdom but virtue too, and imagines itself brave, noble, invincible, pious and beautiful; and that there is a particular tendency in the world for people, when they appear in large numbers, to permit themselves everything that is forbidden to them individually.
These privileges of the We grown large give the downright impression today that the increasing civilisation and taming of the individual is to be balanced by a proportionately growing decivilisation of nations, states and ideological associations; and an affective disturbance, a disruption of emotional equilibrium, plainly appears in this, which fundamentally precedes the opposition between I and We and also every moral evaluation. But is this—one will surely have to ask—still stupidity; indeed, is it still connected with stupidity in any way at all?

Honoured listeners! No one doubts it!

But before answering, let us rather catch our breath with an example that is not unlovable! All of us, although chiefly we men, and especially all well-known writers, know the lady who is absolutely determined to entrust us with the novel of her life, and whose soul has apparently always been in interesting circumstances without any result having come of them—which she now expects from us instead.
Is this lady stupid? Something arising from the abundance of impressions tends to whisper to us: she is! But courtesy as well as justice requires us to concede that she is not so altogether and at all times.
She talks a great deal about herself, and she talks a great deal in general.
She judges everything very decidedly.
She is vain and immodest.
She often lectures us.
Her love life is ordinarily in disorder, and in general her life does not go particularly well.
But are there not other kinds of people to whom all or most of this also applies?
Talking a great deal about oneself is, for example, also a bad habit of egoists, the restless and even a type of melancholic.

And all of it taken together applies above all to youth, in which talking a great deal about oneself, being vain, instructive and not quite at peace with life positively belongs among the symptoms of growth—in a word, displaying exactly the same deviations from cleverness and propriety—without youth therefore being stupid, or more stupid than is naturally conditioned by the fact that it has—not yet become clever!

Ladies and gentlemen! The judgements of everyday life and its knowledge of people are probably right most of the time, but ordinarily wide of the mark as well. They did not arise for the sake of a correct doctrine, but really represent no more than mental gestures of assent and rejection. Thus this example too teaches only that something may be stupid without having to be, that meaning changes with the connection in which something occurs, and that stupidity is densely interwoven with other things without a thread protruding anywhere by which the fabric might be unravelled in a single pull.
Even genius and stupidity are inextricably connected, and humanity circumvents in a peculiar way the prohibition, under threat of the penalty of being considered stupid, against talking a great deal and talking a great deal about oneself: through the poet.
In the name of humanity he may relate that he enjoyed his food, or that the sun stands in the sky; he may reveal himself, divulge secrets, make confessions, give ruthlessly personal accounts (many poets insist on this, at any rate!); and all of it looks exactly as though humanity permits itself, in this exceptional case, something it otherwise forbids itself. In this manner it speaks incessantly about itself and, with the poet's help, has told the same stories and experiences millions of times, changing only the circumstances, without any progress or gain in understanding having emerged for it: should it not in the end, in the use it makes of its literature and in literature's adaptation to that use, also be suspected of stupidity? For my part, I by no means consider that impossible!

Between the fields of application of stupidity and immorality—the latter word understood in the broader sense, no longer usual today, in which it means almost the same as lack of spirit, but not lack of understanding—there is in any event a complicated identity and difference. And this belonging together is doubtless similar to the way Joh. Ed. Erdmann expressed it at a significant point in his lecture mentioned above, in the words that brutishness was »the practice of stupidity«. He said: »Words are ... not the sole manifestation of a state of mind. The same state also reveals itself in actions. And so it is with stupidity. Not merely being stupid, but acting stupidly, committing stupidities«—the practice of stupidity, that is—»or stupidity in Action, we call brutishness.« This appealing assertion teaches no less than that stupidity is a defect of feeling—for brutishness surely is one! And this leads directly back towards that »affective disturbance« and »disturbance of affective equilibrium« which could already be mentioned in passing without having found an explanation.

