Irresolute

The Last Inaction Hero

With more than two weeks gone by since the start of the new year, it feels almost like cheating to spend time on a new year’s post.

But the fact is, I’ve never been especially good at those posts. I don’t engage in the kind of detailed self-tracking that would allow me to write with confidence about the best things I’ve read, watched, heard, or saw over the intervening year. While I don’t change my behavior all that quickly, once I’ve decided to do so, I don’t wait for the calendar to flip. January 1 is typically occasion to put college football on in the background, send out a few texts, and otherwise take it easy. And this year’s flip of the calendar was no exception.

Photo by Maddi Bazzocco on Unsplash

I am more likely to think about the word “resolution” than I am to make actual resolutions, and this year was no exception in that regard. This year, I was thinking about the fact that we only very rarely use the word “resolute” (except as the name of certain space vessels in science fiction). Even rarer is its opposite, irresolute. I’m sure that I’ve come across it once or twice in everything that I’ve read, but if so, I probably wouldn’t have noticed it.

And I wouldn’t have given it more than a thought this year, save for the fact that a friend of mine posted on FB that:

Something I always find a little tricky in talking about Thucydides is the importance of "sophrosyne" in Greek ethics. It's a kind of wisdom that involves taking time to think things through before making a decision, and it was traditionally translated as "temperance," "prudence," "caution," or "hesitation."

It's interesting that at some point all of those words have come to mean something bad and undesirable.

You can see the same sort of lexical drift if you look up the definitions of resolute and its opposite. In some places resolute is equated with certainty, determination, and in at least a few cases, this is described as admirable or courageous. Irresolute, on the other hand, is characterized as an inability to act, weakness, timidity, etc. Many of its synonyms are explicitly negative.

I’m not digging here for anything particularly profound, but I found myself wondering if there isn’t a more positive sense of “irresolute,” or at least a sense that isn’t so overwhelmingly negative. Something that is more akin to sophrosyne, perhaps.

One of the things that I’ve written a fair bit about this past year is irony, and the extent to which it’s corroded our discourse (and our democratic ideals). As I’ve been continuing to think about the larger project I’m working on, I realize that the answer to the problem of irony can’t simply be to reject it out of hand. First, of course, such a thing simply isn’t possible. But more importantly, irony allows us (potentially) to frame different perspectives together in such a way that we can weigh them. I came across a passage in Klein’s Doppleganger which struck me:

…the capacity to have an internal dialogue (or roundtable discussion) with the various parts of ourselves is healthy and human. Moreover, for Arendt, it is when everyday people lose their capacity for internal dialogue and deliberation, and find themselves only able to regurgitate slogans and contradictory platitudes, that great evil occurs. So too, when people lose the ability to imagine the perspectives of others or as she puts it in her essay “Truth and Politics,” “making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent.” In that state of literal thoughtlessness, totalitarianism takes hold (66).

As I’ve mentioned before, Kenneth Burke re-terms irony as “dialectic,” and it bears a strong resemblance to the capacity that Klein (following Arendt) describes above. If you follow that link, you’ll notice that I even use the word “resolution” to describe the outcome of that process, one that begins with what we might understand as a positive sort of irresolution.

The idea of “doing your own research” has received no small amount of scorn over the past few years, because it’s come to represent the process by which conspiracists scour the internet for like-minded thinkers and treat the results as confirmation of their prior beliefs. But genuine research necessarily includes this sort of irresolution—if it’s not conducted with some degree of internal dialogue, and a willingness to update or nuance one’s position in light of what one finds, then it’s not actually research at all. I used to tell my writing students that it was like bobbing for apples, and congratulating yourself for finding an apple.

Photo by Talal Ahmad on Unsplash

I don’t really have a strong conclusion for this post, appropriately enough considering its topic. I’ve been thinking lately about how to frame irony in a way that allows for this positive sense while also making its dangers clear. I’m still working on it, but it’s apparent to me that I can’t simply argue that irony is bad. It has its uses, after all. Like sophrosyne, though, its uses are a tightrope strung between poles of self-righteous certainty on the one hand and paralyzed (or nihilistic) relativism on the other. And it can feel like the guides we once had for navigating that fraught space are dwindling every day. We are more inclined these days to banish (or attack) “the standpoints of those who are absent” than we are to summon them as part of our own deliberations.

Which is a fancy way of saying that it’s easier to see what’s wrong with the world than it is to solve it, I suppose. Happy new year.