Laing
Cincinnati, 8/25/2010
"There is something I don't know
that I am supposed to know.
I don't know what it is that I don't know
and yet am supposed to know,
and I feel I look stupid
if I seem both not to know it
and not know what it is I don't know.
Therefore I pretend to know it.
This is nerve-racking
since I don't know what I must pretend to know.
Therefore I pretend to know everything."
R. D. Laing
Laing intends to offer here a phenomenology of a single individual's pretentiousness. But is not the cognitive dissonance he pinpoints so precisely now the shared absurd logic of the species since the birth of modern rationalism's "know-it-all" mentality?
 
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