Nor can the explanation contained in Erdmann's words agree entirely with the truth; for apart from the fact that it aimed merely at the crude, uncultivated individual in contrast to »culture«, and by no means embraces all forms of stupidity's application, brutishness is not merely stupidity either, nor stupidity merely brutishness; and there therefore remains much to be explained about the relation of affect and intelligence when they combine to form »applied stupidity«, which must first—and best once again through examples—be brought forth.

*

If the outlines of the concept of stupidity are to emerge correctly, it is necessary above all to loosen the judgement that stupidity is solely or principally a lack of intellect; as has already been mentioned, the most general idea we have of it seems to be that of failure in the most varied activities, of physical and mental deficiency as such.
There is an expressive example of this in our native dialects: the designation of hardness of hearing, that is, a physical defect, by the word »derisch« or »terisch«, which probably means »törisch«—foolish—and thus stands close to stupidity. For the popular charge of stupidity is used in precisely the same way elsewhere too.

If a competitor slackens or makes a mistake at the decisive moment, he afterwards says: »It was as though my head had been boarded up!« or »I don't know where I had my head!«, although the head's share in swimming or boxing may, after all, be regarded as vaguely delimited. In the same way, among boys and sporting comrades anyone who handles himself clumsily will be called stupid even if he is a Hölderlin. There are also business circumstances in which a person who is not cunning and unscrupulous is considered stupid. All in all, these are the stupidities corresponding to forms of cleverness older than the one publicly held in honour today; and if I am correctly informed, in ancient Germanic times not only moral ideas but also the concepts of what is knowledgeable, experienced and wise—that is, the intellectual concepts—were related to war and combat.

Thus every kind of cleverness has its stupidity, and even animal psychology has discovered in its intelligence tests that a »type of stupidity« can be assigned to every »type of performance«.
If one therefore sought the most general concept of cleverness, these comparisons would yield something like the concept of competence, and everything incompetent could then on occasion also be called stupid; in reality this is so even when the competence belonging to a stupidity is not literally addressed as cleverness. Which competence stands in the foreground and at a given time fills the concept of cleverness and stupidity with its content depends on the form of life.

In times of personal insecurity, cunning, violence, acuity of sense and physical dexterity will leave their mark on the concept of cleverness; in times of a more spiritualised—one may also say, with the unfortunately necessary qualifications, bourgeois—attitude to life, intellectual labour takes their place. More accurately, higher mental labour ought to do so, but in the course of things this has become the predominance of intellectual performance written into busy humanity's vacant face beneath the hard forehead; and thus it has come about that cleverness and stupidity today are related merely to the intellect and the degrees of its competence, as though it could not possibly be otherwise, although this is more or less one-sided.

The general idea of incompetence originally associated with the word stupid—both in the sense of incompetence for everything and in the sense of any particular incompetence—has also had a quite striking consequence: because »stupid« and »stupidity« signify general incapacity, they can on occasion stand in for any word intended to designate a particular incapacity. This is one reason why the mutual accusation of stupidity is so monstrously widespread today. (In another connection it is also the reason why the concept is so difficult to delimit, as our examples have shown.) One need only look at the remarks found in the margins of more demanding novels that have spent a long time circulating through lending libraries in near-anonymity; here, where the reader is alone with the poet, his judgement preferably expresses itself in the word »stupid!« or in its equivalents, such as »idiotic!«, »nonsense!«, »unspeakable stupidity!« and the like.
And these are likewise the first words of indignation when, at theatrical performances or art exhibitions, man confronts the artist en masse and takes offence.

Mention should also be made here of the word »kitsch«, which is more popular than any other as an initial judgement among artists themselves, without its concept being definable or its applicability explicable, at least to my knowledge, except through the verb »verkitschen«, which in dialect means as much as »to sell below price« or »to squander«. »Kitsch« therefore carries the meaning of something too cheap or of bargain-bin wares, and I believe that this sense, naturally transferred to the realm of the mind, can be found underlying every instance in which the word is unconsciously used correctly.
Since bargain-bin wares and junk enter into the word chiefly through the meaning associated with them of inept, unsuitable goods, while incompetence and unsuitability also form the basis for the use of the word stupid, it is scarcely an exaggeration to maintain that we are inclined to describe everything that does not suit us—especially when, apart from this, we profess to esteem it as lofty or aesthetically refined—as »somehow stupid«.

