Homo insipiens
As Homo insipiens (. From the Latin homo 'man' and insipiens "einsichtslos, foolish, foolish, incapable of learning, incorrigible"), the uneducated, stupid man called, the only through education to a real Homo sapiens - wise "the wise People ”- can be. The humanist Erasmus von Rotterdam was already of the opinion: Man is not born, but raised! In his books he wanted to convey education to his contemporaries and posterity and made it clear:
- Nothing is more natural than virtue and education - without them a person ceases to be a person.
José Ortega y Gasset used this term in combination with the term homo insciens, to describe that a person can never be sure what it means to be a person, except that this being human is a living problem.
Under the book title Homo insipiens or the stupid man , the Berlin psychoanalysts Josef Rattner and Gerhard Danzer show "human stupidity " and make a contribution to "psychological anthropology and cultural criticism" (so the subtitle). They take a close look at the stupidity produced by people themselves and examine it with regard to its causes, appearance and epidemiology and write in the introduction:
- Since every psychoanalysis shows that the illness of the individual is actually only a microcosm, which almost exactly reflects the distortions and grievances of the social macrocosm, the stupidity of society cannot be excluded from our investigation. In doing so, the focus was on ideological delusions of all kinds, which our cultural life almost overflows.
In the further course of their explanations, with which they expose “the methodical swamp and madness of our culture”, the authors establish the relationship between stupidity and prejudice, superstition, religion, politics and humor. They advocate a humanistic mindset and a prejudice-free lifestyle that is detached from religious and political influences.
The sculptor Wilfried Koch found an artistic expression with the sculpture Erdmann ( Adam ). According to Koch, the sculpture represents the moment in which the amorphous mass is transformed into a clearly contoured shape, with astonishment expressed in the features of the creature that has crawled out of the earth, which neither the sense nor the meaning of the world and its own place understands in her and is therefore still a homo insipiens.
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- Josef Rattner, Gerhard Danzer: Homo insipiens or the stupid person . A contribution to psychological anthropology and cultural criticism. Berlin 2004 ISBN 3-921836-33-6
- Werner Welzig (Hrsg.): Erasmus von Rotterdam, selected writings in eight volumes . Darmstadt 1967-1975.