And in determining this »somehow«, it is significant that the use of expressions of stupidity is intimately permeated by a second usage comprising the equally imperfect expressions for what is base and morally repugnant, which directs our gaze back to something that has already struck it once before: the shared fate of the concepts »stupid« and »indecent«. For not only »kitsch«, the aesthetic expression of intellectual origin, but also the moral words »filth!«, »disgusting!«, »hideous!«, »pathological!«, »insolent!« are art criticism and judgements on life in pithily undeveloped form.
But perhaps these expressions still contain an intellectual effort, a difference in meaning, even when they are used indiscriminately; in the last resort, the truly half-speechless exclamation »What baseness!« steps in for them, replacing everything else and capable of sharing dominion over the world with the exclamation »What stupidity!« For it is clearly the case that these two words can on occasion stand in for all others because »stupid« has taken on the meaning of general incompetence and »base« that of a general violation of morals; and if one listens in on what people say about one another today, it seems that humanity's self-portrait, as it emerges unsupervised from mutual group photographs, is mixed entirely from variations of these two discoloured words!

Perhaps it is worth reflecting on this. Beyond doubt, both represent the lowest stage of a judgement that fails to develop, a still wholly unarticulated criticism which indeed feels that something is wrong but cannot say what. The use of these words is the simplest and worst expression of rejection that can be found; it is the beginning of a reply and already its end as well. It has something of a »short circuit« about it and becomes easier to understand when one considers that Stupid and Base, whatever they may mean, are also used as insults.

For the meaning of insults is known to lie not so much in their content as in their use; and many among us may love donkeys but will be offended if one calls them one. The insult does not represent what it depicts, but a mixture of ideas, feelings and intentions that it is not in the least capable of expressing, only of signalling. Incidentally, it shares this with fashionable and foreign words, which is why such words appear indispensable even when they could be replaced perfectly well. For this reason there is also something unimaginably exciting about insults, something that accords with their intention but not with their content; and perhaps this appears most clearly in children's words of teasing and mockery: a child can say »Busch!« or »Moritz!« and thereby drive another into a fury on the basis of secret associations.

But what may thus be said of insults, taunts, fashionable and foreign words may also be said of words of wit, slogans and love; and what all these otherwise so dissimilar words have in common is that they stand in the service of an affect and that it is precisely their imprecision and lack of objectivity that enable them in use to displace whole fields of words that are more apt, objective and correct. Evidently life sometimes has a need for this, and it should be allowed its value; but what happens in such cases is without doubt stupid, walking, so to speak, the same paths as stupidity; this connection can be studied most clearly in a prime and political example of losing one's head: panic.

When something acts upon a person that is too powerful for him, be it a sudden fright or sustained emotional pressure, it may happen that this person suddenly does »something headless«. He may begin to scream, fundamentally no differently from a child, may run »blindly« away from a danger or plunge just as blindly into it; he may be seized by an explosive inclination to destroy, abuse or lament. All in all, instead of a purposeful action demanded by his situation, he will produce a profusion of others that are seemingly always, and all too often really, pointless or even contrary to their purpose. This kind of counteraction is best known through »panic terror«; but if the word is not understood too narrowly, one can also speak of panics of rage, greed and even tenderness, wherever a state of agitation cannot satisfy itself in a manner at once lively, blind and senseless.

That there is a panic of courage which differs from that of fear only in the opposite direction of its effect was observed long ago by a man as witty as he was courageous.
Psychologically, what takes place when panic sets in is regarded as a suspension of intelligence, and of the higher mental constitution altogether, in whose place older psychic machinery emerges; but it may be added that the paralysis and severing of the intellect in such cases does not so much involve a descent into instinctive action as one which passes through this realm to an instinct of utmost need and an ultimate emergency form of action. This manner of action has the form of total confusion; it is planless and apparently abandoned by reason as by every rescuing instinct; but its unconscious plan is to replace the quality of actions with their number, and its by no means insignificant cunning rests on the probability that among a hundred blind attempts that are misses there will also be a hit. A man who has lost his head, an insect that keeps striking the closed half of a window until by chance it »plunges« through the open one into freedom—in their confusion they do nothing other than what military technology does with calculating deliberation when it »covers« a target with a sheaf of fire or with barrage fire, indeed whenever it employs shrapnel or a shell.
In other words, this means allowing a voluminous action to stand in for a targeted one; and nothing is so human as replacing the quality of words or actions with their quantity.

But there is something in the use of indistinct words very similar to the use of many words, for the less distinct a word is, the greater the scope of that to which it can be applied; and the same holds true of lack of objectivity.

If these are stupid, then through them stupidity is akin to the state of panic, and the excessive use of this accusation and its like will also not stand very far from a psychic attempt at rescue by archaic-primitive—and, as may probably be said with justice, pathological—methods. And indeed, in the proper use of the accusation that something is truly a stupidity or a baseness, one can recognise not only a suspension of intelligence but also the blind inclination towards senseless destruction or flight. These words are not merely insults; they stand in for an entire fit of abuse. Where something can be expressed only through them, physical violence is near. To return to examples mentioned earlier, paintings are attacked in such cases with umbrellas (and in place of the person who painted them, at that), and books are hurled to the ground as though they could thus be detoxified. But the disempowering pressure that precedes this and from which it is meant to provide release is also present: one »almost chokes« on one's anger; »no word suffices« except the most general and least meaningful; one is »struck speechless«, one must »let off steam«. This is the degree of speechlessness, indeed thoughtlessness, that precedes bursting! It signifies a severe state of inadequacy, and in the end the outbreak is ordinarily introduced with the profoundly transparent words that »at last something has become too stupid« for one. But this something is oneself. In times when great, vigorous energy is highly esteemed, it is necessary also to remember what sometimes looks confusingly like it.

*

Ladies and gentlemen! There is much talk today of a crisis of confidence in humanity, a crisis of the trust that has hitherto still been placed in humanness; it might also be called a panic that is on the point of taking the place of the certainty that we are capable of conducting our affairs in freedom and with reason. And we must not deceive ourselves that these two moral, and also morally artistic, concepts—freedom and reason—which have come down to us as emblems of human dignity from the classical age of German cosmopolitanism, have not been in the best of health since the middle of the nineteenth century or a little later. They gradually went »out of circulation«, people no longer knew what to »do« with them, and the fact that they were allowed to shrivel was less the achievement of their enemies than of their friends.

Nor must we deceive ourselves that we, or those who come after us, will probably not return to these unchanged ideas; rather, our task, and the meaning of the trials imposed upon the mind, will be—and this is the painfully hopeful task of every generation, so rarely understood—to accomplish the ever necessary, indeed highly desirable, transition to the new with the smallest possible losses! And all the more because the transition to ideas transformed yet preserving what matters, which must take place at the proper time, has been neglected, such action requires the aid of ideas of what is true, reasonable, significant, clever, and thus, in inverted reflection, also of what is stupid. But what concept or partial concept of stupidity can be formed when that of intellect and wisdom is wavering? As a small example of how greatly views change with the times, I should merely like to mention that in a once very well-known psychiatric textbook the question:
»What is justice?«
and the answer:
»that the other person is punished!«
were cited as a case of imbecility, whereas today they form the basis of a much-discussed conception of law. I therefore fear that even the most modest observations cannot be concluded without at least indicating a core independent of temporal changes. This gives rise to a few more questions and remarks.

I have no right to appear as a psychologist, nor do I wish to do so; but to cast at least a fleeting glance into this science is surely the first thing from which one may hope for help in our case. Older psychology distinguished between sensation, will, feeling and the faculty of representation, or intelligence, and for it stupidity was clearly a low degree of intelligence. Modern psychology, however, has stripped the elementary distinction between the faculties of the soul of its importance, has recognised the mutual dependence and interpenetration of the soul's various functions and—has thereby made the answer to the question of what stupidity means psychologically far less simple.

There is of course a conditional independence of intellectual performance even according to the modern view, but even under the calmest conditions attention, comprehension, memory and other things—indeed almost everything belonging to the intellect—probably also depend on the qualities of the emotional nature; and to this is added, in agitated as in highly spiritual experience, a second interpenetration of intelligence and affect that is all but insoluble. And this difficulty of separating intellect and feeling within the concept of intelligence is naturally also reflected in the concept of stupidity; and when, for example, medical psychology describes the thinking of mentally deficient people in words such as poor, imprecise, incapable of abstraction, unclear, slow, distractible, superficial, one-sided, rigid, cumbersome, overmobile and disjointed, one can readily see that these qualities refer partly to the intellect and partly to feeling.

One may therefore say: stupidity and cleverness depend both on intellect and on feeling; and whether one or the other matters more—whether, for example, in imbecility the weakness of intelligence »stands in the foreground«, or in many a respected moral rigorist the paralysis of feeling—may be left to the experts, while we laymen must help ourselves in a somewhat freer fashion.
In life, a stupid person is ordinarily understood to be someone who is »a little weak in the head«. But there are also the most varied mental and emotional deviations by which even an undamaged innate intelligence can be so obstructed, crossed and led astray that the whole amounts to something for which language again has only the word stupidity at its disposal. This word therefore comprises two fundamentally different kinds: an honest and simple stupidity, and another which, somewhat paradoxically, is even a sign of intelligence. The former rests more on a weak intellect, the latter more on an intellect that is merely too weak in relation to something, and this is by far the more dangerous.
Honest stupidity is a little slow to grasp things and is, as we say, »slow on the uptake«. It is poor in ideas and words and clumsy in their application.
It prefers the ordinary because frequent repetition impresses it upon the mind, and once it has grasped something it is not inclined to let it be taken away again so quickly, to have it analysed or to quibble over it itself. It has, in general, no small share of life's rosy cheeks! It is true that it is often indeterminate in its thinking, and its thoughts readily come to a complete halt before new experiences; but in compensation it also prefers to adhere to what can be sensuously experienced, which it can, as it were, count off on its fingers. In a word, it is dear »bright stupidity«, and if it were not sometimes also so credulous, unclear and at the same time so unteachable that it can drive one to despair, it would be an exceedingly charming phenomenon.

I cannot resist adorning this phenomenon with a few more examples that show it from other sides and which I have taken from Bleuler's textbook of psychiatry: an imbecile expresses what we would dispatch with the formula »doctor at the sickbed« in the words:
»One man, he holds the other's hand, he is lying in bed, then there is a nun standing there.«
It is the mode of expression of a primitive painter!
A not entirely clear-headed maid regards it as a bad joke when she is expected to hand her savings over to the bank, where they will earn interest: no one would be so stupid as to pay her something extra for keeping her money safe! she replies; and this expresses a chivalrous disposition, a relation to money that in my youth one could still occasionally observe in distinguished old people!
Finally, a third imbecile has it symptomatically chalked up against him that he claims a two-mark coin is worth less than a one-mark coin and two halves, for—so runs his reasoning—it has to be changed, and then one gets too little back!
I hope I am not the only imbecile in this hall who heartily agrees with this theory of value for people who fail to pay attention when change is made!

To return once more, however, to the relation to art: simple stupidity is truly often an artist. Instead of answering a stimulus word with another word, as was once very common in certain experiments, it immediately responds with whole sentences, and one may say what one likes, these sentences have something like poetry in them! I repeat a few such answers, naming the stimulus word first:

»Kindle: The baker kindles the wood.
Winter: Consists of snow.
Father: He once threw me down the stairs.
Wedding: Serves for entertainment.
Garden: The weather in the garden is always fine.
Religion: When one goes to church.
Who was William Tell: They performed him in the woods; there were women and children in costume there.
Who was Peter: He crowed three times.«

The naivety and great corporeality of such answers, the replacement of higher ideas by the telling of a simple story, the portentous recounting of the superfluous, of circumstances and accessories, and then again the abbreviating compression as in the Peter example—these are age-old practices of poetry; and although I believe that an excess of them, such as is very much in fashion, brings the poet close to the idiot, nevertheless the poetic element in the latter cannot be denied, and light is cast on why the idiot can be portrayed in poetry with a peculiar delight in his mind.

The pretentious higher stupidity now stands in a truly and all too often glaring contrast to this honest stupidity. It is not so much a lack of intelligence as its failure because it lays claim to achievements to which it is not entitled; and it can possess all the bad qualities of a weak intellect, but in addition all those caused by an emotional nature that is unbalanced, malformed, unevenly mobile—in short, any emotional nature that deviates from health.
Since there are no »standardised« emotional natures, this deviation more accurately expresses an inadequate interplay between the one-sided tendencies of feeling and an intellect insufficient to rein them in. This higher stupidity is the true disease of culture (but to guard against a misunderstanding: it means lack of culture, malformation, culture wrongly brought about, a disproportion between the material and the power of culture), and to describe it is an almost infinite task. It reaches into the highest spirituality; for if genuine stupidity is a quiet artist, intelligent stupidity is that which contributes to the agitation of mental life, but above all to its instability and fruitlessness. Years ago I wrote of it: »There is simply no significant thought that stupidity would not know how to apply; it is agile in every direction and can put on all the garments of truth. Truth, by contrast, has only one garment and one path at any given time and is always at a disadvantage.«

The stupidity addressed here is not a mental illness, and yet it is the most life-threatening illness of the mind, the one that threatens life itself.
Surely each of us ought already to track it within ourselves, and not recognise it only in its great historical eruptions.

But by what can it be recognised? And what unmistakable brand can be impressed upon it?! Psychiatry today uses as its chief criterion for the cases with which it is concerned the inability to find one's way in life, failure in the face of all the tasks life sets, or suddenly in the face of one where failure would not have been expected. In experimental psychology too, which is concerned chiefly with the healthy, stupidity is defined similarly. »We call stupid a behaviour that fails to accomplish a performance for which all conditions except the personal ones are present«, writes a well-known representative of one of the newest schools of this science. This criterion of the capacity for objective conduct—of competence, that is—leaves nothing to be desired for the unambiguous »cases« of the clinic or the station for experiments on apes, but the »cases« roaming free require a few additions, because the right or wrong »accomplishment of the performance« is not always so evident in them.

First, the capacity to conduct oneself at all times as a person fit for life does under given circumstances already contains the whole higher ambiguity of cleverness and stupidity, for »appropriate«, »expert« conduct may use the matter for personal advantage or serve it, and whoever does the one tends to consider whoever does the other stupid. (Medically stupid, however, is really only someone who can do neither.)
And second, it cannot be denied that conduct lacking objectivity, and even conduct lacking purpose, may often be necessary, for objectivity and impersonality, subjectivity and lack of objectivity are akin; and as ridiculous as carefree subjectivity is, wholly objective conduct is of course just as impossible for life, indeed for thought. Balancing the two is even one of the principal difficulties of our culture.

And finally, it would also have to be objected that occasionally no one behaves as cleverly as would be necessary, and that every one of us is therefore stupid, if not always, then from time to time. A distinction must therefore also be made between failure and incapacity, occasional or functional and permanent or constitutional stupidity, between error and lack of understanding. This is among the most important points, because the conditions of life today are so opaque, so difficult, so confused that the occasional stupidities of individuals may easily become a constitutional stupidity of the generality.

Thus the observation finally also leads beyond the realm of personal qualities to the idea of a society afflicted with mental defects. What is psychologically real in the individual cannot, it is true, be transferred to societies, and thus neither can mental illnesses and stupidity; but today one might well speak in many cases of a »social imitation of mental defects«; the examples are quite obtrusive.

*

With these additions, the sphere of psychological explanation has of course once again been exceeded. Psychology itself teaches us that clever thinking has certain qualities—clarity, precision, richness, flexibility despite firmness and many others that could be listed—and that these qualities are partly innate, partly acquired as a kind of skill in thinking alongside the knowledge one gains; for a good intellect and a skilful head mean pretty much the same thing. Nothing has to be overcome here except inertia and disposition; this too can be trained, and the comical word »mental exercise« does not express what matters too badly.

The opposite of »intelligent« stupidity, by contrast, is not so much the intellect as the spirit—and, if by that one does not wish to imagine merely a little heap of feelings, the emotional nature as well. Because thoughts and feelings move together, but also because the same person expresses himself in them, concepts such as narrowness, breadth, mobility, simplicity and fidelity can be applied both to thinking and to feeling; and even if the connection arising from this is not yet entirely clear, it is enough to allow us to say that the emotional nature also includes intellect, and that our feelings are not disconnected from cleverness and stupidity.

This stupidity must be opposed through example and criticism.
The view advanced here differs from the common opinion, which is by no means false but extremely one-sided, according to which a deep, genuine emotional nature has no need of intellect and is indeed merely contaminated by it.

The truth is that in simple people certain valuable qualities such as fidelity, constancy, purity of feeling and the like appear unmixed, but actually do so only because competition from the others is weak; and an extreme case of this appeared before us earlier in the image of the feeble-minded person's friendly acquiescence. Nothing is further from my mind than to demean the good and upright emotional nature with these observations—its absence even has a proper share in higher stupidity!—but today it is still more important to place the concept of the significant before it, which, admittedly, I mention only in an entirely utopian fashion.

The significant unites the truth we can perceive in it with the qualities of feeling that command our trust into something new: into an insight, but also into a decision, into a renewed persistence, into anything that has intellectual and emotional substance and »demands« a mode of conduct from us or from others; this is how one might put it. And what is most important in connection with stupidity is that the significant is open to criticism from the side of intellect as well as from that of feeling. The significant is also the common opposite of stupidity and brutality, and the general disproportion in which affects today crush reason instead of giving it wings melts into the concept of significance. Enough of it, indeed perhaps already more than one might wish to answer for! For if anything else had to be added, it could only be that everything said has by no means yet provided a certain mark by which the significant may be recognised and distinguished, and that a wholly sufficient one could probably not easily be given either.

But this very fact leads us to the last and most important remedy against stupidity: modesty.

Occasionally we are all stupid; occasionally we must also act blindly or half-blindly, or the world would stand still; and if someone wished to derive from the dangers of stupidity the rule »Refrain from every judgement and decision about which you do not understand enough!«, we would freeze! But this situation, about which much is made today, resembles one that has long been familiar to us in the realm of the intellect. For because our knowledge and ability are incomplete, in every science we must fundamentally judge prematurely; but we make an effort and have learned to keep this error within known limits and to correct it when the occasion arises, by which correctness nevertheless returns to our action.

There is really nothing to prevent transferring this exact and proudly humble judging and acting to other fields as well; and I believe the resolve: act as well as you can and as badly as you must, and remain aware of the limits of error in your action! would already be half the road towards a promising shaping of life.

But with these intimations I have already for some time been at the end of my remarks, which, as I have put forward protectively, are intended only as a preliminary study. And I declare myself, my foot on the boundary, unable to go any farther; for one step beyond the point where we stand and we would pass from the realm of stupidity, which even in theory still offers variety, into the realm of wisdom, a barren and generally shunned region.

Lecture delivered in Vienna on 11 March, and repeated on 17 March 1937, at the invitation of the Austrian Werkbund.